Melancholic Hopes, Trans Temporalities, and Haunted Biblical Receptions: A Response

Abstract

Queer approaches to temporality and hauntology have the significant potential to alter, reframe, and expand our understandings and uses of biblical texts and traditions, as the articles in this special issue demonstrate. Still other striking juxtapositions or analogies should complicate our approaches to these texts and traditions, and plenty more besides. In several places, then, this essay shows how these complications can be challenged and specified by select insights from trans conversations about temporality and haunting. These trans conversations currently range over a large set of dynamics: visibility and violence, fungibility and fugitivity, necropolitics and “negative” affects, from the monstrous to the melancholic. These resonate with the movements of Sarah and Hagar, Joseph and his kin, Judith and her nearly-ghosted slave, the Gerasenes and their demon/iac, among many other biblical figures, in unexpected and illuminating ways. The cyclical, even loopy qualities of queer and, or as, trans temporality and haunting are hardly progressive, but ambivalent, suggesting the especial importance of melancholic hopes for negotiating these haunted biblical receptions. The juxtapositions, allegories, analogies, and applications of these four articles are precisely the sort of receptions and movements that should be ventured more often within biblical interpretation. A receptivity to what still haunts these texts and traditions requires responding to and rejecting the gendered, sexualized, racialized, and colonized terms of visibility they offer, their doors of entry that exceptionalize a select few and estrange those from the rest who are exploited, expelled, or exterminated.