Isaac B Rosler

Sodom's Threshold Isaac B Rosler

In Sodom's Threshold--The Desire for the Unthinkable, author Dr. Isaac B. Rosler deconstructs the narrative of Sodom and highlights how religion borrows its fervor and passion from a nonreligious impetus that is not only other than religion but also other than God.

He invites us to trespass--to think about what has already trespassed our senses and to make sense of an overabundant excess that remains unsacrificable even through ruins, ashes, and forgetfulness. Sodom's Threshold explores concepts of alterity and otherness, and it calls us to think about a space of passion that keeps returning in spite of interruptions--in spite of religious, family, or state mandates that command us not to touch an alterity that has already arrived and is in excess of every touch.

The Sodomites' forbidden passion is an excess that impassions--it is a surplus that will be usurped and neutralized ad infi nitum by the multiple religions that both rise against its mystery and yet are also founded by it. Though Sodom was erased, its alterity and its surplus are indestructible.