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Sodomscapes

Hospitality in the Flesh

Lowell Gallagher

"Lowell Gallagher's Sodomscapes is a stunningly learned and creative engagement with the ethics of looking back—looking back at a past littered with the calcified remains of those rendered mute by traditional Western Christian and philosophical morality and looking back at the other in a pose of vulnerable and creative welcome to a radically unknowable future. Attending to the figure of Lot's wife in a wide range of images, texts, and imagetexts from across the Jewish and Christian traditions and into secular modernity, Gallagher shows that Sodom was always about the double edge of hospitality. In the process Gallagher uncovers and creates a 'counter-memory of Lot's wife' in which homelessness and home, stranger and beloved, danger and hope stand in radical proximity."—Amy Hollywood, Harvard Divinity School

Sodomscapes presents a fresh approach to the story of Lot’s wife, as it’s been read across cultures and generations, and, in the process, reorients and reinterprets foundational concepts of ethics, representation, and the politics of life. While the sudden mutation of Lot’s wife in the flight from Sodom is often read to confirm the antiscopic bias that critical thought inherits from earlier legacies of prohibited gazing, the archive of Jewish and patristic commentary holds a rival and largely overlooked vein of thought, which testifies to the counterintuitive optics required to apprehend and nurture sustainable habitations for life in view of its unforeseeable contingency.

To retrieve this forgotten legacy, Gallagher weaves together sources that range from exegesis to painting and from commerce to dance: a fifteenth-century illuminated miniature, a Victorian lost-world adventure fantasy, a Russian avant-garde rendering of the flight from Sodom, Albert Memmi’s career-making first novel, a contemporary excursion into the Dead Sea healthcare tourism industry. Across millennia and media, the repeated desire to reclaim Lot’s wife turns the cautionary emblem of the mutating woman into a figural laboratory for testing the ethical bounds of the two faces of hospitality—welcome and risk.

Sodomscape—the book’s name for this gesture—revisits touchstone moments in the history of figural thinking (Augustine, Erich Auerbach, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Blumenberg) and places them in conversation with key thinkers of hospitality, particularly as it bears on the phenomenological condition of attunement to the unfinished character of being in relation to others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt). The book’s cumulative perspective identifies Lot’s wife as the resilient figure of vigilant dwelling between the substantialist dream of resemblance and the mutating dynamism of otherness. The radical in-betweenness of the figure discloses counterintuitive ways of understanding what counts as a life amid divergent claims of being-with and being-for.

Lowell Gallagher is Professor of English at UCLA where he teaches Renaissance literature, critical theory, and biblical studies. He is the author of Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance, and co-editor of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives.

Fordham University Press | May 2017 | 320pp | 9780823275212 | PB | £22.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL17SODOM**

*Price subject to change.

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