ABSTRACT
The displacement of the physical body becomes more abrupt in the eucharistic supper. The scandal of what is enacted at this supper we have already looked at, but in this chapter I wish to point out how the body of the historical man begins its withdrawal from the narrative, from direct representation. With the eucharist, transfiguration turns into transposition. ‘He took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and said “Take; this is my body.”’ Matthew adds ‘eat’. Neither Luke nor Mark mentions the consumption, only the giving and receiving of the bread-as-his-body It is the handing-over of himself that is paramount. He places himself into the hands of the disciples who then hand him over to the authorities. It is the surrendering that is important. It is effected by that demonstrative indicative – ‘this’ is my body. These words perform the transposition. As I have argued, they set up a logic of radical reidentification. What had throughout the gospel story been an unstable body is now to be understood as an extendible body. For it is not that Jesus, at this point, stops being a physical presence. It is more as if this physical presence can expand itself to incorporate other bodies,
like bread, and make them extensions of his own.15 A certain metonymic substitution is enacted, re-situating Jesus’ male physique within the neuter materiality of bread (to arton). The ‘body’ now is both sexed and not sexed.
