The Christian Codex Fetish: Materialist Feminist Encounters in Ancient Christian Codicology

Abstract

My dissertation examines the material-discursive becoming of the Christian codex. With Karen Barad’s agential realist framework, I analyze the material arrangements that constitute determinate, bounded, and measurable things. In this way, I do not understand the Christian codex as realia or bare fact in a realist sense. Rather, I understand the Christian codex as a material-discursive apparatus that produces agential cuts and secures boundaries. I venture into the material-discursive apparatus to understand and to take responsibility for the agential cuts that enact and determine the Christian codex. I read the material-discursive apparatus constructed to measure the Christian codex as entangled practices of boundary making: the apparatus, through the dynamics of intra-activity, imposes determinate borders and corporeal boundaries. That is, material-discursive practices construct certain realities and build certain worlds but not others. I ask what possibilities of existence and being are closed off and cut away from and through our material-discursive practices of the Christian codex. In doing so, I focus on the tropical dimensions of the codex—the virtual and un/real tethers and threads that materialize the idea or figure of the codex within the disciplinary confines of early Christian studies. I center my attention on three sites of excision or cutting. I begin with the cut away from Egypt and the networks of labor and production that constitute the codex as a scientific object. I then turn to questions about the determination of the codex within normative canonical imaginaries that structure the evidence and determinations of what counts as a Christian codex and “cuts away” from diversity. Lastly, I examine the codex as an object of differentiation and the material-discourse about the codex as a symbolic representative of the severance from Jews. I suggest that all three of these cuts represent contingent materializations of the Christian codex and therefore stand as examples of built worlds of exclusion.