Charles Bell’s Bridgewater Treatise on the hand should be read as elaborating philosophies of pedagogy and the senses, and as fitting with Bell’s work on the nervous system. In The Hand, Bell argues that sensory reception must be coupled with muscular action to establish true knowledge, elevating the ‘doing’ hand to epistemological parity with the long-superior ‘seeing’ eye. Knowledge in anatomy was typically couched in terms to do with sight and depiction; but according to Bell, anatomy simply could not teach (...) the sort of feeling that one would encounter inside a living body. Instead, anatomy taught students to map the parts so that their fingers, moving through a surgical field, could ‘see’ and therefore could know and could act. This elevation of the status of the hand also had social implications that fit with Bell’s reformist politics. (shrink)

Torah, the name of the first five books of the ?sacred history? comprised by the Hebrew Bible, tends to be translated as ?Law? and to be affiliated with the separating ?Law of the Father.? But Torah means ?teaching.? Venerable tradition allies this teaching with feminine Wisdom, ?a tree of life.? Theories of poetic language elaborated by such scholars as Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous facilitate discovering beneath the Torah's fractured and labyrinthine surface a way of return to the mother. This (...) way is embodied in the inversions, textuality, and concentricity of the rhetorical trope of chiasmus, which exceeds the bounds of the Law to provide a form for the expression of ?woman's desire? and so for the feminine text. Exploring as such the doubly chiastic poem in which, when naming woman in Eden, a human being (adam) changes its name to man (iysh) challenges man's biblical history, while restoring the memory of interconnection with the mother and all life. Reduplications of this transformative moment expand upon sacred history in terms of the Torah's central injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself. (shrink)

Venerable tradition allies the Torah with Wisdom, a “tree of life.”2 The tree of life is an ancient mythic symbol of the earth mother. This essay demonstrates the capacity of the Torah to facilitate a reintegrative return to the mother when, as now, the religious narratives falter that once seemed to ensure the unity of man made in the image of God conceived only as the Father. Participating in the process of this return one discovers beneath the Torah's fractured narrative (...) surface a reduplicative pattern based on the logic of the unconscious, which is founded on the repressed prelinguistic bond with all life formed at the maternal breast. This pattern reflects the recombinant properties that the unconscious shares with the earth, which breaks down and regenerates dead matter as the unconscious breaks down and regenerates the meaning of words. Folded into rhetorical tropes as into a single letter, the Torah's regenerative pattern repeatedly recalls to man what it means to be human, unique among but also one with all the diverse life of the earth. (shrink)