Divine Cruelty and Rhetorical Violence

This article examines the extent to which the divine marks the extremity of the address that compels us as subjects. If the call of the divine is what makes us subjects, then the subject’s relation to the divine is by definition a relation of violence, a violence that simply is constitutive of the human predicament. After tracing out this displacement, I take up the characteristics of the human-divine relation and what that relation looks like in specifically rhetorical terms by examining Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, which illustrates the way that humans are structured by their relation to divine violence. I conclude by suggesting that paying closer attention to the human-divine relation allows us to see writing not as a refuge—a field or locus—but as a means of interrupting fields, orthodoxies, methodologies, and identities.