erictheobscure
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- Feb 18, 2008
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Margiela shirt obviously a visual meditation on the unstable typological relationship between blood/ink (between the letter of the law that insists on the corporeal vs. the spirit of the law that appeals to a truer meaning) as imagined by The Merchant of Venice.
Portia, to Shylock:
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.
Spelled as 'one iote' in the Geneva Bible and as 'iot' in Shakespeare's Folio, both Portian and Jesus refer to the Greek iota modeled on the Hebrew yodh, its simple stroke constituting the most minimal letter in both alphabets . . . Portia's reference to the 'jot of blood' serves both to align Shylock's bond with the bloody letter of the law and to associate her own legalism not with Shylock's Judaism but with the internalizing 'fulfillment' of the law brought about in Christ's post-Sinai Sermon on the Mount. . . . Portia's maneuver functions dialectically, as the negation of a negation, a sublation that locates the two characters on either side of a historical divide.
- Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints (Chicago, 2005)
Too large to be a jot, neither ink nor blood, worn on the body (over the body) but resisting any signification, the Margiela shirt tries to clog the wheels of dialectical machinery.
Portia, to Shylock:
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.
Spelled as 'one iote' in the Geneva Bible and as 'iot' in Shakespeare's Folio, both Portian and Jesus refer to the Greek iota modeled on the Hebrew yodh, its simple stroke constituting the most minimal letter in both alphabets . . . Portia's reference to the 'jot of blood' serves both to align Shylock's bond with the bloody letter of the law and to associate her own legalism not with Shylock's Judaism but with the internalizing 'fulfillment' of the law brought about in Christ's post-Sinai Sermon on the Mount. . . . Portia's maneuver functions dialectically, as the negation of a negation, a sublation that locates the two characters on either side of a historical divide.
- Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints (Chicago, 2005)
Too large to be a jot, neither ink nor blood, worn on the body (over the body) but resisting any signification, the Margiela shirt tries to clog the wheels of dialectical machinery.
