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The Lives of Objects is a psychoanalytic theory-inflected intervention into the materialist and new materialist turns in the study of the ancient and contemporary worlds. Considering physical objects in tandem with psychic ones, and tracing the felt subtexts of material things, it substantially reorients readers to the literature of the ancient Mediterranean, concentrating on Jewish and Christian literature within it. This literature provides condensed illustrations of the way people across time and geography grapple with the politics and materiality of life and death. This book also offers a number of theoretical propositions issuing from the non-obvious histories of obvious physical artifacts, asking (in the vein of gender and critical race theories) what and who matters, what counts as a life, and what counts as real in the making of history. Finally, it performs a sustained reflection on the stakes and implications of disciplinary mechanisms and the fantasy lives they engender, from ancient imaginations about Roman law and justice to contemporary devotions to particular academic fields and their privileged objects of study.

In the West, monastic ideals and scholastic pursuits are complementary; monks are popularly imagined copying classics, preserving learning through the Middle Ages, and establishing the first universities. But this dual identity is not without its contradictions. While monasticism emphasizes the virtues of poverty, chastity, and humility, the scholar, by contrast, requires expensive infrastructure—a library, a workplace, and the means of disseminating his work. This book argues that Saint Jerome was the first to represent biblical study as a mode of asceticism appropriate for an inhabitant of a Christian monastery, thus pioneering the enduring linkage of monastic identities and institutions with scholarship. Revisiting Jerome with the analytical tools of recent cultural history—including the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Roger Chartier—the author proposes new interpretations that remove obstacles to understanding the life and legacy of the saint. Examining issues such as the construction of Jerome's literary persona, the form and contents of his library, and the intellectual framework of his commentaries, he shows that Jerome's textual and exegetical work on the Hebrew scriptures helped to construct a new culture of learning. This fusion of the identities of scholar and monk, the author shows, continues to reverberate in the culture of the modern university.

This book investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, the author asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.