This article argues that by reading the spectacle of Jacob’s struggle with the angel/man in Genesis 32:22-32, we might explore how the difficulties of representing human and divine male bodies are also bound up with certain scriptings of what these bodies can mean. This is not to simply map biblical characters onto modern masculinities, but to focus on the ‘technologies of the self’ that are involved in reading in the present, a type of ‘pre-posterous’ reading (Bal, 2008) of these biblical patriarchs who inhabit a textual world that has historically been a part of constructing our conceptions of how social, political and theological textualities structure everyday life. I am concerned with how such representations are formed by interpretation and, if such interpretations are to become more androcritical, this includes the necessary acknowledgment of a poetic-ethic double-bind in deconstructive reading and retelling
