Author: staceymeeker

“One fatal swoon has cost me my life . . . Beware of swoons dear Laura. . . . A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”

(Sophia in Love and Freindship)[1]

Ang Lee’s famous and emotionally affecting film version of Sense and Sensibility is among the most highly regarded of Austen adaptations, yet the Austen scholar Paula Byrne commented that Austen “would be turning in her grave” to see it![2] Byrne’s approach to the novel follows Austen’s teenage burlesque Love and Freindship, an outrageously satirical treatment of “sensibility” exemplified in the opening passage above. For Byrne, Sense and Sensibility is clearly a satire—the novel in general and Marianne in particular. Ang Lee’s adaptation affronts Byrne because we have lost the caustic and irreverent Austen: “Austen would have been horrified to discover that the film celebrates the very sentiment that she was trying so hard to ironize.”[3]

Byrne must be right, but is she completely right? A satirical reading of Marianne is indeed very plausible in the first half of SS, but in the second she suffers horribly. According to Byrne’s logic, we should find Marianne’s sufferings hilarious; after all, this is precisely the sort of self-inflicted martyrdom Austen parodies in LF. Yet it is highly unlikely that Byrne would take her satirical reading that far, because we care about Marianne. Thus, in pushing against the sentimental interpretation of SS, what Byrne also does is to bring to light a striking anomaly.

The anomaly is that there are two possible readings of SS, a serious reading and a satirical reading.[4] Either is plausibly supported by the text. Neither can be reconciled with the other. Yet neither can be maintained consistently without being undermined by the other. For instance, the satirical reading becomes unstable, in the manner just demonstrated with Marianne’s sufferings, but so does a serious reading (as Byrne correctly notes) because we can find virtually any aspect of Marianne, including her suffering, parodied in LF. As I hope will become clear, this destabilizing effect arises elsewhere in the novel, and is (I argue) integral to its interpretive structure.

The “double effect” in SS resonates very strongly with René Girard’s premise of “two audiences” for the literary masters.[5] For Girard, the great writers are great specifically because they are “revelatory”: they reveal mimetic desire.[6] Discerning audiences understand this (even if, in Girard’s case, it may be an audience of one!). Otherwise, the work of the masters is an exercise in dissimulation, satisfying expectations of convention, genre, emotional catharsis, or the like, but the larger audience does not penetrate its real substance. For Girard, there are two audiences, those who comprehend the revelation of mimetic desire, and those who do not.

To some extent, Girard’s “two audiences” premise is unexceptional: literary masters certainly do operate at different levels. However, in other ways the “two audiences” premise leads to unsupportable conclusions, even on Girard’s own terms. For Girard, the revelatory literature is about conversion, often in tandem with the descent of the writer into the dark night of mimetic desire.[7] If Girard is right, it is difficult to believe that the revelatory writer is only throwing scraps to the audience, and not morally engaging them as well. Girard, to the extent that he downplays the involvement of the audience, is not only vulnerable to objections that will be outlined in this paper, but is in conflict with the spirit of his own project.

An exploration of Austen might work to correct this. In particular, Austen’s “double effect” in SS, which creates tension between a “satirical” and “serious” reading, presents an opportunity to productively engage this interpretive problem with Girard. I hope that by exploring this effect in SS, and by connecting it to what I will call Austen’s “Gospel hermeneutic” wherein the purpose of her “double effect” is ultimately moral, I can salvage much or at least some of Girard’s “two audiences” premise from its problematic aspects. These have been cogently highlighted by Richard van Oort, whose critique will inform this analysis.[8] Accepting both the validity of van Oort’s objections, representing the approach of generative anthropology (GA), and the direction (if not always the exercise!) of Girard’s, I hope that the engagement with Austen can bring out the best in both.

In the next section I explore Austen’s “two audience” effect in LF and SS, and some of its very disconcerting consequences. In the third section I review Richard van Oort’s objections to Girard’s “two audiences” and also canvas some of my own. In the fourth section I attempt to integrate the Girardian and GA perspectives by considering the “two audiences” as an operation of Austen’s gospel hermeneutic, where Austen’s “double effect” creates dissonance with readers in the same manner as the gospel narratives. Austen’s purpose is not to show how clever she is, or how dull readers are, but to make interpretation an inescapably moral act that reflects back on itself.

Austen’s “Two Audiences” and the Double Reading of Sensibility

Girard’s “two audiences” premise is important here for many reasons, but above all because Austen is an extremely mimetic writer. The default to sentimentalism with SS that Paula Byrne astutely critiques is like Girard’s mensonge romantique(“romantic lie”), and the lack of self-awareness about it is equivalent to Girard’s méconnaissance, or misrecognition.[9] This is the self-deception inherent in mimetic desire, the insistence that one’s desires are original, the refusal to recognize that they are imitative. Marianne most obviously instantiates this with her “sensibility,” whose tenets are unbridled passion, uncompromising frankness, and impulsive action. Almost certainly, Girard would have recognized his mensonge and méconnaissance in Marianne, and there is good reason to suppose that he actually did, since Girard read Jane Austen enthusiastically in his later years.[10]

This is not the place for a comprehensive mimetic analysis of Sense and Sensibility, which I have attempted elsewhere, but it is important to see how Austen’s critique of “sensibility” in Love and Freindship is the same as its critique in Sense and Sensibility, which is in turn the same as Girard’s critique of the mensonge romantique.[11] We should be clear about what that critique of “sensibility” is, since this is precisely where interpretations go awry and where Austen’s “double effect” comes into play. Like Girard, Austen’s core objection to sensibility is not that is it too passionate, too frank, too impetuous, too excessive, or even too self-absorbed. “Sensibility” certainly does manifest these qualities, and they are easy enough to ridicule (or alternately, if one is a romantic, to defend!).

Yet, as per Girard, Austen’s real critique is not that sensibility is too independent but that it is not independent at all, that it is inescapably derivative, hyper-alert to others. As usual, Paula Byrne grasps this well:

Marianne Dashwood’s romantic ideas are derived from the books she reads. Austen gains much comic mileage from her heroine’s faith in her own originality, although, ironically, her conduct places her as a rather conventional type.[12]

Sensibility purports to be what it is not. Its adherents loudly and haughtily disdain the world even as they put themselves on conspicuous display to it. They are brittle, bristly, perpetually on the attack, perversely self-wounding, yet, for all their brute frankness, utterly unaware of themselves. This is all blatantly obvious in LF and, as Byrne argues, it should be obvious in SS as well.

However, the misreadings of SS, orchestrated by Austen herself, center precisely on missing the point of this critique and in so doing falling under it; readers succumb, like Marianne, to the méconnaissance. Furthermore, Marianne, the most conspicuously mimetic character, is by no means the only or even the most mimetic. She is a bellwether for mimesis that manifests first in herself, then in other characters, including characters like Edward, a smirking ironist who represents the satirical view yet is just as mimetic in his own way as Marianne. Finally, the mimesis manifests in ourselves, through our inevitable misinterpretations. This is what the “double effect” of the novel is about.

Though van Oort’s critique of Girard will be reviewed in the next section, it is useful to introduce Girard’s “two audiences” premise about Shakespeare here, since it matches Austen’s situation as a writer in a striking and relevant way. Girard speculates that there was an inner circle of friends who were cognizant of Shakespeare’s philosophical musings and would have caught the references in the plays. Shakespeare theorized overtly about mimetic desire to his friends, then encoded it covertly in his plays. As Girard puts it,

During much of his career, he combined two plays in one, deliberately channeling different segments of his audience toward two different interpretations of the same play: a sacrificial explanation for the groundlings, which perpetuates itself in most modern interpretations, and a nonsacrificial, mimetic one for those in the galleries.[13]

In Jane Austen’s case there is no need to hypothesize such an inner circle; she literally had two audiences! She initially wrote her first three canonical novels (the first being SS) for her family circle, a sophisticated and discerning group of people. Of course, Austen also wrote the novels (or as the case may be, revised them) for the reading public. Though Austen was published anonymously and could not directly engage either the popular or the literary world as a writer, the appreciative family circle was a critical world unto itself. The biographical accounts indicate that they were an excellent sounding board for Austen, against which to assess critical reactions and test narrative effects.[14] Austen’s characteristic meta-awareness as an author—her relaxed consciousness about the reader’s presence and the intimacy she establishes—must owe a great deal to that experience.

As they had been following her writing from the beginning, this “inner circle” must also have had a strong awareness of the satire in the novels, in comparison with the public audience; the family had been in on Austen’s juvenilia. They appreciated her irony and “got” her references and in-jokes. The direct line from LF to SS would have been obvious to them in the same way it is obvious to Paula Byrne. With that in mind, a parallel examination of both here, of LF (for the home audience) against SS (for both audiences), can suggest what Austen expected of each. I turn then to a review of LF, with particular attention to the elements that are recapitulated in SS.

Austen’s discordant effects emerge from the very beginning on the title page of Love and Freindship, with its “accidental” misspelling, and an epigraph which immediately contradicts the title: “‘Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love.’” Laura, the protagonist in LF, describes herself as follows:

“A sensibility too tremblingly alive to every affliction of my Freinds, my Acquaintance, and particularly to every affliction of my own, was my only fault, if a fault it could be called.”[15]

Laura’s chief correspondent in this epistolary narrative is Marianne, the daughter of her intimate friend Isabel. This suggests, rather pointedly, that Marianne in Sense and Sensibility will be the successor of Laura in LF.

But this is in very bad taste! Marianne, for all her faults, is a beloved and sympathetic character in SS, not a caricature. It is important to emphasize just how freakish the existence of Love and Freindship is in relation to SS, as if Shakespeare had written Pyramus and Thisbe before rather than after Romeo and Juliet. Austen satirically deconstructs SS before it is even written. We can indeed sympathize with Paula Byrne and appreciate why she, with a deep appreciation for Austen’s satirical side, is affronted by Ang Lee’s tear-jerking screen adaptation.

As we proceed through LF, the resemblances to what will eventually become SS continue to accumulate.[16] The principal male, Edward, makes a sudden, very Willoughby-like appearance. Thus, we preview the infatuation between Willoughby and Marianne that unfolds with suspicious speediness in SS; in LF, Edward and Laura immediately fall in love and are married within minutes.[17] The bulk of LF follows Laura and her cohorts through absurd and catastrophic misadventures. They loudly proclaim their feelings, continually denounce others for not having them, launch themselves into madly impulsive acts at immense injury to themselves and others, and flail around impotently in noisy, pointless self-absorption. Marianne in SS will manifest all of these traits, though of course more realistically.

Like much of the juvenilia, LF is full of absurdly improbable coincidences. In one chapter, an elderly man discovers four random grandchildren within minutes, and wonders if there are more to come: “But tell me (looking he fearfully toward the Door) tell me, have I any other grandchildren in the house.”[18] Melodramatic coincidence is also a feature of SS, namely the convergence of plot that connects Colonel Brandon, Willoughby and the young Eliza Williams. Importantly, this is a stumbling block for SS, making it seem the weakest of Austen’s canonical novels. The coincidence, though a staple of the sentimental romance Austen constantly parodied in her juvenilia, is usually tolerated in SS as an awkward default to convention. However, in the present context, it prompts a provocative question: did Austen include it as a joke?

This of course would be Byrne’s interpretation, but also the kind of audacious proposal Girard might make. He might argue that SS is much too sharp and realistic to have a glaring “flaw” like the narrative melodrama. Girard (insofar as I put words in his mouth) might hypothesize that it is an engineered “shortcoming,” like Austen’s “accidental” misspelling of Love and Freindship, or the “coincidental” naming of the two Mariannes. He might propose that the plot coincidence is Austen’s authorial misdirection, and a coded message. The message is that SS and Love and Freindship are not far apart; the distinction between the “serious” and “unserious” treatment of sensibility is misleading; the sensibility in the one is the same as the sensibility in the other. Discerning readers (e.g., Paula Byrne) will pick up on this. SS is both Austen’s verité romanesque (“novelistic truth”) and her mensonge romantique (“romantic lie”). SS is two novels in one, exactly like Girard’s Shakespearean hypothesis.[19]

To buttress this Girard-style conjecture, we can consider Brandon’s backstory. It is about parental oppression, sibling rivalry, blackguards, love triangles, and persecuted women (both named Eliza!). Mimesis is not foregrounded in any conspicuous way, but only because the backstory is obscured in historical review, the soft focus of romantic melodrama. However, when the same elements appear in the real-time narrative—mean parents, disagreeable siblings, and multiple interconnected love triangles—they are supersaturated with mimesis.[20] Thus (through a Girardian lens) the improbable melodrama is mythological, a romantic mirage that evaporates in the harder light of mimetic realism in the real-time narrative.

However, as I advance this Girardian conjecture about Brandon’s backstory, there is a problem, also noted above with the suffering of Marianne. It is hard to read the melodramatic coincidence in SS completely satirically. It involves wretched stories: the persecution, heartbreak, disgrace, decline and death of the elder Eliza, and the seduction and abandonment of the younger, the more poignant because she is repeating the elder Eliza’s tragedy, and despite Brandon’s efforts to shelter and protect her, thus failing in his oath to the dying Eliza (senior). Paula Byrne’s satirical interpretation of SS seems to wobble here as well, as jarring in its way as the sentimental excess of Ang Lee.

Three irreconcilable possibilities emerge, and it is impossible to commit wholly to any one:

1) The narrative coincidence in SS is an immature, overly conventional machination of plot. This is the evidence before us, yet Austen managed such conventions with mocking ease in the juvenilia, hardly a sign of meek deference. This suspiciously glaring “lapse” is not tonally consistent with SS, which is otherwise mature and confident, and sustains its gritty psychosocial realism.

2) Austen is satirizing the tragic circumstances of the two Elizas. This implies an irreverence comparable to Oscar Wilde’s when he said of Dickens, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”[21] While it is true that Austen killed off characters with abandon in her juvenilia, including Love and Freindship, the circumstances of the Elizas are genuinely affecting, as is Brandon narrating them. Their plight, even if sentimentalized, seems not to be a laughing matter.

3) We should be deeply affected by the tragic circumstances of the two Elizas. There is no avoiding this, yet it is undercut by glaring similarities to Love and Freindship that run throughout SS, a haze of suspicion around this clumsy appeal to sentimentality. Moreover, as Brandon recounts his backstory, the affecting circumstances pile up suspiciously, tragedy upon tragedy, an “overkill” also suspiciously reminiscent of the juvenilia.

There is no harmonizing solution to this difficulty, no unifying synthesis, no super-superior point of view that puts a “discerning” reader above the perspective of others. This aspect of SS is like a paradoxical drawing by M.C. Escher, with figures situated right-side up, upside down, and sideways. We can see all of the perspectives clearly enough, but we can never focus on more than one at the same time, and our eyes shift jarringly back and forth.  This indeterminable quality narrows but intensifies as we move to Marianne’s sufferings, central to the novel’s “double effect.”

Since Marianne’s suffering is rendered realistically, the three undecidable points above collapse to the two canvassed at the beginning: do we take Marianne’s sufferings seriously, or satirically? In the latter case, the parallels with Laura and Sophia’s “swoons” and “frenzy fits” are glaring, as are the parallels with Marianne’s self-endangering outdoor rambles (“Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”).[22] This supports a satirical reading of Marianne. In fact, this has been the thrust of Austen’s characterization up to the moment Marianne is jilted by Willoughby.

Until then, Marianne’s persistent, grating, tone-deaf remonstrations are either laughable or cringe-worthy, as P.J.M. Scott describes well:

To a large extent she acts out the basic Rousseau-istic premises about the native benevolence of Man and his instinctual wholesomeness as a social being when he is not oppressed by cruel circumstances and his speech and conduct are not perverted into dishonest forms by worldly considerations. This makes her in fact an alarming and mischievous liability. . . . one actually flinches at her participation in any social scene, so likely is she to worsen matters for herself and those associated with her by her free expression of inward feelings.[23]

As with Paula Byrne, Scott’s observation is Girardian. What saves Marianne for us is her suffering; she advances from being an annoying caricature to being a sympathetic character. A satirical reading becomes as problematic as snarky chortling at the fate of the two Eizas. We are stuck again with alternating interpretations.

This is not an arcane issue. Recalling Byrne’s comments, the “serious” reading of SS resulted in Ang Lee’s screen adaptation, which is the sentimental takeaway for millions. Another consequence of “seriousness” is seeing the novel as a “debate” between “sense” and “sensibility.” This is surely a gross misinterpretation, yet so common as to be almost canonical. Debates like this do take place in the novel (e.g., between Elinor, Marianne, and Edward), but there is no genuine debate in the sense of sensibility having pros and cons. That would be like arguing in LF over the relative merits of “swoons” and “frenzy fits.” Nevertheless, exactly such thematic summaries of SS appear repeatedly in reading guides and commentaries.[24]

Tony Tanner, who favors a serious reading of Marianne, delves more deeply into the problem, and in a way particularly relevant to Girard and GA. For Tanner, Marianne should be taken seriously, obviously not because her impressions are correct, but because her sufferings are very real. Moreover, following Foucault on “madness,” they are symptomatic of socioeconomic conditions that prevailed in England, where such nervous afflictions were particularly strong. England’s advanced market society and its competitive pressures create an alienation that manifests in psychosomatic hysteria like Marianne’s. Marianne’s over-reactions are thus a legitimate protest against the stultifying artificiality of society, and her sickness is a reaction to it. Marianne is right to seek solace in nature, with its restorative power.[25]

A problem here, which either Paula Byrne or Girard might hasten to point out, is that Love and Freindship preempts Tanner’s interpretation. If we are talking about restorative effects, Sophia already seems to agree: “Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”[26] On socioeconomic status, Edward in Love and Freindship also seems to agree, when he denounces his father to perfect strangers as a “a mean and mercenary wretch,” “seduced by the false glare of Fortune and the Deluding Pomp of Title.”[27] Love and Freindship is relentlessly deconstructive of interpretations of SS that might contrast its “serious treatment” of sensibility with the burlesque counterpart. A solution thus might be to take Love and Freindship itself more (there is no other word for it) seriously.

This means that similarities between the two are more important than differences, and that the critique of sensibility in LF is continuous with, and consistent with, its critique in SS. This goes back to the point above: Austen’s critique of sensibility is the same as Girard’s critique of the mensonge romantique . Sensibility purports to be exactly what it is not: it is imitative, derivative, manically compulsive, perversely self-wounding, and completely clueless about itself. This is what Austen explores in SS, in a more “serious”—that is, more realistic—way. The difference between SS and LF is one not of kind but of degree. Thus, in many ways, the mimetic approach, considered as a serious moral critique, makes at least some sense of the discordant effects in SS.

Tanner is rightly focused on socioeconomic conditions, but this comes out differently through a mimetic lens. The advance of market forces is not driving madness so much as (in the Girardian view) the madness is driving the market forces; everyone is looking around at their neighbor and making comparisons. In addition, far more things are commodified than Tanner’s observations may encompass. Natural landscapes are not reliable as a source of solace, for they too become an embattled arena of one-upmanship—or, in Marianne’s case, an opportunity for self-harm. In Mansfield Park, landscaping grounds to make them look more “natural” becomes an arena of feverish competition.[28] Even Marianne’s illness will become a trendy form of self-expression in Austen’s final, unfinished novel Sanditon, with its cast of hypochondriacs.[29]

This signals skepticism from Austen not just about the advance of modernity, but also about the romanticism that Tanner finds a healthy, or at least understandable, response to it. In Girard’s view this romanticism is itself a symptom, if not at the root of the illness itself. Nevertheless, generative anthropology would make a different evaluation, one closer to Tanner’s. Marianne’s may or may not be (as per Tanner) a legitimate response to modernity, but for GA it is a real one. We have to take Marianne seriously (from the GA perspective) exactly because she is trying to negotiate the self-exacerbating problems of modern resentment. In short, GA would not be so hasty to dismiss Marianne’s experience, or the reader’s experience of Marianne. The existence of Austen’s youthful satire would not diminish this, in the GA view; Austen would be returning to the problem of sensibility in SS not to simply prolong her satirical treatment but because the burlesque “solution” proved insufficient.

Thus, GA and Girard create their own “two audiences” effect when applied to SS. GA will tend toward the serious reading, and mimetic theory toward the satirical. The GA interpretation leans toward a “sentimental” reading, not because GA gets all emotional about things, but because it appreciates the value of self-expression and the forms that it takes, including its relation to an audience. Girard, by contrast, is concerned with the historical sweep of revelation, where demythologization is key. In that sense, Austen’s satirical voice is the natural language of demythologization. To better delineate these differences, we turn to van Oort’s critique of Girard’s “two audiences” premise.

Girard’s “Two Audiences” and Its Difficulties

Girard’s “two audiences” thesis is by no means limited to Shakespeare; it applies to most of his intellectual discoveries, whether they be his exegesis of biblical text, his analysis of the modern novel, or his explorations in myth, anthropology, psychology, or human origins.[30] Girard constantly situates himself as the enlightened discoverer against almost everyone else (including scholars in the relevant disciplines) who are among the unenlightened that “don’t get it.” Before reviewing van Oort’s objections, I would like to canvass a few of my own.

My first objection is simply tonal. Girard’s stance is presumptuous and off-putting. The “two audiences” premise also smacks of gnostic secret wisdom: “things hidden” from all but the most knowing. More importantly, Girard’s “two audiences” imply a contradiction; canonicity should be a puzzle for Girard. His mimetic masters are canonical, and if it is not mere coincidence, the canonicity must be tied to the revelatory quality of their work. Yet this could not be because a tiny number of truly enlightened readers (which before Girard may not even have existed!) served as a selection committee. Surely it is the same unenlightened generations who established the canon. In short, Girard does not give his “uncomprehending” audience enough credit.

It seems much more reasonable (even just from within Girard’s system) to conclude that the generations of readers or theatergoers whom Girard thinks don’t get it, actually do get it, at least on some level. They are morally engaged with the problematics of mimesis, or the work would not hold the same fascination for so long. The idea of an unconscious process that canonizes revelatory literature but is somehow unaware of its revelatory quality creates the ambivalence that van Oort will observe below about Girard’s “conscious” yet “unconscious” emergence of language and representation.

My final point about Girard’s “two audiences”—less an objection than a puzzle—is that the “two audiences” are actually “many audiences,” since everyone’s interpretation differs. Girard’s “knowing” mimetic interpretation is typically contrasted polemically with a monolithic “standard” interpretation, representing a critical méconnaissance. Yet in practice, there is not one audience which is wrong, as against Girard who is right, but indefinitely many audiences (everyone’s interpretation being at least slightly different), all presumably wrong. My point here is not to attack Girard but to pose a question about the reality of the multivalent reading experience: is it possible to have many valid interpretations in Girard’s system? After all, a text, whether it is Shakespeare, Austen, or the Bible, can speak to many people in many different ways, even the same person reading the same text at different times. If Girard effaces this possibility, it seems to deny something about human and literary experience.[31] This is where I hope the engagement with Austen (who took great interest in divergent reader responses) might validate the multivalent experience without compromising the revelation of mimetic desire.[32]

Turning now to van Oort’s important critique of Girard, caveats are in order. First, van Oort is openly indebted to Girard, whose insights on Shakespeare he generously engages and often finds “startling and original.”[33] The critique of Girard, though important, occupies only a portion of van Oort’s study. Even Girard’s “two audiences” premise van Oort finds unobjectionable in itself:

In principle, there is nothing wrong with this ‘two audience’ theory to describe Shakespeare’s method. You can strive to entertain everyone all the time, but if you want to keep the attention of the more refined, you will have to go beyond mere slapstick and gore.[34]

Nevertheless, van Oort has several objections to the way Girard pursues his literary analysis:

1) Girard brushes past Shakespearean critics who make compatible observations.

2) He insists on the Christian revelation to the exclusion of all else.

3) He does not take into account different aesthetic periods with their distinct modalities.

4) He fails to appreciate the self-correcting capabilities of modernity.

5) He has little regard for the artistic medium (drama).

6) At a deeper level, Girard’s “two audiences” theory betrays (for van Oort) an insecurity about language, or symbolic representation.

In Girard’s scenario of human origins, symbolic representation emerges ambivalently as both conscious and unconscious. For Girard, the “sacred” exists in ritual form, as sacrifice, before a symbolic capacity exists, before any hominids could know what “sacred” is. This is a central objection for GA. Thus, for Girard to set himself up, like Freud, as the arbiter of what is really happening with the protohuman unconscious is of a piece with his setting himself up as the “true” interpreter of Shakespeare.[35] It is suspicious because, by definition, no contrary evidence can be considered; such will simply be dismissed as denial: méconnaissance, again. Girard is right, because other contenders must always be wrong.

Also incisive are van Oort’s objections concerning Girard’s blithe disregard for relevant scholars and the creative medium (drama).[36] Regarding the former, since Girard often comes in as an outsider, it is somewhat understandable; a professional lifetime is needed to master the secondary literature even for one great figure. There ought to be a place for a thinker like Girard to bring a fresh perspective. Yet, this should have prompted more humility. Since Girard comes in with guns blazing, it is easy for experts to shoot him down, and not even for what he is contradicting, but what he is missing or mischaracterizing.

Probably more problematic (for Girard) is the second objection: Girard’s tendency to treat the artistic medium as mostly irrelevant. Like the shell of a hermit crab, the creative form can be casually cast off once its mimetic content is grasped. Here van Oort showcases a great interpretive advantage for GA, which respects the mode of expression on its own terms; the aesthetic is an adaptation to the problem of resentment, which plays out in terms of a scene of representation, with a center and periphery.

This brings us to van Oort’s other objections which are rather of a piece, regarding aesthetic epochs, modernity, and Christianity.[37] I find that these objections, respectively, start out strong but become somewhat contestable. To be sure, a great strength of GA is its penetrating analysis of aesthetic epochs, like its analysis of aesthetic form. The process of modernity in passing through these epochs is also brilliantly illuminated in GA. However, though van Oort sees an inherent deficit here in mimetic theory, I think such insights are available to—or at least comprehensible from—that perspective, whether or not Girard was negligent.

But how negligent was he, really? The intensifying struggles of mimetic desire through the stages of modernity, and its expression in different aesthetic modes, is treated by Girard, in his own way. For instance, mimetic desire for Dante or Cervantes is not the same as it is for Stendhal or Flaubert, and for Stendhal and Flaubert it is not the same as it is for Dostoyevsky or Proust. Broadly speaking, aesthetic expression for Girard follows the evolution of mimetic pathology: model –> obstacle –> rival –> double (alternately, external, internal and double mediation).[38] That Girard doesn’t account for epochs and aesthetics the way GA does, is clear enough, but that is not the same as not accounting for them at all.[39] In short, I don’t think van Oort is entirely fair to Girard about modernity.

This extends to Christianity. Girard thinks that modernity is the working out of Christianity, or more accurately, the working out of a crisis introduced by Christianity. van Oort finds this one-dimensional, and no doubt annoying.[40] However, I’m not sure that he gets past this by appealing to GA’s more sophisticated distinctions between artistic forms and aesthetic epochs, or by the appeal to modernity’s adaptive capability vis-a-vis resentment. Girard would say that these, too, are a working out of a specifically Christian crisis. In fact, I’m not persuaded that GA is not saying the same thing, in so many words.[41] The issue, therefore, is not that Girard emphasizes Christianity but how.

This is the relation of Christianity to modernity, which goes to the heart of other differences with GA. In GA, resentment can be transmuted and defused. For instance, as van Oort notes—one of his most cogent points—the culminating violence in Hamlet for Girard is an “escalation to extremes,” even a prophecy of nuclear annihilation![42] But for van Oort, the violence in Hamlet is a representation which can substitute for violence: resentment finds a creative stand-in, even for Hamlet himself when he orchestrates his play within a play.[43] Here van Oort demonstrates the incisive qualities of GA: its respect for the aesthetic medium and its attention to the processes of modernity vis-a-vis the problem of escalating resentment. GA and mimetic theory may never agree here, because the Christian-infused perspective of mimetic theory will see van Oort’s example from Hamlet (substituting the bloodletting on stage for bloodletting in real life) as cheap grace, while the more secular spirit of GA will see Girard’s reading as nutty fanaticism, like the street corner prophet holding a sign saying “Repent! The end is near!”

This leads back to Jane Austen, who is no fanatic but does believe in repentance. Repentance—whether or not it is Girard’s extreme version—should perhaps be taken as seriously as a solution to resentment as the dizzying adaptations of modernity, at least as useful as watching a bloody play, buying a new pair of sneakers, or—as Marianne discovers—expressing oneself through “swoons” and “frenzy fits.” I hope to establish in the next section that Austen’s “two audiences” facilitates a “Gospel hermeneutic.” The problem in the structure of the narrative becomes the reader’s own problem of méconnaissance, which Austen angles toward moral introspection. Since Austen is deeply mimetic in a way that Girard must certainly have appreciated, I think this aspect of Austen’s narrative structure can work to correct some of Girard’s missteps, as canvassed above in van Oort’s objections as well as my own.

Repentance, Misinterpretation and Austen’s Gospel Hermeneutic

To speak of repentance, an obvious point is that Marianne repents. She finally comprehends the heroism of her sister Elinor, who endures suffering comparable to her own but with forbearance and self-sacrifice, all the while holding the family together and nursing Marianne through her afflictions. Suitably humbled, Marianne renounces the violent indulgence of emotion that endangered herself and burdened those around her, especially Elinor. Marianne vows to keep her feelings in check and think about others.[44]

If this tidy moralism were the real takeaway for Marianne, we would have an uplifting but forgettable tale. It conforms to the “serious” reading of SS and the assumption that it constitutes a “debate” about sensibility; Marianne, in this reading, acquires common sense, and Elinor, perhaps, a bit of sensibility. This framing, as noted earlier, is seriously deficient, certainly in Marianne’s case, more egregiously in Elinor’s. Marianne’s “repentance,” though commendable, stops short of real self-knowledge. It allows her to preserve her sensibility, her méconnaissance, the conviction that her feelings, frankness and impetuosity bubble up from some authentic core within. Marianne’s reform only requires that the “selfish” part be reined in, and that she have more consideration for others.

In the Girardian view, this is quite unconvincing. Marianne’s sensibility was never about too much independence but the opposite, mimetic agitation. She is not suddenly learning to think about other people; she has been obsessing about them the whole time. This is clear from the satirical reading of Marianne, and strongly reinforced by its many correspondences to Love and Freindship. If we forgot, it is because our judgment was clouded by Marianne’s sufferings. Austen prods us back into the satirical perspective in the end, with Marianne’s romantic anti-climax in her marriage to Brandon, “whom, two years before, she had considered too old to be married,—and who still sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat!”[45] The arc of Marianne’s repentance ends with Brandon’s flannel waistcoat.

Everyone can enjoy a chuckle about this, the serious audience and the satirical audience alike.  Recalling such incongruities is a classic ironic device for Austen to, especially in her conclusions. However, like other such quips, the joke is on us. What exactly is so funny? For the “serious” audience, to chuckle about Brandon is to tacitly admit something they knew all along: Marianne’s sensibility was frivolous, superficial; she bases her ideals on waistcoats. Marianne’s amendment is certainly welcome, and nicely ties up the ostensible thematic framing of the novel, but no one takes it too seriously. Marianne lacks moral depth and everyone knows it. The real moral struggle has been Elinor’s, not Marianne’s; this does not even need to be “debated.”

But if there is no comparison, what about that “debate” between sense and sensibility? How can the serious reader believe in that debate, yet not really believe in it? How can Marianne’s problem be that she just feels too much (as per the sensibility debate) and that her feelings are superficial? The wry chuckle about Brandon’s waistcoat reveals that there is something discordant in the reader’s interpretation.

Satirically minded readers do not escape this quandary, though it assumes a different form. Brandon’s waistcoat is funny because it is unsexy, falling comically short of Marianne’s romantic expectations and making a particularly glaring contrast with Willoughby. This sort of critical reaction has even become a trope, as when Billy Crystal’s character in When Harry Met Sally cynically deconstructs the ending of Casablanca: it is tragic because Ingrid Bergman chooses altruism over Humphrey Bogart and must remain sexually unfulfilled. In fact, the conclusion of SS disappoints many readers exactly for its romantic blandness, not only with Brandon but also Edward, who is underwhelming as Elinor’s ardent lover.[46] With Marianne and Willoughby, Austen sets the bar exceedingly high for “hot” romance, then turns around and frustrates expectations—an exercise she repeats and amplifies in Mansfield Park.[47]

Since Austen is quite capable of satisfying romantic resolutions (e.g., Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice) the romantic blandness concluding SS is not an artistic lapse but something deliberate: Austen is provoking an adverse reaction. When we chuckle at Brandon’s flannel waistcoat, we confirm this. Marianne “settled,” stooped laughably far from her romantic ideal. The reaction signifies that we resent the resolution with Brandon, and pine for Willoughby! Yet, as an opportunistic con man who unscrupulously plays to Marianne’s romantic sensibilities but makes life choices strictly according to calculated self-interest, Willoughby is literally the “romantic lie.”  In addition, their exhibitionist romance in the early stages of their attraction represented both peak sensibility for Marianne, and peak satire for Austen.

If we chuckle satirically about Brandon’s waistcoat because it is unsexy, we are undercut by the larger satire about sensibility. We are ensnared by our response. To disdain Brandon is to still want Willoughby, but to still want Willoughby is to demonstrate our susceptibility to the “romantic lie.” If we presume to be on the inside with Austen, or even against Austen (e.g., dissatisfied with the romantic resolution) we will find ourselves on the outside, the object of satire. Readers’ misinterpretations thus become intrinsic to the story.

Lest this extrapolation from Brandon’s waistcoat seem unconvincing, there is an earlier example, where the same process is unmistakable. Edward adopts a satirical stance regarding Marianne’s appreciation of picturesque beauty, a hallmark of sensibility. Edward mockingly presents several picturesque clichés, to rile Marianne. Elinor then intervenes with an incisive comment:

“I suspect,” said Elinor, “that to avoid one kind of affectation, Edward here falls into another. Because he believes many people pretend to more admiration of the beauties of nature than they really feel, and is disgusted with such pretensions, he affects greater indifference and less discrimination in viewing them himself than he possesses. He is fastidious and will have an affectation of his own.”[48]

If Marianne’s admiration of picturesque beauty is the “cool” thing, Edward is “cooler” by being conspicuously uncool, uber cool. But, as Elinor points out, such a perspective, that of the smirking satirist, is itself vulnerable to satire.

If we think we are one step ahead of Edward, adopting Elinor’s stance, are we vulnerable to satire as well? Are we also striking an affectation? Ironic knowingness with Austen always risks such self-incrimination. This is the game—a rather devious cat and mouse game—that Austen plays with her “clever” readers, while her “naïve” readers will branch off toward a different sort of misinterpretation. That is, readers may be like Edmund, or they may be like Marianne. (This, of course, is just another way of characterizing the “double effect.”)

My contention is that the participation of the reader in this process is part of Austen’s point about sensibility, about the méconnaissance. Just as the misrecognition inherent in “sensibility” will come to apply to many more characters than just Marianne, both in SS and in the masterpieces to follow, this méconnaissance also applies to us as readers. There are interpretive traps that, when we fall into them, betray us as having the same mimetic symptoms as the characters. Yet, when we do fall into them—here I deviate from Girard’s approach—it is not that we belong to a “dull” Austen audience that doesn’t get her, as opposed to the “clever” one that does.

What is happening instead is that we are “falling into” the novel, becoming part of Austen’s story, and most importantly, removing the moral distance between ourselves and the characters. Austen is facilitating moral engagement by entangling us in the narrative, making us trip over our contradictory perspectives. Again, this pervades Austen’s writing and is particularly hard to escape in the later novels, yet it is already strongly present in SS.[49] There is a crucial sense in which the novels are interpreting us, rather than us interpreting the novels. This is what I characterize as Austen’s “gospel hermeneutic” (discussed below). Austen’s goal is to foster introspection.

A solution is emerging, then, to Girard’s “two audiences” problem, something that works like subliminal awareness or peripheral vision. The “two audiences” can exist in one person, in the conflicted consciousness of the reader. This is like Girard’s “conscious unconscious,” which troubled van Oort (in the previous section) because it allowed Girard to put forward unfalsifiable assertions. Here, however, I can make a limited case for it, because the méconnaissance has demonstrable effects in Austen’s writing. For instance, a reader can chortle about Brandon’s flannel waistcoat, which essentially deconstructs Marianne’s “sensibility,” yet still believe somehow that the novel encompasses a serious debate about sensibility. The contradictions inherent in the “double reading” (and no reader escapes them), even if not grasped explicitly, create this subliminal dissonance.

This also addresses the problem of canonicity, raised earlier: how can Girard’s revelatory works become canonical if the generations that establish their canonicity are blind to that very revelatory quality? It is because they are not blind to it, after all; the revelatory elements come in under the radar. The mimesis is hidden in plain sight. Its subtle but insistent presence destabilizes the reading experience, yet that destabilization is one of the things that animates the narrative and makes it inexhaustible—in other words, canonical. This is one reason Austen lovers can go back to her novels again and again and make new discoveries, since its revelations flit in and out of awareness, constantly revealing different sides of the same thing.

Thus, this also addresses the issue of the multivalent reading experience, where Girard (as noted earlier) would seem to insist on a single, correct interpretation of a great literary work, the mimetic one. In fact, there is not going to be a single mimetic interpretation because every reader will be bringing in different mimetic baggage. A reader could be a Marianne, or the reader could be an ironic hipster like Edward. In Mansfield Park this effect is even stronger because readers reproduce the foibles of a far greater menagerie of characters.[50] Austen perfects this art of bringing readers under judgment by their inadvertent identification with conspicuously flawed characters. And again, in the reader’s act of interpreting the novel, it is actually the novel that is interpreting the reader. This is in fact quite an important element in Girard’s literary interpretation, or at least, it is consistent with the direction of it.[51]

In Girard’s story of stories, the gospel narrative, this effect is constant. Jeremiah Alberg has provided a particularly lucid exposition of this process, exemplified in Jesus’ scandalous explanation of his own parables: “That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.”[52] Jesus tells the disciples that they get it, but that he is speaking in parables to the crowd exactly so that they won’t get it—a shockingly outrageous and insensitive statement and one that, as Alberg notes, has indeed been a stumbling block to biblical commentators.

For present purposes, we can note that the gospel verse is a “two audiences” formulation. It is useful here to highlight the parallels with earlier pairings:

• • Jesus’ disciples get the parables, but the crowd doesn’t.
  • Girard and a select inner circle in the gallery get Shakespeare, but the “groundlings” don’t.
  • Paula Byrne gets Austen, but Ang Lee doesn’t.

A moment’s reflection on the foibles of Jesus’ disciples is enough to make the first contrast questionable, and that should be enough to problematize the other two.

In fact, as Alberg shows in the analysis of the surrounding text in Mark, including the parable of the Good Samaritan, such a formulation is not the real thrust of the gospel verse. Instead, the context of the gospel narrative concerns insiders and outsiders. The moment one thinks one is on the inside (for instance, as a presumptuous disciple), one finds oneself on the outside, because one has stood in judgment. This interpretation does not “resolve” itself.  Or rather, to the extent that it does resolve itself, it indicates a problem, a deficiency. There is no stable or comfortable place to stand in the gospel narrative except, maybe, at the edge of introspection and moral engagement, that is, repentance.

Austen appropriates this effect of the gospel narratives; we make judgments about characters which, if we followed through with them, would reveal either a self-contradiction, or an unflattering similarity with a flawed character that is actually in the narrative. To bring this back to Girard, Austen’s “double effect” shows how Girard’s “unconscious,” operating alertly but half-aware, can accommodate an audience that can “get it” even when it “doesn’t get it.” As in the gospel narrative, that means everyone.

This could have been emphasized more by Girard, since it accords well with his “interdividual” psychology, where no-one escapes the gravity well of mimetic desire.[53] It is unfortunate that Girard’s “expository arrogance” handicaps this presentation. Too eager, no doubt, to emphasize the proprietary “firstness” of his intellectual discoveries, Girard emphasizes the méconnaissance of everyone else. Yet in setting this tone, he is hobbling one of the strengths of the mimetic interpretation, which is that it is obvious, that it is hovering just beyond the focus of attention, for all to see, if they would but look. Girard himself often effectively elucidates this barely-under-the-surface aspect of mimesis.[54] The “expository arrogance” distracts us from the moral implications of Girard’s discovery: the act of interpretation becomes a moral act, and there is a sense in which no reader escapes it.

There is an aspect of this “spirituality”—if we deign to call it that—that is transferable to the categories of GA. Though GA tends to be allergic to Girard’s Christianity, the disagreeable aspects of Girard with his “two audiences” comes, as just argued, not from his Christianity but from his failure to follow through with his Christianity, owing perhaps to intellectual pride. However, if we look past that, at mimetic desire as a problem of resentment and at representation as an ongoing remedy to it, we can see how Austen’s “introspection” creates an “inner scene” of representation.[55] As with Alberg’s mimetic exegesis of the gospels, one can fancy oneself at the center of this scene of representation in SS, e.g., in sympathy to Marianne, or standing next to Austen in confederacy, as a smirking satirist. Yet any such interpretation, if interrogated, can be destabilized, and one will suddenly be on the periphery. This alternation of narrative presumption and narrative culpability is an alternation of center and periphery. It is an ongoing dynamic of introspection and repentance, not necessarily complete, as in Marianne’s case, but never without value.

Brett Easton Ellis’s modern classic American Psycho (1991) has distinctly time specific aspects in its setting. As suggested by Mattius Rischard, “Bateman’s ‘yuppie’ identity could […] be considered a commodity, meticulously cultivated like that of any celebrity artist, actor, or director (Bateman imagines himself as all three) meant to convey to others his indomitable sense of taste in more commodities” (438). That description constitutes one possible holistic understanding of Ellis’s novel. Everything is a commodity—or on the way to becoming one— including the protagonist and the actual materiality of the book in the reader’s hand, and in addition its potential electronic materiality in our time. However, the novel also has dimensions that probe into capitalism and human desire on a more universal level. These are aspects that cannot be limited to the yuppie era, which stereotypically highlights the frivolous celebration of the capitalist carnival as an aesthetic phenomenon, albeit a brutally empty one. I would claim that the narrative is extreme in such a way that it creates a specific theoretical space that cannot be completely contained by metaphor, symbolism or allegory. That space will be roughly mapped out in what follows. By theoretical space I mean neither something abstract nor something concrete. It is rather a minimalist space of nodes, vectors and forces. However, these forces potentially affect any type of reality, either real or fictional, thus they are not abstract in the sense of being completely cut off from everything else. The present analysis shall depict the space through a palimpsest of theories by three scholars: René Girard, Eric Gans and Oswald de Andrade. The last one, being a perhaps lesser known figure, is a Brazilian twentieth century philosopher, who presented anthropophagy as a key to matriarchy, and that in turn as an important component of the conceptualisation of a possible decolonisation project. Thus, what follows below outlines three parts and each one represents one thinker and one layer in the theoretical space. Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida will contribute further context to the analysis.

The analysis boils down to three overlapping readings that do not exclude each other. The Giradian layer reveals mimetic desire in full swing, which combined with commodity fetishism accumulates violence. A possible outcome of this stratum is that the killing of Paul Owen is in fact a ritualised elimination of the scapegoat, which in the same commodity logic would mean the killing of Bateman himself, since the characters largely are depicted as interchangeable. The second level is the Gansian reading that relies heavily on the ambiguity of what is to be regarded as fiction—daydreaming, perverse fantasies etc.—and what should be seen as actually happening in novel’s “real”, which in toto displays the deferral of the appropriation of the appetitive object. Language/art/fiction constitute a deferral of real violence. In the third stratum of the theoretical space, Oswald de Andrade’s theory of anthropophagy as an instigation of matriarchy shows the way towards the vision of decolonisation. The ritual of anthropophagy escapes the enslavement of the subjects after any conquest.

Girard

The first stratum might seem to be the most obvious one. Girard’s theory about mimetic desire is blatantly present in the narrative’s overall structure. For the present reading it will suffice with a rather cursory definition of the Girardian theory. Girard states that mimetic rivalry can be observed in animal power structures and that such a phenomenon essentially resembles what goes on in the dynamics of human social life.

Mimetic rivalry is already observable in animal life. Even when food or females are not scarce, when many identical bananas, for instance, are available to a group of monkeys, fighting may erupt. We say that the purpose of these conflicts is dominance, prestige, etcetera. But the postulate of such a complex, purposeful activity is unbelievable. The cause of the fighting is simply that two or more monkeys have set their sight on the same banana, and no one wants to yield to someone else. There is nothing special about the disputed banana, except that the first to choose selected it, and this selection, however casual, triggered a chain reaction to mimetic desire that made that one banana seem preferable to all others. (Burkert, Girard, Smith 123)

Mimetic desire appears in several specific situations in Ellis’s novel, but one could also argue that it makes up the macro-structure of the entire work, obviously in combination with Baudrillardian ideas about the existence of a sign taxonomy. It is primarily among his colleagues that the protagonist reveals his being involved in the full-fledged Baudrillardian sign-value economy, which is intimately intertwined with Girardian mimetic desire. The pent-up violence becomes almost comical in conjunction and contrast with the seemingly superficial brand name and prestige economy.

Reed Thompson walks in wearing a wool plaid four-button double-breasted suit and a striped cotton shirt and a silk tie, all Armani, plus slightly tacky blue cotton socks by Interwoven and black Ferragamo cap-toe shoes that look exactly like mine, with a copy of the Wall Street Journal held in a nicely manicured fist and a Bill Kaiserman tweed balmacaan overcoat draped casually across the other arm. He nods and sits across from us at the table. Soon after, Todd Broderick walks in wearing a wool chalk-striped six-button double-breasted suit and a striped broadcloth shirt and a silk tie, all by Polo, plus an affected linen pocket square that I’m fairly sure is also by Polo. McDermott walks in next, carrying a copy of this week’s New York magazine and this morning’s Financial Times, wearing new nonprescription Oliver Peoples redwood-framed glasses, a black and white wool houndstooth-check single-breasted suit with notch lapels, a striped cotton dress shirt with spread collar and a silk paisley tie, all of it designed and tailored by John Reyle. (Ellis 108–109)

The detailed brand economy that is displayed becomes endowed with an uncanny aura in relation to the materials, mainly fabrics, being mentioned with almost the same frequency. Armani, Bill Kaiserman, John Reyle, Oliver Peoples and Polo are juxtaposed to (but also inevitably interwoven with) wool, cotton, silk and linen. These materials have to be extracted out of natural resources and they have to be prepared mostly by workers, most certainly and generally in much poorer parts of the world. There is of course a basic level of economic violence involved here already, that is, basically colonial violence in its semi-new shape of global economy. The signs added to the products map out another aspect of violence, which is revealed in the interaction between the characters, and which constitutes our first level in the stipulated theoretical space. It takes the form of a vaguely humorous quibbling about details of the manufactured materiality that the characters have in hand, but this hair-splitting is mainly about the sign-value. The uncanniness is enhanced by the presence of the powerful press items, magazines and newspapers, that are used seemingly merely as accessories in the arduous performance work needed for the participation in the spectacle of becoming the perfect image of masculinity in this historical moment. The violence in the games of distinction is even enhanced by the utter meaninglessness that they seem to grow out of and what they are able to produce. What does the layout and paper quality of a business card really mean?

The maître d’ stops by to say hello to McDermott, then notices we don’t have our complimentary Bellinis, and runs off before any of us can stop him. I’m not sure how McDermott knows Alain so well—maybe Cecilia?—and it slightly pisses me off but I decide to even up the score a little bit by showing everyone my new business card. I pull it out of my gazelleskin wallet (Barney’s, $850) and slap it on the table, waiting for reactions.

“What’s that, a gram?” Price says, not apathetically.

“New card.” I try to act casual about it but I’m smiling proudly. “What do you think?”

“Whoa,” McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. “Very nice. Take a look.” He hands it to Van Patten.

“Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday,” I mention.

“Cool coloring,” Van Patten says, studying the card closely.

“That’s bone,” I point out. “And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.”

“Silian Rail?” McDermott asks.

“Yeah. Not bad, huh?”

“It is very cool, Bateman,” Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard, “but that’s nothing….” He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. “Look at this.”

We all lean over and inspect David’s card and Price quietly says, “That’s really nice.” A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the color and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly, “Egg-shell with Romalian type…” He turns to me. “What do you think?”

“Nice,” I croak, but manage to nod, as the busboy brings four fresh Bellinis.

“Jesus,” Price says, holding the card up to the light, ignoring the new drinks. “This is really super. How’d a nitwit like you get so tasteful?”

I’m looking at Van Patten’s card and then at mine and cannot believe that Price actually likes Van Patten’s card better. Dizzy, I sip my drink then take a deep breath. (Ellis 43–44)

Again, there is a distinct materiality that blatantly pushes the reading in the direction of raw colonialism, as in the crude reference to the wallet of “gazelleskin”. In addition to the aggression pulsing just under the surface, the micro-level of minimal distinction is noteworthy. The miniscule differences between the cards enhance the force of mimetic desire. It is almost as if the object disappears and the cards could be equated with the identical bananas in Girard’s example above. It just has to be there as a minimal node-point of reference, since the agents are occupied by the competition of ranking each other in relation to one another, as yet another level of commodification, but which is itself meaningless since the characters are next to identical. For instance, Owen consistently refers to Bateman by the name Halberstam, but this does not seem to matter (Ellis 111). Explicitly articulated, the competition is based on becoming the owner of the ideal card, or the banana that has been endowed with the metaphysical power of being the object everyone wants. The passage clearly illustrates the autonomous character of this force. In addition we notice how the object becomes bestowed with value as a consequence of the powers of desire, which in all is a phenomenon we recognise from situations of children’s play. The dark side of homo ludens, so to speak. A certain toy may suddenly become the most precious thing on the playground, but not until the trajectories of desire become explicit. Bateman’s whole existence seems to hang in the balance. He reacts physically on the ranking of the cards by croaking and feeling “a spasm of jealousy” run through his body.

The above is intimately intertwined with the capitalist logic and fetishism that Jean Baudrillard has thoroughly analysed. Just a short summary will be enough in our context.

In effect, our hypothesis is that needs (i.e., the system of needs) are the equivalent of abstract social labor: on them is erected the system of use value, just as abstract social labor is the basis for the system of exchange value. This hypothesis also implies that, for there to be a system at all, use value and exchange value must be regulated by an identical abstract logic of equivalence, an identical code. The code of utility is also a code of abstract equivalence of objects and subjects (for each category in itself and for the two taken together in their relation); hence, it is a combinatory code involving potential calculation […]. Furthermore, it is in itself, as system, that use value can be “fetishized,” and certainly not as a practical operation. It is always the systematic abstraction that is fetishized. The same goes for exchange value. And it is the two fetishizations, reunited—that of use value and that of exchange value—that constitute commodity fetishism. (Baudrillard 102)

Commodity fetishism can then easily utilise brand labels as shorthand for the structuring of a particular prestige economy. American Psycho is completely immersed in such an economy. We must attempt to understand the narrative’s violence in combination with Girard’s theory. Does this kind of capitalist regulation of desire produce violence or is it an underlying violence that the system tries to repress? It seems that the theoretical space would allow for a few different responses to this question. For instance, the scapegoat in Girard, violence turned into language and fiction as deferral in Gans’s originary scene, or as decolonisation through anthropophagy and matriarchal resurrection in de Andrade’s theory.

The theme of pent-up violence is emphasised in the narrative by the protagonist’s ludicrous motivations of subjective rankings of popular music works. However, what is clear is that at least on a superficial level, violence is depicted as the underlying force of the seemingly tidy capitalist organisation of desire. When Bateman has brought Paul Owen—one specimen of his circle of near identical “friends” to his home—he either wants to eliminate a competitor or he wants to ritually eliminate an image of himself, potentially himself as a commodity. It does not matter to Bateman that such an image is incarnated in another human being. In his pathological haze, he does not see human beings. Whether this whole incident is “real” at all on the novel’s plane of “reality” is something I will attempt to approach further below.

“Why are there, um, copies of the Style section all over the place?” he asks tiredly. “Do you have a dog? A chow or something?”

“No, Owen.” I move slowly around the chair until I’m facing him, standing directly in his line of vision, and he’s so drunk he can’t even focus in on the ax, he doesn’t even notice once I’ve raised it high above my head. Or when I change my mind and lower it to my waist, almost holding it as if it’s a baseball bat and I’m about to swing at an oncoming ball, which happens to be Owen’s head.

Owen pauses, then says, “Anyway, I used to hate Iggy Pop but now he’s so commercial I like him a lot better than—”

The ax hits him midsentence, straight in the face, its thick blade chopping sideways into his open mouth, shutting him up. Paul’s eyes look up at me, then involuntarily roll back into his head then back at me, and suddenly his hands are trying to grab the handle, but the shock of the blow has sapped his strength. (Ellis 217)

The explicit violence ties in with the explicit sex scenes and the semi-pornographic descriptions of popular culture items, which encompass artists as well as fashion and clothing. The world constructed in American Psycho is precisely world or matter through and through. It constitutes a material entity in which God could not exist, which reminds the reader of the very first sentence of the novel, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE”, which is actually a billboard text seen from a taxi and arguably it becomes the caption for what will unfold in the novel, the depiction of nineteen-eighties New York as an earthly inferno (Ellis 3).

Remaining on this level of our theoretical palimpsest in hyper-theoretical space, we could explain the whole narrative in terms of it making explicit the violence that underpins any capitalist civilisation. In that theoretical scenario, Patrick incarnates the patriarchal phallos and on all levels of the narrative he just confirms his masculine status. He incarnates the aggressive phallos. In having ritualised, emotionless sex with women that are looked upon as empty dolls, Bateman would further consolidate the validity of such a theory. It would be a depiction of the capitalist machine as primarily following the principle of the father, the male phallic violence at the core of the capitalist order. In Mary Harron’s film version, this is stressed by means of the narcissist behaviour of the protagonist, which is a behaviour that perhaps is best illustrated in the medium of film, since Narcissus was precisely infatuated with his own image. Mirrors and fictionalised filming within the film that reify the kingdom of projection, that is, the order of commodification made manifest and sustained. In all, this phenomenon partly explains why images and filmclips were and are so dominant in our late capitalist era. Moreover, the rather macabre and seemingly “real” splitting of the victim’s mouth, actually also in “midsentence”, illustrates the more violent deconstructive move. If we think of Girard’s theories of the scapegoat, this particular killing could be seen as a desperate action on the part of the protagonist. Perhaps this act does not have any grounding in envy and competition. Bateman wants to eradicate himself, or himself as a commodity by murdering a colleague who is identical to himself. He would of course not be fully aware of this: “No group addicted to scapegoating will knowingly publicize the fact. Its arbitrary scapegoats will be presented, if not as culprits deliberately bent on evil, at least as individuals unwittingly responsible for some disastrous event” (Girard 82). In Bateman’s world, Paul Owen is made guilty of revealing the arbitrariness and hollowness of the commodity economy they belong to. That is unbearable. In order to find a more pacifist understanding of the “split”, we need to turn to Gans and Generative Anthropology.

Gans

The violence already detailed above pushes us in the direction of Gans’s primary scene. The deferral of appropriation of the appetitive object gives rise to language as a means of negotiation and avoidance of immediate violence. This deferral is different from what we find in for instance deconstruction. In New Way of Thinking: Generative Anthropology in Religion, Philosophy, Art, Gans makes the distinction in relation to Derrida clear.

Postmodernism rejects the claimed “purity” of the phenomenological intuition. In La voix et le phénomène (1967), Derrida showed the unexamined presupposition of phenomenology to be the speaking subject’s self-presence in his voice; this deconstruction of the linguistic subject was subsequently extended to the whole metaphysical-religious universe of “(phal)logocentrism.” Deconstruction shows that the phenomenological subject is not alone with the object he “intends”; his experience is in fact mediated by language. Yet instead of seeking the ground of both language and phenomenological intuition in the human community, deconstruction limits itself to demonstrating the dependence of the (metaphysical, religious, ideological) discourse guaranteed by this intuition on the philosophical original sin, the usurpation of the (sacred) center of the scene of representation by the Subject of metaphysics, which parallels the big-man ‘s similar usurpation in the politico-economic sphere. Derrida shows that the “pure” self-presence of the Subject is in fact mediated by différance, the deferral/difference that always already inhabits the sign itself, which he attributes to its dependence on a paradigm of differences. (Gans 170)

Derrida would claim that the split constitutes a split in the sign, which would generate deferral in terms of meaning. For Derrida, the split in the sign mysteriously precedes any idea of a situation in which humanity would have felt the need for communication, hence his convoluted responses to, for instance, what arche-writing really is. Gans places a much more concrete and specific cultural value to the deferral of appropriation of the appetitive object. In relation to American Psycho, the difference between the deferrals is significant. Oddly enough, the originary split of action and language, and language giving rise to fiction and narrativity, can constitute Generative Anthropology’s response to American Psycho. The deferral of violence is partly achieved in terms of the ontological ambiguity that underpins the whole narrative. The audience or collective of readers cannot know what is fiction and what might potentially be real on the narrative’s stipulated plane of the real. What is in Bateman’s mind and what actually happens on the plot-level of the narrative? That question could only be answered by adding more fiction to the existing fiction. However, in the hyper-theoretical space, we do not have to—indeed we cannot—eradicate any layer. The strata are complementary to each other. A scholar well versed in Gans’s theory would realise that the actual consumption of the female as the appetitive object would collapse the whole set-up, it would paradoxically be the end of fiction. The object of desire cannot be actually eaten, but it could very well be fictionalised as being eaten. This layer of our theoretical space then confirms and partly explicates the prevailing fictional–vs–real ambiguity and aesthetic oscillation. If the cannibalism is fictionalised by the arguably schizophrenic Bateman, then the primary scene may be the layer in our theoretical space that holds up the whole building. But, what about the father? Is the bottom line that American Psycho solely confirms the domination of the patriarchal phallogocentric logic? The shift is only from concrete violent masculinity to symbolic masculinity in the shape of the production of fiction.

In any case, our analysis could easily find an ample amount of evidence for the idea that much of the violence is sublimated through fantasy and day dreaming, in short, various modes of fiction. The clearest case is the denial of Paul Owen’s death, since Carnes claims to have had lunch with Owen in London, not only once but twice, chronologically after Bateman must have killed Owen, if he actually committed the deed (Ellis 388).

De Andrade

It is in terms of the explicit cannibalism that this narrative adds yet another layer to the already established ones. The patriarchal logic of the master/father is strongly manifested after the anthropological step from anthropophagy to conquering and enslaving. As formulated by Luis Fellipe Garcia:

[The] contrast can help us understand how Andrade presents the transition from the economy of a matriarchal society to the one of a patriarchal one. Indeed, as affirms the Brazilian philosopher, ‘the historic rupture with the matriarchal world happened when man stopped devouring his Other in order to enslave him’ – from the advent of this practice of enslavement, derived ‘the division of labour and the organization of society in classes’ (Andrade 1978, p. 81). In other words, the transition from a tribe-based society with no private property to a patriarchal family-based one with private property is operated through the enslavement of the members of the tribe, so as to force them to work not for themselves, but for a master who will profit from the fruits of their labour. (Garcia 131; italics in original)

De Andrade and Garcia’s point here sheds an interesting interpretative light on the cannibalism in American Psycho. Since most of the narrative reads as a manifestation of patriarchal capitalism, the anthropophagic aspect needs to be explained. As mentioned, if it only symbolises the devouring of the appetitive object, the whole fiction would collapse. But if we take the layer of de Andrade into consideration, we get another outcome. We need this explanation available in the third stratum of the hyper-theoretical space. This elucidation has to be able to co-exist with the aforementioned theories of mimetic desire and the originary scene. Interestingly, the cannibalism of the written work could not be represented in the film, or perhaps they were rather chosen not to be. If they would have been, they would have had to be strongly veiled by fictionalising filters. Otherwise, such outrageous rituals would potentially jeopardise the ambiguity tensions that are so carefully built up.

However, in our posited theoretical space, de Andrade and Garcia’s suggestion becomes relevant. The ultimate transgression is adorned with the same absurd consumerist and popular cultural references as much else in the narrative.

In the kitchen I try to make meatloaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body, then I rest by watching a tape of last week’s new CBS sitcom, Murphy Brown. After that and a large glass of J&B I’m back in the kitchen. The head in the microwave is now completely black and hairless and I place it in a tin pot on the stove in an attempt to boil any remaining flesh I forgot to shave off. Heaving the rest of her body into a garbage bag—my muscles, slathered with Ben-Gay, easily handling the dead weight—I decide to use whatever is left of her for a sausage of some kind. (345)

If we disregard the almost comedy-like layer of the narration and the simplistic reading of capitalism as the beast under the polished surface, we need to process also what this means in the hyper-theoretical space, which actually does not have any facile ethical conclusions in itself. Not even that it is the ultimate taboo to eat your own kind. Anthropophagy then has to be seen as a pure ritual that governs this layer in hyper-theoretical space. So philosophically, the reader is either consciously or subconsciously being made aware of a vision that functions as a challenge to the patriarchal, capitalist, phallogocentric order. As formulated by Garcia:

The culture opposed to Messianism is, as we have seen, the one that is consolidated within matriarchal societies, namely, Anthropophagy. It is important to highlight, as the Brazilian philosopher carefully does, that Anthropophagy is not to be understood as the practice of pure cannibalism, that is, the practice of eating human flesh out of gluttony or hunger, but rather as something associated to the ritual practices of native tribes for which the consumed flesh represents a vision of the world, a vision that, through the ritualized process of deglutition, is incorporated and transfigured into a new vision within a sort of epistemic metamorphosis. As a consequence, Anthropophagy is to be understood as a Weltanschauung aiming at perceiving existence from the perspective of alterity, a vision according to which the world is a space containing numerous perceptual bodies that should be incorporated so that we can progressively engender more comprehensive visions of existence. (Garcia 134)

Thus, it is as a layer of vision or Weltanschauung that we may see anthropophagy as an escape-way out of the capitalist nightmare. Moreover, this vision is strongly dependent on the fictional ambiguity. Presumably, cannibalism is not even ‘real’ on the fictional plane of the narrative about Patrick Bateman. Thus, the thought of the excess of consumerism contains the vision of its self-destruction, the abandoning of all enslavement.

However, we must also acknowledge the narrative’s own existential darkness. This tension comes out in the hyper-theoretical space too. The positive aspect of the narrative and anthropophagy can only reveal itself as an idea. Indeed, Patrick Bateman is obviously an idea.

If Bateman is an idea, we are able to confirm one of the layers in hyper-theoretical space, which is the production of fiction as an outlet to Gans’s primary scene. To be sure, this also draws attention to the human obsession with fictive violence. Thus, American Psycho can perfectly well be read as a dream rather than a nightmare. The vision of anthropophagy as the restoring of matriarchal alternatives is a Weltanschauung worth acknowledging. The dark ending is then not so dark. The no-exit is of course denoting the no-exit from fiction:

“Well, though I know I should have done that instead of not doing it, I’m twenty-seven for Christ sakes and this is, uh, how life presents itself in a bar or in a club in New York, maybe anywhere, at the end of the century and how people, you know, me, behave, and this is what being Patrick means to me, I guess, so, well, yup, uh . . .” and this is followed by a sigh, then a slight shrug and another sigh, and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry’s is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes’ color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. (399; italics in original)

Tom Bertonneau, my dear friend and prolific Anthropoetics contributor, died peacefully on September 21, 2021. I met Tom 35 years ago, during my first year of doctoral study at UCLA, when we shared a teaching assistants’ office.  We became friends almost immediately, via that alchemy through which people with overlapping interests and complementary sensibilities resonate with each other.  Soon we were socializing, and in late February of 1987, Tom asked me to do him a favor over the coming weekend.  Weekend favors among graduate students usually involved helping someone move or providing airport drop-offs and pick-ups, but this one was different.  Tom’s fiancée Susan was president of the French Graduate Students Association, and they were hosting a guest speaker on Saturday, March 7.  Worried that the event would be sparsely attended, Tom secured my promise to show up.  The speaker?  René Girard, who on that Spring afternoon changed my life’s intellectual course.

By introducing me to Girard and his thought, Tom therefore played a larger role in my graduate education than many of my professors.  Tom and I were eager participants in Eric Gans’s first several Generative Anthropology seminars, and presented at the first GA Symposium at UCLA in 1990.  Tom also spearheaded the GA session at the 1994 MLA, where we first met Richard Van Oort.  Through the next three decades Tom taught at Central Michigan University and the State University of New York at Oswego while publishing books and articles on a wide range of topics with astonishing, even superhuman frequency.  Though he never held a tenured faculty position, he was a model academic:  interested in everything, relentlessly logical, a generous and challenging teacher, and a patient explicator and courageous defender of the majesty of the Western philosophical, aesthetic, and literary traditions.

If there ever was a polymath, it was Tom.  When we first met, I was astonished by his encyclopedic knowledge not only of the classical literary tradition, but also his appreciation of all music genres, from Cajun Zydeco to Ralph Vaughan-Williams.  He also seemed to have read every science fiction book ever written, from Wells and Burroughs, through Asimov and Bradbury, to mid-century pulp magazines.  He was also a connoisseur of science fiction films, and could discourse authoritatively on all of them, from schlock masterpieces like Mars Needs Women to high-concept philosophical epics like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Tom was also an expert on the philosophy and religion of late Antiquity, 19^th-century American literature, Nobel Laureate Knut Hamsun, the English novelist and cultural critic Colin Wilson, 19^th-century French literature—really, anything he put his mind to.

The quirkiest interest Tom and I shared, though, was in military aircraft, particularly propeller-driven planes of World War II.  As a boy, I had built model aircraft kits, and like all children of the 1960s was steeped in admiration for supersonic jets and space flight.  In Tom I found a fellow aviation enthusiast; but, as usual, his knowledge dwarfed mine. An especially fond memory I have is of the afternoon Tom and I took his father to the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California, where we inspected P-51 Mustangs and Grumman TBF Avengers before clambering through the fuselage of a Boeing B-17.  One of Tom’s final blog entries at Orthosphere reviews the history of the Italian Air Force in World War II, which had the distinction of having designed and flown the fastest and most agile military biplane, the Fiat CR42.  At first glance, it seems odd that a deep-dyed humanist and aesthete like Tom would be thrilled by flying machines.  But he believed that the invention of powered flight was a miracle, born of a marriage between the unique human capacities of imagination and technology, and therefore worthy of awe.  He told me once that while hiking alone in the mountains of eastern California, he waved at a passing fighter jet, which dipped its wings in reply.  Like a wink from an angel, that pilot’s gesture acknowledged, he said, both Tom’s individual significance and the skyward gaze of humanity’s collective quest for transcendence.

Tom’s middle name was Felix—Latin for “happy.”  And though he wrote through the last dozen or so years of his life many articles deeply critical of the direction in which higher education was tending (see, for example, this, this, and this), Tom never lost his sense of humor, and never spiraled into cynicism.  Tom was a happy warrior, as well as a gentle and generous friend.  That generosity expressed itself in many ways, not least in the voluminous writings that hint at the range and depth of his capacious mind.  Like Tom, those writings are fearless, and represent the right way to engage with contemporary intellectual trends that airily dismiss logic, reason, and the hard-won insights into the nature of things that are preserved by the artistic, literary, and philosophical achievements Tom Bertonneau cherished.

Rest in peace, my dear friend.  Yours was a life well-lived in the warmth of family and friendship, and you fought valiantly against academic flim-flammery, cant, and the ways in which the current educational establishment is deepening “civilizational twilight.”  Let us take from your example increased courage and devotion to preserving and sharing humanity’s magnificent accomplishments.

Ben Barber is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature Studies at United International College: Hong Kong Baptist University – Beijing Normal University. He teaches courses on literary theory, world literature, composition, and rhetoric. His previous publications in Anthropoetics have addressed nineteenth-century British poetry, early modern drama, and the work of Hunter S. Thompson.

Ian Dennis is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa and Secretary-Treasurer of the Generative Anthropology Society & Conference. He is the author of four published novels, of the Girardian study Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997), and of Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009), a work of literary criticism making use of both mimetic theory and generative anthropology. He was the chief organiser of the 2009 GA conference in Ottawa, and co-organiser in 2013 at UCLA and in 2019 in New York City. He is currently working on a book of GA theory tentatively titled Varieties of Aesthetic Experience, from which the present article is excerpted.

Chris Fleming is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He is the author of editor of ten books, including René Girard: Violence and Mimesis, Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid (co-written with Emma A. Jane), and On Drugs.

Adam Katz is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry, a collection of essays on Generative Anthropology, and of new editions of Eric Gans’s Science and Faith and The Origin of Language. He publishes regularly in Anthropoetics, and posts often on the GABlog. He is the author, under the name Dennis Bouvard, of Anthropomorphics, published by Imperium Press. His current writing can be found on Substack, also under the name Dennis Bouvard. He teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

Matthew Schneider is Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Behavioral Sciences at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 1991. A founding member of the first Generative Anthropology seminar with Eric Gans at UCLA in 1987, Schneider has continued his involvement with GA for more than thirty years, contributing ten articles to Anthropoetics, guest-authoring two Chronicles of Love and Resentment, and publishing an essay in Adam Katz’s The Originary Hypothesis. He has organized three Generative Anthropology Summer Conferences, and his articles on nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory, and Biblical exegesis have appeared in Dalhousie Review, European Romantic Review, Poetics Today, Legal Studies Forum, and Symbiosis.

Matthew Taylor is Professor of English at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan. He teaches courses in English as a Foreign Language (EFL), academic writing, teacher training and culture. He has written on EFL pedagogy, literature, the intersection of science and the humanities, film, social issues, mimetic theory, and generative anthropology. He has co-authored textbooks with National Geographic Learning and Macmillan LanguageHouse. His articles for Anthropoetics have explored social phenomena in Japan, socioeconomic issues, generative anthropology, mimetic theory, and the novels of Jane Austen.

Dr. Joakim Wrethed has hitherto mainly worked in Irish Studies—especially on John Banville—but he also explores the contemporary novel in English more generally without any primary emphasis on national boundaries. Phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics and theology are overarching topics of his scholarly work. Some of the more recent publications have been on Irish Literature as World Literature (on Banville, Joyce, Yeats and Beckett), and The Postmodern Gothic. He has also published within the topic areas of Generative Anthropology and Girardian theory.

It’s long past time for originary thinking to think technics, which is emerging, in the wake of the work of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler in particular, as a term to refer to the co-constitution of the human with the “exteriorizations” through which humans act on (and are acted upon by) the world and each other. I would like to establish the necessity to do so by pointing to a technical issue in GA, which is to say, a scaling problem. The mimetic interactions and central concepts of Girardian mimetic theory and then Gansian Generative Anthropology are unduly tied to, first, scenes upon which all persons are present to each other (small groups) and, second, literature, especially the realist novel (and Shakespeare, as read consistently with realist novels), and to some extent, the lyric. Concepts like envy, desire and resentment are readily intelligible on this small scale: we know what it means to be envious of a neighbor, resentful of a more successful coworker, to desire the possessions or attributes of another person.

Our representational technologies are suited to this scale, but these concepts don’t scale up in any obvious way. What can it mean to speak, on a social scale, of millions of people of some more or less arbitrarily designated group “resenting” millions of members of some other vaguely defined group? What do we imagine we’re describing if we say something like “women resent men,” “blacks resent whites,” “whites resent immigrants,” etc.? All members of the “resenting” group “feeling” in unison, continuously, and doing nothing but resenting? Resenting in a differentiated manner (some resent a lot, others less so, some not at all)? Occasionally resenting, while at other times going about their business? Wavering between resentment and admiration, or indifference?

As soon as we try to explain some event or history trajectory using such terms, we will find that we need to at least mention intermediary factors, such as the media that single out objects of desire and targets of resentment and suggest actions to pursue such desires and resentments; institutions, corporate, judicial, and law enforcement, that prevent or facilitate the enactment of some desires and resentments rather than others; educational and research institutions that provide justifications and mitigations of one or another desire or resentment, and so on. All these institutions involve technics, that is, mediations that serve as material memories of shared human practices. I don’t think it can be said that there is any sustained thinking of technics in GA, and we can’t scale up without it; and once we do scale up, our concepts will take on a different shape, at least insofar as we apply them to the historical world.

Fortunately, the world of academic theory has turned its attention to questions of technics and technology: there is the work of Benjamin Bratton, and the Strelka research group he leads, which explores the implications of what Bratton calls “planetary scale computation”; there is Yuk Hui, who in several books has followed post-Heideggerian discussions of technology through discussions of cybernetics, recursivity, Western and Chinese ethics and aesthetics, and Chinese thought on technics; design theorists like Beatrice Colomina, historians of our growing integration into informational systems like Orit Halpern or researchers into the ethical and political dilemmas of algorithmic rule like Louise Amoore, Taina Bucher and many others. If I have to generalize, I would say that what powers these discussions is a willingness to discard a squeamishness regarding the potentially totalitarian implications of modern technology, especially those types of it that seem to extend into the remaking of subjectivity, which we have inherited from both critical theory of the Frankfurt School variant and post-structuralism—both of which seemed to be consumed with preserving some “humanity” or “unruly” subjectivity from the imposition of what Jean-Francois Lyotard called the “performativity” of all human practices. That whatever is entailed in being human is inseparable from the technical is now presupposed, and this will have important implications regarding the kinds of subjectivities that must be presupposed as a basis of liberalism and democracy: to put it simply, there can be no more external human “measure” of the justice of social and political arrangements.

Part of this new thinking of technics results from the reception of thinkers of technics like André Leroi-Gourhan and Gilbert Simondon whom one might say were marginalized by the domination of structuralism and post-structuralism, thinking that finds a kind of synthesis in the work of Bernard Stiegler, who furthermore synthesizes a critical appropriation of Derrida’s “grammatology” with his reading of these precursors. The book I’m concerned with here is by Daniel Ross, a long-time translator, explicator and colleague of Stiegler. In this ambitious book he brings to bear and extends Stiegler’s thought on the entirety of our current crisis. Along the way he has an all too brief encounter with Girardian mimetic theory (unsurprisingly, no mention of Eric Gans), but I want to make the case for seeing Ross as a crucial and enabling interlocutor for those of us determined to introduce a thinking of technics into GA. To suggest briefly the lines along which I will make the case, if we can imagine speaking of mimetic crisis as death driving “entropy,” and the originary event and the linguistic world emerging from it as “negentropic” (terms Stiegler and now Ross take over from systems theory and cybernetics) we already have the terms on which we can learn from Ross and perhaps teach him a few things in turn.

The technophobia of humanists and poststructuralists alike has been complemented by a “biophobia,” or a terror of seeing human life as continuous with life in general. Here, as elsewhere, the founding of post-war thought on the revulsion from Nazism left its mark. It is here that Stiegler, and here Ross, identify the limits of Derridean deconstruction. Derrida, in one of most famous early articulations of “difference,” in a passage referencing (briefly) Leroi-Gourhan, proclaimed the “mark,” or the “gramme,” as suggesting that “inscription” needs to be considered as part of the history of “life.” Derrida, despite returning repeatedly to the need to deconstruct the boundaries between life and death, animal and human, never continued this line of inquiry, preventing his project, in Ross’s view, from fulfilling its early promise due to a reluctance to pursue the history of “inscription” beyond anything that could be called “writing.”

Stiegler retrieves this promise of a grammatology. Rather than writing, it is, for Stigler, technics that has been suppressed by metaphysics. The very fact that it is still habitual to speak of the human as something outside of technology, and affected after the fact by it, in control of or losing control over it, demonstrates the depth of this suppression. Stiegler, drawing upon Husserlian phenomenology, and continuing Derrida’s deconstruction of it, provides a simple and plausible frame for thinking technics: as retention. There is, first of all, “primary retention,” which is the “memory” of the information of life itself, encoded in the genes; there is then “secondary retention,” the memory of and capacity to repeat and, within limits, depending upon the degree of complexity of the organism, vary “action sequences” that are not transmitted beyond the individual animal. And there is, finally, the tertiary retention characterizing humans, in which material is inscribed with the results of the learning and experience of the human community. Technics, then, begins with the “mark” on some material, a mark that differentiates itself from other marks and defers the meaning indicated by the mark insofar as that meaning can only be redeemed by subsequent marks.

Stiegler acknowledges the question: whence tertiary retention? He speaks of a “default of origin,” which anyone cognizant of the originary hypothesis will find unsatisfactory. Stiegler comes close to recognizing the need to think about the origin in terms of an event in insisting that the “first” mark would be “accidental” but nevertheless meaningful. This is as far as Stiegler (and Ross, declaring any answer to the question of “invention” “impossible” [93]) goes—how this accidental meaningfulness, or meaningful accidentality, might have emerged, goes unexplained. Stiegler has not repudiated the “origin-phobia” that, along with the aforementioned technophobia and biophobia, have characterized post-War thinking (and in this case goes much further back). It seems he would rather think in terms of a gradual process in which humans would find themselves with tertiary retention without realizing how they came by it—as if the various “marks” made by our hominid predecessors came, imperceptibly, to take on a new character.

But that just means that the originary hypothesis has a different account of tertiary retention, of the objectification of memory in some material. Where, exactly, though? The sign itself? This is still “internal” to each individual member of the group, even if each matches his gesture to the others. The central object is consumed and, anyway, is not really “inscribed.” We can see why technics seems a much later development, rather than co-originary with the human itself—the intangible dimension of the scene, the transcendent center, seems not to rely on any lasting mark—memory is retained in the group as a whole. But, then, that must be the co-origin of technics—the configuration of the scene itself, maintained by the reciprocal coordination and holding in place of each by the others. That’s a kind of inscription—the scene is the marking of each by all and all by each. The originary scene is commemorated in ritual, and the specific movements, arrangements and props that organize the scene through the accretion of the memories of the group in its ongoing dialogue with the center is the origin of technology.

Life is a struggle against entropy, which is to say, it is what Ross refers as to as the “negentropic” counter-tendency to entropy. The construction of internal systems engaged in interchange with an external environment creates regulation and self-reproduction, which is nevertheless always threatened by and always defending against the broader entropic environment. The creation of structures resistant to entropy is always improbable, then, and to that extent incalculable, an observation that will have important ethical implications for Ross. The originary hypothesis is entirely consistent with the establishment of negentropic agencies and tendencies: mimesis is first of itself negentropic insofar as the capacity of members of a group to learn from each other enhances each member of the group’s ability to resist entropic tendencies; but mimesis itself turns entropic once it interferes with other group stabilizing mechanisms (the pecking order) and, more precisely, subtracts rather than adding information regarding the action sequences of other members of the group. Some knowledge of a likely range of action sequences attributable to other members of the group (of whatever species) is essential to group stability, and what characterizes a mimetic crisis is that this knowledge becomes impossible. Maybe the other members of the group will order themselves in familiar ways, but it’s at least as likely they won’t and, since there’s no way of knowing in this novel situation, it makes the most sense to assume the worst which, in turn, encourages all the others to assume the worst about you as well. The originary gesture is a highly improbable, indeed extraordinary, restoration of information exchange amongst members of the group and erects the tertiary retention that must henceforth be protected for its negentropic effectiveness.

I can’t recall any discussions in GA that take the notion of the “scenic” literally enough to consider that scenes need to be constructed, and constructed in such a way as shape actions so as to keep all members of the group in conformity with the constraints and affordances of the scene itself. The earliest ritual scenes, of course, design a scene, with props, costumes and boundaries separating the scene from what is outside of it, but also turning what is outside of the scene into potential supports for a modified or expanded scene, so as to align everyone in the relation to the center dictated by the center. In constructing scenes, material is inscribed and arranged so as to derive information from the center. If we think scenically in this way, we are prepared to enter fully into commerce with discourses such as Ross’s, and provide an anthropological “density” lacking in Ross’s discussion.

Such scenic thinking, that is, is what will enable GA to scale up. Indeed, rather than Ross’s still subject-centered analysis of the political, which remains focused on the kinds of citizens need to sustain negentropic institutions (an important question, of course), we can argue for a more center-focused approach that tracks the successive occupations of the center, from the divine beast of the earliest human communities, through the Big Man, sacred kingship, divine kingship, empire, through to today’s liberal democratic centralizing anti-centrism. We can think of the kind of scenes that need to be constructed in each case so as ensure that information flows back and forth between center and periphery.

There would be plenty of room for productive disagreements here—a liberal case might be made, for example, to the effect that with sufficiently trained and rehearsed “actors” (“educated citizens” in a high trust society), a wide dispersal of scenes allowing for high levels of improvisation would allow for an ongoing exchange with a minimally authoritative center temporarily occupied by figures who are selected from and reintegrate back into the periphery following their tenure. This would, furthermore, direct our attention to the construction of scenes (“educational” and “media”) that ensure the kinds of necessary “rehearsals.” It would also keep us aware that all of us, as participants in the design of whatever scenes we contribute to, are ourselves fully products of the scenes we have rehearsed on and for, scenes designed by those whose work we continue.

Stiegler, as Ross points out, draws upon the invention of alphabetic writing, as analyzed in the work of the linguist Sylvain Auroux, to develop the concept of “grammatization,” which is “Auroux’s name for the process necessary for the temporal flow of speech to be turned into the spatial and material forms of alphabetic writing, necessarily involving the discrimination and analysis, not necessarily conscious, of the discrete phonetic elements that would become the letters” (38). This is critical to Stiegler’s revision and continuation of the project of grammatology initiated by Derrida:

Stiegler’s genius was to recognize that a process of spatialization, materialization, discretization and analysis lies at the root, not just of the alphabetic writing that made possible the Greek polis and its tragedy, philosophy and democracy, but also of the industrial revolution. In the latter case, however, this was a process of grammatization applied not to the temporal flow of speech but to the temporal flow of gesture, and, more specifically, of the gestures of the tool-equipped hands (those hands that are the exosomatic consequence of the pre-hominin foot that becomes implied by the tool) of workers possessing the knowledge of how to craft material objects, from the weaver to the potter to the blacksmith and beyond. It was this gestural knowledge of the worker that had to become subject to a process of grammatization in order for the mechanization and automation of industrial manufacturing to be established in the nineteenth century. (ibid)

We can see in this discussion the prerequisite for Stiegler’s notion of “proletarianization” that he sees as having accompanied industrialization, as the knowledge, tacit and inherited, as well as explicit, of workers gets expropriated and transferred to the owners and managers of machines (and of humans). The “gramme” must have preceded “grammatization”; if the gramme is the accidental/meaningful mark that defines the human variation on life then “grammatization” goes all the way back (even if we’d want to distinguish it conceptually from what Ross is referring to here). Ritual itself involves the “discretization” of the gesture, refining so that it serves more effectively in the “mnemotechnic” practice that is ritual—and a ritual will be more or less effective depending upon how it is designed so as to preserve the memory of everything that has “worked” in previous scenes, in response to disruptive events.

Moreover, ritual is meant to do something and make something happen, even if what it makes happen is not exactly what the participants imagine it does (is not the same true to some extent with technology?), so to think of technology as emerging out of ritual as a new way of eliciting information from the center is not really a stretch. The break from ritual that will eventually make a genuine technical thought and practice possible would, then, involve those occasions on which some sovereign actor must act upon either his own or another community as such—such external organization could not be covered by internal ritual arrangements. So, such events as conquest, war, and the levying of mass labor armies is what would “liberate” technics from its ritual origins. Technology would still be a practice of materializing memory, but in this case memory of those external interventions which discretized gesture for some unprecedented purpose.

Meanwhile, the expropriation of the knowledge of workers brought about by grammatization does make possible new forms of knowledge—knowledge of the results of grammatization itself, which involves the creation of a system of references, which can themselves be compressed into more complex references, of the more or less automated practices comprising the system. The problem is that the transition from one form of knowledge to the next is far from “automatic,” and in the meantime can generate significant amounts of resentment towards a newly interventionist and imperious center. The establishment of new pedagogical relations necessary for the transition is costly and uncertain, since it is inevitably unprecedented itself, and can be easily seen as part of the same expropriation it aims at ameliorating and then converting it into genuine social advances. It seems very likely that the new industrializing elites will focus directly on simply immunizing the new arrangements against this disruptive resentment, thereby further disqualifying and alienating the displaced target populations.

The necessary scenic conditions, that is, are daunting. This is part of the “pharmacological” nature of all transformations in the social “exoskeleton,” in which what is medicine is also poison. Ross has a long and interesting discussion of the way industrializing society directly accesses and manipulates the “limbic system” as a means of social control (further proletarianization, this time of the intellect), but I think we can frame the problem he’s pointing to more simply. The fully technological (post-ritual) system relies upon a steady flow of reliable “information,” that is, signs that can be immediately put to some use (and therefore quickly become useless). Ross, following Stiegler, insists on a very sharp distinction between “information” and “knowledge,” and I think we could say that information is the direct descendant of ritual insofar as its use is measured by the immediate transformation it effects.

But information can be, like currency, constantly pumped into the system so as to become “useful” in simulated, ritual-like ways, while being ultimately worse than useless, that is, harmful. We could say that much political information is like this, as it is used to stage polarizing scenes that are meaningless in the strict sense that the outcome of the events staged changes nothing while the constant “rush” of information builds an “addiction” to more such information. Knowledge, meanwhile, we can now say, synthesizing Ross’s analysis with my previous reworking of “scenic thinking,” is more a descendent of myth and involves “rehearsing for the improbable.” This is indeed very difficult because it requires that one defer the direct investment in the polarizations of the moment and learn to look for what, in terms of those information-driven scenes, would be improbable in terms of those scenes but provides the resources for a “organology” that would remediate the scenic conditions of social participation.

The “cosmos” in Ross’s subtitle refers to the Greek word for an order that generates and finds sufficient for its self-regulation knowledge of actors directly involved in the interactions comprising the order. The challenge of the contemporary world is, in fact, to scale up a “cosmic” order to global dimensions. Ross provides a sustained and subtle critique of Friedrich Hayek’s pretensions to be supportive of such an (market) order against a state-led command economy (an exogenous, or “taxis” order), but, by associating “cosmos” with the self-regulation offered by the cybernetic autonomization not only of functions within the market but markets themselves, lays the theoretical groundwork for today’s neoliberal imposition (often state mandated) of “market” imperatives (really, subjected to the calculations of global financial institutions) on all spheres of life. And this expropriation is predicated, paradoxically, on the naturalization of what are necessarily artificial socio-economic relations:

Hayek’s version of the cosmo-local is therefore fundamentally based on a denial of Stiegler’s demonstration that the condition of all neganthropic order is artificial and that the function of neganthropic reason arises and can arise only from processes of artificial selection, where shifts in these processes disrupt existing systems and existing forms of knowledge, and therefore present a problem requiring the care-ful reinvention of knowledge and not just the assumption that existing knowledge guarantees successful adjustment to changed economico-technological conditions. (264)

At this point, Ross’s very ambitious book is taking on the global economy, which it’s hard to imagine anyone, at this point, seeing as very just or functional. Whatever one’s politics and whatever one’s views of inequality, social justice, or the question of climate change (Ross’s book is published in a series entitled CCC2 Irreversibility, predicated upon addressing a crisis in the progress of climate change), there is clearly much to be addressed in a global economy in which most activity is controlled by a few dozen mega-corporations with no imperative other than maintaining control over economic activity and beholden to no sovereign power (only perhaps a few of which could exercise any control, and that only through very intrusive and coercive mechanisms).

Ross advocates a transition to what he calls a “contributory economy,” without saying very much about what that looks like or how to get there. Ross’s book is refreshingly free of cant and NGO-speak about “strengthening democratic institutions,” “renewing citizenship,” etc., but he also doesn’t have much to say about political institutions, especially the state. There’s a real problem here, because if one gets serious and hopes to be precise about agencies capable of bringing about any kind of change without collapsing into laughable clichés about “grass-roots movements,” one ends up fixing one’s eyes on the very figures who seem to be the problem—those with power.

This is another way of saying that Ross, while admirably avoiding the trap of indulging in yet another set of political fantasies involved in “decentralization,” does not want to discuss the center. Stiegler, or, for that matter, Peter Sloterdijk, whom Ross invokes later on to talk about the immunological disorders that seem to be accelerating entropy and “anthropy” (the dispossession of the “endogenous” knowledge needed to construct and maintain negentropic orders), seems to leave him bereft here. Ross here invokes an anti-metaphysical tradition of thought that he traces from Empedocles through Nietzsche and Freud, that would see reality as composed of a perpetual struggle between opposing forces, with this mode of thought enabling the “metacosmical” program Ross calls for.

All this remains within contemporary philosophical debates: what tensions, exactly, are to be “composed” in such a way as to ensure the kind of “localizations” required for endogenous knowledge production? Thinking scenically and mimetically can help here as well. Indeed, if we are suffering from “anaphylaxis,” that is, an exaggerated and potentially deadly response of the body to some disturbance that is not really that dangerous, can we not attribute this over-reaction to the anti-“totalitarian” fervor that has guided Western politics since WW II? Doesn’t any stance or proposal that reminds too many people (that triggers recognition in the exosomatic or institutional memory) of one or another of the totalitarian enemies (Nazi Germany and “fascism” in WW II and the USSR in the Cold War) send the political and ideological system into overdrive, sending out antibodies that extirpate anything the liberal democratic order considers anomalous?

This auto-immune disorder has the paradoxical result of attacking every form of social attachment that can’t be “read” by the “programs” created by the neoliberal algorithm, with the result that the means of identifying and neutralizing potentially threatening antigens (like social media TOS violation determinations and the priorities of the intelligence and police agencies with which they are linked) are increasingly centralized precisely as a function of the reigning anti-centerism (any decision that comes transparently from a responsible center triggers the release of antibodies). That more and more books, like Ross’s, explore these questions without seeming to worry too much whether they are too “like” either “extreme” may be a sign that some autoimmune adjustment is possible. We may be ready to devote our political resources to something other than mopping up after either of the two great 20^th century conflicts.

What we need to “care” about in order to transition to the “contributory,” to be blunt, is a pathological anti-centerism. (We could say that the “West” is best defined, not in terms of shuffling around various definitions of “freedom,” but as the first social order that sought to maintain a perpetual opposition to any settled center.) This is an anti-centerism so pathological that even those who actually occupy the center are devoted to it—no person in power, whether elected official or member of any one of the numerous “committees” and “commissions” claiming the right to plan our future offers any form of legitimation that doesn’t involve fighting against some other more powerful center. Everyone wants power to fight the power, without ever wanting to acknowledge that this constitutes an admission that there will always be power.

Not only does each national state use every crisis and pseudo-crisis to reach more deeply into every aspect of its subject’s lives (and, therefore, Ross wants to point out, subjectivities), but the fact that the summer of 2020 saw “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations across the world, regardless of racial composition or race relations in all those countries, indicates that much of the world would like to look on the US as a de facto world government, even if cynically, as a way of gaining leverage. Our own contribution to this crisis of the center is to advance, as an economic and political principle, one of the simplest imaginable principles: emulation. Someone you look up to is someone “programming events” you would like to “contribute” to. And someone you don’t or can’t look up to, but who is nevertheless in power, can be presented with the demand to become worthy of emulation. This is how you turn poison into medicine: study people in their social roles with an interest in everything that might make them actionable models.

I’m not talking about some anodyne “character matters” political pablum or, if we want to apply that label, we’d have to keep in mind that only someone who fills his office is worthy of emulation, and to fill one’s office is to assume all its formal powers and responsibilities and expose all attempts by informal and “behind the scene” actors to interfere with the exercise of those powers. Ross has nothing to say about ritual, as his notion of a small scale “cosmic” order seems to draw upon models such as the medieval city or small town, but ritual order is equally endogenous while involving more of a “prayerful” than a “careful” relation, not just to other members, but to the center.

A prayer involves an exchange of imperatives: tell me how to serve you. At its most refined, or most “technical,” the imperative exchange enacted in prayer distills itself into something like “help me to know how to donate to you.” This is an exchange prior to any market and an exchange that is a genuine “composition” insofar as the relationship is nothing more than the exchange itself. Moreover, such an exchange relation is the proper relation to those whom we emulate or would emulate or, for that matter, to those who might emulate us.

If such relations are impossible and even unthinkable, well, then, that is what needs to be remedied, and if you want to say that doing so is impossible and unthinkable, I will simply respond by saying all the familiar bromides regarding freedom, democracy, citizenship, justice and so on are far more so, and nonsensical and ultimately vicious as well. They all represent fantasies of a more real order that will some day be able to shake off the center: I’m not obeying any orders from you until you’ve provided me with a full account of the infrastructures ungirding your power (how you came by it, with whose help, in whose interest, at whose expense, in conformity with or denial of which legal mechanisms or principles…)—to my satisfaction, of course. This is the resentment that scales up and proliferates virally across the social and political order without regard to distinctions between right and left. More local resentments, of the kind that provide the material for pulp media narratives, are mere “spin-offs” of this more general one.

Within the current “organological” arrangements, the most urgent medium of exchange between center and periphery is data. Any decision anyone, at any level of the social order, has to make, whether it regards corporate governance in turbulent times or which private nursery school to try and enroll your child in (or, needless to say, whether to take—or mandate—a particular vaccine) will depend upon readily available, competently packaged, and “legible” data. We all know about the intense interest companies and the social media companies gathering “intelligence” on their behalf have in our personal data; governments are no less interested in such data, to the point where traditional ways of thinking about privacy and civil liberties seem pathetically outdated.

We as individuals are equally (desperately) dependent upon reliable data from power centers, whether they be governments, corporations, or other institutions like universities—or, for that matter, “rogue” sources we may trust more but themselves must claim some access to secure data banks.  Data is becoming more currency than currency itself; indeed, isn’t one of the virtues attributed to money that it provides reliable and up-to-date information on the field of social desires and distribution of resources and labor capacities? As money becomes more malleable, it can perhaps be massaged so as to become more akin to data gathered elsewhere within what Benjamin Bratton calls the planetary scale computation that draws upon ubiquitous sensing, measuring, and calculating devices. We need data to design the many scenes on which we act, and thinking in terms of data exchange will help us to mind Ross’s injunction to strive for a genuinely “cosmological” order in which the integrity of each node of “individuation” (individual, family, community, institution, locality, nation, transnational organization, etc.) as a site of data curation is acknowledged precisely in the name of a more “intelligent” as well as more “idiomatic” (that is, differentiated) order. Every one of us does know things about our respective milieus that no one else does, even if it may sometimes be the case that the proper questioning or framing is required to elicit such knowledge.

So, rehearsing for the improbable means enhancing one’s curatorial capacities so that one is increasingly competent in providing data that might be of use to the center and sifting through the data that comes at one through the center. This may sound banal, and I hope there is something commonsensical and readily accessible to such a “politics,” but the kind of practice I have in mind involves a whole range of difficult judgments regarding how to inquire, whom to trust, how to make oneself worthy of trust, what to disclose, when, and to whom, and endless learning regarding the creation, encoding, protecting and distributing of data. It requires “imagining” expanded scenes, upon which the data one has at hand might take on very different meanings as it is included in very different data sets over time and across space within the various mnemotechnical institutions.

And it requires the habit of treating as data what is not ordinarily seen as such, like one’s everyday use of language, which, in a sense is where all data exchange finds its terminus. Think about what it would mean to gather, in various formal and informal ways, at different scales, data regarding what “following an order” “means” today (a very Wittgensteinian question, but one brought into history). The orders you receive and comply with or resist, and those you yourself give and find obeyed or not in varying degrees and manners might be your starting point. But your inquiry could lead you to examine the vast expanse of the current order. At stake is our basic linguistic knowledge, upon which all other data collection, curation, and interpretation depends—if we can’t say that we know what it means to follow an order, what can we say we know? Restoring such basic linguistic capacities is the first order of business in contributing to the kind of “metacosmos” Ross would have us turn our sights to.

For GA, meanwhile, this focus on data exchange serves as a reminder that we are always on a scene, even if the scenes upon which we act today are more likely to be disciplinary research scenes than ritual ones. A scene is a scene—it is bounded, it is “set,” it positions actors in relation to each other with some kind of shared attention toward a center—even if that shared attention needs to be located by someone outside of the scene, a spectator, which is itself merely another scene, but one that can be represented within the spectated scene. We can scale up and scale down as much as is necessary—what counts as data, or a “sample,” will differ from scene to scene, even if it’s the “same” object presented differently at the center of different scenes. What we determine to treat as data provides an ostensive anchor to any scene. Data exchange therefore names a mode of deferral suited to this more thoroughly industrialized age, as we must always act on the data we have and the analysis we’ve made of it, while keeping in mind that data continues to come in and might dictate some new programming at any moment. It’s therefore helpful in dispersing the various on and off line mobs that gather under the influence of various information “highs.” It enables us, that is, to model ways of thinking and acting worthy of emulation, so that GA can become integral to the contributory economy.

Generative Anthropology (GA) holds that the mimetic repetition of the aborted gesture of appropriation (or sign) moved the first humans to view the object they pointed towards as sacred. As the ritual of object-designation transformed into religions, which then began an ongoing process of reform, the scenically arrayed worshipers ceased to insist on making a particular object the focus of their sacralizing attention. Having a scene with a centre was enough. Nevertheless, this centre remained the ostensible locus of the deity, who—when translated into the terms of metaphysics—was understood as Truth or Being (Originary Thinking 32-33). Apophatic (or negative) theology and its associated mysticism encourages Christian contemplatives to give up any word or concept they have for God. Thus, similar to GA, apophatic theology views the centre of the sacred scene as, in its most basic form, empty.

This paper seeks to demonstrate how the philosophical stylist, Emil Cioran, engages and deploys the scenicity of apophatic mysticism in his both his intellectual development and two of his mature works. Cioran was a careful students of the practices of Christian mysticism including those of the apophatic mystics, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. As a young intellectual writing in Romania, his affinity for the apophatic mystics and Christian mysticism in general, informed his involvement in the Romanian nationalist movement of the interwar years, during which he wrote Romania’s Transfiguration (1936). In 1937, he had a crisis of faith, both politically and spiritually, that would lead him to publish Tears and Saints. As the book was coming out in Romania, Cioran moved to Paris, where he eventually, with the publication of Précis de decomposition (1949), achieved national acclaim. Cioran’s intellectual development leading up to his success consists of a movement from one scenic configuration to another. In the first, he remains peripheral—gazing longingly at the inaccessible, beatific vision of Romanian nationalism. In the second scene, he accedes to, and then removes himself from, the centralizing prestige of the Parisian intellectual world. He makes clear his reasons for vacating this luminous centre in his mature writings, which develop a style of reflection that rejects and undermines all positivist intellectual systems by querying the existence of existence itself.

In his collection of essays La Tentation d’exister (1956) (The Temptation to Exist [1968]), Cioran states that, when he closely examines his capacity for representation (i.e. thought or philosophy), he finds it impossible to make incontrovertibly true statements. Because of this, he claims, he cannot understand himself to exist, as, for Cioran, “[e]xistence is . . . defined as thinking,” and thought, as he repeatedly illustrates, is inherently paradoxical and unstable (Sontag 13). Straining towards a truthful statement, Cioran tries, but repeatedly fails, to achieve existence. For him, there is only the Void. Occasionally, by thinking against his every assumption, he feels himself come close to existence, but ultimately returns to what he terms a “deficit of being” (The Temptation 219). Cioran’s stylization of his failure resembles the practices of the mystics. Just as they wrote of their many failures to attain the beatific vision, Cioran reiterates the enduring absence of the central object of the originary scene. In so doing, he foregrounds the scenicity of the human as manifest in our iterative, and typically futile, efforts to recover an origin, Truth, and Being. Cioran’s capacity to achieve such a gesture arises from an intellect shaped by a capacity for a rejection of the very assumptions that it constructs itself upon, as he in fact does in each phase of his intellectual development. For Cioran, this process of negation unfolds in relation to two important scenic configurations. The first intellectual scene he engages occurs in his native Romania and the second appears at the nexus of existentialist thought in Paris.

Cioran’s biography, written by Ilena Zarifopol-Johnston, indicates he was highly attuned to—and driven by—the scenic mimeticism of intellectual circles. When he arrived in Paris in 1937 to work on a doctoral thesis that he would not complete, he positioned himself at the edges of Sartre’s circle in the Café de Flore (Zarifopol-Johnston 4). Every day he would come to listen to the conversation of Europe’s brightest young intellectuals, as they grappled with the tremendous upheavals occurring in European society and around the world before, during, and in the aftermath of, WWII (3).

He had begun his career at the University of Bucharest in his native Romania—geographically and intellectually on the edges of Europe: “In Romania, he [was] well known, the published and controversial author of five books and numerous articles. In Paris . . . he [was] nobody, just an exile from Eastern Europe, hoping to make a name for himself in the City of Light” (4). “His equivocal position on the margins of Sartre’s group, gravitating around the axis of French intellectual authority, always silent but always present,” Zarifopol-Johnston writes, “sums up this ambitious and divided young man, in quest of a center that will focus his own creative energy” (4). His effort to assert himself in the centre of European intellectual life is ultimately successful.

In 1949, after having given up writing in Romanian to refine his capacity to write exclusively in French, Gallimard publishes Cioran’s Précis de decomposition (in English A Brief History of Decay or A Short History of Decay [Arcade]). The book was a major success. In Le Combat, Maurice Nadeau describes Cioran as a thinker perfectly attuned to the period:

he has arrived, he whom we have been waiting for, the prophet of our era of concentration camps and collective suicide, the one whose arrival has been prepared by all the philosophers of the void and of the absurd, harbinger of bad news par excellence. Let us greet him and watch him closely: he will bear witness to our times. (qtd. in Zarifopol-Johnston 5)

The following year, Cioran received the Rivarol prize for “best manuscript in French by a foreign author” (5). All of this in spite of having a late draft of his Précis rebuffed by Albert Camus, who, as an editor at Gallimard, had told Cioran that he had failed to “enter the circulation of great ideas” (qtd. in Zarifopol-Johnston 5).

Struggling to break away from the margins of intellectual life in Europe, Cioran engaged in a fierce, if quietly personal, rivalry with the French luminaries of the period. Zarifopol-Johnston’s description of his efforts vividly illustrates the scenic and quasi-spiritualist nature of his personal campaign to leave the periphery and attain to a powerful centre of intellectual prestige. “He had embarked,” Zarifopol-Johnston writes, “on a lonely and painful adventure. . . . Cioran pursued his mission with dogged determination, with a fanatical belief in its importance that was the equivalent of mystical faith” (5). Cioran is far from quietistic in his successful drive to achieve the heights of European intellectual prestige over and against his contemporaries. Indeed, Zarifopol-Johnston—reflecting on his reaction to receiving the award as recounted by his companion, Simone Boué—states that “[h]e experienced his revenge as a triumph simultaneously over both French pretentiousness and Romanian provinciality” (5). Cioran’s emulative posture vis-à-vis the French literati (a posture which mirrors his competitiveness with the apophatic mystics discussed below) appears most starkly, Zarifopol-Johnston argues, in his opposition to Sartre’s style of philosophy (5). Indeed, he very consciously takes Sartre as his model and rival. In A Short History of Decay he includes a short essay titled “On an Entrepreneur of Ideas” which is an acerbic characterization of Sartre’s thought as devoid of intention, style, and human feeling:

He [Sartre] is a conqueror, and has but one secret: his lack of emotion; nothing keeps him from dealing with anything, since he does so with no accent of his own. His constructions are magnificent, but without salt. . . . Having neither preferences nor oppositions, his opinions are accidents; one regrets he believes in them. . . . (174-5)

As elaborated in detail below, in contrast to Sartre, Cioran’s self-reflexive thought is alive with his avowal of unwanted emotion and his effort to resist it along with the doubts and certainties that press in upon him. Cioran would later say that his “path was the reverse of Sartre’s” (qtd. in Zarifopol-Johnston 5).

Thus, mimetically and symmetrically opposed to the dominant figure at the centre of the scene he sought to conquer, Cioran usurps Sartre’s centrality, only to—in the long run—repudiate the very position he sought. In his time at the Café de Flore, Zarifopol-Johnston notes that Cioran sat in silence listening and never speaking. However, she asserts, “[h]is silence was not shyness or intimidation, but inordinate pride” (5). Offering a rigorously scenic interpretation of Cioran’s posture vis-à-vis the centre, she goes on to explain that, “[w]ith his body strategically placed on the margins of fame, Cioran made a statement. He was nearly inside the magic circle of Sartre and French cultural life, which had enormous prestige in the eyes of European intellectuals, especially marginal Europeans like Romanians” (5-6). Zarifopol-Johnston completes her scenic analysis by characterizing the centre’s periphery: “Just outside the circle, or rather on its borderline, the ambitious interloper [Cioran] worked silently and tenaciously in isolation for another five long years” (5-6). Going on to compare his journey from margin to centre to the struggle of Dostoevsky’s character in Notes from the Underground, Zarifopol-Johnston states that Cioran’s revenge was not the pathetic, impotent gestures of the underground man but, instead, a “blazing success” (6). Cioran would go on to win—but, notably, decline—more awards for this work: the Sainte-Beuve, the Combat, and the Nimier (6). He was praised by Saint-John Perse as “the greatest French writer to honor our language since the death of Paul Valéry” (qtd. in Zarifopol-Johnston 6). Upon his death in 1995, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Paris Match, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Magazine Littéraire honoured him with retrospectives (6). Zarifopol-Johnston further notes that “Cioran’s name has been honored [more than once] with standing ovations in the Assemblée Nationale,” where he was listed with other Francophone Romanians as “one of the greatest French philosophers of the 20^th century” (6). Acknowledged as having conquered the centre of European philosophy, the starting point of Cioran’s conquest is nevertheless located in mystical theology—a realm of thought often scorned and marginalized by the great intellectual movements of the West.

In an interview with Michel Jakob (published in English in 1994, the year before Cioran’s death), Cioran discusses the importance of the Christian mystics and especially the negative theology of Teresa of Avila in his youthful crisis of faith, which resulted in the Romanian publication of his least successful book, Tears and Saints (1937). In the interview, Cioran considers the significance of the book in relation to his obsession with Teresa and her mystical project:

St. Teresa has a certain tone that stirs one to the depths. Although I learned of St. Teresa relatively late and although I felt no religious vocation in myself—nor have I converted—she taught me an unbelievable amount; I am stirred in the truest sense of the word by her. But, as I said, I could not believe—one is simply born with faith or not. (130)

As already noted, Teresa followed a form of negative theology, which derives from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius. Building on Christian teachings about the incomprehensibility of God, Pseudo-Dionysius championed apophatic, or negative, theology. Writing in 500 C.E. under his pseudonym, Dionysius the Areopagite, which alludes to Paul’s reference to “the unknown God” in Acts 17:34, Pseudo-Dionysius outlined his programme for attaining union with God in his Mystical Theology. His practice requires “all positive (or catophatic) naming of God, important as it is, . . . [to] yield to negative (apophatic) naming in order for the soul to attain union with God who lies beyond all affirmation and negation” (McGinn 219). In chapter one of Mystical Theology, Dionysus advises his disciple “to leave behind . . . everything perceived and understood . . . and, with your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge” (220). John of the Cross further developed Dionysus’s Mystical Theology in his own spiritual guides, Ascent of Mount Carmel  and Dark Night of the Senses, after joining the Reform monastic group—the Carmelites—created by Teresa, which took apophatic principles as the centre piece of its religious practice (Kieran Kavanagh qtd. in McGinn 165-6). Enamored with these mystics’ theory and practice, Cioran’s development as a thinker—working amid the cataclysmic events unfolding in twentieth century Europe—took on an intense and profoundly contradictory cast.

For Cioran, who ultimately understood himself as born without the capacity for faith, the negative theology of Teresa and John constitutes a megalomaniacal undertaking to exacerbate a desire for a God who does not exist. Zarifopol-Johnston’s analysis of the period in Cioran’s life when he was writing Tears and Saints reveals this time to be one of great upheaval in, not only in his spiritual life but also his political consciousness. Deeming the book blasphemous, Cioran’s publisher rejected it just before it was to go to print. However, prior to moving to France to begin his doctorate, Cioran took the plates to another publisher and paid to have it printed. The book was extremely poorly received (Cioran qtd. in Jakob 126). Tears and Saints alternately expresses intense admiration of the mystics’ grandiose attempts to achieve union with God. However, it also expresses a profound disdain for their misguided and misguiding aspirations. Cioran “hates the saints,” Zarifopol-Johnston writes, “for the habit of hopeless suffering that they bequeathed to us” (126).

The turmoil of Cioran’s recognition of his lack of faith, as expressed in Tears and Saints, is the culminating gesture in his renunciation of the political project of promoting Romanian Christian nationalism, which he undertook in his 1936 book, Romania’s Transfiguration. In her analysis of Cioran’s development as a thinker, Zarifopol-Johnston juxtaposes the themes of Tears and Saints with those of Romania’s Transfiguration—a work that “borrows the rhetoric of mystical discourse and applies it to the realm of politics”—to fabricate “a utopian political fantasy, dreaming of a Romania ‘transfigured’ from its ‘sub-historic’ destiny” (126). In contrast, the Tears and Saints recognizes the folly of the mystics’ project and, by implication, the folly of militant nationalist self-aggrandizement, which framed its ideology with an agonistic spiritual askesis, through which the nation would reach its destined greatness (127). As a Romanian nationalist and author of Romania’s Transfiguration, Cioran (like the other young Romanian intellectuals of the interwar years) had used mystical language to generate the fascistic ideal of a glorious and truly Christian Romania (128). Zarifopol-Johnston demonstrates that spiritualist principles bolstered the ideology of Romania’s Legion of the Archangel Michael (which later became the fascistic, nationalist group, the Iron Guard), to which Cioran’s intellectual circle had political ties (128). This spiritualist, nationalist project itself constitutes a scene wherein the ideal of a truly Christian Romania is the longed for centre, and the ostensibly inferior Romanians of the 1920s and 1930s make up the periphery. By, in Tears and Saints, attacking and denouncing the saints’ mystical project of unity with the divine, while leaving his homeland for France, Cioran renounced Romania’s nationalist centre and periphery only to position himself at the edge yet another centre—that of the Parisian intelligentsia. This was the locus of desire that he would succeed in conquering, yet ultimately discover to be just as empty as the longed for ideal of a truly Christian Romania.

The account of Cioran’s intellectual development provided by Zarifopol-Johnston illustrates how Cioran’s life affords a stark example of the way that intellectual and political life are constructed scenically in the configuration outlined by GA’s account of the originary scene. In each of his quests for the centre, whether he attains it or fails to attain it, Cioran ultimately discovers that the locus of the scene persists irrespective of it containing any figure, object, or ideal. As discussed above, this discovery derives from his fixation on the practice of apophatic mysticism, as it is modified by his recognition that he cannot believe. Thus, Cioran is mystically minded, but striving towards a centre that contains no beatific vision, no transcendence. His discovery of the basic vacuity of centres of attention highlights an important aspect of the scenicity of the human, as GA elaborates it. In fact, GA posits the vacant centre that Cioran’s crisis of faith revealed to him.

In Originary Thinking‘s discussion of the idea of God, Eric Gans hypothesizes that “[t]he origin of the idea of God must be scenic because God appears to human beings as a center of attention consciously distinct from themselves” (37). GA holds that the sign designates the originary scene’s centre and that the centre of the scene is itself the locus of divinity:

God is . . . the subsisting center of the scene of representation on which . . . specific ideas appear. As this center, God is no particular object of attention, but the permanent object of attention as such, however it may appear to reveal itself in a particular physical being. This revelation can only be understood . . . as God’s appearance rather than his subsistence in the being in question. For the idea of God is the idea of what subsists in the physical being’s absence. . . . (38)

Proposing that the scene of representation produces the subsistence of the deity as manifest in a space devoid of any particular being or idea, Gans goes on to assert, “[t]he sign can only designate what occupies the center of the scene, and the being of this center, the center-as-being, is what we call God” (38). If the centre of the scene is vacant while the designation of the divine centre continues, the deity’s scenic mode of subsisting manifests in the signs that point towards God’s subsistence beyond discrete objects, beings, ideas, and signs themselves. It is the structure of the scene of attention that manifests the deity as absent, since scenicity itself—in its direction of attention towards a vacant centre—is enough to orient the representing subject towards the divine absence. In this sense, GA articulates a negative theology that does not preclude the adoption of catophatic theological traditions, but, rather, illustrates those traditions’ contingency upon the scenicity that presents divinity as a vacant centre of attention.

Leading up to articulating this scenic anthropology of the idea of God, Gans addresses the rise of metaphysics after theology, and finds that such philosophizing lacks an anthropology adequate to account for the persistence of the idea of God. Gans asserts that metaphysics had tried to explain the notion of the divine as Weltgeist in Hegel and Being in Heidegger. He points out that, more recently, Derrida has exposed of the failure of metaphysics by highlighting the instability of language through the concept of différance (33-34). Gans then states that the successive metaphysics that sought a new synthesis for the idea of God have ultimately been abandoned in favour of the positive sciences and asserts that those intellectuals who still entertained an idea of God are ultimately forced to take on an anthropological theology (34). Gans’s solution is the originary hypothesis, wherein God and the human emerge from the originary scene simultaneously (35).

In her 1968 introduction to Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist, Susan Sontag outlines a similar account of philosophy’s progress, and ultimate failure, to that traced by Gans. She describes how the decline of metaphysics is followed by the rise of the “various ‘positive’ or ‘descriptive’ sciences of man,” which included “anthropology, sociology, and linguistics” (11-12). She goes on to observe that, during the period in which the social sciences were gaining ascendance over metaphysics, an alternative to the new descriptive and positive science emerged. This alternative was “a new kind of philosophizing” which was “personal (even autobiographical), aphoristic, lyrical, [and] anti-systematic” (12). She names its “foremost exemplars. . . [as] Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein” (12), before defining this post-philosophy as:

philosophizing . . . the awareness that the traditional forms of philosophical discourse have been broken. What remain as leading possibilities are mutilated, incomplete discourse (the aphorism, the note or jotting) or discourse that has risked metamorphosis into other forms (the parable, the poem, the philosophical tale, the critical exegesis). (12)

Sontag states that “Cioran is the most distinguished figure in this tradition writing today” (12). Though Cioran pursues this route of thinking in the form of essays, his essays have an aphoristic quality that, as Sontag notes, bear “witness to the most intimate impasse of the speculative mind, moving outward only to be checked and broken off by the complexity of its own stance” (13). Commenting on one of Cioran’s essays titled “Dealing with the Mystics,” Sontag observes how closely Cioran’s project resembles that of Dionysius the Areopagite, and remarks that he clearly admires the audacious scale of the mystics’ project, which his essays strive to attain by asserting the impossibility of a God of the Beyond (22). This is true, but in the title essay of The Temptation, Cioran goes farther than denying the possibility of a deity or a coherent metaphysics, when he gives an autobiographical account of how, as a young scholar, he “apprenticed [himself] to every force that invalidated [his] existence” (216). In his account of this process, Cioran reflects on the social—what GA would identify as the periphery of the human scene—as a wasteland of cadavers.

This spectacle propelled him to the verge of what he refers to as “the Void” (217). “Ceasing to live in terms of a self,” Cioran writes, “I gave death enough rope for my own enslavement; in other words, I no longer belonged to myself. My terrors, even my name were borne by death, and by substituting itself for my own eyes, death revealed to me in all things the marks of its sovereignty” (217). Even his conception of himself—as it is based in the social—is merely an occasion for his own negation and the negation of those around him: “Everywhere,” he states, “I stumbled against future victims of the noose, against their imminent shadows” (217). In this period of his life, Cioran takes the centre of the human scene to be as empty as what lies beyond the outer edge of its periphery. “The Void was my eucharist,” he writes—using a metaphor drawn from the symbolism of the sacred—”everything within me, everything exterior to me was transubstantiated into a ghost. Irresponsible, at the antipodes of consciousness, I ended up by delivering myself to the anonymity of the elements” (217). Continuing, he describes himself as incapable of understanding the spectre of his imminent negation as an impetus for positive thought: “[u]nable to see in death the positive expression of the Void, the agent that awakens the creature from itself, the summons resounding in the ubiquity of drowsiness, I knew nothingness by heart, and I accepted my knowledge” (217). He persisted in this habit of unknowing, he says, until—having reluctantly attempted to seek the comfort of “the illusion that something exists”—he realized that he could not claim to know any truth, but, sought to become “the conquistador of a continent of lies” (217), that is, feign belief in the possibility of existence. At this point, he recognized that he had only two options: “To be duped or die” (217)—that is, to accept the idea of existence or commit suicide. “After the banality of the abyss,” he exclaims, “what miracles in being! Existence is the unheard of, what cannot happen, a state of exception. And nothing can engage it save our desire to accede to it, to force an entrance, to take it by assault. To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring” (218). What GA would term scenicity appears in the preceding image of Cioran storming a citadel—a sacred centre encircled by a besieging horde. However, this fortress of Being is, for Cioran, as unattainable as it is an uninhabitable Void; it exists only to the extent that collective desires attempt, yet fail, to attain it.

It is just such a siege of the Void that Cioran sees in the mystics’ efforts to achieve unity with the divine. In an essay titled “Dealing with the Mystics,” Cioran writes: “It is a mistake to suppose that mysticism derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vitality. A . . . John of the Cross crowned an age of great enterprises and [was] necessarily [a contemporary] of the Conquest” (153). Cioran goes on to argue that the mystics’ “idolatry of the will’s abeyance, of gentleness and passivity, secured them against a scarcely bearable tension, against that superabundant hysteria which is responsible for their intolerance, their proselytism, [and] their power over this world and the next” (153). Thus, “[f]ar from being defectives, they fought for their faith, attacked God head on, appropriated heaven for themselves” (153). Echoing his characterization of his youthful conquest of the “continent of lies,” he writes that, to understand the mystics, one must “imagine a Hernando Cortez in the middle of an invisible geography” (153). Seeking to explore this nothingness, mystics are, Cioran asserts,

[a]vid for every kind of wound, hypnotized by the unwonted, they have undertaken the conquest of the only fiction worth the trouble; God owes them everything: his glory, his mystery, his eternity. They lend existence to the inconceivable, violate Nothing in order to animate it (155).

Having highlighted the absurdity of their effort to animate nothingness, Cioran wryly raises the mystics’ project above that of philosophers. “Contrary to that abstract, false void of the philosophers,” he writes, “the mystics’ nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, discharge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of thought” (155). From these ornate descriptions of mystical writing it is evident, as already noted, that Cioran both derides and enviously admires the mystics’ project. However—through the praxis of ever refining his style in denying the possibility of Truth and Being—he emulates them by striving towards the limits of thought.

Far from being a soul seeking union with the deity, Cioran understands himself as a mind engaged in “a certain type of difficult thinking” (Sontag 14), a mind which—if it ever finally reached the limits of thought brought about by self-negation—would be able to recover itself as an existent human being. For Cioran, Sontag observes, “[t]hought and existence are neither brute facts nor logical givens, but paradoxical, unstable situations” (14). Making an apt comparison to Heinrich von Kleist’s treatment of self-consciousness in “On the Marionette Theatre,” Sontag explains her understanding of Cioran’s project as an attempt to rediscover genuine thought by refusing to ever accept any theory or conceptual model:

[His] thesis [is] that, however much we may long to repair the disorders in the natural harmony of man created by consciousness, this is not to be accomplished by a surrender of consciousness. There is no return, no going back to innocence. We have no choice but to go to the end of thought, [and] there (perhaps), on the other side, in total self-consciousness, to recover grace and innocence. (14)

Thus, Cioran appropriates the apophatic tradition’s technique of abnegating conceptions of God as a means to reach Him and, refusing the existence of a deity or anything else, pushes its antithetical logic further. First, he thinks himself out of existence in order to place existence beyond reach and thereby make it into a longed for impossibility, only to turn on his heel and ineffectually strive to attain it. At the end of The Temptation he enjoins his reader to take up this radical practice:

we must learn to think against our doubts and against our certitudes, against our omniscient humors, we must above all, by creating for ourselves another death, one that will be incompatible with our carrion carcasses, consent to the indemonstrable, to the idea that something exists . . .

Nothingness may well have been more convenient. How difficult it is to dissolve oneself in Being! (222)

Embracing its own nothingness, Cioran’s mind longs to turn its gaze back on itself and thereby realize its own non-existence in order to reify itself as an existent entity. However, having outlined his project, his final expostulation is one of failure. Cioran—by publishing his repeated failure—reiterates the enduring absence at the heart of consciousness: an interior scene with an invisible periphery and Void at its centre.

In his adaptation of the apophatic technique, he creates a scene similar to the one posited by GA as the scene of representation. Like GA, Cioran’s thought begins by emitting gestures of deferred appropriation. These are his essays and fragments, which avow his desire for the centre and his resentment of the others on the periphery who also strive to attain it; indeed, the signs Cioran emits represent his failed efforts to attain the being others espouse but unwittingly fail to attain. In his attacks on the mystics’ hubris and his own efforts to outstrip them, Cioran both comprehends and manifests the mimetic rivalry that compels him to refine such radical negations. He imitates the desires of the periphery towards the centre, not by emitting a sign that imitates their affirmation of the central object’s desirability but by indexing the empty space gaping as the abyssal centre of desire itself. In his interior scene, he identifies an empty space beyond the scene’s outer edge, a space created by his symmetrical opposition to the central-object-oriented other. Thus, in engaging the intellectual world through his writing, Cioran uses language, but deploys it in order to make it work against itself. Having vehemently articulated the vacuity of the centre, Cioran turns his back on it and moves as far away from it as possible, thereby establishing an inverted symmetry with his fellow sign-emitters.

In A Short History of Decay, Cioran provides a vivid image of the scenicity of language and culture through the attempt to negate it. In a passage titled, “Promenade around the Circumference,” he writes:

Within the circle which encloses human beings in a community of interests and hopes, the mind opposed to mirages clears a path from the centre toward the periphery. It can no longer hear at close range the hum of humanity; it wants to consider from as far away as possible the accursed symmetry which links men together. (21-22)

The mirages rejected by the mind Cioran describes correspond to the fabrications of language—hypotheses, systems, certainties, and fantasized futures, all of which consist of signs collectively fastened to desired objects, be they physical or imaginary. The disenchanted mind, he continues,

withdraws to the extreme margin and follows the rim of the circle, which he cannot cross so long as he is subject to the body. . . . [W]hile on life’s circumference the soul promenades, meeting only itself over and over again, itself and its impotence to answer the call of the Void (22).

At this extreme distance from the symmetry of signs that form the centre, the mind encounters itself at the limit of the scene of language. From this vantage, it can apprehend the scene’s centre and perceive, as Gans writes, that the clearing that is the centre is “no particular object of attention, but the permanent object of attention as such” (Originary Thinking 38). Such a mind perceives that—within the interior scene of the sign-user—its own representation of the centre is effectively equivalent to its representation of the outer darkness beyond the general human scene and, thereby, representation itself is an iteration of futile gestures.

As noted, A Short History forced Cioran’s entry to the centre of Parisian intellectual life, and The Temptation appeared in French in 1956, while Cioran was an established, enduring, but reclusive presence in the city’s literary and philosophical scene. In a 2007 paper on her projects of writing Cioran’s biography and translating his Romanian works, Zarifopol-Johnston reflects on the source of Cioran’s stylistic power and his taciturnity in the face of fame. As his translator, she was party to Cioran’s habit of rewriting and radically altering many of his early Romanian works in their French translation (2007, 23). Working directly with Cioran while he was alive, Zarifopol-Johnston noted how he often wanted to make large cuts to his early works, cuts which Simone Boué and Zarifopol-Johnston’s editor would later urge her to restore (22). Reflecting on his compulsive rewriting and cutting of previous manuscripts as she wrote Cioran’s biography, Zarifopol-Johnston argues that this tendency went deeper than his desire to escape his youthful involvement in Romanian fascistic nationalism. Rather, his compulsive effort to distill and fragment his thought into ever more concise forms derives from his affinity for the mystics: “Cioran was engrossed with [the mystics],” Zarifopol-Johnston writes “because he identified with their ‘escapist’ mode. Like him, the saints and mystics were running away from life, from history, aspiring to something infinitely greater than the narrow confines of their own worlds” (23). By abandoning his nation and its nationalist, fascistic religiosity, Cioran first escapes what he called the “‘meaninglessness’ of writing—and being—Romanian” to undertake the ascetic askesis of learning to write in French (24). Next, he repeatedly revises and refines his thought in another language, thereby undermining its stability; this implicitly destabilizes the centrality of the Parisian intelligentsia, as they saw fit to centralize Cioran who—in A Short History and The Temptation—deems such centrality akin to the Void.  

In his fragmentary, self-confounding aphorisms and essays, Cioran claims to inhabit the absence that the apophatic mystics struggle to conquer through their own contemplative negations. By taking these mystics as models that he ultimately outstrips, he illuminates the Void that is the centre of the originary scene. Since any object, being, or concept could be cast into this blank space, its emptiness is its defining characteristic, one which—in its vacuous banality—forces the onlooker to return his gaze to the language-animated sociality of the periphery: that “hum of humanity” constructed out of the “symmetry which links men together.” Cioran sees in this symmetry—wherein ideas proliferate through emulation—a need for the individual to refuse all doubt, all certainty, and all emotion in order to attempt the impossible: to definitively crystallize an ultimate truth that would ground one’s Being. Only this gesture could conquer the continent of lies, which our mimetic symmetries ceaselessly engender. Pursuing this lofty ambition, Cioran’s anthropoetics are the disjointed rages and resignations of his mind’s iterative and abortive struggle to subsist beyond intellectual life’s stalemates and aporias, which persist in others’ thought and within his own. Ultimately, in its highly wrought contradictions and impasses, Cioran’s stylization of his struggle affords readers a unique prospect of the empty centre of humanity’s—and the individual’s—originary scene.