Playing with Death

Abstract

The task of identifying a single rationale for the violence on display in the book of Jeremiah may end with a coherent answer, but perhaps not a satisfactory one. That violence serves a reforming purpose seems satisfactory to theological readers in search of theodicy, as well trauma analyses that find the violence problematic but understandable. Other interpreters of Jeremiah, such as feminists and postcolonialists, struggle with the gratuitous and seemingly arbitrary nature of the violence. While not an attempt to rationalize the violence, this chapter engages the arbitrariness of the violence through a systematic analysis of four targets of violence in the book of Jeremiah: the prophet, the feminized Israel/Judah as adulterous wife, foreign nations, and the earth. By distinguishing these separate targets, the chapter examines how gender, sexuality, nationality, and speciesism intersect in the enactment of the rhetorical violence in the book. These delineations also set the stage for a central claim of the chapter, that of exceptional violence. Building upon Carl Schmidt’s notion that exceptional violence stems from exceptional vulnerability that requires the state of exception to use unrestrained violence, the chapter considers how the violence as narrated in Jeremiah not only performs this exceptionalism but also has exceptions. By examining who/what dies from the violence in the book, the chapter points out how the politics of death is played out upon different targets.