Author: staceymeeker

This week’s column is the text of a brief talk I gave at a symposium at UCLA in honor of the centennial of the Iranian philosopher and theologian Ostad Elahi.

 

---

Good morning. I am greatly honored to be able to say a few words to open this symposium commemorating the work of Ostad Elahi. It is fitting to remember those who have insisted on the primacy of the spirit in human affairs.

Let me begin by informing you of the recent creation of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. The Center will begin operation this Fall on Thursday, November 16 at 6 PM in the UCLA Faculty Center with a talk on Religion in the Global Village by the eminent religious and anthropological thinker René Girard; other events will shortly be announced. On behalf of the Center, I urge you to take an active interest in its activities; our intention is to serve the Los Angeles community as well as the academic community.

There is a significant point about the Center that is directly relevant to my remarks: that it is lodged within the Humanities Division. The College of Letters and Science that houses the academic departments at UCLA comprises four divisions: Humanities, Social Sciences, Life Sciences, and Physical Sciences. Religion is clearly not a physical science, and although it may be for many a science of life, the Life Sciences division is concerned with the life of the body rather than that of the spirit. But one might well expect the study of religion to fall within the social sciences. Is not religion an essentially social phenomenon, one that indeed provides the basis of social organization? Emile Durkheim, the founder of scientific sociology, considered religion to be the fundamental expression of communal solidarity. Yet I think it quite appropriate that our center has been located among the Humanities. As one who works in that division, I think of it as the domain of knowledge most profoundly concerned with, and characteristic of, the human spirit.

The simplest definition of the humanities is that it comprises those branches of learning that are concerned with the study of texts. The first texts to be studied were sacred texts: the Vedic hymns, the Bible, the Koran– texts that continue to occupy the lives of scholars in both religious and secular institutions. Just as the idea that religion is the primary expression of the social order is the founding conception of the social sciences, the idea that secular texts–poems, plays, novels–are worthy of the same close reading as religious texts is the founding idea of the humanities. Durkheim‘s justification for sociology was that although religious ritual and myth expressed more or less transparently the communal unity of primitive societies, the absence of such direct expressions in the modern world obliges us to seek evidence of the changing social order in statistical studies of the trends and correlations of everyday behavior. A similar case may be made for the humanities: in the age of the death of God, we can understand humanity only through works of secular literature.

It might appear ironic that having created a domain or “division” of knowledge by displacing studious reverence from religious to secular texts, we now desire to incorporate the study of religion and its texts within this domain. Does this mean that we intend, in the terms of an idea popular some years ago, to read the Bible as literature– that is, to study religious texts as examples of narrative technique rather than as expressions of revealed truth? There may be some who conceive the study of religion in this fashion, but it does not correspond to my conception of the spirit of the humanities.

This spirit should not be confused with that of secular humanism, the view that religion exists merely to provide a mythical basis for ethical values that in fact require no other foundation than human nature and human reason. Voltairean reductionism is not representative of the humanistic spirit. How do we know this? The true spirit of humanistic study is revealed in the fact that it accords its supreme prestige neither to our “natural” effusions nor to logical constructions but to texts that exemplify the categories of irony and paradox–categories that, incidentally, are no strangers to Voltaire’s own writings.

In irony, one says the opposite of what one means; in paradox, one negates what one says in the process of saying it. The father of all paradoxes is the so-called Liar paradox: the sentence This sentence is false. In the sciences, including the social sciences, irony is inappropriate and paradox is a sign of error. Philosophy treats paradox with more respect but ultimately rejects it: how could a discipline grounded on logic do otherwise? Avoidance of paradox is thus the fundamental criterion of philosophical rigor. But among literary humanists, irony is cherished and paradox revered. The more ironic we find a literary work, the more greatly we esteem it. The term paradox is less often used, but the thing itself is no less appreciated. In the greatest masterpieces of all, works like Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Phèdre, Don Quixote, A la recherche du temps perdu, irony distills from every line. Self-reference, mise en abyme, the very stuff of paradox, are features of all great literature. It is no accident that all these archetypes of irony are marked by paradoxes of self-inclusion–Hamlet’s play within the play, Oedipus’ oracle, Phèdre’s labyrinth, Quixote’s encounter, in the second part of the novel, with persons who have read the first part, and most centrally of all, Proust’s generation of the novelistic text from within the world which that text has created.

Irony and paradox have the same fundamental structure. Words that mean their opposite or that include their own negation make us suspicious of the simple difference between signs and things, between representations and what they represent. This difference cannot be dispensed with; it is what guarantees the objectivity of scientific discourse. But to accept unquestioningly the difference between signs and things is to refuse to examine the mystery of the origin of that difference, or of the species that both creates and discovers that difference–the species I refer to is of course our own.

What then is the spirit of the humanities? It is not merely the reverent study of texts, but more specifically, the elucidation of what texts show us about the problematic nature of the human condition. The humanist’s fondness for irony and paradox reflects our intuition that these structures, or rather, these ways by which structure puts itself into question, are more profoundly central to our condition than logical thought–that they are in fact what enable the existence of logical thought. Structure putting itself into question may indeed be the simplest way to define the human.

The work of the humanities, whether undertaken by believers or unbelievers, is not an activity to which the notion of revealed truth is directly relevant. A humanistic reading of a text pushes its coherence to the point at which it puts itself in doubt, as the literary text casts doubt upon the false assurances provided by the less openly paradoxical texts such as laws and oracles that it includes within itself. Reading the Bible as literature is false to the spirit of the humanities, not because it fails to show proper reverence to the biblical text, but because it fails to show proper humility before texts in general. It is not wrong to claim that the Bible is like a work of literature; but it is illegitimate to deduce from this that the workings of either the Bible or of a secular literary work are understandable as products of something like narrative technique. On the contrary, comparison of the Bible with a literary work makes us aware that in either case the text reveals the limitations of any technique that would provide a positive, instrumental understanding of human language and thought.

For many people, such signs of human limitations give proof of the existence of a higher power who has imposed them on us without being itself bound by them. The text points beyond itself to a source of coherence that it can neither realize nor formulate; how then could it have come into being if not through divine inspiration?

For others, however, it suffices that texts leave us with a sense of mystery, of inexhaustibility. Their inherent irony reflects the contrast between the need for closure that defines our practical intelligence and the infinity of desire that language has the power to arouse in us. Whether or not we give a personal name to this power, the very fact that we all know and in some sense understand the word God shows that there can be no simple answer to the question raised by the humanistic spirit as to the origin of the human and its limits.

---

In order to remain faithful to this spirit, we cannot treat as an end in itself the positive exploration of different religious customs and beliefs, however profound the revelations that emerge within them. The fundamental benefit of the study of religion is rather the awareness it provides us of the necessary incompleteness of our human self-understanding. This incompleteness arises not from our mind’s respect for predetermined restrictions but from its paradoxical resistance to closure of any kind, including religious closure–by which I mean the blockage by dogma of humanity’s unending movement toward self-knowledge. The social sciences, including psychoanalysis, offer us a wide selection of positive anthropologies, but only in the humanities will we find the proper respect for the paradox that lies at the heart of the human spirit–the paradox that most often goes by the name of freedom.

This being the tenth of these columns, I thought it appropriate to put it a good word for the institution that makes it possible.

Ever since market society began in earnest–and all society is always already market society–people have been heard to complain that popularity in the marketplace is a sign of vulgarity– the words have the same root meaning–rather than quality. One variant of this dilemma is the greater popularity of the facile over the profound in the realm of ideas. Those the public adopts as its thinkers are generally journalists rather than philosophers.

But philosophers don’t really have to compete with journalists. They become tenured professors whose salary is independent–luckily for us–of the meager revenues brought in by their books, the publication of which is subsidized by foundations or university presses. The reward of popularity in the academic world is not obtained from paying customers but, on the contrary, from taxpayer subsidies.

As a senior member of the academic profession (in the sense used by the waiter who asked me the other day if I wanted to order from the senior menu), I can recall when the academic world was more like a club than a marketplace. The profession was much smaller; the few full professors all knew, and pretended to respect, each other. As a result, their professional value had a low level of fungibility. The rare move from one campus to another was either a necessity (the result of scandal or of loss in a long-standing feud) or a promotion–say, from the Big Ten to the Ivy League.

But because the alternatives to the market partake of the overall structure of market society, they tend to return to the norm by becoming clones, or caricatures, of the economic marketplace. This is certainly true of today’s larger, more impersonal, chronically underfunded academic environment. Faculty are less loyal to institutions, as are institutions to their faculties. As the competition has grown fiercer, the old-boy system has been replaced by a more clearsightedly self-interested network of cliques who regulate the distribution of scarce resources. Particularly crucial is control over the academic media, the channels by which ideas are distributed: scholarly journals, conferences, colloquia. University presses publish fewer books, and the more prestigious periodicals and conferences tend to reward interpersonal skills more than intellectual ones. As the academic world obeys with increasing rigor the laws of the market, one who refuses the current values of the academic marketplace resembles less a pure artist faithful to his ideal than a stubborn manufacturer whose product no one wants to buy.

---

But it is a general rule of market society that when one becomes able to formulate a problem, some way of deferring its impact is not far behind. The new mechanism that acts as a safety valve for the academic market is the rise of electronic media, and in the first place, the WWW. Without the Web, creating Anthropoetics would have been several degrees more difficult, and the Chronicles column would have been unthinkable. Whether or not these are the most heavily accessed pages on the WWW, they are far more available there than in libraries, and Web activity among the notoriously computer-semiliterate intelligentsia is only just beginning.

By relieving the scarcity of channels that assimilates the academic world to the economic world, electronic communications level the playing-field for intellectual competition. Presence on the WWW is no guarantee of quality or of readership, but the most one can expect of any medium is that it facilitate the existence of a true marketplace of ideas unencumbered by institutional inertia.

I’ll be on vacation next week; Chronicles will reappear on Saturday September 30.

Plants and animals that survive in crises where others perish are gifted with the quality of robustness, the ability to adapt to new conditions. The same is true of ideas, of stories, of artworks: a few are immortal, the vast majority do not outlast their own time.

But there is a species of thought-structures that survive not as a models of reality, but because they cannot be thought away. These are the structures of paradox.

Paradox depends on self-reference. Structures are paradoxical when they refer, directly or indirectly, to themselves. But everything human is self-referential. Our consciousness necessarily includes itself in what it is conscious of. Unlike animal appetite, human desire is enacted on an imaginary scene where I see myself through the eyes of the community that gives value to my choice. But to desire and to see oneself desire are contradictory operations. The fulfillment I envisage in the first case is incompatible with the second, where I imagine myself on the periphery of a circle with the object of my desire at the inaccessible center.

Let us examine the two polar forms of human desire we know so well, resentment and love.

Hamlet at Claudius’s court, Alceste, Molière’s Misanthrope, in Célimène’s salon, Rousseau just about anywhere–these resentful figures are drawn to scenes centered on persons whose authority they find scandalously illegitimate. Ostensibly in order to destroy this illegitimate power, resentment attaches itself to the scene on which this power is exercised; but the destruction is incompatible with the attachment. The man of resentment is in contradiction with himself. He is dependent on the object of his hostility; he lives in secret fear that his desire will be granted and the scene of his resentment will be abolished.

But if resentment is paradoxical, how can this be the case for love, where desire is harmony itself?

Love is the converse of resentment. The resenter dreams of destroying someone who appears invulnerable. The lover, on the contrary, makes every effort to fortify his beloved against the mortality he shares with her. The lover does not fetishize the beloved’s power; yet like the resenter he is attached to the scene of his desire. In the less noble forms of love, I am anxious for the world’s approval, even its envy; but even when, in love’s most sublime moments, I lose myself in my beloved’s eyes, I find myself again, reflected in their tiny microcosm.

Thus even as I work for my beloved’s infinite happiness, I cannot wish that this happiness not continue to require my care. Were my love’s aim fulfilled and my beloved rendered invulnerable to death, the scene of my love would vanish.

Thus love and resentment have the same basic structure–the structure of all desire. But their symmetry is not perfect. Vulnerability is the lot of all mortal creatures. However much energy I expend in caring for my beloved, my care will never abolish the human scene on which it acts. There is paradox at the horizon of my love, where my ultimate aim is to free my beloved from the ills of the human condition; but my efforts can never do more than defer her suffering and death. In contrast, resentment is paradox here and now. The pathology of Hamlet’s delay in murdering Claudius is already revealed in Act I, where he wears mourning in council and affects to regard the new King with disdain. If he really disdained the King’s court, he would go back to Wittenberg. If Alceste really hated hypocrisy, he would marry Eliante and forget about Célimène’s soirées.

---

Desire, of which love and resentment are the extremes, is robust because it is paradoxical: we cannot help thinking about it, but it cannot be thought away. When an image will not leave my imagination, we call it an obsession; but we never explain what property of the image produces this effect. It is not because of some physiological presence of the image in our brains; it is because we cannot renounce our dependency on the scene where our paradoxical desire unendingly abolishes itself.

---

 

After body-piercing, what is left to write about but politics?

---

Is it possible to be above politics? Clearly this is not just a theoretical question on the American scene today. The hope of an independent presidential candidate, be he Colin Powell or even the ineffable Ross Perot, is that he will face the nation’s problems free from the narrow partisanship of the two parties, dominated, as it is not unfairly claimed, by their extremes.

It is easy to be skeptical. A “non-ideological” stance grants no particular ability to make the right decisions. Nor does it magically immunize anyone to the interest groups that attempt to influence these decisions. Should we unthinkingly assume that our political system is corrupt in some special way in which the rest of society is not?

The two most characteristic institutions of modern democracies are the elective political system and the free market. Politics is ostensibly an ethical activity, one involving human values. In contrast, the monetary evaluations of the market are considered to be without ethical content. This was not always the case. Before the bourgeois era, when the doctrine of just price prevailed, prices were set outside the marketplace on the authority of the reigning monarch. Money was looked upon with suspicion, and the notion of universal fungibility was unthinkable. Even today, certain services are not payable in money. When one is invited to dinner, one brings a bottle of wine; it would be altogether improper to give one’s host the equivalent in cash. Such symbolic exchanges are marginalized today, but they were once the essence of the social exchange-system: do ut des, I give to you so that you may give to me.

A market is nothing but the resultant of the decisions of its participants. I try to anticipate its movement, as does everyone else. But because market value is determined by neither unthinking desires nor preestablished “just prices” but by judgments like my own, no individual can anticipate it more than marginally and temporarily better than another. Some are more intelligent and better informed, and that is where investment counselors earn their commission; but absent “insider trading,” there is no knowledge and intelligence so uniquely powerful that others cannot duplicate it. The market is a model, not of utopian uniformity, but of human equality in action.

In the stock market, when I claim that a stock is worth a certain amount, the mechanism of the market may force me to revise my claim, sometimes quite drastically. Yet I do not feel that my integrity has been compromised. In the political world, on the other hand, I consider whatever claims I make to be dictated by a set of ethical principles, and I vote for politicians who purport to share these principles. Principles are qualitative, non-negotiable. Even quantifiable financial expenditures express support for policies, and if I am unalterably opposed to a certain policy, I may consider even a penny to be too much.

Yet because my fellow citizens and I differ in our principles, our representatives are compelled to arrive at compromises, just as a stock price is a compromise of the claims of its buyers and sellers, as described by the law of supply and demand. Some politicians are more powerful or more persuasive than others, but no individual, not the President nor even the Speaker of the House, possesses the power to dictate the outcome of the process. The Republican Congress has not been able to fulfill the contract signed by a majority of House Republicans. Politics in a democracy is an art of negotiation; “absolute” principles must be placed on the table along with all other claims.

If democratic politics is conceived on the model of market negotiation, then to stand above politics should mean to uphold one’s convictions in opposition to the process of compromise. Yet the prevalence of strongly-held convictions on both sides of the aisle is precisely what has led independent voters to seek an alternative to the two-party system. The prime qualification for a third-party candidate is a pragmatic lack of ideological commitment.

What this suggests is that being above politics is in fact the last thing the independent electorate desires. What frustrates this group is less the corruptness of the political process than its blockage by true believers, whether of right or left. There is no ideology of the center except insofar as the center is the bargaining table where all parties must meet to thrash out their differences. In setting its sights on someone untainted by association with Washington, the independent bloc seeks not purity of principle but faith in the political marketplace.

Yet third-party activists are no more likely than those of the traditional parties to accept my analogy between politics and the market. Any such talk would be condemned as the most extreme cynicism.

Such are the illusions of mimetic desire. No doubt the third-party ideal is not the proverbial man on horseback, the incarnation of what Rousseau called the general will. He has the more modest bearing of the honnête homme whose freedom from ideology will lead him to solutions unavailable to those who wear the blinkers of partisan extremism. But he is not to be a wheeler-dealer: we want his decisions to express the resultant of our values and desires without his having to bargain for or against any of them.

In other words, we want a leader who can give us the market’s pragmatic results without its messy reality. But like the genius who can pick the winner of a horse race in advance, such a person is a dream rather than a reality. The market system cannot be incarnated in a single “clean” figure. As Mandeville taught us about the economic marketplace in his 18th-century Fable of the Bees, the system operates effectively by permitting the not-so-spotless rest of us to express our conflicting values and desires within it.

My first impulse was to conclude by saying that despite its naïveté, the third-party movement reflects a new understanding of the paradoxical structure of the operation of politics in a democracy, where ideological convictions, however sincerely held, have political value not as moral absolutes but as bargaining chips in the negotiation of resentments that is the critical function–and the real strength–of democratic politics.

But such a conclusion would itself be too unparadoxical. The awareness of the market-structure of politics is not a single burning revelation that transforms history. It is an idea that advances and recedes through discussions and counter-discussions. Markets become paradoxical as soon as they deal with something other than mere commodities; and in consumer society, there are few “mere commodities.” In a market world, principle is a powerful bargaining tool; and those who know it make use of their knowledge as well as of their principles.

 

---

This being said, the breadth of third-party feeling may well be a sign of a new level of political consciousness concomitant with the inability of our current political institutions to deal with the oscillations generated by political paradox. I’ll clarify what I mean by paradoxical structures in my next column.

A search of the WWW will not uncover a plethora of information concerning originary anthropology. Not directly, that is. For all cultural activities inform us of our origins. Does not the greatness of market society lie precisely in its indifference to theory and its concentration on the cutting edge where history is made? Or on the focusing of that edge into a point, in the curious activity of body-piercing.

We are privileged to observe the emergence within our own culture of a sacrificial phenomenon of the sort that ethnologists have traveled thousands of miles and endured unspeakable conditions to experience in medias res in societies they can never fully understand. The pioneer Australian ethnologists Spencer and Gillen, in order to become more fully integrated into Aboriginal culture, underwent an initiation rite that included subincision of the penis. What would they say to be able to examine at the click of a mouse the ceremonial jewelry worn by young Americans in their body’s most intimate recesses?

Body art compels our interest because it is sacrificial, or in other terms, irreversible. A paste-on tattoo is as trivial as a sculpture made out of modeling clay. A hole in one’s anatomy, on the other hand, is a serious matter. The body has many nooks and crannies, and we cannot help but identify with what happens to them and in them, since our bodies are mutually mimetic. Instead of imprinting on the body a predetermined structure as Lévi-Strauss theorized about the Amazonian Indians he described in Tristes tropiques, piercing inscribes a message of personal identity.

Considering the number of different places to pierce and the various types and sizes of jewelry wearable in them, piercing encodes a message of considerable informational content. No corporeal activity, except perhaps tattooing, which in men at least is not new, has the capacity to generate so much information. Even if we assume a modest total of 100 mutually independent pierces including the jewelry, 2¹°° is a 30 digit number. But information of this sort cannot be measured in bits. What counts is how long, how often, and with what effect one can maintain the interest of one’s audience, sharing with some, shocking others, arousing the curiosity of still more, especially their erotic curiosity. The healing problems, the need for continued care, the possibility of enlargement leading to new gauges of rings (gauge measurements figure prominently in this literature–the smaller the gauge, the larger the size), the narratability and photographability of the piercing operation and its results generate an immense wealth of data. For the investment in time and effort, a generally nondescript adolescent is compensated by a payoff in significance far exceeding what he or she could dream of obtaining by more conventional means.

How is such significance generated? Mere difference from the norm does not suffice. A short time ago, any body-piercing at all would have been stigmatized as weird, and the Saussurean difference between one pierce and another, merely ignored. The phenomenon must be sufficiently abnormal to arouse a sense of social danger, but not enough to be simply unacceptable. On the frontier, negotiation proceeds anonymously, following the market model: children with parents, lovers with lovers, workers with employers… At first the single male earring is introduced by a fashion-setting minority, then multiple ear piercings, then nose rings… At each step, there are obstacles; the body’s topography is uneven and the forces flow along the lines of least resistance.

The end of the fad is also clearly predictable. The banalization of the activity, which despite the infinite variety of detail is quite monotonous in its overall result, leads to boredom with others’ stories, with repeating one’s own, with displaying and soliciting interest. The real payoff is, after all, quite limited; a bit of erotic stimulation at the price of possible infection, partial stigmatization, and (I imagine) just plain inconvenience in having that ring there to put in and take out, to wash around, etc. One day, the whole phenomenon is exposed as a Ponzi scheme built on the expectation of further gain from drawing others into the semantic orbit into which one has been seduced. The trend collapses, and another, unpredictable until that moment, begins its take-off.

As with any market phenomenon, the sudden rise of body-piercing results from the confluence of numerous factors. Perhaps the most historically specific is the imperative of control over one’s body in the era of Roe vs Wade. Parents are confronted with a new kind of demand for self-determination. Instead of a girl’s negotiating for the traditional symbols of adulthood, or something easily reversible like a punk hairstyle, she requests permission to wear a ring in her nose–or insists on it, or has it done without parental consent. The mark of adolescent revolt is borne as an ornament that leaves a permanent scar.

The new freedom is not one of pleasure but of pain; this is a sacrificial practice, a personal initiation rite. To undergo the operation and care for the wound, to enlarge the aperture in the hope of a larger gauge, these things call for self-discipline and the cultivation of pain. The gratuity of the practice may strike us as narcissistic, but its actuality is ascetic. Like saints climbing pillars, one suffers for effect, but one suffers nonetheless.

 

---

I will spare the reader the usual recitation of youthful alienation and hopelessness. I will even spare the usual condemnation. I can claim impartiality. Not only am I too old for piercing, I would never have engaged in it; it is too transparent an example of the conformist nonconformity that has defined adolescent culture since the romantic era.

But only one person can discover the origin of language, while many can experience the meaningfulness of piercing. This sacrificial, ultimately sacral claim for recognition makes a visceral case for human solidarity. We must give significance to our bodies, to their pain. The underground man’s aching tooth trumps the crystal palace of science. Just as there are no atheists in the foxholes, there are no indifferent viewers of the body’s capacity to be wounded, to be pierced.

In an earlier column, I defined love as tenderness for the vulnerability I share with the one I love. By both enhancing and controlling this vulnerability, body piercing plays on the familiar but ever-renewable paradox of mimetic desire: I control my pain, so I don’t need your love, yet my vulnerability is revealed in the wound I so proudly display. Like all other human activities, however charged with resentment, body-piercing is a plea for love.

 

---

As might have been expected, last week’s Simpson column aroused more interest than usual. I may have more to say on the subject next week. The present column returns to less topical matters.

 

---

Why is resentment so easy and love so difficult?

Alone, I am the man of resentment. All worldly presence does me injustice, not because it is unaware of its own existence, as Sartre’s Roquentin would like us to believe, but because of its scandalous indifference to mine. Even when my fellow man does not esteem himself over me, he betrays me by admiring another above myself. The least object I encounter in my path, a scrap of newsprint not consecrated to me, an advertisement in another’s image, a street-sign bearing a name not my own; the entire world and everything within it is a complicit witness to my unjust exclusion from the center of significance.

What is there then for me to love? To love what refuses to acknowledge my infinite power to love would be the ultimate abjection, the relinquishment of my claim of centrality.

But now we are two and in love; all things in the world become beneficiaries of our happiness. Not only those who smile on us, but those who fail to smile–we pity them: they have never been in love! By centering my little world on another, I am fulfilled by proximity to its center; I forget the world’s indifference in my beloved’s eyes.

Is not love’s springtime the moment when the libido conspires to perpetuate the species? But our love is not the expression of an impersonal life-force. It is, like all truly human things, a transcendence of appetite mediated by the center of human significance. My beloved and I are not so consumed by desire that we forget the universe; on the contrary, our love opens us to the universe. What resentment saw as obstacles to our being have become extensions of it. Lovers are humble; their love, so much greater than either of them alone, reveals to them the source of their own meaning in the community of meaning that surrounds them.

For the man of resentment, the center of the universe–the place of God–is the only place. No degree of worldly eminence is enough; although, to be fair, there are probably many degrees between God’s eminence and his own that he has not experienced. The man of resentment suffers from his finitude, not because he knows his life is finite, but because he feels his significance is finite. He, at least, knows what is meant by immortality; it is what would purge him of his resentment.

But then to fall in love is to become immortal. The lover discovers that, freed from resentment, he has lost his fear of death; his present is full of eternity. Yet love is not idolatry of an image invulnerable to death, but tenderness for a vulnerability that mirrors his own.

Aimez ce que jamais vous ne verrez deux fois! Love what you will never see twice! Vigny’s line directs us to love not the eternally renewed ephemerality of nature, but our human historicity. By raising my fellow mortal to the source of meaning, I recreate the permanence of langue from the scenic event of parole. The ultimate lesson of Christianity, and indeed, of all religion, is that the human person, the user of language, fully possesses the quality of divinity that human language was created to represent. Fully to possess the quality of God is not to be God as a unique central being, it is to be human. We learn this lesson from our experience of love.

---

Here, finally, is my promised analysis of I love you.

In How to Do Things With Words, J. R. Austin divided sentences into two types. A constative tells you something about the world that is presumably already there before the statement is made; as Marx noted, philosophers have been doing this for a long time. But without becoming Marxists, philosophers and others can change the world with language. Sentences that accomplish this are called performatives: “I now pronounce you man and wife,” “I swear to tell the truth…,” “I promise to …” A couple are unmarried until the appropriate person in the appropriate context pronounces the sentence that marries them. My promise does not exist until I make it.

Linguistic practices are not always this simple. If I say “it’s getting cold in here,” I’m probably inviting you to do something about it, like shut the window. Austin generalized this apparent exception to constative objectivity into the theory of speech-acts, in which the intended effect of my words on my interlocutor is formalized as the illocutory force of my utterance. In so doing, he turned the attention of analytic philosophers to the reality of speech (la parole) as opposed to language “as such” (la langue). The langue / parole distinction does not oppose, as is sometimes thought, language in the street to language in the dictionary, but rather the linguistic formalization of a limited set of syntactic and semantic categories to the uncountable uses of language in human interaction. Formalization is an expensive operation, analogous to creating a new tool; the tools of language are relatively few in number in comparison to the uses to which they may be adapted.

But at the origin of language, the distinction between tool and use, langue and parole, cannot be made. The first linguistic sign is both performative and constative. On one hand, in the characteristic mode of the constative, what is designated is present independently of the sign that designates it. But on the other hand, the sign is the bearer of human meaning. Before the object became the referent of the sign, it was merely one focus of appetitive interest among others; now it is singled out as the unique object of significance. Thus we may call the first sign the name of God. God is someone to whom we give a name only in order to affirm that it is he who names himself to us.

We have all experienced for ourselves this originary operation of language: when we say I love you.

I love you is a formula with exact equivalents in all modern Western languages. Its form is constative, and in antiquity, it seems to have been limited to this constative sense. Love stated as a mere fact is involuntary, a curse of Venus, as is Phaedra’s love for Hippolytus.

Yet the modern sense of I love you is always latent, since to state the “curse” of love is after all to affirm it, to participate in it. This sense becomes generally accepted only in the nineteenth century, when it acquires its institutional basis in voluntary marriage and its later derivative, sexual partnership without marriage, which depends on it still more directly: a couple repeating I love you to each other has wed each other de facto for so long as the expression can be repeated. Many couples, married or not, regularly, even obsessively renew their vows by the exchange of I love you.

The performative component of I love you, unlike that of “I now pronounce you man and wife,” cannot be made precise; it creates the truth it ostensibly reflects. By admitting the feeling I already have, I affirm it as central. My declaration of love is my confession of faith, the verbal transformation of an emotion passively felt into a value actively defended. It is a model of the genesis of human significance out of animal appetite in the originary scene of language.

The medieval inventors/discoverers of romantic love understood that we are made aware of the sacred through our experiences of desire. In what we call the Romantic era, when I love you acquired its present usage, the terms of this relationship between private and public sacrality are reversed: it is our experience of love that gives most of us our sense of the sacred, not our attendance at weekend rites.

To say I love you is to consecrate someone as the object of a care greater than that for my own life. It is to pledge that person eternal fidelity, not as a mere gift, but as an act of faith, that is, as an act performed from within the faith I confess. I love you carries the meaning of “I promise to love you forever.” But it does not say that; what it says is that the feeling it expresses endures forever by the very fact of its expression. That is, the feeling acquires, because it already possesses, significance, the permanent status of the sign. It is in this sense that I love you provides a model for the originary use of language.

---

Generative anthropology, as this example shows, is anything but bloodless speculation on the unknowable. Its quest for a fundamental understanding of the human is dedicated to the cause of promoting, in the face of resentment, the uniquely human union of appetite and intellect that we call love.

This column is dedicated to the memory of Nicholas Collaros, my deeply regretted young colleague in the UCLA French Department, who died on Sunday, July 23.

---

I haven’t forgotten James Williams’ reply to my point that resentment can be expressed more sharply than love. I must thank him for giving me the opportunity to sharpen my own language. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that expressions of resentment are more powerful than acts of love, although in the absence of the former, the latter lose their urgency as acts, as reader preferences for the Inferno over the Paradiso, or for Milton’s Satan over his Christ suggest. I was referring not to the concreteness of such acts , but to their inarticulateness in contrast with the resentful imagination. Since resentment is a reaction to an already-constituted scene, it is representational from the outset and lends itself to precise articulation. Jenny can even tell us the number of sails and cannon on the ship that will come to avenge her.

Jim’s examples illustrate this very point. The scene of Christ kissing the Inquisitor–or even better, the one where Father Zossima bows down before Dmitri–derives its power as an expression of love precisely from its ostensivity, its showing rather than telling. In contrast to Jenny’s dream of vengeance, these gestures of love involve representation not as already constituted in words but as a primal act of designation. The makers of these gestures could not have expressed their love in words. Such an act is not a use of language but a founding of language. The sign is a new form of the originary name-of-God, addressed to a sinner in whom Christ or his surrogate discerns our human identity with the figure whose act of self-sacrifice is our civilization’s most significant archetype of the act of love.

To make the comparison in more rigorous terms, we may say that love is to the ostensive as resentment is to the declarative. Love defines a new significance, whereas resentment is parasitic on an old one. This is pretty close to Jim’s description of the distinction in terms of the relative originarity of human relationships; we need only remind ourselves that the fundamental forms of human relationships are precisely those we find incarnated in the forms of representation.

The point above about sacrifice reminds us of Girard’s insistence that the Crucifixion is not a sacrifice but the demystification of all sacrifice. We should not conceive of God as a father sacrificing his son for the benefit of mankind. But neither should we see the latter as a passive victim of human violence. Jesus on the cross figures the founding paradox of the human. On the one hand, he is wholly a man, suffering as one who cannot help but suffer. But we must also think of him as God, that is, as Being with no need to incarnate himself in human flesh, one whose endurance of suffering is wholly voluntary. The act of love embodied in the Crucifixion can be figured only by the most paradoxical, and therefore the most foundational of images, the one that inspired the phrase credo quia absurdum. The crucified’s words, most notably his Eli, Eli…, are secondary to his deed. What matters is not the representation he creates, but the paradoxical representation he becomes: that of the sacrifical victim as God–a figure who inspires not compassion but tenderness, as I will explain in another column. The mob, in contrast, sees in the Crucifixion the satisfaction of its desire: the image of Jesus on the cross, paradoxical as a figure of love, is unambiguous as a figure of resentment.

Once again, the moment of love is the moment of ostension, of presence and renunciation. The moment of resentment, in contrast, occurs after the sign has been emitted, when peace is assured, at which point adoration of central Being is transformed into the desire to obliterate it, to defigure the figure that preserved the community from violence. But the resentful dream of defiguration is parasitic, as are all such dreams, on the figure that concentrates in itself the mimetic power the resentful subject wishes to destroy.

---

I shall conclude this column with some reflections that Nick Collaros’s death and funeral service inspired.

I have always insisted that our unique knowledge of our own mortality is a product of the originary event; because humanity threatens to become the cause of its own death, death must be deferred by human action. Our Heideggerian “living for death” originates in our awareness of the necessity of this deferral.

In a powerful passage, Pascal described humanity as a group of prisoners some of whom are put to death every day in front of the others, who await their turn with no hope of being spared. The Greek Orthodox priest at Nick’s funeral service expressed this same vision with a quite different metaphor: because we were, as he said, all “terminal,” Nick’s death offers all of us an opportunity to reflect on the final value of our own lives. Pascal’s prisoners must wager on God because their lives are worthless without the hope of salvation. This “no atheists in the foxholes” argument supports the originary hypothesis; prayer in extremis repeats the use of the sign to defer violence and death in the originary scene. There in the church, we each entered a personal foxhole in which we saw the vision of our own death.

My own reaction provides existential proof of the underlying identity of the priest’s and Pascal’s vision. At the ceremony I had been aware of the uncomfortable presence of a colleague with whom I had never gotten along. The effect of the priest’s words was to make me feel impelled to overcome my resentment and make toward him a gesture of friendship. The memento mori didn’t make me feel like seeking to prolong my life-span by improving my diet or exercising more assiduously; it made me feel the need to avert conflict with my fellow man.

The power of the central being of the originary scene to defer our conflicts is not founded on guilt at his murder, as in Freud’s view, or in the exhaustion of our aggressive energy, as in Girard’s, but on the love, the reflection of our own mimetic desire, that emanates from the center. How petty our little quarrels seem in the face of death! But we do not hope to avoid physical death through loving each other. The immortality in which the scene of death inspires us to participate is not that of our individual selves, but of the shared world of signs that is the foundation of the human community. Nick’s death is exemplary as a figure not of fear but of shared renunciation; by abandoning life in the world, he becomes a representation of immortal Being, just as the originary central object, disfigured in the sparagmos, reveals to us the permanence of the Being–undecidably person and Idea–that sustains the human.

---

In my previous column, I promised to analyze the expression “I love you” in the light of the relationship between love and originary language; I will get back to this next week.

In my previous column, I said that resentment, because it is less originary than love, can be articulated more sharply. Jenny’s song, from which I quoted a line, ends with the heroine sailing off in the ship that has left her the sole survivor of the city that humiliated her–a fantasy nearly identical to one expressed by Achilles to Patroclus in the Iliad. Nothing in the domain of love can bear comparison with the concreteness of resentment. But the dream of destruction, even in its intellectual prolongation as deconstruction, not merely presupposes a prior construction, but tacitly anticipates that it will survive the dream. Not even the Nazis could make Jenny’s fantasy altogether a reality.

Odi et amo, I hate and (yet) I love, as Catullus said (though I misattributed the quote to Ovid in Originary Thinking). All hate is frustrated love. Resentment follows the model of the child who wishes his parents dead precisely because the wish cannot lead to the reality. Hamlet’s fascination with the scene of his mother’s adultery, Alceste with that of Célimène’s salon in Le misanthrope are instances of that “early modern” form of resentment in which the defenders of the traditional order find themselves caught up in the desires acted out by its demolishers.

The same is true at the origin. In a recent exchange, James Williams of Syracuse University (Executive Secretary of the COV&R) pointed out that Girard’s position is really consonant with mine, because the point of departure for both is mimesis, and mimesis at bottom is love. I can’t quarrel with that: originary resentment depends on originary love. The problem is that when one bases one’s anthropology on the self-exhaustion of mimetic rivalry rather than on its deferral, one presupposes that this self-exhaustion is bound to take place. Girard never explains why the emissary murder puts an end to violence. If scapegoating does not occur among animals, why does it occur in humans? The only Girardian precondition of the human is a greater degree of mimesis. But although this precondition explains mimetic concentration of desire on a single desire-object, it fails to explain why this concentration first manifests itself as the concentration of aggression on a single scapegoat. The scapegoat phenomenon provides a persuasive model for sacrifice; but what must be explained in the Girardian system is not the origin of sacrifice, but the origin of the human in sacrifice.

Or to put it in terms of love and resentment: the love for the central victim that reveals it as sacred must precede the resentment aroused by its centrality. But then why did it become a victim, which is to say, a communal focus of resentment, in the first place?

---

Love cannot express itself with the concreteness of resentment; but precisely for this reason, its expression is a model of the community-creating function of language. The formula “I love you” offers insights into originary language. More about this next week.