The Face of the Contemporary: Lost World Fantasies of Finding Lot’s Wife

Chapter six examines a relatively unknown Victorian lost-world romance fantasy, Alfred Clark’s The Finding of Lot’s Wife (1896). The novel converts the legend of Lot’s wife, traditionally a cautionary tale of moral turpitude, into a stark lesson on the perilous consequences of intercultural contact in the Orientalizing theatre of colonial Palestine. Clark’s central contribution to the Sodom archive, however, resides in the novel’s prescient staging of a world in which insights associated with Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology of myth converge with the theological residue in Levinas’s writings – notably, the self-emptying action of kenosis, which Levinas takes from Pauline incarnational theology. Clark is no theologian, but his interest in the ethical provocations of kenosis is as keen as Levinas’s—and perhaps more viscerally arresting because of its narrative immediacy. This feature powerfully contributes to the innovation The Finding of Lot’s Wife brings to the Sodom archive. Clark’s ingenious intertwining of Blumenbergian and Levinasian treatments of myth effectively imagines the urgent contemporariness of the legacy of Lot’s wife. Clark shows how the lethal and reparative dimensions of that legacy asymmetrically impinge on each other, producing an arresting narrative image of dread commingled with hope and urgent consequence.

Avant-Garde Lot’s Wife: Natalia Goncharova’s Salt Pillars and the Rebirth of Hospitality

Chapter four shows how the innovative treatment of the flight from Sodom by the avant-garde Russian painter Natal’ia Goncharova (1881-1962) presents a figural merger of messianic expectation and cosmopolitan hope in the artist’s experimental hybridizing of secular and sacral components to aesthetic practice. The strangely oneiric and mortified landscape conveyed by Goncharova’s proto-cubist vocabulary in Salt Pillars (ca. 1909) assembles a prescient image of Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality, which Arendt draws from Augustine’s definition of the human as inherently endowed with the capacity for gratitude and the ability to begin again in the midst of uncertainty. Put simply, the painting gives figural expression to the fundamental ambiguity of Arendt’s notion of natality, its backward- and forward-looking turn toward givenness and new beginnings. Through this gesture, Salt Pillars presents a patient attentiveness to the complicity of worlding and unworlding gestures in the rhythm of being with others.

Out of Africa: Albert Memmi’s Desert of Allegory in The Pillar of Salt

Chapter seven examines the prospect of unhoped-for discovery that colonial discourse analyst Albert Memmi brought to the figure of Lot’s wife in his first published work, The Pillar of Salt (1953). The novel presents a scrupulously confessional report on a life wrecked in the colonial endgame in the Maghreb and rehabilitated by a dream of flight to Argentina. The novel’s critical interest turns on the missed rendezvous between the boy’s conscious assent to the virulent legacy of Sodom and the critical rejoinder figured by the boy’s intuitive and gradually immersive contact with the forgotten face of Lot’s wife. This is the face that testifies, through action, to the ethical awakening born of intimate familiarity with the difficult edge joining home to homelessness. In essence, the novel presents a laboratory for thinking how Arendt’s critically willed hope in natality’s reparative power may speak to the risk and promise of kenotic hospitality at the heart of Levinas’s ethics of vulnerability. Crucially, the novel figures this thought as an echo of Augustine’s Confessions—the text that famously worries over the wounding conflict between the narrated and narrating self, and absolves the conflict through an ecstatic embrace of allegory’s world-making and world-repairing powers.

Soundings in Sodomscape: Biblical Purity Codes, Spa Clinics, and the Ends of Immunity

Under the canopy of cultural geography, Chapter five draws on the resources of critical medical studies and landscape architecture to show how the deep memory of the Sodom story reissues the hospitality question (what are you willing to give up to protect what you think you value most?) in the region historically known as Palestine, even as that very question is currently being subsumed into the engines of biopower promoting the crush of industries in the fragile ecosystem along the southwestern shores of the Dead Sea. The notable symptom of this operation takes shape, perhaps surprisingly, in the region's robust investment in the skincare industry-in particular, the therapeutic regimens for psoriasis, the disorder whose biosemiotic profile and biomedical history quietly point up the shared socio-ethical borders of community and immunity in the figural mooring of Sodomscape.

Remembering Lot’s Wife: The Structure of Testimony in the Painted Life of Mary Ward

Chapter three identifies the sodomitical subtext informing a hospitality crisis on a different register, one provoked by the controversial pastoral career of Mary Ward (1585-1645), the early modern “Jesuitress” missionary. The ensemble of commemorative paintings chronicling Ward’s career (the so-called Painted Life) suggestively folds both the scandal and the eschatological resilience of Ward’s public teaching ministry into a forgotten legacy of Lot’s wife. The paintings’ visual testimony achieves this by recapturing second-century church father Irenaeus of Lyons’ intuition of the abandoned woman in Genesis 19 as the spiritually radiant figure of the ecclesial community’s patient dwelling between disaster and redemption. The paintings’ anamorphically transfigured markers of Lot’s wife confirm Erich Auerbach’s cherished hope in the adaptability of figura as a means of maintaining neighborly proximity between past and present in historical realism’s secular grammar. The paintings also anticipate the keen interest that Auerbach’s contemporaries from the progressive ressourcement school of Catholic theology would also develop in deploying figura’s resources as a means of opening up more generous – more hospitable – pathways between Catholicism and modernity.

The Rise of Prophecy: Figural Neuter, Desert of Allegory

Chapter two lingers on Maître François’ design, treating its suggestive ambiguity as a premonitory witness to the twentieth-century postwar turns to the Sodom archive in Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas’ delicate yet fraught philosophical conversation about the ethical aptitude of artworks. The Sodom archive’s figural suggestiveness guides Blanchot and Levinas’s shared predisposition to identify the primordial affinity of artworks with the disruptive urgency of prophecy and its figural analogue, the desert. Lot’s wife’s subliminal association with the prophecy/desert nexus becomes the site of an ecumenical settlement between Blanchot and Levinas over the captivating and dislocating aesthetic power of artworks. On this note, Maître François’ image and the late modern moment of philosophical hospitality between Blanchot and Levinas speak to each other across centuries. Through different registers of discernment, the two scenes conjure the figure of Lot’s wife as the material remains of a thinking beyond the limit of the phenomenal face of appearances and cognition, so as to give witness to the radiant and interruptive force of artworks’ worlding and unworlding dimensions.

Introduction: Figural Moorings of Hospitality in Sodomscape

The introduction sets up the book’s conceptual and methodological parameters by laying out two intersecting avenues of inquiry. First, it establishes the link between the biblical account of the flight from Sodom and the ethical conundrums the Sodom legacy bequeaths to hospitality theory. Second, it argues for a fresh understanding of Lot’s wife – traditionally the exemplar of moral obduracy and female unruliness -- as an ethically provocative figural mediator between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the “flesh” and Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of dispossession before the “face” of the Other. Through this critical lens, chapter overviews show the far-ranging impact – across millennia and a wide variety of art forms – of Lot’s wife’s legacy as a mutable figure of reparative witnessing and ethical resilience.

Exodus, Interrupted: Lot’s Wife and the Allegorical Interval

Chapter one uses one of the jewels of late-medieval illuminated art from the studio of Parisian illustrator Maître François – a depiction of the flight from Sodom in a fifteenth-century manuscript of Augustine’s City of God – as the occasion to reflect on the ferment of patristic and medieval practices of allegorical composition and reading. The panorama shows how the allegory’s rich variance promotes established midrashic and exegetical habits of looking at Lot’s wife in Jewish and Christian biblical tradition -- a pictorial digest of condemnatory judgments. At the same time, the miniature’s design shows how allegory’s close affinity with the interruptive energy of figural expression (biblical typology) discloses breaches in the compositional chains connecting text and meaning. In these dead spaces between the visible and the legible, Maître François’ depiction of the abortive flight opens onto a glancing intuition of an ethics of prudential hospitality founded neither in the sovereignty of the law nor the satisfactions of duty.