Sodom’s Threshold

Why is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah included in The Book of Genesis? What does it initiate and touch? Who are these people and what do they desperately try to grasp and ‘penetrate’? The narrative has recurred with renewed interest throughout the centuries. There is both rejection and fascination towards those “sinful” individuals that God wanted to eliminate from the face of earth. But, what is the sin of the Sodomites that must be repressed, erased, and exterminated? According to God, their sin, which is neither specified nor described in any manner, is “exceeding grievous:” “And the LORD said: ‘Verily, the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and, verily, their sin is exceeding grievous.’” The unfigurable sin of the Sodomites is in excess, exceeding in a grievous manner. The incommensurable excess of the Sodomites displays their infinite mythical powers insofar that their excess is figurable as an unfigurable truth. Their overflowing trace still lingers, and their desiring impetus still flows quietly from “enamored ashes.” The untranslatable passion of the Sodomites is unspeakable and unseemly, an indefinite desire that does not know the name of what or who is desired. Out of Sodom and Gomorrah, everything has been said without affecting their ecstatic secret. It seems that any attempt for a reinterpretation will find its way to a duplication and multiplication of sorts that will circulate a “proper” knowledge already known, unless one focusses on a repetition that is forgotten, on a recurring surplus, a dream of dreams that is excluded from religion and its history, the remains of an ineludible but quiet exuberance without which religion would not have a chance. This book is about this residue, this remnant without religion that does not make itself present, that remains in the antechamber of religion, and that religion represses (while preserving this surplus as its foundation). The Sodomites perceive the arrival of an “outside” provocation, of two angel-visitors that bring the town to pandemonium and frenzy. The Sodomites’ exorbitant passion multiplies at the threshold of Lot’s door as they sense the contours of those foreign figures enticing their senses. The passion that impassions the Sodomites is a tale of frenzy in a town that cannot control the desire for specters. But, who is not mesmerized by the announcement of the arrival of a coveted indetermination, and, could we not assume that one is at all times anticipating and expecting the advent of an X that is yet to be known? The coming of the other intoxicates, distorts, and contaminates the Sodomites’ senses, an advent that may not be calculated through any known analogy or anticipated with any known desire. Their mesmerizing desire will have existed before the Sodomites, before there was a God, or any gods. This longing for what is yet to come puts in motion the invention of God(s). The Sodomites are affected by the incommensurability of the other, and this moment reveals an impetus that not only can survive any catastrophe but also will repeat recurrently, without religion, even without memory, throughout the history of the world. The entrance of the angels (the other) to Sodom and the trance that they stir up reverberates in the form of a desire for specters, for the strange and the dangerous, and for whatever or whoever is coming. In the threshold of Lot’s home, supplicating hands leave a burning trace without analogy, and without a known language. They leave an immemorial trace that makes everyone want to speak its hyperbolic secret. This writing of desire, of a desire that loves the un-known, will expand and contract, part and depart, divide and multiply in a thousand tales and a million metaphors that transport an insisting desire that is lacking in names. This is not only an excessive writing at the threshold but also a writing without measure that is in excess of destruction and oblivion. A feast of metaphors add up while copulating towards an unfinished ecstatic writing, one that is at the threshold of our senses. The people of Sodom are impassioned by an ecstatic “yes,” an archaic “yes” before religion, before categorical imperatives, before regulative laws, and before “shall not’s.” A mute, positive, and sublime “perhaps” opens the desire to grasp the incommensurable and indeterminate other, a passion for something or someone, a capacity to love anybody that is any other and anybody. The Sodomites’ love for specters is unsacrificeable, finite and mortal.