Author: staceymeeker

One of the basic ways in which the newly arising epoch of performatism(1) differs from postmodernism is that it focuses on the possibility of achieving transcendence. Performatist works do this through artificially imposing closure on narrative characters by enclosing them in a frame of some kind; the active movement towards overcoming this frame constitutes the performance and transfers it to the reader. The feeling of transcendence, though, is constructed and artificial, and the reader is aware of this at all times. For this reason the closure involved must be formally binding. Even if readers critically reject transcendence as an idea, they are forced to experience it involuntarily per formam, as their consciousness passes through and is crimped by the material makeup of the work itself.

Because of its emphasis on transcending closed frames, performatism also treats subjectivity and ethics in an entirely different way than does postmodernism. By virtue of being trapped in a closed space, the performatist subject is able to shut out the endless regress of filiation that would normally keep it from establishing some form of unified self. However, because the performatist subject is radically separated from the outside world, it tends to remain simple, opaque, and constricted in its options. The typical entrapment of the subject in a closed frame weighs so heavily upon it that the subject is moved to escape it, to transcend. Whereas the ethical focus of postmodernism is on the passive, peripheral victim defined by its relation to an oppressive, active center, in performatism the ethical focus is on the subject caught in the center of a closed space and actively trying to get out. The goal of a performatist ethics would thus be to accompany the striving for transcendence, to chart the rights and wrongs involved when a subject tries to break out of a frame that constricts it.

Mark Haddon’s recent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time exemplifies these qualities.(2) Haddon’s book, which appeals to a crossover market of both young people and adults, has become something of a popular classic and as of this writing has sold over two million copies.(3) There are no doubt many reasons for the book’s broad appeal, but one of its most engaging narrative devices is to make us identify with a mentally impaired narrator who is manifestly not interested in identifying either with us or anyone else. His own dissociated way of thinking and acting does not merely unsettle readers, as might be expected, but also exerts a curious, lasting attraction upon them.

The narrator of Curious Incident is a fifteen-year-old boy, presumably with Asperger’s syndrome, named Christopher Boone. Asperger’s is considered a type of autism, or something very similar.(4)People with the syndrome have a limited ability to feel empathy with others and often engage in stereotyped or rigid patterns of behavior making it difficult for them to interact with others socially. Although of normal or above-normal intelligence, Asperger’s patients’ knowledge is often very restricted and cannot be applied practically. The 15-year old Christopher, for example, excels at college-level math and has a vast knowledge of technical and scientific facts. At the same time, however, he is almost unable to do simple things like buy a train ticket or find his way to a nearby train station. This is because, as he himself says, he “notices everything” (175) in a rather literal way, and his mind is unable to sort out the surfeit of new information. As with many Asperger’s patients, Christopher also has difficulties dealing with non-literal language and has trouble understanding common slang terms, paradox, poetic metaphors, irony, and humor. Christopher also likes to organize his life according to rigid habits and rituals that allow him to shut out disturbing outside influences. When confronted with such disruptive influences he reacts by screaming or moaning and occasionally also by physically attacking the person he believes is threatening him.

The author, Mark Haddon, worked with autistic children as a young man, so the stylization of his hero has a certain basis in clinical reality. What is interesting about the story is not, of course, that it simply transposes medical facts into an entertaining prose tale. Rather, it is the way the novel transforms this material into a particular scene of the human with which we as readers identify aesthetically. This means that the work in question, because of certain compelling qualities, moves us to transcend our mere individual desires and interests and appreciate the work in a common, binding way. Of particular piquancy in this case is that the teenage narrator in Curious Incident himself explicitly rejects the aesthetic, transcendent, and human implications of his own story. Christopher, for example, describes his own mind as a machine, he emphasizes the superiority of logical and statistical reasoning over common sense, he considers all metaphor to be a lie, he is unable to feel collective experience or empathize, he disdains what he calls “proper novels,” and he adamantly denies the existence of God. The peculiar positive irony of this radically individualized, radically rational, and radically anti-aesthetic attitude is that collectivist, transcendent, and aesthetic qualities are restituted and redeemed in the course of the story, against the narrator’s own intent. The curious result of the book is that a character who steadfastly denies the existence of aesthetically mediated transcendence himself accomplishes that transcendence and practically forces us to identify with it through a work of art that he has created.

The plot of the story may be summarized quickly as follows. The teenage narrator, who is living with his father after his mother’s death, finds the neighbor’s dog stabbed to death with a pitchfork and decides to solve the crime in the manner of Sherlock Holmes. Because he has great difficulties interacting with others socially, Christopher’s detective work creates embarrassing situations for his father, who had been having an affair with the dog-owning neighbor, Mrs. Shears. After the father confiscates Christopher’s diary in which he has been collecting evidence on the murder, Christopher discovers letters from his mother revealing that she had in fact never died but was living in London with Mr. Shears. As it turns out, it was the father who hid the letters after his wife left and killed the dog after his relationship with Mrs. Shears went sour. Having lost all trust in his father, Christopher decides to travel to London to live with his mother. This short journey by train is made very difficult by his inability to interact with others as well as by his overwhelming fear of strange situations and people. Through ingenuity, applied willpower and some luck Christopher eventually makes it to his mother’s apartment in London. There, his surprise appearance creates difficulties which eventually lead his mother to break up with Mr. Shears. Both Christopher and his mother then return to his hometown of Swindon, where Christopher tentatively begins to reconcile with his father. The book ends not with any emotional resolution or particular twist of plot, but with Christopher taking and excelling in his college-entrance math exams. The book, indeed, closes with one of Christopher’s favorite math problems.

Christopher Boone as a Performatist Hero

As I have suggested elsewhere at greater length, performatism involves four basic strategies that are inimical to postmodernism: using ostensive signs instead of dualist ones; creating closure instead of constantly undermining it; constructing opaque, simple subjects instead of inducing complex ones to dissolve in their contexts; and finally resorting to authorial (reliable) narration instead of creating an infinite regress of narrative undecidability.(5) All these strategies can ultimately be traced back to the binding projection of an originary, ostensive scene onto the narrative text as a whole, or what I call a double frame. The “lock” between the scene (the inner frame) and the text as a whole (the outer frame) creates a free inner space that enables a transcendent act or performance to take place. Transcendence, in turn, may be achieved totally or partially depending on the work at hand. “Realistic” works of performatism, of which Curious Incident is an example, don’t represent transcendence directly. However, they do confirm that there are goals or values higher than the work itself, and they do ensure that the work as a whole is “set” towards achieving them.

We can begin by looking at how Christopher’s way of thinking takes place in terms of ostensivity. In some regards his use of signs has a superficial similarity with the ostensive, in the sense that he is fixated on the direct relationship between simple signs and things rather than between belatedly experienced, more complex levels of declarative meaning. Indeed, like Eric Gans, Christopher is a proponent of Occam’s razor, which suggests that we eliminate as much superfluous argumentation as possible (113). The problem is that Christopher not only occludes declarative meaning and its endless ironies, but also the paradoxicality which is intrinsic to the ostensive sign itself. Thus Christopher can analytically differentiate levels of reference contained in the humorously intended sentence “his face was drawn but the curtains were real” (10), but he cannot experience them synthetically and enjoy their paradoxical effect in the form of a pun or joke. It is also no accident that this inability to think paradoxically and synthetically also applies to the discursive level: “it is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things” (10). Christopher, then, is only able to function by shutting out the discourse of others.

Another thing Christopher’s discourse has in common with the ostensive mode is that he can’t tell lies.(6) The reason for this has once again less to do with an ostensive mindset than with an inability to come to terms with the infinite possibilities of contingency: “A lie is when you say something happened which didn’t happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn’t happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn’t happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn’t happen” (24). Christopher is, however, able to fabricate “white lies” (62), which involve telling the truth only partially and which enable him to undercut his father’s ban on doing detective work. Whiteness, rather than serving as a pejorative term applied to the dominant, naturally superior and unreflective culture, marks an opaque realm which allows the hero to develop his own self (albeit in a limited way) and eventually break through the paternal frame restricting access to his mother. This corresponds to the opacity typical of performatist subjects in general, who must appear as “white” or “blank” to others in order to constitute themselves as subjects in the first place. Whiteness or opacity is not a virtue or end in itself but is rather a transitional point between the endless regress of postmodern subjectivity and some higher, transcendent subject status that is usually only realized in a partial way.

In Christopher’s case, this opacity is closely tied to what Kyle Karthauser calls the awkwardness of being earnest—an attitude which is comically unaware of its own limitations and which creates embarrassing or tension-fraught situations for others.(7) However unlike quasi-fictional agents provocateurs of awkwardness like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, who intrudes on and disrupts real social situations with a fabricated anti-Semitic, sexist, and nationalist ideology, Christopher seems completely innocent because his dissociated behavior lacks any overt ideological or conceptual interest. As Karthauser puts it in regard to a similarly opaque character, he “frustrates the colonizing and assimilatory nature of the cultural matrix in that he is not found on a familiar ‘map’ but nevertheless presents a stable persona.”(8) Christopher’s literal-mindedness and defensiveness vis-à-vis the world around him have, in addition, the paradoxical effect of giving his disability a disinterested, aesthetic aura. As an opaque subject, Christopher is (like all performatist heroes) very close to being an object, but it is an object that attracts rather than repels us.

Another salient aspect of Christopher’s literal-minded type of reasoning is that he refuses to recognize any form of transcendence. This can be found in his explicit rejection of the Name-of-God, which is contained in his very own name—a fact of which he is acutely aware. He notes that in Greek Christopher means “carrying Christ” and adds: “My mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me” (20). In rejecting both the extension and intension of his name, Christopher denies the originary scene of naming itself, which, as in this case too, involves a transcendent, higher agent and an immanent scene of helping another. In Christopher’s thinking, the name should do nothing more than denote his own atomized self and nothing else; ideally, it would be a name without any horizontal social implications or an originary, transcendent charge, as is the case in GA’s originary scene.

Another major difference between Christopher’s thinking and GA is that Christopher is able to engage in mimesis in a very limited way. Although he is able to distinguish between positive and negative emoticons, he is unable to identify and react to more nuanced pictograms and, by extension, to human faces and emotions. This lack of mimetic ability leads to something which at first glance seems comparable to the state of separation described by Emmanuel Levinas in his Totality and Infinity. In phenomenological terms (and, of course, in his own self-image) Christopher appears as an entirely discrete subject, as a “way of being, [as a] resistance to the totality.”(9) Furthermore, his other symptoms and personality traits seem to correspond neatly to many of Levinas’s criteria for the separated subject: his egoism, his atheism, his dependence on direct sensation,(10) and his ignorance of the Other.(11) The major—and decisive—difference between Christopher’s separation and that suggested by Levinas is that Christopher has no way of overcoming it by experiencing the transcendence of the Other through discourse.(12) Levinas, for example, maintains that “signification surprises the very thought that thought it.”(13) Christopher, though, isn’t surprised by signification; he’s confused and overwhelmed by it. His natural impulse is either to retreat even more into his separated state or to strike back physically at his interlocutor. Similarly, the face, which in Levinasian thought stands for the ethical, transcendent pressure on the subject exerted by the Other, has (as the case of the emoticons shows) an extremely limited impact on Christopher. Christopher’s movement towards transcendence—if he indeed can be said to have one—does not take place through discourse.

The main narrative prerequisite for achieving transcendence in performatism is double framing. This means that a narrative work creates a homological relationship (a lock or fit) between an inner scene (or scenes) within the work and the logic of the work as a whole. The lock occludes outside discourse and draws the reader into the inside of the text under the conditions established by the text itself. This is indubitably the case in Curious Incident. We can think of the inner frame as being Asperger’s itself. The syndrome generates countless scenes in which the hero either proves unable to deal with discursive paradox or unable to interpret events because of his lack of emotional awareness of others. The most notable example is perhaps the way his father fakes the death of his mother. Although saddened by the presumed loss of his mother, Christopher accepts and rationalizes her sudden disappearance and makes no attempt to investigate the many discrepancies in his father’s story. Asperger’s syndrome, in effect, creates a series of extraordinarily restrictive frames or scenes which the protagonist has almost no way of overcoming on his own.

The outer frame in this case is the book itself, which projects that dysfunctionality back onto the hero with full force. In narrating, Christopher raises his syndrome to a higher power and centers himself, in the sense that he becomes the creator of a narrative world that at first glance only serves to exaggerate his own limitations. Christopher’s at first purely analytical search for a cause of the dog’s death leads to a discovery that causes him to become separated from his father even more and forces him to engage in a (successful) quest for his mother. The inner frame and the outer frame work together to produce a positive synthetic unity. However, this unity is experienced by the hero and readers in different ways. Whereas Christopher takes it literally, we as readers take it metaphorically, as a story showing how even someone with a separated mind and a complete lack of empathy can cause all of us to empathize with him. This aesthetic act of centering and creating identification is, however, not just limited to a metaphorical dimension, but also has a sacral one.

This peculiar set towards sacrality can be pinpointed more closely in the scene where Christopher is taking his A level math exams. During the test the proctor Rev. Peters reads a book by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called The Cost of Discipleship (1937),(14) a fact which is mentioned twice in the chapter. In the original German, Bonhoeffer’s book is entitled “Nachfolge,” or literally “following after.” In terms of word form and meaning it is very close to the German word for imitation (Nachahmung), confirming that discipleship is as a kind of mimesis or imitation of Christ. One of the more provocative theses advanced by Bonhoeffer suggests that the call of Christ results in a radical separation from others: “Christ wants to make man lonely; he should not see anything except him who called him.”(15) And: “Christ freed man from his immediate relationship to the world and placed him in an immediate relationship to his own self.”(16) The major difference here is that Christ himself inserts himself as mediator “not only between God and man, but also between man and man, between man and reality.”(17) Obviously, this mediating relationship is lacking in the case of Christopher; this is not just because of a rationally motivated atheism, but because he is psychologically unable to accept any mediation at all.

Viewed against this background, Christopher is someone who (like Christ) has no need to imitate anyone else. If at all, he is able to imitate only himself, or, at the very most, other separated individuals.(18) However, by imitating or “following” his own peculiar type of separated logic he manages to change his life circumstances for the better by forcing his parents to deal with him truthfully, which is to say on his own literal-minded terms. In this regard Christopher can be said to “carry himself,” he manages to transcend a situation in which he is trapped without resorting to a mediator (as mimetic theories like GA would require) or engaging in a fractured and obscure discourse with a transcendent Other (as is the case in Levinas). Indeed, like Christ, he comes to act a mediator for others: first for his parents and secondly for readers who come to identify with his separation in spite of themselves. Moreover, within the limited confines of his own perspective he may be said to become all powerful. Here are his last words in the main section of the book:

And I know I can do this [become a scientist] because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything. (268)

Christopher has not experienced any inner psychological development in the usual sense, but he has, as it were, been deified in social or functional terms: like a Durkheimian god, he can now “do anything.” Indeed, when one considers the formal structure of the book’s plot, he has in a certain sense also performed a miracle by metaphorically raising his mother from the dead. Christopher is what I call a first-person authorial narrator (in spite of the massive irony accompanying his way of narrating) because he is proven right by the entire thrust of the work itself; rather than cutting him down to size, the irony of the text serves to empower him all the more. The result is a powerful, unified, centering metaphor—a “white lie”—that makes positive identification with the hero possible.

The Aesthetics of Disability and the Ethics of Perpetration

Curious Incident represents disability in a way that with few exceptions has found a tremendous resonance among readers and critics. The way the book goes about this, however—by ironically sacralizing and centering Christopher—doesn’t fit in well with many of the assumptions being currently made in the field of disability studies, which, like all disciplines in the humanities, is heavily saturated with poststructuralist ideas governing otherness, representation, centering, categorical thinking, and the real.

There have not been very many scholarly treatments of Curious Incident, and of these, there are only a few in the field of disability studies. The most detailed, by Vivienne Muller,(19) compares Curious Incident favorably to what she calls the social and medical models of dealing with disability, both of which she disapprovingly cites as being “totalizing meta-historical narratives that exclude important dimensions of disabled people’s lives and of their knowledge.”(20) As an aesthetic fiction, Curious Incident seems to offer an alternative by providing a “fruitful alliance between the lived and the symbolic levels of culture”(21) and allowing the “valorization of the local and contingent expressed for example in a ‘recognition of the perspectives, voices and cultures of subordinate groups.’”(22)One of the basic strategies of this valorization involves centering the peripheral perspective of the disabled person and “destabilizing the disability/ability binary that often privileges the latter term.”(23)If successful, this deconstructive strategy would cause us to reassess our own notions of what is “normal” or “abnormal,” “able” or “disabled” by exposing the contingent character of such binaries and, one might add, categorical thinking altogether.

To a certain extent, there is an overlap between Muller’s deconstructive approach to disability and how Curious Incident actually works as a text. Because there is little or no narrative relief from Christopher’s unusual way of viewing the world,(24) the reader is forced to adapt to his peculiar dissociated perspective and to recognize in Christopher a “human face.”(25) Indeed, taken alone, most of his symptoms could be experienced by “normal” people, and readers have reportedly caught themselves beginning to think like Christopher after having read the book (looking obsessively for series of yellow or red cars etc.).(26) However, Muller’s deconstructive approach, by lopsidedly favoring the peripheral and the particular, has trouble describing (let alone explaining) a major aspect of our identification with Christopher, namely the sacral, aesthetic, and ethical aspects of his centered position.

If my interpretation of Curious Incident is correct, Haddon is not deconstructing our notion of the center, but reconstituting it: he deliberately assigns Christopher a quasi-sacral, metaphorical status that attracts and holds our attention. By making Christopher into a limited, latter-day Christ, Haddon (to use Christopher’s frame of reference) is lying to us, although of course in a productive, indeed socially constructive, way. This strategy is unquestionably the opposite of deconstruction. Rather than exposing the center as a sham and quickly evacuating it again, the novel tries to occupy it anew by linking Christopher—albeit ironically—with the totalizing narrative at the core of Christianity. This is not to suggest that Haddon is pursuing a hidden Christian agenda. However, he is trying to make us overcome our ignorance and perhaps also fear of disability by forcing us to engage in a positive identification with a centralized, disabled figure whose separation acquires sacral, binding features rather than mundane, disposable attributes of the real.

The peculiar performatist character of Curious Incident can be made clearer by contrasting the novel to the victimary representations of disability employed by Tobin Siebers in his recent Disability Theory.(27) Victimary thinking, as Eric Gans has pointed out numerous times, makes a reciprocal relationship between a peripheral, oppressed position and an oppressive center difficult or impossible.(28) In this case, Siebers sets off the peripheral (disabled) position against the abled center by suggesting that the disabled are better equipped to reflect on their peripheral situation than is the dominant, exclusionary ideology of abledness with its illusions of bodily perfection and inviolability.(29) Furthermore, Siebers suggests that the disabled have a privileged proximity to the real, which is to say to the body, to pain, and, by implication, to mortality itself.(30) Summarizing Siebers’s arguments (which can be conveyed here only in very reduced form), one could say that the disabled may achieve a positive social identity by combining a victimary critique of the center with mimetic representations of the real (disabled) body that run counter to both the mainstream ideology of “ableism” and to poststructuralist assumptions relegating the body to a mere effect of language:

Disabled bodies provide a particularly strong example of embodiment as mimesis because they resist standard ideas about the body and push back when confronted by language that would try to misrepresent their realism.(31)

Victimary thinking of this kind couples a Nietzschean shattering of civilization’s illusions with a Hegelian empowerment of an oppressed, intellectualized subject that is alone capable of reflecting on its situation; both are standard postmodern positions. Siebers however breaks with postmodern thought when he suggests that things (in this case the body) act upon discourse in ways that discourse cannot always control. This, in turn, opens a field in which thingness and discourse interact in necessarily unpredictable ways—a position that Siebers calls “complex embodiment.”(32) In such a field things have independent qualities that exist in “relations of verifiable reciprocity”(33) with the language representing them.

Siebers’ rehabilitation of thingness and mimesis undoubtedly marks a theoretical break with postmodernism. However, in his actual approach to presenting embodiment he remains obligated to a conceptualist (i.e., postmodern) anti-art that limits representations of bodies to their crudest physical qualities. Typical of this are Mark O’Brien’s poems, which Siebers draws on in his discussion of sex and disability identity.(34) O’Brien, who contracted polio at an early age and was confined to an iron lung, wrote highly personal poems and prose pieces that, among other things, depict his own cross-dressing as well as graphic renderings of his sexual experiences as a disabled person. Of interest here are not so much the descriptions of sexual acts, which are in themselves banal,(35) but the transposition of his private experience as a disabled person into the public realm. Such writing works by creating an endless regress of conceptual otherness rather than a stable center of identification or a positive aesthetic focus. Siebers reads the poems as a strategy that “use[s] disability to confuse gender categories with sexual ones”;(36) the goal is to shatter stereotypes of disabled people as being asexual and to show that they, too, wish to be sexually active and attractive. Another example used by Siebers is that of Gretchen Anne Schaper, a paraplegic performance artist who staged a performance that consisted in crawling to her college classrooms without a wheelchair to “reveal her disabled status in full.”(37) Schaper’s performance, which was met with indifference, hostility, and silence, had the desired effect, at least for her, of transforming her physical pain into the political consciousness of disabled identity.(38) As is the case with O’Brien, Schaper’s performance has the effect of rubbing observers’ noses in the real rather than creating a positive focus of identification; the observer is always acutely aware of his or her belatedness, of the inability to experience the real as intensely as the victimized artist has. Identification in this postmodern mode takes place after the fact, by way of conceptualization, and not through the immediate positive impact of form, which in both cases is deliberately restricted to the representation of crude bodily functions. By carrying the private, peripheral experience of the disabled into the public, central realm while sabotaging any spontaneous identification with form, these works can truly be said to deconstruct prevailing norms, shake the illusions of the prevailing ideology of ableness and strengthen the identity of the disabled inasmuch as they wish to define themselves as an oppressed, peripheral minority. The question is, though, whether disabled identity is realized “naturally” through conceptual anti-art or whether there are other positive—in particular performatist—alternatives.

One answer to this question is provided by Christopher’s own approach to thingness, which might be regarded as a kind of originary (and original) aesthetics in which things are not automatically assimilated to discourse. Christopher, as we know, is not interested in abstract notions of beauty. However, he does make a very elementary aesthetic distinction between colors: he likes red and he dislikes brown and yellow—in particular because he associates them with feces and urine (105-107). This elementary aesthetic distinction, which is rooted in a dislike of bodily excretions, allows him in turn to make verifiable judgments about the world around him (at least on his own terms). The curious thing in this case is not that he makes these idiosyncratic judgments, but the way in which he projects them onto the world as a whole: he attempts to use the red/yellow dichotomy to explain the contingency of things around him (four yellow cars in a row means a bad day, four red cars a good day). The fact that this ultimately doesn’t work is apparent even to Christopher. The point, however, is that Christopher has an originary or primary aesthetics rooted in what might be called “simple embodiment”: his extreme sensitivity to the things around him leads him to create a positive, sensual aesthetics rather than a conceptualized, negative one. This positive aesthetics, in turn, is forced upon the reader through the authorial irony already described above. While we don’t literally identify with his choice of colors, we do identify with his insistence on making them, with his ability to “carry himself” by constructing an aesthetic, ethical, and metaphysical system of his own. This type of positive identification is not “better” or “worse” than the strategies used in postmodernism to deliberately sabotage identification and make us dependent on a peripheral perspective. However, after nearly thirty-odd years of postmodern dominance it is beginning to emerge as a refreshing—and effective—alternative to yet another round of anti-aesthetic, conceptually guided deconstruction that “naturally” portrays the real as crude and base.

The second question regarding the possibility of a performatist alternative to postmodernism is ethical. Eric Gans has suggested numerous times that victimary ideology has exhausted its potential and that it is now time to move past it into a new era of non-resentful dialogue.(39) This is easier said than done, especially if one doesn’t share Gans’s neoconservative ideology. This is because even conciliatory movements from the periphery to the center generate tension between that center and the encroaching otherness from its perimeter (the perhaps best example of this is when the sacred, central ritual of heterosexual marriage is opened to include gays, a subject which I’ve touched on elsewhere in regard to performatism(40)). In the case of Curious Incident, we would at first seem to have an ideal instance of a peripheral figure occupying a center position without provoking too much resentment, let alone resistance or violence. However, even in the fictional world of Curious Incident this ideality is not achieved, and I think for good reason. For one of Christopher’s peculiar traits is that he insults (and possibly also pushes around and strikes) other disabled children in his school.(41) It is also evident that his almost complete lack of empathy and mimetic ability makes life very difficult for his parents and others around him (at one point he is jailed for punching a policeman). Why, then, do we still identify with Christopher in spite of this transgressive behavior?(42)

Since centered, sacralized persons by definition always carry the “charge” of the collective and in turn act upon that collective, they necessarily acquire a power that spills over and encroaches on others. In the ideal, dogmatically regulated world of religion this excess power is by definition benevolent; in our profane world it is not. Thus the prime paradox involved in the overcoming of victimary ethics is that they are immediately and necessarily replaced by an ethics of perpetration.(43) Christopher is only very mild example of this, but there are numerous, more extreme ones (the recent Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds, for example, rewrites the history of WWII by portraying Jews as vengeful, sadistic perpetrators, and Lars von Trier’s Dogville makes a central, annihilating perpetrator out of a peripheral, helpless victim(44)). Perpetration is also an issue in comedy that represents disabled people physically or verbally abusing other disabled people. In the comedy show My Name is Earl (season 3, episode 18) an extremely physical wheelchair sport called “killerball” is described by one of the participants as being about “people who are already hurt try[ing] to hurt each other more”; the players constantly engage in comic sports banter touching on disability, one of the more tasteful examples of which is “Let’s go out and kick some chair!” By comically representing disabled people as earnest perpetrators of abuse, this kind of humor confirms their ability to occupy a center and engage in “normal” transgressions against others around them. The immediate gags may seem tasteless (a paraplegic player at one point exclaims “Over my half-dead body!”) but the overall ethos is one of centering and inclusion.(45) In the case of Christopher, it would seem that the absolute, quasi-sacral character of his separation—his innocent and earnest indifference to the mimetic conflicts afflicting the rest of us—allows the more problematical elements of his persona to appear as comic and redemptive.(46)

The shift from an ethics of victimization to an ethics of perpetration highlights another important aspect of performatism, namely that there is no “white” or “neutral” scene in which dialogue or conciliation in the center can naturally take place. The persons who divest themselves of what Gans calls “white guilt”(47) (persons who forsake the role of passive, resentful victims) become structurally speaking active perpetrators of some kind (the German word for perpetrator, Täter, expresses this relation most economically: the word literally means “doer”). For if I feel no “guilt” I have effectively separated myself from and deified myself vis-à-vis others; I can act as freely as I want. Unfortunately, there is no “natural” center (whether that of either current neoconservative ideology or Obama’s conciliatory brand of liberalism) that would regulate the excesses which inevitably result from this freedom.(48) This is also why performatism is not an ideology of acquiescence or, strictly speaking, even an ideology at all: it is simply an aesthetic mode that forcibly focuses our sensibilities on centered, closed spaces and the opaque figures within them and lets the ideological chips fall where they may.

The problem of how best to empower disabled people and/or Asperger’s patients is a complicated question of public policy that exceeds the scope of this article. My main point has been that a positive aesthetic representation of disability —pace Siebers, Muller and many others—is now beginning to take place without recurring to postmodern modes of representation, which these scholars assume exists in a natural, immutable relation to their progressive politics.(49) My suggestion is that aesthetic strategies involving centering, metaphorical sacralization, closure, and a set towards transcendence may be more productive in representing disability than the by now tired conceptualist techniques that mercilessly deconstruct prevailing norms by confronting us with unpalatable details of the real that allow only a belated, conceptual identification with otherness. It might also be added that Siebers himself, in a noteworthy article from 1998,(50) once raised the possibility of linking the Kantian, formal notion of beauty with otherness and the political; it would appear that in Disability Theory he has slid back into the standardized anti-aesthetic posture of poststructuralism, with its Nietzschean and Hegelian conceits. Finally, it should be noted that a Kantian approach linking beauty and disability theory already exists. The noted disability scholar and activist Anita Silvers has repeatedly criticized postmodernist disability studies for being “too much obsessed with existing socio-political relations and too little inspired by the potential of aestheticizing”(51) and has argued that “aestheticizing disability elevates otherness to originality”(52) in an inclusive way that makes “the human variation we call disability . . . meaningful.”(53)

In this spirit I would like to conclude by giving an example of how a sacralizing, centering kind of strategy and a “deconstructive” one that undercuts the boundaries between private and public can work together to empower the disabled. The example is provided by Siebers himself, in a kind of coda to his call for a new discourse on human rights for the disabled. Siebers calls attention to the city of Geel in Belgium, which since the Middle Ages has served as a haven for people with mental disabilities and is now considered “a model for community-based mental health care.”(54) In Geel, citizens serve as hosts and supporters of the mentally disabled, who move around freely and work there according to their wishes; as Siebers notes, “the presence of mentally disabled people [in the town] was so common that mental impairment lost its stigma.”(55) Geel attracts mentally disabled people from all over the world who are allowed to live there as citizens—the only requirement being that they be mentally impaired. The original—one might also say originary—reason for Geel becoming a center for the deinstitutionalized care of the mentally ill was however an act of sacralization. According to legend, a certain king of Oriel (in present-day Ireland) decided after his wife’s death to wed his own daughter, Dymphna; Dymphna then fled to Geel, where her father found and killed her. Because her father’s actions were regarded as insane, and because Dymphna was thought to have special powers resisting that insanity, she became the patron saint of the mentally ill, and Geel became the center for treating the mentally disabled that it is today. The model of Geel suggests that the aesthetic, performatist model of dealing with disability is not without correlates in the real world. Geel has an originary, sacral legitimization; it is a center of decentered care for the disabled, and it is subject to closure in the sense that a categorical criterion (being mentally disabled) is a prerequisite for living there freely. And, if one follows Siebers’ argument, it also involves a specifically disinterested aesthetic motivation in the Kantian sense: “The entire population protects, apparently without regard for its own interests, the members of their community least likely to be accepted elsewhere.”(56) If the model of Geel as Siebers describes it is correct, then there is considerable potential in the real world for a performatist, rather than a postmodern, approach to representing and dealing with disability directly.

After 2400 years the Republic continues to generate intense scholarly and hermeneutical debate. It is one of Plato’s longest works and clearly one of the most important for an understanding of his thought. Richard Kraus explains its centrality, by reason that in the Republic we find:

a unified metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and psychological theory that goes far beyond the doctrines of the early dialogues. The Republic is in one sense the centerpiece of Plato’s philosophy, for no other single work of his attempts to treat all of these topics so fully. (10)

In the light of the sheer scope, depth, and range of complexity of the Republic, of its pivotal role in Plato’s corpus, and of its still living interpretive reception, I will focus on a single but clearly central issue in the dialogue, that of mimesis, emphasizing its treatment in Book X, and referring also to a key passage in Book VI. Mimesis plays a crucial and highly contested role in the dialogue as a whole, figuring centrally in Books II, III, and X. Socrates picks up his earlier discussion of it in the tenth and final book in the light the intervening discussion in books IV through IX of the role of justice in an ideal city and in the well-balanced individual psyche. I will discuss some of the complexities attendant upon the role of mimesis in the Republic; this will be followed by a treatment of the responses of René Girard and Eric Gans, both of whom, because of the central role played by mimesis in their work, of necessity comment on Plato’s founding role in relation to their respective conceptions of mimetic theory.

Like Girard and Gans, I choose to leave the term mimesis untranslated from the Greek, since the usual English translation as “imitation” fails to capture several of the key resonances in its aesthetic, ethical, psychological, and epistemological ranges of significance. In his masterly analysis of the mostly aesthetic uses of mimesis, Stephen Halliwell calls the view that Plato holds anything like a “monolithic notion” of mimesis “one of the supreme myths of modern histories of aesthetics.” Rather, Halliwell argues, “Plato’s importance as the ‘founding father’ of mimeticism is much more complex and much less easily condensed into a unified point of view than is usually supposed” (25). Far from holding “an unchanging and consistently negative attitude” to mimesis, Halliwell observes, “Plato introduces mimesis terminology in a remarkably wide range of contexts, using it in connection with issues in epistemology, ethics, psychology, politics, and metaphysics, and applying it to both the musicopoetic and the visual arts, as well as to other human practices, including even aspects of philosophy itself” (24).

Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere (see below, Works Cited), there is a fundamental ambiguity in Plato’s use of mimesis in the argument of the Republic, in particular. In Book X, Socrates banishes the poets from the ideal city, because, he says, “the argument determined us” (607b); namely, for the reason established in Book IX that poetry nourishes the pleasure-seeking and emotive and obscures the calculative and reasoning parts of the psyche–that it is imitative of the sensible world, eliciting in us conflicting and opposing perceptions, rather than of the intelligible world of a reason ruled by the law of (non-)contradiction. In relation to the law of (non-)contradiction, Allan Bloom points out in a note to his translation of the Republic that the “earliest known explicit statement of the principle of contradiction–the premise of philosophy and the foundation of rational discourse” (457, n. 25) occurs in Book IV of the Republic, where Socrates observes: “It is plain that the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or to suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing” (436b). As Socrates argues in Book X, the tragic poets are the chief offenders when it comes to nourishing that part of the psyche that is attracted to conflictive emotions and passionate engagement. It is tragic displays of agonistic experience that constitute dramatic force and evoke intense audience response: “Now, then, irritable disposition affords much and varied imitation, while the prudent and quiet character, which is always nearly equal to itself, is neither easily imitated, nor, when imitated, easily understood especially by a festive assembly” (604e). Socrates emphasizes “the greatest accusation”: that it is dangerous not only for the general audience but also, he argues, even for those who pursue and practice philosophy. Even “the best of us,” he says, “praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in this state” (605d) of heightened tragic emotion. In sum: “[F]or all the desires, pains, and pleasures in the soul that we say follow our action, poetic imitation produces similar results in us, for it fosters and waters them when they ought to be dried up, and sets them up as rulers in us” (606d). We ought, Socrates says, to be ruled by those things described in Book VI that do not draw us into conflict and contradiction, the ideals of “the just, fair, and moderate by nature” (501b).

The just cited passage in Book VI contains the much-discussed analogy of the philosopher-ruler as a “painter using the divine pattern” (500c; for a discussion of the debate surrounding this passage, see Foshay 103-104). The philosopher as painter, the analogy goes, “would look away frequently in both directions, toward the just, fair, and moderate by nature and everything of the sort, and, again, toward what is in human beings; and thus mixing and blending the practices as ingredients, [he or she] would produce the image of man, taking hints from exactly that phenomenon in human beings which Homer too called god-like and the image of god” (501b). Such an analogy of the philosopher-ruler arises naturally from the preceding discussion, in which Socrates describes the passionate nature of the philosophical vocation, what he calls “the true erotic passion for true philosophy” (499b):

[A] man who has his understanding truly turned toward the things that are has no desire to look down toward the affairs of human beings and to be filled with envy and ill will as a result of fighting with them. But, rather, because he sees and contemplates things that . . . are always in the same condition . . . he imitates them and, as much as possible, makes himself like them. (500b-c; my emphasis)

Thus, the philosopher is mimetic in just that matter and manner that truly makes him or her a philosopher, that is to say, in relation to those things that in being always the same are always as they are and neither in conflict with themselves nor cause conflict in those who in loving them for their own sake awaken to the philosophical life. This is the argument given by Plato to the character of Socrates in the Republic. Of course, because of the poetical and mimetic resources of the dialogue genre we cannot with any certainty attribute to Plato such a doctrine of forms. The notion of ideal forms is used quite inconsistently by Socrates in Books VI and X and is seriously questioned in dialogues like the Sophist that are almost certainly composed later in Plato’s career. In keeping with the literary structure of the philosophical dialogue as a genre, Plato always places his philosophical arguments in the mouths of characters in discussion, and in a particular context and setting which itself reflects thematically on the content of the philosophical preoccupations in the dialogue. No view expressed in the dialogues can with any certainty be attributed to Plato himself, and if the Seventh Letter is to be believed authentic, this is for very conscious and explicitly philosophical reasons, as the writer of the Seventh Letter explains: “There is no writing of mine about these [highest philosophical] matters, nor will there ever be one. For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences” (341c).

Both in being animated by philosophical eros and in achieving an explicitly mimetic relation to the ideal forms of unmixed and unchanging value, the philosopher in Socrates’ argument in Book VI of the Republic displays precisely those qualities for which the poets are eventually excluded from the ideal polis in Book X. The philosopher and the poet are likewise erotic and mimetic, but in regard to very different objects: the philosopher of “the just, the fair, the moderate by nature,” the poet, as Socrates specifies, of “sex, and spiritedness too, and all the desires, pains, and pleasures in the soul that we say follow all our actions,” establishing such passions “as rulers in us when they ought to be ruled” (606d). Socrates goes on to defend the exile of the poets because “our argument determined us” (607b) and so to do otherwise in the end would be an act of impiety toward the truth of a specifically rational and critical order. The critique of mimesis in the Republic begins in Books II and III as a critique of religion and the canonical role the poets have played as carriers of the Greek mythological tradition. In Book X, the poets and their defenders are to be given a fair chance to argue for their rights as citizens of the ideal polis, but Socrates advises the discipline of lovers for whom “the inborn love of such poetry we owe to our rearing” would be ascetically resisted.(1) If poetry is not able to mount a persuasive defense, he instructs, “we’ll chant this argument we are making to ourselves, as a countercharm, taking care against falling back into this love” (607d-608a). Thus, the rhythmical poetical resources of language are invoked to defend philosophical from poetic eros, and the power of ruler over the ruled in the contention between philosophy and poetry is sustained by marshaling erotic emotion for the sake of those forms or ideas of stable and unchanging ideals that promise to bring peace and stability to the ideal city and the well-balanced psyche. What is clearly at issue for Socrates is the question of self-command of the passions and the emotions, the need to direct them away from those changing objects and pursuits that lead to instability in the psyche and conflict with others in society, from what he described in the passage we cited from Book VI as the envy and ill-will that arise from pursuit of finite desires.

It is precisely this intimate link between mimesis, desire, and social rivalry that led René Girard to the discovery of the centrality of the scapegoat mechanism in the development of social and cultural forms. Naturally enough, Plato is a key reference point for Girard in articulating the relationship of his anthropological theory of culture to the philosophical tradition. In a key passage in his first full summation of his theoretical model in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, a work staged as a prolonged interview with two students of his work, Girard is asked pointedly about his relation to philosophy, and it is assumed that this means to Plato, with whom he shares such foundational concerns with questions of mimesis, desire, violence, and justice. Girard’s response displays a quite self-aware relationship of mimetic rivalry with Plato (and one might gather with philosophy itself). For Girard, Plato is unique among philosophers for the sharpness both of his hostility toward mimesis and of his perception of its importance. Girard responds to the above question:

If Plato is unique in the history of philosophy because of his fear of mimesis, he is for the same reason closer than primitive religion. Yet Plato is also deceived by mimesis because he cannot succeed in understanding his fear, he never uncovers its empirical reason for being. Plato never relates conflict to acquisitive mimesis, that is, with the object that the two mimetic rivals attempt to wrest from one another because they designate it as desirable to one another. (15)

Now, it is clear from our earlier analysis of the complex and multivalent (not to say contradictory) role of mimesis in the argument of the Republic that it is not accurate to say either that Plato (or even the character of Socrates in the Republic) is simply afraid of mimesis, certainly not hostile to mimesis as such, though certainly he fears and respects its artistic uses because of what he argues to be their de-stabilizing effects on the psyche and on the community. Socrates in Book VI argues forcefully that philosophy, in its defining pursuit of the ideal forms and the unmixed concept of the good, is itself mimetic. Nonetheless, the category of mimesis is reserved exclusively in Book X for its artistic and poetic and indeed, its tragic expressions, with Homer described as “the most poetic and first of the tragic poets” (607a). The near scriptural status of the Homeric poems in Greek culture constitutes the greatest challenge to the philosophical aspiration to the life of virtue, moderation, and avoidance of social rivalry. For Socrates, tragic tradition fosters the pursuit of sensuous and emotional desire that leads to inevitable conflict over finite resources, entailing precisely that acquisitive use of mimesis that Girard so rightly identifies as the core dynamic of violence in society. One cannot escape the ironical observation that Plato, in having Socrates reserve the notion of mimesis for its acquisitive and conflictive forms, displays the very conflictive mimetic rivalry that he attributes to the poets. Given Plato’s subtle command of the literary resources of the dialogue form, we cannot at all be certain that this irony is not conscious and deliberate. We should recall the passage in the Laws where the tragic poets are anticipated to request entry into the well-ruled city, the response by the philosopher-lawgivers being this:

Most honored guests, we’re tragedians ourselves, and our tragedy is the finest and best we can create. At any rate, our entire state has been constructed so as to be a “representation” of the finest and noblest life–the very thing we maintain is most genuinely a tragedy. So we are poets like yourselves, composing in the same genre, and your competitors as artists and actors in the finest drama, which true law alone has the natural powers to “produce” to perfection (of that we’re confident). (817b-c)

For Plato, it is only philosophers who engage in the real mimesis of the forms that, in providing a sufficiently unqualified representation of a non-possessive good, make possible a society where the competing interests of its citizens can be peaceably mediated and modulated. Plato either refuses or else fails to explicitly theorize this notion of philosophical mimesis, but it is more than apparent that he clearly performs it in the dialogues. Indeed, Socratic dialogue is possibly more philosophically consistent as representation than it can be as linear and discursive argumentation. Both the Seventh Letter and the above passage from the Laws are frequently cited to support such an interpretation. (I am thinking here in particular of the recent so-called Third Wave of Plato interpretation, in the work of such scholars as Francisco J. Gonzales, Charles L. Griswold, and David Roochnik.)

Eric Gans, while drawing on the fundamental insight of Girard into the relation between mimetic desire and violence, emphasizes the linguistically mediated nature of human enculturation rather than the more realist approach of Girard to the founding murder, the scapegoat mechanism, and the mediation of violence through myth and ritual. Gans sees the founding moment of language as the key event of hominization, when human beings crossed over from a merely appetitive mimesis to a more complexly mediated representation of an object of desire that had to be consciously renounced in order for the conflict of acquisitive mimesis to be avoided. The founding gesture of language and representation for Gans is thus a complex renunciation of the object, a deliberate forgoing of direct conflict over the object for the purpose of social cohesion. This founding gesture of signification defers the acquisition of the object on the material level and re-presents it on the newly formed ideational level of imaginary, symbolical acquisition in and through the sign. Thus Gans’s model of language is consistent with the Derridean model of the sign as a creature both of difference and deferral: language makes present what is constitutively absent, and Gans points out that this absence is a renunciation of the material referent which generates the presence of a human recognition that the social bond takes precedence over the self-seeking of merely material survival. Language in that sense is truly generative for Gans of human co-existence in a community of interest. As for Girard, mimesis plays an integral role for Gans. At the appetitive level, our direct animal imitativeness leads to the acquisitive mimetic crisis of two or more hands reaching for the same object. The originary act of representation/renunciation, one of ostensive indication or pointing, Gans argues, is likewise mimetic, leading the model to join the disciple in renunciative deferral of acquisition. As he describes this key moment:

Within the practical realm, the goal is no longer to appropriate the object in imitation of the human mediator but to imitate the object to the latter’s satisfaction, that is, well enough to make him understand the new sense–which can already be called the “meaning”–of the gesture. This closure is not perceived within the practical world but on the other’s imaginary scene of representation. In practical terms, this imaginary aim mediates the deferral of conflict, averting the potential wrath of the other-mediator toward his disciple-rival. (28)

The key point here, as Gans puts it, is the substitution of a sufficiently effective mimetic representation by the rival to divert the model from his act of appropriation. This is a potent mimetic significance indeed, one that Gans is subtle and evocative in presenting and defending, and on which hangs an analysis of the workings of culture that, similarly to that of Girard, generates some highly generative perspectives on cultural development and the evolution of social institutions.

Gans mounts a particularly vigorous critique of metaphysics and of the thought of Plato in particular. “Plato does not seek, does not want to recognize the configuration of the originary scene of language in which alone such a substitution [as word and concept for thing] is conceivable” (78). Gans is sharply critical of Plato’s doctrine of ideas; I am less convinced that Plato has one. In place of the ideal philosophical construct, Gans offers his own more complex and comprehensive model of the generative ostensive sign. “To eliminate the ostensive,” as Gans claims Plato does by means of the doctrine of ideas and the abstraction of the concept, “is to expunge the local historicity of deferral of collective violence by means of the sign” (81). It can be argued indeed that Plato might be seen to be doing exactly the opposite. Rather than expunging the historicity of the deferral of violence, he embodies that historicity by means of the complex ostensivity of the dialogue form–a higher order ostensivity that encompasses the abstraction of the concept, but embeds it critically in the performative representation of the Socratic dialogue as a specifically literary/philosophical genre.(2) Certainly, philosophical argumentation in its traditional monological form is declarative and conceptual rather than ostensive. But Plato’s choice and persistent practice of the philosophical dialogue–as he has Socrates demonstrate inconsistently in the Republic but the lawgivers declare explicitly in the Laws–is not in overall form declarative. As already observed, none of the philosophical declarations within the Platonic dialogues can with any certainty whatever be attributed directly to Plato. He took lifelong pains to represent and to embody philosophical argumentation as an ongoing inquiry, one that does not harden itself in declarations of philosophical position taking, no matter how tirelessly 2400 years of Plato interpretation has insisted on trying to establish this. When Socrates takes a philosophical position in Book X of the Republic, he is in open contradiction with his own earlier application of mimesis to philosophical thought itself in Book VI. Socrates’ arguments in Book X in support of the expulsion of the poets and against artistic mimesis are tendentious and inconsistent on a number of levels. It can be argued that Plato was entirely aware of these rather bald inconsistencies, that he is at once pointing to the ideal of philosophical eros in its pursuit of a transcendence of philosophical and political conflict and at the same time demonstrating dramatically and dialogically how very difficult it is to achieve in practice, even by the exemplary character of his own teacher. Precisely because Socrates and the other characters of the dialogues are historical and actual, and yet are portrayed fictionally in the dialogues, Plato can be argued to ground his representation of philosophy in history, but at the same time to lift it to the imaginative level, to indicate an imaginary scene of philosophy. It implies that philosophy by its very definition for Plato is an imaginative pursuit of an ideal, one that can only with very great difficulty and perhaps only imperfectly–and indeed not at all by Plato himself in his own failed historical attempts–be realized in actuality. Plato’s dialogues are not an attempt on his part acquisitively to seize and individually to possess the philosophical object, but rather to situate his own pursuit of philosophy both historically and at the same time as a representation, a sign rather than an object. The dialogues are a highly wrought sign, not less ostensive in being more complexly performative, of the ideational difference of philosophical inquiry from the endless deferral of its attainment of what remains in its very ideational structure an imaginary scene of thought and understanding, one that must prove itself in the actual conduct of a life in keeping with such a “true erotic pursuit of true philosophy,” a pursuit of the ideals of “the just, the fair, and the moderate by nature” (501b) such that we might live in personal and social justice, peace and the avoidance of conflict.

It is this overall probing enquiry into a non-acquisitive ideal that characterizes the thought of the dialogues, not any particular formulation or argumentation of Socrates or another of their historically referential and yet fictionalized characters. The fear and rejection of mimesis that both Girard and Gans perceive in the dialogues is a performance marked both by discursive and terminological inconsistency and by a mimetic rivalry between philosophy and the religious and poetic tradition that is arguably so overt as to strongly suggest a conscious dramatic representation on Plato’s part of the constitutively subtle nature of mimesis as a construct, of the inherent reflexivity that makes of all accusations of mimetic blindness double-edged weapons that require a highly tuned critical circumspection on the part of the wielder. The critique of metaphysics that casts Plato as the founding thinker in an originary forgetting or a forgetting of originary thinking rings with a mimetic rivalry that Plato was himself the first to represent as a founding question of the constitution of theoretical reflection itself.

In this paper, I will interrogate the idea of destiny in George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda (1876) and analyze it from the perspectives of phenomenology and generative anthropology. I will argue, firstly, that group destiny (destiny common to a group of people that define themselves as a community) is an originary anthropological concept that allows the participants on the scene of representation to construct its collective identity by symbolically re-enacting the moment of origin. Secondly, I will show that Zionism is paradigmatic of group destiny in that it possesses the indispensable characteristics of scenicity, authorial voice, and ethical renunciation that, at the same time, establish a territorial claim.

The notion of destiny is thematically central to Daniel Deronda, reappearing under various guises throughout the story. Insofar as the novel narrates the discovery by the main character of his heritage and his subsequent decision to join his destiny with that of his people, this theme forms a major plot element. But it is relevant, as well, to several other characters, who try to descry and comprehend their destiny in order to know what is awaiting them and what they should do. Destiny has a double connotation of being a mandatory pre-charted course of events that is planned by some higher power, on the one hand, and a future that has been selected for the subject by providence as his proper inheritance, on the other. The first meaning is restrictive, while the second is empowering, and the story line plays with both of them. In either case, destiny manifests itself as something external that a characters awaits, looks forward to (whether with dread or anticipation), and rightfully expects to be conferred on him. Conceived in this way, destiny is construed as one’s lot in life, and is consequently associated with games of chance. Thus, in the opening casino scene, Gwendolen Harleth’s idea of herself as “a goddess of luck” is overturned after the “Faites votre jeu” announcement by “the automatic voice of destiny” (10-11)(1) presages a reversal that sets the plot into motion. To Deronda, destiny presents itself “in the shape of Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away from the true point of attack” (455).

Destiny means different things to different characters. For Gwendolen, it symbolizes a dream of a brilliant future in high society. Even though she comes from a family in reduced circumstances, she has an “implicit confidence that her destiny must be one of luxurious ease, where any trouble that occurred would be well clad and provided for” (16). It is her beauty, graceful manners, and accomplishments that entitle her to the rightful possession of her brilliant future: “About her French and music, the two justifying accomplishments of a young lady, she felt no ground for uneasiness; and when to all these qualifications . . . we add the spontaneous sense of capability some happy persons are born with . . . who can wonder if Gwendolen felt ready to manage her own destiny?” (40). After she is married for a while to a tyrannical husband, however, her arrogant attitude of mastery vis-à-vis her destiny is reversed, while her self-image suffers a serious blow: “Her confidence in herself and her destiny had turned into remorse and dread; she trusted neither herself nor her future” (432). Thus, from Gwendolen’s perspective of entitlement, destiny is seen as a right to a legacy.

But legacy is not just a right: it exacts duties and imposes responsibilities. And it is not just social class, privilege, and money that can constitute a legacy. It can also be construed as a fellowship of talent, which combines the sense of being greatly favored by fate with the future rigors it imposes on the luckily endowed. When Miss Arrowpoint challenges her parents’ opinion that Klesmer is an unsuitable match, she argues that the ideas they hold dear are nothing other than “a ridiculous mish-mash of superannuated customs and false ambition” (247). The true measure is men’s intrinsic worth. By this standard, Klesmer “is of a caste to which I look up–a caste above mine” (243). The reason for her elevated judgment is that he is a great genius, a true artist and, as such, cannot be measured by any common yardstick. This singular status gives him the right of an “ancestor” (in Sir Hugo’s words). Klesmer himself applies this criterion first to Gwendolen, then to Mirah, the young woman rescued by Deronda from suicide. To Gwendolen, whom he wants to support in her struggle to become an artist, despite his critical verdict, he says “Where there is duty of service there must be duty of accepting it” (260). As for Mirah, after listening to her sing, he puts out his hand, saying “Let us shake hands: you are a musician” (484), in a way that suggests that their shared talent implies a special communion that can chart its own destiny. Such is also the reasoning of Leonora Alcharisi, who resorts to a similar argument when she justifies her decision to abandon her son to become a singer. “Had I not a rightful claim to be something more than a mere daughter and mother?” she asks him, “Whatever else was wrong, acknowledge that I had a right to be an artist, though my father’s will was against it. My nature gave me a charter” (664).

The most prominent significance of destiny in the novel, however, is that of heritage. Heritage is broader than class and occupation. In a sense, it combines both. According to Martin Heidegger, opening oneself up to one’s heritage “involves handing oneself over to traditional possibilities” that one inherits, “although not necessarily as traditional ones.”(2) These possibilities are not just professional ones–they can also unfold in the arena of politics, domestic life, and religion, among others. Thus, Alcharisi, a talented Jewish singer who feels constricted by her heritage and religion, wants a different, better fate for her son Daniel that will open up to him a great many opportunities she never had. Knowing that Sir Hugo Mallinger loves her and will refuse her nothing, she asks him to bring Daniel up with all the advantages of an English peer. At first, the boy, who is aware of his uncertain status and parentage, is eager to accept the heritage that is handed down to him. When it is first discovered that he has a beautiful voice and suggested that he train as a singer, he rejects this suggestion indignantly, offended that his guardian has “thought of a career for him which was totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was not thought of among possible destinations for the sons of English gentlemen” (168-169). As he matures, however, he grows indifferent to the opportunities of this ready heritage, telling Sir Hugo: “I want to be an Englishman, but I want to understand other points of view. And I want to get rid of a merely English attitude in studies” (183).

It is true that, as Sir Hugo Mallinger’s ward, and not his legal heir, Deronda cannot inherit the title and the land–a fact of which he is acutely aware and which makes him slightly resentful of the landed gentleman Grandcourt, who can afford to chase brilliant Gwendolen. But Sir Hugo presents him with another idea of destiny. An exceptional and talented individual does not have to inherit–he can create his own inheritance. He can carve his own path in life and thus become an originator of a new tradition and be crowned with the laurels of the founder. “You remember Napoleon’s mot–Je suis un ancêtre,” he tells Deronda, to which the other replies: “I am not sure that I want to be an ancestor . . . . It doesn’t seem to me the rarest sort of origination” (163).

Deronda’s rejection both of his English destiny and a destiny as “an ancestor” foreshadows his eventual embrace of a more comprehensive notion of destiny. This wider meaning of destiny is communal. In fact, for Heidegger, the very term “destiny” implies “the occurrence of the community, of a people” (352). In Eliot’s novel, the idea of group destiny and the protagonist’s discovery of it occupy a central place. What is group destiny? At its heart, according to the novel, lies an organic metaphor of cooperation and common purpose. Organic thinking is directly relevant to the national idea that dominates the Deronda narrative. When Daniel meets Mordecai, he does not know him to be the brother of Mirah for whom he has been searching, yet his responsive and empathetic nature responds strongly to what he perceives as the other’s need for him. Mordecai tells him of receiving a call from the “voices of the past” that announced his spiritual destiny–working on bringing his people home. Mordecai takes Deronda with him to a local pub, where his debate club is holding a meeting, discussing the issue of nationalities and, particularly, that of the Jewish return to Palestine. On the one side of the spectrum, there is the view of Pash, the watchmaker. He believes in and expounds the idea of progress. According to that idea, nationalities are a thing of the past. They are slowly dying out, and anyone who clings to this idea is retarding progress. The middle-of-the-road view belongs to Gideon, the optical instrument maker. Gideon concedes that “[t]here is no reason now why [Jews] shouldn’t melt gradually into the populations [they] live among” (527). However, as long as they exist in the form of a self-identified national consciousness, he will continue to worship and keep the traditions of his forefathers. Mordecai’s position belongs to the other side of the spectrum. He is a strong believer in the preservation of the Jewish nation by giving it its national home. His argument builds on a series of organic metaphors that have to do with soil, planting, growth, coming to fruition, but also with invisible, tentacle-like blood ties. While Gideon’s self-acknowledged motto is that a “man’s country is where he is well off” (527), Mordecai articulates his predicament of exile to Deronda by saying: “England is the native land of this body, which is but as a breaking pot of earth around the fruit-bearing tree, whose seed might make the desert rejoice” (497). To the group, he says:

I believe in a growth, a passage, and a new unfolding of life whereof the seed is more perfect, more charged with the elements that are pregnant with diviner form. The life of a people grows, it is knit together and yet expanded, in joy and sorrow, in thought and action; it absorbs the thought of other nations into its own forms, and gives back the thought as new wealth to the world; it is a power and an organ in the great body of nations. (526)

In the “great body of nations,” the role of the Jewish people will be central, according to the messianic vision. Geographically, it will be “a new Judea, poised between East and West–a covenant of reconciliation” (537). As a “community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom,” it will be “a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West” (535). The restored homeland will be a spiritual center as well; its pioneers will “found a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just like the old–a republic where there is equality of protection, an equality which shone like a star on the forehead of our ancient community, and gave it more than the brightness of Western freedom amid the despotism of the East” (535). Finally, it will be an affective center–an organic source from which the transformation of the world will begin. Several metaphors convey this idea. Citing Yehuda Halevi (Jehuda-ha-Levi), Mordecai claims that “Israel is the heart of mankind, if we mean by heart the core of affection which binds a race and its families in dutiful love” (530). Therefore, “our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and brain to watch and guide and execute; the outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations, as the outraged Englishman or American” (535). He also uses vegetative imagery–the root, from which everything grows, and the interconnected branches–to underscore the idea of a people that are conjoined by multiple blood, cultural, historical, and religious ties and linked all together to a common heritage. It is entirely rational, he insists, “to see more and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth–yea, consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches towards me the appealing arms of children” (528). Consequently, to spur growth and to enable the generational transmission of culture, it is necessary to “[r]evive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality” (532). Mordecai also frequently resorts to the metaphor of fire, which, strictly speaking, is a chemical, not an biological phenomenon, but which evokes organic associations in the way it is experienced as a living thing, originating at one point and spreading to other places as if by connecting threads. He says, for instance, that the soul of a man “who feels the life of his people stirring within his own” is like “a seed of fire that may enkindle the souls of multitudes, and make a new pathway for events” (527). From the organic center, “the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel” (533), and its “national life” will once again become “a growing light” if “the central fire [is] kindled again, and the light will reach afar” (537). Mordecai suggests that “the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice” and concludes by appealing to his audience: let us “choose our full heritage, claim the brotherhood of our nations, and carry into it a new brotherhood with the nations of the Gentiles. The vision is there; it will be fulfilled” (538).

The metaphoric language of Mordecai’s passionate entreaty is suggestive of a specific type of a historical nationalist argument that uses the organic model as the basis of the functional explanation of its world picture. The two competing paradigms are those of a nation as a collection of individuals or as an organic whole. At the bottom of this dichotomy lies the difficulty of theorizing group behavior and group rights. Are groups just aggregates of individuals or do they form new kinds of entities with emergent properties that warrant different models than those valid for individuals? An atomistic model imagines society as a sum total of its inhabitants endowed with individual rights. Citizens of such a polity must be bound by a law-like fiduciary link for this arrangement to work and not dissolve into chaos. The laws could be imposed from above, as in an absolute tyranny. They could also be voluntary, in conformity with Kant’s categorical imperative, whereby each rational subject articulates a maxim that is valid when applied as a universal law. What guarantees agreement between maxims then is the belief in the universality of reason. Both models view society in mechanistic terms, however–at best, as a well-oiled machine, the constitutive parts of which are subject to laws, be they external, imposed by a dictator from above, or internalized by the conscientious citizenry as the rational rules of moral behavior. What this model does not admit is ideas such as collective striving, political will, joint decision. Ultimately, it is a society without a destiny because it does not allow for a common purpose–all its members pursue their own goals and interests, coexisting in a state of competition and contributing in their combined striving to a zero-sum result. In Daniel Deronda, this paradigm is embodied by the idea of gambling. Gwendolen is initially puzzled by Deronda’s disapproval of her gambling and wants to hear his explanation. She asks him whether he objects to her gambling on the grounds of her sex. Deronda’s response is that this is not the main reason.

I think it would be better for men not to gamble. It is a besotting kind of taste, likely to turn into a disease. And, besides, there is something revolting to me in raking a heap of money together, and internally chuckling over it, when others are feeling the loss of it. I should even call it base, if it were more than an exceptional lapse. There are enough inevitable turns of fortune which force us to see that our gain is another’s loss:–that is one of the ugly aspects of life. One would like to reduce it as much as one could, not get amusement out of exaggerating it. (337)

Hearing him present this in the formula of “one’s gain is another’s loss” makes a profound impression on Gwendolen: “the idea that somebody thought her gambling wrong, had evidently bitten into her” (404). She quickly connects it to her own action of marrying Grandcourt against the interests of his illegitimate family and confesses to Deronda that she has “done a great deal worse” (445). This is why she is so hesitant in the end to touch even the meager allowance left to her by Grandcourt’s will. The same win-or-lose logic operates for the inheritance plot as well. Grandcourt stands to gain Sir Hugo’s title and his property because of the latter’s failure to produce an offspring of the requisite gender, whereas, in a surprising turnaround of fortune, it is Sir Hugo who luckily profits from his healthy nephew’s untimely demise. In a similar twist–and despite Gwendolen’s agonizing awareness of having disinherited Grandcourt’s first family–it is Gwendolen herself who is disinherited. Henleigh Grandcourt’s illegitimate son, little Henleigh, whose chances of inheriting were slim to none when his still young father marries a young woman, benefits unexpectedly from his father’s not leaving a legitimate heir. In an ironic plot reversal, Mrs Glasher’s family and Gwendolen exchange circumstances. Little Henleigh, who inherits the large estate of Ryelands and Grandcourt’s fortune, is to assume Gwendolen’s former lavish style of living, while Gwendolen herself is to move to the humble Gadsmere in the heart of the disfigured coal-mining country and make do on the kind of modest income that Mrs Glasher had to contend with previously. Gwendolen, who used to be afraid of being poor, now accepts her lot with humility as a debt she has to pay for her former selfishness. Yet Deronda cautions her not to read “debt” in terms of the zero-sum logic of the atomistic paradigm.

Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot be really so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with that penitential, loving purpose you have in mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions–there will be newly-opened needs–continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant. (769)

In contrast to the atomistic paradigm, the organic idea envisions society in the collaborative terms of a biological entity. Each part of it has a specialized role, and all components must work together in harmony in order to contribute to the organism’s survival and thriving. Thus, particularization implies functionality. The participants can no longer be theorized as undifferentiated and replaceable parts of a mechanism–each is assigned a special function. This particularistic model is compatible with a worldview that accords with the functional explanation in biology, which views systems teleologically. Each component of the system contributes to overall survival (just as each organ in the body or each part of the plant): it is placed there “for the sake of something,” and, as such, is futural, making purposiveness one of the important aspects of the functional view of things. A purpose implies a creator who has a special relation to his creation: he wills his creation into being–and, by willing, chooses it. Thus, his relation to it is that of an election. But also, if he wants his creation to be aware of its special mission, he must convey that mission by imparting to it a knowledge of its calling, and this calling must be reciprocated in some contractual form. In other words–the call, the election, the covenant, the mission–are the necessary attributes of the organistic view of society. All of these elements are clearly present in Mordecai’s reasoning. The organistic metaphoric language of his eloquent entreaty is closely compatible with the Heideggerian moment of appropriation or en-ownment: the call of conscience is heard in the ancestral voices that awaken one, speaking through “the soul fully born within” (498) him; the responsible grasp of one’s ownmost possibility grounded in its primordial thrownness is felt through the affection and fellowship that binds one to his race, the periphery to its center, the outgrowth to its root; and, finally, the temporalization of authentic decision that unifies the past, present, and future is understood as collective destiny–“the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches towards me the appealing arms of children” (528).

Zionism, as a model of nationalism, employs such an organistic, functionalistic schema, which ascribes to the people of Israel a special role among the nations. David Vital, paraphrasing Rabbi Yehuda Liwa, says that “God granted every nation its proper place. . . . To the Jews he gave the land of Israel. Equally, he ordained that no nation should be subservient to any other and that each nation should cohere, rather than be scattered.”(3) Thus, Judaism extends the metaphor from one nation to many; that is to say, not only do people within the nation relate to each other as organs within an organism, but the world as a whole can be considered as one organism, consisting of many nations–each with a unique function. This extrapolation from individuals to countries is internally consistent with the idea of an organism, but is at odds with a more “realistic” realization of nationalism that Hans Kohn calls “double-faced,” because “[i]ntranationally, it leads to a lively sympathy with all fellow members within the nationality; internationally, it finds its expression in indifference to or distrust and hate of fellow men outside the national orbit.”(4) The conflict between sympathy and competition that Kohn notes reflects the simultaneous human desire to exclude while being included and maps onto the mimetic configuration of ingroup versus outgroup (see, for instance, Girard’s discussion of Albertine and her set in Proust).(5)

From the anthropological and ethological perspective, the conflict can be situated in the collision between two needs–group cohesion and the struggle for resources. Mutual attachment between the individuals of the same group is an essential feature of animal sociality. Even in primate societies, the level of cooperation between members is surprisingly advanced. For example, several primatologists, such as Frans de Waal and Christophe Boesch, observe wide-spread meat sharing among unrelated chimpanzees (but it exists among other primates and some social carnivores as well), even though meat is only obtained by hunters: “Meat is eaten by the vast majority of group members only thanks to the collaborative effort of others and of generous meat-sharing rules.”(6) In addition, chimpanzees exhibit behaviors that are tempting to interpret in the anthropomorphic terms of generosity and chivalry. For instance, dominant males like to distribute the surplus of food themselves among other members, not caring whether the portion they leave for themselves is the smallest. Also, it is common for males to give up their place to females (although they would never give up their place to a lower-ranking male) and to allow females to break up fights and confiscate weapons. Another example of group allegiance is the apparent compassion and support primates show to injured and handicapped members that allow the latter to survive–something that has been observed not only in higher primates but in Japanese and rhesus monkeys. Group cohesion allows social animals to behave in a cooperative manner. Boesch distinguishes between four levels of cooperation. The highest degree of cooperation is collaboration, wherein individuals “different complementary actions all directed toward the same prey” (94). Collaboration, which is rare or unproven among lower primates, has evolved to sophisticated levels among chimpanzees, who use very complex and flexible cooperative strategies during hunt and territorial defense. All in all, the complex social organization of higher primates which employs relatively advanced forms of cooperation and specialization for performing difficult tasks demonstrates that the use of the organic metaphor for describing social interactions is neither far-fetched nor unjustified. Solidarity and attachment between social animals is a survival mechanism on the group level–a “real” phenomenon, as it were, that is universally agreed upon. There are some disagreements in explaining it, however. The variations on popular theories of kin selection and the selfish gene claim the collaborative behavior of social animals to be an evolutionary adaptation that allows genes to propagate. In other words, these theories postulate that (seemingly) altruistic behavior occurs between relatives who share genetic material and can therefore be ascribed to the evolutionary mechanism of genetic replication, so that “individual organisms are merely the vehicles or throw-away survival machines for those selfish genes.”(7) These genetic-level explanations are reductive in that they put social behavior down straightforwardly to genetic causes. Frans de Waal’s emergentist view, on the other hand, is that the picture is more complicated, because, as he notes, strong social bonds between members of social species operate on the behavioristic level of social adaptation, since altruism, coalition-building, empathy towards sick individuals and other examples of “proto-moral” behavior are often exhibited by genetically unrelated animals.(8)

Some anthropological and bio-evolutionary studies of human conflict also indicate that humans are not fundamentally different from animals in that group identity is a prominent feature of human socialization that has evolutionary origins and adaptive value. Johan van der Dennen writes that “[p]roto-ethnocentrism is supposed to imply some kind of group identity, that is, the ability to recognize ingroup versus outgroup members, to discriminate between these categories, and to preferentially treat ingroup members to positive reciprocal (altruistic) interactions such as protection, nepotism, and sharing of resources.”(9) Ingroup recognition is aided by so called ethnic badges. Van der Dennen distinguishes three basic kinds of ethnic badges: the first is physical–an identifiable phenotype–and the other two are cultural. One of these is body markings–van der Dennen calls them “a man-made ethnic uniform” including “bodily mutilations and/or adornments carried as visible badges of group belonging. These markers range from clothing and headgear to body painting, tattooing, circumcision, tooth filling and sundry mutilations of the lips, nose and earlobes.”(10) The other is linguistic (he calls it behavioral): “[e]thnicity is determined by speech, demeanor, manners, esoteric lore or some other proof of competence in a behavioral repertoire characteristic of the group. Language is the supreme test of ethnicity (e.g., the shibboleth).”(11) Just as for animals, the evolutionary significance of human groups is to promote survival by increasing the efficiency of obtaining food, defending themselves from predators and other groups competing for the same resources, and, in the case of humans, sharing knowledge.(12)

Cooperative behavior between social animals coexists with conflict, which accompanies the hierarchical struggle for a higher dominance rank–the ethological precursor to human mimetic desire. Dominance drive, according to de Waal, is universal, with animals continually striving to establish a dominant social position and maintain it. He writes: “From my own study of both macaques and chimpanzees I have no hesitation whatsoever on this point. The animals I observed clearly strove to attain a higher status.”(13) But a significant feature of the ingroup fight for social position is that the conflicts and skirmishes it generates rarely lead to life-threatening injuries. The confrontations between contenders often have a ritualistic character and resolve in an act of “formal” recognition. In the case of chimpanzees, “[t]he formal dominant may lose numerous times, flee in panic, end up screaming high in a tree, and so on, but if he refuses to raise the white flag that the species evolved for this purpose, the challenger will not let up. Only when his target formally submits will the challenger change his conduct from aggressive to tolerant. The two rivals will reconcile and the calm will be restored.”(14)

The situation changes radically when the focus is switched from intra- to intergroup conflicts. Whereas lethal aggression within a group might not be a viable survival strategy, the hostilities between groups are often devastating and deadly, because what is at stake in intergroup antagonism is a competition for vital resources. Thus the relationship between individuals within a group has a principally different character from that of intergroup interactions: the former is collaborative, while the latter is agonistic. The character of intergroup aggression is typically territorial. Social animals patrol the boundaries of their territory trying to maintain its integrity in defending it from intruders; yet they also make raids into the neighboring territories in an attempt to expand their own. While the fighting does not always assume the form of an all-out war of attrition because groups may rely on each other for mates or the territory may be too large to defend, the territorial struggle becomes especially acute with the pressure of certain ecological factors, such as habitat saturation or shortage of alienable resources. Material resources are defined as alienable if they are confined to “valuable objects or land that can be seized”–for example, “fruit trees used by territorial monkeys are alienable, because territorial boundaries can shift. Accordingly, monkey troops are expected sometimes to encroach on others’ territories.”(15) The same holds true for human foraging societies. The result of a study by Joseph Manson and Richard Wrangham on a relation between territoriality and aggression demonstrated that “[t]he hypothesis that in appropriate circumstances alienability of resources is an important determinant of the causes of intergroup aggression is . . . supported.”(16) Territoriality is thus a key feature of both human and non-human intergroup aggression. Van der Dennen writes that the myth about peaceful hunter-gathering societies has received a mortal blow in the last several decades. Warfare is endemic to these societies–in fact, “’primitive’ warfare (among hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, simple agriculturalists) and prehistoric warfare is generally a lethal, bloody, and sometimes even genocidal business: guerre à l’outrance (due to rapidly accumulating casualties in raiding and routing). Group extinction due to chronic warfare between (horticultural) village communities is quite common in New Guinea, Amazonia, and other regions where feud and war are endemic.”(17) He quotes P.A. Corning’s explanation of war: “War is obviously one way of gaining access to needed resources–and of eliminating potential threats to your own population or resources.”(18) “Territoriality as a causal factor in primitive warfare and feuding has been described for hundreds of peoples,”(19) as Van der Dennen points out. At the same time, the reverse is also true: “Territoriality [is] a way to avoid continuous warfare” because “it is quite possible that territoriality at the band level developed as a means of regulating inter-band aggression”(20) by helping bands to steer clear of territorial disputes.

The purpose of this excursus into the sociobiology of cooperation and conflict is not only to remind ourselves that these behaviors are deeply rooted in the evolutionary past of sociality, but to introduce the material factor into the discussion of nationalism. The material question of resources and territory is indispensable to the ethical dimension of human intersubjectivity revealed by Eric Gans’s elaboration of René Girard’s mimetic theory from the appetitive angle. While Girard considers mimetic desire from the interpersonal perspective, Gans’s linguistic and ethical extrapolation allows us to expand this analysis to the group level. An important insight of his is the vertical dimension of the sign, which became possible with the evolution of joint attention or, as it is also termed, triadic mimetic intersubjectivity, which makes communicative mimesis possible. The concept of the triadic nature of language, pointed out and explained by C. S. Peirce, is applied by cognitive scientists to the comparative study of animal and human communication. Jordan Zlatev, Tomas Persson, and Peter Gärdenfors write that “human language is, in general, triadic–it is used by one individual for explicitly representing an existing or imaginary state of affairs for another individual. On the other hand, animal signs are generally speaking dyadic: the animal responds to a stimulus or cue in the environment, causing the emission of a particular signal directed to a conspecific, without linking self, referent and addressee into a referential triangle.”(21) This distinction resolves into the differentiation between shared and joint attention. “To make a given object X fully intersubjective between you and me, I would need not only to ‘see that you see X’ [shared or second-order attention], but also ‘to see that you see that I see X’ [joint or third-order attention] and vice versa” (17). In other words, joint attention is a reciprocal attention: the participant holds in mind the object, the other participant, and the other participant’s awareness of his awareness. Apparently, it is only humans who are capable of the latter, because “it has not been shown that (non-enculturated) apes are capable of understanding another’s mental states about their own mental states, which would involve . . . third-order mentality;” and therefore joint attention “appears to be beyond the cognitive capacities of apes” (17).

The idea of the verticality of the sign originates precisely in the split of joint attention between the awareness of the other contemplating the central object and the self-conscious awareness of the self contemplating the object as reflected through the eyes of the other. Thus, the meaning of “desire” is clarified: a desire is not just a directional intentionality of attention, a deliberate turning toward an object with a purpose of appropriating it, but a reciprocal knowledge of this intentionality by the desiring individuals. According to the mimetic configuration of two subjects vis-à-vis an object, one of the desires may well be non-original, but imitative. But this does not make a difference at the point when two desires converge on one object–they become each other’s obstacles that are bound to collide. This mutual awareness of impending collision brings with it an understanding of “the incompatibility of the two roles of subject and the other in the mimetic process.”(22) It is at this juncture that the “sign emerges as a turning away from the other as model to the object of desire as model. In the transformation of the mimetic relationship wrought by language, the subject displaces the intention of his gesture from (unconsciously) imitating the other to (thematically) imitating the object.”(23) The contemplation of the object as something desired by the other injects a new dimension into the relationship between the subject and the object, which Gans calls the verticality of the sign: “The emission of the sign creates verticality out of what was previously a horizontal relationship of appetite and appropriation by combining the roles of model and object in a single behavior.” In its new role, the object is perceived thematically, which is an important milestone in the origin of language. “The originary sign is the first instance of the free, conscious, intentional thematization of an object.”(24) On the level of interpersonal conflict, the ability to thematize also implies that the two contenders withdraw or defer their conjoined appropriative gestures and convert them into a shared designative gesture. Instead of battling over the disputed object for the purpose of usurping it, they suspend hostilities and share it symbolically as an ideal object of representation. In this acknowledgment of their mutual desire and its ritual sublimation lies the ultimate ethical moment. “Instead of my action being a simple means of self-expansion into the world through the incorporation and obliteration of external objects,” writes Gans, “it becomes a means to preserve these objects by reproducing them within myself.” (25) The ethical gesture of symbolic sharing through representation must be accompanied by a prohibition of the real object, the appropriation of which was suspended at the moment when the sign is invented. Earlier, it was the mimetic competitor that presented an obstacle. But no longer. “Because the [mimetic] model does not disturb my signing behavior, it is the object that is perceived as the obstacle to its own appropriation; this is what we call its sacrality.” (26)

Gans’s exposure of the ethical dimension of language has important implications for elaborating the materiality of the sign by illuminating its original acquisitive connotation that later becomes obscured by the formalized relationship between signifier, signified, and referent. His analysis suggests that the originary referent is the appetitive object of which the mimetic rivals imagine themselves in possession and from which they collectively abstain in the formal act of interdiction that designates it as the sacred. Thus the originary linguistic act is a speech act that designates the sacred. It is the ostensive act of naming. “The originary use of the ostensive takes place in a collective scene where each participant designates the central object-referent to fellow participants at the periphery.” Which means that, in its minimal form, “language would originally possess only a single word that would mean ‘uniquely significant.’” (27) Consequently, the first performative performs this unique significance, presenting it as such to all participants on the scene of representation. “What is ‘performed’ by the ostensive is a centering of its referent that is at the same time a subsumption of it under the category of the significant center.”(28) Gans suggests that the meaning of this first uniquely significant word is the name of God. I would like to deviate from this somewhat and make a conjecture as to an additional/alternative object of the act of naming. What else could possibly be named? Let us reiterate again Gans’s assertion that language emerged as an ethical resolution to contentious and potentially violent mimetic rivalry. How is it resolved? In two ways: settling the conflict by making a contested resource shareable (representation), but also claiming it as communal property (designation). Both are achieved through the act of the “imaginary prolongation of the designative gesture toward the object [that] constitutes the original experience of desire. . . . For the object is necessarily inaccessible, and it is precisely this that permits each individual to imagine himself as alone acceding to it.”(29) It is tempting to suggest that the appetitive object of unique and most fundamental significance, on which the very survival of the community unconditionally depends, is the ultimate resource of the land that sustains all life. I therefore propose that the originary performative moment of naming could be construed as a double speech-act: a self-naming and a naming of the territory one claims as one’s own. The bestowing of a shared name on itself as a group and on the land one occupies is a self-founding event by a speech community. The community springs into existence by staking its territory in a symbolic act that signifies both the sharing of resources by all members as well as the territorial arrogation on behalf of the entire community. By associating the group with the resources, this originary linguistic event aspires to engineer an abiding–“hard-wired,” as it were–coupling between the sign and the referent as a founding act that puts a signifying system into circulation. This supposition accommodates Gans’s prioritization of the materiality of reference, which rests on the underlying desire to possess the appetitive object. It is because the contested object is the locus of desirous intentionality that language emerges in its ethical functionality. Insofar as language, as a cultural convention, is “activated” through the act of pointing at or selecting the real as something of appetitive (broadly speaking) import, its contractual operation is predicated on some ethical agreement established on the formal scene of representation. The double-naming as the grounding of the transcendental signifier thus bridges the gap between the symbolic cultural domain and that of the real. Consequently, heritage is passed on and conferred via the symbolic act of appropriation that bestows sovereignty and grants one complete and rightful disposal over one’s claimed domain.

We are reminded of the significance of naming in Eliot’s novel when Grandcourt drowns and his estate is to go to his son. Sir Hugo tells Deronda: “The boy is to take his father’s name; he is Henleigh already, and he is to be Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The Mallinger will be of no use to him, I am happy to say” (716). The middle name will be of no use to him, because he will not be able to inherit Sir Hugo Mallinger’s estate. It will now go to Sir Hugo’s future grandson. Having lost the inalienable connection to the right to the land that inheres in the title, the name has also lost its meaning. Similarly, Deronda is precluded by his unassimilably foreign name from coming into the possession of the English heritage proffered to him. His name serves as a constant reminder of his non-English provenance, consistent with the fact that, before the restoration of Israel, Jews, as a “virtual” entity, exist in the form of a dispersed world diaspora community. It is significant that Daniel’s mother, Leonora, is not firmly planted in any particular place: her father’s branch of the family is from Genoa, while her mother is from England, but with more distant roots in Portugal. There is also a connection to Germany, where the grandfather’s oldest friend, Joseph Kalonymos, resides and where Deronda first meets him. Neither do Jewish names have strong significance in the novel. They neither manifest a natural connection to the historical territory nor signify belonging, being further attenuated by the fact that, in exile, Jewishness is determined through the mother. This is reflected in the ironic circumstances of Deronda’s successful search for Mirah’s brother. His full name, Ezra Cohen, turns out to be so generic that it is shared by a non-relative who happens to have taken him in, while the brother himself goes under the name of Mordecai. There is even irony in the fact that the noble Hebrew name of Cohen, from which in the Messianic times future priests will be selected to serve in the re-built Third Temple, is devalued by the characters of the novel, being seen as too common and low. A more presentable name, Lapidoth, is selected as Mirah’s stage name, with Deronda telling her: “I assure you, you must not be called Cohen. The name is inadmissible for a singer. This is one of the trifles in which we must conform to vulgar prejudice” (467-468). But even though he puts the blame on the “vulgar prejudice” of the crowd, to Deronda himself, “the name Cohen was equivalent to the ugliest of yellow badges” (468). This is why the Jewish inheritance that Deronda receives is as abridged and “virtual” as can be, comprised of a chest of papers that Joseph Kalonymos keeps for him in his grandfather’s name which contains blueprints that lay out a plan for the future Jewish homeland. As a sign, it is not once-, but twice-removed from the real (the appetitive territorial object), which reflects the predicament of the Jews.

Territoriality is the final component of the Zionist model, in addition to those of election, covenant, and destiny. It completes the picture by giving the nationalist model an indispensable “grounding” in the real. In The Zionist Idea, Joseph Heller considers several characteristics of a nation: “1. ‘National consciousness,’ i.e., a feeling of unity and a will to its preservation active throughout the community. 2. The idea of common origin. 3. Common physical and mental peculiarities. 4. A common historical past and traditions (common memories, common struggles and victories, suffering and happiness). 5. A defined territory as ‘homeland.’ 6. A common language. 7. A common culture.”(30) Not all of these criteria, writes Heller, must be in place for a nation to be a nation. In the case of the Jews before the creation of Israel, not all of the conditions were met. However, the defining gauge of the Jewish national consciousness, according to him, was the existence of a distinct Jewish identity deeply rooted in religious belief. It is the religion that defines the Jewish mission and, through it, gives meaning to Jewish history. “The Jewish people never renounced the ‘Land of Israel,’ but always kept its memory alive and cherished the hope of a restoration. This hope was merged into the people’s prayers and connected with its belief in the future redemption of mankind” (17). But, at the same time, “[r]eal historic right derives not from a mere external event or from a factual situation belonging to the past, but from historically significant cultural achievements that become permanent factors of national life. . . . A nation therefore has a historic right to its homeland not because it conquered the territory at some time in the past and occupied it for a certain period, but because its connection with the territory has become a creative factor and a permanent element of cultural, economic and spiritual development both in the history of the country and in the nation itself” (91-92). The historical memories, in their turn, sharpen the resolve to carry out the historic mission. “Jewish religion . . . proclaimed the historical mission of the ‘chosen people,’ which had been predestined to live and act as an example for the other nations and to teach them the truths of God’s uniqueness and of the unity of mankind” (29). They are chosen by God to be his champion and messenger, proclaiming his will and “striving for the messianic era to come, the era of universal knowledge of God” (64).

Zionism was not the only solution to “the Jewish question.” Historically, there were other proposals, such as the idea of individual rights, Diaspora nationalism and territorialism. The first is not nationalism proper but an emancipatory ideal that stems from the discourse of Enlightenment and views the national question through the prism of individual rights within nation-states. According to this paradigm, Jews would not be seen as a distinct group but as individuals to whom all inalienable citizen rights are to accrue on non-discriminatory terms. The second, the Diaspora nationalism, popular in the nineteenth-century, took a group view, but from a strictly cultural perspective. Its proponents envisioned some kind of a territorial integrity in the form of “national autonomy, involving three basic principles: communal self-determination, legal recognition of Yiddish, . . . and free national education.”(31) Heller criticizes Diaspora nationalism as misguided because of its “belief that the independence and freedom of Jewish cultural life can be safeguarded by constitutional law and international treaties alone, without the material basis of a national economy” (56). The concern with the material basis of economy is essentially a Marxist position that advocates territorialism. Vital summarizes this line of thinking as a belief in a uniquely Jewish predicament. Because of their refusal to assimilate, the Jews can never feel safe. “All have a home somewhere–except the Jew. All can therefore require or deny hospitality–except the Jew. And as he cannot requite it, he cannot demand it. He is neither friend not foe, but an alien, the stranger par excellence. At best, he is granted privileges; and these can be taken from him.”(32) Another angle, mentioned by Heller, is that in the Diaspora, Jews exist in an abnormal situation, because “[h]aving lost contact with the soil, the nation becomes more and more alienated from the life of nature” (69). Both the normalization of economic life and political security demand the solution of endowing the Jews with their own territory in the form of a sovereign state, not necessarily in Palestine. The shortcoming of territorialism is that it overlooks the historical connection with the land of Judea and Israel, “the living power of the past and the subconscious working of historical memories, and it takes into consideration nothing but immediate external conditions and observable present needs” (59). It also neglects the religious doctrine and the weight it places on the idea of messianic destiny. “To achieve its mission the Jewish people must be restored to the national independence in Palestine; nothing else can deliver them economically, socially and spiritually” (64).

All these political ideas sanction nationalism and emancipation on the basis of the principle of self-determination as an unexamined universal attitude valid both/either for a person and/or national entity. Zionism, however, explicitly incorporates self-determination into its organic model of society. This paradigm is compatible with the Heideggerian sense of destiny, which is collective from the outset. For Heidegger, the question of destiny is closely bound up with the problematic of historicity and relevant to a historical generation. Historicity enters into destiny by way of anticipatory resoluteness, which discloses to Dasein its ownmost, authentic possibilities. But which possibilities are the most authentic? They are the possibilities that have been disclosed throughout history as true, tried out and selectively adapted as received tradition. “The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself discloses the actual factical possibilities of authentic existing in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness takes over as thrown” (351). Thus, insofar as “everything ‘good’ is a matter of heritage and if the character of ‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible, then handing down a heritage is always constituted in resoluteness” (351). Heidegger’s understanding of a collective decision is based on his idea of unproblematic intersubjectivity: “essential willing already in itself brings about mutual understanding, and this through the mystery of the actual willing of the individual.”(33) In other words, authenticity presupposes like-mindedness and consensus: any authentic decision rendered by an individual is assuredly in agreement with other authentic decisions. What guarantees this concord is Dasein’s constitution of being-with-one-another. Which means that Dasein’s authentic “occurrence is an occurrence-with and is determined as destiny” (352). With the term “destiny,” he writes, “we designate the occurrence of the community, of a people. Destiny is not composed of individual fates, nor can being with one another be conceived of as the mutual occurrence of several subjects. These fates are already guided beforehand in being-with-one-another in the same world and in the resoluteness for definite possibilities. . . . The fateful destiny of Dasein in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Dasein” (352).

Elsewhere (Contributions to Philosophy), Heidegger develops the notion of enownment (Ereignis), which is a more fleshed out version of anticipatory resoluteness (a moment of vision–Augenblick–in which we perceive and claim our destiny). Etymologically, Ereignis is related to Augenblick, while semantically it strengthens the relation between a momentous, resolute decision and an act of possession–a decision as a coming into the possession of one’s rightful inheritance. Enownment, in reference to an individual, signifies the becoming of one’s proper self or the resolute appropriation of what belongs to one. But as an act of appropriation by a group, it constitutes a taking possession of its destiny. What I am proposing is that destiny has a performative meaning as an act that establishes a community and grounds its eschatological narrative of appropriation. The possessive aspect of enownment is suggestively and significantly reminiscent of its anthropological underpinnings in the originary act, which creates the communal scene of representation and institutes the sacred (to be shared symbolically between the members of the community). The narrative character of destiny is thus to be understood as a prolongation of the deferred gesture of appropriation that aims to close the gap between the symbolic and the real (such as the name and the land).

Heidegger stresses the active component of enownment (it is also described by him as a leap) as the act of appropriating one’s future, which corroborates the territorial meaning of destiny as a field of endeavor. Destiny clears a space, creates elbow room in which one can perform appointed duties. In other words, a kinesthetic link is forged between the tasks one has to do and the proper territory that is cleared for them. Once Deronda begins to think of himself as “probably a Jew,” he is faced with an “inheritance of tasks” (515) that his birth would burden him with. As he informs Gwendolen at the end of the novel about his plans to travel to the East to research the location for the Jewish homeland, he explains them as “a task which presents itself to me as a duty” (803). Another task that he appropriates as incumbent on him–that of finding Mirah’s surviving relatives–also has territorial connotations in the form of Daniel’s wandering through the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt and London. Even Mirah’s destiny as a singer is assigned a specific territory. Klesmer tells her: “No high roofs. We are no skylarks . . . I would not further your singing in any larger space than a private drawing-room. But you will do there” (485). At the same time, it is suggested that territory will be denied to those who defy destiny. This is why Leonora describes her strict Jewish upbringing with confining gender roles as suffocating: “I knew what was in the chest–things that had been dinned in my ears since I had had any understanding–things that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around my life–my life that was growing like a tree” (637). A very similar metaphor is used to describe the redemptive ending for Gwendolen, who finds her destiny in renunciation after her husband dies, disinheriting her. During her marriage to Grandcourt, despite the life of ease and luxury it affords her, she feels “like a galley-slave” (695). But after Grandcourt’s death, she resolves to live the life of debt in expiation of having wronged his illegitimate family, while Deronda promises her that despite her newly constrained circumstances, great vistas will open before her: “there will be newly-opening needs–continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant” (769).

The other relevant aspect of enownment is its connotation of belonging–coming into the inheritance of something that properly belongs to you. The notion of belonging together is the source of the interpersonal elements of Heidegger’s analysis of anticipatory resoluteness, without which there is no “group” destiny. They are constituted by the call of conscience, the summons, and the voice that together have the capacity to summon Dasein from the mode of inauthenticity back to the mode of authenticity. These elements together with the insights of mimetic theory give an adequate account of the construct of destiny. The call, the election, the covenant, the mission are mimetic in character. The absolute (both in the sense of unqualified and peremptory) position of God who chooses but, at the same time, makes a contract with humanity, combines the mimetic authority of the ontologically prior sacred center, occupied since before man was thrown on the scene of representation, with the foundational status of the supreme law-giver who forges a fiduciary link with man, on whom he bestows the gift of reason. As a destiny-giver, he is therefore both a commanding and inspirational figure who orders and leads, and the physical first cause through which man is anchored to (in Heidegger’s terminology) the primordial existential structure of care, which orients him teleologically toward his future (his for-the-sake-of-which). Therefore, human obligation to destiny in the form of a covenant has a dual nature–that of a duty imposed from above and a rationally discernable responsibility he undertakes willingly. Not incidentally, Kohn reports on a Midrash that recounts how “God offered the Covenant to all the nations, one after another, and all rejected it, until at last Israel declared itself ready to accept it. God did not choose Israel from the beginning and single it out from all the nations of the earth; Israel alone was willing to take upon itself the obligation of a covenant” (38).

According to Kohn, “[t]hree essential traits of nationalism originated with the ancient Jews: the idea of the chosen people, the consciousness of national history, and national Messianism…. It was only through the Covenant that the Jews were constituted a people…. God chose this people and acted through it in history: the people received the mission to live and to act in history according to God’s will” (37). Modern Zionism rests on similar construals, embedding the idea of the national destiny in interpellation (the call), thrownness, and for-the-sake-of, to use Heidegger’s language. This destiny is appropriated through a decision that affirms the collective will. Thus, the collective will is the performative agency of destiny. Kohn maintains that “Jews became a nation . . . by an act of volition and of spiritual decision” (37), while Heller writes that “Zionism expresses the genuine will of the Jewish people” (116). What is performed by the decision, shaped by the collective will of Zionism’s adherents, is the ritualistic reaffirmation of the coupling between the sign and the referent, the name and the territory. According to Gans, the function of the ritual, as a cultural phenomenon, is the reproduction of the memory of the original event. “The central moment of ritual is the communal performance of the sign”(34) aiming to make its referent present again. “The remembered significance of the object . . . makes its reintroduction–or, rather, its reproduction–on the scene an object of desire. The original event will thus not simply recur but be reproduced,” (35) renewing the ethical bond within the community.

What was formerly the biological regulation of social behavior within a group through alliance-formation, collaboration, dominance hierarchy, and other adaptational strategies becomes symbolically transformed and codified through ethics with the appearance of culture. But an important implication of this event is also that the formal structure of symbolic systems has the capacity to be extrapolated to higher levels of abstraction. Hence, the national idea is capable of extending the ethical model of intragroup sharing to intergroup sharing, by representing all the societies that constitute humanity as one community consisting of individual member nations, just as one society consists of individual citizens. This is why the functionalist conception of a nation as a metaphoric organism can, without a loss of integrity, be transferred to the world community of nations. Here, again, according to the organicist paradigm of cultural specificity, each nation has its unique function in the overall design and, consequently, no nation can be eliminated without the failure of the larger organism. Accordingly, Heller contends that in the “world-community of free and equal nations,” there must be a place for a “restored and liberated Jewish nation,” because “[i]n the polyphonic harmony of a united humanity every nation has its unique, individual part to play” (86). Such an extrapolation of the functionalist metaphor to the next level is an instance of cultural emergentism, because it injects an ethical imperative into what would otherwise be biologically stipulated antagonism between competing human groups. The mimetic relationship between individual participants on the scene of representation is exported to the intergroup configuration, and with it, the ethical imposition of self-restraint. This means that the natural tendency of competing groups to unlimited self-expansion and unrestrained growth with its attendant uncompromising conflict can be checked through the symbolic representation of the world as a shared resource. The Hebrew Bible, according to Girard, is the first culturally self-conscious text that recognizes the victimage mechanism and attempts to contain mimetic contagion with moral law. Its codification is traditionally located in the obligation imposed by the Ten Commandments. But insofar as the Ten Commandments refer to the internal Jewish moral code (with seven of them extrapolated to the Noahide code), there exists perhaps an even more crucial instance of moral self-limiting that regulates the relationship between groups–and that is the covenant God makes with Abraham: “I am the Lord that brought thee out of Ur and Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it. . . . Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” (Gen 15:7,18). Thus, the covenant prevents the Jewish people from unconditional expansion, restricting their territory to the boundaries set in his name and vouchsafed by his law.

In Daniel Deronda, the ideal of coexisting but unmingled nations is advocated by Joseph Kalonymos, a friend of Deronda’s late grandfather, whom Deronda meets in order to retrieve his grandfather’s legacy. Kalonymos tells him about Daniel Charisi’s conclusions after he “travelled to many countries, and spent much of his substance in seeing and knowing”–namely, that “the strength and wealth of mankind depended on the balance of separateness and communication, and he was bitterly against our people losing themselves among the Gentiles” (724). In a ritual re-enactment of the originary scene, Kalonymos exacts a pledge from Deronda by assuming the preeminent interpellating position that issues the call of invitation. Putting his hand on the other’s shoulder and, “looking sharply in his face,” he asks Deronda: “You will call yourself a Jew and profess the faith of your fathers?” (725). Deronda, who is, at this point, prepared for Joseph Kalonymos’s revelations about his heritage, affirms his destiny: “I think I can maintain my grandfather’s notion of separateness with communication. I hold that my first duty is to my own people, and if there is anything to be done toward restoring or perfecting their common life, I shall make that my vocation” (724).

All of the above indicates that the idea of collective destiny promoted by Mordecai and embraced by Deronda implies the events of invitation and inclusion in an elect fellowship. The invitation is issued from the mimetically central interpellating position occupied by God and cannot, therefore, be refused. But, at the same time, a decision to join is voluntary, made in a moment of anticipatory resoluteness that appropriates its destiny as its authentic ownmost possibility grounded in its communal heritage. As a response to an invitation, the decision is a submission, but it is a willingly undertaken submission, better described as consent that chooses to defer to the transcendent power in the spirit of reverence. Mordecai tells him: “I have had the experience which gives me a keen interest in the story of a spiritual destiny embraced willingly” (498), and his words have a strong effect. It is with newly-won respect for Mordecai’s spiritual authority that Deronda is “strangely wrought upon” by his new friend’s life story, and his initial suspicions about the other’s sanity “[give] way to a more submissive expectancy” (494).

In Deronda’s eyes, the structural position of God is arrogated to Mordecai, who, in an epiphanic vision against an icon-like golden background of the setting sun, recognizes Daniel as the prophesied man who will accept from him “the sacred inheritance of the Jew” (500). So strong is Mordecai’s conviction that Deronda is mimetically swayed by it, that he says to himself “I am in a state of complete superstition, just as if I were awaiting destiny that could interpret the oracle” (495). In Gwendolen’s case, on the other hand, it is Deronda who occupies the authoritative central position and becomes the voice of her conscience. Because Deronda is the first person who surprises her by his disapproval, his opinion gradually becomes more and more important to her. That is to say, because he does not choose her as a mimetic model, she chooses him as one: “he was unique to her among men, because he had impressed her by not being her admirer but her superior: in some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience” (415). So when Deronda tells her that she ought to become the best woman she can be, she accepts this injunction as a voice from the above, gradually picturing herself as part of “the larger destinies of mankind” (803). As for Mordecai, the origin of the central voice that serves as the basis of his conviction remains a mystery, because his consciousness is not as fully revealed to the reader as those of Deronda and Gwendolen. But because this is a novel of foreshadowing, Mordecai’s position is bolstered by our identifying him with the narrative device of deus ex machina–and thus he garners the authority of the authorial voice.

From the perspective of generative anthropology, the event of the origin of representation inaugurates transcendence. It does so by opening up a gap between what is given and what can be represented as a possible future. The prospect of many alternative futures creates the dilemma of choice, making the question of what to do a genuine conundrum for the symbolic species. I suggest that the idea of destiny presents a viable strategy and originary solution for resolving man’s existential “lostness” that connect him in a sacrificial way to his fellow group members in a bid for survival.

About Our Contributors

Ian Dennis is Associate Professor in English at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of two anthropologically inflected books of literary criticism: Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Macmillan 1997) and Lord Byron and the History of Desire (Delaware 2009). He was chief organizer of the 2009 Generative Anthropology Summer Conference in Ottawa, and is guest editor of the current issue of Anthropoetics. He is also a novelist, with four published titles.

Raoul Eshelman (Ph.D. University of Constance 1988, Habilitation Hamburg 1995) is a Slavist and Comparatist specializing in modern and postmodern literature. He is presently teaching at the Dept. of Slavic Literatures at the University of Munich. His book Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism appeared in 2008 as a publication of the Davies Group.

Chris Fleming is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. His research interests include theatre and performance, the philosophy of science, and anthropology. His book, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis was published in 2004 by Polity Press.

John O’Carroll is Lecturer in the School of Social Science and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst NSW, Australia. His research interests lie in the area of the philosophy of communication, postcolonial theory, and Western epistemologies of landscapes (especially in Australia and the South Pacific). He has also taught at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji Laucala campus).

Raphael Foshay teaches in the MA Program in Integrated Studies at Athabasca University.  He works on the relations between philosophy and literary theory and is currently writing on mimesis and dialectic. He also works in the area of comparative east/west philosophy, with a particular interest in Buddhism.

Robert J. Hudson is Assistant Professor of French at Brigham Young University, where he specializes in the French Renaissance, lyrical poetry, French film, and socio-anthropological approaches to literature. Along with Scott Sprenger (BYU) and Peter Goldman (Westminster College), he is busily organizing GASC 2010 for Salt Lake City/Provo.

Marina Ludwigs is an independent researcher who lives in Stockholm, Sweden. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine and has worked with, and presented papers on, both Girardian theory and Generative Anthropology. She is currently writing a book on the anthropological structures of epiphanies.

Sylvie Nelson is an MA student in English at the University of Victoria, where she recently studied some of Gans’s work in a seminar with Richard van Oort. She is interested in the ways in which postromantic and modernist literature theorize the aesthetic experience, and the implications of aesthetic experience for critical methodology, socio-political dynamics, and the question of agency.

Richard van Oort is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria, and author of The End of Literature: Essays in Anthropological Aesthetics. He is interested in Shakespeare and anthropology, and is working on a book entitled Shakespeare’s Big Men.

Matthew Schneider is chair and professor of English at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and Ph.D. in English from UCLA in 1991. A founding member of the first Generative Anthropology seminar with Eric Gans at UCLA in 1987, Schneider has continued his involvement with GA for more than twenty years, contributing six articles to Anthropoetics, guest-authoring two Chronicles of Love and Resentment, and publishing an essay in Adam Katz’s The Originary Hypothesis. He has published two books, the latest of which, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, came out from Palgrave Macmillan in June 2008. His articles on nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory, and Biblical exegesis have appeared in Dalhousie Review, European Romantic Review, Poetics Today, Legal Studies Forum, and Symbiosis.

In what follows I briefly outline a possible Gansian reading of Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” which many critics have identified as Stevens’ most mature formulation of his theory of poetry. Stevens is usually considered a modernist poet strongly influenced by romantic ideals, but his work can be more specifically classified in Gans’s schema as postromantic. Although much of his work displays a strikingly modernist “formal opacity” (189), Stevens’ work deviates from modernism proper on the level of content: he does not perform modernism’s replacement of “esthetic askesis” with “esthetic hedonism,” which followed from the belief that “all desiring experience is equally a reflection of the originary and therefore equally suitable for esthetic representation” (188). Instead, Stevens remains true to the postromantic dictum of seeking to “eliminate all vestiges of the empirical”—that is, all indications of the worldly desire that has its object in the material world—by exploring “transcendental modes of experience” (184), a project to which the formal difficulty of his work is integral.

Stevens is strongly influenced by Mallarmé, whom Gans identifies as “the most intellectually rigorous” exemplar of the postromantic aesthetic (185). Mallarme’s later work “was increasingly concentrated on the constitution of the (empty) scene of representation” (185): a purging of worldly desire through images of absence such as an empty room or the open sea. The Stevensian parallel to this is seen most clearly in “The Snow Man,” in which the ideal reader and creator of poetry is identified by the poem’s end as “The listener, who listens in the snow,/ And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (Stevens 54). Stevens’ particular mode of transcendental exploration begins to take a more unique shape in “Notes,” in which he configures the originary scene as “the first idea,” a non-empirical imaginative event. This scene-as-idea, which can also be thought of as the idea of the scene, is perhaps a more distanced intuition of the event than the immediate phenomenology of the empty scene achieved by Mallarmé. However, this heightened self-reflexivity and emphasis on the theoretical renders “Notes” an especially productive exemplar of the special place of the postromantic aesthetic in my anthropoetic literary-critical methodology, and of the type of dialogic interaction that literary experience and theorization should achieve in this methodology.

My reading will follow the three steps for Gansian criticism outlined above to show how the poem both performs (through its formal characteristics) and thematizes (through its content) the paradoxical nature of transcendence, and finally how it reveals the anthropological import of this subject through metapoetic theorization. The fact that the poem itself performs the temporal progression of the three stages of criticism, and initiates their enactment through the experience it incites in the reader, reinforces the primacy of the emic belief in literature which I have brought out as primary in the Gansian critical schema.

On a first reading, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” performs the paradoxical nature of transcendence by inducting the reader into a phenomenology of difficulty elicited by irrational, dreamlike images such as “At night an Arabian in my room,/ Inscribes a primitive astronomy/ Across the unscrawled fores the future casts/ And throws his stars around the floor” (Stevens 209). Stevens explores the notion of empiricism through his use of images, which, as visual representations of the physical, are directly linked with the empirical world perceived by the senses. Since empiricism is associated with rationality and the real, the irrational, surreal nature of the images achieves transcendence of the empirical through the empirical itself. The reader is left on the surface of language, with only an experience of difficulty as a “meaning” for Stevens’s imagery.

The sense of irrationality is reinforced by the intermingling of abstract ideas (“future,” “primitive,” “astronomy”) with the concrete images, which also points to a second way in which Stevens transcends the empirical through the empirical itself: the images do not root the reader in the visual world but rather propel us out of it into the realm of abstraction. While an image is a surface-level phenomenon and is thus primary in the temporal experience of the reader, in a more general sense the image and the interpretation of the image (that is, idea) are inseparable in that image automatically leads to idea: the incomprehensibility of the poem’s images pushes the reader’s attention towards its more comprehensible abstract phrases, such as “you must become an ignorant man again” (207). The latency of the idea in the image is analogous to the relationship between form and content which I have theorized earlier; in fact, this is the very reason that I have been discussing images in the emic (formal) stage of my reading. This latency manifests performatively in the reader’s automatic movement from images to abstract phrases in the experience of the poem as a whole, and also thematically in individual passages: “How clean the sun when seen in its idea,/ Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven/ That has expelled us and our images” (207). The image is temporally primary in this schema, since only after the sun’s image is acknowledged and expelled can we access the idea of the sun. The paradox here is that although they are opposites, idea depends upon image; we transcend the empiricism of images through images themselves. Passages such as the above which thematize the movement from image to idea move the reader to the etic position through the initial emic encounter with irrational images.

Only after we have experienced the process of transcendence that the poem performs can we take the etic position, which allows us to pinpoint the poem’s theorization of transcendence as a process. From the etic perspective, we can see that the poem thematizes the paradoxical nature of transcendence by making the relationship between opposites explicit: “Two things of opposite natures seem to depend/ On one another, as a man depends/ On a woman, day on night, the imagined/ On the real. This is the origin of change/ Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace/ And forth the particulars of rapture come” (218). Even though this passage does not deal with transcendence explicitly, it theorizes a general process of which transcendence is the epitomic example, as the emic experience of the poem has shown us: the generation of opposite from opposite and the paradoxical dependence of these opposites upon one another.

The intellectual theorization of “rapture,” a state of being carried away by overwhelming emotion, is analogous to and thus thematizes the paradoxical conscious suspension of consciousness which characterizes the “willing suspension of disbelief.” This thematization of emic experience moves the reader toward an apprehension of the metacritical stance which mediates between emic and etic, since being “carried away” is a transcendence of subjectivity which is necessary for the relationship between the subjectively experienced emic and etic perspectives to be thematized in the poem and conceptualized in the reader’s interpretive process.

Later in the poem, this thematization of the relationship between emic and etic is fully realized in a passage which brings the reader through emic experience, etic distance, and a final metapoetic synthesis of these two perspectives. Beginning with an irrational image, “the golden fingers picking the dark-blue air” (225), the speaker then thematizes the difficulty of the imagery as a property of interpreting the poem: “But the difficultest rigor is forthwith/ On the image of what we see,/ To catch from that/ Irrational moment its unreasoning” (225). Finally, the speaker gives examples of these irrational images—”As when the sun comes rising, when the sea/ Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall/ Of heaven” (225)—in order to thematize the relationship between direct reading experience and distanced analysis of content: “These are not things transformed. Yet we are shaken by them as if they were./ We reason about them with a later reason” (225). “Later reason” refers to the lateness of the critic who adopts an analytical perspective after an initial aesthetic encounter, the perspective which transforms “things” (images) into ideas. But the fact that these images emotionally move the reader on a first reading as if they were already transformed reinforces the idea that content is already implicit in form and ideas are already implicit in images, with the additional insight that the affect generated by a first reading cannot be completely divorced from any cognitive implications. Catching “from that irrational moment its unreasoning” can be seen as a comment on the paradoxical nature of criticism: the critic must first experience the irrational aesthetic moment and at a later time—which is anticipated proleptically in emic experience—express this irrational experience within the systematic and rational framework of an academic essay.

This metapoetic progression pushes the reader’s analysis toward the metacritical level of generative anthropology. The persistent transformation of images into ideas, even within the emic encounter, gives idea priority over image in the world of the poem: Stevens not only foregrounds the process of transcending the immanent, but positions the transcendent realm as superior to the immanent. This overall privileging of the transcendent leads to the insight that what Stevens refers to as “the first idea” (209) is his particular configuration of the originary event. The reader, now aware of the significance of “the first idea,” is primed to recognize the anthropological implications of Stevens’s theory of poetry:

The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural. ( 209)

The phrase “unconscious will” and the fact that the first idea is shared in a communal moment of insight recall the transcendence of subjectivity implied in the thematization of “rapture.” Here, the transcendence of subjectivity is explicitly tied to the creation and interpretation of poetry: the poet, like the linguistic sign, mediates between the reader and the content of the literary work, and as such must transcend subjectivity in order to be a transparent medium through which the first idea can be communicated and understood. The critic must also transcend subjectivity in order to move between the emic (“ever-early candor”) and the etic (“late plural”).

Stevens insists that poetry itself can bring us back to the originary experience, which he conceptualizes as a belief in the “immaculate [i.e., transcendent] beginning” of humanity. The apparently contradictory idea that a poem, itself a mediation of experience, can provide access to unmediated experience of the origin is clarified by Stevens’ earlier question, “Is there a poem that never reaches words/ And one that chaffers the time away?” (223). A poem that never reaches words is not a literal, material poem but the idea of a poem. The generation of idea from image that is fundamental to “Notes” suggests that this ideal poem has been generated from and thus made possible by “Notes” itself, although the interrogative form used to speak of it indicates that it is a possibility rather than a reality. Paradoxically, the mediatory nature of language can be transcended through language itself if used in an aesthetic capacity which remains conscious of its function as language.

This paradox clarifies the apparent contradiction of the postromantic artist’s elevation of literature and general suspicion of mediation. The postromantic ethical order “foregrounded the mediating function of exchange that had in fact existed since the origin,” causing “the market [to be] blamed for the ‘unnatural’ evil of mediation” (Originary Thinking 183); hence, the postromantic artist desires the unmediated experience afforded by poetry. A further anthropological insight afforded by this passage is the association of the transcendence of mediation with “chaffer[ing] the time away”: this is a desire to overcome our temporal alienation in an experiential return to the immediacy of the origin, a return that is a fundamentally temporal-linguistic enterprise, since originary lateness was inaugurated with the first linguistic sign.

Continuing with the anthropological level of interpretation, it is possible to ascertain an intense disdain for the appetitive satisfaction that concludes the originary event and is thereafter associated with the marketplace. Appetitive satisfaction is clearly denoted by phrases such as “the easy passion, the ever-ready love” and “accessible bliss” (221), but significantly, these phrases are embedded in such a beautiful and initially appealing passage that the disparaging tone in which they are uttered would be easy to miss if it were not for the emic experience of difficulty in reading the poem:

We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is true. Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe
. . .

The lover sighs as for accessible bliss,
Which he can take within him on his breath,
Possess in his heart, conceal and nothing known. (221)

Because accessibility is directly opposed to the difficulty that the reader now believes in through an originary encounter with the poem, the speaker’s negative tone toward accessibility in all of its manifestations can be grasped. Although the emic experience of difficulty forms the basis of this interpretation, the etic “hermeneutic of suspicion” also has a crucial role to play in allowing the reader to discern a negative tone in “accessible” and “ever-ready.” In order to ascertain the speaker’s ethical promotion of a spiritual/intellectual rather than appetitive basis to human relationships, the reader must resist the passage’s tempting impression of beauty and its indications that we are to identify with the speaker (“we” and “us”).

The opposition of difficulty to the marketplace is reinforced by Stevens’ association of difficulty with the pre-linguistic ground: “The sun/ Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be/ In the difficulty of what it is to be” (208). The use of “must bear” rather than “bears” shows that this desire is not fulfilled: in the world of the poem, the transcendence of mediation is infinitely deferred. But this deferral which is in fact a fundamental characteristic of the poem, signaled from the outset by the very title “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” can be more accurately identified as prolepsis: the poem’s title, along with its other intimations of unmediated experience, both perform and signal the absence/deferred presence of the paradoxical transcendence of mediation which they thematize.

The “supreme fiction,” which in anthropological terms is the narrative of human origin, is only gestured towards, and yet at the same time the poem itself is a supreme fiction, a means of access to “the first idea” through poetic language. The desire to access “a myth before myth began” (210), that is, the mythic origin that preceded the advent of “myth” as a discreet category, is fulfilled in the evolution of generative anthropology from the postmodern aesthetic. The inseparability of postmodern art from raw experience that makes this evolution possible gestures toward the inseparability that literature and criticism once shared in the originary scene, which can be recovered only in that forever-deferred proleptic space of the postmodern, literally “after now.”

In fact, Gans’s original statement about human self-reflexivity imbues his entire project with prolepticity. He states that “humans would not exist as self-understanding beings if such understanding were not necessary to their existence” (Originary Thinking 1), but if we already exist as self-understanding, why do we need studies such as Originary Thinking which are written in order to facilitate self-understanding? Our self-understanding, like the originary aesthetic experience, must have a proleptic temporality. The connection between the temporality of criticism and that of culture that is emerging here is clarified by noting that metacriticism operates from the principle of self-reflexivity, which Gans identifies as essential to the survival of the human community, and that prolepsis is implied in the futural orientation of every definition of the prefix “meta”: “occurring later than or in succession to,” “after,” “change, transformation,” and “more comprehensive: transcending” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).

The final and fundamental prolepsis of the originary schema is found in Gans’s definition of the human: “the paradoxical generation of the transcendent from the immanent, the vertical from the horizontal” (Signs of Paradox 4). Although it could be argued that he is speaking here of a process that happens once and for all during the originary event, the present continuous verb “generation” suggests a constant becoming rather than a static achievement. The association of the transcendent with the vertical in this definition of the human, along with the verticality of language, which indicates its metaphoric character, points to a close link between metacriticism and transcendence. “Horizontal” consciousness, conceived in terms of literary criticism, would entail primarily basing arguments on the content ascertained by other critics rather than on the vertical relationship between the form and personally perceived content of literature. Earlier in the paper I touched on the fact that, given the huge and swiftly-growing corpus of literary criticism, the critical experience often relies more on the horizontal critic-critic relationship than the vertical critic-work relationship. This seems to be unavoidable, although it is quite problematic from a Gansian perspective because it bypasses the originary aesthetic experience and is alarmingly reminiscent of the mimetic rivalry that made the vertical sign-object relationship necessary in the first place.

Just as language can be paradoxically transcended through language itself, the problem of criticism can be transcended through the doubling or surpassing of criticism which is achieved in metacriticism. Metacriticism returns the critical enterprise to the vertical dimension by treating criticism itself—both the personal interpretive process and the critical work of others—as an aesthetic object worthy of oscillatory contemplation. This paradoxical doubling and surpassing is the “end” of criticism, which, like Gans’s “end of culture,” has a double meaning as both “terminus” and “purpose.” Although criticism’s prolepticity seems to foreclose any pronouncement of “the end of criticism,” criticism’s end is to be interminable. Its continual process of becoming, like becoming-human, necessitates a continual act of transcendence, and in transcending criticism, metacriticism brings us back to the originary aesthetic experience that is the guarantee of criticism’s primacy as a human institution.

On the afternoon of February 19, 1964, five of the most famous men who have ever lived met for the first and only time. On that day, the Beatles—in the second week of their first visit to the United States—dropped by the Miami training gym of heavyweight boxing contender Cassius Clay, who was in the final stages of preparations for his title challenge of champion Sonny Liston later that month. The Beatles were at the outset of their conquest of the world’s popular culture, which would be complete by the end of the decade. And Clay was about to stun the sports world in two ways: first by defeating Liston—an 8-1 favorite—in a seventh-round technical knock out; and then, only days after that, by announcing that he had joined the Nation of Islam, rejected his given name of Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., and would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali.

One knows one has reached the zenith of celebrity in the modern world when only one name is sufficient to identify you: Napoleon, Caesar, Garbo; John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Ali. By the time of his retirement from boxing in the early 1980s, it was virtually forgotten that Muhammad Ali had come into the world as Cassius Clay. The title of Michael Mann’s 2001 film biography of the fighter is Ali,tout court; and this three-letter adopted surname now evokes not only the boxer who could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” but the turbulent mix of fame, race relations, and bloodsport in mid twentieth-century America. The story of how Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali also illustrates the almost magical significance that proper names possess and retain in our era, despite the emergence of a variety of linguistically-based philosophies that view names as arbitrary signifiers, incapable of capturing or communicating the spirit or essence of the people to whom they are attached. Names are viewed, in other words, in mutually contradictory ways: a name can either carry, as it did for Ali, the freight of one’s unique identity, or it can be seen as contingent, accidental, fundamentally meaningless. Generative anthropology can help to illuminate both why this dichotomy exists, as well as why proper names—despite widespread, postmodern, skepticism about the ontological status of the sign—retain a connection with essential identity strong enough to make people fight to be called what they want to be called. In applying the heuristics and insights of generative anthropology to this issue, I hope to open up a potential subfield of GA (one that happily preserves the familiar abbreviation): generative anthroponomastics, or the study of proper names from an originary point of view.

Onomastics is the study of names; anthroponomastics the study of human names. Conventional anthroponomastics approaches its subject ethnographically, cataloguing the ways in which naming systems originate and evolve as indices of both individuality and membership in a larger social group, like a tribe or family. Generative anthroponomastics, by contrast, takes a more philosophically analytic approach, examining the originary significance of names, and therefore touching necessarily on the frequent conflation of one’s name with one’s unique or spiritual identity. The meeting of the Beatles and Clay/Ali presents a vivid contrast between two modes of celebrity naming. The Beatles came to be known as John, Paul, George, and Ringo through the most basic process of contemporary fame, in which snowballing celebrity ends up producing something like an immediate, interpersonal familiarity with the famous figure. This familiarity makes one name—either a first name or a surname—sufficient to ensure precise identification. Celebrities like these keep their own names, but come to be christened with shortened monikers in the public sphere through the mimetic force of sheer repetition. Celebrity naming can also, of course, be highly deliberate and strategic: this is the logic of the stage name, a calculated attempt to achieve or cement fame by substituting a more striking or euphonious name for one’s given name: thus Archibald Leach became Cary Grant, and Frances Ethel Gumm was rechristened Judy Garland. Ali’s name change, by contrast, belongs to neither of these categories: as Cassius Clay, he was already famous, and changing his name incorporated a religious dimension absent from the show biz motivations of entertainers like the Beatles, Grant, and Garland. Ali’s case, therefore, better illustrates the problematics of naming, and the originary reasons why names—even in the age of manufactured celebrity—hold on to their originary identification with the bearer’s individual essence.

For a variety of reasons, Cassius Clay’s desire to rename himself initially met with widespread public resistance. His name was manifestly important to him—he literally fought to be called Muhammad Ali; so, both to him and to his detractors, his name was not merely an arbitrary label. Ali can be said to have rejected, therefore, what I will call the nominalist conception of proper names, as famously expressed by Shakespeare’s Juliet in her balcony soliloquy:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
* * * * * * *
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet. . .
(Romeo and Juliet, II, ii, 36, 40-46)

The benefit of the nominalist conception lies in its offer of maximal freedom of self-determination. If a name is just a convenient, outward badge, not essentially connected to one’s true self, then that self is free to shift its identity virtually at will. The opposite view—which I will call anthroponomastic realism—is that names are deeply significant, as indicated by the common Judeo-Christian practice of changing one’s name in the immediate aftermath of a spiritual conversion. Thus Abram and Sarai become Abraham and Sarah after sealing the covenant with God (Genesis 17:3-15); Jacob becomes Israel after wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:28); Saul becomes Paul after encountering Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). The harder Cassius Clay fought to be called Muhammad Ali, the more public resistance galvanized against his wishes; Clay’s struggle to get the world to call him by his adopted name thus illustrates the almost necessary connection between religion and anthroponomastic realism. But why should it be so? Why does the anthroponomastic realist require that a change of heart be manifested in a change of name? Why in religious life are names so significant?

GA is particularly well-suited to answer these questions, because GA ties an individual name’s significance to the source of all significance—the name-of-God that emerges as the first signifier in the originary scene. Since proper names derive from the first word, they retain much of that first word’s power. The story of how Cassius Clay became simply Ali illustrates with particular clarity the contrast between the realist and nominalist conceptions of names, and opens up a deeper understanding of why personal names are still so routinely believed to reflect one’s true identity. That story begins in 1959, when 17-year-old Cassius traveled from his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to Chicago for a Golden Gloves boxing tournament. In Chicago he met Black Muslims, and began to explore the doctrine of the Nation of Islam; his aunt remembers him returning from Chicago with a record album of Elijah Muhammad’s sermons. Over the next five years, Clay’s involvement with the Nation of Islam deepened, but the young fighter stopped short of openly declaring his allegiance to the sect out of fear that association with what was regarded as a hate group would harm his budding career. Public suspicion that Clay was a Black Muslim steadily grew, however, particularly in the run-up to the first fight with Liston, when Malcolm X turned up at Clay’s Miami training camp. In the ring immediately after defeating Liston, the new champion hinted at his true religious convictions by shouting, “I talk to God every day—the real God!” A few days after the fight, Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam, and on March 6, Elijah Muhammad went on the radio to say that because the name Cassius Clay lacked a “divine meaning,” the new champion would be given an Islamic name. “’Muhammad Ali’ is what I will give to him, as long as he believes in Allah and follows me” (Remnick 213).

It was unusual for new Black Muslims to receive a full-blown Islamic name; most were simply given the letter X as a place-holder (like Malcolm X) until, in keeping with NOI doctrine, the member’s original name was restored. But Clay’s enthusiastic adoption of his new name—Muhammad, he giddily told a reporter on March 13, meant “he was worthy to be praised” and Ali meant “most high”—was met with suspicion and derision by much of his immediate family and the sporting press. “The fight racket, since its rotten beginnings, has been the red-light district of sports. But this is the first time it has been turned into an instrument of hate,” wrote veteran New York Post sports columnist Jimmy Cannon (Remnick 209). Cassius Clay, Sr. told reporters that his son had been “conned” by the Nation of Islam, and that to adopt a new name at the height of his fame was both insulting and financially unwise. “I’m not changing no name,” the elder Clay said. “If he wants to do it, fine. But not me. In fact, I’m gonna make good use of the name Cassius Clay. I’m gonna make money out of my own name. I’ll capitalize on it” (Remnick 209).

Floyd Patterson, whom Ali met in a title defense on November 22, 1965, pointedly refused to use his opponent’s new name, and called the Black Muslims “a menace.” Infuriated, Ali drew out a fight he could have easily won at any time to 12 rounds in order—many asserted—to prolong Patterson’s punishment. The controversy over the new name reached its zenith, however, before a February 1967 title defense against Ernie Terrell. In a pre-fight interview between the two fighters and Howard Cosell, Terrell referred to his opponent as “Cassius Clay,” prompting Ali to interrupt, “Why do you want to say Cassius Clay when Howard Cosell and everybody else is calling me Muhammad Ali—why do you go to be the one of all people who’s colored to keep saying Cassius Clay? . . . Why don’t you call me my name, man?” “Well, what’s your name?” Terrell asked. “You told me your name was Cassius Clay a few years ago.” “I never told you my name was Cassius Clay,” shouted Ali. “My name is Muhammad Ali, and you will announce it right there in the center of the ring after the fight, if you don’t do it now. . . . You actin’ just like an old Uncle Tom! Another Floyd Patterson! I’m gonna punish you!” As Terrell advanced menacingly, Ali repeated the taunt two more times. In the fight, Ali—who was shorter, but, as usual, much faster than his opponent—made good on his promise to punish Terrell, easily scoring with lightning-fast left jabs, and punctuating his blows with repeated shouts of “What’s my name, Uncle Tom?” before winning a unanimous 15-round decision.

What’s my name, Uncle Tom? This rhetorical question, underscored by punches to Terrell’s jaw, presents the anthroponomastic realist’s answer to the nominalist’s naïve faith that names are nothing more than arbitrary labels. From its beginnings, the Nation of Islam had made the deep significance of names a central doctrine. New members were stripped of their “slave” surnames, as Mattias Gardell has written, in order to ritually repudiate the “remnant of slavery” American Blacks carry in those names, and to symbolize the new Nation of Islam member’s “mental emancipation” (54) from the legacies of racism and oppression. Indeed, Ali identifies the Nation of Islam’s teaching on names as the starting point of his own spiritual conversion. As he tells it,

The first time I felt truly spiritual in my life was when I walked into the Muslim temple in Miami. A man named Brother John was speaking, and the first words I heard him say were, “Why are we called Negroes? It’s the white man’s way of taking away our identity. . . We don’t even have our names.” And I said to myself, “What’s he talking about; I got my name.” But I kept listening, and he explained, “If Mr. Chang is coming, you know he’s a Chinaman. If Mr. Goldberg is coming, you know he’s a Jew. Mr. O’Reilly is an Irishman. Rolling Thunder and Silver Moon are Indians. But if someone says here comes Mr. Jones or Mr. Washington, you don’t know what’s coming. We were named after our white slavemasters.” . . . And I said to myself, “Cassius Marcellus Clay. He was a Kentucky white man, who owned my great-great-granddaddy and named my great-granddaddy after him. And then my granddaddy got named, and then my daddy, and then me.” (Hauser 89-90)

Ali is mostly right here—his forebears probably got their name from a slaveowning member of the distinguished Kentucky family that produced celebrated statesman Henry Clay—but his interpretation of the significance of his own name doesn’t capture its intended meaning. Early in his professional career Clay had liked what David Remnick has called the grand “history and euphony” of his given name; in Rome for the 1960 Olympics, he had invited reporters to consider how his name “makes you think of the Colosseum and those Roman gladiators. Cassius Marcellus Clay. Say it to yourself. It’s a beautiful name” (Remnick 213). Ali’s paternal grandfather, Herman Clay, had given this noble name to his son—Ali’s father—in order to honor the memory of Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810-1903), a wealthy Louisville aristocrat who also happened to be enough of an abolitionist that he was seriously considered as Abraham Lincoln’s running mate in 1860. Ali’s father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr., in turn, passed this name onto his son, presumably in the same spirit in which it had been bestowed on him: as an assertion of racial pride and as a repudiation of the family’s slave roots. The name that Ali rejected was therefore already a post-slavery name, meant to grant its bearer the kind of genuine identity that the Nation of Islam promised by substituting the letter X for the “slave name,’ or, in the case of Ali, giving the follower an entirely new name. But underlying the act of both naming and renaming Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr. was an identical ontological presumption: the anthroponomastic realist’s conviction that proper names arise from and reflect essential being.

But where does this presumption come from? Answering this question requires us to turn to generative anthropology’s account of the origin of the capacity for signification itself, and speculate a little on the originary meaning of proper names. GA posits that the primary linguistic form was the ostensive, the repetition of “an instinctual gesture toward an object of potential appropriation” (The Origin of Language 75). The first ostensives were “intentional acts of signification which call attention to the presence, in principle verifiable, of their referent” (76). The repetition of the sign in the absence of its referent produces the imperative, the next stage in linguistic evolution. A proper name, Gans observed in Science and Faith, can be either ostensive or imperative, as its vocative use demonstrates: we can say “John, it’s you” (ostensive) or “John, come here” (imperative). Whether used as an ostensive or imperative, though, the first linguistic sign was a name: the name-of-God which the inaccessible center acquires as a result of the originary event. Proper names echo the original act of naming, and therefore retain a share of the sacred power attributed to the scenic center. Seen in this light, both Ali’s given and assumed names are ostensive/imperatives, differing only in the referent of the gestural sign. Cassius Marcellus Clay invokes the intrepid, but white abolitionist and proud Kentucky native son; Muhammad Ali invokes the founder of Islam, who—according to Nation of Islam doctrine—was the (black) prophet of the one true (black) God. This explains why Ali felt he needed to pummel and taunt Ernie Terrell: in refusing to address him by his “divine” name, Terrell was preventing him from partaking in the full share of divine enjoyment to which Ali felt his Islamic name entitled him. To the anthroponomastic realist, names feel closer to one’s real being because their ostensive/imperative immediacy is foregrounded by the dominant role religious ritual and thinking play in that person’s life. In other words, the realist grants proper names greater significance because his life is lived, as it were, closer to the origin, when signification carried greater life-or-death importance than in less mimetically fraught—and potentially violent—iterations of the originary scene.

This accounts for the realist’s conviction that his name reflects his true identity. What of the nominalist’s position? How can GA account for those who, like Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee, ask not “What’s my name?” but “What’s in a name?” In fact, this is exactly what Dundee did say when asked for reaction to his fighter’s name change. “To me he’s still the same individual, same guy,” said Dundee. “Actually, I didn’t know what Muslim was, really, because I thought it was a piece of cloth” (Remnick 209). Dundee’s easygoing nominalist philosophy is the result of the final stage of linguistic evolution: the development of the declarative sentence. The ostensive and imperative grant the proto-human community a rudimentary means of representation. But the power of critical self-reflection and the sort of self-conscious ethical deliberation required to question the ontological status of signs and their referents is enabled by, and comes after, the development of the declarative sentence. This linguistic capacity encounters and alters the originary name-of-God in the Mosaic revelation, an event which Gans examines in depth in Science and Faith. Before Moses encounters the burning bush on Mt. Horeb, God was known by name. “Naming God,” Gans writes, “is the sense of the originary signifying act directed towards the central object. This gesture is ostensive; it designates its referent by showing it. To name God outside the communal scene is to give the name an imperative sense by summoning him to appear in order to reconstitute this scene.” But when the burning bush offers a declarative sentence, not just a name, in answer to Moses’ question about whose name he is to invoke in order to free the enslaved Israelites, a new way of conceiving of God, not as the Other present in the communal scene (like a boxing ring), but as an affirmation “of the imaginary scene as a prerequisite not only of linguistic communication, but above all of human relations” comes into being. The God who gives not a single word but the sentence “I am who I am” when asked for his name evacuates the originary scene of its primal specificity, reconstituting the scene as a locus for imaginative freedom rather than mere ritual repetition. In answer to Moses’ question of “What’s your name?” the burning bush answers, in effect, “What’s in a name?”, and by doing so (in Gans’s words)

guarantees man’s freedom to engage in thought beyond the ideological bounds of hierarchical society, a freedom that the prophets would later reaffirm against the very social order that the Exodus had made possible. God’s sentence teaches Moses that at the center of the communal scene, where the old hierarchical society still preserved the memory of an originary figure, there must exist only a free place. Far from being an interpretation of the name YHVH, the sentence ehyeh asher ehyeh reveals by its very syntactical construction the irrelevance of all divine names. This is the summit of the Mosaic revelation. (Science and Faith 63-64).

At the core of the anthroponomastic realist’s view, then, lies a conception of the scene of representation—and, by extension, human interaction—as oriented toward the ritualized, sacred center, with proper names deriving their power to manifest essential identity from their status as repetitions of the originary name-of-God. It should not surprise us that a boxer like Ali would be led to such a view, for boxing, like all sports, is a ritualized and mediated form of primal combat. The world of boxing therefore gravitates toward more primitive conceptions of human interaction, and reflects a time and state of mind closer to that of the emergent human. Perhaps this is why both boxers and other sports celebrities acquire alliterative nicknames—modernity’s versions of the ancient heroic epithets—so easily and naturally. Before he was Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay was the Louisville Lip; Joe Louis was the Brown Bomber; Jack Dempsey was the Manassa Mauler. (The sense of the scene as ritually defined and closed may also help explain why George Foreman named all of his five sons George!) By contrast, anthroponomastic nominalists see the scene of representation as defined by the free play of imagination, and so feel less bound to see names as determinative of being. Anthroponomastic realists and nominalists stand at the opposite ends of what Gans describes, in Chronicles of Love and Resentment 372, as the difference between religious and philosophic ways of seeing and being in the world. “For words to be understood as shared ideas rather than ritual gestures,” Gans writes, “language must be cut off from the ostensive activities of ritual.” This is precisely what anthroponomastic nominalism does when confronted with the ritual question of “What’s my name?” Answering that question with a question introduces a metaphysical element into what was once, presumably, a ritually bound performance, and for which, in the boxing ring, there is only one right answer, and the wrong answer earns you the sure and just reward of a clenched left fist to the head. GA shows us what’s both gained and lost between the two poles of anthroponomastic nominalism and realism. Believing that names do not reflect true being opens up selfhood, makes the personal transformation a matter of will and determination rather than a negotiation between what you think you are and what the community will allow you to be. The price of this freedom, though, is the loss of fame, as a moving target is notoriously difficult to hit. On the other hand, hewing, as Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali did, to a conception of names as ineluctably intertwined with essential being can secure you a lasting place in the roll of honor, especially if you are allowed, even encouraged, as he was, to visit upper cuts and right crosses on those who do not acknowledge your self-conception. As they do in so many other realms of human activity, the twin desires for liberty and security come inevitably into conflict in the gap between one’s name and one’s identity.

A hundred years ago, Émile Durkheim (1995 [1912]) argued that the origin of humanity begins with the distinction between sacred and profane. All human societies make use of this distinction, though the cultural forms used to enforce it vary widely across different human communities.

Why must the distinction be enforced? Why must human societies worry about what is sacred and what is profane? It is telling that most people—at least most modern, secular people—would say that the distinction is in fact quite unnecessary. Why indeed must the tribesman gather around his totem pole and beat his drum? Or lest the question appear too ethnocentric, why must the Catholic believe that the bread is the body of Christ? Referentially speaking, such beliefs are absurd. The totem is a piece of wood. The bread is not the body of Christ, it is bread.

We usually associate this kind of reaction with hardheaded Voltaire types—people like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, for example. Let’s call them the scientific fundamentalists. What is their point? Their point is the same as that made by the Enlightenment philosophes, who held that humanity wouldn’t be free until the last king was strangled in the entrails of the last priest. (I’ve seen this line attributed variously to Diderot, Voltaire, and Jean Meslier—no matter, it nicely captures the attitude of scientific fundamentalism.) Basically, the idea is that once liberated from the superstitions legitimating the tyranny of kings and priests, people would be free to be rational. Rational here means: free to follow the authority of individual experience and test that experience against nature. If the authority of your concepts doesn’t come from your identity, from your status in a hierarchy or Great Chain of Being, your proximity to the sacred totem pole, then it must come from somewhere else. Where? Why, from nature of course. This is the basic idea behind both rationalism and empiricism. Reason must learn to stand on its own two feet without any outside influence from “transcendental” sources.

But let’s return to our original question. Why must the distinction between sacred and profane be enforced? The Enlightenment philosophes believed that it didn’t have to be. They hoped to take the transcendental off its pedestal in order to release humanity from servitude to its obnoxious and irrational demands. But the curious thing is that humanity seems predisposed to servitude. The philosophes prepared the way for the revolution; but the revolution led not to liberty, fraternity, and equality, but to a servitude that seemed at times more violent and terrible than the coercion of divinely sanctioned kings. Nor has subsequent history shown the French case to have been an aberration. Quite the contrary.

The Czech-born and British-educated philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner has an interesting theory of why human beings are predisposed to submission before their gods—or, to put it less dramatically, of why humans are predisposed to constraint by the sacred. He points out that, genetically speaking, humanity is enormously plastic. Human infants will acquire the characteristics of their specific cultures quite effortlessly. Once they are fully incorporated into their culture, however, the capacity to acquire new or different linguistic and cultural habits becomes remarkably more difficult, sometimes impossible. In other words, human beings seem to be defined by a paradox. They are born with a remarkable genetic plasticity, but the particular cultures they acquire are remarkably constraining. As Gellner (1995: 48) puts it, “Man is born genetically free but is everywhere in cultural chains.” Why?

Gellner’s answer to this question is very Durkheimian. Without constraint, human society would be impossible. All types of social organization, whether human or animal, require a degree of homogenization, standardization, and discipline in order to function. From insects to wolves, animal societies have come up with various genetic solutions to the problem of social organization. This is pretty obvious among bees and ants. Individual behaviors or “functions” are genetically given. It is inconceivable for the worker bee to throw off her genetic chains and usurp the resident queen. Bees appear to have solved, rather admirably, the problem of maintaining peaceful coexistence within a single colony. On the other hand, the displacement of the alpha is a fairly routine occurrence among higher social animals, such as wolves and chimpanzees. Like humans, these animals demonstrate a far greater degree of genetic plasticity. But even here there are limits. Chimpanzee societies are a good deal more flexible than insect societies, but they do not come close to demonstrating the cultural diversity of human societies. I’m therefore skeptical of the claim, made by some primatologists, that chimpanzees have culture in the same sense that humans do. But this point does not affect the main argument made here.

Gellner proposes that human culture is a response to human plasticity. Given the fact of genetic plasticity, human society is possible only if a new cultural system of constraint is superimposed on the preexisting biological system that has, so to speak, thrown off its genetic chains. Cultural chains substitute for genetic ones. Here I must emphasize something that remains only implicit in Gellner’s argument, namely, the idea that human social interaction is extremely volatile. The superimposition of human culture onto human nature is a consequence of the volatility of human nature. Gellner takes this volatility to be the plasticity of human cognition. But this is really to beg the question. The human brain is “plastic” because it has co-evolved　over millions of years with culture. But plasticity in itself does not explain the origin of culture. The answer to that question must rather be found in Gellner’s idea of the volatility implicit in all forms of social organization, whether human or animal.

Gellner rightly stresses that a certain degree of homogeneity and standardization is necessary for any society to exist. As we have seen, insect societies solve this problem by genetically hardwiring their members from the start. The division of labor is part of their genetic makeup. But this genetic determination is precisely what cannot be relied upon in human societies. Now the cause of this breakdown of the genetic system cannot be sought in the genetic system itself. It must come from outside it. The plasticity-culture tandem must arise from a specific problem within human, or protohuman, social organization. The most plausible theory I know for the source of this volatility comes from René Girard (1977, 1987) and Eric Gans (1985, 1990, 1993, 1997). The plasticity or “volatility” of the human brain is in the first place a response to the volatility of human social organization. More specifically, it is a response to the danger of mimetic conflict in the human, or protohuman, group. The breakdown of the genetic system of stabilization occurs when this system is no longer capable of controlling the mimetic lability of protohuman interaction. In contrast to humans, conflict among chimpanzees is controlled by ontogenetic ritualization. Behaviors such as snarling, hooting, and violently shaking branches are indices of real conflict. They are connected contiguously, in space and time, to a larger pattern of behavior that may in fact take place, namely, a real fight between rivals. These indexical signs are not learned from scratch, as in Skinner’s conditioning experiments. As Terrence Deacon (1997: 330-32) has shown, they are examples of genetically assimilated behaviors. In this sense, they are like our own repertoire of “gesture-calls” (Burling 2005: 24), such as laughing and crying. These gesture-calls are narrowly constrained by our biology, and it is therefore highly implausible to regard them as prototypes or precursors of human culture and language.

Gellner has no concept of mimetic conflict in his theory, but his anthropological intuitions are nonetheless very sharp. He sees clearly that culture originates as the non-genetic means of constraining an otherwise highly volatile protohuman community. And he also sees that this system of constraint is modeled minimally on the arbitrary signs of language. “Language,” Gellner (1995: 50-1) says, “is, initially and basically, a system of prohibitions. Am Anfang war das Verbot. In the beginning was the prohibition.” Language originates not as an attempt to refer to the empirical world—a mistake made by virtually all empiricist philosophers. The existing indexical sign system already does that very effectively. Instead language originates as a radically new way of constraining potentially volatile behavior. The subsequent use of language for exclusively referential purposes—in a word, for modern science—is a secondary and historically very late development. But given the secondary nature of this development, it is no longer possible to interpret scientific rationality as the basic condition of all humanity. This is the lesson the Enlightenment philosophes failed to grasp. Though we can certainly appreciate their optimistic belief that they had transcended the irrationality of religion, it is rather more difficult to excuse the same error made by their avatars and imitators two centuries later. This is one of Gellner’s most fundamental points. The originary function of language is not reference but constraint. The collective focus of attention on a central object is a form of prohibition. It constrains individual behavior in what would otherwise be an extremely labile and unstable situation. Communities can survive only because of this constraint, which is why in most societies ritual prohibition takes precedence over empirical truth.

The question then becomes: What enabled the shift to empirical truth upon which modern industrial societies depend for their economic and technological success? For Gellner, this very recent transition must be understood in the context of previous modes of cognition. First, representation had to be freed from the multi-stranded functions of traditional hunter-gatherer societies. The first step in this direction occurred with the neolithic revolution and the origin of agrarian societies. Here, specialization of functions and the division of labor became vitally important for social organization. In particular, the creation of a food surplus produced, for the first time, political centralization and large-scale coercion because the central storehouse had to be protected. Proximity to the center creates hierarchy. The other important function was the priesthood, the class of legitimizers. The priests were responsible for the codification of doctrine that endorsed the hierarchy. The final crucial ingredient was the origin of writing. When writing is used by the clerisy to produce a doctrine, you have what Gellner calls “generic Platonism.” The important thing about generic Platonism is the codifying of norms and behavior that had previously existed and been enforced at the ritual level. When ritual is codified in writing, ethical concepts are lifted from their communal face-to-face existence to take on a universal, trans-communal application. “The central intuition of generic Platonism,” Gellner (1989: 76) writes, “is the independent existence of concepts, ‘Ideas.’ These entities simultaneously constitute logical and moral models for reality. The transcendent receives formal recognition. Reality does not constitute a check on Ideas: on the contrary, they are the norms by which reality is to be judged and guided.”

Generic Platonism is still an ethical doctrine, but unlike the multi-stranded ritual practices of traditional hunter-gatherer societies it provides a coherent and ordered world picture. Ethical concepts are theorized as part of a unified ontology. The possibility of modern science occurs when ethics is finally divorced from this unified ontology, when, as Hume famously put it, is becomes distinct from ought. Transcendence retreats from the world and nature becomes the sole basis for an experimental and revisable ontology. Gellner is extremely self-conscious about the difficulty of explaining this transition from agrarian to industrial society, a shift which is without precedent in all of human history up to the point in question. What on earth motivated people not simply to overthrow their kings but to resist the temptation of becoming kings themselves? “How can it happen,” Gellner (1989: 158) asks, “not merely that the weak, the swordless, overcome the swordsmen, but that the whole organization and ethos of society changes, that Production replaces Predation as the central theme and value of life?” Given the existing logic of the agrarian order, it is extremely hard to see how it could produce this shift. The transition requires a wholesale reorganization of society, a reorganization that occurred only once in human history. Modern industrial societies have escaped from the cycle of often brutal coercion that characterizes agrarian societies. As Gellner (1995: 59) puts it, whereas agrarian societies are “inescapably Malthusian,” modern industrial societies are affluent and can afford “the luxury of a marked relaxation of coercion.”

Figure 1 provides a schematic representation of Gellner’s (1989: 77) theory of the cognitive evolution of humankind.

Our society—i.e., modern industrial society—is represented by C, in the upper right quadrant. We inhabit a world that is single-stranded and referential. In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies, represented by A, in the lower left quadrant, are multi-stranded and largely non-referential. What Gellner means by “multi-stranded” is that there is no attempt to unify the concepts that guide behavior into a unified logical picture of the external world. Reference is possible but opportunistic rather than logical. The “fingers” or “periscopes” that extend into the world are not logically connected to one another. Instead they are connected to the social, non-referential world that guides behavior. Referring to E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Gellner (1989: 40-42) cites the Nuer people’s “identification of bulls with cucumbers.” Anthropologists have either taken the view that this “indicates a special, pre-rational kind of mentality, radically discontinuous with our own,” or entertained the “benevolent or charitable thesis” that the “apparent empirical content is really a re-affirmation of the social order.” For Gellner, both views are flawed. The first, because it can’t explain the otherwise excellent abilities of the Nuer and other tribal peoples to negotiate their physical environment perfectly rationally; the second, because it attributes to the tribesmen the same “logical fastidiousness” as the modern philosopher-anthropologist. The first sees only a massive gulf between primitive and modern; the second, no gulf at all. For Gellner, there is a gulf, but the gulf is not explained by referring to modern standards of empirical rationality. Rather the difference must be explained sociologically, by referring to differences in social organization, in particular, to the difference between societies based on single-strand activities (C) and those based on multi-strand activities (A).

The purpose of a philosophical anthropology, at least as conceived by Gellner, is to explain the historical passage from A to C. Thus, you can’t get from A to C without passing through B. This is the period of unification and codification represented by “generic Platonism.” Here the referential content is still small (Gellner 1989: 77), but unlike in A there is an attempt to bring reference under the umbrella of an overarching and logically coherent social ontology. The shift to C represents the inversion of this logical system. The unification remains but receives its sanction not from the ethical order but from the external world. This is the world of modern science with its experimental and provisional ontologies based on reference to nature. The implication of this inversion for the social order is a notable weakening of the concepts governing social ontology (i.e., religion).

What are the implications of this model of human history for our understanding of “transcendence in a secular age”? In his discussion of the political and moral order of modern civil society, Gellner (1994: 94) claims that “a free order is based in the end not on true and firm conviction, but on doubt, compromise and doublethink.” What does this rather enigmatic statement mean? Is Gellner saying that our politicians must be janus-faced? In order to understand Gellner’s statement, we need to compare it to the options that preceded it, in particular, to the options of the two previous stages of human history, the hunter-gatherer stage and the agrarian stage. Both hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies depend upon constraint for their existence. It is the job of culture—and, in particular, of ritual—to enforce this constraint. Industrial society is exceptional in the sense that, for the first time, ethical and conceptual constraint is significantly relaxed. The cognitive ethic of agrarian society is rigidly hierarchical. Social stability is prized above all else. In contrast, industrial society is highly mobile. Individual identities are not rigidly tied to kinship or social status. Instead, they are open and changing. This mobility reflects the opening of the cognitive and economic spheres to experimentation and choice. What is sacralized is method rather than concepts. Indeed, the sacralization of concepts now takes a backseat to method. Gellner (1995: 59) associates this liberation of cognition and production with “a rather special new and inwardly imposed restraint.” This new form of internal constraint is a “second-order sacralization of procedural propriety,” which Gellner (1995: 60) describes as “the rule of treating like cases alike, of conceptual tidiness, of the unification of referential concepts in an ideally unified system, and of their separation, to a remarkable extent, from the markers delimiting social conduct.” The consequence of this liberation of cognition from cultural constraint is that our social rituals are no longer taken very seriously. Serious cognition today is associated with science, not with moral philosophy or theological doctrine. However, science cannot tell us how to live. So we still use the old rituals and ethical concepts, even if these no longer have the authority they used to. As Gellner (1994: 94) puts it, the link between serious cognition and daily life is “wobbly,” because “the superior kind of truth available in science is both unstable and largely lacking in any clear social implications.” It is worth quoting Gellner (1994: 95) at length on this:

The world in which men think seriously, and to which serious thought refers, is no longer identical with the world in which one lives one’s daily life. The instability, contestability and often incomprehensibility of the serious, respect-worthy kind of cognition, and hence of its object, make it and them altogether unsuitable to be the foundation of a stable, reliable social order, or to constitute the milieu of life. The mechanisms underlying that cognitive and technological-economic growth on which modern society depends for its legitimacy, require pluralism among cognitive explorers as well as among producers, and it is consequently incompatible with any imposition of a social consensus. The attempt to impose it, in Marxist societies, in the end proved catastrophic, and helped bring about its eventual disintegration.

The upshot, as Gellner (1994: 95-96) puts it, is that

Daily life is sacralized at most in an ironic spirit. . . . Social co-operation, loyalty and solidarity do not now presuppose a shared faith. They may, in fact, presuppose the absence of a wholly shared and seriously, unambiguously upheld conviction. They may require a shared doubt. Inner-directedness co-exists with a recognition of the legitimacy or even the obligation of an ultimate doubt. Inner authority is more effective than an external one, but it leads to an ultimate sovereignty of individual inquiry, and thereby also to scepticism. If the Cartesian consciousness is the ultimate court of appeal, it is free to reach the conclusion that the evidence available does not warrant a firm decision.

This, then, is what Gellner means when he says that we moderns must live our lives in a spirit of “doubt, compromise and doublethink.”

To sum up the larger argument, Gellner’s position is basically a restatement of Durkheim’s but with two important modifications. First, he sees more clearly than Durkheim the connection between ritual and language. Language is basically a system of prohibitions; it constrains an otherwise unstable human society. Second, the theory is purely deductive. Gellner does not assume, as Durkheim (1995 [1912]) did, that a global anthropological theory must be based on the empirical observation of an actually existing culture, one that is assumed to be the most elementary available. Instead, he begins with what he takes to be the minimal assumptions necessary to make sense of the overall structure of human history. Without beginning with these assumptions, it would be impossible to make sense of historical change, because the very idea of human history, with its remarkable potential for accumulative cognitive, economic, social, and technological growth, presupposes the prior emergence of these minimal concepts or categories. The question is not whether such an “originary” hypothesis is permissible, but whether we choose to make our presuppositions explicit. It is a mistake to assume that historical analysis begins with pure description. For how do we know what to describe? A description is already a selection. The point of beginning with a hypothesis of human origin is to make this selection explicit from the beginning. If the hypothesis is judged to be inadequate when measured against the available historical facts, then it must be revised. The implementation of this procedure is, of course, no easy task. It requires a range of inquiry and knowledge quite out of fashion these days. But as Gellner (1989: 12) points out, this skepticism is itself paradoxical. Global speculative history is out of fashion among postmodernists, but the ideas of Hegel, Marx, Comte, and Spencer are nonetheless “everywhere in use” in our everyday language. Gellner’s work challenges us to think more critically about the broader pattern of human history. For this reason, he is an excellent interlocutor for those engaged in “originary thinking.”

The third Generative Anthropology Summer Conference, which took place in Ottawa in June of 2009, is the main source of the articles presented in this number of Anthropoetics. GASC 2009 aspired to an expansion in size and visibility, and the issue will follow suit by presenting eight pieces, a larger-than-normal offering. The conference organizers were conscious of—wrestled with—the paradox of ambition common to all those whose proud marginality, cultivated or thrust-upon as the case may be, at length brings them, if not to the center itself (where is it?), but into its undeniable if relative proximity. Badges of validated identity–large-scale funding, hired help, catered muffins, parallel sessions—paid for with missed papers, rushed schedules, crowded foyers, unfamiliar faces. Was this really us?

A birder, I idly accumulate of-a-feather collectives: skein of geese, exaltation of larks, murmuration of starlings. What then for intellectual loners, for Bronx Romantics? A “transcendence” thereof? Or maybe we just hope it, uneasily enough.

Another conference unfolds next year, at a higher elevation. That surely betokens eternal life! Or nearly so. Anyway, may Peter and Bob prosper, go beyond. Finally, though, as they might agree, the question must be answered in print, not person. Is there a theme, a commonality, a coherent thing that enacts the process inquired into by the 2009 conference title? Is there a future? The essays collected here proffer some grounds for deciding.

Raoul Eshelman builds upon his remarkable work on “the newly arising epoch of performatism” with a suggestive exploration of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Here GA’s vision of the victimary comes to grips with postmodern and performatist ideas of human disability and its potential for transcendence, with fascinating results.

Chris Fleming and John O’Carroll in their turn perform elephant-in-the-room ostensivity, pointing out the large mammalian matter of desire around the rotundities of which economics attempts, futilely, to conduct a rational-sounding conversation. In the process they startlingly reposition the ostensibly tributary domain of advertising to the front and center of any serious analysis of market society—as good an example as one could wish of the power of originary thinking.

Raphael Foshay incisively engages both Gans and Girard on their positions in the 2400-year long discussion initiated by Plato’s Republic, reminding us of the “complex ostensivity of [its] dialogue form” and of the implications of that form for any anthropologically inflected critique of Plato’s metaphysics.

Robert J. Hudson, one of next year’s conference organizers, brings a sophisticated anthropological methodology to bear on famed filmmaker Robert Bresson’s 1967 masterpiece Mouchette, asking how preconceptions of Bresson’s religious orientation may have obscured the film’s entirely un-dogmatic realization of scapegoating and sacrifice.

Marina Ludwigs returns to Anthropoetics with an originary analysis of the idea of group destiny and nationalism in George Eliot’s powerful but enigmatic 1876 novel Daniel Deronda. Her provocative discussion explores a Zionism that “possesses the indispensable characteristics of scenicity, authorial voice, and ethical renunciation that, at the same time, establish a territorial claim.”

Sylvie Nelson, who strove to attend the conference in Ottawa but was prevented by material contingencies, gives us a voice not before heard in the journal. Subjecting the institution of literary criticism to a rigorously originary analysis, she demonstrates yet again the flexibility and productivity of GA as an heuristic, even as she comes to new conclusions on a subject of central importance to many of us.

Matthew Schneider’s immensely engaging excursus on “Generative Anthroponomastics” vividly recalls what’s in a name, especially the name of Mohammed Ali as backed up by that champion’s incomparable combinations. Here nominalism, indeed postmodernism itself, is confronted with a commitment to the ostensive with which it would be, and demonstrably was, unwise to quarrel.

And another Anthropoetics veteran, Richard van Oort, continues his wide-ranging survey of thinkers with whom the ostensibly black sheep of GA share significant commonalities. Here it is the twentieth-century philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner, whose focus on the necessities and complexities of “transcendence in a secular age” provides a sharp and revealing counterpoint to and reinforcement of the mimetic theory he did not himself deploy.

Of course, many worthy presenters in Ottawa are not here. All told, there were almost forty talks at the conference—too many for publication in one or several issues. We are hoping, however, that our next issue will offer several more, including a few more new voices.

Introduction

A certain tendency in Film Studies seeks to hastily affix the facile labels of “spiritual,” “Catholic,” or even “Jansenist” to the work of French filmmaker Robert Bresson without taking the time to explore the implications of such pigeonholing.(1) When directly asked whether or not he considered his films to be “religious,” Bresson would respond in the affirmative, but would nuance the question by stating that he was indeed “croyant” (literally, “a believer”) and that his beliefs must naturally find a way into his films.(2) However, reducing Bresson’s challenging body of work to traditional Christian tropes is, in a sense, merely a way to evade the intellectually taxing enterprise of analyzing these most esoteric films–especially when one considers the degree to which Bresson breaks from conventional Catholic thought. Those labeled his “most spiritual films,” namely Au hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, include scenes of human cruelty, prostitution, rape, and suicide, which are employed more to illustrate human interaction within a society than to act as a dogmatic assertion of religious creed. In other words, his work is much more anthropological than theological. In fact, his films often seem to pose more questions than they offer answers. Thus, while embodying certain Catholic themes in his films, Bresson appears to be turning the mirror on ritual and aiming to understand its sociological and anthropological underpinnings. This seems especially the case in the film to be studied in this essay: Bresson’s 1967 offering Mouchette, where transcendence, even redemption, is found in an act of suicide, a mortal sin held as unpardonable by the Catholic faith.

While Bresson’s Catholicism certainly has bearing on the film, especially in all that concerns his choice of symbolism and motifs (the number three, falling objects representing the Fall, stigmata, etc.), Mouchette is the Bresson film that most fully presents the filmmaker’s anthropology. As we follow this young girl from rejection to violation to suicide, we become complicit as members of the society that virtually sacrifices her. Employing his signature cinematography that accentuates either sound or image, Bresson creates an uneasy mood that the viewer carries to the cathartic moment in the final (self-)sacrificial scene. Still, as this essay aims to demonstrate, Mouchette is not as concerned with presenting a poetics of transcendence as it is with understanding how man negotiates his own redemption. In no way does this study attempt to undermine Bresson’s Catholicism; rather, I suggest that by understanding his anthropological concept of sacrifice and his sociologically-driven vision of humanity, one can better grasp and further nuance what it meant to be Catholic for a complex thinker like Bresson, whose ideas often challenge religious convention. With a sound understanding of the sacrificial nature of society and mankind’s precarious place within it, in Mouchette, Bresson cinematically expounds an anthropology that depicts our role in redemption.

From Au hasard Balthazar (1966) to Mouchette (1967): Reflections on Society and Violence

Released only ten months apart, Bresson’s final two black-and-white features are often considered the most “spiritual” of his films. His 1966 Au hasard Balthazar presents an elliptical narrative of the tragic life of a donkey, which parallels that of his first owner, a young girl named Marie, both of whom are trampled and debased by the cruelties of society until the donkey ultimately dies a senseless and ignominious death away from his beloved. Choosing a donkey as his central protagonist, Bresson appeals to the humble beast of burden’s “time-honored place both at the Christmas crib and in Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday” (Cunneen 98). The choice of the name of Marie, who in the film is repeatedly sullied to save her donkey from the same society that will ultimately slaughter him, carries obvious religious connotations as well. In fact, some have gone as far as to read the humble Balthazar, her “son,” as a “Christ-figure” (cf. Cunneen 105). As compelling as such a reading may be, unlike that of Christ, Balthazar’s death serves no transcendent end: no sin is atoned for and no mortal being expiated through the shedding of his blood. As indicated by the elliptical presentation of events from the donkey’s life, he dies as arbitrarily as he has lived. In fact, Jean-Luc Godard’s reading of the film is much more incisive: “Ce film, c’est le monde. Vraiment, en une heure et demie, en une heure quarante, on voit le monde depuis l’enfance jusqu’à la mort avec tout.” [This film represents the world. Really, in an hour and a half, in an hour and forty minutes, we see the entire world from childhood to death.](3) Essentially, the violence enacted upon the donkey represents that of society towards its own scapegoats. In other words, the death of Balthazar is more a reflection of society’s arbitrary violence and an individual’s release through death than any message of intercessory salvation. A scapegoat in life that is sanctified in death, Balthazar merits our attention as he draws in the cruelty of society and mitigates it through his escape from the world.

Upping the ante in his subsequent film–as if the struggle of a helpless beast was not sufficiently powerful as an image of the cruelties of society–Bresson makes his next victim the eponymous Mouchette, a young social misfit who is driven to suicide in what has been described as “one of the most searing portraits of human desperation ever put on film.”(4) In making this transition from beast of burden to fellow human being, Bresson embodies, most vividly and horrifically, his anthropological vision. French novelist Georges Bernanos, upon whose Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette (1936) the film is based, claimed inspiration for this story about “une fillette traquée par le malheur et l’injustice” (1886n) [a young girl stalked by misfortune and injustice] from his first-hand witness of the atrocities and miseries of the Spanish Civil War while exiled in Majorca. Borrowing Spanish tropes from Bernanos and relating Mouchette’s demise to that of Balthazar, in his Cahiers de l’Herne interview on the novelist, Bresson explains Mouchette’s character in terms of Bullfighting: “(E)lle était comme un taureau qui reçoit des banderilles, les piques, et l’épée” (15). [She was like a bull who receives banderillas, lances, and the sword.] In the sacrificial scene of the corrida, spectators are simultaneously drawn in and repulsed by the ritual violence enacted upon the sacred/sacrificial body of the bull. One is met with a Kierkegaardian crossroads of skandalon, where one must reject or forge ahead, the violence becoming either a stumbling block or a necessary–albeit atrocious–part of scenic ritual. In fact, the filmmaker admits in this same interview that extending the domain of the corrida to the life of the village and the progressive destruction of this young adolescent at the hands of society is what drew him to the text: “Je me défiais de l’atroce” (13). [I wanted to defy atrocity.] So effectively does Bresson cinematically depict atrocity that critically engaging with his film nearly equates to an act of self-flagellation as we as viewers implicate ourselves and become complicit in the communal torture of this innocent child. However, as the film progresses to its climactic conclusion, the askēsiseventually gives way to a cathartic–even transcendental–sense of hope, which is wrought, ironically, in the scene of the protagonist’s suicide.

Mouchette’s Victimary Status: A scenic analysis of Ostracism, Violation, and Sacrifice

At a narrative level, Mouchette is the rather simple tale of a wretched young outcast, who, rejected from all circles of society (family, school, community), over the span of a few days is subjected to various tribulations–including ostracism from peers and family, rape at the hand of an older man she trusted, and the death of her mother–and is finally so downtrodden that she takes her own life. For this film to go beyond the sadistic observation of (even participation in/complicity with) the progressive demoralization of this young victim, it is essential that Bresson both establish a pathetic image of social marginalization as well as provide meaning–even a transcendental sense of hope–to the ultimate scene of suicide. In the three sequences I will analyze over the course of this article–the introduction of Mouchette as scapegoat (00:06:02- 00:14:21), her rape at the hands of a local villager (00:42:17- 00:53:45), and, finally, her suicide (01:18:01- 01:21:07)–Bresson establishes a cinematic interplay between sound and image that creates a contagious tension in the audience as it builds to the sacrificial moment. While introducing Mouchette as a social misfit in the first scene, Bresson at the same time provides subtle thematic clues and motifs that will recur in the two other scenes to be analyzed, which will ultimately allow his anthropological message to break through the sentimental and transcendental (or Christian) mood that had been the backdrop of the entire film.

i. Mouchette as Misfit: Depicting Disconnect

By design, the young Mouchette (played by non-professional actress Nadine Nortier), is the center of our focus in the film. As Bresson explained to Jean-Luc Godard in a 1966 Cahiers du cinéma interview that preceded the film’s release: “I want to concentrate, constantly, absolutely, on one face, the face of this little girl, to see her reactions. . . . That is what interests me. The camera will not leave her” (cited in Cunneen 112). Following two brief vignettes (to which I will return), which bracket the narrative and represent a sort of mise-en-abyme for the entire film, Bresson introduces us to Mouchette as a social misfit in three “concentrated and economical” scenes (McNeece 269) that effectively separate her from peers, home, and community. Visually detaching and isolating her from these various social levels is key to establishing her character and allowing her to entropically evolve as different and apart–and thus subject to scapegoating. Employing parsimonious cinematography and an austere mise-en-scène, Bresson successfully creates this mood of dejection in these early sequences.

In the first scene to be analyzed, social disconnect is related in a matter of seconds. Set at the school gates, it depicts Mouchette, dressed in a drab grey housecoat and walking lethargically towards the threshold, being passed by on both sides by classmates, whose cheery disposition, well-kempt hair, and lightly-hued spring dresses separate them from her, as they rush to enter the gate. Eventually fixing the camera on and panning with a now solitary Mouchette, Bresson zooms to a medium close-up to catch her reaction: she sighs deeply, hesitates at the gate, and with an expression of profound angst and despair, stares off into the distance. Even when acknowledged by a classmate, it is painfully clear that Mouchette has no status or sense of belonging in this world of juvenile girls. She is a misfit.

From this scene of isolation amongst peers, we next see Mouchette at home in her equally desperate family situation. Dwelling in a squalid, one-room shack that lacks basic amenities and is located immediately next to a busy highway, she is left to tend to her ailing, bed-ridden mother and provide all care for her infant brother. As her father and older brother, whom Bresson has just introduced in a previous scene as local bootleggers who sell alcohol on the black market, return home, they do so without any greeting or acknowledgment–verbal or non-verbal–of Mouchette or her mother. The brother leaves the screen in seconds and the father immediately collapses, flopping down onto his shabby cot, removes his hat, and pretends it is a steering wheel in some infantile game that Tony Rayns describes as a “perfect disconnect.”(5) Mouchette’s pitiful domestic separation is amplified by Bresson’s signature concentration on diegetic, off-screen sound:(6) the exaggerated whoosh of speeding automobiles and clatter of delivery trucks on the freeway, the shrill cries of Mouchette’s baby brother, the raspy breathing of her mother, and the sputtering car noises of the absentee father, all contribute to sense of desolation that is reflected, once again as the scene fades to black, in Mouchette’s face as she impassively gazes into the distance and apathetically retires to her own cot on the floor.

Sound also plays an essential role in a third scene, which rounds out Mouchette’s identity as social misfit, rejected by peers, family, and now community, as represented by the schoolmistress. In another scene at the school gates, where Mouchette once again lags behind, a prevalent, cheery blend of giggles and gossipy side conversations eventually gives way to the lone, grave clunk of the trailing Mouchette’s oversized clogs on the pavement and tile as she tardily stomps into the classroom.(7) Met with the scornful gaze of the schoolmistress (which is ironically, almost comically, aggravated by Bresson with a prolonged, low-angle, point-of-view shot to reinforce Mouchette’s anxiety, inferior position, and status as societal scapegoat), the impassive and rebellious Mouchette merely stares back. As this shot dissolves into the next, we witness another sign of revolt as Mouchette refuses to sing along in the music class. However, beyond depicting a simple act of rebellion, Bresson offers here a rich clue to understanding the film’s central paradox. In what constitutes the opening scene of Bernanos’ novella, the girls are standing and–all but Mouchette–singing in unison an apparently banal song about Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World. Forebodingly circling the girls, upon noticing that Mouchette is not singing, the school-teacher violently shoves the young adolescent to the piano and, grasping her by the nape of the neck, forces her to listen to the first few notes and sing by herself. While Mouchette’s humiliation before her classmates and their amusement at this ridiculous spectacle reconfirm her status as social misfit, our attention in this scene is beckoned elsewhere: to the suggestive lyrics of a song that we will hear again, one whose subject speaks to the paradox of hope and redemption at the heart of the film.

Ultimately reduced to tears by her inability to hit a musical note, Mouchette, in false tones, sings the following lyrics (adapted for the film by Bresson’s composer Jean Wiener):(8)

–Espérez!–Plus d’espérance!
–Trois jours, leur dit Colomb,
En montrant le ciel immense,
Le fond de l’horizon.
Trois jours et je vous donne un monde
Vous qui n’avez plus d’espoir,
Sur l’immensité profonde
Ses yeux s’ouvraient pour le voir.

[Hope! Hope is dead! / Three days, Columbus said to them, / Pointing to the vast sky ahead / That stretched beyond the horizon. / Three days and I’ll give you a world / to you who have no more hope / Over the vast depths / He opened wide his eyes.](9)

In the case of the figure of Columbus in this poem, the imperative “Espérez!” (Hope!) that begins the poem is based on his faith that beyond the horizon and despite the naysayers in his company, hope of a new world still exists. Juxtaposing this command with the reply “Hope is dead!,” the film seems to ask whether or not, in the face of such seemingly insurmountable adversity, one can still find place to hope. Of great significance is Columbus’ retort to the naysayers: “Three days,” which matches the period between the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ–the quintessential scapegoat, who was ostracized, violated, and crucified by society, thus rendering hope possible. However, in this case, Mouchette’s (and, by connection, Bresson’s) Christ is not necessarily the image of transcendence and guaranteed salvation a Christian reading would generally propose. While Columbus’ three days hold the promise of a new world beyond the horizon to those who have no more hope, for the rebellious Mouchette who sings these lyrics, as we shall soon see, hope is located not in accepting Christ’s expiatory sacrifice as infinite but rather in recognizing him as a scapegoat whose choice of sacrifice at the hands of society liberated him from the pains of life. Mouchette’s negotiation of the potential for hope is more internal and individualistic in nature than that of Columbus and is substantially based upon her personal experience of degradation. While we cannot know as much at this point in the film, Bresson’s focus on Mouchette’s humiliation in singing this song opens the doors to an overarching paradox upon which the plot–and the film’s anthropological message–will hinge–especially in the closing scenes when we hear the song again. With his focus on this song/poem, Bresson seems to ask each viewer to reconsider his or her personal, human role in enacting hope and how this hope figures into our own earthly redemption.

The answer to this all-important question is dependent upon an understanding of Mouchette’s degraded situation and the character’s complete evolution to victimary status. To this point in the film (and our analysis), she is but a social misfit; however, in order to more fully come to terms with this status, it is useful to understand the society from which she is ostracized and will ultimately escape. Her home town is a decaying collectivity in the Vaucluse region of southeastern France that Keith Reader describes as “a spiritually and materially impoverished village community” (89). In a 1967 interview accorded to Theodor Kotulla on the set of Mouchette, which would be included in his award-winning documentary Au hasard Bresson, the filmmaker takes a Manichean stance in asserting that “Il y a la solidarité dans le bien et il y a la solidarité dans le mal. J’ai choisi pour [Mouchette], la solidarité dans le mal. Il y a encore, oui, une espèce de solidarité dans le mal contre la pauvre Mouchette.” [“There is solidarity in good and solidarity in evil. For [Mouchette], I chose to focus solely on the solidarity in evil. There’s a kind of evil complicity against poor Mouchette.”](10) The small town is plagued with alcoholism, marital infidelity, unbridled masculinity, violence, and moral ambivalence. Mouchette’s father and brother, we have already seen, operate by selling liquor on the black market, with complicit police that turn an indifferent eye to a crate left behind. They, like other townsfolk, are paid in shots of alcohol, consumed without speech. Following Sunday mass, the village parishioners leave church and hastily head to the bar before the bells cease to toll. Mouchette’s dying mother has to hide gin from her abusive spouse. Even the town’s interdependent poacher/warden pair, Arsène and Mathieu, bring an end to their cat-and-mouse charade in the woods by sharing a drink from Arsène’s canteen full of gin. The motif of alcohol and its abuse stands as a distinctive mark of the moral decay of Mouchette’s society; however, the corruption of this town is not limited to alcoholism. Nearly all the social actions we witness are heavy-laden with lawlessness, abuse, violence, and/or oppressive sexuality. To name but a few: the married warden Mathieu is, at least, attempting to seduce the barmaid Louisa; Mouchette’s father and the school mistress violently shove her in three separate scenes; young boys expose themselves to Mouchette as she walks home from school and, last not least, Mouchette is raped by a poacher, an outsider whose survival depends on his transgressing the law. Indeed, Mouchette’s society is one of extreme decadence and lawlessness, one that is ripe for a scapegoat upon whose back it can collectively discharge the burden of its vice and one from which the victim will gladly depart.

ii. From Outcast to Victim: Mouchette’s Rape and its Consequences

Another scene of confrontation with the young classmates who have spurned her–in which Mouchette appears alone filmed at a low angle in a ditch throwing mud at a group of cheerful young girls who are giggling and spritzing each other with perfume before leaving with their boyfriends–prepares the determining scene for the entire film. After having her mud-cake assault basically ignored by her peers, Mouchette takes a momentous walk into the woods that will essentially all but seal her fate. Finding herself in a rainstorm, she takes refuge under a tree, not far from the location of a physical altercation between the poacher Arsène and Mathieu the warden, one that oddly ends in the two men sharing the gin from Arsène’s canteen in an indication of their co-dependency. Upon being discovered by Arsène, the young Mouchette, who was far enough removed from the conflict not to witness the outcome, pretends she is lost and then decides to accompany the poacher to his hut in the woods, where together they devise an alibi should the police question Mouchette. While it is unclear at this time why Arsène would need an alibi, this act of solidarity with a member of her society–a marginalized outcast himself no less–provides Mouchette an unprecedented bond with another human being. This acceptance and complicity with Arsène will, however, soon prove her undoing and assure her victimary status.

From the hut, Mouchette follows Arsène to a deserted bar. Kicking in the door, Arsène enters and continues constructing his alibi, oddly changing his story and now admitting that he believes he has killed a man and that he needs Mouchette to stand by him. Arsène, who was unaware of what she may have seen, is astonished to hear Mouchette mention Mathieu and, between sips of gin, constructs an unlikely story of their struggle. As the details become increasingly vague and Arsène’s speech begins to slur, he suddenly drops the canteen and begins to rub his forehead, all the while reassuring Mouchette that all is well and this is a common occurrence for him, which he calls une absence [a blackout]. Approaching Mouchette and now perspiring and continuing to rub his brow, temple, and eyes, the poacher continues the story (that we later discover to be entirely untrue) of his murder of Mathieu, who he claims to have killed with his rabbit trap. Whether a delusion as part of the absence, the result of an earlier blackout, or a pure invention altogether,(11) we never fully know–but, we see Mouchette buying into it, despite evidence to the contrary. What this confession allows is for Mouchette to become even more complicit with Arsène, reassuring him that he can count on her, that she hates everyone in her village, and that she will defend him against them all. This intense solidarity she feels with Arsène is accompanied by his progressively falling deeper and deeper into an absence. Eventually, he begins to drool, his vision becomes hazy, and, he falls violently to the ground, where he convulses and a stream of blood and frothy gin spew from his mouth. Rather than being repulsed at this scene or escaping, Mouchette kneels beside her new accomplice and, with a rare smile, steadies his head in her arms, wipes the bloody foam from his lips, and, as the seizure passes, begins to sing to him. The song is none other than the same Columbus song she had sung earlier; however, this time–with the acceptance of a fellow outcast–she is pitch-perfect, hitting the note she had missed with her classmates.

As Arsène regains his senses, the two smile at each other; then, he arises, grabs his rifle and canteen and offers to accompany Mouchette back to her house. Unsure of how wise his idea is, Mouchette demonstrates her devotion to Arsène, reminding him that (at least according to his story) he had killed Mathieu, something of which he now appears to be totally ignorant. Hanging his gun and canteen on the rack, Arsène then blocks the door with his body, pursues a suddenly uneasy Mouchette, and threatens to kill her if she utters a word of the affair to anyone. Assuring him she would rather die than harm him, Mouchette drops her satchel to the ground and watches in disbelief as Arsène caresses her shoulder. Pushing him away proves futile as his drunken attempts to capture her culminate in his throwing her onto a pile of kindling, where he forces himself upon her and rapes her. Significantly, while Mouchette resists at first, her struggle is accompanied by–once again–three audibly exaggerated moans, the last of which is paired with a medium close-up of her hands on Arsène’s back, once constricted in resistance, now oddly relaxed and caressing him as he violates her.

As Mouchette’s perceived complicity with Arsène gives way to distrust and violation, the physical act of violation further transforms into an act of consensual love. The rape/love scene, which immediately follows Mouchette’s pitch-perfect rendition of the Columbus song and a series of objects falling (canteen, Arsène, Mouchette’s satchel, bottles), is significant as it represents a transformative action whose discovery transfigures Mouchette from simple outcast to victim. Already spurned by society, Mouchette bears salient marks of this physical, sexual initiation (gin on her breath, her unbuttoned top, scratches on her chest, her defense of Arsène, etc.), which will lead her neighbors to deduce (albeit erroneously) and react to what has taken place. As varied accounts of the event circulate in her society, it is this misinterpreted sexual act that assures Mouchette’s victimary status, thus rendering impossible her continued status as a marginal youth. In its stead, the village will see her as a common whore, while she grapples with the dual status of woman capable of love as well as victim of a horrific act of violence. If we are to read Christian themes into Bresson’s anthropology (as I think we should considering the repetition of the number three), we must do so in seeing Christ as the exemplary victim–another outcast, who was unduly scorned and violated to bring about, first, his own redemption and then that of mankind. Again, in Au hasard Bresson, the filmmaker is quite clear on this point. Feeling that Bernanos had glossed an important step that is, what he terms, “the transformation of the soul,” Bresson holds that a central message of the film is as follows:

Bien sûr, la rédemption ne se fait pas dans la mort–on ne sait pas ce qui se passe après. Mais, la rédemption doit se faire dans la vie même–au moment même–là, dans notre vie. Le Christ nous a rachetés par sa mort; mais, nous, nous sommes rachetés de notre vivant. C’est à nous de bien vouloir nous faire racheter.

[Of course, redemption is not achieved in death–we don’t know what happens in the hereafter. But, redemption must occur in life itself–now, in this moment–here, in life. Christ redeemed us with his death; but, we redeem ourselves in life. It’s up to us to be willing to be redeemed.](12)

For Bresson, redemption is an important step; however, human beings play an active role in their own redemption, one that can be expressed through free agency and will. While holding that Christ paid the price of our redemption for the hereafter, the filmmaker’s anthropology is concerned with this world, where we redeem ourselves in emulating Christ’s expiatory suffering and sacrifice, where we are saved with our own stripes.

Mouchette’s redemption is assured in her transfiguration from social outcast to scapegoat–as her victimary status has been assured. As she redeems herself, Bresson includes imagery and motifs that reflect the ideas of a lost and fallen state. For example, Rayns notices a motif of dropping, pointing to at least four cases (there are more) where Bresson uses a low camera angle to show objects falling and crashing to the ground; yet, the critic insists that there is no clear meaning and nothing to decode in this motif. However, read both anthropologically and from a Christian perspective, these images of falling objects point to the Catholic doctrine of the Fall of Mankind, which necessitates the intervention of the Christ in the first place. The four scenes in question–the dropping of the boy’s pants when he exposes himself to Mouchette, Arsène’s steel rabbit trap clanking on the ground when he is confronted by Mathieu in the woods, Mouchette’s satchel falling to the floor of the bar when she is about to be raped by Arsène and, later, Mouchette’s dropping of the tea cup at the grocers’ exposing the scratches on her chest–are all moments of rupture that mark Mouchette in her life’s experience, and all are visual images of mankind’s destitution. This point is supported by the stain or mark of sin with which Bresson has likewise imbued his film–in the motif of mud. When mocked at school, Mouchette retaliates by throwing mud at her classmates. She loses her clog in mud before the fateful meeting with Arsène. She stamps her feet in mud before entering the church and repeats this action later when she grinds the mud into the rug of the “sale, vieille bête” [dirty old beast (my italics)] who offers her a shroud and a few dresses to wear for the interment of her deceased mother. When she does dishes at the bar on Sunday to earn a few extra sous for her alcoholic father, her wet, dirty hands soil her skirt. She wipes the bloody foam from Arsène’s mouth with her handkerchief when he has an epileptic crise. She spills coffee on the table at home and loosely swaddles her baby brother after he’s dirtied his diaper. And, finally, when she reacts to her father’s curt response to her and false devotion at the bedside of his deceased wife, Mouchette uses a key term of souillure (that Bernanos explains is the worst word she knows): Merde! [Shit!]. Numerous are the metaphors of the experience of moral depravity and indelible are the marks left behind on this young social misfit.

Two themes that Rayns analyzes exceptionally well are those of experience and sexuality. As she is forced to assume the role of a mother even before she is fully a woman, Mouchette’s venture into womanhood is as corrupted as is everything else in her life. Poet and essayist Robert Polito aptly titles his comments on the film “Girl, Interrupted,” focusing on the fact that “For Mouchette, love, sex, empathy, service, humiliation, and force are all bound up together.” While her “white-knickered” (Rayns) classmates are riding off on motorbikes with older boys, Mouchette is subjected to flashing by young boys at the distillery. Given a sole chance at a normal development and happiness in the flirtation scene on the bumper cars, the natural course of her sentimental education is thwarted as her father suddenly appears and violently shoves her away from her potential paramour. When she gets lost in the woods during Arsène’s “cyclone,” not only is she sexualized by Bresson’s camera angle (Rayns) as she wrings the water from her soaked stockings, she realizes her sexual awakening as she is raped by the man she has just cared for through an epileptic fit. From outcast to victim, as classmate, pupil, daughter, sister, caretaker, citizen and “lover,” Mouchette progressively has her most basic desires and needs frustrated by the prevalence of worldly carnality. Physically and emotionally marked by this carnality, in the violation that is rape, she is forever separated from youthful innocence and, as a victim, has earned the basis for her redemption in life.

iii. Sealing Fate: Mouchette’s Death and Bresson’s Poetics of Redemption

In order for Bresson’s message to ring true, “Mouchette ne doit pas seulement souffrir mais en mourir” (Au hasard Bresson). [“Mouchette must not only suffer but also die.”] Before she dies, however, she must make another pass through the village and face the society that has rejected her. Having lost her mother on the same fateful night, in a community with sympathy, Mouchette should normally be consoled and taken in by benevolent neighbors. However, such is not the case in this depraved society. Once again, her rejection occurs with the motif of three. Bearing physical marks of her experiences, she is questioned about the odor of gin on her breath by the inquisitive Madame Mathieu, whose husband is very much alive, and to whom she simply replies, “[Arsène] is my lover” (which also indicates that she has accepted this role as woman and outcast). When the grocer’s wife, who has invited Mouchette in for coffee and croissants upon hearing the news of her mother, notices the bloody scratch marks on her chest, which can even be interpreted as a stigmata, the physical manifestations of Christ’s suffering, she dismisses Mouchette as a common “whore” [traînée]. While the simultaneous dropping of the tea cup symbolizes the depravity of this world, the third potential surrogate for her mother that Mouchette encounters en route to her death is the aforementioned sale, vieille bête, who has offered Mouchette a shroud for her mother, dresses to wear to the funeral, and her services to stand in wake with the body. She is not, however, as directly related to the stain/mark of depravity as she is the idea of death, the final step in Mouchette’s rejection from society. In fact, Mouchette’s disgusted name-calling is prompted by this woman’s explanation of her strange cult of the dead, which prompts the young girl to flee the awkward situation and escape to the woods, with death fresh in her mind.

Arriving in the forest and witnessing hunters shoot and kill rabbits right before her eyes (presented graphically by Bresson in a lengthy scene), the thought of death-as-escape presents itself–for a third time (her mother, the old woman, and now the rabbit)–in Mouchette. In fact, this hunting scene both parallels and completes the frame of the second of the two mise-en-abyme scenes that open the film, which immediately follows the opening credits. This early scene, containing a montage of a series of close-ups on hands, glancing eyes and game traps–reminiscent of Bresson’s Pickpocket–introduces us to two characters that we later learn are Arsène and Mathieu. The poacher sets a trap and catches a partridge; the game warden, seeing the partridge suffer and struggle on earth, eventually lets it fly free, in another case of exaggerated sound with the wings flapping freely as the bird ascends to the heavens. Naturally, this partridge can be taken to represent Mouchette, whom Bresson calls “the prey,” and her earthly sufferings that will eventually give way to an upward release, a moving away from this world. This early scene mirrors that of the rabbit hunt, where, as she stares down at the dead beast in shock, Mouchette appears to be overcome with a pervading sense of animal kinship and solidarity similar to that felt the evening before with Arsène.

Escaping from the scene of the rabbit hunt and arriving at a hill near a pond, Mouchette next sits and opens the package from her elderly neighbor and holds a light-colored, muslin dress against her figure for size, but not without catching and tearing it, however, on a shrub beneath her. Gunita Randhawa interprets this rupture poetically as the complete rupture in her life and an example of Mouchette caught in a trap, as was the partridge, the one unique path to liberation: death (102). Marked by sin and a witness to death (her mother, the rabbit) and trapped as an object of inescapable hostility, Mouchette realizes the only path to freedom from society and redemption is her own death. The other mise-en-abyme frame at the beginning of the film depicts–although unknown at this time–Mouchette’s mother (played by French novelist Marie Cardinal), who, seated in a church with tears on her face, prefaces both her own death and the unsure fate of her family: “What will become of them without me? I can feel it in my breast; it’s like a stone inside.” The answer to her question (and the nagging pain in her breast) comes in the final scene, thus rounding out the framed narrative, when Mouchette, the only hope for the dysfunctional family, abandons her brothers and father and joins her mother in death.

While depravity, death, and hopelessness weigh heavily in this final scene, Mouchette’s decision to end her life by suicide is made rather instantaneously. We must insist, as does Fanny Howe, on the random, unpremeditated nature of Mouchette’s suicide, as being caught in a moment. “Suicide is usually a reaction to one’s own idea of a future. . . . Rather than running and shedding the present in a state of blind hope, you falter and feel the rest coming at you” (46). And, later, “One is seized by suicide as one is seized by love” (47). Initially, Mouchette’s rolling down the hill appears to be no more than a little game she’s invented , perhaps a way to sully the dress as she has stained everything else in her life. Following her first of three rolls down the hill, she notices and waves at a neighbor on a tractor, possibly suggesting second thoughts about what she was doing or simply requesting a ride back into town. When this final chance at conciliation with a society that has repeatedly rejected her once again fails,(13) she looks down twice in despair (as she did when we first saw her at the school gate and with her family), ascends the hill again, wraps herself in the dress and begins to roll. Off-screen, we hear the deep, spaced peals of a church bell (perhaps the glas announcing the death of Mouchette’s mother and, quite possibly, presaging her own). The second roll down the hill, this time towards the water, with the heightened sound of Mouchette’s body and clogs banging over the terrain, results in her being tangled in some shrubbery alongside the pond–and is immediately followed by another resounding peal of the church bell. On the third trip down the hill,(14) Bresson follows Mouchette with the camera, panning to a certain point and then stopping to allow her to leave the frame. Suddenly, we hear a pronounced splash off-screen, following which Bresson cuts to a moderately high-angled shot of the water rippling and Mouchette’s muslin dress caught in the brush. Although we may expect her to re-emerge from the depths of the murky water, she never does. Bresson brings closure to this ambiguity with a selection from Monteverdi’s “Magnificat” from the Vespers for the Blessed Virgin, the same sacred music played in the opening credits, successfully “giving the girl’s ‘suicide’ the overtones of liberation” (Cunneen 112).

However, music is not the only way Bresson sacralizes this tragic event. Joseph Cunneen and others have suggested that the white muslin dress resembles a wedding dress (119), offering a ritual or sacramental feel to the suicide. Beth Curran also reads the scene in sacramental terms, suggesting that

The purity, gentleness, and clarity of the water evoke not only a peaceful rest but also the waters of baptism. . . . Mouchette will emerge to a new life [and thus her] . . . drowning then represents both death and rebirth: Mouchette achieves rebirth through her baptismal death. Water plays a central role in religious symbolism for Christians through the association with baptism and eternal life. In the rite of baptism, which is the first and most important sacrament, baptismal water is literally a substance of life: it purifies the soul by erasing sin, and bears the sign of the Christian’s birth. (81)

Still, we cannot ignore the fact that this act of purification and redemption came by way of a mortal sin. And, while the tired Catholic cliché would see death as the shedding of this mortal tabernacle of the flesh, escaping this veil of tears to the paradise that awaits our immortal soul, the Catholic stance against suicide still considers it a sin that jeopardizes immortality. In her aphoristic article “Au Hasard Suicide,” which discusses the random nature of the decision to commit suicide in Mouchette (comparing it to Bresson’s preceding film Au hasard Balthazar), Howe speaks to the same notion: “Suicide for Catholics remained a renunciation of hope; it was a collapse into despair” (46). However, rather than accepting her sole option of complacently continuing to exist in a world of depravity amongst a society that has arbitrarily singled her out as its scapegoat, Mouchette chooses to physically remove herself through the pis-aller of suicide. Even if the scene is replete with ritualistic imagery, the active choice of suicide representing redemption precludes a facile Christian reading of the event.

Bresson is very clear on this point: Christ’s sacrifice provides us redemption for the hereafter. Still, that only satisfies what happens after life, and the sacred music is truly just the means of marking the end of the life of the character Mouchette and framing a cinematic narrative for which there is a deeper meaning. As her innocent rolling game gives way to the choice of suicide, Bresson pulls back the curtain on his theory. At this sobering and cathartic point in the film, Mouchette is no longer the subject but the vehicle of Bresson’s higher anthropological message. In having cinematically depicted the miserable–and atrocious–existence of this young girl, steadfastly tracking her from ostracism to victimization to her ultimate sacrifice, Bresson offers an “esthetic redemption” to his complicit viewers in turning the mirror on society and forcing them to reflect on their own vicarious violence.

In this sense, Bresson’s cinematic anthropology is active (and inter-active) in that it draws the viewer into an allegorical universe, one in which he or she is complicit in the progressive degradation, breakdown, and ultimate sacrifice of an arbitrarily-chosen victim. However, as the film builds and progresses to this sacrificial scene (or, even, as we reflect upon it after the film), we are able to separate ourselves from the crowd and sympathize with Mouchette, as she symbolizes our common humanity. In so developing his film, at the end, Bresson simultaneously expiates us from the communal violence (as the cinematic death is quickly followed by sacred music), provides us a cathartic moment to reflect on this violence and the necessity of its deferral, and offers an explanation of our personal, active role–as well as that of Christ–in our own redemption. Otherwise stated, Bresson’s allegorical film accomplishes something that Catholicism alone cannot: it depicts, using the rational terms of sociology and anthropology, the human condition, mankind’s need for hope, and our role in redemption from a violent world in a manner that surpasses the means of the irrational realm of religion. With his brand of cinematic anthropology, Bresson defends the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity (the exemplary love that can conquer resentment) in terms that defy transcendence and are almost entirely this-worldly.

Conclusion

For the unprepared viewer, engaging with a Robert Bresson film is a very off-putting and tedious experience. Many resist the somber tone, the slow development, the emphasis on reaction over action, the uneasy use of heightened sound, even the choice of black and white film stock in an era of full color pictures.(15) This is deliberately so. Bresson’s unique take on cinematography (as detailed in the aphorisms that make up his Notes on Cinematography)(16) is dependent upon the viewer’s apprehension and discomfort. He calls for his viewers to “Be attentive” (55) and “Use these impatiences” (28), insisting that the message of his films comes forth in these most austere, visceral, and emotionally-charged moments. As much is revealed by the viewer’s reaction as by the model’s (re-)action on-screen. As suggested above, this is certainly the case with Mouchette.

In attempts to avoid the personal involvement Bresson requires with films like Mouchette or Au hasard Balthazar, it is easy to fall victim to the dismissive gesture of simply relegating them to the domain of “spiritual” or “Catholic” films. Bresson’s choice of music, themes, motifs, symbolism, and so on, certainly allows such an easy way out. However, simply labeling Bresson as a “Jansenist” or “transcendental” filmmaker is rather disingenuous, especially considering just how decidedly this-worldly his films are. In his “most spiritual films,” Bresson offers his most anthropological message on the nature of society and sacrificial violence. Not only is the ill-fated donkey Balthazar not a Christ figure but the earthly redemption of the wretched Mouchette is not guaranteed by grace alone. Bresson’s films go beyond mere Catholicism. A self-confirmed believer, what sets Robert Bresson apart is his status as a Catholic thinker, one who reflects on society and understands the need and purposes of religion. What makes Bresson an extraordinary filmmaker is his ability to challenge convention and contain his anthropological message–and theory of society–within the space of a 90-minute film.