Postscripts 13.1 (2022) 27–62] http://www.doi.org/10.1558/post.23246 Postscripts ISSN (print) 1743-887x Postscripts ISSN (online) 1743-8888 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell: Isaiah 66 and the Affect of Discard Erin Runions Pomona College, Claremont, CA erin.runions@pomona.edu This essay explores connections between the expansion of the prison industrial complex and the evangelical debate about hell in the late twentieth century. It starts from the evangelical assertion that the Valley of Hinnom, from which the idea of Gehenna emerged, was a place for burning garbage and dumping the bodies of criminals. It traces this misguided “fact” through its reception history back to Isaiah 66:24 and to the trauma and loss of war that the interpretive tradition disavows. Isaiah 66 describes a favored heir at Jerusalem’s breast and an expulsed group of rebels, following a strikingly similar trajectory to Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic object relations. The subject phantasizes violence toward those projected as persecutory bad objects that threaten safety. The essay argues that Klein’s psychic structure, analyzed by critics as colonial, is resonant with evangelical discourses of hell, as well as with colonializing practices of waste management and incarceration. A close Kleinian reading of Isaiah 66 suggests that the final verse of eternal torment for rebels encodes a hyperbolic vilification and phantasy of violence toward the prophetic community’s own bad objects. It proposes instead a more complex reading of the conflict animating the poetry and suggests that the text may be read reparatively as a negotiation of loss for both sides in a situation of trauma; it welcomes the heterodox community back into the fold. Following critics of environmental racism and the domestic warfare of incarceration, it argues for decolonizing reparations that recognize the needs and desires of those most affected by idealizations of safety Keywords: hell, Gehenna, Isaiah 66, prison, waste management, garbage, environmental justice, affect, affect of discard, prison industrial complex, Melanie Klein, object relations © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, South Yorkshire S1 2BX. 28 Erin Runions that do great harm. Finally, it argues that there is no reparation without understanding that we are connected to our bad objects. On March 25, 1991, the U.S. News and World Report ran a cover story titled “Hell’s Sober Comeback” about a renewed interest in eternal punishment in churches. And indeed, starting in the 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s and into the early naughts, there was an explosion of evangelical discussion about hell. Evangelical theologians in Britain, Canada and the United States wrote voluminously about whether hell existed eternally or whether the damned would eventually be annihilated. In nonevangelical circles, similar trends were evident; the 1993 Catholic Church catechism asserted the traditional position that the church “affirms the existence of hell and its eternity,” with a metaphorical understanding of hell as separation from God. Significantly, this debate about the infinity of hell came at a time when the prison industrial complex began to boom. Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, provided close to $10 billion for construction of prisons, created thousands of new policing jobs and enacted three-strikes sentencing (Thuma 2019, 7; Dubler and Lloyd 2020, 89–91). Discourses of punishment intensified in both secular and religious spheres, creating a national environment that normalized what happens to “the wicked” in the human realm of prisons. Punitive discourse has been upheld in the name of safety and salvation. Whole communities have been criminalized. Millions of people have been discarded and left to rot in horrendous conditions in prisons. The affect of discard that develops in evangelical teaching about hell has one important beginning in Isaiah 66:24. There Yhwh’s chosen worshippers look out from the lap of Jerusalem onto corpses burning with unquenchable fire and eaten by indestructible worms. Following a long and mostly unacknowledged tradition, this verse is often understood to be referencing the Valley of Hinnom on the south side of Jerusalem. Hinnom has been phantasmically elaborated as a place for burning garbage and dumping the bodies of criminals. In the context of a society that supports a massive prison industry, it is worth an essay-length pause on the connection made between “criminals,” burning garbage and “the wicked.” When burning garbage is so casually connected to people labelled as criminal, it feeds the societal logics and administrative procedures by which criminalized communities are thrown away in prisons and tormented. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 29 In this essay, I interrogate the affective association of hell, criminality and trash as it develops in the afterlives of Isaiah 66 to influence the evangelical discourse about hell, and as it resonates with actual practices of waste management and incarceration. In its entirety, this last chapter of Isaiah responds to the trauma and loss of war through the idealization of Jerusalem as divine mother; it elevates one group of religious practitioners as a favoured heir, who extracts goodness and pleasure from Jerusalem’s breast; and it expels, destroys and replaces “brothers” who are vilified as violent, ritually impure rebels against Yhwh. War trauma and loss shape a narrative of safety, extraction and discard in Isaiah 66; the text’s psychic structure is repeated into ideas about Gehenna that may continue to influence actual practices of disposal, whether of objects or humans. Isaiah 66 becomes a prototype for the relations of security and exclusion that continue to undergird evangelical teaching about hell and its this-worldly version, the prison industrial complex. Inspired by affect theorists in biblical and cultural studies, I turn to Melanie Klein (1882–1960), the foundational theorist of psychoanalytic object relations. Klein famously analyses infants’ psychic responses to losing the mother’s breast by phantasizing violence towards “bad objects,” including siblings, which threaten safety.1 Sometimes the child phantasizes pollution of the breast itself. Klein’s description of early infant responses to the lost breast resonates uncannily with Isaiah 66.2 Klein allows us to perceive that what resonates in Isaiah 66 is not an eternal truth but a psychic structure of loss compensated for by phantasies of abundance and extraction, fuelled by feared loss of safety and accompanied by destructive discard. As Lana Lin emphasizes, “Klein’s discourse is rooted in mourning” (2017, 77). Jeremiah Cataldo (2013) has shown how Klein’s work illuminates the view of the second temple as an idealized communal object in the prophetic book of Haggai, which, like Isaiah 66, is concerned with rebuilding after conquest and exile. Maia Kotrosits (2020) uses Klein to focus attention on the losses to which the Gospel of Mark phantasmically responds; her analysis can be extended to the depiction of Gehenna that borrows from Isaiah 66. Because Isaiah 66 is a text that 1. 2. I adopt Klein’s term “phantasy,” which, as Kristeva explicates, combines “drives, sensations, and acts as well as words … [it is] manifested just as much in a child at play as in an adult” (2001, 13). Phantasy is both physical and discursive, “a veritable incarnation, a carnal metaphor” (13). Klein does refer to the Tanakh in her work (see below; Peri 2009). Kristeva tellingly calls Klein’s work Dantean and points to the places Klein seems to draw on the Christian tradition (Kristeva 2001, 67, 6, 90). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 30 Erin Runions negotiates – and reproduces – trauma, it is in need of a reparative reading that foregrounds loss and seeks to revalue the excluded. In what follows, I introduce the evangelical exegesis of Gehenna and some of its interpretive history as it relates to what might have taken place in the Valley of Hinnom; I then sojourn with Klein and the affect of discard, which elucidates a reading of Isaiah 66 and its hellish, detrital and carceral afterlives. I write as a prison abolition and environmental justice activist. Having taught inside prisons and protested their abuses and existence for the better part of two decades, I have witnessed the oppression of the system up close and seek to end it. In the city of Pomona where I live, I participate in an environmental justice group that works to resist environmental racism in the city, create green space and protest against the toxicity of police violence. I offer the following as an intervention into systems of waste, recognizing the limits of this analysis due to my social locations, primarily whiteness, that have placed me on this side of the prison bars and in less toxic neighbourhoods. Gehenna and Hinnom, Garbage and Criminals In 1982, Edward Fudge published The Fire That Consumes, sparking the evangelical debate about hell. Fudge made his titular annihilationist argument that the fire of hell is not eternal but rather “utter extinction into oblivion forever” (1982, xiii). A few years later in 1988, the evangelical intellectual world was shocked when the influential British evangelical theologian John Stott indicated an interest in annihilationism (Barton 1996). Another influential evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock (1987) also joined in this Arminian leaning. Those who were more staunchly Calvinist, such as J. I. Packer (1990, 1997), David George Moore (1995), David Pawson (2014 [2007]), Robert Peterson (1995), William Crockett and John Walvoord (Walvoord et al. 1996), took strong stands for eternal punishment. Books were published, statements were made. For evangelicals, the emphasis on hell is in the service of salvation; it comes from concern for a future haven of safety for the soul. Peterson is called to foreground teaching on hell so that “More unsaved people will hear God’s truth concerning their fate, and by God’s grace, will turn to Christ for salvation” (1995, 242). Walvoord passionately exhorts, “Eternal punishment is an unrelenting doctrine that faces every human being as the alternative to grace and salvation in Jesus Christ. As such, it is a spur to preaching the gospel, to witnessing for Christ, to praying for the unsaved, and to showing compassion on those who need to be snatched as brands from the burning” (Walvoord et al. 1996, 28). Salvation, among © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 31 other things, is a form of safety, a promise that neither the proselytizer nor the repentant sinner will be subject to eternal pain. As Peterson writes of Isaiah 66, “God will grant peace and comfort to his own” (1995, 30). While I do not doubt evangelical goodwill in seeking to bring others into a state of eternal bliss, I consider here at what rhetorical and real cost it comes. In expounding hell, evangelical theologians follow a lexical and associative chain from Jesus’s words about Gehenna in Mark, to the Valley of Hinnom, to Isaiah 66:24. As is commonly noted, the Greek term Gehenna is derived from Ge-Hinnom (‫)גיא הנם‬, the Hebrew for the Valley of Hinnom (Haupt 1919, 45; Peterson 1995, 41; Walvoord et al. 1996, 58; Lusthaus 2008, 176; Jersak 2009, 14). In Mark 9:43–50 Jesus says, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. ... It is better for you to enter life maimed ... than go to Gehenna ... where the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.”3 The text borrows from the final verse of Isaiah: They will go out and they will look upon the corpses of the men rebelling against/in me. Their worm will not die and their fire will not go out, they will be an object of contempt for all flesh (66:24). Isaiah 66:24 is then taken as a reference to the Valley of Hinnom, poignantly prophesied in Jeremiah 7:32–33 as the Valley of Slaughter, where corpses would be eaten by birds and animals. Jeremiah 7 also calls Hinnom “Topheth,” which connects the valley to a purported place of child sacrifice to Molech destroyed by Josiah (2 Kgs 16:3, 21:6, 23:10).4 These prophetic associations with idolatry and war developed into the early Jewish idea of Gehenna (Bailey 1986; Lusthaus 2008) and fed its elaboration in the Christian, and eventually evangelical, tradition (Peterson 1995, 41; Walvoord et al. 1996, 20, 58, 146; Block 2004, 61; Pawson 2014 [2007], 51). In reaching for historical referents for Gehenna, evangelical exegetes have taken up the idea that Hinnom was a place for burning garbage (Fudge 1982, 162; Walvoord et al. 1996, 20, 58, 146; Block 2004, 61; Pawson 2014 [2007], 51). To give one example among many, Crockett says, “As the years passed, a sense of foreboding hung over the valley. People began to burn their garbage and offal there, using sulfur. Thus when the Jews talked about punishment in the next life, what better image could they 3. 4. Some later manuscripts of Mark emphasize the connection to Isaiah, quoting Isaiah 66:24 not only once in v. 48 but also as a refrain in vv. 44, 46 (A. Y. Collins 2007, 443). For a range of views about whether human sacrifice ever took place at Topheth, see Gilmour 2019; Dewrell 2015; Stavrakopoulou 2004. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 32 Erin Runions use than the smoldering valley” (Walvoord et al. 1996, 58).5 This explanation is variously deployed to say that ancient authors would have referenced a fire that seemed to burn endlessly, or conversely to say that they understood that just as garbage was consumed by fire, so the wicked would be annihilated. Other interpreters further imagine Hinnom as a place for the bodies of criminals. In presenting the literalist interpretation of Gehenna and “the everlasting state of the wicked,” Walvoord asserts, “The valley was used as a burial place for criminals and for burning garbage” (1996, 20). Although this claim is stated as fact, it is an interpretive development, as I will show. Walvoord draws directly on the 1975 edition of The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible which says, “In later times, the valley seems to have been used for burning refuse, and also the bodies of criminals” (Davies 1980, 671). The Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land describes Hinnom in similar terms: “To prevent infection, rubbish, bodies of criminals and animals were dumped in the valley and eventually burnt” (Negev and Gibson 2001, 230). No evidence is provided by these sources for their assertions. The connection between criminals and garbage in Hinnom certainly does not begin with twentieth-century interpreters.6 In his explanation of Gehenna, Baldwin Thayer, a nineteenth-century universalist, cites Augustin Calmet writing in the previous century: “After the captivity, the Jews regarded this spot with abhorrence, on account of the abominations which had been practised there, and following the example of Josiah, they threw into it every species of filth, as well as the carcasses of animals, and the dead bodies of malefactors. To prevent the pestilence … constant fires were maintained in the valley” (Thayer 1904 [1862], 384, italics mine). Like the annihilationists, but more radically, Thayer used this explanation to argue against the idea of eternal punishment of sinners. In the eighteenth century, interpreters drew in Levitical transgressions for which the punishment was burning, under the assumption that it would take place in Topheth, where other kinds of human burning were presumed to take place. For instance, John Parkhurst’s eighteenth-century Greek– 5. 6. The detail about sulfur likely comes from Revelation 21:8; it is also present in Enoch 67:6. To make the citational chain transparent: Jersak references a nineteenth-century universalist reliance on the idea of Hinnom as a repository for garbage “as an alternate to the infernalist picture of hell” (2009, 40). Thayer is listed in his bibliography. Jersak also drew my attention to Lightfoot’s seventeenth-century lexical work (2009, 39). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 33 English lexicon states, “The Gehenna of fire … does … in its outward and primary sense, relate to that dreadful doom of being burnt alive in the valley of Hinnom (as the innocent victims above mentioned [child sacrifices to Molech] … or as those executed on the statutes, Lev. xx.14, xxi. 9)” (1794, 131, italics original). The close relation between supposed child sacrifice and Levitical laws clearly draws on anti-Semitic tropes, condemning both practices together. Phantasmic material referents In her immensely generative book The Lives of Objects (2020), Maia Kotrosits emphasizes the materiality of the objects on which phantasies are built, as well as the role of phantasy in constructing “reality.” In making her argument, Kotrosits draws on the psychoanalytic study of object relations, as it develops from Klein, through Donald Winnicott to Lana Lin. As Lin points out, Klein’s object relations are concerned with the psychic negotiation between subjects and objects, whether that be “a thing or a person or even a part of a person … either external to or constitutive of the subject” (2017, 10). Lin broadens the idea of the psychic object to include external things as well, suggesting that such an approach pays “attention to the unstable boundaries between the human and nonhuman, the immaterial and material” (2017, 14). Kotrosits takes up these ideas to show the unstable boundaries between objects, texts and readers. I will return to Kotrosits and Klein in more detail further on, but for now note that Kotrosits urges us to think about the interplay of phantasy and material “fact” in biblical interpretation. Actual material referents are difficult to trace in Hinnom, with respect to either garbage or bodies. Certainly, the naming of Jerusalem’s southeastern gate as the Dung Gate (Neh 2:13, 3:13–14, 12:31) contributes to the idea that garbage was disposed of in the southeastern portion of the Hinnom Valley, where it meets the Kidron Valley. Lloyd Bailey importantly traces the idea of a garbage dump to the medieval rabbi David Kimhi. As Bailey translates Kimhi’s commentary on Psalm 27, “Gehenna is a repugnant place, into which filth and cadavers are thrown, and in which fires perpetually burn in order to consume the filth and bones” (1986, 188). Notably, Kimhi does not specify the bodies as criminal. Bailey notes that there is no corresponding archaeological or literary evidence from the second temple period for Kimhi’s assertion (1986, 189). More recent archaeological work does show that there are signs of waste management in the valleys around Jerusalem, although not of the eternally burning sort. Consistent with the location of the Dung Gate but © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 34 Erin Runions further east than Hinnom, Yuval Gadot and his team excavated what appeared to be a first-century waste management site. They found deep layers of landfill, including high quantities of pottery, ash from cooking stoves, and evidence of a varied diet of plants, fruit, fish, sheep and goats. A majority of the coins found are dated to the early first century, ending in the time of Agrippa I (41/42 CE). No human bones were reported. There is evidence of deliberate burning but not of “constant fires.” It would seem that following incineration, dirt was thrown over the site: “Analysis of the animal bones from the site showed that the material layers were quickly covered by layers of dirt following their disposal …. There are relatively few bite marks from rodents and other scavengers on the bones … [and] the bones are not weathered, meaning they did not blanch in the sun and open air” (Gadot 2018, 43). Many of the animal bones were burned, indicating that they were “intentionally burnt and then … quickly covered with soil” (2018, 43). Gadot hypothesizes that the system may have been implemented by the Romans, but he indicates that this kind of deliberate waste management is unique in the ancient world to Jerusalem, perhaps indicating attention to ritual purity. While controlled burning of trash may have taken place in areas of the valleys outside Jerusalem, the unceremonious disposal of criminal bodies is not attested. On the contrary, the ancient rock-hewn graves, stone headrests and material objects found in the Jerusalem “necropolis” – the burial grounds in the valleys around Jerusalem – reveal signs of social prestige, not humiliation (Ben-Dov 1994; Avni et al. 1994; Greenhut 1994). The tombs in Ketef Hinnom on the edge of the valley (7th–5th c. BCE) famously contained amulets with priestly blessings (Barkay 1994, 2009; Smoak 2019). On the eastern slope of the Kidron Valley, the tombs are monumental, including the tomb of Pharoah’s daughter and the tomb of a royal steward (9th–7th c. BCE) (Ussishkin 1970). When Gabriel Barkay excavated Ketef Hinnom, he did find evidence of crematory burial practices in the late Roman Tenth Legion’s station at Jerusalem (c. 70–305 CE). Yet the cremation, likely deceased soldiers, appears to have been done with respect, with ashes contained in pots (1994, 91; see also Avni et al. 1994, 217). With respect to treatment of crucified “criminals,” John Granger Cook notes that Roman sources indicate that bodies were often reclaimed by families, as indicated in the gospel story of Joseph of Arimathea burying Jesus’s body. If they were not requested by kin, Romans would leave bodies hanging, eventually to fall off for birds and dogs to eat. As Cook points out, “Open mass graves in Judaea do not seem © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 35 probable, given Jewish attitudes toward burial. At this time there are no known mass graves in Judaea” (2011, 206). In short, the idea that criminal bodies were dumped in Hinnom is a phantasy. What inspires the creation of these “facts” reported by Bible dictionaries and scholars, besides a sense of schadenfreude or an antiSemitic alignment of Molech worship and the Levitical tradition? It seems likely, although unstated by expositors, that the reference to criminals is an amplification of the Markan citation of Isaiah 66:24. The gospel does not quote the whole verse, but interpreters know that it condemns those who rebel against Yhwh. As early as 1684, Cambridge scholar and member of the Westminster Assembly John Lightfoot uses Rabbi Kimhi’s commentaries to draw the line between the disposal of trash in the valley and the bodies of Isaiah 66:24: Gehenna: It is well known that this expression is taken from … the valley of Hinnom. … And thither, as D. Kimchi saith, was cast out all the filth and unburied carcasses, and there was a continual fire to burn the filth and the bones in Psalm 27. From hence the Jews borrowed the word, and used it in their ordinary language, to betoken Hell: And the Text from which they especially translated the construction, seemeth to have been the last verse of the Prophesie of Isaiah, which by some of them is glossed thus, And they shall go forth out of Jerusalem into the valley of Hinnom, and there they shall see the carcases of those that rebelled against me. In the subsequent circumambulations of interpretation, philologists like Parkhurst fill in Levitical details about why the bodies are burned, shortened to “malefactors” in Calmet, and passed on. As a result, Isaiah’s rebels become criminals and trash. Their demise in the ravine is not to be mourned. The imagery of these phantasmic “facts” is powerful. It normalizes for believers, churchgoers and others within evangelical educational purview the idea that those labelled as sinners, or rebels, or “criminals” should be treated like garbage and jettisoned from the social order. There is no understanding of the colonized context in which these texts developed, or what “criminal” might mean. “Criminal” is taken as an ontological and spiritual category (of trash) and not a societally produced label. It is not surprising that this interpretation resurfaced at the burgeoning of the prison industrial complex. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 36 Erin Runions War Trauma and Loss It is more likely that disavowed suffering and loss from war is at work in the development of the idea of Gehenna, a fact that has lasting effects into the present and, arguably, shapes contemporary approaches to punishment. Some evangelical exegetes have made the more plausible suggestion that the connection of Gehenna to Hinnom references bodies left in war, a possibility that I take up here but with different conclusions (Fudge 1982, 162; Peterson 1995, 31–32; Block 2004, 61). Warfare would have made the ravines around Jerusalem a site of trauma, especially in affronts by successive Mesopotamian empires. Assyrians, for instance, were known to pile the dead in valleys and waterways and there is some evidence that the Assyrians piled and burned bodies at Lachish that were later reburied (Richardson 2007, 198–200). Jeremiah associates the valley with warfare, as with the Valley of Slaughter (7:32–33; 19:6) and the text references a “whole valley of corpses and ash … as far as the stream Kidron” (31:40). The Septuagint translation of Jeremiah 19 uses the term πολυανδρεῖον (polyandrion, or cemetery), which connotes warfare, as when Antiochus swears to turn Jerusalem into a cemetery (2 Macc 9:4, 14). In Jeremiah 19:2, polyandrion is given for “Valley of the Sons of Hinnom” (‫)גיא בן הנם‬, matching its translation of the Hebrew Valley of Slaughter (‫)גיא ההרגה‬ in 19:6. In the clearest attestation of military circumstances, although likely also shaped by scripture, Josephus refers to the valley below Jerusalem in his account of the Roman conquest in The Jewish War (referenced by Fudge 2012, 118). Josephus tells of Titus routing rebel Jewish fighters into the valley and slaughtering them there (JW 5.2.5). His distressing and visceral account of the siege-induced famine concludes: The upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine, and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young men wandered about the marketplaces like shadow, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead. ... Now the rebellious at first gave orders that the dead should be buried ... not enduring the stench of their bodies. But afterwards, when they could not do that, they had them cast down from the walls into the valleys beneath [so that there was] thick putrefaction running about them (5.12.3–4). Tucker Ferda (2013) has traced the influence of Jeremiah 7 in Josephus’s larger account; perhaps it shaped the framing here of a valley of slaughter. Josephus’s usual disparagement about the Jewish rebels, evident here, may be likewise informed by Isaiah 66:24. Nonetheless, his vivid © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 37 description seems to attest actual trauma in Hinnom, as well as any scriptural traditions about past wars. The scenes of devastation in Hinnom referenced in Isaiah 66:24, Jeremiah and Josephus animate the idea of Gehenna as a place of judgement. Kotrosits is helpful in thinking about how trauma feeds symbolic ideas in ancient texts. She proposes that ancient and contemporary people integrated the trauma of conquest into their psychic lives through phantasmic interactions with physical ruins. Reading the effect of the Jewish War on early Christian texts, Kotrosits shows that the ruins of conquest are represented in ways that remake loss into sublimity. This transformation happens in Mark where the destroyed temple is figured in the ruined and resurrected body of Jesus (2020, 61) and also in the book of Revelation, where Jerusalem is rebuilt as a sublime, heavenly city (47). Gehenna may be another such moment in Mark, a reworking of the ruins of those under siege in Jerusalem, their bodies thrown over the walls. The actual and imaginary bodily ruins of disintegrating, worm-eaten corpses might require fire to mitigate disgust and contamination. Even if there is no discovered evidence of literal fire burning the corpses after battle, as some suggest (Block 2004, 61; Fudge 2012, 117), the Isaianic image allows for the development of another kind of sublime: the fire that does not die. The material referents of war may be lost, but texts such as Isaiah 66:24 and Mark 9:43–50 may be negotiating with scenes of traumatic ruin in the hopes of establishing safety. As Kotrosits argues, phantasy compensates for imperial subjection and it smooths over the reminders of loss in actual ruins (44). It creates a sense of present and future security for the traumatized. Yet if an originary trauma is transmitted only in spiritualized, phantastical ideas about final judgement, paired with desires for safety, it authorizes the projection of pain onto others in ways that have longterm material effects. As Kotrosits points out, some phantasies still contain “colonial insidiousness” (2020, 48), repeating the power dynamics of destruction. Negotiating with colonial ruins, scriptures can in turn create damaging and racialized material structures through processes of interpretation (2020, 152–3). When traumatized texts are interpreted in ways that downplay the violence of their phantasy referents, as exegetes do when they imagine the bodies of criminals and garbage burning together, they are likely to authorize further trauma. Such interpretations have racial implications (although presented as universally applicable). Prison abolitionists have shown that ideas about punishment always disproportionately affect minority communities (Nellis 2021). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 38 Erin Runions Put another way, interpretations about Gehenna as a place for criminals and garbage have created a theological space in which the trauma of war can be repeated in the racialized, subjugating violence of prison. Punitive violence is naturalized as something to be expected for criminals and needed for their salvation.7 The imagery of the burning criminal or rebel, treated as garbage, seems clearly to live on in actual material conditions in US prisons. People inside prisons experiencing unmitigated 115-degree heat, in concrete, poorly ventilated cells, call it a “living hell” (Dunham 2020). People increasingly suffer and die from the effects of climate change, including intense heat and cold, as well as flooding in their cells (Thompson 2019). In the massive forest fires consuming California, incarcerated people are deployed as fire fighters on the frontlines. And in the 2020–22 pandemic, those inside prisons were infected at disproportional rates. These are not mere anomalies; they are matters of policy, what abolitionist scholar and activist Dylan Rodríguez calls domestic war fuelled by an ongoing anti-Black, racial-colonial white supremacy. Prisons are part of a “culturally normalized asymmetrical warfare,” in which “pathologized populations are rendered collective targets of statesanctioned social liquidation and political neutralization” (Rodríguez 2021, 3, 209). Incarceration kills, maims and terrorizes, just as war does. The trauma of the text compulsively repeats in the domestic war of the prison industrial complex. Ejecting Bad Objects Gehenna has become a site of smouldering detritus and judgement that repeats disavowed loss and trauma. From it wafts a pungency you cannot ignore. What psychic work does the preoccupation with garbage in Gehenna signal? Kotrosits’s work urges us to consider the material interrelations of such phantasies, via Klein. Garbage – like the “malefactor” dumped in Hinnom, the “wicked” doomed to Gehenna, or the “criminal” abandoned in prison – can stand in for psychic threats and anxieties about loss and safety. Klein calls such projections “bad objects.” She theorizes that an infant’s ego is shaped in relation to the safety and inevitable loss of the mother’s breast. Daily, the infant experiences loss of the internalized “good object” (the mother’s breast and the mother). As a result, the child splits the breast into good and bad objects. The breast is good when it provides 7. For the historical development of prisons in the United States as a pain-inducing project of salvation, see Graber 2011. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 39 “love, pleasure, and security” (Klein 1975 [1937], 325), it is bad when the infant is frustrated. The desire for safety, security, comfort is central to the processes Klein describes. Klein’s work helps me to elaborate the relations between loss, discard, desired abundance and safety that have become central to racial capitalism’s procedures of garbage and human disposal. As we will see below, these relations follow, perhaps even draw on, a psychic structure already present in Isaiah 66. The child attempts to control loss and the safety of the mother’s breast through phantasies of destroying it and jettisoning the things and people thought to jeopardize access to it. In Klein’s analysis, “The object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand in for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness and security. All of these are felt by the baby to be lost and lost as result of his own uncontrollable greedy and destructive phantasies and impulses against his mother’s breasts” (1994 [1940], 96). Lin explains, “If the baby cannot withstand frustration … the “no-breast” will become a bad object that must be evacuated” (2017, 58). For Klein, the infant aggressively turns on the breast that has sustained them and then feels guilt and anxiety over those aggressions. The bad object is projected onto “persecutors” – the absent mother, or those who might interfere with the mother’s attention (1975 [1937], 325, 333). The persecutors could be imagined as the breast itself, siblings, or the other parent, but ultimately they are generated by the infant’s own destructive impulses. These phantasies are mutually reinforcing, creating an ongoing sense of loss, even while aiming at control (Klein 1975 [1952], 70, 73; Lin 2017, 49). As the child matures to adulthood, these infantile losses are reactivated in mourning. In “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1994 [1940]), Klein suggests that any new loss or trauma unconsciously brings up childhood fears of lack of safety and fears of persecutions. The mourner might then try to defend against the reactivated “bad objects” through various strategies, such as denial of threat and pain, or control through triumphing over it. Klein gives the example of a mourner sorting through old letters, keeping those of a loved one and throwing others away, “attempting to restore [the loved one] and keep him safe inside herself, and throwing out what she felt to be indifferent, or rather hostile – that is to say, the ‘bad’ objects, dangerous excreta and bad feelings” (1994 [1940], 106). In this scenario, the discarded letters stand in for the psychic objects that threaten an internalized and idealized good object (the lost person), who is associated with the idealized mother symbolizing safety and security. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 40 Erin Runions These dynamics of loss of safety and control may be at work in contemporary attitudes to trash. Think about it: why throw something out? It is not only that it is no longer needed, but also that it could pose a danger (broken objects, rotten food) or disturb a sense of order. Perhaps “comfort” has required something else. When safety is threatened or lost, the danger may be understood as a persecutor, or bad object, whether it is imminent or not. Cultural studies scholars writing about the relation of garbage to self-formation in late-stage racial capitalism resonate with a Kleinian description of attempts at control through banishing bad objects. Those theorizing trash note and complicate the idea that humans are steadfastly unable to contend with the ongoing production of waste in late consumer capitalism, whether individual or industrial waste. Waste is something that humans disavow and abject to control their environments (Hawkins 2005; Scanlan 2005; Thill 2015; Huang 2017). This work illuminates the affective work of discard, whether that be the refuse of daily life, eternal burning, or the exclusion of those called criminal. The compulsion to throw things out is connected to a belief in abundance and the desire for the next shiny object. As Gay Hawkins points out, waste relies on the plenitude of commodity culture and the desires that it creates. Waste is “conspicuous consumption” (2005, viii). Brian Thill, as if channelling Klein, calls waste “the expression of expended, transmuted, or suspended desire” (2015, 8). Things no longer wanted or consumed remnants are thrown into landfills. As desires change, what were once objects of affection become trash (68), “The line between desire and discard is often a fluid and malleable one” (20). What is once desired for comfort or happiness can become a threat and is ejected, creating a sense of mastery. John Scanlan draws on Mary Douglas (1966), ever relevant to discussions about biblical logics, to argue that trash disposal is about creating systems of order, however those are culturally conditioned (2005, 42). For Hawkins, commodity culture creates a “self whose waste practices confirmed its sense of mastery over and separation from the world” (2005, 29).8 Like Klein’s infant devouring the mother and then guiltily ejecting the bad objects that might threaten that source of nourishment, humans use objects until they are perceived as being a threat to flourishing – they no longer work, they no longer look good or make us look good, they take up space, they go out of style, they are broken down 8. Hawkins further shows how subjectivity – produced by practices and attitudes toward waste management – is managed through various kinds of discipline in state controls, state infrastructure and state moralizing processes. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 41 and threaten our safety, they threaten a sense of order. Only intermittently do we think about where they go. Neither real nor psychic discard is ever so simple. Michelle Huang persuasively destabilizes the picture of trash as separation from ourselves by thinking with epistemologies of entanglement. Huang suggests that garbage is something that we only feel we separate from ourselves. Refuse is not so easily contained. Ocean currents cause trash to travel and bind people across continents.9 On the molecular level, trash travels through bodies. Plastics break down into microscopic particles and are eaten by marine life forms and eventually humans. Huang cautions, “As part of the [Great Pacific Garbage] Patch’s entangled ecology and the top consumer of many food chains, we are already becoming plastic” (2017, 105). Along similar lines, Max Liboiron demonstrates that even the lowest detectable levels of plastic have harmful effects so that there is no real possibility of living without plastics’ harmful effects on bodies and ecosystems (2021, 83–111). For Huang, waste is “the fantasy of detachment” that depends on entanglement. “Garbage is the opposite of detachment: it is the material cathexis of that fantasy” (104). Detachment is impossible, either physically or psychically. As Julia Kristeva says of abjection, writing about the Levitical system, “The impure is neither banished nor cut off, it is thrust away but within, right there, working, constitutive” (1982, 106). Kristeva had in mind the formation of the self via expulsion; her idea of abjection shifts slightly when we consider with Huang and Liboiron that toxins form the self, not only as a constitutive outside but also as an internal force of harm. In Kleinian terms, late capitalism enviously destroys the good breast. Sometimes the baby’s phantasies of destruction come from a sense of envy of the goodness of the breast. In envy of the source of nourishment, the child desires to “put badness, primarily bad excrements and bad parts of the self, into the mother … in order to spoil and destroy her” (1975 [1957, 181; see also 1975 [1952], 63). In their book of Klein’s key concepts, R. D. Hinshelwood and Tomasz Fortuna emphasize that “Envy is the spoiling of something good because of its goodness” (2017, 123). Envy is venomous and increases the fears of persecution. Ecopsychologists Joseph Dodds, Philippe Claudon and Claire Squires make the Kleinian point that through “phantasies of an infinitely giving Earth-breast we feel entitled to suck on with ever increasing intensity without limit. Unable to 9. Huang gives an insightful reading of Ruth Ozeki’s provocative consideration of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in A Tale for the Time Being (2013). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 42 Erin Runions tolerate weaning, our response to ecological crisis includes rage, envy, and destructiveness, including spoiling and omnipotent attacks on the earth-breast” (Dodds et al. 2013, 4). Abundance creates a kind of feeding frenzy that fuels the production of commodities in systems that suck the earth dry and poison it. The fantasy of detachment from trash is even less plausible in racialized, working-class communities. Environmental justice advocates have demonstrated for decades that waste management and other polluting facilities are disproportionately placed within BIPOC, immigrant and economically marginalized communities (National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit 1991). Proximity to waste is part of racialization and proportional to economic status. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, capitalism is always racial capitalism (2017). Trash becomes an unwieldy neighbour, populating vulnerable communities with toxins (Pellow 2002). As Thill notes, even being able to view trash from a sense of safety, instead of feeling its detritus in the body, depends on privilege (Thill 2015, 73–80). Industrial extraction also produces toxic waste that unduly affect marginalized and racialized communities (White 2013; Malin et al. 2019). Liboiron points out that extraction is part of the colonial process. The production and disposal of toxic plastics requires extraction and transport of oil and gas on colonized indigenous land, as well as use of that land to store and dispose of plastics (2021, 11). Not only are racialized and economically marginalized people more entangled with trash than white, economically secure people, they are often socially discarded. Huang understands “garbage as a metonym for deracinated history” (2017, 99). She writes powerfully about “jettisoned histories of disregard and violent erasure” in Asian-American migration racial formation (99). For Huang, the transpacific oceanic currents that carry and accumulate garbage also illuminate the “racialization of plastic.” Treated similarly to plastic, Asian immigrants are both highly desired and considered a “human menace” from elsewhere (109). When plastic, or immigrants, turn from the desired object to the threat, they become abject. Asian immigrants to the United States, torn from their roots for a variety of reasons, have been categorized and expelled from the social body, whether through prejudice or physical removal, as in the case of Japanese detention in the Second World War, or immigrant deportations. In Huang’s words, “Anything can be devalued as garbage, or ‘material otherness’” (2017, 101), including racialized and displaced people. Huang’s observations resonate strongly with the treatment of incarcerated people as well. Prisons are institutions that run on disregard and © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 43 violent erasure. People are disappeared into prisons, often for decades. They are “managed” as little more than refuse. To give a local example from the winter of 2021, people incarcerated in the California Institution for Women reported that they were subjected to extraordinarily dehumanizing conditions. These included lack of medical attention; COVID quarantining in an old building with broken windows, rats and spiders, with faeces in the showers and toilets; lack of heat in near-freezing temperatures; an undisclosed water contamination event that lasted several weeks and caused illness; inadequate provisions of drinking water; inability to shower and do laundry for days at a time; and lockdown for 23.5 hours a day (Dorotik 2022; personal correspondences). People were treated like trash, isolated in buildings that were little more than refuse. Entanglement is also true of the criminal legal system and the prison industrial complex. As a national society, the United States is shaped by collusion with a set of institutions that relegate wellbeing to the hands of demonstrably dangerous institutions and people (prisons and police). Writing about colonial and racial violence, Dina Georgis offers the important insight that “If political events psychically wound, then the affect that they unleash unconsciously organizes meaning” (2013, 75). Likewise, people living in the United States are regulated by a discourse about safety and by the resources that are dedicated to it. The result is to create lack of safety for many communities. A chief exhibit is the shiny flyer sitting on my desk, issued by Congresswoman Norma Torres. The flyer boasts of the $14.3 million in federal funding for the Inland Empire, of which the City of Pomona is a part. Of this, $775,000 will “help the Pomona Community Center purchase and deploy a mobile health center,” while $3,404,000 will be provided to “the City of Pomona Police Department to upgrade portable and mobile radios.” More than four times the amount of money will go to police radios than to people’s health. Uncritical demands for safety (in schools, on streets, in parks) create the conditions in which racialized communities, the unhoused, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the substance dependent, the undocumented are palpably less safe and likely to be hurt by police or incarcerated. It is important to emphasize that toxins of waste are ingested by the entire social body, creating more loss. In a culture of disposal, we have lost generations of talented and skilled people, mentors and elders in the prison industrial complex. Yet discard cannot be complete. In the language of object relations, the subject depends on the object, even the objects that are purportedly excised. Kristeva explains, “The very notion of the object becomes increasingly irrelevant in the light of the fluid © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 44 Erin Runions exchange of fragments expelled without and integrated within” (2001, 72). Garbage, plastic, the violence of the prison industrial complex, the toxic smoke of hell; no one is immune from these contaminants, physically and psychically. The United States must reckon with the wellnesscrushing, culture-wide effects of the ongoing domestic war at the core of its supposed systems of abundance, safety and salvation. Perhaps it is for this reason that the banished objects of Isaiah 66:24 are eternally burning: the idea of hell/Gehenna/Hinnom, as an ever-present place for human garbage, diverts thought from actual processes of disposal, their negative effects and our entanglements with them. Yet if we stand over Hinnom with the righteous, we still breathe the smoke of destruction and it becomes part of us. The heat of everlasting torment and the distress of the trauma it encodes burn a hole in the heart of our collective imagination. Isaiah 66, the Extractive Male Heir and Rebel Trash The Kleinian dynamics of extraction, consumption and discard in racial capitalism’s systems of human and non-human waste are nascent in Isaiah 66. Directly in the centre of this final chapter of Isaiah, flanked by ten verses on either side, is an image of the (collective) male heir raised by his mother, Jerusalem (vv. 11–14). A beloved boy child flourishes after a time of loss. Addressed in second-person masculine plural forms, the child signifies the emergent post-exilic nation. There is family drama as well – sibling rivalry – which turns out badly for those who end up forever consumed by worms and fire at the close of the chapter. Most striking is the proto-Kleinian phantasy of the nation-as-child devouring Jerusalem’s breast (66:11). The implied audience is told to put aside mourning and rejoice (v. 10), So that you (mpl) will suck (‫ )ינק‬and be satiated (‫ )שבע‬from the breast of her consolation. So that you will drain out (‫ )מצץ‬and enjoy yourself (‫ )ענג‬from the nipple of her glory (v. 11). A desire for safety and security after conquest drives phantasies of abundance and consumption. The verbs intensify in the parallelism. The third verb ‫מצץ‬, especially, has an extractive quality; some lexicons give “drain out.”10 The final verb (‫ )ענג‬connotes pleasure in the reflexive hithpael: to 10. The verb is variously translated as “milk out” and “drink deeply.” It only appears here as a conjugation of the root ‫מצץ‬, but is related to ‫מצה‬, which can mean “to wring out” or “to press out.” © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 45 enjoy oneself, take one’s pleasure in, pamper oneself, or refresh oneself. Like Klein’s child greedily “scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast” (1975 [1957, 181), the male heir takes enjoyment in consumption. The breast is poetically magnified, moving from consolation (‫ )תנחום‬to glory (‫)כבוד‬. Chris Franke highlights the abundance of the metaphors: “Effusive language highlights the deep satisfaction and exquisite delight …. The mother’s body furnishes comforting and lavish sustenance” (2009, 45). Along these lines he translates the last clause as “her glorious nipple,” indicating, without noting, the child’s libidinal pleasure in the breast. As scholars have noted, the mother becomes divine in the metamorphoses of the poetry (Schmitt 1985; Franke 2009; Niskanen 2014, 68–69; Chapman 2016; Langton 2021). Yhwh extends security to Jerusalem and also glory (‫)כבוד‬, previously depicted as the substance of the nipple, making it run like a river (v. 12). Solace is emphasized with the threefold repetition of comfort (‫)נחם‬, moving between Yhwh and Jerusalem: “Like a man whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you, and in Jerusalem you will be comforted” (v. 13). Jerusalem and the deity merge, becoming the idealized object. As Jeremiah Cataldo astutely analyses the focus on the second temple in Haggai, “Idealization may effectively stave off persecutory anxieties of annihilation” (2013, 6). The image of divine Jerusalem likewise projects safety and respite in a time of loss. But there might be another side to this security. The righteous male figure is extractive. In her compelling work on bones as a symbol of male fertility in the Tanakh, Ingrid Lilly (2019) argues that Isaiah 66 deploys the feminine metaphor only to foreground the masculinity and virility of the nation. As Karen Langton notices about the woman’s labouring body elsewhere in Isaiah (42:5–17), here too “The experience of the female body that is present in the text is forgotten, and her voice is silenced” (2020, 20). Analyzing Isaiah 66:11–14, Lilly writes, “The text uses Woman Zion and the maternal deity as a rhetorical fertility treatment, … a discursive reproductive technology meant to interpolate milk nurture for a male reader, stimulate his fertility, moisten his bones, and rhetorically ensure his reproductive future” (2019, 443). The collective male heir “drains” the breast to secure his own vitality and future. Having extracted the necessary nourishment, he grows strongly with bones that “sprout like the grass” (v. 14). As Lilly puts it, “Male children sprout moist bones in their milky bodies promising clan regeneration and the establishment of a future through male seed” (444). The breast imagery further shores up the male heir’s authenticity and authority. As Cynthia Chapman shows in her groundbreaking work on © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 46 Erin Runions kinship language in the Tanakh, this passage signals belonging. She demonstrates that drinking from the same breast is a primary way of indicating kinship in the Tanakh. In ancient Near Eastern literature, “Breast milk was understood as a substance that transmitted royalty and sometimes divinity from mother or wet nurse to suckling” (2016, 125). Given the slippage between Jerusalem and Yhwh, there is a similar implication in this passage. Chapman explains that “The rebuilding of a people and a nation involves sucking at the breasts of royalty, and for the returning exiles, it is the milk of their capital city that will complete their rebirth as Israelites dwelling in their homeland” (2016, 133). Along with fertility, royalty and divinity are extracted, establishing the prophet’s community as rightful heirs to the city. This nation building comes out of the pain and loss in the destruction of Jerusalem, the experience of which seems to motivate a kind of Kleinian splitting into good and bad objects. The poem defends against loss. Zion gives birth before she experiences birth pains (v. 7). No one has heard of a child/nation born this quickly (v. 8). The birth is accompanied by a call to set aside mourning, with a threefold imperative to happiness: “Be glad with Jerusalem. Rejoice with her all who love her. Exult with her exultation all who mourn upon her” (v. 10). The pain of conquest is sublated into a new nation in a way that denies the history and the people of the nation that have gone before. This refusal to mourn in a nationalist context is reminiscent of what Georgis has written in her Kleinian analysis of Lebanese nationalism (domestic and diasporic): “If the lost object is a nation [lost through colonialism or migration], then this paranoid-schizoid state (Klein 1935), which wants to fragment and split the world into good and evil, suggests that we are either in a nostalgic relationship to a place or in repudiation of our attachment to it” (2013, 79). Georgis gives a moving and personal account of the losses of colonialism and their disavowals in projection onto bad objects. Isaiah 66 rather classically depicts this kind of nationalist splitting. The chapter’s final verse (66:24) conveys a sense of internal conflict over the proper form of religious expression and inclusion in a time of national building. Yhwh proclaims that the righteous “will go out and they will look upon the corpses of the men rebelling against (or in) me.” Although the usual translation of ‫ פשע בי‬is “transgress against me,” more literally the preposition conveys “in me” or “with me” (‫)בי‬.11 The syntax implies 11. Reading ‫ פשע בי‬as a form of internal rebellion is supported by Zeph 3:11, where the construction occurs in parallel with Yhwh’s vow to remove “from your midst the ones exulting in your pride.” See also Ezek 20:38. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 47 that transgressions are internal to the divinely assembled body. The poem gives only one side of the conflict, the side in which Yhwh favours the haredim, those “trembling at his word” (from the adjective ‫חרד‬, vv. 2, 5). The opposing side is characterized as impure and as instigators of the conflict. They are called “your brothers, the ones hating you, the ones excluding you for the sake of my name” (v. 5). Ideologically the two groups are not so different – the prophet ironically complains about the rejected group as saying, “Move away from me, for I am holier than you” (65:5). Both sides claim authenticity and righteousness. But the prophetic text promises these brother-rebels shame and doom (66:5, 17). All the past pain of conquest and loss is transferred to the rebels. Those who are said to sacrifice, eat and conduct themselves in an impure way are criminalized as they are ejected (66: 3–5, 17). A series of equivalences is given in which acceptable sacrifices in the Levitical system are paired with practices that should be unthinkable: The one slaughtering a head of cattle [is] one striking a man. The one slaughtering a sheep [is] one breaking the neck of a dog. The one offering a tribute/grain offering [is] blood of a boar. The one praising (with) incense [is] one blessing trouble/bloodshed/ idolatry (66:3). Some interpreters argue that these verses are a critique of Yahwist sacrifice, or a critique of influence from “non-Yahwistic cults” (Niskanen 2014, 67; Blenkinsopp 2019, 669). Anne Gardner notes, however, “The kinds of sacrifices which are mentioned in the first part of each sentence in Isa 66:3 are acceptable in theory to God;” in her view, the problem is the hypocritical attitude with which sacrifices are practised (2006, 518, 524). Alternately, the intensity and disparateness of these accusations could signal that they are persecutory projections. The level of invective is high. Gardner makes a persuasive case that the second half of each of the lines refers either to murder (3a, 3b) or idolatry (3c), or to both (3d).12 The text further calls their practices wantonness (‫תעלולים‬, v. 4), a term that carries overtones of abuse and capriciousness.13 There are also accusations of heterodox practice, with reference to the one in the middle 12. Gardner reads ‫ און‬in 3d as a double entendre referring to both “idolatry” (Isa 41:29) and the “shedding of blood” (Isa 59:7) (2006, 520–27), to which I would also add the meaning of “trouble” (Isa 59:4). 13. See, for instance, the other use of this word in Isa 3:4, where it is parallel with children acting as princes; or consider the related hithpael of ‫עלל‬, which carries ideas of sexual assault (Ju 19:25) or military humiliation (1 Sam 31:4; Jer 38:19). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 48 Erin Runions of the gardens, as well as “eating flesh of the boar, and the detestable thing, and the mouse” (66:17). The poet throws the book at the offenders: unrestrained violence, unclean religious practice, undisciplined or abusive behaviour. The other brothers are phantasmically projected as dangerous, unclean persecutors, bad objects destroying the safety of the chosen group. The vituperation works hard against any form of care for those endlessly destroyed. Who might the “rebels” have been? The chapter rhetorically leaves the identities of the people involved in its conflict unspecified (Middlemas 2011, 122). The setting evokes a postexilic time, before the temple is completed, with Yhwh desiring to see the temple built (66:1) and with a sense of mourning over Jerusalem (66:10–13; see Chan 2010; J. J. Collins 2018; Ristau 2017). The conflict over temple building between the returning golah community and the people who remained in the land, voiced in Ezra-Nehemiah, is one possible context. The use of the term haredim to describe the righteous in Ezra 9:4 and 10:3 implies a connection.14 On the other hand, the redactional history constructed for Isaiah 56–66 indicates that the final chapter was added late, in order to counteract other theologies in Trito Isaiah (Gregory 2007; Tiemeyer 2017). These last eleven chapters of the Isaianic corpus express various understandings of who should be included in the assembly, from anyone claiming Jewish decent, diasporic Jews, practitioners of a particular Yahwism, to Gentiles (Gregory 2007; Doak 2010; Middlemas 2011; Tiemeyer 2017). Isaiah 66 appears to be open to diasporic Jews and Gentiles in a way that other chapters in Trito Isaiah are not (vv. 18–23) (Gardner 2002; Tiemeyer 2017; Schuele 2019), but it clearly circumscribes religious practice. It could be that the final chapter is late but deliberately references the conflicts depicted in Ezra-Nehemiah. The final verse could itself be a late addition, as Saul Olyan argues, to balance out the “enduring states” of vv. 22–23, and to refocus attention on punishment (2018, 155–157). Given the difficulties in pinpointing a historical moment for the text, the vilified party in Isaiah 66 could be any group that did not practise the accepted Yahwism. The writer is certainly aligned with the polarizing views and ethnic/religious anxieties of the golah community, which were projected onto the non-elite people who remained in the land during the exile, those who were resettled in Samaria and wanted to be included (Ez 4), or those who had migrated to Jerusalem. These others were 14. Blenkinsopp (2019), however, argues strongly that there are enough differences between the texts to suggest a different group of people, and that Isaiah 66 is slightly earlier than Ezra-Nehemiah. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 49 represented by the golah community as Canaanites to be excluded, killed or purified (Carroll 1992). Brian Doak argues the poem’s protagonists are a proto-apocalyptic sect, possibly contending against the exclusiveness of the Zadokite hierarchy as described in Ez 40:46. Yet the polemic against any rival group ends up limiting Trito Isaiah’s overall purported inclusiveness (2010, 17–21). Isaiah 66 simply relegates those vilified as heterodox and violent to eternal fire. The final verse is pollutive. As Klein says of the envious child, the favoured community not only extracts from the mother but more venomously, seeks to put bad parts of itself into her, destroying her goodness. Although the interpretive tradition places the burning bodies in Hinnom, outside of Jerusalem, the text does not go so far. The righteous “go out” to look upon the burning corpses, but a location is not given. While “to go out” (‫ )יצא‬can certainly mean to exit a city, one could also think of the command in Ezekiel 9:7 for the righteous to “go out” and defile the temple with the corpses of the unrighteous. Whether internal or external to the actual city walls, the image of ever-burning, worm-eaten corpses is toxic to the purported abundance and nourishment of Jerusalem. What lasting harms might there be to the new nation when the source of nourishment is polluted by an inability to deal with loss and difference? Colonial Reparations New brothers are allowed into the fold in a way that the rejected brothers are not. Despite the fears of persecutors, representatives are sent out to bring in “your brothers from all the nations” (vv. 20–21). It is a repopulating effort. The newly integrated people are called the true “sons of Israel.” They bring offerings in “pure vessels.” They will even be priests and Levites (v. 21). The community makes room for those who follow what the author considered to be the right religious practice. The movement of the poem is a precursor to Klein’s own colonial impulses. In “Love, Guilt and Reparation,” Klein states that the child, after fantasizing destruction of the mother, seeks to restore her by searching for and repopulating a new territory, “the ‘promised land’ – the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’” (1975 [1937], 334). The reference is telling, especially considering that there is scholarly consensus that the biblical texts of conquest are redacted with the concerns of the returning golah community in mind (Carroll 1992). Klein explains that sometimes the child grows up to be an explorer. In a passage that David Eng calls out as “the rationalizing of the colonial project across political and psychic registers” (2016, 15), Klein says, © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 50 Erin Runions We know that in discovering a new country aggression is made use of in the struggle with the elements, and in overcoming difficulties of all kinds. But sometimes aggression is shown more openly; especially was this so in former times when ruthless cruelty against native populations was displayed by people who not only explored, but conquered and colonized. Some of the early phantasied attacks against the imaginary babies in the mother’s body, and actual hatred against new-born brothers and sisters, were here expressed in reality by the attitude towards the natives. The wished-for restoration, however, found full expression in repopulating the country with people of their own nationality (1975 [1937], 334). Eng points out how quickly Klein glosses over the cruelty to indigenous people by upholding repopulation as a form of reparation (2016, 13). Mamta Dadlani emphasizes Klein’s minimal acknowledgement that these psychic processes can become real colonial violence in adults. As Dadlani puts it, “Persecution and loss of subjectivity are not always in the realm of phantasy; the colonized is an active target of persecution” (2020, 122). Moreover, as Emily Green (2018) has so brilliantly argued, Klein’s idea of the breast may itself be a form of colonial takeover. She persuasively demonstrates that Klein is influenced by, and disavows, the figure of the Black Mammy popular in interwar Britain. Green points to places in Klein’s work where a mammy or “negress” appears and is forgotten (2018, 171–73, 175–78). Moreover, Green shows how black face operated as a means for Jewish assimilation in the British and American postwar period. She proposes that the disavowed Mammy may have been Klein’s mode of wrestling with Jewish assimilation and her own conversion to Unitarianism (2018, 174–75).15 Green’s analysis indicates that Klein has engaged with her own bad objects by filling her therapeutic theory with whiteness.16 The dynamic of Isaiah 66 mirrors these colonial impulses. The favoured brothers follow a colonial form of reparation, negotiating their own difference (in identifying with the returning golah community) and their own trauma of conquest and exile by erasing other forms of difference and bringing in sameness. The “many slain” (vv. 15–16) and eternally tortured (v. 24) are replaced with brothers returning from the nations. If they are to join in purity, presumably they will join in discard. Yet if they 15. On Klein’s ongoing relation to Judaism and her conversion, see also Kristeva 2001, 22. 16. Lin similarly discusses Freud’s collected antiquities, which were reparative to him but colonizing in their acquisition, including items taken in tomb robbing (2017, 124–28). © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 51 are to be brothers, following Chapman’s explanation of kinship structures, they also will drink from the (polluted) breast of Jerusalem. This same logic of criminalizing invective and colonial reparation that I have been discussing is also central to the construction of the prison industrial complex. The rhetoric and work of John DiIulio provides a prime, biblical-adjacent example. DiIulio is the Princeton political scientist and Brookings Institution Fellow who infamously coined the term “superpredator” to describe Black youth. DiIulio was a cheerleader for the Clinton-era growth of the prison industrial complex. In 1996, the same year that Walvoord repeated the tradition about criminals and garbage in Gehenna, DiIulio painted a dire picture of Black Youth at the Senate Subcommittee on Youth Violence. He spoke of the “moral poverty” of Black youth, stemming from “growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in chaotic, dysfunctional, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings where drug abuse and child abuse are twins” (1996, 24). DiIulio called the youth a “horde from hell [that] kills, maims, and terrorizes merely to become known, or for no reason at all” (emphasis mine, 1996, 23). With disavowed but unmistakable enthusiasm he continued, “No one relishes the thought of locking up more juveniles. But it must be done.” On the heels of his criminalizing pronouncements, DiIulio offered another way: “Our guiding principle should be, ‘fill churches not jails’ ” (1996, 24). Jails and churches. Judgement and salvation. Hell and heaven. Threat and safety. For all his pretence to political innovation and policy savvy, DiIulio simply repeated polarizing binaries as old as Isaiah 66. It is little wonder that the ideas gained traction, so familiar as they were. Unsurprisingly, DiIulio became the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, in 2001 under George W. Bush. This office led an exponential increase of faith-based programmes in prisons. Prison ministries formed by the hundreds, to serve the staggering increase in prisons. Prisons become hellish, and faith-based ministries offer salvation. Communities are violently depopulated, detained, converted and then repopulated in the image of the Christianity of the prison ministry. As Brad Stoddard (2021) has so importantly documented, prison ministries are deeply invested in socializing people to reproduce white heteropatriarchal norms of Christian conservatism, which continues to promote merciless tough-on-crime policies.17 17. Communities decimated by the prison industrial complex may be repopulated physically as well, through gentrification and development. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 52 Erin Runions Reparation-Entanglement I have argued that it is not incidental that during the expansion of the prison industrial complex, the emergent evangelical debate about hell imagines Gehenna as a place for burning garbage and dumping the bodies of criminals. Beginning with this phantasy about Hinnom, I have traced, via Melanie Klein, a relation between texts about Gehenna and the trauma of war. In them, we see an inability to process loss, idealization, a demand for safety, extraction and abundance, and an attack upon that idealization. The structures of idealization and discard elaborated in Isaiah 66 have had a long history of replaying the trauma of war, arguably shaping how we think about the psyche, garbage, the planet and the people we call rebels. Decolonizing reparation is needed. For Klein, the child seeks to “repair, preserve, or revive the loved injured object” (Klein 1975 [1952], 74). The subject reintegrates the object that has been split into good and bad part objects, “healing the splitting process in some measure and therefore diminishing the fragmentation, which means that the lost parts of the self become more accessible to him” (1975 [1960], 267). Kotrosits describes this process as the child artfully taping the bits of the object back together into a new object (2020, 37). Loss is tolerated, even in its painfulness. As David Seitz describes it, “While the threat of pain and bad surprise remains soberingly ever-present, good surprise and love become possible” (2017, 14). Lin and Green make the important observation that no reparation can happen without a process of mourning the lost breast (Lin 2016, 53), including the “‘good’ colonial breast” (Green 2018, 179).18 What would it mean to mourn the loss of Jerusalem as a breast? Perhaps it would mean letting go of the idea of a holy, untouchable city, a place that would fulfil all human needs of goodness and safety. It would entail admitting the coloniality and the violence of whiteness that inhabits security culture and produces the prison industrial complex. It would require acknowledging and mourning the trauma that repeats from ancient times into carceral warfare. It would mean putting aside the presumptions of abundance and extraction and recognizing how these entitlements have produced the mountains of trash that unevenly pollute our environments. 18. Salvation has been offered as one form of reparation, as we have seen. But as Nikia Robert (2017) has shown, the valorization of sacrifice that is dominant in much of the Christian tradition contributes to the logic of the prison industrial complex because both sacrifice and prisons demand “salvific” pain on the part of historically oppressed peoples. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 53 Huang’s notion of entanglement is important here in identifying losses to mourn. There is no reparation without understanding that we are connected to our discarded objects and people, even if we think we are not. In Klein’s object dramas, both good and bad objects are part of the subject. If we endlessly throw out consumer items in the phantasy of abundance, we lose something of ourselves, including our health, including our oceans and air. Likewise, the whole of US society is wounded by its own formation in the violence of the prison system and the unmourned losses of disappeared people. Fred Moten names it as a deficit: “I will note the debt, and I will note the brutal and venal and vicious way in which the debt is unacknowledged” (Harney and Moten 2013, 151). The racist venom called out by Moten is the pollutive projection of Klein’s child, but on a societal scale. Eve Sedgwick has famously urged reparative reading as part of the work of literary interpreters – moving past paranoid positions that seek to illuminate hidden historical and material causes for the production of literature (Sedgwick and Frank 2003, 123–51).19 Yet as Jennifer Knust (2014) has so cogently demonstrated in her study of Genesis 9, it is difficult to read some biblical texts reparatively because they are so deeply marked by the kind of paranoid splitting that Klein describes. The eternal destruction of bad objects in Isaiah 66 certainly presents a challenge to reparative reading. I find helpful the turn to aesthetic texts in Georgis’s reckoning with the losses that drive nationalisms. For Georgis, “Aesthetic production provides unprocessed affect a playing field … the space to represent unassimilated trauma” (2013, 76). In this vein, the prophetic text can be taken as an attempt to work through raw conflict and trauma. Georgis further calls for “an interpretive approach … that engages with the nuances, the conflicts, and the desires of a human subject that lives in complex relation to political realities and identities” (2013, 76). A focus on aesthetics asks us to pay attention, as Francis Landy does, to the complicated way in which the entire redaction of Isaiah treats the experience of exile and death. As Landy puts it, “The words, for all that they attempt to construct and anticipate a new reality and ecstatically bring that reality into being, are spectral, shadowed by irretrievable loss” (2010, 249). Landy shows how the poetic language is ambiguous, shifting, trying to contend with that trauma. For Landy, death in Isaiah “is most truly home” (252). Perhaps we should not read the burning rebels as something of the future, but a specter of the past to mourn. Such an approach compels reading beyond 19. Clearly some of the work of this paper has been to do just that. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 54 Erin Runions hyperbolic and damaging imputations, like DiIulio’s condemnation of Black youth, or Trito Isaiah’s rebels. Rather than vilifying the rebels, or the youth, it is important to look at the violence to which they have been subjected and at what they offer. Dadlani also provides relief from colonizing splitting, projection and reparation by offering a queer approach to bad objects. Dadlani proposes that in “attending to what one is supposed to pass over, creatively engaging with what is left behind, and finding value in what is discarded, one lives as a challenge, and as such, one lives in proximity to violence” (2020, 124–25). Seitz makes a similar suggestion, when he imagines “improper queer citizenship” that focuses on “loss, nonsovereignty, and reinvigorated desire for collectivity” (2017, 11). What would it mean to revalue the excluded and to form collectivities between “good” and “bad” objects? In terms of trash and pollution, it would require developing good, decolonizing, land relations (Liboiron 2021). It could also mean thinking with compost (Arthur and Jentink 2018) or shit (Bray 2016). In terms of prisons, it should mean decarceration and material reparations. It can include learning from African-American, feminist and queer abolitionists how harm can be addressed within and between people, rather than viciously projecting it outwards (Piepzna-Samarasinha and Dixon 2020; Kaba 2021; Davis et al. 2022). Isaiah’s rebels can be read queerly, as portrayals of one side in an internal conflict. They too were part of Jerusalem’s family, subject to trauma and losses of conquest. Perhaps after the return from exile, they were targeted for abuse. One clue might be the fact that Isaiah 65:4 speaks of people sitting in the graveyards, keeping watch (‫ )נצר‬overnight. This passage has typically been read negatively, as the epitome of necromancy, or as Kristeva puts it, “corpse fanciers” (1982, 108). But perhaps “ones keeping watch” could be taken in the sense of protecting graveyards, for instance from something like Josiah’s vindictive tactic of digging up graves of the heterodox and burning their bones on the offending altar (2 Kings 23:16; 2 Chron 34:3–7) (a story noted in Lilly 2019, 443 n. 43).20 The rebels could be vilified because of their resistance. It could be, as Dadlani contends, via Eng, that reparation cannot be initiated by the powerful to those they have oppressed. If those in power are aligned with the helpless infant, there is a misrecognition of the relation; repair is only for the dominant and therefore is a form of violence (2020, 125). If the subject is in the position of the colonizer, reparation should 20. For much more on this story in its postexilic form, see Barrick 2002. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2022 Rebel Trash, Bad Objects, Prison Hell 55 not be about the subject at all.21 As Gila Ashtor argues, object relations are too focused on the subject’s autonomous agency in initiating reparation. Instead, following Jean Laplanche, she suggests that “The subject is constituted by its necessary response to an-other’s desire” (2021, 185). Perhaps we could desire each other into repairing relations with our own bad objects before they are projected outwards, so that the harms of discard and oppression do not occur. In terms of the biblical text, we could attend to the desire of the people guarding the graves. Maybe it entails taking their claim to holiness seriously (65:5). In sum, a decolonizing, queer reparative reading of Isaiah 66 finally mourns the ancient traumas of war so that they cease to inspire visions of hell and their damaging afterlives. It recognizes scripturalized structures of psychic splitting that compensate for loss and attack sources of goodness. It stops only taking the side of the text and allows ancient heterodox practices of Yahwism back into the interpretive fold. It gives them back their bones for dignified burial. Further, it names those harmed by the ongoing legacies of elimination enabled by this text – including people affected by environmental racism and incarceration. It makes space for those affected to initiate and demand what they need for reparation. Without diminishing the real violences of a society of discard on communities of colour, it accepts that there is no disposal without entanglement. It’s time to stop damning the rebels, violently projecting our bad objects and poisoning our world. Acknowledgements I thank my colleague Gary Gilbert for reminding me of the Dung Gate in Jerusalem and pointing me to resources for archaeology in Jerusalem. I also am grateful to my colleague David Seitz for his generous and generative reading of this paper in an earlier stage, in which he offered many resources and insights. I am appreciative of ongoing conversations with Maia Kotrosits, her writing and her many amazing book suggestions. Brad Anderson, editor of Postscripts, has given valuable feedback and encouragement in making this a better essay. The online Facebook community at Greg Seigworth’s Capacious/WTF Affect is an extraordinarily helpful resource for affect theory. I thank participants for their generative responses to my crowd-sourcing question on affect and trash, including Greg’s fulsome response. 21. Moten notes that Black radicals might not even ask for reparation because “It can’t be repaired. 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