Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Models of Identity

    The concept of “identity” is no longer an easy one to define. The nineteenth-century idea of identity, as illustrated in the biographical cast of the novels of the period, was ever-evolving, but rarely problematic. The Nervals (“je suis l’Autre”: [I am the Other]) and Rimbauds (“je est un autre” [I is another]) were limited to the poetic fringes. This solid notion of identity was grounded on a benign version of Girard’s mensonge romantique that understood each individual’s desire as essentially his own. It began to break down in the postromantic era of Flaubert and Baudelaire, when the beginnings of consumer society problematized the individual identity of desire by openly proposing both its generation and its satisfaction.

    The postmodern era has been characterized by an extreme skepticism about personal identity. We have so imbibed Barthes’ “death of the author” in the wake of Nietzsche’s “death of God” that we forget that the logique du supplément cuts both ways. If insisting that something exists, as Rousseau does for the purity of our moral intuition, is a demonstration that this existence is already compromised (for why else would we need to insist on its existence?), insisting that something does not exist, as Barthes does for the author, is a demonstration that it still haunts us (for why else would we need to insist that it shouldn’t?). And it is all too easy to remark that the authors of discourses denying the reality of the authorial subject inevitably add them to their CVs. In the heyday of deconstruction, personal identity was all but dismissed as a category of thought. Then the Paul de Man scandal undermined the prestige of this mode by showing that the ethical dereliction implicit in the denial of the responsible self went beyond simple inconsequence. If I cannot be identified as accountable for my acts, then all evil is possible.

    Today, identity has been reestablished with a vengeance and, however collective and victimary it may be, this is on balance a good thing. The most resentful identity is better than none at all. Even if when you commit a crime you say “history will absolve me,” you’re a step ahead of one who says, as was claimed in defense of de Man–he was mercifully never called upon to say such things himself–that the continuity of self between the author of antisemitic articles and the Yale professor is so problematic as to make condemnation reflect more on the condemner than on the condemned. Nevertheless, collective identity is ultimately unsatisfactory. I say this not as a moralist, but as an originary thinker about culture. There is not enough content in collective identity to nourish the cultural function of deferring resentment. Collective identity is only functional in a political context, and politics is a “thin” activity, as opposed to the “thickness” of economic life. Only in times of revolutionary unrest does the political realm offer the general public a sufficient context for action. At others, we must look to our personal lives, which primarily means to our place within the system of production and exchange.

    The thinness of political-collective identities is concomitant with their resentful nature. Although it is a tautology that there must exist dominant collectivities as well as dominated ones, one hears little about the former because, precisely because the rich and powerful generally have a more lucid idea than the powerless of their collective self-interest, they need not identify their selves with it. Non-homeless people don’t identify themselves as “the homed.” It is those who find it harder to promote their interests within the exchange system who must turn to collective political action, and to the collective identity it presupposes, in order to turn their resentments into action.

    I have often spoken in these columns about the ever-expanding capacity of consumer society to furnish elements of a discourse of identity to its members. Our clothing, foods, furnishings, cars, are bearers of messages that, although lacking in syntax, are filled with “lexical” meaning. However secondary and ephemeral these creations, they are real and freely chosen, in some cases with great care and self-consciousness. No doubt our desires are second-hand, but we all possess and react to this Girardian insight it by some form of what he calls l’ascèse pour le désir [askesis for desire], ironizing, modifying, hiding or hyperbolizing our desire.

    But in the esthetic realm, and particularly in literature, we find models of individual identity that we can apply not merely to the messages we construct from consumer products but to our historically existing selves as a whole, to what in more religious times we would have called our “souls.” In contrast, those works that operate in terms of collective identities suffer from the fallacies of the “typical” that Lukács had already denounced two generations ago in socialist realism–a mode still alive today in various victimary guises.

    Despite the hyperbole of the slogan “death of the author,” Barthes was not wrong to emphasize the dynamic nature of all the identities literature creates, including the author’s. The authorial self is not only constituted by the work in the external sense that the work is the author’s mode of self-presentation to the world; it is no longer possible for a self-conscious author to distinguish a priori between his own constituted identity and the identities-in-process of his characters.

    Let me suggest a paradigm of two literary models of individual identity, the Proustian and the lyrical.

    Marcel Proust is arguably the writer who put the most of his personal life into his work, and in the most systematic fashion, yet it is impossible to derive from A la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past, or literally, In Search of Lost Time] a sense of the “identity” of the hero, in the sense that one has such a sense for nineteenth-century heroes, or even for Swann. Proust’s is a universe without human love which therefore lacks the possibility of fulfillment through human interaction. Art is the only means of genuine communication with others. The goal pursued by the protagonist from the beginning is to accede to the realm of esthetic creation, which requires of him renunciation of worldly desires. His “identity” is defined by his search for salvation as an artist, the point of departure for which is the generative scene of the mother’s kiss described in the first part of the novel, before the petite madeleine restores to him his memories of “lost time.”

    In this model of identity, “life” in itself is not a totality, but a mere multiplicity; it is the source of our identity only insofar as it is “transcended.” Life is a trial; we are constantly subjected to desires, “temptations” like those that assailed Flaubert’s patron saint Anthony, but not being saints, we do not simply reject these temptations, we fall into them, and through suffering the pains of jealousy and disillusion, we learn that our desires cannot find satisfaction in the human sphere. Once we have gone through this process, we can write our own novel of disillusion.

    Proust’s story both comes to a logical end and is cut off arbitrarily–by the war, by the narrator’s illness, by his stepping on a loose paving-stone that reminds him of his visit with his mother to Venice, where he saw a mosaic of the face of Christ in the Baptistery of Saint Mark. God, or the author, decides that the hero has learned enough; now he can leave the world to write. His identity includes all the content of the worldly desires he has transcended. Esthetic salvation does not reject the worldly, but lifts it to a higher sphere. The attractiveness of Proust’s novel as a model for individual identity is that it understands the totality of our life, however sordid or self-indulgent its details, as an askesis and therefore as something valuable in its very lostness. But this is only possible through renunciation; we cannot remain bound to the world, even to our families and loved ones. The solitary narrator becomes a priest of art, as Proust himself did in his last years in his famous cork-lined room where he worked incessantly on the manuscript of his novel.

    But there is only one Proust. If I try to salvage my “lost time” in the same manner, I am soon faced with the realization that the real secret of his novel is its generative structure, beginning with the scene of the mother’s kiss. Thus even if I concoct such a scene for my own novel, I am only repeating what he has already done. The specificity of my content is irrelevant, as is my own askesis. For Proust does not in fact provide us with an ascetic praxis, merely with an abstract pattern that can be filled in arbitrarily. Certainly the scene of the novel grows darker toward the end, with Albertine’s imprisonment and Charlus’s increasingly open perversion, but there is no way of justifying within the fallen world itself the transcendental leap that will get the protagonist out of it. He has all along hoped for such an act of grace, and we are not surprised when it finally occurs, but because it is not generated from his life, it consecrates it only abstractly, as a lesson in futile snobbery and false hope. My own false hopes can therefore only be more of same.

    The lyrical model, in contrast–that offered by lyric poetry–does not take a purely ascetic view of the world. The human world, the locus of human love, is meaningful in itself and not merely as material for art. The lyric, because it is addressed in the first place to a single reader through whom the assignment of meaning is potentially to be achieved, allows me to include the content of my life in a gesture not of immolation but of consecration. Snobbery and disillusion are not lessons in the vanity of human desire on our way to art, but lessons in the inadequacy of one stage of love in preparation for a higher stage. Art is necessary to communicate these lessons, but it is not their final solution; poetry is only possible because life is already virtual poetry. In this way, my identity as the synthesis of my experience retains its dynamism within the world rather than being defined from outside it by its negation. There is but one Proust; everyone is potentially a lyric poet.

    Neither of these models of identity is political or otherwise collective; but they do not exclude politics or collective experience. When we hear the self spoken of as an “intersection” of different identitary discourses on the model of the exilic or colonial traversal of boundaries, we should give some thought to the mode in which these discourses are synthesized. Is their diversity the occasion for Proustian cynicism about the world of desire, or for lyrical enrichment of experience? Perhaps the best indication might be the degree of concreteness with which love is evoked, for it is here, it seems to me, that the operation of cultural empowerment may be most fruitfully exercised. The models of identity that art procures for us must increasingly emphasize the intimate sphere because that is where the vast majority of us are best advised to seek satisfaction in a world whose public scene grows increasingly less glorious as it becomes more difficult of access .

     

  • The Critique of Love

    In Génie du christianisme [Spirit of Christianity] (1802), his attempt to rekindle interest in Christianity after the “godless” century of the philosophes, Chateaubriand counseled a critique des beautés [criticism of “beauties,” of good points], in contrast to the more traditional and less spiritual critique des défauts [criticism of defects]. Criticism, in this perspective, was to help the reader to appreciate the work rather than merely evaluate it. This paradoxical understanding of critique as a positive activity may be said to be the foundation of modern literary criticism, an activity associated in England with such as Matthew Arnold and later T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, which consisted in choosing a canon of works to read and justifying one’s choice. Today, after a generation dominated by demystification’s ideological version of the critique des défauts, can we find our own critique des beautés? Or in the terms of this column, as presented in Chronicle 99, can we formulate a critique of love to oppose to the critique of resentment?

    In originary terms, love and resentment are relationships to difference. Resentment attacks (questions, suspects) difference because it sees it as invidious: the other’s difference from me is a sign of his greater proximity to the center and its power, prestige, wealth, etc. Resentment sees only the “vertical” component of difference, that which distinguishes between greater or less sacrality.

    Love, in contrast, sees difference in “horizontal” terms, as a non-hierarchical source of value. The essential symmetry of the love-relationship is founded on openness to difference, beginning from the sexual difference that is the foundation of the couple in the first place. The woman’s childbearing role and all it entails requires of the man a particular care, in addition to the couple’s other differences and similarities, and for which it provides a non-hierarchical model. I am not in competition for the center with the one I love; on the contrary, I freely choose to grant significance to (“sacralize”) her desires and needs as a source of meaning for my own life, knowing in principle that she has made the same symmetric choice with regard to mine. Any differences in power, prestige, etc., between us are accepted without envy along with the others in the service of our relationship.

    In the sphere of cultural, including textual, criticism, the critique of resentment is demystification. The literary work purports to liberate its reader by letting him participate freely in its imaginary universe. The demystifier then shows that this liberation is spurious–that, on the contrary, the reader is being surreptitiously made to participate in his own enslavement by assimilating a discourse the implicit presupposition of which is the domination of the dominated by the dominator. In the deconstructive variant, the implementation of this presupposition in the discourse itself is shown to be paradoxical, since its very immanence in the text as a “natural” truth is belied by its transcendental construction as a denial of the “unnatural.” At its best, deconstruction is not mere demystification, but it tends to be pulled toward the familiar gender, race, ethnicity dichotomies and end up as a weapon in the war on patriarchy, hegemony, etc.

    In contrast, the key to a critique of love is the notion of empowerment. The reader’s imaginary liberation is not merely a vacation from reality; the pleasure in reading a literary work is the assimilation of what are ultimately new ethical possibilities, and the greater the work, the more significant and wide-reaching these possibilities. The critique of love may be defined as an interpretation of the work that elucidates these implicit possibilities, making explicit the liberating function of the text. In the case of the great works of the past, this is tantamount to writing cultural history, since the liberating function of such works lies in their ability to offer new models of behavior to their readers; the more significant the work, the more these models were overtly present in their social context. But the more subtle task of this form of criticism is to find, in less obvious cases, implicit models that may have reached public implementation only through the route of other works, or perhaps not (yet) at all. That a work has not had a direct social impact is no reason not to carry out this critique; empowerment however virtual remains a cultural datum whose potential impact has not been lost.

    As a foretaste of the method this kind of critique requires, here are a few examples of this approach from previous Chronicles:

    • My remarks about Manon Lescaut in Chronicle 17 emphasized the Chevalier’s love-relationship to Manon not, as has tended to be the case since feminist critics got hold of this work, in the context of Manon’s destruction and death, but as a living relationship. The Chevalier’s claim to his clerical friend Tiberge that Manon is a more effective divinity than the Christian God can be contested from within Christian theology itself–Christianity is after all the religion that tells us to love God in the human–but his example is nevertheless of importance as a model, not of polemical extravagance, as might have appeared at the time, but of modern attitudes and practices of love. I am sure a considerable percentage of men and women today would agree with the Chevalier, and surely a far lower percentage would agree with Tiberge than at the time of the book’s publication in 1733.
    • Similarly, my brief comments on Madame Bovary in Chronicle 99 emphasize the semiotic richness of consumption rather than following Emma to her demise. Everyone makes fun of Emma for borrowing her models of desire from books, but they forget that she also constructs these models in a more active fashion from the imagery of her fashion magazines, and above all, they forget that their own lives are largely spent doing the same thing. One does not escape mimesis by denouncing it in others; one never escapes it at all, but one learns to master it by admitting to and understanding it, and Flaubert’s novel is a means to such an understanding.
    • I can also give the example of the extraordinary pregnancy of Hamlet’s behavior (I believe I touched on this in an earlier Chronicle, but haven’t been able to locate it). His delay may be attributed, as by Girard, to a lack of mimetic intensity, but the danger of that interpretation is that it makes Hamlet into Girard’s own figure of the mensonge romantique, indifferent to others’ desires. I think it more productive to see Hamlet as the prototype of the modern homme de ressentiment, and note that when Hamlet first appears in I, ii, he is not yet aware of the Ghost, but sits at the King’s table wearing black, ignoring the proceedings, and showing disrespect for Claudius who is obliged to solicit his attention. This is already a Rousseauean or “romantic” attitude, copied by countless young 19th century bourgeois at their father’s dinner tables. The play as a whole expands on this new behavioral productivity: the dramatic action, avant la lettre like that of En attendant Godot, is one of awaiting. The awaiting mode structures Hamlet’s ironic attitude toward the other characters, whose worldly temporality makes them stand to him in the same relation as Pozzo and Lucky to Vladimir and Estragon; this attitude, more attentive to language than action, is eminently “portable.”
    • Finally, my very brief remarks on Ronsard’s “Mignonne” poem in Chronicle 96 attempt to show that even in implementing the well-worn carpe diem seduction theme, the poet is obliged to empower his beloved by separating her consciousness from the flower that is her metaphor and allowing her the free choice to profit from its example.

    I will attempt to give further examples of a critique of love in the coming months. But its fundamental principle stands in clear contrast with that of the critique of resentment. Instead of seeing the literary work as ultimately a form of propaganda that denies the freedom of its audience, the critique of love insists that, whatever discourses of domination may lurk behind the literary work, its effective operation on its audience is one of emancipation rather than enslavement.

    Such a criticism has no clear political agenda, although the practitioners of demystification will no doubt accuse it for that very reason of reinforcing the status quo. But that is not its point at all. On the contrary, as Doug Collins remarked recently, it is the demystifiers who can with far more justification be accused of playing the game of the Establishment, by redirecting creative energies that might be used to enlarge the freedom of society as a whole into the narrow channels of “identity politics” and its resentful cultural agendas. “Repressive tolerance” is a two-edged sword, and it is after all the very ideologues who denounce late capitalism who are the Humanities’ chief beneficiaries of corporate largess in the form of research grants and the like. Follow the money, as Deep Throat was wont to say.

    The critique of love is empowering in ways that cannot be predicted precisely because it has no predefined constituency. Those who are liberated as individuals by art, and by love itself, are a far more powerful force for social evolution than the groups of victims that dominate our public consciousness. But we cannot be content merely to note this; some degree of “consciousness-raising” is required. On this too I shall attempt to elaborate in the coming months.

     

  • Comparative Literature and Global Culture (Cultural Studies series no. 2)

    As promised, I have been reading and thinking about Cultural Studies (CS), less in the context of the place of the Humanities in the contemporary university than in that of originary thinking. Intellectual activity necessarily takes place in an institutional context, but it is the worst déformation professionnelle to privilege that context over the content and ultimate purpose of one’s activity. It is also very short-sighted from a practical standpoint. Humanities professors and even their deans are bound to a certain context, provosts and chancellors are not. If the only problem the Humanities can solve is that of finding busy work for themselves, forces beyond their control will soon relieve them of the problem itself.

    The reader of the well-known report cum commentaries Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism (Johns Hopkins, 1995, ed. Charles Bernheimer) is struck by the parochialism of the near-totality of the discussion, as though the real problem is not, “what is the place of our activity of cultural analysis in its broader ethical context?” but “how should Comparative Literature (CompLit) departments adapt their curricula to new ‘multicultural’ conditions?” If only for accounting reasons (zero-based budgeting), let alone intellectual ones, the first, ethical, alternative should have priority. Yet of all the participants, only my fellow Anthropoetics editorial board member Tobin Siebers put the ethical question at the heart of his response. The term “age” in the title seems to have foreclosed discussion: if this is the age we live in, we had better adapt to it, or at most, resist it. It would have been preferable to reflect on the nature of the cultural in our era before imposing a label on it.

    What provoked most of the other responses was the feeling that the old CompLit ethos, created by pre- and postwar Central European exiles around a “Eurocentric” (I shudder to use this term) conception of high culture, must be modified to reflect the new multicultural reality with which cultural studies (CS) is associated. Should our students learn non-European languages? Should we use team teaching to introduce new elements into the curriculum? Should the “literary” be retained as a central category, or should we include other “discursive practices”?… The more enthusiastic (e.g., Mary Louise Pratt) emphasize the liberating value of new options; the sadder and wiser (e.g., Marjorie Perloff), the constraints of time and cohesion.

    But these natural responses miss the point of the challenge posed by the enlargement of the purview of CompLit. GA can always make the valid claim that before studying culture, one should construct an originary hypothesis; but the value of the claim in this particular context comes from the fact that the real change is not the “discovery” of new cultures or of their importance, but the problematization of cultural identity. The old CompLit corresponded to the coherent idea of a single international culture, that of the educated European, which no doubt could not be fully mastered by any one individual, so that specialization in it required choices among languages and literatures, but which remained nonetheless a single culture. To that culture, one might add knowledge of, say, Chinese or Indian culture, without displacing its central importance.

    But once world culture, including that of the Third World, is added to the mix, our difficulty in encompassing it is not just a function of the additional time required but of the very nature of this academic “encompassing.” What corresponds in the “global marketplace” to the high Western culture that dominated the European sphere of influence? On the level of high culture, we can still live pretty well as Eurocentrics; there is little pressure to study, say, classical Chinese literature. The drive to include non-Western cultures is attracted rather to popular elements and thereby to CS. But inclusion of the popular poses a different problem. European scholars were familiar with local popular cultures; they simply didn’t consider them relevant to the cultural identity that underlay the establishment of CompLit as a discipline. Why then should they be relevant now?

    In a word, because “global culture” is not of the same nature as Western culture, the original basis for CompLit has disappeared, and the fundamental question is to determine the nature of the culture that has taken its place, not what curricula or job descriptions we should design.

     

    I am the last to suggest despair. There is indeed a global culture roughly comparable in coherence to the Western culture of old. Where it is structured differently, thereby posing a problem to the academic structure of CompLit, is in the relation between its high and popular components. The importance of the popular is not an academic artifact of the intrusion of area studies and its politics into the CompLit orbit. There is no truly global high culture, and to the extent there is one at all, it is simply–pardon my Occidentocentrism–Western high culture. The West has provided the dominant thought-systems for the modern world, as well as–by no means coincidentally–its economic system. Culture is more democratic and pluralistic than economics or science, but we would do well to remind ourselves that the third-world resentment that sells so well in the cultural sphere cannot undo the historical triumph of the Western market system over its former global competitors, even if we forbear to speak of them as “Oriental.”

    The high culture that complements the ethic of the Western economic system has therefore a global viability–for example, European classical music has a presence in Japan or Taiwan, even in mainland China, incomparably greater than that of Chinese or Japanese music here. But today the overall context of this viability is not such as to justify maintaining the old CompLit curriculum unchanged. Western high culture is not so much defunct as inadequate to the task of providing a global civilization with a living basis. That the phenomena of popular culture have come increasingly to the fore, disturbing the old “elite” stability of the CompLit world, is a genuine cultural fact, independent of the ideological biases of the academy in our own society. Although skepticism in the face of ideology is the beginning of wisdom, ideology generally reflects a certain degree of truth.

    To say that global culture is more amorphous than Western culture is merely to allude to its popular nature. High culture, pace two decades of resentful critique, cannot be understood as the locus for the hegemonic illusions of the ruling class; it proposes rather to society as a whole an esthetic askesis. To know this culture in its spatio-temporal extension, in the exilic consciousness that Emily Apter pertinently attributes to the founders of the specialty, is to possess the summa of its ethical wisdom as enacted in the–eminently portable–linguistic imagination: what Erich Auerbach could bring together in wartime Constantinople while writing Mimesis.

    Today’s global culture is equally portable, but no longer focused on askesis because no longer bound by the confines of a single society, however broadly defined. The old high culture was, ultimately, a sacrificial system, a means of purging resentment from an ensemble that, however vast, was conceived as a totality. The global system is a proliferating, “rhizomatic” network, not a totality–at least, not yet. Following the lead of the musical fifties in the United States, its culture is primarily one of youth, whose relative uniformity across world cultures has not gone unremarked. The generalized semi-excluded (and therefore semi-victimary) status of youth gives it an enhanced need for cultural rites de passage, and this function comes to dominate the entire cultural sphere.

     

    On the basis of this analysis, how then should CompLit programs adapt to our age?

    In the first place, although flexibility in opening up to the great cultures of Asia is a good thing, it should be recognized that today’s global culture has its roots in Western civilization, not only because the United States has played a hegemonic role in the creation of the youth culture (a phenomenon largely due, as I suggest in my recent book Signs of Paradox [Stanford, 1997], to the creative interaction of youth and our culturally significant Black minority), but more profoundly, because the market system that has created the socio-economic conditions for the global culture is a creation of Western society. This implies that the central role played by classical Western civilization in CompLit should not be abandoned for the sake of “diversity.” Whatever may be gained from studying Indian, Chinese, or Japanese culture, none of these has the same direct filiation with contemporary global culture.

    But, in the second place, it is indeed important to study global popular culture. Popular culture is more uniform worldwide and far less difficult of access than high culture, and does not urgently require linguistic skills. One can acquire through translation a far higher degree of understanding of a Chinese popular song than of a Chinese poem. The focus on global popular culture, beyond the celebration of empirical diversity, should be on the creative interaction between its two originary elements, the Western and the local. As I have already noted in Chronicle 98, this focus emerges naturally from the empirical richness of the material: CS’s emphasis on content makes it “naturally” a critique of love rather than of resentment.

    CompLit programs have therefore no need to disperse their curricula among endless choices. Their primary focus on European culture should be maintained, which need not exclude students with exclusive interest in non-European cultures. Above all, the fashionably victimary “post-colonial” mentality should not be allowed to obscure the primacy of Western civilization as the source of today’s global culture, including the post-colonial ethic itself.

  • Love, Resentment, and Generative Anthropology

    When I began this series just two years ago, I never expected it to reach one hundred. But habits grow on you, and after a while, writing these columns began to structure my week and even my intellectual life. Although the number of subscribers and readers has grown respectably, it remains modest by media standards; one doesn’t write a column like this as a means of attaining stardom or even “visibility.” But it is an invaluable means to develop ideas of interest to me in the context of informal communication with friends, intellectual sympathizers, and other interested parties.

    Some readers, astute or simply undiplomatic, have wondered what the connection is between the “chronicles of love and resentment”–a title that everyone seems to like–and “generative anthropology”–a slogan I didn’t invent and that I in fact rather regret. Resentment has an important place in the theoretical framework developed in my books on GA, but the idea of “love” plays no role there.

    How does one get from “the deferral of violence through representation” to “love and resentment”? In the course of these Chronicles, I have attempted a few explanations of the phenomenon from the standpoint of originary theory, but minimalistic originary speculations are not enough for number 100. So let me come at it from a different angle.

    The term “love” can be made to apply to all sorts of human relations, but as I have used it in these Chronicles, it has a clear focus on “romantic” love, which, from my own masculine standpoint and that of culture generally, is directed to women. It would therefore not be altogether inappropriate to interpret “love and resentment” as a reference to the two sexes: love for women, resentment for men. In this case, as opposed to that of the hypothetical originary scene of language, it is the women who merit first place.

    As the presupposed reference for the unqualified term “love,” in these Chronicles as elsewhere, the heterosexual couple furnishes the exemplary model of mutual human caring. And whereas all other kinds of love can furnish metaphors of what we presume to be God’s care for his creatures, “romantic love” alone, through the love-of-Other / love-of-God analogy elaborated in neo-Platonism and in more accessible form in lyric poetry from the troubadours on down, including the radical inversion of divine-human dominance in Manon Lescaut (see Chronicle 17), allows us a general understanding of our relationship to the sacred.

    Over two centuries have reinforced the human priority over the divine in this analogy to such a point that I wonder how, outside the experience of love, one can claim any first-hand understanding of the sacred as Other, that is, as the originary source of language. The high point of religious consciousness realized in Christianity conceives of the human Other in general as sacred, as worthy of our care and reverence, but that is not quite the same thing. Although we must see Christ in every other person, romantic love offers our only normal chance at the uniqueness required to sustain an appropriate intensity of identification. It is not enough to say that care takes time and energy, and that ours is limited. Care of the kind merited by the divinity is essentially infinite. The saintliest person cannot love his neighbor in a way approximating his love of God, because he has many neighbors and only one God, and because his devotion to God encompasses that to all his neighbors whereas the converse is not the case. This is not to say that our care for our neighbors is necessarily deficient in face of the ideal of considering each Other as divine. If my neighbor needs my help for a specific task, and I give it to him, it would do him no good and in fact would only embarrass him to treat him on top of that as an object of infinite care. And if I do this merely as a spiritual exercise, e.g., looking into his face and imagining Jesus in his place, then my relationship to him is not an ethical one at all.

    But for the one person I care for most, the social institution of the couple, married or not, facilitates the exercise of infinite care. I won’t rehearse the biological basis for coupling, but suffice it to say that a Sirian arriving here (in the Sirian planetary system there are 1.73 sexes and reproduction is carried out by computers) would be struck by our tendency to pair off even when raising children is not the object. Because couples share essentially their whole lives, the loved one may be conceived without practical inconvenience as the origin and goal of all one’s activities. Personal mediation tends to take the place of the public mediating function of religion because it alone offers genuine interaction with the mediator.

    The love relationship affords us a scenic understanding of the sacred otherwise unavailable save in the most intense revelatory experiences. Influenced by the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a recent vogue emphasizes the abjection of the Other as an appeal to our care. But while recognizing (through “tenderness”) the other’s mortality which s/he shares with me, love never treats the Other–not even the Crucified–as denuded or abject, in a word, as victimary. What I see in the beloved Other, beyond mere human vulnerability, is her sacred power to give and take away meaning from my world.

    This is a subject better explored through lyric poetry (see Chronicle 96) than theory. Because love is the most interactive of possible relationships with another (in contrast with the caricature of romantic love as idolatry, “putting woman on a pedestal”), it is the freest, the least theorizable a priori. This potentially infinite private richness offers a model for life and thought in the postmodern world that has tended to get lost among more highly publicized cries of collective resentment. I intend this third year of Chronicles to be devoted chiefly to the elaboration of this idea, particularly in its impingement on critical theory and on the practice of Cultural Studies.

     

    For the moment, let me return to the beginning of the Chronicles in July 1995. It was, I will admit, something of an effort to insert the idea of “love” into a series I had originally intended to call Chronicles of Resentment. I had conceived it as an ironic narrative of the humiliations of everyday life, somewhat on the model of the diary of Dostoevsky’s “underground man” that had been for me the literary equivalent of puberty. But it became clear that this formulation was too subjective and self-serving to be associated with an originary anthropology that begins, after all, from the deferral rather than from the enactment of violence–from love rather than resentment. And as a result of insisting and reflecting upon love over the past two years, I now feel ready, as last week’s “prophetic” Chronicle 99 suggests, to insist on it as the structuring principle of critical thinking and discourse. Of course we will always feel resentment. But the whole point of human culture is the deferral of resentment, and the “higher” the culture, the greater the effort expended in making us aware of the costs of our resentful satisfaction to its potential victims.

    I think it is the duty of those of us who are privileged to spend comfortable tenured lives studying cultural phenomena to work for the triumph of love over resentment, not in a utopian final conflict, but here and now, in every act. Today’s academic conversation is saturated with overt and unapologetic resentment of a kind that not long ago would not have been tolerated in the political, let alone in the academic arena. Let us work, whatever our political views, to expunge the language of resentment from our own vocabulary and to encourage by our example our students and colleagues to do the same.

    This is no profound analytic conclusion, merely the humble acceptance of moral truth; but it would not likely have occurred to me had I not originally been inspired to entitle this column “Chronicles of Love and Resentment.”

  • Ending the Era of Suspicion

    Since this is my last Chronicle before reaching triple figures, I hope the reader will forgive me if it waxes a bit prophetic. The expression Era of Suspicion (L’ère du soupçon) is Nathalie Sarraute’s characterization of modernity.

     

    The contestatory tone of Western thought dates from the Enlightenment, when the philosophe claims an understanding of human reality superior to that incarnated in its ruling institutions. The Enlighteners were spokesmen for the rising bourgeoisie in contrast with the agro-ritual social organization of the old regime; perhaps naively, they intended their rationalist discourse not as a mere critique of traditional discourses but a substitute for them. The charm of 18th century satire, whose high point is Voltaire’s Candide, is that it is only minimally resentful of the order it mocks.

    Already in the following generation, Rousseau laid the foundation for the Romantic relocation of the resentful self within bourgeois society. But his critique is aimed at society in general, and his idea of the good society, as expressed in the Social Contract, is not historically situated in relation to what it must supersede. Rousseau is not yet a suspicious thinker; he finds anthropological truth in a universally available intuition of the “heart”: je sens mon coeur et je connais les hommes.

    It is Karl Marx who inaugurates the age of suspicion, and intellectuals ever since have made use of his method of demystification: the demonstration that the discourse of the “ruling class,” or by extension, of the patriarchy or the white race or the West, not merely expresses the ruling group’s self-interest but unwittingly disguises this self-interest as a universal truth. The very rational universality that the philosophes had fought for against the “obscurantism” of religion and tradition was now shown to be the expression of the values of one class–the bourgeoisie–in their struggle for the supremacy of their mode of production relations. What then were the truly universal values on the basis of which this demystification could be carried out? Those of the proletariat, in whose interest Marx claimed to write. Since bourgeois society makes obsolete the older divisions between nobles, clergy, and tiers état, the bourgeoisie is in fact the only “class” remaining; once the knell of private property has sounded, everyone will be a proletarian. Hence Marxism is only provisionally a class-bound truth; its historical destiny is to be the truth of, as they say nowadays, humankind.

    Since the collapse of the Socialist bloc, it has become obvious that the bourgeois market is a less essentially inequitable mechanism for distributing goods and services than any centralized system, however ideologically committed to utopian ideals. Which is to say that the idea that demystificatory truth resides in a final, classless state has been disproved by history. But if this is so, then the extension of the demystificatory enterprise to other domains (race, gender, colonialism, etc.) is founded on a faulty epistemology. Marx criticized present society from the standpoint of a reasonably coherent view of the end of history, however flawed this has proved to be in hindsight. Lacking such a final perspective, contemporary forms of suspicion can only fall back on our originary moral intuition, which cannot be analyzed as such in the context of the demystificatory model.

    What this suggests is that the more recent forms of demystification implicitly depend upon the Marxian critique of “capitalism.” It is this dependence that explains why, although socialism has been tried and, to put it euphemistically, found wanting, instead of celebrating the virtues of liberal market society or à la rigueur criticizing it in its own terms, the academy remains dominated by critical theorizing consecrated to demystifying the hegemonic discourses of late capitalism.

    Reading Antony Easthope’s well regarded Literary into Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1991) for my CS series, I was appalled to discover that if, as we saw last week, ad hoc CS thinking is often air-headed, its serious variant is even worse. The eclecticism of CS’s refusal to favor one kind of culture over another is mirrored in its attitude toward critical discourse. So instead of just Foucault, or Lacan, or Marx, or la déconstruction, or feminism, we get all of them at once. But seeing all the contemporary critical jargons together in one place made me realize how similar they are. They all are, or have been made to be, discourses of radical suspicion, which is to say, of resentment, since they all attack something that they have no substitute for. Their resentment remains internal to the structure they attack, and they sometimes theorize this internality, but never the resentment itself.

    The system of critical suspicion is an intellectual perpetual-motion machine, a self-unfulfilling prophecy. It lacks a fundamental theory of how culture operates, because, absent the “classless” model provided by Marx’s discredited utopia, its very method precludes such a theory. If the underlying model of the social order is a binary structure of domination, then no historically existing cultural institution or discourse can be of any value in revealing the moral horizon of non-dominated human relations, our intuition of which has presumably descended on us from the moon. Post-Marxian suspicion is a form of radical Rousseaueanism for which society has so blighted our original human essence that even our “heart” no longer retains its intuition of it. But the moral indignation that bubbles through all this writing demonstrates that our originary moral intuition is alive and well; it’s just our theories that are unable to situate it in relation to the cultural forms they are so busy demystifying.

    Whence the following modestly prophetic suggestion:

    Let us declare an end to the era of suspicion. Let us study the operations and discourses of society, including in particular its cultural discourses, with a little humility, to see how they work, and not in order to hasten the demise of late capitalism, the patriarchy, and Big Corporations. Let us examine the expressions of political and other resentments within these discourses in the context of their operation, not as objects of our own resentful approval or denunciation.

    In future columns I will attempt to enunciate and develop a generative approach to cultural criticism, and to CS, as an alternative to the demystifications of the era of suspicion. (As I pointed out in last week’s column, because CS, although informed by the usual theories of suspicion, is driven by empirical curiosity rather than ideology–if only to find new topics for Conferences–it often goes far to realizing my suggestion in practice.) In the past, I have never elaborated a GA methodology, since from a generative perspective, no moment of history is reducible to any other and each cultural form must therefore be understood in terms of the scenic consciousness of its specific historical context. But in response to the critique of suspicion, it becomes necessary to define the activity of cultural criticism in a broader ethical context.

    In a word, what is needed is a critique that begins from love rather than resentment: one that understands the components of culture as means of adding rather than subtracting from their audience’s freedom, of empowering it rather than submitting it, whether or not through the ruses of what Marcuse called “repressive tolerance,” to the oppression of whatever version of Big Daddy one desires to denounce.

    I do not think this sort of criticism will be very hard to create. It will not require we throw away the strengths of what Easthope usefully calls the modernist (i.e., close) reading of texts, although it will require that we subordinate this reading’s celebration of well-wroughtness to the ethical function of culture. Readers familiar with GA will recall that it defines the function of culture as “the deferral of violence through representation.” What this means is not offering inauthentic substitutes to distract the audience from its genuine impulses of revolt, but recycling the audience’s resentment into the system as a means of enrichment.

    To give a brief example: in a little manual on Madame Bovary (G. K. Hall, 1989), I developed the idea that Emma is the first literary character to incarnate the values of what has come to be called consumer society (la société de consommation). Although Emma’s life ends tragically, Flaubert’s accomplishment is malgré tout an enrichment and empowerment of the desiring self, not just because Emma’s own career illustrates increasing control over her circumstances (although this ultimately leads not to emancipation but suicide), but because her praxis uncovers new layers of meaning that readers can apply to their own lives. To understand the semiotic relation between Emma’s purchases and her desires is not to repeat her failure, but to give oneself new options. It is sufficient demonstration of this point that market society has ever since emphatically followed Emma’s (and the merchant Lheureux’) lead, although the new system had no name in Flaubert’s day and for several generations afterward and was not theorized on a comparable level of acumen until 1968 in Jean Baudrillard’s Le système des objets.

     

    I hope you, dear reader, will seriously consider implementing my “prophetic” suggestion in your own work, thereby transmitting it by example to others. Let us hope that, by the time of the new millennium, we will all have learned to speak with civility and (not uncritical) respect about the social order we profit from and to which, hopefully, we all wish to make a positive contribution.

  • Cultural Studies & GA (First of a Series)

    The phenomenon of Cultural Studies (CS) has been spreading through the Humanities like kudzu through our inland waterways. Although I’m no expert on the subject, I’ve been doing a little reading, and feel I know enough by now for a first Chronicle. More are planned for the future.

    I’m not a Realist in the Platonic sense, but one does have to pay attention to language. When people complain about the lack of unity or “methodology” in cultural studies, one might start by looking at the words. Since everything human is “cultural,” and “studies” says nothing specific about the mode of examination, it would be surprising if a field so named, whatever its beginnings, did not evolve into an infinite grab-bag. And so it has. Although in its British origins with Raymond Williams, cultural studies had a specific political agenda, which in Britain at least it has not altogether lost, the implicit caveat that “culture” refer to “popular” or “working-class” culture could not be sustained. No type of “culture,” including “high culture,” is outside the CS orbit. But better than a description or even a meta-description (“cultural studies is precisely what cannot be totalized in a [sc patriarchal] description”), I will provide a functional model. One advantage of this column over more serious scholarly publications is that first impressions are 90% accurate and save 90% of your time.

    The chief reason for the success of CS is that it is an adaptation of the Humanities to the contemporary condition of the university. Most humanities professors, even recent PhDs, are trained in reasonably rigorous methods of literary scholarship, textual analysis, etc. Little of this is useful in CS. But the payoff, in contrast with the fabled dryness of the kind of scholarship we were trained for, is that CS involves ingenious, politically fashionable, and often popularly amusing subjects, and that the number of such subjects, unlike the traditional ones centered on the “canon,” is for all practical purposes infinite. This infinite possibility is a more central factor than even the PC that adheres to the various (post)Marxist domains like “subaltern studies,” “post-colonial studies,” et al. (A simple measure of (post)Marxist dominance in a text is the number of times the term late capitalism appears per hundred words.) What is of primary interest is interaction, not domination; less dogmatic minds see the postcolonial as interacting with the metropolitan rather than suffering its oppressive domination or even, à la Williams, resisting it.

    The bottom line of CS is that it vastly facilitates holding conferences to which one can invite one’s network– the central preoccupation of 90s Humanities scholars. Instead of subjects that require well-defined, and therefore restrictive, expertise (e.g., the best known Montaigne or Dante scholars), CS subjects are ad hoc. No one is really an expert in them, and at the next conference they will be replaced by others. This puts a premium on networking rather than scholarly achievement as a criterion for selection. But precisely it is the networkers who set up the conferences in the first place. (Dawkins disciples would consider conferencing a meme and networkers its carriers: a networker is just one conference meme’s way of producing another.) Given the current CS vogue, the same people can reinvite each other indefinitely without ever having to do in-depth scholarship on any subject.

    Conferencing aside, there is a clear positive side to this development. The proliferation of different cultural approaches and rapprochements is a welcome alternative to the rigid textualism that had dominated literary study since the New Criticism, to which deconstruction added both a new philosophical sophistication and an often sophomoric perversity. The canonization of Literature, whatever works it was deemed to include, was an artificial move that corresponded more to the structure of the university than to any organic cultural reality. Or to put it more sharply, it corresponded to the absorption by the university of all the living force of the old high culture. Today, “classical” musicians and poets, even artists, are increasingly likely to be found on university faculties. But there is a far more vital cultural world beyond the campus borders that cannot be forced into the traditional categories of literary study.

    The study of popular culture in its various ramifications is closer in general methodology and approach, insofar as generalization is possible, to ethnology than to literary scholarship. Literature is tautologically textual; aside from the details of literary history and the necessary factual background, the student of literature is expected to be sensitive to the various levels of intertwined structure that make up the text. On the contrary, studying ad hoc interconnections between different genres and places is essentially doing “field work,” and indeed this term, which gave its name to the anthology I shall refer to below, comes up frequently as a kind of exotic professional marker–just as, conversely, in the heyday of deconstruction an ethnologist might have claimed to be studying the “text” of a tribal culture. This development signals not simply a shift in specialization, but a wholesale despecialization. Although the CS perspective is adaptable to the study of earlier centuries–particularly those involved in colonization– its real thrust is contemporary. As a result, the traditional historical fields of the humanities are sapped of their energy, and eventually, I fear, of their staffing.

    The problem is particularly critical in the “language” departments, such as the one in which I am located. Although secondary in historical perspective and a minor specialty just a few years ago, third-world or francophone literature has become the hot field in French studies. This is not due to the brilliance of its literary production, although the former colonies are surely more vital today than the métropole, but to the PC-CS connection. French, at least, has a claim to the CS world; German and Italian, whose nations came too late to create colonial empires, are now, as if in vengeance for their savage reaction to this fact in World War II, approaching a position of quasi-extinction. When the current “language” faculty retires, it will surely not be replaced at anything like its current strength. The future of the Humanities points to “European Studies” programs that will be not only far smaller than the current ensemble of European language departments, but far less literary (as a local example, the UCLA European Studies program is heavily dominated by social science departments, especially History, which UCLA, I think rightly, classifies as a Social Science).

     

    The debate on CS (such as in the recent PMLA Forum) goes back and forth on the literature cum history vs CS issue, which has important practical consequences for academic demography. But never does it pose the problem in originary terms, and rarely even in terms recognizable to standard anthropological theory. From the GA perspective, this is CS’s most significant weakness. There is no lack of “theory” in CS, but its thinness is at times remarkable. I will take one example. In her article “The Made-Up and the Made-Real,” in Field Work: Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies (ed. Garber et al, London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 214-24, Elaine Scarry of Body in Pain fame develops a new phenomenology of “created things”:

    The difference between art objects and other objects can therefore be understood as follows: both undergo creation, but almost all artifacts other than art undergo a second stage of creation to which art is never subject (217; my emphasis).

    Art, you see, is created, point. But, mirabile dictu, manufactured goods are created twice, once as things-in-themselves and again as elements of reality. A painting is just a created painting, but a car is (1) created as a car-thing and (2) created again as a driveable thing. This kind of analysis makes the Muses weep, not only because of its absurdity–as though the car wasn’t created to be driven in the first place–but because it ignores, whether in ignorance (I hope) or arrogance, all the relevant writings on the subject by Dead White Male thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, not to mention Plato and Aristotle. It’s as though now that the new era of CS Conferences has dawned, we can wipe the slate clean, or as the author puts it, demonstrating the admirable depth of her philosophical training:

    In the past, a solitary philosopher may have now and then emerged to work on the nature of creation, but there never emerged a large assembly of people working in concert… (215; my emphasis)

    To the extent that this example reflects CS’s attempt to clear away the theoretical cobwebs that prevent us from seeing anew, it appears that CS will not only reinvent the wheel, but start out by making it square.

    Now GA makes similar claims, but I would not wish to describe its theoretical superiority over Scarry’s phenomenology as the mere result of a more thorough assimilation of the texts of Western philosophy. GA, as readers of both Girard’s work and mine know, is not a branch of metaphysics. It is rather Scarry, and CS theory in general, even when less embarrassingly vacuous, that begins where classical philosophy begins, with subjects and objects, as though CS’s relationship to classical thought were to have forgotten all of it except its weakest feature. GA, on the other hand, privileges human interaction, which is, curiously enough, precisely what CS tends to discover when it puts its theorizing behind it. But originary thinking provides an idea of what culture is that is not simply a working definition, of which the CS books have plenty, but an explanation of what culture is for. One would think that a hypothesis about what something is for might be useful to people who study it. Even Scarry, I am sure, understands that cars are for driving.

    Thanks to Stacey Meeker and Markus Müller for their help in researching this Chronicle.

    [to be continued] 

  • Resentment, Guilt, Compassion, and Injustice

     

    In her talk on “witnessing” that concluded the UCLA GA – Religion series last month, Stacey Meeker suggested an interesting paradigm. If we consider the scenic center in its capacity as the center of significance, the relation of the observing periphery to it is one of resentment. But the witness to “trauma,” one of Stacey’s two witnessing categories, is made to feel not resentment but guilt. The centrality of the victim is experienced primarily as undesirable; our feeling of guilt reflects our sense of dependency on the scene of cultural representation that we all share. Guilt is thus the inverse of resentment, which equally reflects this dependency. I resent the person in the center because I cannot help participating in the scene of which he is the center–which means that I cannot, or, in the self-conscious modern mode inaugurated by Hamlet, will not, put an end to his centrality. Similarly, I feel guilty because the centralized victim’s sufferings, even if I have not caused them, generate cultural meanings from which I benefit. I participate in the victim’s sacrifice just as I worship the central divinity, whether I do either overtly or not.

    What is most interesting about guilt and resentment is that people do not generally admit to either of them. At Stacey’s talk, a few people objected to the term “guilt” and wanted to speak rather of “compassion.” Com-passion, fellow-feeling, Rousseau’s pity– these are “egalitarian” emotions that stem not from my coercion by the other’s centrality but from my conscious or unconscious generosity in identifying with his sufferings. In other words, these emotions express unmediated desire; they are of Girard’s mensonge romantique. The notion of compassion is only useful to describe my feeling for persons whose role in my world transcends their scene of suffering: a man may be said to show his wife compassion because he shares her impairment on all the scenes of his life, not just on the immediate scene of her suffering. (Even here, sympathy is a better term, and the husband himself would use neither but say that he suffers to see her suffer.) People resist terms like “guilt” and “resentment” because they make explicit the mimetic nature of desire that the free individual prefers to deny. Yet the ubiquity of “trauma witnessing” in advertising and propaganda suggests that it makes use of a mechanism inherent in the scene of representation itself. We are indeed free to resist our feelings of guilt or resentment, but only après coup. Indeed, it is best not to speak of these phenomena in psychological terms at all; they are not emotions but structural relations of the scene.

    Compassion is an sentiment not lacking in political connotations. Conservatives tend to reject it; it is liberals who “feel your pain.” The liberal emphasizes and cultivates compassion because he considers it a valid discovery principle for political action. When you feel compassion, you know there is a problem to be solved. GA’s analysis takes no a priori stand on political matters, but by preferring the mimetic category of guilt to the ostensibly free-standing one of compassion, it undercuts this liberal epistemology. For if guilt is generated by the very mechanism of the “trauma” scene, this scene may then be used as a means of generating it. The question of what prior operations led, not to the sufferings we see, but to the fact that we see them, is one that the model of compassion does not pose, since it implies a free-floating universal attention rather than admitting its dependency on a preestablished scenic organization. 

    A particular vigilance is required to overcome the inherent effect of the scene of representation. Even the most evidently self-serving display of beggary, for example, always generates a certain reaction, and a certain income, since, provided the suffering itself be genuine, the guilt it generates is prior to any reflection on the process of its generation. (In contrast, if the suffering is not merely theatrical but counterfeit, it will generate intense resentment, since the center has been unjustifiably usurped.) Thus a refusal based on cynical distrust of the terms of self-presentation alone, however flagrant, indicates deficient generosity–a fact that panhandlers exploit, for example, in addressing a man when he is with a woman he wishes to impress.

    The scenic view of GA is critical of the liberal analysis of compassion, but it is not therefore identical with the conservative position. The latter rejects compassion as per se a sign of liberalism. Rather than analyzing it as guilt and proceeding to examine the scene on which it was produced, the conservative uses the sentiment itself as proof that such sentiments must be denied, thereby conferring on it, with colors reversed, the same epistemological value as his liberal adversary. But since the Holocaust, if not since the Crucifixion, certain victimary relations have been accepted as unambiguously authentic–whence the distressing effect on most people of “Holocaust denial.” The guilt that is behind compassion, in other words, cannot simply be denied without mutilating one’s conscience in the manner of Nazi death camp trainees. Conservatives’ “Nuke the whales” bumper stickers pay homage to the scenic structure of guilt they would humorously have us deny. But this guilt must be acknowledged before it can be either implemented or resisted. This is the “deconstructive” truth of originary analysis.

     

    If compassion is the romantic euphemism for guilt, that for resentment is sense of injustice. When I resent someone for his greater centrality on some scene or other, my first reaction is to condemn his advantage over me as unjust. In contrast to compassion, injustice is a term we can hardly do without. I explained in “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality” (Anthropoetics I, 1) that resentment is our epistemological guide, our sense-organ for injustice; one need make no utilitarian calculations to feel when one is getting shafted. No doubt most of the time the shafting is in the eye of the beholder, but whether it is or not, what we call our “sense of injustice” is indistinguishable from our resentment.

    The dissymmetry between injustice and compassion becomes easier to understand when we realize that guilt too may take injustice for its object. If the other’s suffering is indeed caused by an injustice that favors me, then my guilt has the inverse function of resentment: the unmasking of my own unjust privilege, about which I do well to feel guilty. But in either case, and this is the real point, injustice is not self-evident. No doubt the Holocaust was an injustice, American slavery was an injustice. But was the Roman destruction of Carthage or Athenian slavery an injustice? As compared to what? As a catch-all concept for the divergences that resentment reveals of ethical reality from the model of reciprocal morality, the notion of injustice provides a horizon of moral reflection, not a criterion of practical judgment. Thus it is easy to understand that resentment will discover a great deal more “injustice” than will guilt. Avowed guilt is problematic as an ethical concept; it implies the insistence of a moral critique of the ethical that appears in the West primarily in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, e.g., in the prophet Nathan’s “You are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7) that arouses David’s guilt for sending Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to his death.

    Both guilt and resentment see injustice from the outside in, giving respectively negative and positive valence to the central position. But there is a structural difference between the two attitudes. Resentment is deluded in its essence; it can only be experienced as a sense of injustice, never qua resentment. One can become aware of one’s own resentment, but the feeling itself cannot reflect on itself as a mere effect of scenic reality. To resent someone’s greater centrality is to experience it as unjust, however easily one is able to justify it. In contrast, the sentiment of guilt is not in itself deluded. When I am sensitive to the immorality of my superiority to the central other, whether or not socially countenanced, I admit to feeling guilty. Otherwise, in the general case, I deny my feeling of guilt by calling it “compassion.” This does not exclude the possibility of the same lucidity I referred to in the case of resentment. I may recognize that I have no reason to feel guilty because the object of my guilt is not suffering from an injustice in any way connected to me, yet realize that my sentiment is nonetheless one of guilt rather than compassion.

    But for this to happen, I must have an understanding of the scenic structure of human experience–in a word, I must have at least an elementary notion of Generative Anthropology.

  • Poetry After the End of Culture

     

    As promised, here are some ideas on how the apparently high-cultural activity of writing poetry might survive the “end of culture.”

    The problem posed by high culture to our era is its one-many structure; we don’t want to subordinate our individual imaginations to the mastery of an Artist. But if this problematizes the novel and the theater, it leaves an out for lyric poetry. For unlike epic narratives that address an undefined audience, or drama where the characters address each other before such an audience, lyric poetry is, not necessarily but typically, addressed to a single reader. Most poems, in other words, are “epistles.” The most common type is the love-poem, where the poet writes to his beloved, but friends, the King, even nightingales, winds, and urns, are possible addressees. For the lyric originates in prayer directed from the human periphery to the sacred center, and the center is originarily conceived as the source of language. As opposed to other literary forms, the lyric voice is in virtual dialogue with its interlocutor.

    If I write a poem for someone, my writing is validated if she likes it, regardless of the rest of the world. (To write a novel for one’s bien-aimée is not merely un-cost-effective, it’s unfaithful to the structure of the genre.) Even if I don’t send her the poem, my imagination of her reading it provides a testing-ground for judging its quality. Or when I address my poem to a nightingale, it becomes the incarnation of a divinity always potentially capable of responding. Anyone to whom I show my ode can stand in for this figure as my reader, or for the implied (single) reader if it is addressed to no-one in particular.

    Let us pursue the reception of love-poetry a little farther. To imagine my beloved reading the poem in the way I would like is to think of her as being “impressed” by it. It must appear to her as a product of labor, neither a spontaneous expression of desire nor a facile piece of doggerel that rhymes “moon” with “June.” Her “impression,” one presumes, will allow her to interpret the sentiment it expresses as appropriately respectful of her freedom to respond to it. The poet’s respect may be equally well described as directed to her as the reader-recipient of the poem or as its principal character.

    The ostensibly concrete aim of most love-poetry is seduction. It is no accident that the best-known poem in the French language is Ronsard’s “Mignonne, allons voir si la rose…” which, like Marvell’s far superior “Had We But World Enough and Time,” puts to good use the old theme of carpe diem. However, the seductive danger of the seduction model is that it appears to take the biological enterprise of sexual reproduction as a satisfactory goal for cultural activity. My “sociobiological” point in the last two Chronicles on this subject is not this at all. The biological basis for culture is its “goal” only in the external sense that the function of culture is to permit us to maintain this basis. But this explains the internal functioning of cultural phenomena about as well as saying that the aim of football is to let the spectators vent their aggressive impulses helps you to follow the Superbowl. Making a poem into a performative whose “illocutionary force” is to get a woman into bed raises questions about the practical efficacy of poetry as compared with flowers, strong drink, diamond necklaces, etc., but not about poetic technique or quality.

    On the contrary, if we consider the origins of high-cultural love poetry in the West (and, once again, Sappho provides a powerful anticipatory model), the love-poem is typically written to someone far away, whose physical seduction is now, or has always been, unthinkable. Sublimation is the very stuff of love-poetry. What is exemplary about the “Mignonne” poem is that it is a minimal model of sublimation. The poet shows his beloved the short life-span of the rose as an inducement to “cueill[ir] votre jeunesse.” Presumably she will appreciate his delicacy in not merely comparing her with the flower but in proposing that she use it as a model for her own freely chosen behavior. The Other is, as they say, empowered as an agent in “her” poem. The minimal nature of this empowerment coincides with a minimal degree of poetic elaboration: the discovery and, we might say, cultivation of the flower-metaphor. The agricultural figure inherent in the word “culture” reveals what has been the specific aim of high culture ever since the Greeks invented paideia, one that can be summed up as just the opposite of providing sexual satisfaction: as askesis, deferral of desire. This is what schooling is supposed to provide, and still does more often than we think, as the means of controlling the animal impulses of youth.

     
    In the lyric poetry of the post-cultural era, we can continue to exercise askesis, but within the “bracketing” of one-on-one relationships. The category operates for everyone on his or her own level. (If, like Hugo’s Ruy Blas, you are a “worm in love with a star,” then you have to meet star-, not worm-criteria.) For those blessedly ignorant of Kitsch, less stringent standards apply, but any standard is one of an upward, sublimating movement toward cultivation.

    The poetic marketplace today, unlike that which obtained in the Romantic and even the early Modernist eras, is highly insular, largely limited to poets themselves and a few camp followers, except in the few cases where some personal or collective factor, not necessarily linked to literary talent, sets a poet off from others and propels him or her to stardom. To the extent that awareness of the perennity of the lyric would lead to greater poetic output and more frequent reading of poetry by lovers, friends, etc., it would skew the poetry market away from the narcissism of (personal or collective) “self-expression” to the refinement of one-on-one communication. It would thus lead to a general improvement of poetic taste and, for published poets, a wider and more literate audience.

    To give an example, I thought I’d end this week’s Chronicle with a poem of my own. Pour n’offenser personne, it is addressed to my late mother.

    Orphanage

    Corpse on a stone table
    chilled to latency
    prime object of my
    dread curiosity

    Cadaver at the altar
    bride of entropy
    my last kiss bestow
    anew virginity

    There will be no column next week; I’ll be in Michigan visiting my son & his family. See you again June 21!

  • L’Amour intellectuel de Dieu: Lacan’s Spinozism and Religious Revival in Recent French Thought

    Irony is attached to this past fall’s transferal of the remains of André Malraux to the Panthéon. The desacralized church of St.-Geneviève, recycled by the Revolution for the purpose of storing the ghosts of questioners of old faiths, now contains the body of the man whose most currently relevant achievement is perceived to have been his prediction that religion and not Enlightenment values would make possible and dominate the century that is about to be born. Michel Tournier’s novel of the life of Moses appeared during this same autumn,(1) and in an interview published on the occasion, the author excitedly reflected upon what in France has been called “le retour du religieux.” “Read the newspapers, and books,” he said, “they only speak of God. We are headed towards a century of religion; Malraux was totally right.”(2) And here is Régis Debray, juxtaposing two famous prophesies, the first from Sartre, one the ex-revolutionary now feels to have been embarrassed by another, that of Malraux: “Between [the statements] that Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time.’ and ‘The twenty-first century will be religious or it will not be,’ the course of events seems to suggest that a choice has now been made.”(3) This seemed to have been the only Malraux the year knew anything of. A third such 1996 reference, this from Luc Ferry : “The famous line of Malraux on the possibility of planet-scaled religious event marking the twenty-first century has caused us to speculate endlessly.”(4) The man whom Lyotard (plausibly) described as having believed in nothing but himself,(5) is seen as imagining only a posterity that would exclude him, is reassigned by posterity as futurologist of faith.

    The timing of the Malraux celebration might have made its opportunistic sense for the Gaullist government, eager for symbolic legitimacy at the moment when the more tangible variety proved unavailable, but it could not have been more curiously off at the moment the prediction of Malraux rushes towards its vast confirmation. As early as 1982 Marc Augé wrote that “the easily perceptible current of the day in France is the intellectual rehabilitation of religion and the Bible.”(6) Alain Finkielkraut reported: “And it is in this melancholic climate of farewells to the hopes of modernity that now begins a spectacular renaissance of religious feelings. [. . . ] History once succeeded God; God has now succeeded his successor.”(7) Christian Jambet, formerly of the tradition of “la pensée 68:” “Religious belief has now become a central fact, a way of feeling power where power had almost entirely disappeared. After World War II religion meant the abdication of thought. But it now again has a role in the drama of thought.”(8) Ghita Ionescu, writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1993:”[T]he real sea-change in the modern French moral and mental attitudes is the restoration of the dominant Catholic spirit.”(9) A year later in the same periodical, Henri Astier sought to explain the relative indifference of the French to 300th anniversary of Voltaire’s birth: “Since the late 1970s, a markedly spiritual trend has made a comeback in French philosophy, in the writings of authors like Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas.”(10) And more than a decade after the first examples of this movement, Jean-Pierre Vernant could observe: “Only ten years ago the people of my generation could be astonished to notice that religion no longer belonged to the past but to the present. One gets used to one’s own astonishment, to such an extent that one is no longer astonished. It is true that today the resurgence of religion has taken on a considerable scale.”(11)

    “Too much God,” Hegel famously complained of Spinoza. The charge has echoed through the Left Bank as this current has taken on ever greater vitality. The birthday of Voltaire may have been a dry affair, but this also Parthenoned ghost has retained some residue of his former authority. “Ecrasez l’infâme,” the same Debray suggested, as he here contrasts the past with the present: “In Paris, Marxist theory was then all the rage, ‘all powerful because it is true.’ Its place has now been taken by the sacred and the return to the spiritual in no less terrorist a form. ‘Heaven inside our heads’ has eclipsed the earth and the Holy Scriptures have pushed aside the duplicated leaflets.”(12) A discomforted Julia Kristeva reported on the agenda as of 1984: “At the moment we’re in the middle of a regression which is present in the form of a return to the religious, a return of a concept of transcendence, a rehabilitation of spiritualism. It’s a vast problem which can be interpreted in various ways. It is not uninteresting. There are now in France all sorts of spiritualistic movements: pro-Christian, pro-Jewish, pro this, pro that.”(13) “Sartre was all right until he fell into the hands of the Jews,” an early disciple said.(14) At the end of her life, rancorous Simone de Beauvoir described how Sartre spent his last decade discussing the meaning of the Torah with the, on her account, intolerably rude Jewish philosopher Benny Lévy, who like a number of former Maoists sought to reuniversalize through developing an interest in a draconian critique of representation.(15) Related is Sollers’s complaint of Simone de Beauvoir’s undisguised hostility to the late Sartre’s frequentations: “The dubious company he kept. . . . former revolutionaries now turned toward God and learning Hebrew. . . It’s as if that’s what shocks her most–God and Hebrew.” Kristeva’s husband imagines the words of an urgently indignant final Althusser: “For now the Opium’s making a comeback–religion itself. . . That really is the last straw! Where can such a crack in the edifice have sprung from? Such a terrifying leaking away of meaning? Vigilance must have been relaxed. . . God? No Really! Anything but that!”(16) In January of 1996 Catherine Clément seconds the critique of laxity: “The rationalist rigor that has marked the years since the war is now threatened by the onslaught of religion that is not limited to the rise of fundamentalisms in far-off lands.”(17) Complaining continues in May of 1996, when Christian Delacampagne wrote: “Alas, we have been flooded with this current return of the religious.”(18)

    2

    Not only have we in this country not taken the measure of this vast phenomenon, with its dozens of figures and hundreds of books, but we have not even so much as honored it with the most uncomprehending, briefly dismissive cringe.(19) Among the most visible early examples was the 1979 appearance of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Le Testament de Dieu, a book that describes itself as owing its reasoning to Girard and Levinas,(20) whose own works have their complex roles in this tradition. Perhaps the earliest example would be the Lacan-inspired theology found in L’Ange, by Christian Jambet and Guy Lardeau.(21) Sartre’s 1980 Nouvel Observateur interviews that dealt with his new, warm feelings about religion provoked the raising of eyebrows already described.(22) Deserving of prominent mention are the numerous books of the Catholic philosopher Jean-Luc Marion,(23) as well as the journal Communio, in which he has had a prominent role. Numerous also are the books of the Jewish thinker Daniel Sibony, author of, for example, Le groupe inconscient,(24) La Juive,(25) and Les Trois monothéismes.(26) The books of Sibony, as well as the biblical readings of Mary Balmary–her Le Sacrifice interdit; Freud et la Bible(27) and L’Origine divine; Dieu n’a pas créé l’homme(28)–together with those of Bernard Sichère, for example his Histoires du mal,(29) provide examples of the impact upon this current of Lacan that will be my major focus in what follows.

    Two Christians have their roles–the novelist Christian Bobin(30) and the philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien, author of La Voix nue; phénoménologie de la promesse.(31) Michel Serres’s 1993 book on the legend of angels is but one example of many of his texts that have their roles in this current.(32) There has been the widely followed debate over the extensively translated work of the Catholic theologian Eugen Drewermann. The most recent books in this tradition to have achieved best-seller status would be philosopher Ferry’s book, L’Homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie (dealing in part with the public interest in Drewermann), and André Comte-Sponville’s Petit Traité des grandes vertus.(33) The most dramatic and intellectually compelling of recent examples is certainly C’est Moi la vérité, a reading of the gospels by Michel Henry. This eminent historian of philosophy and thinker in the phenomenological tradition, author of much respected books on Marx, Husserl, Freud and Kandinsky, here describes what he feels to be the superiority of the logic of Jesus to the Western philosophical tradition: “Religious beliefs, two-thousand and more years old, only they are in a position today to instruct us about ourselves.”(34) Notable as well are the writings of Shmuel Trigano, including his La Nouvelle Question juive,(35) and the new journal of Jewish thought, Pardès, with which he has been associated. Not untouched by Lacan as well are the projects of Christian Jambet, previously mentioned author of L’Ange, who now is an enthusiast and scholar of the history of Shiite Islam.(36) For American followers of French developments, the tip of the iceberg has been Derrida’s new writings on religion.

    Central has been the issue of the Biblical interdiction of representation, the issues of the ethical content, the sociological and political consequences of the Second Commandment and its relation to the First. A perspicacious critic has been caused by this emphasis to remark: “Everything is coming to pass as if the iconoclastic discipline of the people of Moses, after a millennial incubation in the theological compost, were regaining its critical virulence in the languages of the sciences and of the soul.”(37) Now, as the theological ban on images can be understood to constitute a critique of the charismatic and charismatically excited unanimities, what Gans calls “the figural,” the mediation that generates “compact” communities, we can easily understand its partial embrace by that body of thought we have come to term “critical theory.” Here immediately coming to mind are the selectively warm remarks concerning Jewish thought we find in the writings of Adorno, Benjamin, Lyotard, or Derrida. The ambition of this movement, which it is my aim to contrast with “le retour du religieux,” can be efficiently described. It is this–the complaint of charismatically organized group closure (appearing in Adorno in philosophical terms as “identity theory”) from the perspective of the only minimally dialectical version of this same phenomenon, almost sociologically inert, historically but not economically ineffectual images of narcissistic closure.

    Distinctions are required, Derrida noted: “Narcissism! There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other, open and closed, generous and not.”(38) To use the vocabulary of economist Fred Hirsch, the organizing symmetry of critical theory involves the juxtaposition of the positional, or exclusive, versus the relatively uninvidiously distributed availability of the deaggrandized versions of an identical resource–the image of reflexivity.(39) The great polarities that anchor critical theory illustrate the point: the distinction between molar and molecular in Deleuze and Guattari, for example, between what Bataille terms “low materialism” and what he understands as “sacrifice,” between the spoken and the written word of Derrida, between what Adorno calls “identity theory” and the modest irreducible by which it is said to be unaggressively undone, the included and excluded forms of the parasite in Serres,(40) the split between what Lyotard terms ugliness and “la belle totalité” in his Discours, figure.(41) The intractability of this symmetry is demonstrated by the large number of synonyms it has generated, synonyms that are all recognized to posses gratifying levels of explanatory power.

    3

    The goal in each case is the production of what I would call “sustained unpunishability.”

    Banal now is notice of the fact that what we term postmodern thought requires heterogeneity to rescue from the universals that are perceived to be oppressive. Yet this same postmodern automatically generates a climate within which there flourishes an identity politics, required, it would seem, if there is to be a basis for negotiating between the differences it must inexhaustibly create and defend. Economist Joseph Schumpeter has provided an explanation for the co-existence of these two requirements that might appear to be impossible to reconcile.(42) “Sustained unpunishability,” in his terms, would be what was fervently aspired to by the risk-taking, innovation-oriented entrepreneur, who, more than cheap labor, or the availability of raw materials, is the market’s decisive resource. For Schumpeter, the taboo-violator (the “intellectual” is his term for him) requires a protection that cannot be denied, for he is the figure of the entrepreneur–his unfettered outlandishness creates a field of permissions that sustain the market hero with whom he has a necessarily fraternal relation:

    In capitalist society–or in a society that contains a capitalist element of decisive importance–any attack on the intellectuals must run up against the private fortress of bourgeois business which, or some of which, will shelter the quarry. [. . . ] In a purely bourgeois regime like that of Louis Philippe, troops may fire on strikers, but the police cannot round up intellectuals or must release them forthwith; otherwise the bourgeois stratum, however, strongly disapproving some of their doings, will rally behind them because the freedom it disapproves cannot be crushed without also crushing the freedom it approves. [. . . ] In defending the intellectuals as a group–not of course every individual–the bourgeois defends itself and its scheme of life.(43)

    This providentially disruptive figure is thus what Serres calls the included third parasite. On the symbiosis he writes: “[W]here does this come from, this need to have such a rogue traveling with you? To such an extent that you even risked your life in running to protect him! In the same way that he lives off you, is it maybe the case that you couldn’t survive without him?”(44) Without his antisocial energies we could know only the torpor of the anthropological situation. But precisely because of his minimal sociability, his insistence upon seeing differently, he is, as Schumpeter argues, perpetually, self-protectingly at the same time self-damagingly, in the process of secreting organizations and values that would limit the scale of his anarchic freedoms. The entrepreneur must protect himself from himself, but as he does so, his identity as providential delinquent is ceaselessly menaced.

    It would be, Schumpeter has argued, the hypertrophy of these anarchy-disciplining structures– state development, punitive or caring bureaucracies with their “new class intellectuals,” what Carl Schmitt called “motorized legislation,” that would deaden the innovative drive, and drive up the costs of transactions. The view of the police-loving outlaw may appear odd coming from an economist, but it is very modernly recognizable. Here is Nietzsche: “Thus we immoralists require the power of morality: our drive of self-preservation wants our opponents to retain their strength. . . . “(45) Finally a perverse branch of feudalism, according to Schumpeter, capitalism is not a self-sustaining formation, as it is parasitic upon traditional values it can also only have life through insulting.

    What critical theory notices, in its own languages, but what Schumpeter was perhaps too early to see, is that decisive distinctions are to be made according to the character of the friendly fire the entrepreneur calls down upon his anarchic procedures, according to the levels of lethargy produced by the secreted disciplinary structures, according to whether the discipline comes from within or without, whether it is empathically motivated, emptily administrative or theologically grounded and if theologically grounded, the extent to which this theological position can be deployed to legitimize variously organized heteronomous administrative cultures, whether or not it can be called upon to sponsor charismatic organizations, for example. Distinctions are to be made according to which the disciplinary force–that cannot be dispensed with–is lived as entropic. To sustain the animating unpunishability is the challenge faced by the entrepreneur, to limit the impact upon his excesses of the antidote he creates to protect himself from the consequences of the resentment he produces as he produces. This is a fact of which, as we shall see, modern philosophy is very much aware. The categories of critical theory have provided our vocabulary for not simply noticing the Schumpeterian irony, but also for describing the conditions that would make possible the levels of sustained unpunishability needed for the free development of the entrepreneurial spirit.

    4

    It is with this as background that I would like to take notice of the fact that an unmissable feature of this “retour du religieux” is a convergence, that is sometimes aware, sometimes unaware of itself as such, upon key aspects of the thought of Spinoza. Levinas has written two essays on Spinoza.(46) There are the books by Robert Misrahi and Catherine Challier, to mention but a few.(47) He was the only philosopher, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere.”(48) They have called him “the Christ of philosophers,” and “the prince of philosophers,”(49) and dedicated two books to him in addition to passages in other of his volumes. Vincent Descombes has written a useful book, in which he has convincingly described the centrality of Kojèvian Hegelianism in French thought since the 1930s.(50) Hegel was indeed the name of the game, but Spinoza became the name of the wanting out of the game. Here is Deleuze:

    In the reproach that Hegel will make to Spinoza, that he ignored the negative and its power, lies the glory and innocence of Spinoza, his own discovery. In a world consumed by the negative, he has enough confidence in life, in the power of life, to challenge death, the murderous appetite of men, the rules of good and evil, of the just and the unjust. Enough confidence in life to denounce all the phantoms of the negative. Excommunication, war, tyranny, reaction, men who fight for their enslavement as if it were their freedom–this forms the world in which Spinoza lives. [. . . ] In his view, all the ways of humiliating and breaking life, all the forms of the negative have two sources, one turned outward and the other inward, resentment and bad conscience, hatred and guilt. ‘The two archenemies of the human race, Hatred and Remorse.’ He denounces these sources again and again as being linked to man’s consciousness, as being inexhaustible until there is a new consciousness, a new vision, a new appetite for living. Spinoza feels, experiences, that he is eternal.(51)

    Related to Deleuze’s praise is Ferry’s notice of the Nietzschean relation to what he terms “this new Spinozism” (that he finds in Serres, for example):

    [It]connects with one of the profound intuitions of Nietzschean vitalism, according to which life constitutes ‘the most intimate essence of being,’ the ultimate foundation of all things as well as the basis of all valorization. Recall that in the name of such a reference to life, Nietzsche came to denounce ‘the absurdity’ of the Platonic-Christian opposition between this (tangible) world and the (intelligible) world beyond. According to him, this dualism merely conceals a pathological and ‘decadent’ desire to negate real existence, which is nonetheless the only life that truly is, in favor of a pure fiction produced by the lucubrations of a sick imagination. Such is the essence of morality and religion, forever destined, neurotically so, Freud would later say, to seek a meaning to life elsewhere.(52)

    Revealing here is the overly easy collapse of Spinoza and Nietzsche. Doubts are in order here for, as Foucault among others have noticed, including Nietzsche himself, Spinoza presented a particularly difficult challenge as well as a strong model for Nietzsche.(53) Equally important in France in causing Spinoza to be viewed with affection would be the possible compatibility with Marx. Althusser was famously intrigued by Spinoza. One of his associates, Etienne Balibar has written often on Spinoza,(54) and another, Pierre Macherey, author of no less than seven books on Spinoza, is responsible for the book with, for the French, the decisive title: Hegel ou Spinoza ? “It is Spinoza who constitutes the true alternative to the philosophy of Hegel” he here argues.(55)The ground of the Marxist interest is explained by Fredric Jameson, as he asks: “How then to coordinate our very limited positions, as individuals or indeed as historical subjects and classes, within a History whose dynamics representationally escape us? The lesson was given as far back as Spinoza, surely the most dramatic of all the thinkers of totality, when he recommended a kind of stoic adjustment as a part or component, to that immense whole of being or nature of which we are the merest partial reflexes.”(56)

    But compatibilities with Marx and Nietzsche would seem revealingly to break down in the case of the thought of Bataille, Marxist and Nietzschean, against whom Spinoza has been posed as decisive contrast. Three examples follow. Invited to the inauguration of an urban legend, André Masson sent his excuses. Bataille had asked some twenty friends to the forest at Marly to silently meditate before a lightning-struck tree. Was the artist present? Bernard-Henri Lévy quizzed participant Klossowski: “No. He always maintained a certain reserve. As a fervent Spinozist, he reasoned differently.”(57) “The system of Spinoza is a white pantheism; that of Bataille a black pantheism,” Sartre wrote,(58) putting in the most condensed form the opposition that will be the concern here. In viewing Spinoza as decisive contrarian, Sartre, who was a reader of Julien Benda, was perhaps influenced by the author of Belphégor, who had seen in Spinoza the single solution to all that he viewed as unacceptably modern (Bergson was, for him, its proper name.)(59)

    5

    Now here is Lacan’s lesson, in a moment of jarring clarity, dividing the posterity of his friendship with Bataille, and opening a space for something new as he moralizes the symmetry that had been noticed by Sartre: “It is the eternal meaning of the sacrifice, to which no one can resist, unless animated by that faith, so difficult to sustain, which, perhaps, one man alone has been able to formulate in a plausible way–namely Spinoza, with his Amor intellectualis Dei.“(60) This remark on the sacrifice that is difficult to avoid without Spinoza as guide, was made in the “Eleventh Seminar,” in the midst of Lacan’s analysis of the Holocaust that is here seen to reproduce the logic of archaic ritual.

    In France Lacan is quite routinely seen as a religious thinker. This is very clear in the many books of Sibony, for example, or in Marie Balmary, or in Sichère who has called Lacan “Doctor of the Law of the Jews.”(61) But, if this thought is Jewish, it is in a special sense, one that caused one Jew to be expelled from the Synagogue in Amsterdam in 1656. As much of the recent Spinozism and near-Spinozism can be traced to Lacan, finds its footing in Lacan, the following of his path to the “polisseur de lunettes” as Lacan affectionately names him,(62) will clarify further developments in the current and facilitate necessary broader conclusions concerning the historical function of “le retour du religieux.”

    Lacan’s impressively rigorous route to Spinoza begins with his break with Freud’s pansexualism, replaced in his system with a focus upon, to use his expression, “the great winged hornet of narcissistic tyranny.”(63) Under the influence of, to use Lacan’s own words “my master Kojève,”(64) the psychoanalyst understood “narcissistic tyranny” in terms of the struggle for recognition between the Master and Slave that Hegel had described, and that Kojève had redescribed in the way that has proved so influential. Their struggle, in Lacan, involves the battle to have access to what he termed “the object small a,” that mysterious nonthing that is the cause of all desire, that object that is the sign of the absence of an object, therefore the absence of desire that characterizes the glorious (an) affectivity of the Hegelian Master, who, it will be recalled, risks his life for nothing in order to establish his sovereignty. We have seen Derrida noticing that there are many narcissisms and Lacan would have agreed, as there are differently gregarious experiences of the object a. Differently managed, our relations with the a can assume the most apparently benign of forms or those of ultimate evil. Episodes from two Lacanian vacations illustrate the point regarding the diversity of experiences of the a:

    It’s a true story. I was in my early twenties or thereabouts–and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Brittany was not industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fishermen went out in this frail craft at their own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn’t all danger and excitement–there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him–like his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class–this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me–You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!

    He found this incident highly amusing–I less so.(65)

    A dangerous joke this was, and deeper into the same seminar we learn of the extent. The social function of the nothing is further explored in a passage in Augustine mentioned several times by Lacan, one in which the author of the Confessions describes the rage he felt seeing his brother at his mother’s, for him, useless breast:

    Invidia comes from videre. The most exemplary invidia, for us analysts, is the one I found long ago in Augustine, in which he sums up his entire fate, namely, that of the little child seeing his brother at his mother’s breast, looking at him amare conspectu, with a bitter look, which seems to tear him to pieces and has on himself the effect of a poison.In order to understand what invidia is in its function as a gaze it must not be confused with jealousy. What the small child, or whoever, envies is not at all necessarily what he might want–avoir envie, as one improperly puts it. Who can say that the child who looks at his younger brother still needs to be at the breast? Everyone knows that envy is usually aroused by the possession of goods which would be of no use to the person who is envious of them, and about the true nature of which he does not have the least idea.6

    Such is true envy–the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself, before the idea, that the petit a, the separated a from which he is hanging, may be for another the possession that gives satisfaction. . . .(66)

    The object-cause-of-desire is no object, or rather just barely an object, its minimal externality, minimal otherness, suggestive of the possibility of the lack of need for an object–it is the object form of lack of need that characterizes the Master’s (an) affectivity, as we have noticed. Now what Lacan calls sacrifice in his analysis of the Holocaust is very difficult to avoid because of the fact that this desire to have exclusive access to the experience of unmediated relations with the object a, and to be recognized as being in this position of exclusivity, is the basic human drive. The Holocaust is the same experience, albeit very differently scaled. The urge is to cause oneself to be seen as sole owner and proprietor of the a, that is to say to experience the objectlessness of the narcissistic condition. The scene of sacrifice, he writes in another text, is a scene of seduction: “Let us say that the religious person leaves to God the ownership of the cause of desire, but that he thereby cuts off his own access to the truth. Thus is he led to give back to God the cause of his desire–this is properly the object of sacrifice. His demand is organized around the imagined desire of a God whom one must then seduce.”(67) The wasting is a trick–the person or the group in a position to waste is the hoarder of the a. Derrida knows this: “But the sacrifice recaptures with one hand what it gives with the other, and its account must be kept on a double register.”(68) An angry god, one we invent to function as humiliated witness to the ability to waste, this the role taken by Lacan himself in the fishing story, or the angry Augustine of the Confessions, presides over the experience of sacrifice, it is argued, his rage before the spectacle of human wasting, that is the contrastive experience of the a, being the guarantee that he, the god, the sacrificed to, contrasts himself depressively with the figure of realized desire that is the sacrificer.(69) Gans writes, compatibly, that “the figural. . . is also the sacrificial.”(70) To be added to this remark is the fact that the sacrificial is the experience of the shift in the address of the figural–synonym of Freud’s ego ideal, synonym of the entity that exclusively hoards the object a–from one position to another. A depression is overcome as one moves from the unfavorable to the favorable pole of a contrast.

    This fishing scene is to be juxtaposed with another, less painful vacation snapshot. During a wartime visit to the home of his friend Jacques Prévert, Lacan was exposed to the poet’s collection of match boxes and its associated reward, empty match boxes, on the surface resembling the useless empty tin can of the earlier episode:

    It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. The match boxes appeared as follows: all the same, they were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each one being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they we all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and crept down again next to a door. I don’t say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view.

    Yet I don’t think that was the be all and end all of what was surprising in this “collectionism,” nor the source of the satisfaction that the collector himself found there. I believe that the shock of novelty of the effect realized by this collection of empty matchboxes–and this is the essential point–was to reveal something that we do not perhaps pay enough attention to, namely, that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing.

    In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn’t simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn’t even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box.(71)

    This found object pastoral is a “little fable of the revelation of the Thing beyond the object,” showing “one of the most innocent forms of sublimation. Perhaps you can even see something emerge in it that, goodness knows, society is able to find satisfaction in.” Importantly he concludes: “It is a satisfaction. . . that doesn’t ask anything of anyone.”(72) Beyond use because beneath it, the boxes were just any body’s now, and savingly so.

    7

    Now these objects are already familiar to us as occupying the poles of critical theory that habitually poses the image of an anonymously distributed insignificance against that of its provocative, exclusive capture. The indifferent distribution of indifference–match box vacation, is deployed to defeat the image of exclusive capture–sardine can vacation. An undernarcissism, a deniable narcissism, is summoned to replace its sociological polar-cap-producing charismatic double. This would be the distinction made by Serres between strong and weak parasites, that of Kojève between the Master who risks life for nothing and the modest successor form who, as post-historic snob, seeks recognition without fear of a violent comeuppance, as the object of his predilection is not provocatively, because exclusively housed by his person.(73) Lacan: “The patient says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this–I love you, but, because I love in you something more than you–l’objet petit a–I mutilate you,”(74) This summarizes what occurs in sacrifice and what is avoided through the free circulation of the same object, the free levitation of which it has been the major project of critical theory to guarantee.

    The reason for the choosing of sides is clear enough if we turn to the insights of Generative Anthropology, or if we consult the confirming Jean-Pierre Dupuy, for example, who writes: “[T]he economy is the negation of the crowd: the economy emerges entirely against the crowd; it is the return of the crowd that it works above all to prevent.”(75) What is meant here is that charismatically generated unanimities do not produce the scattering affectivities that make markets possible.

    This point can be differently made. In Envy and Gratitude, Melanie Klein describes how the infant’s living of the contrast of the experience of its own weakness and dependency with that of the seemingly omnipotent source of its nourishment causes a killing desire that is immediately renounced.(76) Her description of a site of impossible happiness occupied by the figure who generates at once envy and gratitude recalls the grounding insight of Generative Anthropology that the sacred center is a dangerous place. The moment of the renunciation of murder is that of the birth of what Klein terms “the envious superego,” that agency that blocks the drive to insist upon worldly centrality. As this story is clearly compatible with Lacan’s, who borrows elements of it, we can say that what he terms sacrifice is the pedagogy of envious superego development. If, as Bataille knew, sacrifice is the critique of the charismatic individual, whose destruction is employed as mediation to produce the charismatic group, the of the imagery of the charismatic for the sake of its undoing, for the purpose of the creation of the envious superego, then the esthetic critique of representation is the charismatic autocritique, the using of the charismatic against itself for the sake of its free, ubiquitously, minimally contrastive life, the sustained unpunishability that we have described as required to excite the production of market effects.

    One produces envious superego, the other blocks its development through generation of minimally inciting, prestressed figurality, one that is always already at a vanishing point, having placed itself at this vanishing point, not having been placed there by another. The immanent usurpation of critique makes unnecessary any external correction. The yield is this: asyndetically arranged images of autoaffection, minimally constrained, because immanently constrained, minimally adhesive, because minimally contrastive. The esthetic critique of representation is not about the end of contrast but the creation of an unmanageable and therefore manageable surplus of intentionally minimally effective, that is historically neutral but economically powerful contrasts. The metaphor is from a letter of Leibniz to Sophie-Charlotte: “When one throws into the water at the same time several stones, this produces a number of circles that cross without destroying one another . When the number of stones is very great the eye can no longer keep track.”(77) In either case, whether it is through the esthetic critique of sacrifice or through sacrifice, an ethics is produced through the experience of an invidious contrast, more or less intensely lived, as the fact remains in each case that a circle has been created by a stone.

    Spinoza for Lacan is the name of the vacation from both vacations. Spinoza calling it in all its forms “satire,” rejected contrast tout court, rejecting it with a perhaps uniquely powerful consistency, and this is what has moved his logic to the center of current concern: “[S]atire is everything that takes pleasure in the powerlessness and distress of men, everything that feeds on accusations, on malice, on belittlement, on low interpretations, everything that breaks men’s’ spirits (the tyrant needs broken spirits, just as broken spirits need a tyrant.”(78) If Lacan’s two vacation objects stories are read together, without mention of his theological position that he has emphatically attached, it is as a postmodernist that he appears–as in the postmodern one form of satire is used against another. But at the invocation of the name of Spinoza he disappears from our map; no longer does he maintain residence in the space produced by the tensions of the organizing symmetry of critical theory as I have described it above. Now the esthetic (as well as sacrifice) always involves the overcoming of a contrast one feels oneself to have been disadvantaged by, but this is quite different from the totalizing elimination of all experiences of derision, however they may be scaled, through the description of the absolute ontological impossibility of contrast–this being the position of Spinoza. From a letter to Oldenberg: “I attach to nature neither beauty nor ugliness, neither order nor confusion: things cannot be said to be either beautiful or ugly, ordered or confused, except according to our imaginations.”(79)

    8

    Strictly, there can be no Spinozist esthetics.(80) Thus the absurdity of the following position of Schlegel: “Why won’t you arise and revive those splendid forms of great antiquity? Try for once to see the old mythology, steeped in Spinoza. . . and everything will appear to you in new splendor and vitality.”(81) Only an imagination unhappy and false could argue that there would be possible a reconciliation of this position with the great classical expulsions that only know of contrast.

    Christopher Norris has written that “[N]early all the great debates in present-day literary theory have their origin in one or another aspect of Spinoza’s work.”(82) True, but not as he intends the point, for curiously unmentioned by him is Spinoza’s striking relation to the decisive matter of mimetic desire. Spinoza’s point of departure is identical to that of the Kojèvian Lacan, and hence the logic of Lacan’s saving conclusion. In the Ethics there is abundant, central notice of the mimetic foundation of human interaction. Desire is the very essence of mind, he tells us, but objects are not desired on the grounds on intrinsic properties alone: “[W]e do not endeavor, will, seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary, we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after and desire it.”(83) This will is mimetically animated: “If we think that someone loves, desires, or hates something that we love, desire or hate, that very fact will cause us to love, desire or hate the thing.” And: “Emulation is the desire for some thing, engendered in us from the fact that we think others to have the same desire.”(84) Thus, “Anything can. . . be the cause of pleasure,” because it is the mediation that is decisive.(85) The key notion in Spinoza of “external cause” is translatable as the presence of Girard’s triangulation: “Love is merely ‘pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause,’ and hatred is merely’ pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.’”(86)

    Unhappy contrasts and with them mimetic entanglements are dissolved into the monism of divine substance in the doctrine of “God or Nature,” according to which whatever is, is God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God:

    This doctrine [Deus sive Natura–“apart from God no substance can be or be conceived”] assists us in our social relations, in that it teaches us to hate no one, despise no one, ridicule no one, be angry with no one, envy no one. Then again, it teaches us that each should be content with what he has and should help his neighbor, not from womanish pity, or favor or superstition but solely from the guidance of reason.(87)

    The critique of all transcendence, of the imagined external causes that are responsible for all human unhappiness, and Spinoza’s suggestion of the necessity of the summum bonum that is the intellectual love of the God who is coextensive with all of nature, is understood to solve the problem of the ignorant servility of passion faced when man becomes a god to man, and the transfer of this imbalance into the seduction scene of sacrifice. Spinozism thus involves, to quote Christian Jambet, “the supreme denial of the a, from which we turn away in order to affirm rebellion.”(88) If mediation there is in this system, then it would have the character here described by Schlegel: “For the perfect Christian–whom in this respect Spinoza probably resembles most–everything would really have to be a mediator.”(89)

    Maimonides, a thinker studied by Spinoza, sought to explain the golden calf episode by arguing that a people that had so long inhabited a land of images could not be expected to remain completely uninfected with idolatry even after liberation. Spinoza’s entire system might be described as developing from this position regarding the partial contamination by figurality. At the opening of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he complains of what he felt to be the incoherence that exists between the ban of images and the fact that Moses is said to have heard the voice of God.(90) This selective critique of representation leads to the image of an unextended divinity, thus the possibly of Lacan’s angry God. Consequences of charismatic slippage might include the owing of perfection to an external final cause, the idea of power as domination, the comparing of God’s power to that of kings, a power that can advertise itself as divinely sponsored, and thereby lead the people of Israel to the alienation of the servitude to an earthly absolute. Fall-out from the claim of exposure to the voice is the possibility of reciprocal oppression, the social volatility due to the struggle for glory amongst various emerging leaders who may assert exclusive divine legitimacy. Within the culture of the voice of God, even the greatest of leaders cannot guarantee the absence of discord produced by anarchic claims of election: “Moses had gained the strongest of holds on the minds of his people not by deception but by his divine virtue, for he was thought to be a man of God whose every word and action was divinely inspired; yet even he was not exempt from. . . murmurings and criticism, and far less so were other monarchs.”(91) The figure and the social order of the change of address of the figural (sacrifice) will not have been annulled unless God appears as the immanent rather than the transitive cause of all things.

    9

    The logic of Generative Anthropology has made possible a sensitivity to this issue of figural residue in Christianity. Eric Gans writes:

    Even if the figure of Christ cannot legitimately be called a figure of resentment, it remains a potential focus of concentration for the resentful, like the grain of sand that brings about crystallization in a solution at the saturation point. Pure water remains unaffected; but how many can apply this metaphor to their souls? The historical revelation of the single son of God cannot but provoke the envy of those not so honored, whatever assurance we are given of his infinite imitability. Today one might ask, for example, why not the daughter of God? No figure can be general enough to include the entire human community; as soon as attention is concentrated on it, someone is bound to see in it a sign of exclusion.(92)

    But Spinoza finds the birth of the problem within the Old Testament itself, and locates the solution in the annulation of the transcendental separation between God and humanity that would eliminate the danger of the resentment of the human periphery. Whenever “the dialogue between center and periphery is unequal,”(93) whenever there is the ontological separation of divine and the world, there will be, following Spinoza, the inexhaustible tensions produced by lack and the concomitant threat of charismatic slippage, the threat of the drift from the unexperienceable to the charismatically experienceable, from its strongest forms to the modern variety of the coveting of the position of the victim, this last being denounced by Spinoza in his critique of pity that is found in the Ethics.

    The themes of the indivisibility of divine substance, of God as immanent rather than the transitive cause, of the infinity of mediation, are very much on display in Michel Serres’ long poem in prose on angels:

    For pantheism, everything is divine. Trees and stars are gods. You are a god too, you whom I love and who are now listening to me. So are angels still pantheists? Certainly they are, because by the fact that they pass everywhere and occupy all space, they enable divinity to be seen at all points; your guardian, who shadows you like your shadow, makes me see that you are God, just as my guardian, who abandons me, makes me forget it every day. There are so many angels, they exist in such extraordinary numbers, that one finds them everywhere, testifying to divine ubiquity.(94)

    And in the same spirit:

    No difference separates gods from men, archangels from animals, profane love from sacred love, body from soul, beauty from the beast, prayer from sex, coitus from high mystique. . . . The end of the reign of angels sounds with the birth of the Messiah, who makes flesh divine and incarnates love: immanence encompasses everything, in its unmoving equilibrium.(95)

    In the absence of this position, Serres writes, implicitly setting Spinoza against Hobbes: “the war of all against everyone will continue to rage.”(96)

    Spinoza is revealingly absent in Grammatology. Is Grammatology a secular Spinozism, unable finally to sustain itself as such, a Spinozism waiting to happen?

    Impossible to not notice the Spinozan cast of the following remark of Derrida, from his Donner la mort, because it involves the suggestion that the monotheist critique of representation falls short, and that a radicalization of it should be used against the tradition within which it is only selectively found:

    Perhaps one should, following the Judeo-Christian-Islamic injunction, but also risking turning it against this tradition, think God and the name of God without this representation or this idolatrous stereotyping–and to then say: God is the name of the possibility for me of keeping a secret that is visible from within but not from the outside. As soon as there is this structure of consciousness, of being-with-oneself, of speaking, that is to say to produce an invisible meaning, as soon as I have in me, that to the invisible word as such, a witness that others do not see, and who is thus at the same time other than me and more intimate to me than myself, as soon as I can keep a secret relation with myself and not say everything, as soon as there is secret and secret witness in me, there is what I call God, there is what I call God in me, there is the possibility of calling myself God, a phrase that is difficult to distinguish from “God calls me,” because it is on this condition that I call or am called in secret. God is in me, he is absolute self, he is this invisible structure of interiority that one terms, in the Kierkegaardian sense, subjectivity.(97)

    10

    But Derrida is certainly no Spinozist.(98) And neither is Michel Henry, who is immediately critical of anything resembling the “intellectual” love of God or involving the arrogance of an “intellectual” access to his existence. But if there is implied complaint of Spinoza here, it might be said to be leveled from the perspective of a meta-Spinozism. The author of the Ethics would be describable by Henry as offering only a partial solution to what he had felt had been the only partial solution to the figural that was the key flaw in the logic of Moses. Henry, who does not mention Spinoza, shares with him the belief that the experience of the radical otherness of God can only result in charismatic slippage. Following from this is the sense that a reorganization of the anesthetic is necessary–the critique of the figural must have its basis in an immanence rather than a transcendence. Spinoza had a higher view of Jesus than of Moses, consequently; and consequently Henry only has the harshest remarks for the Old Testament Law.

    The umbrella distinction organizing Henry’s book is the one he makes between belonging to “the truth of the world” and the authentic relation to what he terms “Life,” by which he means living in the love of God, lived, as in Spinoza, as immanent and ubiquitous, fully, unhierarchically shared throughout all of experience. Repeating Lacan’s first step, Henry describes what he terms “the world” as dominated by the experience of the spectacle. To belong to the realm means to seek to appear to the other as image and to be troubled by image of the other. Recalling the young Sartre or Lacan, he writes that “projecting itself outside of itself, towards a self, the ego finds outside of itself only a phantom.”(99) The consequences are depressive: “[One is] conditioned. . . to despise oneself, to count oneself as nothing. . . admiring everything that is less than what one is, and despising all that is more than what one is.”(100) As in Spinoza there is an association of the figural and with the idea of external cause, associated by both with resentment and feelings of impotence following from and resulting in the drive to identify: “Imaginary driftings [produced by external cause] are due to feverish representations of a . . . sickness. . . that involves turning against oneself, no longer desiring to be what one is, seeking to identify with another.”(101) In Henry, as in Lacan, the image-impulse results in a movement towards sacrifice.(102)

    The true person is said to not be the empirical individual, because this is a creature of the spectacle, always losing him or herself to the image of another. Authentic subjectivity participates in the essence of Life that is the self-love of God with whom we are all said to be fully coextensive. In this situation the other is no longer experienced as outside, as humiliating external cause: “Life [associated strictly with God’s self-love and self-revelation] experiences itself without distance, without difference.”(103) The pantheism is, like Serres’, lyrically thorough-going: “The Revelation of God is his autorevelation [. . . ] [It] does not consist in the unveiling of a content that is foreign to his essence and communicated, one would not quite know how, to several initiates. To reveal himself to men can only mean for God to share with them his eternal self-revelation.”(104) “The Word of Life” involves the defeat of all contrast , and thus the opening for the emergence of the esthetic that Gans saw in Christianity is closed, as anestheticism is reinvented on a basis that is identical to the one organized in Spinoza.

    Now one could refer to a specifically French Spinoza requirement. We need scarcely fear contradiction if we characterize this current as the latest example of French totalism, as a product of the nostalgia for the universalizing vocation of the French intelligentsia, seeking, in its Leftlessness, new grounds to assert the prerogatives of its historical role, refusing to allow itself to be consigned to what Pareto called “the graveyard of aristocracies.” Spinoza’s thought might understandably appear to reconcile the sometimes mutually exclusive imperatives involved in the French sense of national destiny and belonging, so effectively described by Louis Dumont as forcing into uneasy coexistence the revolutionary heritage that is the drive to universalize, with the insistence upon the French, Catholic difference.(105) Bergson described himself as a Spinozist.(106) And so did Alain. Writing in 1946, in an introduction to one of his Spinoza texts: “It is astonishing that Spinoza reconciles the pure monk and the pure Jacobin in the same person.”(107) He continues, describing adherence to Spinozism to be a matter of patriotic necessity:

    Such is the meaning of Spinozism, a meaning that is positive and very easy to grasp, on the condition that one is persuaded that one is in the presence of the universal spirit. This conviction will cause thinking to be bearable to you and suddenly you see yourself as a man in the light of the axiom ‘Homo homini deus.’ This view would be the key to the future Republic and of the view of equality associated with 1848. I say equality because it is impossible for to not have passions and because all affection ceases to be a passion as soon as one has an adequate idea of it. This is the secret of peace, which in every case is the peace of the soul, this being a truth that is very much misunderstood. In this manner we will for form the Party of Spinoza, that we will be careful not to call the party of Jews, but it is the party of Jews nonetheless. Without combat then Nazism, fascism and every kind of despotism will be defeated, and evil established to be the impotent thing it is (because it is nothing). Such will be the immediate future, the one contained in this little book.(108)

    11

    But it is the larger issue of the market’s reconciliation with itself that should concern us, the issue of the postmodern’s inability to advance against the Schumpeterian irony. This transcends in significance the specifically French issue of the reconciliation of key, seemingly incompatible features of one nation’s historical experience–in Spinoza’s appearing to Alain at once as Jacobin and monk.

    As much as critical theory seeks to enlist the sponsorship of the theologically grounded anesthetic, it is clearly reluctant to simply dissolve into its harshest terms. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this point as they describe Spinoza as the patron saint of drug addicts and schizophrenics,(109) these last being manifestly less kin of Spinoza than of the prehumiliated heroes of waste of modern literature, of nineteenth-century dandies, tubercular courtesans, Beckettian marginals, etc. Because of his critique of transcendence that buttresses refusal to be involved in contrast, Spinoza is sensed to provide the extended wings of delinquency, enables it to live more easily, by supplying a discipline that Schumpeter had described as required, but one that is friction-free, thus not entropic.

    The partial purchase of which I speak can be found in Bataille. The following Spinozist remark from Madame Edwarda: “God is nothing unless he is the transcendence of God in all senses.”(110) But elsewhere on the same page there is this: “God is a whore. . . in all respects similar to all others.” At one moment we can find Derrida, as we have seen, wishing away residual figural features within the Judeo-Christian tradition, at another we spot him providing examples of unparalleled clarity of prehumilated estheticism. In Glas he collapses the strategies of Jean Genet with the logic of the Jewish law of circumcision:

    By first incising his glans, he defends himself in advance against the infinite threat, castrates in his turn the enemy, elaborates a kind of apotropaic without measure. He exhibits his castration as an erection that defies the other. The logical paradox of the apotropaic: castrating oneself already, always already, in order to be able to castrate and repress the threat of castration, renouncing life and mastery in order to secure them.(111)

    Fused in these examples are contrasted experiences of contrast–in one a fascination that comes to an end at the moment it is produced (in the prehumiliated), and in the other there is a monism that excludes the possibility of such a sequence, however minimally visible it might be. The remark about the philosopher’s alliance with drug addicts and schizos obviously makes no sense at one level. But less interesting than the issue of an unembarrassedly inexact account of the positions of Spinoza is the possibility that the yoking of logically mutually exclusive critiques of figurality may be designed to satisfy a historical requirement. This need would be the necessity of blocking the decay that is the work of the Schumpeterian irony, the erosion of the deviant energies that are checked by certain premodern moralities the market had allowed to continue to exist in order to rescue itself from the consequences of its providential disruptions. These ethical systems now come to be perceived as insufficiently respectful of difference, because they are involved in ontological imbalance and thus have the potential to sponsor the dreaded, compactingly affective charismatic and its terrible posterity, “the envious superego.” In the positions of Deleuze and these others we see the market aspiring to guarantee difference through a specific kind of neutralization of the charismatic. The contrastively experienced figural is submitted to a double critique, through the pincer-like deployment of two complaints of representation, complaints that are oppositely vantaged, the tools of intensely conflicting imperatives. The logical failure involved, however, is of no consequence, disappearing as it does behind the likelihood of a shared material success.

    As Philippe Ariès remarked, a novel intellectual position is only able to establish itself if it is “very close to” as well as “slightly different from the general feeling of its age.” “If it were very different,” he continued, “it would not even be conceivable by its author, or understandable. . . . If it were no different at all, it would pass unnoticed.”(112)

    Spinoza is lauded in part because, as Comte-Sponville notices, he supplies “a theory of desire in which a notion of lack is missing.”(113) It is possible to say this, for, as Emilia Giancotti writes: “By opposing the Cartesian concept of extension to his own, Spinoza confirms . . . his original conception of substance and its attributes as a dynamic principle which, though it remains one, is realized by pluralizing itself to infinity. This structure makes the moment of mediation superfluous, since it is already within substance itself.”(114) But we have already noticed Schlegel convincingly describe Spinoza as depicting the ubiquity of mediation. Hypermediation is indistinguishable from its opposite. Antisocial energies become nearly indistinguishable from the system that disciplines the excess.

    12

    We have seen Schumpeter arguing that capitalism was a feudal structure. The entrepreneur was a new human type, but not a free-standing one, finally a childish one who could not be the Enlightenment hero described by Kant, characterized escaping the need of a self-imposed tutelage. Schumpeter would have argued that Kant’s figure would be capable of sustaining his newly free activities only on the condition that he permit the general field of his experience to be saturated with the values he would have appeared to have renounced, thus causing this field to be lived as a permanent state of ethical dissonance. But this partnership, characterized by Schumpeter as feudal, is always in the process of dissolving, its distinct elements blurring progressively to the disadvantage of the figure of anarchic impulse it had been engineered to preserve. The mutually exclusive requirements of postmodern thought– for unabsorbed difference on the one hand and a totalization on the other, a totalization that assumes the form of identity politics or empathic moralities, mirror the Schumpeterian the poles that are destined, according to him, to not forever remain poles. The immanentization of the divine in the “Deus sive Natura” doctrine provides a new structure of security, a superior one in that there is not here the sclerotic undoing that is caused by this competing pull. This Sartre dimly grasped when he called Spinoza the opposite of Bataille.

    Critical theory has always understood the internalization of disciplining myth as making possible the birth of the free modern self–Bataille said in response to the Holocaust: “We must practice upon ourselves what we once practiced on others.” Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment wrote that the history of the modern subject was that of the introversion of sacrifice.(115) But this position, the “prehumiliated,” could be argued to be no less feudal; it is the feudalism of the immanentization of mythological tutelage, producing the estheticized version of entrepreneurial energies that are intentionally constrained. Spinoza’s immanentization that replaces the immanentization of sacrifice that we find in the prehumiliated involves far more than the mere replacement of one discipline with another, for one is entropic and the other is arguably not. So sponsored, the entrepreneur might cease to be a figure of medieval sociology, as he might need to be no longer preemptively reduced, daring only to appear as drug addict or schizo.

    “Among millions of decaying worlds, there is once in a while an acceptable one!”(116) Nietzsche’s cry is that of Schumpeter’s market, gasping in the heavy atmosphere within which it has been said to be condemned to breathe. And we can thus understand the appeal of Spinoza, who is imagined to suspend the iron law of cultural thermodynamics as it is described in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The entrepreneur in this logic will no longer be threatened with the erosions that Schumpeter had darkly described, with being diminished by the cowing eruptions of transcendence, with being beamed up and away as self-offering to the angry god whom Spinoza had unmasked, with the eroding of his energies by the low burning empathies of the caring state, the pity that is inseparable from derision that Spinoza condemned. But rather, now as newly, unentropically sustained, the force is with this figure, who is with us, eternal below, for transcendence has been vanquished in this thought, but not the at once disciplining and energizing love of God that is what the world in this new ethical oxymoron has now become.

    13

    Notes

    1. Eléazar ou la source et le buisson (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).(back)

    2. “Entretien avec Michel Tournier,” Lire, October 1996, p. 36.(back)

    3. A Demain De Gaulle (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), pp. 16-17.(back)

    4. L’Homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie (Paris: Grasset, 1996), p. 127.(back)

    5. Signé Malraux (Paris; Grasset, 1996).(back)

    6. Génie du paganisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), p. 79.(back)

    7. La Sagesse de l’amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 128.(back)

    8. Le Monde (co-authored by Guy Lardreau) (Paris: Grasset, 1978), p. 146.(back)

    9. In a letter to the editor, on “Catholicism in France” (April 9, 1993) p. 15. (back)

    10. “The Unfashionable Gadfly,” TLS (December 9, 1994), p. 16.(back)

    11. “Quand quelqu’un frappe à la porte. . . ,” in Le Religieux dans le politique (Paris: Seuil: 1991), p. 9.(back)

    12. Critique of Political Reason, trans. David Macey (London: Verso Editions, 1983), p. 4. See also Debray’s La Puissance des rêves (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).(back)

    13. “Two Interviews with Julia Kristeva,” Partisan Review, I (1984), p. 130.(back)

    14. Quoted by Paul Webster and Nicholas Powell, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés (London: Constable, 1984), p. 249. (back)

    15. La Cérémonie des adieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).(back)

    16. Women, trans. Barbara Bray (N. Y.: Columbia UP, 1990[1983]) p. 98. See also pp. 172, 292 and 355. On the matter of whether or not Althusser was either shocked or disappointed by the revival of interest in religion, see pp. 410-431 of Bernard-Henry Lévy’s Les Aventures de la liberté (Paris: Grasset, 1991).(back)

    17. “La Raison contre la religion,” [ interview with François Ewald] Magazine littéraire, no. 339 (Jan. 1996) p. 39. See also Clément’s novel, La Putain du Diable (Paris: Flammarion, 1996).(back)

    18. “Derrida, dans l’épreuve de l’aporie,” Le Monde, 3 mai, 1996, p. ix. (back)

    19. An exception to my charge of indifference would be the specialized study of Judith Friedlander, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). (back)

    20. (Paris: Grasset, 1979).(back)

    21. (Paris: Grasset, 1976). (back)

    22. Published eventually in book form in L’Espoir maintenant; les entretiens de 1980 (Paris; Verdier, 1991).(back)

    23. Including La Croisée du visible (Paris: La Différence, 1991), Réduction et donation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989), Dieu sans l’être (Paris; Fayard, 1982), Prolégomènes à la charité (Paris: La Différence, 1986) and L’Idole et la distance (Paris: Grasset, 1977).(back)

    24. (Paris: Bourgois, 1980).(back)

    25. (Grasset, 1983).(back)

    26. (Seuil, 1992).(back)

    27. (Paris; Grasset, 1986).(back)

    28. (Paris: Grasset, 1993).(back)

    29. (Paris: Grasset, 1995).(back)

    30. Le Très-bas (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).(back)

    31. (Paris: Minuit, 1990).(back)

    32. Angels, A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1995). (back)

    33. (Paris: Presses universitiares de France, 1995).(back)

    34. C’est moi la vérité (Paris: Grasset, 1996), p. 169.(back)

    35. (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).(back)

    36. See La Logique des Orientaux. Henri Corbin et la science des formes (Paris: Seuil, 1983) and La Grande Résurrection D’Alamût (Pais; Verdier, 1990).(back)

    37. Jean-Joseph Goux, Les Iconoclastes (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p.7.(back)

    38. “There is no One Narcissism, ” in Points. . . ; Interviews, 1974-1994 trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 199.(back)

    39. Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).(back)

    40. For his most thorough development of the issue, see his Rome; the Book of Foundations, trans Felicia McCarren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). (back)

    41. (Paris: Klinksieck, 1978).(back)

    42. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1950 [1942]). (back)

    43. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 150.(back)

    44. Angels, A Modern Myth, p. 116.(back)

    45. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 197.(back)

    46. “Le Cas Spinoza,” in Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), pp. 152-157. The view here is hostile. Levinas speaks of “le rôle néfaste joué par Spinoza dans la décomposition de l’lintelligensia juive.” (p. 155). See also “L’arrière-plan de Spinoza,” in L’Au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1982), pp. 201-208. (back)

    47. Misrahi’s writings on Spinoza include: Spinoza (Paris; Seghers, 1964), Le Désir et la réflexion dans la philosophie de Spinoza (Paris: Gordon and Breach, 1972), Ethique philosophique et théorie de l’état. Introduction au Traité politique de Spinoza (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), Le Corps et l’esprit dans la philosophie de Spinoza (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1992),Le Bonheur (Paris: Hatier, 1994). He is also a translator of the Ethics (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990). On Spinoza, Chalier has written Pensées de l’éternité (Paris: La Nuit surveillée, 1993). Other major books include André Tosel’s Spinoza ou la crépuscule de la servitude (Paris: Aubier, 1984), Alexandre Matheron’s Individu et communauté chez Spinoza(Paris: Minuit, 1988 [1969]), as well as his Anthropologie et politique au XVIIe siècle. Etudes sur Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1986), Pierre-François Moreau’s Spinoza; l’expérience et l’éternité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), Alain Billecoq’s Les Combats de Spinoza (Paris: Ellipsis, 1996), Antonio Negri, Spinoza subversif (Paris: Kimé, 1994), Henri Laux’sImagination et religion chez Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1993), Geniviève Brykman, La Judéité de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1994). Most of André Comte-Sponville’s books contain discussions of Spinoza. See for example his Petit Traité des grandes vertus (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995) and Une Education philosophique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996). Chantal Jaquet has writtten two books: Spinoza ou la prudence (Paris: Quinette, 1997) and Sub Specie aeternitatis (Paris: Kimé, 1993). Philosopher Patrick Rödel has written a novelized life, Spinoza, le masque de la sagesse (Paris: Climats, 1997).(back)

    48. What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (N. Y.: Columbia University Press, 1994) p. 48.(back)

    49. What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (N. Y.: Columbia University Press, 1994) pp. 48 and 60.(back)15

    50. Le Même et l’autre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1979).(back)

    51. Spinoza. Practical Philosophy, trans Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), p. 13.(back)

    52. The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (U of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 79.(back)

    53. See “La Vérité et les formes juridiques,” in Foucault, Dits et écrits (1954-1988), Vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), p. 549.(back)

    54. For example, Spinoza et la politique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990).(back)

    55. (Paris: Maspero, 1979), p. 13. His other books on Spinoza include an Avec Spinoza (Paris: P. U. F, 1992) and a five volume commentary on the Ethics—Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994-96). (back)

    56. The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 69-70.(back)

    57. Quoted in Les Aventures de la liberté (Paris: Grasset, 1991), p. 172.(back)

    58. “Un Nouveau mystique,” Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1975 [1947]), p. 225.(back)

    59. Trans. S. J. Lawson (London: Payson and Clarke, 1929), p. 118.(back)

    60. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978) p. 275. For another discussion of Spinoza, see Le Seminaire. Livre VII: L’Ethique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986), p. 212. For mention of Lacan’s interest in Spinoza, see Robert Misrahi, “Spinoza en épigraphe de Lacan,” Littoral, 3-4, February 1989 and Elizabeth Roudinesco, “Lacan et Spinoza, essai d’interprétation,” in Spinoza au XXe siècle, ed. O. Bloch (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992).(back)

    61. Le Moment lacanien (Paris: Grasset, 1983), p. 27.(back)

    62. L’Ethique de la psychanalyse, p. 212.(back)

    63. Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 122.(back)

    64. For a study of Lacan’s dependency upon Kojève, see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).(back)

    65. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978) p. 95. (back)

    66. Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 116. See also, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans with notes by John Forrester. New York: Norton, 1988), p. 171.(back)

    67. “La Science et la vérité,” in Ecrits, p. 872.(back)

    68. Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 259.(back)

    69. Lacan’s view of sacrifice seems influenced by Sartre’s view of masochism: “Masochism is less an effort to fascinate the other through his experience of me as an object than it is a project to fascinate myself with my objectivity for the other.” L’Etre et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 443.(back)16

    70. Signs of Paradox. Irony, Resentment and Other Mimetic Structures (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 152.(back)

    71. Le Séminaire. Livre VII, p. 136.(back)

    72. Le Séminaire. Livre VII, p. 137.(back)

    73. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 437.(back)

    74. Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 263.(back)

    75. La Panique (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1991), p. 54.(back)

    76. The Writings of Melanie Klein, ed. R. E. Money-Kyrle, Vol. III (New York: Free Press, 1975).(back)

    77. Quoted By Michel Serres, in Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), p. 371.(back)

    78. The Ethics and Selected Letters, trans. by Samuel Shirley; edited and introduced by Seymour Feldman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), p. 181.(back)

    79. Letter #42 to Oldenberg, quoted by Marianne Schaub, in “Spinoza ou une philosophie politique galiléenne,” in La Philosophie, ed. François Châtelet, Vol II (Paris: Marabout, 1972), p. 140.(back)

    80. Levinas sees this in L’au-delà du verset (Paris: Minuit, 1982), p. 205.(back)

    81. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (University Park and London; Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 86. (back)

    82. Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Blaackwell, 1991), p. 12.(back)

    83. Ethics, p. 110. (back)

    84. Ethics, p. 149.(back)

    85. Ethics, p. 113.(back)

    86. Ethics, p. 113. (back)

    87. Ethics, p. 100. (back)

    88. L’Ange (Paris: Grasset, 1976), p. 79.(back)

    89. Friedrich Schegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Peter Firchow, foreword by Rudolphe Gasché (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 50.(back)

    90. Trans. Samuel Shirley (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989). (back)

    91. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, p. 291.(back)

    92. Signs of Paradox, p. 160(back)

    93. Signs of Paradox, p. 153.(back)

    94. Angels, pp. 90-91.(back)

    95. Angels, p. 185.(back)17

    96. Angels, p. 290.(back)

    97. Donner la mort (Paris: Metailié, 1992), pp. 101-102.(back)

    98. There is no mention of Spinoza in the most thorough study to date of Derrida’s relation to religion–John D. Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Religion without Religion (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997). (back)

    99. C’est moi la vérité, p. 181.(back)

    100. C’est moi la vérité, p. 345.(back)

    101. C’est moi la vérité, p. 148.(back)

    102. C’est moi la vérité, p. 225.(back)

    103. C’est moi la vérité, p. 43.(back)

    104. C’est moi la vérité, p. 37.(back)

    105. L’Idéologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), pp. 249-294.(back)

    106. “Tout philosophe a deux philosophies: la sienne et celle de Spinoza.” Quoted in Philippe Soulez and Frederic Worms, Bergson (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), p. 25.(back)

    107. Spinoza; suivi de Souvenirs concernant Jules Lagneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 21. (back)

    108. Spinoza, pp. 22-23.(back)

    109. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 153).(back)

    110. Madame Edwarda, in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. III, p. 12.(back)

    111. Glas, p. 46. The hidden imperfection of the body is one of Benjamin’s themes: “And as birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low in safety. And no passer by would guess that it is just here, in what is defective and censurable, that the fleeting darts of adoration nestle.” Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 68. (back)

    112. The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. xvii.(back)

    113. Une Education philosophique, p. 245.(back)

    114. “On the Problem of Infinite Modes,” in God and Nature. Spinoza’s Metaphysics, ed Yirmiyahu Yovel (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), p. 113.(back)

    115. Trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972), pp. 55-56.(back)

    116. Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. and trans. by Daniel Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1979), p. 33.(back)

    18

    Selected bibliography

    (Not included are the already well-known works of Girard and Levinas.)

    Attali, Jacques, Il Viendra. Paris: Fayard, 1994.

    Balmary, Marie, Le Sacrifice interdit. Freud et la Bible. Paris: Grasset, 1986.

    —–La Divine origine. Paris: Grasset, 1993.

    Bobin, Christian, Le Très-bas. Paris: Gallimard,. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

    Brague, Rémy, Europe, la voie romaine. Paris: Criterion, 1992.

    Chouraqui, André, Moïse. Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1995.

    Chouraqui, Bernard, Le Scandale juif. Paris: Hallier, 1979.

    Chrétien, Jean-Louis, La Voix nue: phénomenologie de la promesse. Paris: Minuit, 1990.

    —–L’inoubliable et l’inespéré. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1991.

    Derrida, J, Donner la mort. Paris: Métailié, 1992.

    —– “Foi et savoir,” in La Religion. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

    —–Mal d’Archives . Paris: Galilée, 1995.

    —–Adieu à Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Galilée, 1997.

    Ferry, Luc, L’Homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie. Paris: Grasset, 1996.

    Friedlander, Judith, Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France Since 1968. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

    Grunberger, Béla and Dessuant, Pierre, Narcissisme, Christianisme, Antisemitisme. Paris: Actes Sud, 1997.

    Haddad, Gérard, Les Biblioclastes. Le Messie et l’autodafé. Paris: Grasset, 1990.

    Henry, Michel, C’est moi la vérité: Pour une philosophie du christianisme. Paris: Grasset, 1996.

    Jambet, and Lardreau, Guy, L’Ange . Paris: Grasset, 1976.

    —–Le Monde. Paris: Grasset, 1978.

    Jambet, Christian, La Logique des Orientaux: Henri Corbin et la science des formes. Paris: Le Seuil, 1983.

    —–La Grande Résurrection d’Alamût. Paris: Verdier, 1990.

    Lardreau, G., Discours philosophique et discours spirituel. Paris: Seuil, 1985.

    Lévy, Benny, Le Nom de l’homme. Paris: Verdier, 1984.

    —–Le Logos et la lettre: Philon d’Alexandrie en regard des pharisiens. Paris: Verdier, 1988.

    —–. and J.-P. Sartre. L’Espoir maintenant. Paris: Verdier, 1991.

    Levy, Bernard-Henri, Le Testament de Dieu. Paris: Grasset, 1979.

    Marion, Jean-Luc, L’Idole et la distance. Paris: Grasset, 1977.

    19

    —–Dieu sans l’être. Paris: Fayard, 1982.

    —–Prolégomènes à la charité. Paris: : Ed. de la Différence, 1986; 2nd edition, 1991.

    —–La Croisée du visible. Paris: Ed. de la Différence, 1991.

    —–Réduction et donation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989.

    —–Questions cartesiennes I: Methode et métaphysique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991.

    —–Questions cartésiennes II: Sur l’ego et sur Dieu. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996.

    Mondzain, Marie-José, Image, icône, économie. Paris: Seuil, 1996.

    Nemo, Philippe, Job et l’excès du mal. Paris: Grasset, 1978.

    Serres, Michel, Rome: Le Livre des fondations. Paris: Grasset, 1983.

    —–Les Cinq Sens. Paris: Grasset, 1985.

    —–La Légende des anges. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.

    Sibony, Daniel, Le Nom et le corps. Paris: Seuil, 1974.

    —–La Haine du désir. Paris: Bourgois, 1978.

    —–Le Groupe inconscient. Paris: Bourgois, 1980.

    —–La Juive. Paris: Grasset, 1983.

    —–Jouissances du dire. Paris: Grasset, 1985.

    —–Perversions. Paris: Grasset, 1987.

    —–Ecrits sur le racisme. Bourgois, 1988.

    —–L’Amour inconscient. Paris: Grasset, 1983.

    —–Entre-Deux. Paris: Grasset, 1991.

    —–Les Trois Monothéismes. Paris: Seuil, 1992.

    —–Le Racisme ou la haine identitaire. Paris: Bourgois, 1996.

    Sichère, Bernard, Le Moment lacanien. Paris: Grasset, 1983.

    —–Histoires du mal . Paris: Grasset, 1995.

    Trigano, Shmuel, Le Récit de la disparue. Essai sur l’identité juive. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.

    —–La Nouvelle question juive. Paris: Gallimard, 1979.

    —–La Demeure oubliée. Genèse religieuse du politique. Paris: Gallimard, 1994 [1984].

    —–Philosophie de la Loi; l’origine de la politique dans la Tora. Paris: Cerf, 1991.

    —–Un Exil sans retour? . Paris: Stock, 1996.

    Tournier, Michel, Eléazar ou la source et le buisson. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

    Vaneigem, Raoul, La Résistance au christianisme. Paris: Fayard, 1993.

    20

    Recent French Publications on Spinoza from 1968 to the present

    Badiou, Alain, L’Etre et l’événement. Paris: Seuil, 1988.

    Balibar, Etienne, Spinoza et la politique. Paris: PUF, 1985.

    Billecoq, Alain, Les Combats de Spinoza. Paris: Ellipsis, 1996.

    Bloch, Olivier. ed., Spinoza au XXe siècle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994.

    Bové, Laurent, La Strategie du connatus. Paris: Vrin, 1995.

    Brykman, Geniviève, La Judéité de Spinoza. Paris: Vrin, 1994.

    Chalier, Cathérine, Pensées de l’éternité. Paris: La Nuit surveillée, 1993.

    Comte-Sponville André, Petit Traité des grandes vertus. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995.

    —–Une Education philosophique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996.

    Cristofolini, Paolo, Spinoza: Chemins dans l’Ethique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995.

    Deleuze, Gilles, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression. Paris: Minuit, 1968.

    —–Spinoza: philosophie pratique. Paris: PUF, 1970.

    —–Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit, 1991.

    Gueroult, Martial, Spinoza. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968.

    Jaquet, Chantal, Sub Specie aeternitatis. Paris: Kimé, 1993.

    —–Spinoza ou la prudence. Paris: Quinette, 1997.

    Lacan, Jacques, Le Seminaire. Livre XI: les quartre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse . Paris: Seuil, 1973.

    —– Le Seminaire. Livre VII: L’Ethique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1986.

    Laux, Henri, Imagination et religion chez Spinoza. Paris: Vrin, 1993.,

    Levinas, Emmanuel, “Le Cas Spinoza,” in Difficle liberté. Paris: Albin Michel, 1963., pp. 152-157.

    —–“L’arrière-plan de Spinoza,” in L’Au-delà du verset: lectures et discours talmudiques . Paris: Minuit, 1982., pp. 201-208.

    Macherey, Pierre, Hegel ou Spinoza. Paris: Maspero, 1979.

    —– Avec Spinoza. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992.

    —–Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza Vol. III: la Vie affective. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994.

    —–Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza Vol. IV: la Condition humaine. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995.

    —–Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza. Vol. V: les Voies de la liberation. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996.

    Marion, Jean-Luc, “Spinoza et les trois noms de dieu,” in R. Brague et J.F. Courtine . eds.., Herméneutique et ontologie. Hommage à Pierre Abenque. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990.

    —–“The Coherence of Spinoza’s Definitions of God in Ethics I, Proposition 11,” in Y. Yovel. ed.., God and Nature. Spinoza’s Metaphysics. Leiden: Brill, 1991.

    21

    Matheron, Alexandre, Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza. Paris: Aubier- Montaigne, 1971.

    —–Anthropologie et politique au 17e siècle: études sur Spinoza. Paris: Vrin, 1986.

    —–Individu et communauté chez Spinoza. Paris: Minuit, 1988 [1969].

    Millet, Louis, Spinoza. Paris: Bordas, 1997.

    Misrahi, Robert, Spinoza. Paris; Seghers, 1964.,

    —–Le Désir et la réflexion dans la philosophie de Spinoza. Paris: Gordon and Breach, 1972.

    —–Ethique philosophique et théorie de l’état. Introduction au Traité politique de Spinoza. Paris: Gallimard, 1978.

    —–“Spinoza en épigraphe de Lacan,” Littoral, 3-4, February 1989.

    —–Le corps et l’esprit dans la philosophie de Spinoza. Paris: Empecheurs de penser en ronde, 1992.

    —–Le Bonheur. Paris: Hatier, 1994.

    —–Spinoza: le système du monde. Paris: Granchet, 1992.

    Moreau, Pierre-François, Spinoza: l’expérience et l’éternité. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994.

    Negri, Antonio, Spinoza subversif. Paris: Kimé, 1994.

    Osier, Jean-Pierre, D’Uriel da Costa à Spnoza. Paris: Berg, 1983.

    Raymond, Charles, Qualité et quantité dans la philosophie de Spinoza. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1995.

    Révah, I. S., Des Maranes à Spinoza. Paris: Vrin, 1995.

    Revault d’Allonnes, Myriam, “Spinoza et la ‘crise’ du théologico-politique,” in Le Religieux dans le politique. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

    Rödel, Patrick, Spinoza, le masque de la sagesse. Paris: Climats, 1997.

    Roudinesco, Elizabeth, “Lacan et Spinoza, essai d’interprétation,” in Spinoza au XXe siècle, ed. O. Bloch. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992.

    Tosel, André, Spinoza ou la crépuscule de la servitude. Paris: Aubier, 1984.

    —–Du matérialisme de Spinoza. Paris: Kime, 1991.

    Vaysse, Jean-Marie, Totalité et subjectivité. Paris: Vrin, 1992.

  • Writing in the Dust: Irony and Lynch-Law in the Gospel of John

    One of the New Testament’s most memorable stories is John 7:53-8:11, the haunting and dramatic pericope de adultera, or as it is perhaps better known, the story at the center of which stands the famous saying “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”:

    7:53 Then each of them [the apostles] went home, 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”

    Homilists and theologians seeking to illustrate the “radicality of forgiveness” and “radical acceptance of sinners” practiced by the historical Jesus (Kysar 134) have frequent recourse to this pericope, since it seems so powerfully to embody the egalitarian morality of the Sermon on the Mount: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and prophets” (Mt. 7:12). But to see the story of the woman taken in adultery as little more than a dramatic vehicle for the delivery of a separable ethical commandment is potentially to overlook the moral significance of those aspects of the scene that give it its power: the ironic tone that suffuses Jesus’ utterances and the cryptic action of stooping to write in the dust. The homiletic approach follows existential theologian Rudolf Bultmann in drawing a distinction between the story’s significant content–the famous saying–and its form, the dramatic context in which the saying is pronounced. To Bultmann, the saying possesses historical and theological priority; the context, however, he assigns to what we might call the “mythic” background:

    Here, in proper fashion, Jesus is first of all asked for a judgement, to which he replies with a saying that has been conceived of as an unity with the situation itself. But the initial silence of Jesus is unusual and can be classed as novelistic; if so, the circumstantial ending, introducing the conversation with the woman, is more than anything else novel-like and secondary (63).

    Is there an alternative to Bultmann’s hard-edged form/content dichotomy, a way of reading this story–and, by extension, the other gospel texts it resembles–that demonstrates the equal theological significance of utterance and context in revelatory scenes like this one? This essay will present such an interpretation, by approaching the pericope de adultera from the standpoint of Eric Gans’s “generative anthropology.” First sketched out in The Origin of Language [University of California Press, 1981] and subsequently extended and tested in four books and numerous articles, generative anthropology represents a rigorous and far-reaching means of understanding cultural phenomena–such as religion–by viewing culture in light of its hypothetical origin. Culture’s origin, Gans posits, was simultaneous with the emergence of humanity’s defining characteristic, the ability to use language. But how, precisely, did this ability emerge? Gans rejects the widely-held view that language evolved gradually (that is, unconsciously) from non-significant animal communication because such a view ignores both “man’s uniqueness with respect to his animal ancestors” (Science and Faith 2) and the logical necessity that “[c]onsciousness must originate all at once–it must originate consciously” (“Differences” 798).(1) The ability to use language, he argues, resulted not solely from the gradual accumulation of random physiological mutations in individuals, but in a collectively-experienced event–a scene–in which the capacity for linguistic signification deferred an imminent conflict that was threatening to break out among a group of proto-humans. For Gans, humanity’s essential attribute is therefore its capability for deferring violence through representation.

    2

    But whence does the need for such deferrals arise? Generative anthropology answers this question by considering not how proto-human and homo sapiens differ, but what they have in common. Humans and higher animals share a capacity for imitation or mimesis, which is both the vehicle of non-genetic transmissions of information and a potent source of intraspecific conflict. Here generative anthropology follows the pioneering insights of René Girard, whom Gans credits with having rediscovered “the critical, inherently conflictive nature of [mimesis], a category of action that had previously been viewed, following Aristotle’s Poetics, as an unproblematic source of esthetic pleasure” (Originary Thinking 8). Girard agrees with Aristotle that “the habit of imitating is congenital to human beings from childhood (actually man differs from the other animals in that he is the most imitative and learns his first lessons through imitation)” (Poetics 20). Girard differs from Aristotle, however, by holding that the intensity of the human capacity for mimesis (as Gans explains)

    leads to intensified rivalry over attractive objects and thence to a generalized conflict that can only be resolved by the channeling of collective aggression against a single “marked” member of the group­­–one whose marginal status makes him an appropriate butt for the hostilities of the others. Because this victim brings peace to the community in crisis he is the first sacred object; . . .he is also the first significant object, and the source of all significance. (“Differences” 800)

    The mob Jesus confronts in the pericope de adultera bears all the hallmarks of what Gans and Girard would identify as a “community in crisis”: feeling their religious/legal tradition belittled by the imposition of Roman authority, and riven by competing ideas about how to re-assert the significance of Jewish nationality and identity, the crowd gathers and prepares to immolate a hapless woman in the hope that the execution of an adulteress will re-establish group unity. To this recurrence of an archetypal human event–a lynching–Jesus brings an originary intuition of the shared roots of significance and violence that enables him to short-circuit the sacrifice of the woman taken in adultery. In what follows, I will employ the methods and insights of generative anthropology to interpret two of the most puzzling and provocative aspects of the pericope de adultera: why, exactly, Jesus’ famous words disperse the lynch-mob, and what is the meaning of writing in the dust, an action which Bultmann sees as just an atmospheric embellishment of the “novelistic” silence with which Jesus initially answers the crowd’s challenge. I will then extend these insights to suggest how the pericope, ­­though not written by the same hand as the rest of John, ­­is thematically and theologically unified with the Fourth Gospel by its demonstration of the ethical dimensions of verbal and gestural irony. From this analysis will ultimately emerge a vivid illustration of generative anthropology’s extraordinary capacity for extracting from religious texts and phenomena their innate, though sometimes obscured, cognitive and ethical insights.

    II

    Consideration of the story of the woman taken in adultery from the standpoint of generative anthropology begins with a kind of reader-response analysis: on what in the story does my attention focus, and why? Clearly, our attention to the pericope is as much drawn to the saying that stands at its center as it is to those more evocative details–the writing in the dust, the actions of the mob, and the puzzling exchange at the end of the episode between Jesus and the adulteress. Nevertheless, since the saying stands out from the rest of the story with a sort of epigrammatic intensity, I will begin with it before turning to the more mysterious aspects of the scene.

    There is in the famous saying “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” more complexity than the homiletic tradition tends to grant it, complexity that resituating the saying in the fullness of its context helps to identify. The primary source of complexity in the saying and context is the melange of impulses motivating the crowd to want to lynch the woman in the first place. Behind these sometimes suspect and contradictory impulses stands, however, the unifying feeling of resentment, directed first and foremost against the Roman conquerors of Judea. Captured after the Sanhedrin has been stripped of its power to enforce the sanctions for violations of Jewish law (believed to have occurred around 30 C.E.), the woman must be lynched ­­that is, executed without benefit of “official” due process­­ because, as Duncan M. Derrett observes,

    3

    that was the only way in which she could be punished. Because the Sanhedrin was not allowed to hear cases involving the death-penalty, at any rate in Jerusalem itself, the constitutional method of seeking a penalty against her would have been to approach the Roman governor. The [Jewish] Law prescribed how and by what means an adulteress should be punished; but its application was hindered so far as regular administration was concerned, and the Romans provided no attractive alternative. No Roman judge would condemn to death a woman taken in adultery, and that was what the crowd (and the husband) wanted, it would seem, to happen to her. A smaller legal punishment, or even another at the judge’s discretion, would by no means satisfy their zeal (10-11).

    The pericope itself demonstrates, however, that the zeal of the crowd was aroused by more than just the woman’s violation of the law. Mixed in with their righteous indignation against the woman’s sin are at least two kinds of resentment: the first against the constituted colonial authority of the Romans, the imposition of whose relatively lax legal code could be seen as yet another affront to Jewish religious and political sovereignty, and the second against Jesus, taken by the crowd as a self-constituted moral authority, whose self-evident righteousness also arouses resentment. When in John 7:19 Jesus asks an adoring throng, “Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?” he is greeted with shocked disbelief: “You have a demon! Who is trying to kill you?” (7:20) Verse 6 of chapter 8 reminds us that the crowd’s moral outrage against the woman is not unmixed with an animus against Jesus: the purpose of their question of “Now what do you say?”, the story remarks, is “that they might have some charge to bring against him.” This lynching is, then, a more involved enterprise than it appears on the surface. The woman is largely a pretext for the expression of other resentments, especially those of the scribes and Pharisees for any perceived threat to their civic and political authority. Understanding this aspect of the story enables us to appreciate even more the interconnectedness between Jesus’ famous utterance and the context in which it arises. Note that “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” does not prohibit the contemplated action from taking place. Indeed, it is not even a direct answer to the question the crowd directs at Jesus; it is, rather, something of a mild suggestion (“Let him among you”) qualified by what is under the circumstances an ambiguous psychic and moral condition: what does it mean to be “without sin?” Not presently in the act of sinning? Never having committed a sin? Incapable of sinning? And to which of the many varieties of sin and sinfulness is Jesus referring?

    The vague and mild character of Jesus’ response to the crowd’s question presents, of course, a striking counterpoint to the malice and clear intent presumably emanating from the assembled group. There is, though, one part of this utterance that is crystal clear, and from it emerges the saying’s overriding anthropological significance. The part of the sentence to which we should look for the saying’s ethical importance is not the ambiguous expression “without sin,” but the phrase “the first to throw a stone at her,” especially the adjectival phrase “the first.” “To throw a stone” is, of course, an unambiguous action, the motivation and consequences of which are obvious in this context. One cocks an arm, takes aim, and lets the stone fly, hoping it will strike the presumably restrained sinner squarely in the head. Jesus seeks unmistakably to bring to mind for each member of the crowd a clear picture of what is about to happen, and thus forgoes euphemism or any other type of figurative language. “First” is similarly unambiguous, and lies even closer to the revelatory kernel of the entire scene, for it brings to light the secret, fatal vulnerability that lurks at the heart of every lynch mob.

    Generative anthropology sees the all-against-one configuration of the sacrificial mob as the sinister repetition of a moment of the event in which language originated, the moment of the sparagmos in which the violent impulses temporarily deferred by the emergence of linguistic signification are vented, as it were, upon the body of the central object. Since the center/periphery orientation of the originary scene of language was produced by a build-up of mimetic tension and rivalry between the members of the group, the aggression ultimately released on the body of the victim was not originally aroused by that victim per se. Thus the “sin” of the lynch-mob’s victim, as my analysis has already suggested, is something of a pretext, since at least part of the real purpose of the punishment is to ward off a threat of group disunity. Establishing and securing the unanimity of the group of sacrificers is, as it were, the real purpose of the lynching; and anything that conduces to single out any member of the group thus threatens the entire enterprise. The precise means that this group has chosen to exact punishment on the woman caught in adultery is, of course, particularly well suited to this end, since in the aftermath of a hail of stones, who can say which was first and which was last?(2) (Or, for that matter, which merely injured the victim, and which delivered the fatal blow?) The unanimity of the group’s action ultimately confers anonymity on each individual, who, after all the stones have been thrown, enlists his own uncertainty concerning the precise order of events in order to still any pangs of conscience that might be stirred by having participated in what could, under other circumstances, be construed as a murder. Jesus’ use of the word “first” is intended precisely to destroy the comforts of anonymous unanimity. And this is precisely what it does, for after another short pause, the story relates how the mob, originally an undifferentiated mass headed by “scribes and Pharisees,” degenerates into a collocation of individuals, who depart from the scene “one by one.”

    4

    A sophisticated understanding of what could be called the hidden anthropological strata of lynch-law thus undergirds Jesus’ canny response to the question laid before him both verbally by the group and situationally by the circumstance with which he is presented. This understanding stems not from just a historic or scriptural knowledge, but from an intuition of the originary connection between scenes like this one and the internal scene of representation–the conscience–that results from the origin of consciousness itself. Were there no need for some sort of forestalling of the pangs of conscience that such events are capable of arousing, were there no ethical ambiguity in the action contemplated by the mob, then there would be no need for the elaborate measures the crowd takes to ensure the anonymity of unanimity. Jesus knows that the crowd’s felt need to ask the judgmental question testifies to the presence of a latent moral pang. Human consciousness is originally constituted on a public scene (possibly, like this one, a scene of victimization); the scene leaves in each individual a trace, a remnant, that is the source of what is commonly identified as conscience. There is an originary link, then, between victimization and conscience. Awareness of this link is precisely what lynch mobs must try to forget, but which Jesus’ carefully crafted reply is formulated to bring to light.

    But what of this scene’s other feature which the story is so careful to preserve, the mysterious moments in which the reluctant judge “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground?” What is the purpose of these actions, and what, if anything, does Jesus write in the dust at his feet? These evocative details have understandably intrigued generations of interpreters, and over the centuries many have exercised their ingenuity in attempting to solve this tantalizing textual riddle. Some have taken the story’s failure to specify the content of Jesus’ inscription to mean that nothing identifiable was written–Jesus doodles in order a), to buy some time for the victim and then to allow his words to sink in, or b) to show his contempt for the entire proceeding. Others see the unusual word used to describe the act of writing–katagraphen, “writing down” or perhaps “tallying up”–as an indication that Jesus wrote something specific, such as the sins of his questioners.(3) Duncan Derrett enlists his formidable knowledge of the laws and customs of colonial Judea to support the hypothesis that Jesus wrote two passages from Exodus that comment upon the actions of the lynchers. The first is Exodus 23:1b, “You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness,” and the second is Exodus 23:7, “Keep far from a false charge.”(4)

    These two schools of thought are, of course, mutually exclusive: either Jesus wrote a recognizable text the content of which somehow helped to shame the mob into dispersing, or his writing was illegible and achieved a similar purpose via less direct and obvious means. Of these two alternatives, the latter is preferable for two reasons. First, the chronicler shows meticulous care in preserving the delicate precision of Jesus’ utterances. If Jesus had indeed written some text in the ground that directly commented on the event, it is likely that the chronicler would have carefully preserved it as well. Second, some sort of written accusation, such as the crowd’s violation of a law, or their sins, no matter how subtle or implicit, would jar with the resolutely non-accusatory tenor of both Jesus’ central utterance and his concluding refusal to condemn the woman.

    To hold that nothing recognizable was written does not, however, necessitate viewing the action of writing in the dust in the way that Bultmann does, as a secondary, “novelistic” detail included to dramatize the heightening tension of the situation. The importance of this element of the story lies more in the act of writing itself than in what is or is not written on the ground. The very action of writing, in other words, is itself symbolic, and forms an essential part of Jesus’ ethically-oriented response to the situation. That such is the case may be observed by recalling exactly when Jesus pursues this cryptic action. Verse 2 relates that after Jesus’ early morning arrival at the temple, “all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.” Though the text does not specify the precise configuration of this group, the fact that Jesus sat down to teach leads one reasonably to infer that the people were arranged in a rough circle, Jesus sitting with them seminar fashion on the periphery of the circle. That this was the arrangement is further suggested by verse 3, which relates how the scribes and Pharisees placed the woman caught in adultery “in the midst.” The Scribes and Pharisees thus transform the egalitarian circle into a potential scene of violence simply by providing the circle with a center. Jesus’ response is to bend down and write “with his finger on the ground,” an action which, in its way, repeats the action of the scribes and Pharisees, though with a difference. Writing in the dust echoes the placement of the woman in the midst of the crowd by directing the attention of those on the periphery away from each other to the circle’s center. Jesus’ action differs from that of the scribes and Pharisees, however, in the extent to which it is ambiguous. Like the famous central saying, writing in the dust presents a striking conjunction of gestural clarity with representational ambiguity. Jesus touches the ground, and leaves a lingering trace of something in the dust–but what, exactly, is the inscription? Is it composed of letters, initials, pictures, or just random markings?

    5

    The intriguing combination of ambiguity and clarity serve something of the same purpose here as it does in the gripping central utterance. In the originary event, the production of the first linguistic sign occurred when a group arranged around an attractive central object reached for it at the same time, only to abort their gestures of appropriation in fear of the conflict that would break out if all managed to lay a hand on the object. The object’s apparent ability to repel the appropriating gestures of the individuals on the periphery granted it a sacred aura, and, thereby, the “transcendent”–since it is capable of being both itself (an appetitively attractive object) and something beyond itself (the thing that forestalls conflict)–nature of the linguistic sign. On the originary scene, gestural certainty leads to sacred ambiguity, with the emergent capacity for language serving as a means to defer intraspecific, mimetic conflict. By writing in the dust, Jesus portrays how scenes of sacrifice like those urged by the scribes and Pharisees are capable of producing a decidedly less troubling and victimary outcome. The action symbolizes what generative anthropology offers as a minimal definition of the human capacity for language: the deferral of violence through representation.

    III

    The two aspects of the pericope de adultera upon which this essay has so far concentrated–the famous saying and Jesus’ writing in the dust–have something in common: both seem calculatedly ambiguous and ironic, requiring of the hearer a degree of interpretive intrepidity far beyond that of even the most obscure of the synoptic parables. In fact, the ambiguity of this pericope extends past obscurity to enter into the realm of irony, not in the narrow literary-critical sense of meaning the opposite of what one says, but in an existential sense akin to that developed in Soren Kierkegaard’s doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard begins his examination of the unsuspected depths of irony with an observation about questions that emerges as remarkably pertinent to this essay’s interpretation of the story of the woman taken in adultery:

    It is manifest that the intention in asking questions can be twofold. That is, one can ask with the intention of receiving an answer containing the desired fullness, and hence the more one asks, the deeper and more significant becomes the answer; or one can ask without any interest in the answer except to suck out the apparent by means of the question and thereby to leave an emptiness behind. The first method presupposes that there is a plenitude; the second that there is an emptiness. The first is the speculative method; the second the ironic (36).

    Jesus’ first utterance is a response to a direct question posed by the Scribes and Pharisees, and his second utterance is comprised of two questions he directs to the erstwhile victim of the mob, with whom he is now left alone: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” Strictly speaking, these are rhetorical questions, since their answer is obviously provided by the context in which they are asked. The shamed crowd has trudged off, having abandoned in embarrassment their grim purpose. While, as Duncan Derrett observes, the text fails to provide any explicit guidance as to whether Jesus’ tone in asking these questions is “sarcastic or humorous” (25), it seems likely that a faintly wry smile of irony–the look that says “Ah, I knew it” or “Just so”–crossed his face at that moment. The credulous woman answers the questions, which in the context of what has just occurred illustrate the unacknowledged ethical dimension of Kierkegaard’s concept of the ironic mode of questioning. The ambiguity of Jesus’ words and actions in the presence of the mob ironizes the menacing scene constituted by those who would condemn the woman to the extent that their scene is disassembled, leaving an emptiness behind. Or, to put it another way, the ironic distance Jesus is careful to put between himself and the woman’s accusers has the ultimate effect of exposing the ultimately debilitating internal contradictions of “lynch law.”

    In addition, irony provides an important thematic and formal link between the interpolated story of the woman taken in adultery and the rest of the Fourth Gospel, which, for all the resolute Christology of its famous opening sentence–“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”–presents us with a picture of Jesus at his most human: loquacious, emotional, occasionally bitter and mocking, and almost always teasingly ambiguous when he speaks. It is, after all, only in John’s gospel that Jesus’ troubling rebuke of his mother at the wedding in Cana occurs: informed by Mary that the wine has given out, Jesus responds “Woman, what concern is that to you and me? My time has not yet come” (2:3-4). It is also only in John that we find the encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, in which Jesus may or may not declare himself the Messiah. The woman says to Jesus “‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’” Jesus’ response in the original Greek is ego eimi, ho lalon soi: does that translate (as most Bibles have it) to “I am he (that is, the Christ), the one that is speaking to you?” Or is it just “I am the one that is speaking to you?” as if to say, “Don’t talk to me of the Messiah now; listen to what I am saying to you.”

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    By far the most striking and extended example of irony in John, though, comes in the trial before Pilate, longer and far more detailed here than in the synoptic gospels. As in the story of the woman taken in adultery, irony and verbal ambiguity arise in the context of a capital accusation. Unlike the lynch mob in the pericope de adultera, however, Jesus’ priestly accusers admit–though not to Pilate, of course–that their real motivation for bringing the charge of sedition against Jesus is not to punish him for his crimes but to secure Jewish unity at the expense of a scapegoat. In chapter 11, the infamous Caiaphas berates his fellows on the high council with “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die than to have the whole nation destroyed,” a statement which persuades the elders “from that day on” to plan to put Jesus to death. The Roman governor’s ignorance of this conspiracy initially places him in something akin to the impartial stance Jesus assumes when called on to judge the woman taken in adultery. His anthropological intuition, though, is no match for Jesus’: that this is the case is indicated by Pilate’s mode of questioning, which is, in Kierkegaard’s terms, predominantly speculative rather than ironic:

    18:33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 35 Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 37 Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

    There is a great deal of psychological and anthropological significance packed into this subtle and complex verbal dance, the complete elucidation of which lies beyond the scope of this essay. For our purposes, it is necessary first of all to notice that irony and ambiguity once again arise during a forensic examination–that is, at a time and place in which discursive clarity assume life or death importance. Second, it is noteworthy that Pilate’s famous ironic question–“What is truth?”–produces an emptiness similar to that revealed by Jesus’ questions to the adulteress: without staying for a reply, the Roman governor leaves his captive and returns to the crowd to report “I find no case against him” (18:38). Again, questioning in the ironic mode reveals the moral emptiness of the charges brought against the scapegoat. But the events of the next few hours will demonstrate that there inheres yet another wrinkle to what the pericope and Pilate’s examination reveal as irony’s ethical dimension. By turning away from his interlocutee after asking his sardonic question, Pilate pinpoints the distinction between mere mockery and the revelatory irony Jesus employed to disperse the crowd in the pericope. In this context, mockery is irony’s pale and ineffectual shadow, as is illustrated when Jesus, mocked and scourged as the “King of the Jews,” truly has his body broken and actually dies on the cross.

    IV

    It may be observed from the above analysis of the scene between Pilate and Jesus that irony’s structuring role in the Fourth Gospel is ultimately paradoxical, since what serves in the first case to avert a violent outcome appears to produce one in the second. How can this be?

    Solving this riddle requires recognizing what the two episodes reveal in juxtaposition. In both, the essential function of the originary scene–the generation of meaning out of crisis–may be observed. In employing verbal irony and gestural ambiguity to divert the attention of the woman’s would-be lynchers from the object of their malicious intent, Jesus demonstrates the fragility of the sign/signified relationship which the lynching hopes to establish. The crowd, provoked by the scribes and Pharisees, want the dead body of the lapidated adulteress to serve as a guarantor of the authenticity of the Law which they feel has been delegitimized first by the Romans and then by Jesus. That is, they want to make the body into a sign that will derive an unshakable stability from the permanence of the woman’s death. The law of Moses, say the scribes and Pharisees, “commands” this. Jesus’ response is consistent with his statement in Matthew 5:17 that he came not “to abolish the law or the prophets.” To reveal through ironic detachment the law’s cognitive and linguistic sources is not, strictly speaking, to abolish the law. It is, however, to show how the law, as a system of representations, is vulnerable–perhaps even fatally so–to deconstruction. In the pericope, Jesus destabilizes the hoped-for sign–and thereby spares the woman–not by merely questioning the crowd’s right to execute her or by suddenly superseding the old law with a new. Rather, he approaches the question of the law anthropologically: he tacitly asks the crowd, “What is a law? What is the relationship between the law and the language in which law is expressed? What, if any, essential characteristics of social interaction are exemplified in setting up systems of law and punishing transgressors?”

    7

    That he asks these questions ironically and indirectly indicates the extent to which Jesus’ anthropology is generative–that is, it attempts to understand human interaction from the standpoint of the origin of humanity’s defining characteristic, language. To do so, however, is to threaten to unleash the mimetic tension originally deferred by the emergence of language against himself, for, as Gans writes,

    Irony is the necessarily indirect and allusive expression of the deconstructability of the formal structure of language that is the model for all formal structures, all of which are in the last analysis structures of representation. To think a formal structure is to conceive both its levels on the same plane, to deconstruct it–to ironize it. True thinking, originary anthropological thinking as opposed to the positive thought that unconditionally respects formal difference, is thus always ironic. (Signs of Paradox, in MS).

    The task of sifting the teachings of the “historical Jesus” from apostolic emendations and corruptions, it seems, would greatly benefit from considering whether the text in question respects or questions formal difference. For all that can be said about the New Testament’s varying depictions of Jesus–especially between the synoptics and the fourth gospel–there is a striking consistency in the lack of respect Jesus affords to the formal differences upon which his age set such great store. What are the parables of the good Samaritan (Lk. 10:30-37), the laborers in the vineyard (Mt. 20:1-16), and the prodigal son (Lk. 15:11-32) if not reminders of the ultimate instability of human concepts of significant difference? What are the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12) if not a call to re-think the relationship between linguistic sign (“Blessed” or “Happy”) and the collective contexts from which those signs originally derived their meaning?

    That Jesus ultimately fell victim to the originary instability his characteristic irony was so effective in revealing does not, of course, invalidate either that irony or the truth it was capable of uncovering. As Gans writes,

    because humanity depends on the maintenance of formal structures in order to defer conflict, ironic thinking is potentially tragic. Once the absolute formal barrier between sign and referent has been shown to be vulnerable, an end is made to deferral and the central figure becomes subject to sparagmatic violence (Signs of Paradox).

    Both the pericope de adultera and John’s description of trial of Jesus by Pilate illustrate not only the power of generative anthropology, in Gans’s words, “to extract from religious texts clearly formulated and in principle ‘falsifiable’ anthropological theses” (Science and Faith vii-viii). They also show the extent to which Jesus’ theology and mission–his theory and practice–reflected an understanding of the originary links between mimesis, violence, and the definitive human attribute of language.

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    Notes

    1. Thomas F. Bertonneau has pointed out how the discussion of language acquisition in Richard Leakey’s The Origin of Humankind (New York: Basic Books, 1994) exemplifies this kind of gradualism. Following Richard Pinker’s arguments in The Language Instinct, Leakey accepts that language is genetically programmed and therefore can be explained in terms of natural selection. However, continues Leakey, “what were the pressures of natural selection that favored the evolution of language? Presumably, the ability did not spring into being full-blown, so we have to wonder what advantages a less-developed language conferred on our ancestors. The most obvious answer is that it offered an efficient way to communicate. This ability, surely, would have been beneficial to our ancestors when they first adopted rudimentary hunting and gathering, which is a more challenging mode of subsistence than that of the apes. As their way of life grew more complex, the need for social and economic coordination grew, too. Effective communication would have become more and more valuable under these circumstances. Natural selection would therefore have steadily enhanced language capacity. . . . Language as we know it today [would therefore have] emerged as the product of the exigencies of hunting and gathering” (122-23). See Bertonneau 1994: 2-3. (back)

    2. Derrett notes that the crowd is merely following tradition, not the law, in telling Jesus that “Moses commanded us to stone such women.” Stoning was an all-purpose form of execution, “the traditional penalty to be resorted to whenever the Law said ‘he shall certainly die’ or words to that effect without prescribing a different penalty” (11). (back)

    3. Some ancient manuscripts add the words “the sins of all of them” to the second instance of Jesus writing in the dust. This emendation is, however, widely held today to be a late textual corruption. (back)

    4. “Law in the New Testament,” pp. 16-23. (back)

     

    Works Cited

    Aristotle. Poetics. tr. Gerald F. Else. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986.

    Brooke, A.E. “John,” in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959.

    Bultmann, Rudolf. History of the Synoptic Tradition. Tr. John Marsh. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

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    Gans, Eric. “Differences,” Modern Language Notes 96(4): 792-808.

    ———-. Originary Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

    ———-. Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation. Savage, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990.

    ———-. Signs of Paradox. In MSS.

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    Kysar, John. John (Augsburg Commentaries). Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.

    Lightfoot, J.B. Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion. London: MacMillan, 1893.