Wrestling

I remember as a child another child running up behind me and then wrestling me to the ground. Stronger than him, I let him do so for no reason other than to punish myself for my strength. I saw him coming but knew my yielding should be my punishment, deliciously endured. I was punished for strength by weakness; strength punished itself in me. Or perhaps I found myself in that punishment, in the contorsion or shame whereby strength became ashamed of strength.

A soul, you might say, was born; it hollowed itself out. I was not weak, but drawn to weakness. The strong, as Nietzsche argues, remember nothing. Was I weak in the manner of Nietzsche’s slave, remembering every slight and dreaming of an imaginary revenge? But I did not resent my own strength but was ashamed of it, as if it were implicated in the bullying which afflicted other children and in the tyrannies of our teachers.

Jacob wrestles the angel as one stronger than he. The name Israel, the one who struggles with God, was given to the one who had struggled with the angel. Henceforward he would walk with uncertainty just as Moses was said to speak with uncertainty (he stammered). Philo of Alexandria will see in Jacob’s hip wound ‘the crown of the victor’: he lost, he won. Jean-Louis Chretien comments:

For Philo, to allow oneself to be outstripped by what is better than oneself is the wound of humility, the loving wound, sincerely desired and accepted. No one is stronger than him when he gives place in such a way to that which surpasses him, without, however, consenting to separate himself from it, but, instead, following it and pursuing it with a limping step.

Defeat, then, is victory and victory defeat. Remember the story: Jacob has helped his family across the ford of Jabbok. He remains alone. Then he wrestles an unknown adversary. ‘There was one that wrestled with him until daybreak who, seeing that he could master him, struck him in the socket of his hip, and Jacob’s hip was dislocated as he wrestled with him‘. The adversary asks to be let go ‘for the day is breaking’. Jacob answers, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me’. Jacob receives his blessing. He is renamed Israel, the one who struggles with God, but he cannot obtain the name of his adversary.

Dream of a writing struck by a wound which gives it to the strength to bear weakness. A writing-struggle with the angel that allows its author to take on another name, to be born again – not, now, a rebirth into faith, and not even a proper birth, but that certain-uncertain setting forth which demands a new name be taken even as it stands in for what dissolves each name. A new name taken? – or is it that one is received, marked into writing as into the socket of Jacob’s hip? A name? No, not even a name, but that resurgence out of which all words form and that all words try to speak.