Sex, Lies, and Paradise: The Assassins, Prester John, and the Fabulation of Civilizational Identities
By Geraldine Heng
Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol.23:1 (2012)
Extract: The more interesting question would be to ask, as a way to begin a critical exchange, why some features in the story of medieval Assassins get attention and become targets of desire while others drop out of sight: to dialectically reclaim, in other words, process, especially the processes by which certain figures and events, in the Middle Ages and today, gain traction and seem to retrieve a culture or civilization so compellingly at moments that they come to acquire an iconic and resonant status. A modest practice of this kind, we can hope, fosters the continuing education of our own desire and helps to sustain enlivened conversations on desire and responsibility.
This kind of endeavor also draws attention to the action of shards and fragments: to incidents and rumors, names and anecdotes, that have willy-nilly accrued incrustations of significance. Rather than forcing such fragments to organize a magisterial story of foundational premises, leading to weighty narrative historiographies over deep time, we might ask if they can open brief windows that afford partial glimpses into key instants of time. Accessing the past in this admittedly factitious and episodic way might be to acknowledge the always partial nature of recovery (including mine, in present context) and to acknowledge, also, the interruptive force of discontinuities, gaps, and shifts in cultural memory that intercut memory’s modes of persistence.
We might then receive a historical discontinuum of fragments, an assemblage of vistas lightly hatched open by cultural shards rendered significant through insistent, aggregative acts of sedimentation by human agents and imparting access to meaning that changes with historical and contemporary reshufflings and renarrations. The mobility of such vistas—their holding together in such transparently contingent and provisional relations—might more dynamically honor the episodic character and contradictory processes of cultural memory, without, we can hope, occluding the agency of narrating subjects and the vantage points from which they narrate, both in the past and today.
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