Anthropoetics

Author: staceymeeker

  • Lust, Caution: Love, East and West

    This Chronicle is dedicated to Ian Dennis, Secretary-Treasurer and general mainstay of the GASC, who introduced me to the writings of Eileen Chang (1920-1995), aka Zhang Ai-Ling.

    Having spent my university career teaching 19th-century French novels, I rarely had the time for, or even much interest in, reading others. But since retiring, I have been able to read a good many, especially novels by women, who, with a few very great exceptions, I tend to find more attuned than men to the novelistic sensibility, and are perhaps even better at the short story. This Chronicle discusses a masterpiece of short fiction by a major Chinese writer, strangely little known to the American literate public, exploring how it diverges from, and at the same time, clarifies, the Western conception of “romantic” or transcendent love.

    Stacey and I thought very highly of Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution when it came out in 2007-8, although it does not seem to have left a strong general impression. I think many of its critics were distracted by its lengthy (NC-17-rated) erotic scenes, which, although by no means gratuitous in the context of the film, modified the thematic of its literary source.

    It is only when, quite recently, Ian introduced me to Chang that I had occasion to examine this source: a story by the same name, originally drafted sometime in the 1950s, revised over two decades, and published only in 1979, near the end of Chang’s creative life. (She died a recluse in Los Angeles in 1995.) But if the film is excellent, the story is a masterpiece, among the greatest of the genre. It runs some 40-odd pages, about 8000 words; but what makes it unforgettable, and the film as well, is the concentration of the narrative action and its revelatory force in a single word.

    If Lust, Caution seems a strange title, in Chinese, it is a pun, whose words can also be understood as “colorful ring,” the object whose purchase brings about the narration’s climax.

    The story, roughly based on a historic incident, takes place in the context of WWII. Beginning in Hong Kong, then after its 1941 Japanese takeover, in Shanghai, Wang Chia-Chih, a beautiful student and amateur actress, is recruited by a patriotic student group to seduce Mr. Yee, a key Japanese-collaborationist official. Pretending to be the wife of a businessman, she joins Yee’s wife’s mah-jongg group and catches his eye, leading to a series of assignations.

    The action of the story takes place on a day when, setting Yee up for assassination by the group, Chia-Chih entices him to a jewelry shop on the pretext of repairing an earring. Not altogether unexpectedly, once at the jeweler’s, Yee decides to offer Chia-Chih a rare and valuable pink-diamond ring.

    They sit together on the mezzanine of the shop while the Indian jeweler writes out the receipt:

    Only now, as this last, tense moment of calm stretched infinitely out, on this cramped balcony, the artificial brightness of its lamplight contrasting grubbily with the pale sky visible through the door and windows downstairs, could she permit herself to relax and inquire into her own feelings. Somehow, the nearby presence of the Indian, bent over his writing desk, only intensified her sense of being entirely alone with her lover. But now was not the moment to ask herself whether she loved him; instead, she needed to—

    He was gazing off into the middle distance, a faintly sorrowful smile on his face. He had never dared dream such happiness would come his way in middle age. It was, of course, his power and position that he had principally to thank; they were an inseparable part of him. Presents, too, were essential, though they needed to be distributed at the correct moments. Given too soon, they carried within an insulting insinuation of greed. Though he knew perfectly well the rules of the game they were playing, he had to permit himself a brief moment of euphoria at the prize that had fallen into his lap; otherwise, the entire exercise was meaningless.

    He was an old hand at this: taking his paramours shopping, ministering to their whims, retreating into the background while they made their choices. But there was, she noted again, no cynicism in his smile just then; only sadness. He sat in silhouette against the lamp, seemingly sunk into an attitude of tenderly affectionate contemplation, his downcast eyelashes tinged the dull cream of moths’ wings as they rested on his gaunt cheeks.

    He really loves me, she thought. Inside, she felt a raw tremor of shock—then a vague sense of loss.

    It was too late.

    The Indian passed the receipt to him. He placed it inside his jacket.

    “Run,” she said softly.

    For a moment he stared, and then understood everything. Springing up, he barged the door open . . .

             (Lust, Caution. Tr. Julia Lovell, Anchor Books, 2007: 44-46)

    Few softly-spoken words in any work of fiction accomplish what Chia-Chih’s does here. It saves Yee’s life and declares to him her love—at the same time as it destroys the students’ plot and all their lives, including her own. There is no instant of mutual recognition; her demonstration of love, as soon as he understands it, sends him away without a glance.

    Leaving the shop minutes after Yee, Chia-Chih, seeking to leave the area, is caught within a cordon set up to catch the conspirators. That is the last we see of her.

    Returning home after all is finished, Yee, realizing that she was “his first true love” (52), muses that, despite his pessimism about the future course of the war,

    . . . now that he had enjoyed the love of a beautiful woman, he could die happy—without regret. He could feel her shadow forever near him, comforting him. Even though she had hated him at the end, she had at least felt something. And now he possessed her utterly, primitively—as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost. (54)

    Chang’s love stories do not have “happy endings”; this is as happy as they get. My impression is that, in Chang’s world-view, this is as happy as it ever gets.

    No doubt both Yee and Chia-Chih each had the revelation of the other’s love; she before warning him, and he afterward. In both cases, it was indeed the first; we learn that, as part of her training for the operation, Chia-Chih, a traditionally brought-up Chinese girl, had to lose her virginity and be “initiated” by the only member of the student group who had been to a brothel, an experience anything but amorous.

    In contrast to the Wagnerian love-death Schwärmerei, the ultimate hyperbolization of the Western love tradition, the power of Chang’s story is in inverse proportion to its sentimentality. Not only is there no mutual revelation of love, but Yee revels in the finality of their separation. “Possessing” his lover as a ghost, a “shadow forever near him,” is for him the contrary of privation: it is a permanent state of grace that reconciles him to death.

    I have not been able to consult the critical literature, but the translator’s preface expresses in no uncertain terms what I imagine to be the common view of the story. Julia Lovell speaks of Chia-Chih’s “impulsive abandonment of the cause for an illusory love,” her “final, self-destructive change of heart,” making the story “a disturbing meditation on psychological fragility, self-deception, and amoral sexual possession” (xv-xvi). Finally, she helpfully points out that the author’s first marriage was with a Japanese collaborator whom she helped to escape punishment after the war, but eventually separated from after discovering his unfaithfulness.

    With all due respect, I believe this interpretation trivializes the story and fails to grasp the immense difference between it and the works that made Chang famous in the 1940s, stories of failed romance and female disillusion, the best-known of which are “Love in a Fallen City” and “The Golden Cangue.” The implication of Ms. Lovell’s words is that the substance of the passages quoted above, particularly Yee’s post-mortem meditation, should be taken ironically. Yet Yee’s feeling, after having ordered the execution of this young woman, that her demonstration of love was not just the high point of his life, but that it will allow him to die happy—beyond being the very opposite of Chang’s collaborator husband’s presumed view of his analogous experience—is, as presented, altogether impervious to irony.

    If we see Chia-Chih as deluded and Yee as a ruthless traitor to his people, her life-changing word is reduced to a pathetic, misguided gesture feeding the vanity of a villain. But if Chang leaves us at the story’s end with Yee, it can only be to show us his awareness that the grace she has given him means more to him than life itself. What comeuppance indeed can befall someone who feels he can die “without regret” now that he has known “the love of a beautiful woman”? If the author did not want us to take Yee’s words seriously, the story would be no more than gratuitous black comedy.

    There is indeed real irony in Lust, Caution, but it is between the author and the reader. In contrast with Ang Lee, who ends his film with Chia-Chih on her way to execution, Chang does not follow her beyond the point where her escape is cut off. Having given her proof of love, her feelings, on which Yee speculates post mortem in the passage above, have become irrelevant. Nor is Yee fated to have a happy future; we, and already he too, know how the war will end.

    But if a blossoming young woman could not be expected to find her life’s fulfillment in the sublimity of this love, Yee, “squat,” middle-aged, and world-weary, could truly appreciate it. We imagine that his last thought would be of the beautiful Wang Chia-Chih, whose ghost had never left him. And this makes us realize retrospectively that, observing his melancholy, affectionate air, it was her intuition of this future that brought forth, softly, the word “Run.”

    Unlike the hard-edged heroines of Chang’s earlier stories, Chia-Chih gives up the battle, both against the Japanese occupation and against the masculine-centered vision of love—neither of which will, in any case, survive the war—for the sake of a sublimity that she can share only from without. Is this a sign of Chang’s self-deceived submission to “paternalistic” values? On the contrary, the irony of her tale conveys the understanding that man’s lack of the biological integrity of the female is the source of a salvation through love that woman does not need. Has any woman ever thought to herself, “now I can die happy . . . without regret” simply because she has possessed, for an instant, “the love of a handsome man”? The idea is slightly ludicrous.

    Let us think back to the origins of transcendent love in the West. The biblical Song of Songs is charming, but hardly sublime. The sublimity of the Western love-tradition was the creation of Sappho. Very few of her poems have been left to us, but the remaining fragment of her oeuvre is enough to reveal the revolution it made possible, and that only a woman could have accomplished.

    In the Hebrew tradition, sex is about being fruitful and multiplying. Only with Christianity, a religion of paradox that integrates within Hebrew transcendence Greek tragic passion, could the Judeo-Christian West make sense of Sappho’s antinomian love for what does not directly benefit the social order, either by winning battles or by producing children. Sappho’s one perfect poem affirms, through her preference of the grace of her beloved Anactoria to the armies sung by epic poets, the precedence of individual love over tribal solidarity. Let us not forget that the Trojan War, in Greek legend, was fought over a beautiful woman.

    What then is “non-Western” about Chang’s vision? I certainly would not seek to classify this cosmopolitan writer as “Oriental.” Yet the character of Mr. Yee, on which the story’s credibility rests, is hardly plausible in a Westerner. A Western man who profits from his position of power to enjoy the favors of many women (think Ted Kennedy) can hardly be imagined attributing his ultimate happiness to “the love of a beautiful woman.”

    The difference between Lust, Caution and Tristan und Isolde is the absence from it of any sense of sin. For Judeo-Christian culture to incorporate Sappho, she must be conceived as sinful, absolved only through her suffering. This is, to all appearances, an attitude profoundly irrelevant to Chang’s world-view. We learn that Yee, unlike Chia-Chih, speaks little English because he studied in Japan. Yet the story takes place, significantly, in the European concessions of Shanghai, and was written in the West. I think we can say that, even if Yee’s attitude toward love is truly Chinese, as illustrated for example by the 18th-century Dream of the Red Chamber, only a writer aware of the Western tradition could have conceived this story.

    It is relevant to note that in her later years, Chang devoted many hours to translating into Mandarin (version published in 1985), and then into English (published posthumously in 2005), Han Bangqing’s late-19th-century Chinese novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, which narrates a long series of love-affairs, often far from vulgarly sexual, between clients and courtesans. Like the geishas of Japan, the “sing-song girls” had a quite different status from prostitutes in the West. Just as, in Chang’s youth, it remained common for men of a certain standing to have one or more concubines, and these accepted relationships were often as serious as marriages.

    Only in such a society, where sexuality can be thought of as a bodily need that neither implies nor excludes love in the transcendental sense, could a man like Yee have the thought, even before Chia-Chih’s word of sacrifice, that he “had never dared dream such happiness would come his way in middle age.” Is Chia-Chih really so much more beautiful than all the other young women he has known? Or is it that the combination of her beauty and her inexperience inspired in Yee an intuition of plenitude that, sitting in the jewelry shop, he could do nothing to render definitive, but merely wish for—and that her word of warning, inspired in turn by her sense of this intuition, fulfills in a way he could never have anticipated.

    Lust, Caution portrays, ironically but not nihilistically, a fallen world in which human love alone is other than illusion. It is also a world that, at the time of writing, had forever disappeared. This judgment is made all the more persuasive by the fact that this elegiac rectification of the disillusioned view of love in Chang’s early stories by a paradoxical yet all the more real sense of the sublime was worked out over twenty years, and finished at the end of her creative career.

    I think we may be certain that only a woman could have sympathetically imagined, in the heart of her otherwise cynical male protagonist, this transcendent revelation of salvation through love. With all the good will in the world, we cannot share Sappho’s love, however much we admire her genius. But we can share that of Mr. Yee, both a woman’s worshiper and a woman’s creation, realized through an act of artistic magnanimity that Sappho, in a simpler time, could not have conceived. In my judgment, this extraordinary tale sets Eileen Chang among the world’s great artists.

  • Morality and Ethics in a Time of Crisis

    In times like these, one hopes the pain will stimulate rethinking that will make the world better in a time-frame that makes sense to us as individuals. The destructive power of today’s weaponry increasingly makes the individual life-span a more realistic measure of that of the entire species: if a catastrophe blows me up, starves me, sickens me to death, there’s a good chance it will do so to everybody.

    Times like these make us wonder what good GA can do. Yes, it offers an intuitively plausible solution to the central anthropological problem of the origin of language and the transcendence of the animal world of appetite. Before the post-modern era, such problems, precisely to the extent that they had not previously been solved within the bounds of metaphysical reasoning, but only in that of the transcendental-religious, were treated with the special prestige accorded to sacred things. Today, their transcendent nature is denied, or “bracketed,” and they are dissected into myriad research projects, each with its own granting and career opportunities, as is appropriate in the natural sciences. That this process obviously does not explain the origin of human language in its radical difference from animal communication is, in the current institutional perspective, actually a favorable outcome, for it stimulates an unending stream of empirical research. It cannot even be said to leave the basic problem unsolved; it simply denies its pertinence as a scientific problem, as in Michael Corballis’ The Truth about Language (Chicago, 2017) discussed in Chronicle 629, while at the same time, this origin’s intrinsic interest—and the funding it generates—continue to reflect our intuition of this pertinence. One more function of sacred paradox.

    However each of us defines his “quest for truth,” the world operates pragmatically, and it is not altogether cynical to point out that agnosticism in reference to the “big questions” reflects the needs of the scientific community much better than attempts like ours to pare them down with Occam’s razor. In the digital big-data age, the philosophy of science that makes the best use of available resources is plus il y a de fous, plus on rit. This situation explains the failure of once-fashionable “French Theory” to have a real effect on the social sciences. Beyond institutional considerations, the underlying cause of this failure was the inability of its dominant, “deconstructive” faction to take in account the complementary “constructive” insights of René Girard—whose intellectual leadership in putting together the 1966 Johns Hopkins conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” as we tend to have forgotten, was instrumental in creating “French Theory” in the first place. I view GA as having accomplished this task, but too late to take advantage of the cachet that had made Derrida, although not Girard, a household word.

    From the minimalist standpoint of GA, the fundamental human problem was eloquently enunciated by the immortal Rodney King: “Can’t we all just get along?”

    As a result of the crisis of animal hierarchy that led to the origin of deferral via communication through the sign, the first humans established the “moral model” of reciprocal exchange that is the basis of our universal sense of moral equality. Yet almost all of human history, or at least the part of this history that we can call history, because it coincides with the power to record it, does not emphasize this fundamental equality. For, with the emergence of sedentary agriculture, if not before, primitive egalitarianism proved itself an inefficient way of maximizing the fitness of the human community.

    Whence the birth of human hierarchy, which in The End of Culture I attributed to the “big-man” in Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, who was the first to acquire political power by virtue of his superior ability to produce food, hence to dominate the communal feasts previously hosted alternatively throughout the year by a series of clans. The originary source of political hierarchy would thus have been the economic benefit to the community provided by one more productive than the others—and who, Sahlins insists, tended to be less well fed than his beneficiaries.

    It is easy enough to see how this opening to hierarchy through individual ability, coupled with the rivalries among tribes for Lebensraum and other desirable objects, would lead in a few thousand years to the extreme differences of wealth and power that characterized the archaic empires. These differences have not so much been abolished as mediated by the institutions of governance that have evolved over time. That the coexistence in today’s most advanced societies of centi-billionaires with the penniless does not pose any real difficulty is a sign that “inequality” in itself is not a problem of hierarchical society.

    I borrowed the term firstness from Adam Katz, who found it in C. S. Peirce (who uses it in a very different sense), to designate the originary human form of superiority, which consists not in being more powerful, as the Alpha animal had been in the previous social order, but in being first to grasp the advantage of converting the “aborted gesture of appropriation” into a sign—for himself, of course, but as a consequence of this discovery, for the group as a whole, which is to say, the human race.

    By emphasizing temporal anteriority over competitive superiority, the term firstness expresses the essence of human as opposed to animal hierarchy. The animal world never evolves quickly enough for the relationship between those who first acquire an advantageous trait and their fellows to be other than a statistical guide to which of them will be shown, generations later, to have been the “fitter” perpetuators of the gene pool. Humans, and already some animal species, celebrate the permanence of norms in ritual competitions: all perform the same operation, and the winner does it faster, farther, more elegantly, etc. Yet what makes for human progress is the temporal competition for firstness in inventing new ways of doing things.

    As opposed to preeminence, firstness is not simply a matter of rank; its temporal nature means that it can be passed on to others. Although being first in rank is of value to the society, this value and its “rarity” are attributes of the system itself, whereas firstness in innovation implies the possibility of spreading its effects throughout the social order. Such was the originary firstness of the inventor of the sign.

    Political leaders not are generally inventors of new methods, but their effectiveness and ability to remain in power depend grosso modo on their ability to supervise more productive societies than their rivals—realizing of course that throughout history, “productivity” has often simply meant the ability to defeat these rivals and appropriate their production. Often, but not always.

    Thus it is useful to say that, although humans are morally equal in the sense of being able to participate in the culture that allows us to live in peace together, and in particular, to use language, they are not ethically equal, given that they make different contributions to the public welfare.

    The different modes of social organization that we have known since the Neolithic have followed each other in a series of “struggles for life,” with the might-makes-right relationship suggested by Darwin’s language being both enhanced and attenuated by the human capacity for “proactive” violence (Wrangham), which makes mastery far more than an attribute of the physically strongest.

    Seen from afar, human history is filled with horrors, and we cannot help finding them horrible, but at the very least we must agree that, if you want a less horrible society, you had better acquire more might than the more horrible one you wish to defeat, or at the very least, enough to prevent it from defeating you.

    There are no “fair fights” between societies. I don’t have to point out that we didn’t win WWII because we were better people than the Nazis and Japanese, although we would like to think that our social order gave us—with a little help from Stalin—a greater ability to harness the forces and talents of our societies. But there is obviously no iron law that links moral goodness with ethical efficacy.

    Moral philosophy is a matter of ideology rather than “reason.” Kant’s insistence on the self-evidence of “moral law” is a consequence of the extreme consistency of his adherence to the credo of metaphysics. “Moral truths” are not notions we invent to manipulate the world—the concepts of the “understanding”—but concepts of “reason,” independent of empirical reality. There is no need to argue with Kant; he offers a model of human behavior that may well claim to be superior to any other. If you want to teach your child not to steal, you would have to use all of Socrates’ sophisms in arguing with Callicles in the Gorgias to attempt, no doubt unsuccessfully, to persuade him that his own “good” is not enhanced by stealing, even if he is not caught. It is far better to teach him simply that stealing is wrong—in effect, to invoke the sacred, even if by another name.

    An anthropological ethic is necessarily a form of pragmatism, since focusing one’s concern on a biological species, however blessed or cursed by the transcendental, implies that the ultimate interest of this species be placed above all else. Slogans like “the greatest good for the greatest number” demonstrate a blindness to the very nature of human ethics, reducing it to the originary moral model, whose most profound contribution to ethics was rather to allow itself to be transcended for the benefit of the human community.

    What is of genuine interest in John Rawls’ “original position” is how near and yet how far it is from the minimal originary event of GA. Rawls’ intuition rightly tells him that what is equal among all humans is more fundamental than their relative value to the community, that the moral precedes the ethical. Hence to get from one to the other, he sends us back to a time before hierarchy, when everyone was in principle really “equal.” So far, so good.

    At this point, we are asked to imagine that the passage from this “original position” to our stratified modern society is made in such a way that each of us is arbitrarily assigned a place, with the qualities and level of privilege associated with it, and then to consider how we would judge the society, given the possibility that, as one of his presumably privileged readers, we might be destined to the lowest position in the society.

    In this way, Rawls seeks to reconcile firstness with moral equality, not by crudely suggesting that the more or less meritocratic distribution of responsibilities and privileges should be abolished, but that it should be judged on the basis of this more fundamental egalitarian standard; if there were an equal chance that I might wind up like this person, what changes would I wish to make in the social order?

    Rawls seeks a way to minimize the amount of violence we would need to wreak on moral equality in order to bring about a maximally “just” society. But in this instance, morality and ethics simply do not mix. No doubt his speculation’s thought-experiment status makes it vastly superior to the idea of applying “the greatest good for the greatest number” directly to social problems. But the idea of conceiving a society on the basis of each individual’s fear of being stripped of every personal characteristic to become the least favored citizen undoes the very sense of communal harmony that led to the “original position” in the first place. Such a construction of the “original position” could be imagined only as the act of a tyrannical divinity—or a professor speaking to his students. What is lacking in Rawls’ ingenious scheme is, very simply, an originary hypothesis capable of converting the thought-experiment into a model of human reality.

    What ethical system then does GA propose in its place? It can only propose Churchill’s worst system except…, because it is the least systematic, and therefore of necessity the maximally self-correcting system: the one that gives the most latitude to human firstness to generate additional degrees of freedom.

    So far, this system has clearly been liberal democracy, as invented and practiced in the Judeo-Christian West. But we cannot help wondering whether a society that combines political dictatorship with private ownership, like the inter-war fascist regimes, or China today, whether or not it begins by stealing other nations’ ideas, cannot sustain a higher rate of innovation that allows it to surpass them. The unflinching confidence in liberal democracy that we felt after WWII, and renewed after 1989, is no more.

    Yet if indeed the pseudo-religion of totalitarian ideology is more suited to the cybernetic age than the freedom of thought permitted by our civilization, then we must work all the harder to develop our humanist anthropology while we still have the freedom to do so, as the gift of our own firstness to a future world that we hope will one day be able to benefit from it.

  • Bear Theory II — Thérèse and the Bears

    Six years ago, in Chronicle 470 on “Bear Theory,” I focused on the essential qualities of the relationship between a human and a “bear,” essentially a plush animal of whatever species that one “adopts” in a personal relationship.

    Internet search fails to turn up any useful bibliographic references on this subject, let alone any literature on “bear theory.” One can read about the history of plush animals starting in the 19th century, or about animal toys and representations since the ancient Egyptians, but the specific phenomenon I am describing, whose origins cannot be more than two generations old, does not yet appear to have inspired any scholarly research.

    To sum up the principles of “bear theory,” adopting a bear is, more than a thought-experiment, a life-experiment in “playing God” that, liberated as it is from religious solemnity, gives one insight into the role from within rather than as a worshiper in the public arena. We fashion these creatures “in our image,” not physically, of course (although we prefer bears with a human-friendly appearance) but morally. In adopting a bear, we implicitly promise to care for it: to treat it as a subject, to use our “absolute” power over it only for its benefit, and in ways that do not demean it. Anyone who would mistreat a bear would surely be a good bet to do the same to other humans.

    Such adoption is in no way an exercise of vanity. The satisfaction one obtains is in the addition of new “degrees of freedom” in expressing love, a satisfaction that often makes it difficult to resist the urge to add a new bear to one’s “family.” We “play God” only in the sense that we exercise toward our bears an analogy of God’s love for his creatures. Whereas little girls may still teach good manners to their dolls, punishing them when they are “bad,” adults are free to consider their bears as companions, whether childlike or founts of wisdom.

    Love for a bear is a uniquely human emotion, one wholly dependent on the configuration inaugurated in the originary event. This freedom to invest subjectivity in bears is all the more of interest because it has not attracted public attention, hence not become the object of a publicity campaign, along with so much else that renders our public life superficial. A bear is not a religious object, but it is certain that, whatever one’s attitude toward religion, only a creature able to believe in God can love a bear.

    This second Chronicle attempts to situate the human-bear relationship in its historical context, while examining its unexpected parallel in Thérèse de Lisieux’s relationship to the Trinitary God. I insist, as she herself did, on this trinitary aspect, lest one interpret her devotion as a love-affair with Jesus, as some of her language might tempt one to think. The human aspect of the Son is essential to Thérèse’s devotion; no one could address as she does the One God of the Hebrews. But her relationship with Jesus is explicitly trinitary, which is to say in worldly terms, explicitly paradoxical. She never forgets that Jesus is not a human mediator, or that his divine exemplarity is not something to discover, but revealed from the outset.

    What does this have to do with bears? Whereas in the earlier Chronicle, I examined the man-bear relationship from the perspective of the “godlike” human owner, with Thérèse, one learns what it means to see oneself as, so to speak, a bear of God.

    I need not insist that if adopting a bear involves a kind of spiritual askesis, it is far easier to carry out than inverting the roles. If our bears can be guaranteed not to have a subjectivity of their own beyond the soul that we attribute to them (and even when two humans collaborate on this project, there are surprisingly few disagreements as to specific attributes), this is hardly true of a human being who defines herself as someone whose personal will is governed at every turn by what she thinks God would want her to do—or more precisely, would want her to want to do, for Thérèse never sees herself as following a divine command, but rather as willing in harmony with God’s will.

    Before the latter part of the 19th century, the creation of “ensouled” as opposed to merely instrumental toys was essentially limited to human or humanlike figures: dolls, Jack-in-the-boxes, or the macabre creatures one finds in Halloween costumes, and except in public ceremonies like the Carnival, intended exclusively for children. The emergence of the “bear” in the place of the doll corresponds paradoxically to the need for a more rather than less reciprocal relationship with an imaginary other subject. Not being thought of as a fellow human, the bear can maintain with its owner a strictly personal, extra-worldly relationship.

    Having begun a generation earlier, the plush era really took off in reaction to a 1902 incident, when on a bear hunt, President “Teddy” Roosevelt forbore (forbeared?) to shoot a bear that had been captured and tied to a tree. Needless to say, this incident could only have had so great an impact in a social configuration that was well prepared to commercialize it.

    But bears still remained entirely in the child’s domain. I can’t imagine my parents playing with bears, and even less, members of earlier generations. In Chronicle 470, I mentioned a lady in her late eighties who was indignant at being asked to meet a “toy,” and I think this would have been the universal attitude until quite recently.

    For people of Thérèse’s generation, more or less that of my grandparents, little girls had dolls and little boys played with tin soldiers. Thérèse’s “bearlike” attitude toward God could not have been influenced by any symmetrical activity of her own. But that is not my point. Thérèse’s playfully passionate attitude toward the paradoxical transcendence of the sacred coincides, along with the birth of the “stuffed animal,” with a most significant development of modernity: the emergence of consumer society.

    We hear constantly of the materialism and hedonism of the “consumerist” modern world, but I would emphasize just its opposite aspects. Along with general literacy, liberation from fears of starvation and early death from a variety of causes that were beginning to be eliminated in Thérèse’s day freed the general population to enrich their semiotic universe as well as their practical one by attributing meaning to objects, whose usefulness was no longer an obsessive concern. Nor was this meaning limited to showing off one’s wealth and good taste, as in Veblenian “conspicuous consumption.” In consumer society, as Baudrillard and others have made clear, we do not merely “express ourselves” by our purchases, but fashion our persona, both public and private.

    Born in 1873, Thérèse’s life coincided with the third phase of consumer society, which can be said to have begun in France under the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis-Philippe in 1830, but only began to influence the middle classes during the Second Empire that emerged from the failed Revolution of 1848. In this period, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary (1856) was its best-known fictional exponent, as in the next, in an elitist mode in counterpoint to the Third Republic, was J.-K. Huysmans’ Des Esseintes (A rebours, 1884).

    Thérèse’s own life was anything but “materialistic.” Confined from the age of 15 within the austere convent of the Carmelites, she was wholly cut off from the marketplace—indeed, from more than a bare minimum of consumption of any kind. To beautify her world, Thérèse relied not on luxury goods but on flower petals. Nonetheless, the emergence of consumer society and Thérèse’s new insight into the paradoxical reciprocity between man and God are parallel developments that mutually illuminate each other.

    Thérèse’s provincial petit-bourgeois world was one in which class relations were not salient. Her family was relatively well off, and as a little girl Thérèse gave charity to the needy. But her father was a pharmacist, not a factory owner, and the devout Martins were respectful above all of one hierarchy, that of the Catholic Church. Very unlike the five daughters of Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennett, all five of M. Martin’s found their vocation in the Church. Thérèse as the youngest, and her father’s favorite, was from an early age eager to follow her sisters.

    What in Thérèse reflects the consumer era is her passionate search for reciprocity with Jesus, without becoming in any way his rival. On the contrary, she sought to fully integrate her sense of personal value within her submission to the divine, in a mode that we might call transcendentally affectionate. Which is to say that her search for meaning went beyond the accumulation of “meaningful” objects to its transcendental source in the sacred.

    To convey something of the flavor of this relationship, I have translated a few non-consecutive fragments from a 297-line poem composed in 1895, “Jésus, rappelle-toi !” [Jesus, remember!]*

    I come to you, hide me in your bedclothes
    In your cradle I want to stay always!

    To the festival of love that your Mother gives you
    Oh! Kindly invite me, Jesus, my little brother,
    About your little sister
    Who made your heart beat,
    Oh! Remember!
    [the original se souvenir de is much more natural than “remember about”]

    With your little hand caressing Mary
    You held up the world and gave it life
    And you thought of me!
    Jesus, my little King
    Remember!

    O Bread of the exile! Holy and divine Host
    It is no longer I who live; but l live of your life
    Your golden ciborium [=wafer box] Preferred above all others
    Jesus, it is I!

    *Poésies de la bienheureuse Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus (Lisieux, 1913) : 12-23

    Calling Jesus her “little brother” who is then asked to remember his “little sister” says it all. This kind of reciprocity would be unthinkable were it not for the freedom with which Thérèse articulates the paradox of God’s inclusion-of and inclusion-in the human, as illustrated by the Eucharist, in which we become part of God as he becomes part of us. When Thérèse depicts herself as Jesus’ ciborium chosen above all others, she is not implying rivalry with either Jesus or his other communicants; the paradox of faith is that each believer is “chosen above all others” because he or she “possesses” God.

    Similarly, in another poem (“Mon ciel à moi”), she writes: “My heaven is hidden in the little communion wafer . . . Oh! What a happy moment, when in your tenderness / You come, my Beloved, to transform me into you!” No doubt this reciprocity is implicit in the Trinity itself. But the intimacy of these poems is one of companionship and familiarity, less mystical than joyfully paradoxical.

    It is not by accident that we find in Thérèse’s language many of the same accents that a generation earlier had been heard a few dozen kilometers to the north-east in Emma Bovary’s dreams of romantic love. The capital difference between the adulteress and the saint is that the latter maintains the paradoxical distance between the worldly and the sacred that the former confuses. The possibility of this confusion tests Thérèse’s moral purity: her fervent but playful affection is secure in the knowledge that it will never be tempted to go beyond its bounds. In a number of her poems, Thérèse insists on her chastity, the virginity in which she resembles Jesus’ Mother.

    In a different, yet not so very different way, our playfulness with bears can never be tempted to bridge the transcendent gap between us and them. The bear cannot figure in a Pygmalion myth like that of Balzac’s “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” [The Unknown Masterpiece], where a painter works desperately at creating a beauty so perfect that she could descend from the canvas into the real world. Like God and man, man and bear are not subject to confusion, which is why we can be so much freer with bears than with human-like dolls.

    However “childlike” these relationships may be, they are never childish. Thérèse’s petite voie is explicitly a model of adult life. Although Thérèse lived only to 24, she was far from a little girl at that age. As pointed out in Chronicle 651, she had been despite her youth given a highly responsible role in the training of novices, and in the opinion of the Prioress would have been an excellent choice to perform even her eminent responsibility. La petite voie emphasizes Jesus’ love for children and the humble, but without embodying it in ascetic practices, or even necessarily in the praiseworthy activities of a Mother Teresa—although only failing health prevented Thérèse from participating, as she had hoped, in missionary activity in Asia.

    Thérèse’s early death can hardly be called “providential,” yet it allowed her example to have its maximal effect. Her saintliness was a potential for good works more universally exemplary than any specific activity could have been.

    It is for “the rest of us,” believers and non-believers, that priests and nuns are in principle set apart from biological necessity in order to furnish examples of the sacred’s peace-bringing power. As, on a humbler level, are our bears.

    Supplement – 4/11/20

    A couple of comments I received after posting the original version of this Chronicle suggested a connection between “bear theory” and the Winnie the Pooh books that remain a living element of culture in an era when young people are no longer familiar with works like Peter Rabbit or Wind in the Willows. Pooh Bear, and by extension, all of Christopher Robin’s friends—Kanga and Roo, Eeyore, Tigger, Mr. Owl (who spells his name Wol as I recall), and of course Piglet—are bears in the modern sense, personages inconceivable before “Teddy” became the center of a stuffed animal universe.

    This contrasts with Kenneth Grahame’s characters, Mr. Toad, Badger, Otter, Mole, Rat, and the little Hedgehogs, who still belong in the tradition of animal tales going back to Aesop and beyond. As for Lewis Carroll’s personages, although associated with Alice’s playtime universe, they are far more diverse and less clearly adoptable than bears. They include cards, chess pieces, a cat, an egg like Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn from British heraldry, and fictive personae like the Walrus and the Carpenter (and their oyster victims), whereas we are meant to imagine Christopher Robin surrounded in real life with his little gang.

    I have known these books and their characters from childhood. But if I failed to mention them in the original Chronicle, my only excuse is that the idea never crossed my mind. Reading about Pooh as a child—I had a few stuffed animals of my own, although I don’t recall any bears—was not contiguous with my current bear experience, which I owe chiefly to my wife Stacey. Stacey is younger than I, but both her parents have enjoyed good relationships with bears, albeit not quite as intense as ours.

    I recognize that this is not a valid excuse for excluding these literary antecedents from my discussion. No doubt they would have been irrelevant to the discussion of Thérèse, but certainly not to the attempt to link the bear phenomenon to the evolution of consumer society. Pooh in particular was not only a great literary success, but a stimulus to the creation of innumerable avatars of all its main characters, which still sell today in no doubt considerable quantities, as well as to the extension of the Pooh concept to non-bears, as in the Toy Story series. I doubt that the personages from Alice in Wonderland have known anything similar, and even wonder if the work is still widely read by today’s children, whom I would not trust to being given anything to read other than study manuals for the SAT.

    As a final point, post-Teddy as they undoubtedly are, the Pooh stories remain in essence, as they presumably originally were in reality, bear stories told by a father to his son. Stacey and I talk to and about our bears, but there is between us nothing of a parent-child hierarchy, and relatively little story-telling—although we have composed back-stories for some of our most important bears, notably my mentor-hedgehog Henri Kipod. The bears accompany us through life and provide above all occasions for acts of tenderness that find their reward in themselves and their sharing within our family circle.

    The purpose of “Bear Theory” is to point out the possibilities opened up by our freedom to assign meaning for the kind of “playing God” that Thérèse, equally playful in her passionate seriousness, attributes to Jesus in her poetry and her prayers. The decline of formal religion does not mean the demise of the paradox of sacred transcendence, which embodies itself in these private fictions, perpetuating a process that began with the first “work of art.” For helping us to break down the barriers between “real life” and the adult childlikeness that Thérèse embodied so ideally, we certainly owe a great debt to A. A. Milne, Christopher Robin, and their little friends.

  • GA and psychoanalysis?

    When I wrote my dissertation on Gustave Flaubert’s adolescent writings (The Discovery of Illusion, UC Press, 1971), I found the Freudian “family drama” useful in making sense of these hyper-romantic tales, where the clearly indicated familial roles, including a friend-rival identifiable as Gustave’s friend Ernest Chevalier (and often named “Ernest” in the story), allowed one to trace the development of the configuration up to the point where the “romantic subject”-protagonist was smitten with an extra-familial love, the model for the later heroine of (both versions of) L’éducation sentimentale.

    But although the family drama was clearly useful in analyzing the works of a romantic adolescent, my subsequent efforts at literary analysis (Mérimée, Musset, Racine…) were more deeply influenced by the notion of pragmatic paradox introduced by members of Bateson’s “Palo Alto” school of psychology—an encounter for which I will always be indebted to Alain Cohen. Since then, one might say that my intellectual life has been devoted to finding a justification for my intuition that paradox, the bane of logicians, is not simply a clever form of what Irving Massey calls Necessary Nonsense (Ohio State UP, 2018), that is, a frustrating anomaly within the metaphysical mindset for which the raison-d’être of logical propositions—declarative sentences—is independent of anthropological considerations. Once one thus explains away the anthropological nature of language, it is no wonder that one can no longer reflect intelligently on what the origin of language might have been, nor comprehend the paradox inherent in it.

    All thinking is really originary thinking. Its effectiveness depends on what one chooses to consider as its originary elements. But we think of its anthropological foundation less critically when we are familiar with these elements from childhood, as in Freud’s family drama, or when, on the contrary, they derive from what appear to be the logical properties inherent in rational discourse. Hegel’s attempt to construct a logic of “everything,” beginning with Being and ending with the human-centered physical universe, whose history reaches its “end” in the revelation of all conceivable categories of being, marks the culmination of the metaphysical age—and the beginning of its deconstruction.

    Recorded history and prehistory give us many clues to the origin of the specifically human, but we cannot simply trace them back to this origin. The only procedure that allows one to maintain any degree of rigor is to begin from a hypothesis as minimal as possible. In particular, originary anthropology cannot begin with the child, because the child’s assimilation of culture is a process very different from its genesis.

    These reflections bring me back to what was ultimately René Girard’s central intuition, and the one that has influenced me most deeply: that the discourse of religion, however fanciful it may appear in its elaboration, is closer to the essence, the soul of the human than any other. This is quite the reverse of concurring with Auguste Comte—and with virtually all of today’s human scientists—that religion’s truths, having emerged at an early stage of human history, have simply been superseded, like those of ancient astronomy and medicine, by those derived from empirical observation via the scientific method.

    This is by no means to deny the legitimacy of “positive,” natural-science anthropology. But as earlier generations of anthropologists intuitively recognized, with respect to originary anthropology, that is, anthropology as centrally concerned with how we acquired what in the human is not shared by our animal cousins, religion cuts closer to the bone than any other cultural practice. Such an anthropology cannot avoid the paradox of transcendence, which each religious discourse conceives in its own culture-bound set of experiential terms. We cannot eliminate these terms without exposing in their nudity the logical contradictions inherent in expressing the “presence” of the transcendent in the natural world. Yet to remain within the vocabulary of metaphysics, where such paradoxical expression has no place, is to forfeit the possibility of understanding the roots of humanity’s différance.

    As a follow-up to Chronicles 649 and 651, I recently read Jean Clapier’s Thérèse de Lisieux au risque de la psychologie (Presse de la renaissance, 2010), a book summing up the twenty-odd psychological studies of Thérèse from the 1920s to the present. All of the analyses referred to were respectful of her faith; even the most psychoanalytic did not suggest, with Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, that religious faith was an illusory solution to real psychic difficulties. Yet throughout these analyses, however perceptive, I felt that Thérèse’s own God-centered language was more fundamental than the categories that were alleged to elucidate it. Most critically, her emphasis on love, which was as central to her faith as it is to Christianity (“God is love”), was more faithful to its human/transcendental source than any possible interpretation involving the sublimation of the libido.

    I have no quarrel with the idea that Thérèse recruited her somatic emotions in the service of her love for God, and have no particular insight into the sources of such emotions, whether the libido or that quite unlibidinal need for someone to give you a hug. But clearly Thérèse’s love for Jesus is not only cheapened but misinterpreted if we conceive it, as Bernini famously did with her Spanish namesake, as a form of sublimated sexual ecstasy.

    One should rather say that human sexual ecstasy, to the extent that it is more than a physical spasm, is informed by our sense of the sacred. Yet the chastity required of the exemplary devotees of Catholicism as well as of many other religions reflects the fact that even with the best of will, the orgasm, in putting an end to (its) deferral during the act of intercourse, cannot—as can the act of communal eating and drinking—be wholly subsumed within culture’s transcendence. Whether one revels in it, like Sade or Bataille, or deplores it, sex is an animal act, an act of mortality redeemed by biology through reproduction, not by the transcendence embodied in the “immortal” sign.

    Human love is defined not by the sublimation of Eros, but by the transcendence of resentment. One cannot understand the human by beginning with biology and then tasking the human individual with implementing the transcendent différance that uniquely characterizes us. Beyond the question of language origin, how the child learns to be human, a process whose description Lacan refined from Freud’s series of erogenous zones into the progression of perceptual representation from the (self)-image to the symbolic realm of signs, sheds only an oblique light on the process whereby pre-humans learned to make themselves human.

    In the time of Thérèse’s étrange maladie (strange illness) around the age of 10, during which she exhibited quasi-schizophrenic symptoms, she worked out her problems herself, or, as she would have put it, with God’s help. This alternative can be restated as the two possible explanations of the “miraculous” smile of the statue of the Virgin that put an end to this episode on the day of Pentecost, May 13, 1883.

    The anthropological truth in the Freudian-Lacanian link between the “symbolic” and the communal domain of the interdictive superego is that interdiction is inherent in language itself. When the child, instead of grabbing for something or screaming to get Mommy to bring it, uses a linguistic sign to obtain it, he is already deferring his appetite for it, thus expressing this appetite as a desire, which can exist only in deferral. However banal the circumstance, to the extent that one uses an imperative, one defines its object as, in its origin, forbidden fruit.

    This state of deferred possession arouses in the language-initiated child what we may call primary resentment. It is in overcoming this sentiment that love acquires its transcendent sacrality. And to the extent that we make this process the touchstone of our participation in transcendence, it is difficult to conceive an analysis more fundamental than the Trinitary identification of the sacred with the being that is at the same time sufficient unto itself and also its mortal incarnation, and can be so only by the agency of the “spirit” that communicates between them, which is logos as language itself.

    If indeed the child’s primary object of love is not simply the biological mother but the mother become a figure of conscious separation that the child desires to end, then we should not explain as “sublimation” Thérèse’s religious solution to what Clapier refers to as her abandonnique sufferings, beginning with her mother’s early problems in nursing her that led to infant Thérèse’s spending an entire year away from home with a wet-nurse, followed by her mother’s death before she was five years old, and then the departure of her quasi-maternal sister Pauline to the Carmel in 1882, precipitating the étrange maladie. On the contrary, when Thérèse becomes finally confident in offering herself to the Trinitary God, toward whom her moments of doubt had been conquered through an ever stronger love that manifested itself not as a simple act of will, but as the paradoxical one of will to submission to God’s will, this confidence can be understood as the discovery of the originary basis of the human psyche in the revelation of humanity’s need for a transcendent solution to our capacity for self-destruction. Far from an attractive illusion, the originary sacred is the central human truth.

    This confrontation led me to reassess the relevance of the Freudian conception of the psyche. Once “religiously” accepted, Freud’s tableau has fallen out of fashion—for to say it has been discredited would imply that some better theory had taken its place. Instead, like all the great syntheses of the 19th century, it has simply been replaced by a general distrust of such syntheses, or “master narratives” (métarécits).

    Yet, the sacred element aside, Freud’s map of the psyche is not so very different from the one GA would draw of our psychic constitution. The opposition between Ego and Id opposes our “human” to our “animal” components in the fundamental dialectic of human psychic activity. As animals, we have “instincts” or “drives,” but to the extent that they go beyond physiology to have an impact on the human community, we have a “self” that can re-present them scenically to ourselves in a space of deferral and decide whether and how to exercise them.

    Most crucially, to distinguish the human Ego from the consciousness of even the highest animals, which cannot be said not to think, Freud adds the superego. Whether or not “introjected” into the psyche by the Father, the superego corresponds to the internal complex of forces that connects us with the rest of the human community, including as its originary elements not only the “moral model” of reciprocal exchange, but most fundamentally, our sense of this complex as grounded “beyond itself” in the sacred/transcendent. This remains true of our sense of “right and wrong,” whether or not we subscribe to any institutional religious belief.

    Lacan’s insistence on the importance of the “symbolic,” of language, makes explicit what Freud’s “talking cure” had always presupposed; that our use of language and related symbolisms was the principal sign of this super-egoistic agency, whether or not we need accept, or even understand, his pronouncement that l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage. Freud’s interest in “the psychopathology of everyday life” is centrally concerned with language, as is his interpretation of dreams. The Freudian unconscious, we might say, occupies the wings of our internal scene of representation.

    This is not to deny what Thérèse understood better than any of the psychiatrists who have sought to clarify her psychology: that the dominant presence of the sacred cannot be fully encompassed within the superego. Freudian therapy seeks to permit the individual to liberate himself from his neuroses in order to be able to function in the world, to have a satisfactory affective and above all sexual life. But the one thing we cannot introduce into our relationship to our superego is love.

    Reading Thérèse’s passionate yet chaste poetry about her love for God/Jesus, we realize that this Trinitarian “superego” was for her the mediator of all love. The therapy that such as my old friend, the late Rusty Palmer exercised by getting the patient to become aware of and to root out his worldly idol-mediators goes very much in this direction. And by beginning Mensonge romantique with the Max Scheler quote, “Man possesses a God, or an idol,” and ending it with Alyosha Karamazov speaking to his followers of the joys of the afterlife, Girard makes explicit that in genuine conversion, the liberating gesture of negation must be followed by adherence to the one true mediator.

    GA is not in the business of telling people how to define this mediator, whether as a divine subject in its own right or a virtual totality like Durkheim’s la société—or as the human paradox itself. But as Thérèse made clear in her life, and as Christianity makes perhaps clearer than any other religion, to love God is to love his creatures, to express our love for “humanity” not in a vague “humanitarian” sense, but concretely in every action of our lives.

    This Chronicle offers merely a preliminary suggestion of how the originary hypothesis might be elaborated into a post-psychoanalytic understanding of the human psyche. It is a suggestion that I propose to others to flesh out through research and reflection, in confidence that the originary hypothesis provides the most fundamental understanding of the specific difference that makes us human.

  • A defense of liberalism — and its “victims”

    As has never been more evident than today, history, particularly political history, is always smarter than “smart people.” When the intelligentsia all start to repeat the same ideas, you can be assured, not necessarily that they are “false,” but that they have become irrelevant to the problem at hand.

    This has certainly been true over the past decade or two in the academic world, which becomes ever more immersed in the victimary thinking that my readers are surely tired of hearing about.

    But being myself one of the “smart people,” I recognize that denouncing their folly is no less futile. The theses of victimary ideology are certainly vulnerable to ridicule, or would be if everyone were an emeritus professor on a pension as opposed to a job-seeking PhD devoid of victimary advantages. Ridicule is as much a sign of frustration as of genuine superiority. If ridicule were, as in an aristocratic 18th century salon (cf. the film Ridicule), effectively murderous (la ridicule tue), one would not have to use it more than once. As it is, the more absurd the underlying theses of victimary thinking, the more crucial it is to explain them by reasons more profound than power-hunger and delusion. Explaining is not condoning, but neither is it simply pointing to the emperor’s new clothes.

    It might seem strange to imagine my defending “liberalism” precisely at a time when it is being attacked by everyone on the right, especially the element of it that takes religion seriously (which is not the same as the “religious right” of Falwell et al.).

    I am not talking about the “liberalism” of the mainstream press. In a recent MSM piece, Biden was described as the standard-bearer of the “centrist” wing of the Democratic party, and Sanders that of the “liberal” wing. If Sanders is a “liberal,” should we call Stalin an “ultra-liberal”?

    The liberalism I would defend is not that of the Democrats, not even of FDR and Truman, for whom I feel a residual nostalgia. It is the nominal form of the adjective used in describing what remains the world’s most successful social order as liberal democracy. I have mentioned Francis Fukuyama’s name too many times in this context to repeat my continued agreement that ours is indeed the “worst—except for all the others” political order, unless you prefer Chinese-style state capitalism cum emperor-worship.

    It is this liberalism I would defend, and I deplore the confusion involved in ascribing the problems of American democracy, which is indeed close to a crisis, to the demerits of “liberalism.” The critics of liberalism typically define it by references to Locke and Mill and tutti quanti instead of focusing on the specificity of today’s politics. Use of the word functions to absolve the critic of explaining either how our “liberal” democracy has produced such aberrances, or what would remain of it if these aberrances were corrected.

    Pace Heidegger, recreating mythological etymologies using ur-Aryan roots is not really the best way to understand the “originary” sense of things. Words are rooted in fairly recent history, and even Anna Wierzbicka’s praiseworthy attempt to seek the fundamental elements of the human vocabulary across linguistic differences can take her only so far. Thus it is unfortunate but not surprising that Wierzbicka’s explanation for the origin of language repeats the ultimately absurd cliché that people started talking to each other because their brains started creating ideas that they wanted to express (see Chronicles 552 and especially 553). In Adam Katz’s praiseworthy effort to use her “natural semantic metalanguage” (see in particular his March 5, 2020 GABlog post “Toward a Generative Logic of Translation”) as a means for supplementing the originary hypothesis, he might also do well to consider using the originary scene as a basis for judging the originarity of the words in its vocabulary.

    No doubt any definition of liberal democracy will be both too explicit and not explicit enough. The idea that finding the right definition somehow improves the situation is a metaphysical myth. What makes liberal democracy work is not its conformity to an algorithm, presumably discoverable in the same way that computers have “learned” to beat humans at chess and Go, but its reliance on the regularities of human communication, derived from our scene of origin through a historical process that continually tests them in practice.

    Beyond this, arguing about the “meaning” of liberalism—whether it includes libertarianism, implies acceptance of the sexual revolution or homosexual marriage, etc.—is not a useful exercise, whether for one who calls himself a “liberal” or his opposite. If what I am calling liberal democracy, and in particular its current American version, is near crisis, then what need to be solved, or at least described, are the specific problems of this democracy.

    In tandem with critiques of “liberalism,” we are also beginning to see an increasing number of denunciations of what I have been calling for two decades “victimary thinking,” the chief impetus of which, as is still rarely acknowledged, is not the victims’ own resentment (although this is surely a reality) but apotropaic White Guilt, to which the adjective “male” may most often be added.

    To simplify the discussion, despite the oft-cited “intersectional” nature of the problem, I shall leave aside feminism, which deserves to be treated as a separate issue. Not only does what was once known as the “weaker sex” make up over half the population, but its social problems have a clear biological basis which, however little it may allay the concomitant resentment, has at least to interact with it, on peril of exacerbating still further the demographic overwhelming of advanced societies by those in which women are restricted to little more than their biological role. Sloganeering is not the answer to such a problem; nor can it be mitigated by dismissing women’s biological difference from men as “socially constructed,” let alone as a choice of “gender identity” that allows boys to win girls’ athletic contests.

    That presumably responsible politicians fear to dissent from such notions, even in their own minds, is a sign of the power of victimary thinking, but calling it somehow a necessary consequence of “liberalism” begs the question of how it is linked, necessarily or contingently, to the broader category of liberal democracy, which has been around a lot longer than gay marriage and affirmative action—or female suffrage. I welcome the fact that critics are becoming aware of the centrality of the victimary concept to what they condemn in “PC” or “identity politics,” but so far “liberalism” is still the only commonly used term that links it to our social order.

    Let me stipulate for our current purposes that the emergence of the victimary as a political force can be explained in the broadest sense as a reaction to the breakdown in the digital era of the primary condition of human solidarity, the sense of possessing the capacity to engage in the reciprocal exchange of meaningful signs. (I will deal with some obvious objections to this thesis below.) Then the question we must ask is whether and how this deficit might be made compatible either with liberal democracy in more or less its present form or with some variant of it that preserves its essential character.

    Today, the system of implicit rules of interaction that we until recently took for granted as simple civility is close to breaking down—to the point where the Speaker of the House publicly tears up the President’s State of the Union speech and the Senate Minority Leader calls out Supreme Court Justices in gangland fashion on the courthouse steps. The ground rules of debate in Congress, particularly in the House, are no longer merely adversarial but on many issues no longer consonant with rational discussion. Even our system of elections, although still more or less functional, is increasingly in disorder. The absence in many places of any meaningful control over voter identification, on the pretext that this “discriminates against minorities” rather than checks for illegality, makes the results increasingly less certain; and the supplementing of election-day balloting with all kinds of “convenient” schemes makes a mockery of ballot security and undermines the act of voting as a civic exercise.

    In the early years of the victimary revolution, I published an article called “Originary Democracy and the Critique of Pure Fairness” (The Democratic Experience and Political Violence, ed. David Rapoport and Leonard Weinberg, London: Frank Cass, 2001, 308-24; also issued as Terrorism and Political Violence 12, 3-4, Autumn/Winter 2000). In it I pointed out that the interdiction of ascriptive discrimination and the imposition of “fair” criteria that is the substance of contemporary meritocracy generates more resentment than the traditional means of allocation of privilege.

    There is an essential difference between what can be called caste distinctions and meritocratic differences in competence (see, e.g., Chronicle 484). A medieval peasant was illiterate and ignorant of Latin, but he saw this as a consequence of his place in society, not of something like a lower IQ. Whence the fairy tales where a frog, beast, or pauper turns out to be a prince. But when everyone takes tests, and those with lower scores cannot find work of a comparable level of remuneration to higher ones, it is no longer possible to attribute one’s inferiority to God’s inscrutable will—or to anticipate one’s future reward where “the last shall be the first.”

    In traditional liberal democracies, precisely because they were still far from fair in meritocratic terms, those less favored did not have to doubt their sense of moral equality with their “betters,” a sense reinforced by America’s dominant Protestantism, with its priestless congregations of morally equal individuals, in parallel with its political philosophy.

    The decline of our traditional Sabbath demonstrations of moral reciprocity is most simply explained as resulting from the same phenomenon as the rise of victimary resentment: loss of the sense that, despite our differences of wealth and competence, we all “speak the same language.” Why does the businessman today marry a lawyer, the male doctor a female doctor, rather than, as in the past, his secretary or his nurse? Because of the stratification that is defined by symbolic exchange before it can be attributed to income level.

    In the digital world, where professional status even outside the STEM fields generally involves a high level of competence in symbol manipulation, whether by lawyers or journalists or advertising executives, let alone stockbrokers and accountants, the simplest way for the less competent to preserve the principle of moral reciprocity is the refuge provided them by victimary ideology—which is not, however, primarily of their own creation.

    The postwar economic boom had produced a relative leveling of salaries between “blue-collar” and “white-collar” workers—terms now nearly forgotten—more or less consonant with the Marx/Ricardo “labor theory of value,” and reinforced by the then near-universal “middle-class” culture that Charles Murray describes in Coming Apart.

    Culturally even more than economically, today’s society has moved closer to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but with the game-changing difference that our Alphas and Epsilons are not distinct castes in principle unable to conceive their moral equality. Yet to the extent that different ethnic groups have been more or less successful in negotiating the challenges of the digital age, their frequent alignment with these categories, even in the absence of legally prohibited discrimination, gives a premium to the victimary explanation that substitutes ascriptive oppression by the “privileged” for the formerly inscrutable will of God.

    This premium given to minority resentment at a time when these same minorities, particularly blacks, have not only vanquished Jim Crow but made considerable economic progress over the recent past, cannot be explained by increased frustration. Its ever-increasing prominence reflects above all the power of White Guilt among those whose “privilege,” whatever its social roots, is mostly in the quality of their minds, and whose economic power allows them to dominate the nation’s, and the world’s, chief sources of cultural influence.

    In an era when the global reach of the digital economy has replaced the millionaire with the billionaire, and soon perhaps the trillionaire, it is the privileged, not their “victims,” who feel the need to denounce the very principle of privileged status, however meritocratically obtained, as a mark of cosmic injustice. The purpose, or in any case the effect, of this largely successful apotropaic gesture has been to protect themselves from resentment. Whence the surfeit of ultra-rich donors and candidates in the “socialistic” Democratic Party.

    For whatever reason, but largely determined by their upbringing in often affluent but above all stable families that inculcated respect for education and self-discipline, the mostly white members of the digital elite have become particularly adept at manipulating symbols: in a word, smarter than most others. But there is no payoff in expressing guilt for being smart, let alone rich. By expressing the object of this guilt rather as the indelibly ascriptive trait of (male) white skin, the favored can recognize and do penance for it without having to feel really responsible, all the while self-righteously denouncing those deplorable working-class and rural whites as benighted racists, and ultimately denouncing the racism that, whether or not we are aware of it, flourishes in the core of white American souls to this day.

    Whence the usefulness of asserting, for example, that the greater proportion of blacks in prisons is due to “racism” rather than to the fact that blacks proportionally commit a higher percentage of crimes. As Mr. Bloomberg learned recently, even to allude to this simple fact now carries a considerable stigma, with the result that Giuliani’s crime-abating “broken windows” policy is being abandoned in New York City and elsewhere—even if it is law-abiding black people who suffer the most from black crime, just as the entire black community suffers from the premium the welfare system accords to unwed mothers. There was a time when black community leaders requested more severe punishment for possession of crack than of cocaine because of its effect on crime in their neighborhoods. And, as Thomas Sowell likes to point out, there was also a time in pre-Great Society days when black families were as stable as those of the white middle class—which today in its lower income levels is suffering from similar problems of family breakdown and single motherhood.

    Let us assume that you accept this explanation of the victimary surge. What strategy does this suggest? The solidarity that holds societies together, which had found its most flexible and creative form of expression in government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” is working ever less well. Victimary thinking has spread from the universities into the greater society, including all but a small fraction of its educational system. I shudder to think what kids are learning today in place of “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

    The archaic social order enforced extreme levels of differentiation; leaders were treated as gods and endowed with limitless power over others, in effect imposing religions of idolatry. The subsequent conquest of the West by Christianity, by separating God from Caesar, realized something like a renewal of originary universal solidarity in the religious realm. This liberation of moral equality from worldly firstness gave birth within a few centuries to bourgeois society and liberal democracy, which reduced all remaining caste stratifications to historical relics, and with universal suffrage, empowered the political equivalent of the “moral model” of reciprocal symbolic exchange: one person, one vote. Today, this system shows signs of breaking down. How then can we go forward rather than turning backward, as China has done, despite its economic liberalization, to a coercive totalitarian hierarchy?

    Thus far, the growing victimocracy has remained compatible with a flourishing economy and a minimum of social disturbance. But it is hard to believe it can be sustained for more than another decade or two. The burgeoning of the national debt along with near-zero interest rates is but one indication of this. This year’s septuagenarian candidates for the presidency embody our tenuous link with postwar America as the self-confident savior of Western civilization. When all of us are gone, when even the middle-aged will have been taught from early childhood to despise the “Founding Fathers” as slave-owning sexists, this remaining anchor of civility will have disappeared.

    To blame this unhappy perspective on the “liberalism” embodied in the loosening morals of the sexual revolution, with its corollary insistence on the rights of homosexuals and victims of “gender dysphoria,” is not a helpful explanation of the victimary phenomenon. However unreasonable it may be to consider a child’s unhappiness with its “gender role” as a form of oppression, it is childish indeed to see this as a product of “liberalism” rather than of the victimary movement’s feverish search for ever-new categories of victims to explain away the guilt of those who pass and the unhappiness of those who fail the tests of meritocracy.

    As one who throughout his life has benefited from such tests, I am no doubt ill-suited to recommend them to those less likely to do so. But given the needs of our digital world, it would seem that the only feasible long-term solution to ever-increasing symbolic inequality is the development of means to permit human intelligence to be, not replaced, but aided by cybernetic “intelligence.”

    Whether this be done by genetic manipulation, implantation, or other as yet unanticipated procedures, I see no other way to permit all of us to function adequately in the postmodern world. Victimary accusations increasingly render our society uncivil and unlivable—and above all, increasingly less able to tap those reserves of national will that we had always been able to count on in emergencies.

    The silver lining of the present Coronavirus pandemic is that it should remind us of the importance of national solidarity, something easily forgotten in less critical times. Let us hope, at the very least, that in overcoming this crisis we demonstrate once more to the world that our social order has remained the worst with the exception of all the others.

  • Religion, Love, and Common Sense

    Is the originary hypothesis just a synonym for common sense? Forgetting about the specifics, its core is the irruption of the “vertical”/transcendent into the “horizontal”/material world; individual appetites are deferred and mutually communicated through what Peirce called “symbolic” signs, even if at this stage the “symbolism” consisted only in shared pointing at the central object—”joint shared attention” not practiced by even our closest animal relatives. It is all too easy for Michael Tomasello, one of the discoverers of this key human distinction, to dismiss the theological baggage associated with the animal-human transition as “leaders’” claiming they have “somehow been anointed by a deity” to justify their privileges (see Chronicle 519). How can what seems to us the common-sense reaction of différance to avoid bloodshed possibly require the endless variety and complexity of religious systems?

    The short answer to this question is that GA’s ability to cut through the whole of human history to the originary interposition of the néant of deferral between us and the world in order to sum up what makes us human is the intellectual product of this very same history and the institutions it has built. These institutions have contributed over the centuries both to the complexity that hides the simplicity of our origin, and to the intellectual simplification that makes it possible in our “post-modern” era to formulate a commonsensical hypothesis of it. That the latter, far from being welcomed with open arms, or even disputed, is simply ignored as irrelevant, is itself a phenomenon that follows from GA’s prehistory; indeed, it can be seen as a corollary of the originary hypothesis itself.

    Playing with such paradoxes is enjoyable, but only because it further defers what deferral was invented/discovered to prevent in the first place, the collapse of our cultural system back into nature raw in tooth and claw. It is preferable to examine a real-world example: the case, referred to in Chronicle 649, of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

    Thérèse’s saintliness has at first glance two distinct components. On the one hand, she was a young woman of “saintly” character: charitable to a fault, always ready to deprive herself for others, careful not to indulge her worldly appetites more than absolutely necessary. As all her canonization witnesses make clear, Thérèse was at great pains not to accept even deserved privileges or respond to slights and insults; she was infallibly kind and helpful to all, especially to those who were at first unkind to her. She had an inspiring effect on virtually everyone who knew her, even (or especially) those fellow sisters who had greeted her with hostility, seeing her as the spoiled benjamine of her family and (with two and then three older sisters also present) at the convent as well. Thérèse would never complain nor show annoyance when treated unfairly; she avoided those nuns she felt warmly toward, particularly her sisters, in order to frequent those who were unpleasant to her, not out of masochism, but in order to help convert them to a more Christian disposition.

    Thérèse never refused to help anyone in need. Yet when she was (at a very young age) put in charge of her convent’s novices, she did not hesitate to speak to them of their faults, out of her duty to make them better sisters and better people. The Prioress of her convent at her admission, who was a difficult woman, said that, despite her extreme youth, Thérèse would herself have made an excellent prioress, given her excellent judgment and irreproachable and charitable dealings with all her fellow nuns.

    But on the other hand, these universal human qualities were in Thérèse’s mind inseparable from her faith. Thérèse was not a trained theologian, but John Paul II named her Doctor of the Church for what he saw as her flawless comprehension of Christian beliefs, from the Gospels to later texts, such as the Imitation of Christ, which she knew by heart, or the mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross, fellow Carmelite and disciple of the first Saint Teresa. Above all, Thérèse was able to articulate the terms of Christian doctrine in such a way as to illuminate them with her own spiritual experience. She described her personal path to salvation as la petite voie, the “little way,” consisting in humbly doing her duty without calling attention to herself, and above all, in motivating all her acts by her love of the Trinitarian God, Father and Son bound together as one by the Holy Spirit.

    Thérèse’s continued popularity reflects her success, unique among modern saints, in seamlessly uniting reverence for God’s firstness with the moral model of human reciprocity. Her desire to remain poor, humble, and unknown was not motivated by inverse pride or a need for self-abasement, but by allowing to God in his wisdom the choice of whether to use her example to contribute to mutual love among human beings, and thereby to their love of God. Her autobiographical text, Histoire d’une âme, which made her world-famous, was not written on her own initiative but on that of her order, and she had no part in its posthumous publication. We must consider as perfectly sincere her declaration that if the Prioress decided to throw her manuscripts on the fire, this would change nothing in her love of God.

    La petite voie stands in sharp contrast to the “way” of Joan of Arc, with whom Thérèse nonetheless identified to the point of playing her role in several plays she wrote about Joan for performance at the Carmel. (Joan was actually canonized after Thérèse, these two young women being subsequently named among the nine secondary patron saints of France.) Thérèse’s sainthood has appealed both to many Catholics and to others outside a religious context because her petite voie requires nothing more than humble devotion to God as himself a source of love of humankind.

    Thérèse as Joan of Arc in her play Jeanne d’Arc accomplissant sa mission (1895) [Taken by her sister Céline; Archives du Carmel de Lisieux: http://www.archives-carmel-lisieux.fr/carmel/index.php/les-photos-de-th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se-prises-par-c%C3%A9line/photo-13]

    We may find it difficult to imagine that someone brought up in a highly religious family, whose parents attended the 6 AM mass every day, who appealed personally to the Pope in order to enter the Lisieux Carmel at fifteen, and whose four sisters also became nuns, ever had occasion to doubt her faith. Yet one thing that caused Thérèse considerable spiritual pain was her moments of doubt concerning heaven—not her merit for attaining it, but its very existence. We cannot interpret this as a resentful feeling of injustice that after all her efforts she might not be rewarded by God. Her fear was simply that she would be deprived of the celestial joys of union with Jesus that she had so passionately anticipated—joys at the antipodes of the celestial reward of 72 virgins promised to the jihadist martyr. This denial would mean not a loss of “pleasure,” but the invalidation of her faith in the transcendent différance that had sustained her through life, and that in her worldview sustained our entire God-governed universe.

    The exemplarity of Thérèse’s sainthood, which cannot help but touch anyone with the least love for our shared humanity, embodies religion’s ultimate paradox. If we bracket the institutional aspect of her religious beliefs and consider them simply in human terms, we must admire the ethic that she faithfully followed in pursuit of these beliefs. Yet this ethic could not have been, not merely realized, but made public in such a way as to inspire others, without the institutional weight of the late-19th-century French Catholic Church.

    Nothing similar would be even remotely possible today. It is noteworthy that the only comparably saintly personage widely known in the West today, Thérèse’s late namesake Mother Teresa, is admired above all for her works as a missionary and healer of the sick rather than for her personal example of saintliness, however powerful it may have been. Thérèse would certainly have admired her as she did Joan of Arc, but Teresa was like Joan a heroic figure, not a follower of the petite voie of seeking saintly perfection in the humble activities of everyday.

    The Act of Oblation quoted in Chronicle 649 expresses with admirable clarity the paradox of firstness and reciprocity inherent in Thérèse’s practical ethic. Thérèse declared her desire to be a saint, but that God be “her sanctity.” Elsewhere, she expressed a strong desire to remain unknown. In our terms, Thérèse desired to be “first,” but it is Jesus, not she, who would supply her firstness.

    But this allows us to understand that the paradoxical quality of Thérèse’s desire is that of language alone. In life, her self-seeking self, resentful of the sacred, is continually overcome by the process of transcendence that we call love, a sequence we can intuitively understand but whose dynamic can be expressed only in paradoxical terms. For desire must change its meaning from one sentence to the next; in order that love be the transcendence of resentment, its process can never cease long enough to formulate it as a simple proposition. In this our description is like that of Nagarjuna’s “traverser who never traverses” (see Chronicle 515), being both inside and outside the world of the sentence—except that here the paradox is not attributed to the propositional universe as such, but to our affirmation of the transcendence that permits us to be human.

    We can accept Durkheim’s equation of God with “society” only if we define “society” in originary terms as the absolutely necessary solidarity of the protohuman group without which humanity would not exist. At that moment, the “brotherhood of man” was concentrated in the renunciation of rivalry in favor of deferral and reciprocity within one face-to-face hunting band. No future social group could reproduce this originary moment, whose innovation occurred in the absence of (human) memory. But the impossibility of such reproduction has been the source of the series of imperfect triumphs that has brought humanity to its present state. What Thérèse’s example shows is that what cuts through the historical detail is love—the assertion of human solidarity, mediated by the shared sacred, over resentment; love as instantiated in the sense of fellow-feeling that we regularly seek to rekindle in collective celebrations, from Seders and Thanksgiving dinners to Aztec festivals and Nuremberg rallies.

    If we seek the core of our ethical problems, the element that makes humanity’s discovery of transcendence anything but a utopian solution to its problems, it is the eternal tension between firstness—the “life-force,” but mediated by the sacred center—and morality, the reciprocity embodied in our exchange of the signs of human culture. This is the tension that found its resolution in the originary sparagmos.

    Adam Katz was right to point out that the whole group could not have discovered/invented the sign “spontaneously” or “simultaneously.” Some member(s) of the group must have been first to grasp the sacrality of the scenic center as significant, and the “aborted gesture of appropriation” as a sign or signifier. This recasting of the gesture was not a “theoretical” discovery, but an act performed in the interest of their own safety by signaling their non-rivalrous intention to the others. And on this occasion, firstness was of value only insofar as it was absorbed by unanimity. The sign, a gesture of renunciation, could not provoke resentment, but on the contrary, invited non-rivalrous imitation.

    The Genesis story of the Fall as resulting from the discovery of “knowledge” is necessarily paradoxical, since the evolution of language makes inevitable the acquisition of “knowledge” (as contained in the declarative sentence), and the social distinctions it permits. And the attribution of this discovery to Eve’s conversation with the serpent, finding in woman’s resentment of her secondarity the source of Satan’s competition with God, is at the very least a well-conceived epistemological model.

    Rousseau was nonetheless historically justified in locating the societal consciousness of the “fall of man” in the institution of private property, historically associated with the sedentary agriculture of the Neolithic Revolution. For the first time, a social order was obliged to give an explicit role to firstness untranscended by reciprocity, a moment defined in the Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité by “Le premier qui . . . s’avisa de dire: Ceci est à moi . . .”

    Religion is not idolatry of the center. Its essence is the attribution of all firstness to the originary sacred, whether it be the firstness of the god-emperor or of the holder of the floor in a discussion. In practical terms, we must of course distinguish between degrees of firstness. But saintliness, as Thérèse insisted on living it, attributed to God every form of firstness, any fact that might risk being interpreted as setting a given individual above another. Such saintliness thus provides a universal model to humanity, fulfilling Kant’s “categorical imperative” that the justification of all one’s deeds, and I would add, one’s thoughts, be formulable as a “universal law,” for in no case would they violate what we call the moral model.

    The sentiment that accompanies this exemplary code of conduct, whose nature would have been indifferent to Kant, or which would be in a Buddhist context the self-containedness resulting from the evacuation of the center, was in Thérèse’s world expressed as a passionate love of God’s benevolent authority. There is no point in speaking of the superiority of one ethical system over the other, but it is surely no accident that the originary hypothesis is a product of Judeo-Christian society. To capture with some plausibility the experiential kernel from which the human sprang is possible only in a context that regards both the sacred center and the resentment it arouses as anything but illusions.

  • Sacred Resentment

    Given my thesis that love is “the transcendence of resentment,” one might ask why both in the name of these Chronicles and in the last two of them love precedes resentment. No doubt in the first case one can allege the superior euphony of the word order, but a more serious justification must be found for the other.

    Which is that one must begin with the end, because were we still at “the beginning,” we, that is, human beings, would not yet exist. Once more, this is a distinction that Girard unfortunately never made clear enough, but that, as a representative of his “elder brothers,” I have been able to sharpen—recalling the point I made in the previous Chronicle that the ability of Jewish thinkers to do without Christianity is dependent on its existence. It is love that makes religion, so that in the strictest sense, there is no “sacred resentment,” unless you consider the non-originary Satan as sacred.

    This makes clear why religions have a “problem of evil”: if God is goodness itself, why is all resentment not transcended? Even to claim that resentment is the necessary predecessor of sacred love, of transcendent différance itself, inverts the Biblical genesis of the world by a perfect God, a fact only indirectly referenced by John’s “correction” of Genesis, where the Logos that he places “in the beginning” can be identified with the “light [that] shineth in darkness” that the “darkness comprehended not,” to paraphrase the King James version. That “darkness” must consequently have been there from “before,” as part of the originary chaos, the tohu wa bohu of Gen 1:2, and John’s precision about its rejection of the light is thus pretty close to making it a figure of “originary resentment,” except that, given that resentment is etymologically a form of deferred emotion, it can never be understood as truly originary. In the originary event, we can only speak of resentment, as opposed to the kind of frustration that produced a “paradoxical state” in Pavlov’s dogs, once it has already been transcended. In other terms, “chaos” is only chaos from the standpoint of a prior or posterior order.

    Whence the usefulness of Darwin for unraveling the mystery of the originary paradox of transcendence, which is that of human origin. Evolution, by increasing (mimetic) intelligence beyond a certain point, makes prehuman social forms no longer possible. The confirmation of this thesis by primatologist Richard Wrangham in his The Goodness Paradox (Pantheon, 2019; see Chronicle 614), who, I daresay naively, interprets uniquely human proactive or premeditated violence as a result of our acquisition of language, is as close to empirical corroboration of the originary hypothesis as we are likely to get. Save that if Wrangham would avoid treating language as a gratuitous gift from heaven, he would be obliged to situate his murder scenes within a society already acquainted with la différance.

    The point of originary resentment is that it is focused not on one’s fellows, however much they may have been in the pre-scenic stage the objects of aggression, but on the central object that is interdicted by its sacrality. The paradox of desire is that its object is too desirable to be possessed. That a lover may have this sentiment when alone with his beautiful beloved would be incomprehensible were it not derived from a much simpler scene where the central object is surrounded in “fearful symmetry” by rivals for its possession. Recalling that hierarchical animal societies do not divide up such objects, but award their total possession to each member in turn, tacitly assuming that those at the head of the list will leave something for (most of) the others, we must appreciate the unnaturalness of the “moral model,” the principle of equal division that to humans, all other things being equal, goes without saying.

    Those on the periphery of the scene can be said to resent the sacred central object, but they gradually lose their fear of it as the pacific nature of the scene becomes patent, motivating the transition to the sparagmos which supplies alimentary reinforcement to the community. But the resentful tension between appetite and non-fulfillment remains a permanent feature of desire. To desire is, precisely, to defer appetitive possession, and whatever appears as the agent of this deferral may then be said to constitute an object of resentment. It is in this configuration that we can begin to understand resentment’s transcendence by love.

    The difficulty of defining resentment should make us realize that any characteristically human emotion/relationship cannot be described by starting from its physiological manifestations. Resentment is a cultural phenomenon. Nor is it necessarily experienced as hostility or a desire for “comeuppance.” This is no doubt the way the word is used in normal parlance, and if we begin from the originary relationship with the central object, resentment is, on the one hand, a source of the aggression against this object—as described in Robertson Smith’s famous camel-sacrifice that has served Freud, Girard, and GA as the model for the originary sparagmos. But on the other, if indeed love is the transcendence of resentment, we should recall from Hegel’s Logik that “transcendence” or Aufhebung not merely annuls but also preserves (“lifts up”) what is transcended. It is this easily forgotten aspect that explains what we call esthetic pleasure, whether in an artistic fiction or the real-life experience of beauty.

    This allows us to make more precise my definition of the esthetic experience as the  oscillation of the attention of the recipient of an artwork between the esthetic sign and the imaginary construction it evokes in his mind (see “Originary Narrative,” Anthropoetics 3,2).

    For example, the viewer of a painting sees the physical object as the representation of a figured world; but in order to continue to figure it, he must return his attention to the painting itself. Thus the most compelling paintings, “objective” or not, convey a sense of incompleteness “at first glance” that tempts us to “take another look.” The works of Escher do this in a naively mechanical way, but plastic art’s masterpieces incorporate a sense of anticipation in their narrative and descriptive details. And in the case of a temporally unfolding work of music or drama, we return dynamically from the incompleteness of our imaginary construct to the new matter that we trust will lead us to a final resolution of the work’s tensions.

    This formulation can be made more concrete by returning to the originary experience of deferral, during which the object itself cannot be possessed and therefore arouses originary resentment, yet it is through its sacred différance  that it provides the community with peace, and consequently makes it an object of love.

    Originary love can be qualified as religious, being wholly dependent on the sacred interdiction of immediate satisfaction and therefore providing no “supplementary” esthetic pleasure to that of (peace-bringing) transcendence itself—the proof being that in the originary event, satisfaction can be realized only through actually devouring the object.

    The object’s deferred status is precisely, in the phenomenological sense, its presence. Derrida’s critique of presence, as I have pointed out (see, e.g., Chronicle 408), is a critique of the sacred foundation of the human itself as being from the outset always already inhabited by inequality—an anticipation of social hierarchy that is, from an originary standpoint, inconceivable.

    None of this, however, invalidates the reality of presence, which in the human/cultural sense is defined simply by the object’s deferral, and need not be associated with the supplemental vice attributed to it by Derrida as a spuriously immediate sign of authentic truth. I have often wondered how Derrida would have responded to the observation that the présence he describes is essentially inhabited by absence, Sartre’s néant, which opens the scenic space within which alone the object can present itself.

    Once we add the “emotional” love/resentment dimension to our experience of art, it becomes clear that the aforementioned resentment/love oscillation, which existed at the origin independently of supplementary satisfaction, is in esthetic experience supplemented by what we call its “esthetic value,” the sensual pleasure it provides on the scene of representation independently of reality, as a fiction or object of the imagination. The difference between the spectator’s experience of the painting of a beautiful woman (or in watching a beautiful woman on the screen) and the mere presence of a sacred object that is frustratingly unavailable—the essential difference between the objects of erotic and alimentary desire that makes the latter the only kind conceivable as the source of the originary event—makes it the object of an esthetic mode of love, one not dependent on mediation by the sacred’s power over the community, but capable of being experienced by the isolated individual independently of any contextual mimetic influence on his desires. The resentment/love oscillation that maintains us in the presence of the artwork detaches itself from the “fearful symmetry” of the origin while retaining its emotional charge, just as the signs of language become desacralized in the interest of conveying human desires and information pertinent to them.

    Girard’s designation of the Satanic as the domain of mimetic desire can be understood as expressing essentially the same intuition, if we recall that the Scheler quote that serves as the epigraph to Mensonge romantique (L’homme possède ou un Dieu, ou une idole) makes clear that good or bad, one always has a “mediator,” that is, the sacred is indispensable, and our relation to it is defined as the transcendence of resentment by love. But the love in idolatry is misplaced, incompatible with the originary root of the sacred experience. This is necessarily a matter of judgment, but in any social order there are criteria that guarantee such judgments, and in the West, at least in the era of the novels Girard studies, these criteria were defined by the Christian divine/human exemplarity of Jesus.

    These observations suggest that Nietzsche’s seizing on what he called the “Jewish” emotion of le ressentiment as the primary characteristic of the modern “common man,” whatever its proto-Nazi flavor, is nonetheless a step toward grasping humanity’s originary essence. Even its attribution to the Jews or Hebrews is, as would be the ensuing Nazi horrors, a backhanded compliment to their firstness, which Christianity pushes to its paradoxical limit.

    If we cleanse resentment of its associations with Scheler’s homme du ressentiment or Dostoevsky’s underground man, and go back before the birth of resentment-epistemology with the French Revolution, we arrive at a time when ressentiment was an expression of prideful indignation (Rome, l’unique objet de mon ressentiment, says Horace’s defeated rival’s beloved in Corneille’s Horace), the attitude of the nobleman challenging his offender to a duel. The nobleman’s pride is not a mere assertion of personal power, but of his place in a divinely guaranteed social order.

    But such divine guarantees are not inherent in this order; they must be affirmed by the society. In the suffering of the modern man of resentment, endlessly replaying the “triangular” scene of failed rivalry so powerfully depicted by Dostoevsky and analyzed by Girard, the rival in his superiority usurps the center of the scene of representation as the big-man did at the origin of hierarchical society, but without creating a stable order: his centrality is experienced as both inevitable and arbitrary.

    The prevalence of the epistemology of resentment in the modern world is the result of its constantly increasing demand for firstness that, in the digital era more than ever, empties the shared sacred of the moral model of its concrete content and fuels the demand for victimary alibis. “Meritocracy” is a praiseworthy concept, but in the terms of originary morality, it is a contradiction in terms: our very existence as a human community depends on the presumption of universal reciprocity. The increasingly clear evidence in the digital era that this cannot be the case—the crucial element (see, e.g., Chronicle 484) not being inequality of wealth and power, but the demonstration that we cannot preserve reciprocity in the use of signs, be they mathematical, legal, biological, or philosophical—is the source of the urge to explain these differences of ability by in principle correctable forms of ascriptive injustice.

    These reflections confirm my conviction that generative anthropology must periodically return to the originary hypothesis to seek ever more fundamental, more “minimal” expressions of it, and only this once accomplished can it go forward into history to seek to unravel the web of human culture. Grasping the minimal components of the specifically human relation to the world is not, as it might first appear, a task immediately accessible to our clear and distinct Cartesian intuition.

    Hopefully this process will go on indefinitely, or until what we call “GA” has mutated into something that requires another name. When I began forty years ago to think in these terms, I proposed in The Origin of Language what seemed to me a minimal expression of the hypothesis, which has permitted me and others to investigate various historical phenomena, most fruitfully in the domain of literature, my original field of study. As this Chronicle shows, I still find it profitable to rethink the fundamentals of the hypothesis. But having rewritten TOOL, I no longer have the time to rework the subsequent, more concrete analyses of The End of Culture, Originary Thinking, Signs of Paradox, The Scenic Imagination, or A New Way of Thinking—a task I happily leave to others.

    I hope that these reflections will also stimulate new thinking in more practical domains, most urgently, in that of politics, where the absence of “new ideas” is nowhere better demonstrated than in the current presidential campaign. The leading figures are all septuagenarians, two of them Jewish, three from different boroughs of New York City. None, however, is from the Bronx, my homeland of resentment—and of love.

  • Sacred Love

    If generative anthropology is less well known than “mimetic theory,” it is not simply because the latter is easier to understand. The primary reason is that, although GA can talk about sacred “fear and trembling,” it does not provoke such emotions, whereas from the first (see Chronicle 507), Girard speaks directly to the soul. Mensonge romantique is a compelling theory of the novel because it is in the first place a work of conversion, whose theoretical brilliance is focused on identifying the protagonist’s “idolatrous” mediations with those of the author’s prehistory, and by an inevitable extension, of the reader’s. There is nothing spurious about these identifications, even if their tendentiousness tends to gloss over the dominant and equally authentic mode of the novel, that classified in Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel as the Erziehungsroman, or more familiarly, the Bildungsroman. Whence the interest of the fact that in his later years, according to Andrew McKenna and others, Girard enjoyed reading the novels of Jane Austen, where the characters’ conversions to authentic love take place within the world, allowing them to live happily ever after to sustain the human community—for the sake of which, one might say, their tragic fellows have Christ-like given their lives to purge it of its self-destructive tendencies.

    Although GA takes into account the deferral occasioned by the sacred and does not make the error of metaphysics in assuming that language can deal with significance independently of its experiential source, it cannot take it into account experientially. GA is not written in the prophetic mode of Girard, but in the language of metaphysics, however “deconstructed.” And to understand in what sense, a generation ago, deconstruction had a similar, if more cerebral, existential effect, we should recall its links to 60s-era Marxism. Deconstruction may have been a critique of metaphysics, but it took the language of metaphysics as a synonym for the rationale of bourgeois society in general. This is confirmed by the fact that the residual philosophes in this tradition, such as Zizek, Badiou, or Agamben, have continued to assert this neo-Marxist stance, often in yet more radical forms.

    As readers of these Chronicles know, GA is a synthesis of these two tendencies of “post-structuralist” French Theory, of which the less visible but more crucial was largely represented by Girard alone. This synthesis can be seen as one more stage in Western civilization’s millenary interaction of Hebrew and Greek thought, although to grasp it more accurately we should rather speak no longer of “thought” but of anthropological discourse. For the Greek-Hebrew partnership has been from the beginning a quarrelsome marriage of metaphysical and religious expression that finds its unity not in any academic field but in the totality of human self-understanding—the overall project of which was originally embodied in the university. Whence the epithet of “humanistic” that GA attaches to its brand of anthropology.

    There is a permanent need for empirical anthropology, and no reason for GA to think of “absorbing” it. But to understand what can broadly be called the discursive basis of Western Civilization, GA should be seen not as a radically new concept, but rather as a self-conscious attempt to bring together what the authors of both philosophical and religious texts had always been doing.

    This is the sort of process that old Hegel understood better than anyone, which is why I consider him the great master of modern metaphysics. It is no accident that it was the neo-Hegelians far more than the neo-Kantians who had the truly radical ideas about transcending metaphysics. That several hundred million deaths can regrettably be attributed to the various political implementations of this tendency is from our standpoint only one more reason for urgency in promoting a new understanding of these developments. For whatever his errors, Marx’s watchword that humanity exists primarily to change the world and not simply to explain it cannot be gainsaid. Life is praxis, and no branch of knowledge, however “theoretical,” exists as an end in itself.

    With this in mind, the reader can understand why a human being should turn to religion not (only) to find personal consolation in faith, but to examine what faith can tell us about the human. This is the path first taken by Girard, himself a man of faith. But we should not neglect the similar movement in deconstruction. Derrida was very much a Jewish thinker, and the role of Jewish thinkers in the Christian era may be summed up as not refuting Christianity so much as denying its necessity, that is, the necessity of the paradoxical trinitary union of God and man—a denial that I believe, to add a fresh layer of paradox, could only be effectively made after the triumph of Christianity in the West.

    Jews are those who deny the necessity of Cur deus homo? Hitler’s dream of exterminating the Jews was only superficially “pagan.” Its roots, like those of Marxism, lay in Christianity, which is not to blame Christianity for Hitler any more than for Stalin. The gap opened up by la différance is on the one hand the equivalent of Sartre’s néant, but on the other it is the God-defining separation from God that mystics and saints have ever sought to annul by identification with the sacred itself. And in this regard, it is hard to deny the human appeal of identification through love with Christ. The Jew can love God, even “converse” with him, but he can never speak of and to him, as so many Christians have done, as brother or even as bridegroom. By retaining both versions of Biblical religion, the West brings together both the best and the worst of both worlds.

    The originary scene resolves the problem of the protohuman excess of mimetic desire. The sharing of the central object is the point of departure for the social conception of love as binding human beings in a transcendent, sacred/significant rather than a merely visceral/appetitive way—even if its visceral form is also more unproblematic, as dog owners often have occasion to remark.

    I have defined love as “the transcendence of resentment.” (This formula first appears only in Chronicle 121, but the conception was presented in Chronicle 6.) I see no need to repudiate this definition, but I think it can be sharpened, particularly in the sense that love is in the first place a religious emotion, and it is this mediation by the sacred that defines what we now call love. At the origin, love is the transcendence of originary resentment, the hostile reaction to the sacred object’s self-refusal—the root of the Satanic.

    Given humans’ long gestation period and the even longer infancy of our neotenic offspring, requiring extended maternal care, it is reasonable to presume that hominins at the protohuman stage were already monogamous. That “romantic love” in its modern sense was born only in the Middle Ages, and that its classical antecedents, as we see in the works of Sappho and in Plato’s frequent references to homosexual love—in the absence of any similar heterosexual attachments—corroborate the hypothesis that in the Classical confluent of Western culture, love of the sacred enters into interpersonal relationships only in contrast with the child-producing institution of marriage. Indeed, this contrast remains institutionally, if not erotically, a feature of medieval “courtly love” as well, whose “romantic” association with marriage in modern societies is quite recent. In contrast, the sacralization of the erotic within the marriage bond can be traced to the Old Testament, where homosexuality is repudiated and adultery condemned.

    Hence Helen’s role as the différend at the origin of the Trojan War is quite distinct from that of a Beatrice or a Laura. Her seduction by Paris no doubt distinguishes her from a valuable object that could simply be stolen, but this possession of agency is no more respected than the wishes of Briseis when Agamemnon takes her from Achilles. Nor do we hear of Menelaus composing love-sonnets in her absence.

    On this point, as on many others, we should follow Girard’s lead in understanding the Christian idea of love both as grounded in a more fundamental intuition than that of the Greeks and as, unlike the Hebrew, emphasizing its transcendence of social norms. We never hear of “loving” the Greek Gods, and although the love of God is fundamental to Hebrew religion, it is never expressed in orthodox Judaism in anything like an erotic mode. What is lacking is the Incarnation’s opening to the ultimate parity of the two parties, which permits love to become attached to erotic desire.

    The idea that God is love sums up the essence of transcendence as the source of human relations. No doubt this formulation lacks the differentiating/deferring aspect of transcendence without which it could never have emerged in the first place, but its point is not theoretical but, in the deepest sense, practical. It assumes something we cannot simply take for granted: that we can all experience love, and that this experience tells us what in humanity transcends us as individual human beings. And it is this conviction that inspires in the Christian world what we can call in the broadest sense romantic art and literature: art that makes the achievement of love between two human beings the fictional equivalent of unity with the sacred. No doubt the danger of romantic love is the idolatry of mensonge romantique, but in enjoying the novels of Austen, Girard himself lent credence to the ultimate possibility of its unity with vérité romanesque.

    As a wise old Irishwoman in Miles Franklin’s outback novel Ten Creeks Run points out, when God wanted to have a son, he wouldn’t have a man as its father, but he was perfectly content with a woman as its mother: mother-love, the most visceral yet non-hedonistic form of human love, could well be conceived as a human parallel to divine love. And it is a variant of such love, mediated through the exaltation of the Virgin, that gave birth to the modern conception of romantic love, sacramental before it is physical, yet not afraid to recruit the energy of desire, sexual as well as filial. This fusion is predicated on the prior prohibition of incest that is the traditional benchmark of human societies, separating the caress of mother and child from the embrace of lovers.

    Where then, might we ask, is “love” in the originary event? At the risk of passing from the sublime to the mundane, although not the ridiculous, there is no ritual of human society both older and more vigorous than the sharing of food. The prehuman antecedents of this sharing need only be mediated by sacred deferral to make it the visceral basis of the transcendent emotion of love.

    That we are tempted to model our origin on the most extreme sacrificial practices when we practice food-sharing ceremonies virtually every day, and in more intense and elaborate forms on special occasions, reflects the sense of alienation from our origin that was an unfortunate byproduct of the anthropological discoveries of the 19th century. But just as Lévi-Strauss refuted Lévy-Bruhl’s mentalité primitive by assimilating the “savage mind” to that of the modern bricoleur, we should emphasize less the exotic than the common elements of such fundamental human activities. That virtually every non-perfunctory personal encounter between two or more people involves at least an offer to share some kind of refreshment cannot be explained by a biological imperative.

    From the point of view of GA, the fact that “God is love” is for Christians most intimately experienced in the Eucharist or its equivalent makes us realize that the Christian infusion of human affect into religious devotion, far from a symptom of mere emotionalism, is the equivalent of an etiological, that is, an originary investigation. The totalistic intuition of God’s presence that we can observe in the language of the exemplary believers that the Catholic Church canonizes is moving even to atheists, for this language incarnates the paradox of transcendence in linking the otherness of the sacred/significant to the most fundamental human needs.

    La petite sainte

    As an example of the Christian expression of the discourse of religious love as an acknowledgement of, and as such, an aspiration to transcend the paradox of transcendence, I offer an excerpt from the writings of the Carmelite Thérèse Martin (1873-97), France’s vastly popular petite sainte, with a statue in virtually every French church. Years ago, my Catholic ex-wife Monique and I visited les Buissonets, the modest middle-class home in Lisieux where Thérèse and her four sisters, all of whom also took the veil, had lived during her early adolescence.

    Before pooh-poohing the following text as a naïve outpouring of emotion, the reader should know that John Paul II thought so highly of the theological value of Thérèse’s writings that, on the centenary of her death in 1997, he designated her as the youngest of the (only) thirty-three Doctors of the Church.

    Act of Oblation to Merciful Love
    [composed on the occasion of the Feast of the Trinity, June 9, 1895]

    O My God! Most Blessed Trinity, I desire to Love You and make you Loved . . . I desire to accomplish Your will perfectly and to reach the degree of glory You have prepared for me in Your Kingdom. I desire, in a word, to be a Saint, but I feel my helplessness and I beg You, O my God! to be Yourself my Sanctity!

    . . .

    In order to live in one single act of perfect Love, I OFFER MYSELF AS A VICTIM OF HOLOCAUST TO YOUR MERCIFUL LOVE, Asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your Love, O my God!

    . . .

    May this martyrdom, after having prepared me to appear before You, finally cause me to die and may my soul take its flight without any delay into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love.

    I want, O my Beloved, at each beat of my heart to renew this offering to You an infinite number of times, until the shadows having disappeared I may be able to tell You of my Love in an Eternal Face to Face!

    (Story of A Soul, translated [slightly modified] by Fr. John Clarke, O.C.D. Copyright (c) 1976 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E., Washington, DC 20002 U.S.A., pp. 276-278: https://www.ewtn.com/therese/readings/readng4.htm)

    What this text reveals not merely in but through its lack of sophistication is a necessarily paradoxical effort to express the transcendence of worldly language in language. Thérèse wants to be a saint, but she wants this not as an accomplishment but as a divine gift that she does not “merit,” but to which she submits. Yet the text is nonetheless a voluntary offering of herself.

    The word “Holocaust” has horrible associations in the 20th century, and its victims could have taken no consolation from Thérèse’s love (although John Paul II’s calling the Jews his “elder brothers” is not likely to have occurred without it). But for our purposes here, Thérèse’s sacrifice is noteworthy for its rejection of any self-abnegating gesture. Thérèse does not need to wear a hair shirt or flagellate herself, her will is to act as though by the will of the Trinitarian God. Her desire to “renew this offering an infinite number of times” with each heartbeat can only be understood in the world as a hyperbole, but in the kingdom of God it is within the power of the sacred, of transcendence. To call it a paradox, one feels, would reduce it to metaphysics, whereas its whole point is as an expression of the faith that it is not paradoxical, that it expresses the inexpressible unity of what transcendence separates and which is, in its origin, la différance.

    It is Thérèse’s exclusive focus on this union that defines faith itself to the exclusion of all else that made her Histoire d’une âme a worldwide best-seller and led to her canonization. Unlike Pascal’s soul qui cherche en gémissant, Thérèse’s surrender to love allows her to act to the limit of her forces without the Jansenist anxiety of lost grace.

    Some mystics seek to leave the material world by punishing their own materiality with torture. But (as did the Buddha in a very different context), Thérèse never approved of asceticism. She saw her physical suffering and mortality as signs of her dependency on God’s grace and opportunities for the joy of submission to divine will. These sentiments are recognizable extensions of the relief felt by the participants in the originary event to be held in a state of deferral, not by their individual fear but by the sense of a “greater power” deferring their action. The fact that they could not articulate this sentiment as clearly as Thérèse is a sign not of the anachronism of this parallel, but of the unity of human history—and of the progress of the human spirit that after many millennia allowed a young woman in 1895 to express the paradox of faith so movingly.

    Years ago, Richard van Oort pointed out that GA is not a religion. Nor is it a substitute for religion. Like all theoretical discourse, it can seek only to express in rational, metaphysical terms the content of faith. It traces these tools, the declarative sentence and its products, back to the originary experience whence they emerged, but it does not pretend, as does Thérèse’s or any discourse of faith, to provide its readers with a pre-metaphysical equivalent of the originary experience. To that extent, GA is compatible equally with religion and with atheism, and indeed with those intermediate states that this dichotomy expels from consideration, but with which even the most saintly, Thérèse included, have been acquainted in those moments when they doubt their link to the transcendental.

    To be continued…

  • The Anthropological Idea of God — 32 Years Later

    Back in 1988, at a time when my old friend Doug Collins used to invite me regularly to speak at the University of Washington in Seattle, I gave a talk entitled “The Anthropological Idea of God.” Thirty-two years later, I feel I should revisit this idea, but unlike in preparing the second edition of The Origin of Language (TOOL), I don’t think it useful to return to the old text.

    My basic ideas about the origin of language have not fundamentally changed. The sign is the originary solution to the problem posed by the potential violence of mimetically enhanced appetites, and culture can still be summed up as “the deferral of violence through representation.”

    In contrast, as is perhaps inevitable as one reaches one’s later years, my thinking about religion has evolved, not in the sense of a conversion to belief (Pascal’s j’ai pleuré et j’ai cru), but of a rapprochement between the perspectives of GA and that of (particularly Judeo-Christian) religion.

    Even if, as I wrote at the start of TOOL, mysteries should not be multiplied beyond necessity, the mystery of faith cannot be eliminated. For faith is paradoxical; it is mystery itself, since could it be either demonstrated or refuted, it would no longer be faith. But GA can understand in its own terms faith in supernatural events such as God’s creation, virgin birth, or the Resurrection, even if believers cannot accept this understanding. There is no point in attempting to reduce the supernatural to worldly terms. The paradox is always there, whether we let faith solve it, or leave it as an unprovable point of departure.

    Whether we are to take the supernatural literally or figuratively is secondary to our understanding of it as the mark of transcendence. This is the key to the paradoxical nature of the sacred/significant. Those who disrespect religion because of its myth-like elements and incompatibilities with empirical reality (such as fixing the origin of the universe in 4004 BC) treat these disparities as simply the difference between fact and fiction. Data tell us that the earth was formed billions of years ago, and that our universe itself, whether or not there are others, is so many more billions of years old—a long time by our standards, although hardly “eternity.” But to respond to the atheist by alleging his ignorance of “why there is something rather than nothing” does not demonstrate the existence of anything like the divinities we worship. Such polemics are not only unwinnable but unproductive.

    GA offers an entirely different perspective, untainted as far as is possible by the metaphysical postulate on which philosophy and subsequently natural science is founded: that (mature) language is a neutral, timeless medium of communication “downloaded” by humans when they discerned a need for it, and that the details of the downloading process, formerly the object of religious just-so stories, can be fully understood by seeking the prehuman origins of its cognitive, physiological, and social components.

    Once language itself, as opposed to its worldly appearance, need not be explained, its use to describe the universe requires no reference to the divine or transcendental, although the latter reemerges in Western philosophy under the influence of Judeo-Christian transcendentalism. The Greeks had gods as well, but as Xenophanes’ writings make clear, their transcendentality lacked the radical necessity of the One God. The philosopher’s claim that horses would have gods who looked like horses would be meaningless within the Hebrew tradition, where it is illegitimate to either question the reality of the One God or, not coincidentally, to attempt to figure it.

    I am certain that the reason GA has survived for 40 years is the fact that, despite the increasing hostility to “speculative” thinking of the institutions that academics depend upon, GA’s supporters share the intuition that its message is of epochal importance. As with the Jews, GA’s chutzpah turns people against it, and until we make our own Israel, it will always lack the institutional backing needed to forcer l’admiration. But as the last decades of language origin literature demonstrate, none of this carefully researched material shows any sign of grasping the categorical difference between the evolutionary emergence of language and that of the opposable thumb. At best we are told that “there is something profoundly distinct about human language” (see Chronicle 611). As for religion’s coevality with language, the less said the better.

    Over the years since TOOL, I have come to realize that to appreciate GA’s uniqueness, it is essential to focus on the idea that at the origin, the sacred and the significant are one. This is the core of the originary hypothesis. It is not congenial to our common sense, because the two terms have diverged through history—indeed, we can say that “history” is nothing but the story of their divergence. But we can only hope to understand them if we seek to reestablish the originary mindset that would grasp them as synonymous: that as opposed to using a signal, using a sign for something is in itself taking it as sacred, even if, once the “taking as” becomes a praxis, it can and will detach itself from the attitude that inspired it—whence, in the terms of TOOL, the emergent distinction between formal and institutional representation.

    The idea that signs “substitute” for things, as though signs were objects like those Swift’s Laputans carried in their backpacks, is impossible to avoid so long as one refuses to accept the transcendental nature of language, which transcends any linguistic system that purports to “include” it. GA differs from other ways of thinking in recognizing the paradoxical nature of language and thought, and the consequent impossibility of containing them within a metaphysical system that refuses to understand language as an anthropological reality rather than an eternally existing possibility—as is, at least in a first approximation, the case for mathematics.

    This attitude once established, language origin becomes, in the context of Darwinian evolution, like the origin of any other form of behavior, and can be investigated as such. Such investigations are not illegitimate in themselves; but they are like the blind men’s descriptions of an elephant. They can attain their objective only by being situated in a context of genuine ontological change—as the emergence of a new kind of being, to put it in necessarily inadequate philosophical terms, which could not fail to be accompanied by a new type of mental function. What I have called the scene of representation must have a physical counterpart in the individual brains of the first exchangers of the sign, but cannot be reduced to its material reality, because it necessarily bears the trace of the communal scene in which language arose. The reader may be shocked to realize that claiming that “language is a gift of God,” however unsatisfying this may be from a scientific viewpoint, is of a higher level of truth than the metaphysical agnosticism that denies that language’s origin is pertinent to the discussion of the ideas it expresses.

    Unlike the relevant components of animal societies, language, and culture as a whole, are not reducible to the contents of individual neurosystems. They involve unpredictable interactions that cannot be reduced to the chemical formulas that have been so successful in regulating the behavior of social insects. Language is a means of communication in a sense qualitatively different from that of the signal-exchanges characteristic of insects—or of vervet monkeys or chimpanzees.

    In the first version of “The Anthropological Idea of God,” I defined this “idea” as the subsistent center of the scene of representation. This is true enough from an etiological standpoint, but clearly the substance of the idea “God” in any religious system is not equivalent to its reduction to a memory trace of the originary scene. The believer who encountered this “definition” would rightly reject its reductionism as incompatible with his and with every other believer’s experience of God. And since God has no objective worldly extension, but is only (universally understandable as) an Idea, the believers would have every right to agree in this rejection.

    There is no way to get around this objection other than to recognize it, which is possible only from GA’s extra-metaphysical perspective. Although we use declarative sentences as do the philosophers, we recognize, as they do not, language’s anthropological rather than “logical” blind spot.

    Paradox is not a mere curiosity, nor a defect that could be cured by additional rigor. Paradox exists because language can operate only by pretending it does not. Hence although we may assume that the aura of the sacred, after inhabiting the original central object, is afterward transferred to the locus of its immolation and consumption, this is neither a logical consequence nor an inference from our experience of holy places. It need not even be true. But what must be true is that the sense of the sacred, which Kierkegaard called “fear and trembling,” once born in this originary event, is never lost, not simply as the memory of an event, but as a world-transcending (although derivatively, individually experienced) Being. This Being cannot be designated by the metaphysical term concept, but neither should we consider it bound permanently to anything so specific as a “subsistent center.” The sacred, in the first men’s experience and in our own, is that which imposes the need for différance, the néant that separates us from our appetite for it without negating this appetite, as would a Pavlovian inhibition. The superiority of the term différance/deferral to designate our sense of the sacred reflects its relative clarity as a philosophical term that has nonetheless a sufficient element of deconstruction, that is, of what was in its origin an anti-metaphysical use of quasi-anthropological language within metaphysical discourse, to confer on it sufficient specificity.

    The absence of any “name” for the sacred-in-general is most simply illustrated by the custom of Orthodox Jews to simply refer to God (written “G-d”) as “the name” (Hashem). Whatever role YHVH played in ancient Hebrew history, the word is never pronounced, and referred to only by a substitute, in prayers commonly Adonai (Lord); but Hashem is the usual way to speak of God in ordinary language. This is a paradox in a single word—what has no name can be designated only as “the name”—a tighter “definition” of the One God even than ehyeh asher ehyeh. Coupled with the interdiction on “graven images,” it embodies a maximal effort to separate the sacred from the simply nameable, the signifié of Saussure, not because God is a “spiritual” rather than a “material” being, but because the ontology of the sacred is transcendental and cannot be encompassed on either side of Saussure’s “sheet of paper” with signifiant on one side and signifié on the other.

    “Belief” has the outward appearance of a metaphysical entity surrounding a transcendental core. What one “believes” is a discourse, a consecrated account of a revelation of divine action in the world, not a product of reasoning or deduction, although much may be deduced from it, which is what we call theology. The possibility of such deductions, like the possibility of deducing anthropological truths from artworks, is inherent in language because the metaphysical language of truth is there made to reveal its pre-declarative origin. For example, the interpretation of what appear to me the central Hebrew and Christian revelations found in the text of the two Testaments make up the core of Science and Faith.

    Christianity goes beyond Judaism to make the point that maintaining a notion of the sacred based on the historical revelations of the Old Testament and of God’s laws as spelled out in the Torah still does not make clear where, beyond a set of propositions in which to “believe,” it is that religion enters my life. The personal relationship of the Christian with Christ, as realized in the Eucharist and personified in the Trinity by the Holy Spirit, must be experienced as a continual presence, so that the individual human being may never for an instant become unaware of his intimacy, as if with a fellow human, with humanity’s transcendental source. The “absurdity” in the credo quia absurdum (more accurately, credible quia ineptum est) for which Tertullian remains uncanonized is the Incarnation of this source in a single historically existing individual, which is another way of saying that we can only “understand” the sacred as just this absurdity. In contrast to seeking to understand the sacred in “logical” terms, congenial to metaphysics, Christianity offers an experiential mode of understanding. Whereas their “elder brothers,” the Jews, refuse this “absurd” understanding and accept Hashem’s mystery. Which does not prevent most religious Jews from frequently “talking” to Hashem beyond reciting prayers, given that Hashem’s “conversations”—with Adam, with Moses—are the heart of the Torah.

    Other religions demonstrate other ways of dealing with the transcendental. My limited knowledge of Buddhism allowed me to interpret (in Chronicles 515–516) Nagarjuna’s paradoxes, in contrast with Zeno’s, as denying rather than merely problematizing Parmenides’ way of truth, and hence the coherence of the metaphysical universe of ideas. Although the construction of Nagarjuna’s paradoxes appears arbitrary, I think they can simply be understood from the standpoint that a given sentence stands both inside and outside the world it describes—transcendence cannot be reduced to logic.

    Hence in Nagarjuna’s Mahayana Buddhism, the scene of representation is one from which all language has been expelled as unreliable, a néant from which not merely all desire but all thought processes are “deferred.” This state of deferral, essential to the various forms of Buddhist meditation and its derivatives, is an experience of abstract sacrality that substitutes in Buddhism for “God.” This explains why Buddhism is so blissfully indifferent to the worship of the gods of other religions, or to the articulation of the sacred/human status of the Buddha himself, who unlike Christ does not link the divine to the human by including different “persons,” but bathes in a sacrality that universal deferral allows to exist within ourselves and can be embodied in an indefinite number of Bodhisattvas. In this sense, Buddhism is “atheistic,” retaining from the originary scene the sacred as disincarnate experience, the prolongation of the originary deferral of appetitive action, experience for which the Buddha remains a human example rather than, or more than, a transcendent source.

    Even this limited example shows that the minimal anthropological basis provided by the originary hypothesis allows a given religion to be studied on its own terms, just as it provides a basis for understanding our originary relationship to language. Extending this procedure to the world’s other religions would permit the creation of a universal religious typology.

    Much can be learned about cultural phenomena without regard to the insight provided by originary anthropology, but their deepest connection with the human community is thereby lost.

    Structural linguistics, which studies language as a set of mature systems, would surely benefit from examining, even in speculative terms, language’s prehistory. The remarkable uniformity of the world’s languages that led Chomsky, albeit not without question-begging, to figure human language as the product of a universal “module” with a set of “switches” whose settings exhaust the possibilities of linguistic diversity, would be seen from an entirely different perspective if the effort were made to derive these structures from an originary hypothesis. The current revolt against the Chomskian model to study “languaging” (see Chronicle 634) as a mode of interaction rather than of syntactical construction would particularly benefit from tracing this activity to a concrete, evenemential origin.

    But if linguistics could surely benefit from generative anthropology, the study of religion would be wholly transformed by it. Religious culture cannot be understood without reference to transcendence. The dismissal of the transcendent, scandalously common in the scientific community, whether as a myth concocted by the ruling class as “opium of the people” or the result of man’s “wonder before nature,” reduces religion to a set of superstitious practices that at best convey socially useful values at the cost of falsifying our understanding of both natural and human phenomena.

    Whether the natural world suffices to generate the presence of transcendence in the human universe, or whether some extra-worldly force is necessary, is a question we have every right to bracket, so long as we recognize that in the absence of the deferral through sacred “fear and trembling” of our appetitive existence, and of the signs by which we not merely recall but regenerate this state, none of the phenomena uniquely characteristic of the human community could have appeared. Once we grasp this fundamental truth, we are free to explore both the various religions and the worldly “life-philosophies” that would replace them without concern that in either case we are putting the reality of transcendence in jeopardy.

  • Identity Politics and the Sacred

    There is certainly no lack of victimary thinking in Europe, particularly with respect to migrants from Africa and the Middle East, or in Britain from the Indian subcontinent. And in certain respects, for example in the French insistence on parity between the sexes for such things as political candidacies or awards of the Légion d’honneur, its intensity exceeds that in the USA. Yet there is nothing in Europe quite like what Americans call identity politics. I do not believe that anywhere outside the US a man, merely by calling himself a woman, can become entitled to compete in woman’s sports and take showers in the ladies’ locker room.

    I think the historical source of the greater American sensitivity to the victimary is our long and dolorous history of black slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow laws of varying severity. My neighborhood in the Bronx was off limits to blacks when I lived there in the 40s and 50s; it has now become a mostly black neighborhood, the buildings solid enough to last another century. And when I went to Baltimore in 1960 to attend Johns Hopkins, I was shocked to discover that hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters were racially segregated, if not to the point of the back-of-the-bus segregation in the deep South. None of this exists today, but it gives White Guilt deeper roots in our culture than in Europe, where slavery was far less pervasive and abolished earlier (and without a Civil War), and where colonials, being foreigners, were a more distant source of disquietude.

    White Guilt is at the origin of our identity politics. Its power explains why it is in the US that “intersectionality” is more than a mere slogan—but also, strangely yet logically, why our victimary passions are far less destructive, and our culture far more unified, than in Europe. The US has no “no-go” zones, no car-burnings and interminable strikes and riots, no French gilets jaunes, nothing like the British “grooming” scandals. Instead, we have boys running in girls’ races. If we must choose, this is certainly preferable.

    I have no desire to mock sufferers from gender dysphoria who want to identify as members of the opposite sex. But whereas in the past, such individuals kept a low profile and tried to “pass,” as many no doubt still do, since the flourishing of gay liberation in the 1970s, the door has been opened for boisterous self-assertion and the expectation of provoking pharisaiacal denunciation. There is a need for ever-new ways of attacking the legitimacy of normality, stigmatized as an instrument of straight-cis-white-male oppression.

    The self-assertion of the bearer of a problematic identity serves as a canary-in-the-coal-mine to detect discriminatory norm-enforcement. Discrimination is understood in ascriptive terms, and need not be deliberate; “disparate impact” is enough. But explicit norms such as toilet segregation for the transgendered are poster children for discrimination that provoke demonstrations and activist posturing, which often prove extremely effective—as in the recent decision of the Christian-principled Chick-Fil-A to defund the Salvation Army following complaints by the LGBT community.

    We should not talk about identity politics as though it were an emanation of the “liberal” desire for self-assertion, as we often find it described by Christian thinkers. It is demand-, not supply-driven. Its applications of the epistemology of resentment are stimulated less by the real or fancied victims of discrimination than by the needs of the clerical brain-working class, who define their moral status by virtue-signaling and intolerance-shaming.

    The ideological roots of this cultural pathology can be found in the era of deconstruction, when the critique of metaphysics became in effect a critique of “normal” language. After the demise of both Barthes’ naive “zero degree” and its supersession by the infinite degree of écriture in the scriptible text, the final solution was to turn the paradox around to fire on the metaphysicians who had from Parmenides onward sought a discourse of truth rather than opinion. This perspective denies the transcendental nature of language only to insist that language has hitherto been an instrument of central power, just as religion is denounced as a set of superstitions imposed on the ruled by their rulers. The revelation of this supposed original sin of public discourse, which in the hands of Derrida remained always at least potentially paradoxical, became the positive critique known as PC, which imputes to language not paradox, originary or not, but ascriptive discrimination, prejudice. Indeed, no term for this supposed original sin is strong enough. This is not an accident, but a necessary consequence of the system, similar to the fact that although antisemitism is a misleading and inadequate term to describe “prejudice” against the Jews, there is no better alternative.

    In an earlier reflection on victimary thinking, I sought an explanation in the exaggeration of the Christian side of the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western Civilization at the expense of the Jewish—the aspect that Frost spoke of as “never taking its own side in an argument.” This attitude can be acceptable even in its extreme form in a strictly religious context, but it becomes monstrous as soon as it leaves this context for that of the epistemology of resentment that has dominated secular politics since the French Revolution. The failure to learn from history that makes “socialism” (and Bernie Sanders) more popular in the US than “capitalism”—two terms coined by left-wing revolutionaries—can be reduced to this.

    The example set by Jesus’ sacrifice is not that of virtue-signaling. That is why Christianity postulates his prior divinity. Jesus has nothing to prove; he has pushed God’s love for humanity to the point of sacrificing his/His own life. Protection of the “widow and the orphan” was a key element of the Hebraic conception of nationhood; the Christian surenchère is to demand of the individual that he approximate Jesus’ universal sacrifice—in his heart, and only then in his practice, where he may well do more good for humanity by honestly exercising his profession than by giving away his possessions and entering a monastery. But behind Jesus’ not-of-this-world kingdom is the memory of the Hebrew kingdom, the same memory that would sustain the Jews for two millennia.

    Whence what might seem the anomaly of identity politics, were it really about identity: that it deliberately excludes the Hebraic element that we normally consider most fundamental to our public identity, our nationality. I am a male, and a Jew, and if it is worth mentioning, a heterosexual, but the prime fact of my identity is that I am an American, a citizen of the USA. Yet those whose politics is that of “identity” are precisely those who reject their national identity for the sake of solidarity with the members of their race or one of the several senses of sexual preference. Which is to say, identities that bear the mark of victimhood, cultivated in particular by those of the unmarked who wish to demonstrate their “wokeness” by taking the marked side against their own, morally and symbolically, albeit rarely materially.

    They misunderstand identity politics who view it as a sin of “liberalism” and trace it back to Locke or Mill. The norms that until recently less defined than protected the governmental operations of the US, and that still do in principle and to a large extent in fact, although their erosion cannot be indefinitely prolonged, are not the substance of liberal democracy, but its implicit framework. Its operating principle is, given these shared norms, to allow political tensions at the margins to work themselves out through discussion and negotiation, with a minimum of violence. There is really no alternative to this other than tyranny of one form or another—and the forms are really unimportant, although the degree of tyranny matters a great deal. It is the very contrary of liberalism to shout down or cancel speakers, impose absurdities like pronoun laws, or publish newspapers whose idea of “All the News Fit to Print” presents political evaluation first and fact below the fold.

    The most problematic and revelatory aspect of identity politics is its focus on sexuality. Even if gay liberation can be understood as an extension of the civil rights movement, presenting the homosexual lifestyle as at the very least not felonious and therefore abolishing sodomy laws, and even if one is willing to consider as a reasonable extension of this recognition opening up marriage to same-sex couples, the insistence on such things as declaring one’s own gender, allowing people to change the sex on their birth certificate, etc., as though sex has suddenly ceased to be a biological category and has become an arbitrary “assignment” inflicted on newborns without their consent, demonstrates that combating “discrimination” is hardly the way to understand the victimary process. The abrupt switch from civil rights equality to affirmative action and its extensions was already a sea change; but the sexual dimension goes farther and suggests a different perspective on the entire history of the epistemology of resentment.

    For if we can say that the gay liberation movement, like the anti-segregation civil rights movement, was in its origin an initiative of those on the receiving end of discrimination, this is difficult to conceive in the case of the tiny minority of sufferers from sexual dysphoria, let alone those who wish to be called by abnormal pronouns. The pressure to let men who “identify” as women use the ladies’ room is clearly an artifact of victimary thinking on the part of the majority, and any belligerency by the victimary group is generated by their perception that such expressions of resentment are effective in influencing popular opinion and granting the prestige of visibility.

    What is there about sexual identity that makes it an exemplary terrain for identity politics, to the extent that biological fact is treated as an effect of discrimination? I cannot modify my birth time, or date, or place; I cannot declare my age, height, weight, or eye color as other than it is, but in an increasing number of places I can treat my sex as a “gender assignment.” Even if we might à la rigueur consider someone who has had his or her genitals modified as in some sense a member of a new sex, this is no longer necessary; it suffices to make a voluntary declaration. Surely this anomalous mode of victimary identity has something critical to tell us about the whole victimary phenomenon, something hardly reducible to a form of “sexual liberation,” given that it is independent of the kind of sexual activity, if any, the subject intends to engage in.

    Among those few who take the trouble to “refute” the originary hypothesis, the most common objection is that sexuality, not eating, is the source of man’s archetypal conflicts. Adam and Eve on eating the fruit are ashamed of their sex organs, as animals are not, whereas no one is ashamed of eating. The old anthropological rule of thumb, which anthropologists have never really abandoned, is that a truly human society is defined by the incest taboo, not by food-related rituals. And certainly the universality among humans of sexual shame and the (at least nominal) prohibition of incest cannot be overlooked, even if I think I can say with confidence that there are no human societies without food-sharing rituals of a qualitatively different kind from any animal modes of food distribution, rituals whose continued vigor no longer depends on a strictly religious context.

    And yet, of course, although there are certainly religious rites with an orgiastic element, just as moderns attend swingers’ parties, these are never at the center of any ritual culture. For sex is an intermittent and alimentation a constant requirement of animal life, whether ours or that of the lowest sexually reproducing invertebrate.

    In Chronicle 419, I pointed out that the choice of Eve as Satan’s interlocutor can be interpreted as reflecting woman’s resentment at the male priority in inventing and using language. The intuition of this priority should not surprise us, given that a mere century ago women were not allowed to vote in elections, and that most major religions still bar them from priestly status. I would extend this analysis by noting that the conversation with Satan that leads to the couple’s eating the “apple” is followed by the famous scene of sexual shame in Genesis 3:7. What this suggests is that only when women as well as men could use language were both members of the couple inspired to cover their nakedness. As long as males alone made use of the deferring function of cultural signs, shame would presumably not have been experienced.

    In short, sexual shame is conceivable only between reciprocal language-users. Originary sexual inequality had been a blemish on the moral model of human reciprocity; the male participants in the scene are “equal,” but their in principle equally intelligent spouses are not treated as such.

    The Genesis story does not tell us explicitly how Eve acquired language, but we should not expect the Bible to do all our work for us. Clearly once men began to talk, even in a strictly ritual context, their partners could not long be prevented from learning language, although Eve’s story as well as the originary hypothesis suggest that this process was not fully reciprocal. We still live with traces of disparagement for women’s use of language in gossip and “old wives’ tales.”

    How does this explanation of sexual shame affect our understanding of human representational culture? If we assume that the latter came into being in order to defer mimetic object-desire, how does it affect desire between members of the group, desire for each other?

    There is no use attempting to construct a hypothetical series of events, as was possible for the schematic series of basic utterance forms. But we can understand the transition between sexual relations that did not and did involve language as opening up to cultural deferral woman’s self-presentation to male desire. Early anthropologists saw human sexual relations as indiscriminate (the “primal horde”), but before the usurpation of the sacred center by a “big-man” or equivalent, given what we can assume to have been the progress of neoteny occasioned by the evolutionary pressure toward larger brains, monogamy was almost certainly the norm. In any case, sexual shame can best be understood as reflecting the woman’s, and by extension, albeit less viscerally, the man’s self-consciousness as an object not merely of appetite but of desire. This self-consciousness would reflect the woman’s awareness of language, even if its actual use remained confined to masculine ritual activities.

    That female resistance tends to increase male appetite is no doubt a pre-linguistic phenomenon; but the phenomenon whose vulgar form Girard describes in Mensonge romantique as coquetry is dependent on the woman’s self-representation as a desire-object. As an object of desire on the scene of representation, she stands “on a pedestal,” in the central place of the divinity.

    Let us now return to our original reflection on the particular relevance of the transgendered as an exemplary victimary category.

    From the preceding, we can understand why insistence on the freedom to change one’s sexual identity is from a victimary standpoint sexually asymmetric. In the past, given men’s greater social presence, for an ambitious woman to want to pass as a man required no sentiment of “gender dysphoria.” Throughout history, many women, real and fictional, have sought to pass as men. But although such women still exist, today the transgendered who raise ethical questions are inevitably men wishing to be women. Although from a victimary standpoint the reason is obvious, this observation does not exhaust the significance of the phenomenon.

    The transgender phenomenon is taken by conservative Christians such as R. R. Reno of First Things as emblematic of what he sees as the liberal nature of the victimary, by which he links it to sexual libertinism as exemplary of its deconstruction of the norms of civil society. Blacks may have suffered under slavery and Jim Crow, but womanhood, as a status of otherness within the minimal human community, is invested with sacrality by desire, and I think it is this deviation of the sacred that troubles Christian thinkers like Reno more than sexual libertinism. The apparently contrary fact that classical culture emphasized male beauty and homosexual “romance” can most simply be understood as cultural overcompensation, hyperbolizing the deferral of the natural into its negation. The Hebrew and particularly Christian insistence on the sacrality of womanhood reflects this civilizational strain’s deeper intuition of humanity’s originary essence, an intuition that Sappho alone among the Greeks was able to realize in a mode that we recognize as our own—and would no doubt recognize better had more of her unique poetry been allowed to survive.

    To recognize the depth of this male envy of femininity is not to excuse the nonsense of letting men use ladies’ rooms or compete against women in track meets. The TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are certainly right on this point. But beyond mere victimary cry-bullying, male transgenderism may be seen as expressing an unavowed yearning for the sacred, as manifested more creatively in the drag-queen culture (see Chronicle 608). Most males are content to adore woman’s sacrality, but some feel the need to usurp it.

    The upshot of this analysis is that today, with the decline of traditional religion, it may well be such apparently absurd extensions of the victimary that most clearly reveal, and even most effectively preserve, the transcendent basis of human culture. This is in no way an argument for cowardice in the face of victimary blackmail. But we should at the same time take a long view of the situation. It reinforces our conviction that, in comparison with the tyrannies that compete with it, Western Civilization is still the best environment in which to live, to desire, to worship—and to think.