Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy After the Death of God (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Styles of Piety

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

P ERSPECTIVES IN C ONTINENTAL P HILOSOPHY

Styles of Piety Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Edited by S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler

F O R D HA M U N IV ER SI TY P R E S S New York

2005

Copyright 䉷 2005 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series, no. 47 ISSN 1089–3938 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Styles of piety : practicing philosophy after the death of God / edited by S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler.— 1st ed. p. cm. — (Perspectives in continental philosophy ; no. 47) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2500-3 (hardcover) — ISBN 0-8232-2501-1 (pbk.) 1. Philosophy and religion. 2. Philosophy, European. 3. Death of God. I. Buckner, S. Clark (Samuel Clark), 1968– II. Statler, Matthew. III. Series. B56.S89 2005 101—dc22 2005018151 Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

To the memory of Stella Thompson

Contents

Introduction S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler P ART I : T HE P ERSISTENT P ROBLEM

1

OF

VALUE

1

Violations Alphonso Lingis

15

2

Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics Kelly Oliver

35

3

Suffering Faith in Philosophy S. Clark Buckner

55

4

Becoming Real—with Style Merold Westphal

76

5

Morality without God Charles E. Scott

93

P ART I I : P HILOSOPHY

AND

I TS F ICTIONS

6

How Does Philosophy Become What It Is? Matthew Statler

105

7

Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction Jason K. Winfree

119

ix

8

Tragic Dislocations: Antigone’s Modern Theatrics Tina Chanter

151

9

A Touch of Piety: The Tragedy of Antigone’s Hands Michael Naas

171

P ART I I I : D ECONSTRUCTION

AND

R ELIGION

10

The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida John D. Caputo

193

11

God: Poison or Cure? A Reply to John D. Caputo David Wood

205

12

Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears: Reading John D. Caputo’s Ethics Edith Wyschogrod

212

Derrida and Dante: The Promise of Writing and the Piety of Broken Promises Francis J. Ambrosio

222

13

14

x

Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God: A Response John D. Caputo

253

Notes

271

Index

301

Contents

Acknowledgments

As editors of this volume, we are indebted to our colleagues, friends, and families. We are especially grateful to Worth Hawes, who helped us first to define our topic as a co-organizer of the conference at Vanderbilt University, ‘‘Styles of Piety.’’ We are also grateful to David Wood, who advised us on that initial project, and to the McVean Fund and the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department for supporting it. As this volume took shape, we refined our understanding of the topic in conversations with Vanderbilt colleagues, including Steve Bibro, Sarah Cunningham, Andy Fiala, Sebastian Lurie, Jim Mangiafico, Anne O’Byrne, Bob Richardson, and Scott Zeman. We appreciate the constructive, critical comments provided by Gregg M. Horowitz and David C. Hoy on our introductory chapter, the critique of the entire volume provided by an anonymous reviewer at Fordham University Press, and the supportive role played by John Caputo as series editor. Finally, we want to thank Jennifer Perfilio and Roxanna Sooudi for their companionship and loving support.

xi

Styles of Piety

Introduction S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler

Styles of Piety explores questions of value in light of the problem of nihilism articulated in Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God. With the accomplishment of a thoroughly rationalized world, the categories that had promised to give meaning to experience proved untenable. The problem of the irrational appeared to be immanent to reason rather than merely an aberration from its proper functions, the aspirations of philosophy appeared to be inherently contradictory, and its ideals seemed to harbor coercive deceptions and tyrannies. Nevertheless, philosophers since Nietzsche have continued to pursue questions of value; indeed, they have found new avenues to address the problems conventional to philosophy within this crisis itself by exploring the concrete conditions that qualify reason rather than dogmatically defending its pretense to self-transparency. Philosophy’s project has developed as a critical turn against its own abstract ideals. And yet, paradoxically, this immanent critique of philosophy simultaneously serves as a defense of the problems of value conventional to it. In this way, the problem of piety defines the fault line along which philosophers now tread. They work critically to deconstruct philosophy’s pieties, but in the name of those same values to which philosophers have been so devoted. ‘‘Piety’’ names both the dogmatism they seek to avoid and the spirit in which they continue to work. How, we ask, are these contradictions to be best negotiated?

1

The problem of style has developed as a correlate to the breakdown in the philosophical authority of reason. The subject has proven to be qualified in its functions by the heteronomous phenomena from which it previously sought to distinguish itself. Reason appears to be situated in the world and informed by the culturalhistorical conditions in which it develops. Truth appears to be qualified by what previously had been dismissed as mere rhetoric, and philosophers have been forced to acknowledge the performative aspects of their critical practices. ‘‘Style’’ names the dissolution of philosophy’s ideals in history, culture and language, and the plurality of possible approaches to experience (and possible truths) revealed by the contradictions in reason’s pretenses to universality. At the same time, style names the persistent attempt to give order to experience, to articulate meaning, and to express oneself. Along with its potentially subversive implications for philosophy, style also presents an attempt to maintain one’s sense of integrity. Style, one might say, has its pieties as well as its impieties. By gathering the essays in this volume around the theme ‘‘styles of piety,’’ we hope to help articulate the contradictions that both sustain and disrupt the practice of philosophy, while exploring questions concerning the genealogy of value that arise whenever philosophy finds itself confronted by its own historical, cultural, and linguistic artifices. Beginning Again: A Genealogy At the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God gave voice to the experience of nihilism that resonated throughout the modern world. The rationalization of modern life had resulted in the subjection of humankind to a world of its own creation. Rather than exalted as the expression of the sovereign subject’s free will, human action had been subordinated to abstract processes. Experience had been fragmented into incommensurate fields of expertise over which reason could no longer hope to claim mastery as a totality. In its overcoming of myth and tradition, reason appeared to be at odds with itself and to have lost its philosophical authority. While the Enlightenment’s faith in reason could no longer be maintained, the problems of value and the telos of human life nevertheless remained. What would give order and direction to life now that ‘‘all horizons had been wiped away?’’1 What would possibly reorient social action and critical reflection? What would become of 2

Introduction

the values that had thus far sustained human involvements? Or conversely, what would prevent the world from degenerating further into irrationality? With questions such as these, philosophers confronted the problem of value in spite of philosophy and its failure. The task of philosophy developed as a turn not only against earlier philosophies but also against the project of philosophy as a whole— and toward a genealogy of problems of value in the concrete conditions of human life and its contradictions. This turn against philosophy had been anticipated at the advent of the nineteenth century by Kant and Hegel, who questioned the limits of philosophical reason from the vantage points of science and history, respectively. Nevertheless, they both continued to presuppose reason’s autonomy. They had a faith in reason, which they displayed in the mythological figures of transcendental subjectivity and worldhistorical spirit that subtend their philosophies. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers had become disillusioned with such inflated ideals, and they began to call them into question by further examining the limits of reason in light of the concrete conditions of human life. Marx, for example, argued that philosophy both abstracts from and serves to deny the material conditions of social life. Contrary to Hegel, he argued that history is determined not by the unfolding of reason in the world, but rather by the material struggles of social classes, defined by their respective positions in the structure of the economy. Nietzsche similarly saw power struggles at work in the ideological regimes of religion and philosophy. He analyzed theoretical perspectives as expressions of will to power, qualified by the contingency and heteronomy of the conflicts from which they emerge despite their purported transcendent or transcendental standpoint. Kierkegaard declared the breakdown of reason an existential crisis, mourning the death of God like Nietzsche’s madman himself, and criticizing both Hegel’s historicism and nineteenth-century positivism as excessively rationalistic denials of the anxious conflicts that define our human condition. And, through his confrontation with the suffering of neurotics, Freud came to see the rational subject itself as an ideological construct resulting from the uncertain compromise between conflicting unconscious forces. With the advent of the twentieth century, the development of modern warfare turned the accomplishments of science and industry to the task of mass slaughter, and provided further evidence of the dangerous irrationality at the heart of a thoroughly rationalized Introduction

3

world. Whereas Husserl had developed the phenomenological method as a response primarily to epistemological deficiencies of positivistic philosophy, Heidegger defended it as providing a necessary response to a more profoundly existential crisis. Heidegger argued that, through the development of scientific rationality, modern civilization had lost its sense of philosophy’s governing question: the question of the meaning of being. According to Heidegger, the nihilism of the modern world resulted from the effacement of the ontological distinction between Being and beings. He argued that, because philosophy has consistently obscured the question of Being by explaining experience with recourse to a particular being, namely, nature, God, or the human individual, our sense of our place in the world has been denied its dynamism and singularity. The subject has been reduced to an anonymous ‘‘they-self’’2—the modern mass subject— instantiated ad nauseum as an empty cliche´. To restore the question of the meaning of being was, for Heidegger, to reclaim the burden of experience by bringing to light the anxiety of our limited condition and authentically confronting the being-toward-death through which all experience unfolds as time. In Marxism, the problem of nihilism also appeared in the divorce between philosophy and social theory, betrayed by the proletariat’s identification with and assimilation to the institutions of bourgeois society in the First World War. Marx’s philosophy of history appeared to be little more than a philosophical fantasy; social theory seemed to be limited to strictly quantitative analysis of the world as it happens to be. Against this bourgeois formalism, Luka´cs worked to restore the revolutionary directive in Marx’s philosophy of history by reestablishing the central role of ideology critique in social theory through the extension of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to an analysis of society as a totality—including the reifications of philosophy. According to Luka´cs, philosophical concepts function as instruments of class conflict: they must be dissolved in their abstraction, and this dissolution can occur only as they are realized through the struggles of revolutionary social praxis. Thus, in their writings of the 1920s and 1930s, Heidegger and Luka´cs recognize that self-consciousness and self-determination cannot be accepted as axioms, but must be dealt with, respectively, as existential and social-political matters. And yet, both thinkers presuppose the possibility of realizing such philosophical values. Following the Second World War, however, philosophers develop a still deeper cynicism. In response to the collapse of reason, postwar philosophers 4

Introduction

emphasize the failure of philosophy’s project and focus on the immanent contradictions that betray the irrationality in reason. Indeed, to speak of the autonomous subject after the experiences of genocide, total war, and atomic holocaust would seem to deny the contradictions engendered by the rationalization of the modern world. Rather than treating the subject as rationally self-determinant, postwar philosophers describe the subject as lost in anonymous, anarchic institutions of its own creation. They argue that rationalization of the modern world has subverted the fantasy of the unified subject that previously had provided coherence and direction to science. And they see social life as having taken on an empty, virtual quality, despite the concrete reality of its violence. Horkheimer and Adorno confront the irrationality of the modern world as a consequence of what they describe as the dialectic of enlightenment. The breakdown in reason, they contend, results from a pattern of blind domination in the development of the modern world, involving domination of nature by human beings, domination of nature within human beings, and domination of some human beings by others. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that, in the violence and repression of modern society, enlightenment rationality appears to be implicated in the mythical forms of tyranny that it worked to overcome. Enlightenment reason, they contend, is mythical fear radicalized. By tracing the origins of Enlightenment reason in mythology, they expose the ideological tendencies within the process of enlightenment and defend the contributions of myth and tradition from foreclosure by the disenchantment of scientific rationality. Nevertheless, they do not deny that these mythologies were themselves tyrannical. Foucault explains this displacement of the subject by arguing that modernization has been characterized not by the emergence of freedom as a correlate to the development of rational self-consciousness, but rather by a reconfiguration and refinement of the techniques of social organization and control. He argues that the rational subject is ultimately not a self-determining agent, but the instrument and effect of regulatory social processes that give shape to the world in which we live. The idea of the responsible subject itself, Foucault contends, serves as an instrument of constraint; and the sexuality that we take to be the seat of our desires is in fact ideological—a cultural product that organizes otherwise anarchic forces and practices as a matter of identity. We learn to desire, he argues, as we learn to think of ourselves as responsible subjects, through our incorporation into the disIntroduction

5

cursive regimes that sustain modern institutions and provide us with a sense of our place in the world. For Derrida, subjectivity appears in the midst of language. He contends that the subject develops through a reiteration of language that is not initially its own and over which it never gains mastery. As a result, what one says always means something more and something different than what one means to say. All sense and signification is, according to Derrida, corrupted by the particularities of the rhetorical form in which it is articulated. Meaning is plagued by what philosophers have conventionally treated as antithetical to it, or derivative of it. Derrida pursues these derivatives through the history of Western philosophy and literature; through his deconstructive readings, he works to reveal the violent denial of these differentials in the first principles of philosophy as a challenge to their hegemonic claim to universality. Deleuze and Butler have examined rationality in relationship to the body and raised questions concerning how the subject comes to appear, if not to be, autonomous. Still others like Levinas have adopted a religious attitude in their philosophical reflections celebrating the passion and play of images in religion as an obscenity in direct contrast to the sterile pieties of the Enlightenment. The social struggles against colonialism in the latter half of the twentieth century, along with the struggles of women and homosexuals for selfdefinition in society have further revealed the prejudicial overvaluation of a particular type of subject in the otherwise strictly formal universals of philosophy. And postcolonial, feminist, and queer theorists have explored the formal subject of Western philosophy as an instrument of racist, patriarchal, and heterosexual institutions that is constituted at the direct expense of precisely those marginal forms of life against which reason has historically defined itself. The Problem of Style Philosophers have come to see the subject as situated in the world and qualified by the cultural and historical conditions in which it develops. Theoretical praxis appears to be only one among many possible modes of engaging the world, with its claim to universality prejudicially privileging one form of life over others and defensively foreclosing diversity and conflict. Philosophy finds itself confronted by the power of affect, rhetoric, and prejudicial belief it had hoped to master, not simply as problems yet to be resolved, but as irreducible 6

Introduction

remainders integral to its own project. The purportedly autonomous subject appears to be implicated in and informed by forces of suggestion and social domination. Philosophy is compelled to pursue its own origins in the distortions of art, myth, and ritual; indeed, in the turn against metaphysics, philosophers from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida have affirmed this distortion as true to the human condition, and turned not only to literary and art criticism but also to employing aesthetic practices as philosophical practices—constructing texts poetically, graphically, and ritually. Contemporary philosophers have translated questions concerning the constitution of experience into aesthetic questions of style and, at times, into stylized performances of philosophy. Kant already acknowledges the importance of style when, in the Critique of Judgment, he builds the hinge that completes his philosophical system around the ‘‘common sense’’ revealed in the experience of the beautiful. Schelling, Schiller, and Hegel further explore the centrality of aesthetic problems to philosophy: Schelling with respect to the playful intermediation of subject and object, Schiller in view of the ‘‘Spieltrieb’’ through which education is accomplished as a sublimation of politics in aesthetics, and finally Hegel as the historical unfolding of spirit in the world. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, his critique of reason does not remain pure from the exigencies of history, but rather requires the reconstruction of reason’s development through various shapes of consciousness. For Hegel, reason is bound up with the form of life from which it emerges. The subject is world-historical and reason is understood as an expression of desire that suffers frustrations and defeats by virtue of the same concrete historical conditions that give rise to it. The Phenomenology itself reads like a bildungsroman. Theoretical positions enter and exit from the stages of history like dramatic characters in a play. And Hegel draws on Goethe as much as Kant, referring to literature and history as much as to philosophical concepts. Picking up on Hegel’s interest in Heraclitus, Nietzsche claimed that the universe can best be understood as a form of child’s play involving cycles of creation and destruction. Thus the eternal return of the same serves, on the one hand, as an existential reminder to affirm life and, on the other, as a disruption of the metaphysical tendency to assume that all appearances are causally derived from some anterior substance or idea. Nietzsche’s affirmation of superficiality over depth is evident from his early work on tragedy and in his lifeIntroduction

7

long insistence that the philosopher should be considered as an artist. His embrace of the surface of philosophical writing itself is evident in his poems, aphorisms and songs. Indeed, it was Nietzsche who claimed that the one thing needful in both philosophy and life was ‘‘to give style to one’s character.’’3 With this claim, he opened up the problem of style for philosophy in a post-metaphysical world. Kierkegaard’s Either/Or reads like modernist fiction more obviously than like a philosophical text. In it, he does not entertain theoretical positions as such but constructs a patchwork of points of view through stories, parables, sermons and novellas. By theatrically writing under multilayered pseudonyms, Kierkegaard plays with the constitution of identity and the authority of the subject as appearances, employing narrative and other literary forms to treat the subject as situated in the world and in relationship to others. For Kierkegaard, the problem of truth is a matter of passion rather than of logic. And he both reads and writes texts hermeneutically, as love letters rather than as statements of merely objective fact or principle. In the wake of the failures of both Enlightenment rationality and Marxist revolutionary social praxis, Adorno traces the residues of their utopian promises in modernist art. As he sees it, modernist art sustains the project of establishing humankind’s autonomy in the world even after that project has proven inherently self-contradictory. Whereas the philosophical overvaluation of natural scientific objectivity disavows the irrationality of modern life, Adorno argues that art reveals an eccentric capacity to articulate this irrationality by preserving rather than effacing the contradictions that plague the subject. Modernist art preserves the project of establishing humankind’s autonomy by articulating the material obstacles that immanently hinder it and ultimately render it impossible. As early as Being and Time, Heidegger cultivated a philosophical language of his own, presenting it as methodologically integral to the liberation of thought from the conventions of metaphysics. Reacting against the professionalized language of academic philosophy, he drew upon everyday words which he hoped might carry more direct significance and help to restore a sense of wonder—specifically concerning the meaning of Being. In his later work, Heidegger’s attempt to restore this question concerning the meaning of Being focused on critiquing the theory of truth as correspondence, which he argues has dominated philosophy since Plato, and thereby on unearthing a doctrine of truth as aletheia, or unconcealment. Heidegger contends that the correspondence theory posits a disjunction between subject 8

Introduction

and object that must then be hypothetically overcome by correct judgment. By contrast, truth as aletheia first concerns the revelation of the world as such—namely, the disclosure of beings in their Being. He further contends that the poetic aspect of language is integral to this revelation; only secondarily does language take the propositional form characteristic of philosophical argumentation. In this sense, Heidegger cultivates an explicitly poetic practice of philosophy, both by retrieving the originary meaning of Greek philosophical texts and by writing poems and presenting them alongside his prose texts. For his part, Derrida emphasizes the force of rhetoric in determining the sense of even propositional language in philosophy and literature. He deconstructs philosophical concepts by tracing the way in which the words philosophers use carry unanticipated meanings that contradict their truth claims. He argues that all experience is mediated by language and thus tainted by a degree of artifice that undermines the ideals of authenticity and self-presence conventional to philosophy. And in his own writing, he playfully experiments with rhetorical flourishes that at once enact the aporias he works to articulate and serve as hedges against the temptations of metaphysical thinking. For Deleuze, the question of style and performance is explored at the level both of the written text and of conceptual architecture or logic of sense. He has, for example, claimed that The Thousand Plateaus should be read as one listens to a record. His texts, particularly those he coauthored with Guattari, appear to involve deliberate experimentation with the rhetorical, presentational form of philosophy. At the same time, Deleuze is interested in the distinct and differential effects of concepts in what he refers to as the ‘‘smooth space of philosophy.’’ This spatialization of philosophy and its concepts is inspired by, if not directly extrapolated from, topology and systems theory. Thus Deleuze’s philosophy of science engages in serial explorations of different forms of thinking such as the fold, the rhizome, and the surface, rather than in an elaboration of a coherent, systematic vocabulary. With respect to the practical implications of this manner of philosophizing, Deleuze affirms Socrates’ injunction to ‘‘Do with me,’’ as opposed to ‘‘Do as I say,’’ and, in this way, he emphasizes the empirical intensity of experience, even as he continues to critique the self-sameness of the philosopher’s own identity. Although such stylistic efforts have been criticized as impious subversions of the philosophical tradition, we present them here as defenses of the problems conventional to philosophy in the wake of its Introduction

9

demise. What strategies remain for understanding and addressing the human condition? To what can philosophy appeal if not to the principles of self-reflection and self-determination? What values sustain and orient philosophical practice, and for whom? Might not philosophy still sustain a commitment to the values of the Enlightenment, if only implicitly? We also want to ask whether the critical force of continental philosophy’s impieties has not been taken for granted. Have its purported subversions become ossified as dogma? How do they function as ideologies? Does the rigorous insistence on the collapse of metaphysics render philosophy contradictory and pointless? To what pedagogy do philosophers aspire, if indeed they harbor cynicism about the value of self-reflection? What motivates the genealogical practice of Foucault’s antihumanist thought if not the relief of human suffering? Do the conclusions he draws from his genealogies not risk reifying modern institutions insofar as he ultimately declares the subject to be nothing more than their superficial effect? And how then does he account for his own critical perspective? In deconstruction, the persistent problem of value and its contradictions has recently appeared in a growing emphasis on religion in Derrida’s writings and the scholarship that surrounds it. Does this religiosity in deconstruction challenge the philosophical commitment to the purported universality of reason? Or does it betray an irrational commitment to an abstract principle of authority, an implicit deference to the status quo, despite Derrida’s deconstructions of the first principles of philosophy? If, as Horkheimer and Adorno contend, all rational synthesis is intrinsically violent, what possibilities remain for social praxis? Does the implication of reason in the violence of modern institutions leave critical theory with a choice between utter despair and the kind of reversion to neo-Kantian idealism that Habermas has pursued in his work? What aim do postcolonial, feminist, and queer theorists pursue in their critique of the prejudices implicit in rational objectivity if not to think about subjectivity differently and to decide more freely how to live and define oneself? And does this aim not betray a commitment to precisely the philosophical values that have otherwise proven suspect? Or can the values that once sustained philosophy nevertheless be defended without being hypostatized in theoretical abstractions that deny their own contradictions at the expense of human life? 10

Introduction

Practicing Philosophy The essays that follow have been collected under the heading ‘‘Styles of Piety’’ as responses to the paradoxical situation of contemporary thought. Attempts to address the persistent problem of value in experience are here taken up both as expressions of piety with respect to the problems conventional to philosophy—and as heretical encounters with the philosophical fantasies that have contributed to the nihilism of the modern world. The essays in this volume explore the confrontation between philosophy and its others, both as an instance of the dissolution of traditional concepts and as an occasion to rethink the problem of value in a post-metaphysical world. Alphonso Lingis begins part I, ‘‘The Persistent Problem of Value,’’ by challenging Hegel’s notion that the end of human life is the accomplishment of rational recognition, arguing rather that value appears in moments of rupture, when one finds oneself overcome by the suffering of the passions. Taking up the return of twentieth-century philosophers to the problem of God in light of Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, Kelly Oliver then examines the logics and contradictions at work in ethics and patriarchy through readings by Ricœur, Levinas, and Derrida of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.4 Through an analysis of Husserl, Derrida, and Levinas, Clark Buckner examines the fate of what Husserl describes as the persistent compulsion to do philosophy despite its failure to constitute itself as a rigorous science, and the problematic relationship between history, faith and affective need that this failure leaves in its wake. With The Velveteen Rabbit as his point of departure, Merold Westphal addresses the philosophical problem of becoming through an analysis of the religious significance that Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous personae give to the idea of style. Drawing diversely on science, poetry, and religion, Charles Scott concludes part I by exploring the role played by what he describes as ‘‘the enormity of our setting’’ in the constitution of humankind’s sense of its proper place in the world. In part II, ‘‘Philosophy and Its Fictions,’’ Matthew Statler returns, with Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Socrates, to the principle of noncontradiction, focusing on the practical question of how philosophy might perform the movement of becoming. Jason Winfree brings Kant into dialogue with Cormac McCarthy to address what Winfree sees as the violence intrinsic to the project of the Enlightenment and, with both Nietzsche and Foucault, rethinks the work of genealogy. Introduction

11

Tina Chanter and Micahel Naas close out part II with complementary essays on the relationship between philosophy, tragedy, and femininity through the filial piety of Antigone. Chanter analyzes Sarah Kofman’s response to Lacoue-Labarthe’s 1978 staging of the Antigone, while Naas examines Sophocles’ treatment of the hand as distinctively male or female, and its place between the state and divine law in the performance of social functions. In the third and final part of the volume, ‘‘Deconstruction and Religion,’’ John Caputo, David Wood, Edith Wyschogrod, and Frank Ambrosio engage in an extended discussion of the pieties of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. With Caputo’s The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida as their point of departure, these four thinkers examine what appears to be the essentially religious dimension of deconstruction, and consider the demand for deconstruction to sustain the value in human involvements after the end of metaphysics. Wood raises questions about autobiography and religious experience, Wyschogrod underscores the immanence of ethical obligations, and Ambrosio deals with self-presentation and resurrection in the work of Derrida and Dante. In closing, Caputo responds to his three collocutors and to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God by affirming philosophy as a practice of the question: ‘‘Of what do I dream, when I dream of my God?’’

12

Introduction

PART

The Persistent Problem of Value

I

1

Violations Alphonso Lingis

The Onus of Recognition How eccentric of Hegel to have imagined that when we go to encounter others, it is recognition we demand, recognition of the freedom and self-consciousness of the ego, confirmation, attestation, certification of our identity! Yet there are such encounters. ‘‘Last week you said you would . . .’’ ‘‘But you are now a mother . . .’’ ‘‘But you just said that . . .’’ ‘‘How is your dissertation coming along?’’ ‘‘You said you loved me . . .’’ Our interlocutor seeks coherence, a line of intelligibility in the phases and states of our duration. He and she seek to link up our past with the present, to know the future as that to which what we say now commits us. When we respond to these demands, our words are so many positions, postures we take before this witness. ‘‘Yes, last week I said I would, but here is what happened that made me realize we should not do that.’’ ‘‘Yes, I am now a mother, but that does not mean I am giving up my course work at the university.’’ ‘‘I said that, but what I meant was . . .’’ How burdensome, how tedious, how vacuous is all this identity, all this coherence to have to maintain, all this deployment of reciprocal recognition! In fact we get facetious. ‘‘Did I say I would last week? I forgot.’’ ‘‘Mother . . . Ma Spunky. Mamma Spunky, how 15

does that sound?’’ ‘‘Sure, I said I loved you, otherwise, you would not have written my term paper for me.’’

Understanding and Respect in Action Morality takes thought and action to be polarized by the notions of good and evil. It takes us to act in order to maintain, secure, or acquire what we take to be a good. Goods, as the goals and results of actions, are durable goods; they must at least endure the time it takes to reach or take possession of them. And they should contribute to the conservation and preservation of those who acquire them. Morality understands action to subordinate our forces to that good; the one who acts makes his or her organs and faculties serve. Every action narrows down and focuses our forces. The one who acts is not the whole psychophysical organism, but a specialized function of it. Morally good action designates the active respect for things, for ourselves, and for others. Respect is respect for the limits, the boundaries, the space of others, and thus of their natures. The violation of the existence and natures of things, of oneself, or of others is evil. To respect the good is to act to secure and conserve the nature of things that will serve to conserve the one who acquires them. Disrespect encroaches on the space of others, and alters or empties out their nature. Sometimes people seem to have found the formula early in life, and they apply it with equanimity until they die: they are genial, affable, helpful. Others find it is good sense: before any problem, their own or those of others, they appraise the issue, survey the alternatives, select the best one, do not worry over it if, as often happens, the best available decision did not work. Do not the majority of people with whom we converse fall into those categories—the kind ones and the sensible ones? Trivializing, leveling kindness, shallow, selfjustifying sensibleness.

The Transparency of Our Souls The use of language presupposes that we can recognize mental beings. The words are only sounds in the air unless we take them as uttered meaningfully by someone, just as marks on paper cease to be stains and marks on rocks cease to be the effects of erosion when we 16

Styles of Piety

take them to have been made by someone who intended to designate something to someone with them. Is not language itself the way we recognize the presence of mental beings? What proves to me that the figures I see in the street under my window are not hats and coats covering robots pushed by springs is that, taking the sounds they make to be intended as words, I find a coherent meaning in them. I verify it by asking the speaker if this is what he or she meant. For me, then, whatever utters a coherent set of words, and further sets of words coherent with that set, is someone with a mind like my own. But is it not in nonsense and indecency—in laughter and in erotic excitement—that we, rather than recognize, re-cognize, one another, find ourselves transparent to one another? And is it not this transparency that precedes the assumption in language that I am addressing someone with a mind like my own? We recognize whoever laughs as one like us—even if we do not see what he or she is laughing at, do not see what is funny. And we are drawn to anyone who laughs by a primary movement of sensibility. Human interattraction is not at bottom a fearful and cautious alliance for purposes of mutual defense and mutual cooperation. You are in an airport in Abu Dhabi, unable to leave the transit lounge, an American—when the television is showing the reports of Reagan’s bombing of Libya. You push to the back of the room and sit against the back wall, trying to be invisible. A mullah comes into the room, carrying a copy of the Koran and fingering his beads. He doesn’t see your leg stretched out on the floor, trips, catches hold of a bystander, but as he does so two bottles of Johnny Walker fall from his robes and smash on the floor, soaking you in an alcoholic puddle. Laughter breaks out, spreading wider as people get up to see what is going on. Laughter rises and falls and rises again as eyes meet eyes. The mullah himself and you are laughing when your eyes meet. In each individual, the laughter is now no longer pleasure over the unexpected, the incongruous, but pleasure over the boundaries, the clothing, the body armor of strangers in an airport being dissolved, pleasure over the evident pleasure of others. It makes the object or event that unleashed laughter slip out of attention, and sets into motion an intense human communication. If the mullah had tripped and smashed his smuggled Johnny Walkers in the toilet, he would not have laughed. Awkwardness is transformed into clowning, distress into exuberance, in the transparency of each to the others. And the gratuitous release of energy in Violations

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laughter gives even the mullah the sense of adolescent insouciance beyond what the bottles of Johnny Walker had promised. The energy of the laughter is felt by those who laugh as a surplus of energy that was in them despite the fatigue of the night, despite the new constraints of the international incident that will affect their lives and yours. We can feel and see all this surplus energy when, ten minutes later, the flight is announced and we all grab our bags and jump up with adolescent gusto. Erotic excitement arises by contact and spreads by contagion, making us transparent to one another. A bare-breasted woman is voluptuously dancing in the street in Salvador during Carnaval; we fix our fevered eyes on her and feel a current of complicity with the men and women about us, white or black, adolescent or aged. We find ourselves aroused by feeling the warm thigh of the dozing passenger next to us on the bus, as we are not aroused by the warm vinyl of the bus seat. During rush hour when we are standing in a packed subway car, we feel in a ripple of excitement someone’s fingers lightly brush the inside of our thigh. Whether we are male or female, we feel aroused when, leaning over a gable we see in the neighboring yard a woman sprawled on a towel spread over the summer grass, pleasuring herself. Whether we are straight or gay, we feel our penis pulsing when we look over some rocks in the summer beach and see a man writhing under a gleaming erection. In his White Book, Jean Cocteau drew a picture of an aroused penis and labeled it ‘‘The part of a man that never lies.’’ Whatever the educated, disciplined, decent mind may say, the penis stiffening, the labia and clitoris throbbing with blood and excitement and pleasure affirm, yes, I like that, yes, he or she is my kind, yes, I am attracted to him or her. Words deny and lie. Language is so essentially a power of contradiction that, instead of saying that language is the way we recognize mental beings, we are rather inclined to say that language is the way what others have in their minds can always be falsified. But we speak out of our complicity in laughter and sexual excitement, an interattraction in which we find ourselves transparent to one another. Our Sense of Separateness Language, where all the words are common words, is not a means for the ego to be recognized to be a pale of unity and also uniqueness, is not a means for our peculiar identity to be confirmed, attested, and certified. It is in tears, and in passionate rejection that we experience 18

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our separation from the others. But tears and passionate rejection do not bring forth some positive traits that make me appear to myself to be distinctive and distinct. When my home burns, when I lose my job, when I discover that the investment scheme in which I put all my savings is a swindle, my desolation, finding expression in tears, contains the sense of the extreme difficulty of replacing these things. How immediately the others understand those tears and, with them, all the significance my perhaps ordinary house had for me! But when, at the limit of frustration over finding myself unable to get anyone else—my family, my friends, my therapist—to see my point of view, to feel the gloom of my depression or the edge of my exasperation, even though I am using common words which everybody understands, I break down in tears, these tears affirm not the unique traits by which I am positively distinct from all others, but how incomprehensible to me it is that what I feel is incomprehensible to others. Is it in passion, rather than discourse, that we demand to be separated, distinct, and distinctive? Out of the uniformly clothed crowds, I single out one person in an extreme and obsessive attachment and in a longing that she or he love me. In denuding ourselves before one another, we take off the uniforms, the categories, the endurance, the reasons, and the functions with which our existence had been clothed. I denude myself before her or him, as she or he before me, and expose to her or him all the singularity of my frame, my pitted, birthmarked, and scarred skin, as so many signs of the singularity and irreplaceability of my existence. Passion pursues the denuding inward. Our sense of ourselves, our self-respect shaped in fulfilling a function in the machinic and social environment, our dignity maintained in multiple confrontations, collaborations, and demands, dissolve, the ego loses its focus as center of evaluations, decisions, and initiatives. That denuded me to which another devotes so excessive and exclusive an attachment, slips wholly out of my focus. The response the other brings to my passion is there, is true, but is ungraspable. If I draw something out of our exposedness to one another—if, for example, I take from it a sense of my reality and my worth, to retain that and hold on to it when we part—this sense of my reality and worth becomes laughable. How ridiculous is the man who would say: ‘‘Well, she gave me proof that I am the most important man in the world!’’ That what was at stake is unidentifiable, ungraspable, we realize when the intimacy of our communication is broken—by death, sepaViolations

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ration, or misunderstanding. The break is not identified conceptually, but in sobbing: inarticulate cries of anguish return to, retain, hold on to the moment when the communication broke and what it awaited never arrived. In sobbing, I realize that what I have lost, by this death, separation, or misunderstanding, is not something we had. For what we had in common or were building in common is still there. The present sense of desolation I feel is that something utterly indeterminate has now vanished; something our weeks, months, years together had not yet made real; something foresight, planning, projects did not outline and make clear—what passion divined only as an abyss of chance and luck. In fact, that temptation, to see in the extreme and obsessive attachment of the other to me evidence of my exceptional reality and worth—does it not spring from the fact that I had not been able to justify them to myself by the positive traits I had seen in myself? The arbitrary element in that extreme and obsessive attachment can only give me the notion that someone else, perhaps many others, could also see and prize my improbable and ungraspable separateness. And then, one day, what this notion made me fear comes about: she or he leaves me for someone else or, while not ceasing to love me as intensely, also loves another. What does that one have that I do not have? I ask in misery. But I also feel that whether that one has more, or less, than what I have, am, and give to my lover, that one is still about, and I cannot fully substitute myself in my lover’s eyes for that other one. The sense of having a distinct and distinctive existence can be precarious; it can be illusory, as illusory as the passion another seems to have for that existence. I consolidate and promote my separate existence at the expense of others. The very sense of having a separate existence can be malevolent and pernicious. The sense of having a separate existence, throbbing in tears and erotic rejection, cannot take being an improbable and irreplaceable I to be a good—still less, to be the fundamental good that I seek in discourse and in passion. I am attached to it, but would I be if I were not certain that I could just as well laugh at it? We laugh at ‘‘Freudian slips’’ when someone utters something he or she had no intention of uttering; we are sure that what came out is what that someone really thinks or feels. We laugh at a kitten falling over itself in playing with a ball; we feel that we have just gotten a glimpse into the real nature of a young animal, of this young animal. We laugh at other people, whose oafish or obese bodies are ri20

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diculous, whose lives one cannot take seriously, whose jobs or careers are a joke, who were conceived out of spite and who died in some screwup of the machinery, of nature, or of their own program for living on. However miserable I am when my lover has left me for someone else, I cannot not sense that the feeling that there was something uniquely in me that deserved so extreme and exclusive an attachment was laughable. What else can we do, do we do, but laugh, when we face the improbability of our birth, the ludicrously squalid death we are heading for, the filthy corpse our vaunted and incomparable existence is going to turn into? This laughter at the I, at the demand the I makes, laughter over one’s birth, over one’s death need not be ironic or bitter. It can be as light as the laughter with which we greet the fanciful anatomy of a praying mantis or dragon pipefish, the pompous assertiveness of a bumblebee, the birth of a baby crocodile. Looking at oneself while laughing turns into an erotic relationship. How one is lustfully drawn to one’s own mouth that, in the mirror, one sees shaking wide open, exposing the wet and lascivious tongue! One stands in front of the mirror looking at one’s legs shaking, one’s belly rolling in peals of laughter, and unable to stop oneself, one strokes that belly, runs one’s hands up between one’s thighs, falls back upon the bed. It is not socially approved. But the reason they fix mirrors on the ceilings and on the walls around the bed in bordellos is so that one will be able to see the awkward, unmanageable contortions and flailings of one’s body and not be able not to laugh, and it is this, and not the simple sight of one’s genitals, that will hurl one hopelessly into the throes of orgasm. And is it not by not taking ourselves seriously that we enter into conversation?

Universal Humanity as the Telos of Rational Practice Reason, the establishment of coherence and consistency, is serious, is seriousness itself. Edmund Husserl argued that reason makes us enter into conversation, and remain in conversation with anyone and everyone. Species interattraction depends on the development of the Esperanto of reason. We recognize as another human someone with whom we can speak; those whose tongue we do not or cannot learn are babblers and barbarians. But speaking with someone whose tongue we do unViolations

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derstand comes to an end when that someone makes truth claims based on his or her tribal ruler, ancestor, or deity. Something new dawned in the history of the human species, Husserl wrote, when men in Athens, called philosophers, conversing with foreigners, began giving reasons for the ways of Athenians. Until then to the questions of foreigners—‘‘Why do you think as you do, do as you do?’’—the answers had been, ‘‘Because our fathers, who founded our clan, nation, city, have taught us to do thus.’’ ‘‘Because our gods have said this.’’ The men called ‘‘philosophers’’ set out to give answers that those who did not have these ancestors, did not have the totem gods of the Athenians, could accept, reasons that just anyone, anywhere, with insight could accept. It is the practice of giving, and demanding, reasons, reasons that anyone with insight could acknowledge, that breaks through the particularities of languages, traditions, and customs that not only shape the way what we know is formulated, but shape our very perception of things. This new discourse, rational discourse, gives reasons for each of its assertions and submits each of its reasons to contestation. It takes just anyone endowed with insight as its judge. It invokes, Husserl said, the idea of humanity—universal humanity, rational humanity. But as scientific discourse extends ever further the range of things for which it supplies reasons, the reasons supporting assertions about microscopic and macroscopic fields become ever more complex, and a proportionally ever smaller part of it exists in the discourse of any scientist or man in the street. We call ourselves ‘‘rational’’ when we can justify a small part of our discourse with reasons, but those reasons are reasons only because they can be justified by verified observations, laws, and theories that we believe others could supply. Our rationality functions to castigate as backwardness, religious fanaticism, and superstition the discourse of others we intuitively sense to be at variance with that small part of our discourse we can justify with reasons—reasons whose justification we take on faith. Our rationality functions to invoke the notion of universal rational humanity only to exclude our interlocutor from it. The Primary Language of Conversation It is with horseplay or farcical comment on their looks or on our own activity they interrupt that we greet friends, plumbers, or fathers-inlaw. When we encounter Jamaican reggae musicians, Brazilian capoeira fighters, Haitian practitioners of voodoo, or specialists in some 22

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sector of our Western mythology of reason, the first thing we do is use language to unleash a laugh. Words have valences and extend lines of expectation. A speaker begins with a particle, or an adjective, or a title, which makes the listener expect a certain kind of noun or name, which has a valence for certain kinds of adjectives and verbs. As the speaker utters one word after another, he or she extends a narrow and more precise line of cohesion and coherence. Then, instead of the expected concluding phrase of the sentence, words from a different line, a different context, a different rhetoric, are switched in, or else the sentence breaks off in stuttering or silence. The line of coherence is abruptly broken, the expected future vanished. The momentary skid into the abyss of meaninglessness is intensely pleasurable. This moment when the subjugation of each moment to the next is broken stands forth as sovereign. The voice breaks into peals of laughter, which hold on to and reinstate just this moment. When we get together, it is to laugh together, to radiate the vibrancy of our excess vitality on all the unadapted, unworkable, absurd, and unpredictable events the prestidigitation of nature scatters about us. We use words to get to laughter, and laughter generates words, words that set forth and share—consecrate—the things that left us abashed, disconcerted, disheveled, the events that did not enlighten but delighted us. Philosophy misses this use of words when it envisions words as discriminators, functioning negatively to delimit and contrast. Language, like everything real, is based on positive entities, the positive, positing words that illuminate and consecrate. These words do not simply isolate entities by contrast and delimitation; they pick up the radiance of passing strangers, birds, trees, cars, landscapes, and intone that radiance in their sonority. Their rays of allusion, their inner pacing and resonance enshrine the languid and gentle summer landscape, the secretive and melancholy medieval town, the vast desert under sheltering evening skies. How transparent we are to one another in laughter, and how understandable to one another are our tears! When we get together it is also to share one another’s sorrow. Mourning is not a way our psyche, unable to confront the loss of a lover or the death of a friend, closes in on itself to conserve that lost one in our memories. For most of us, we first mourned, in childhood, a squirrel or a bird we came upon dead on a wooded path and of which we had no memory. The Violations

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grief and weeping open on the void left by that loss or that death. How transparent is that void to the compassionate eyes of others! As we advance in life and adulthood, we shall weep over the loss of lovers and the death of friends. We shall also grieve over gifted young people we never met who are struck down in accidents or in crippling diseases; we shall grieve over young and old heroes in remote lands who arise from nowhere and are struck down in noble and lost causes. It is indeed in the grief over these heroes and heroines that we shall weep over the loss and death of those we have known and do know. As laughter generates words, words that consecrate, words of blessing, weeping generates words, words of imprecation, words that accurse the human and cosmic villainy. It is not, then, in a discourse that demands and gives reasons for what we saw and did and reasons for those reasons that we recognize our common humanity. If we begin to speak to someone, it is because first we recognize him or her as one with whom we could laugh together and grieve together. Prior to the speech that is informative and imperative, the speech that directs and orders, there is the speech that articulates for those who were not there and articulates further for those who were what we laugh and weep over, what we bless and curse. Our speech is polarized by the grand things, the blessed events, that come as surprises and accidents from the outside, and by the sinister things. Laughter and tears, blessing and cursing give birth to the primary operative words of language—the value terms. Great, beautiful, strong, healthy, delicious, wild—all our conversations—weave about such words. The value terms are not labels, which record observations, or gauge gradations and comparisons. They find their meaning not in comparative sentences, but in exclamations: ‘‘How healthy I am!’’ ‘‘How strong I am!’’ ‘‘How happy I am!’’ ‘‘How beautiful I am!’’ ‘‘How good it is to be alive!’’ One says that because one feels it, and by saying it one feels still better. There are people who have no positive notion of health, for whom health is only the absence of illness, and who can apply it to themselves only after the annual checkup when the doctor has reported that no foreign organisms have been detected proliferating within them and all the vital functions have tested to be within the statistically average range. There are people for whom health has a dense and radiant meaning, for whom it is the sovereign value—men dancing up the steps from the gym after a workout to muscle exhaustion, women setting out on 24

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their vacation to trek through the Andes, adolescent boys on Patagonian ranches breaking the young bulls for rodeo. The value terms are not forms that inform and classify, but forces: the beautiful words make radiant the one to whom they are said and make gracious the one who says them, the noble words ennoble, the healthy words vitalize, the strong words invigorate; the ugly words sully, the servile words debase those to whom they are spoken, but also those who speak them, the weak words enervate and enfeeble, the sick words contaminate. They do not consolidate our superabundant energies within us, but concentrate them to channel them outward in the hands made for blessing and the cursings that come from the heart. Saying, ‘‘How happy I am!’’ we leave the house to leave our happiness on passersby hailed, on the trees and the clouds, in flowers left on the Formica desks of offices. Is it not because we recognize someone as one with whom we could laugh together and grieve together—because we begin speaking of that for which we have no reason—that we believe the reasons we find or construct will be recognizable by all those with whom we speak? Walls of Respect Respect for the other, for the sincerity, honesty, and integrity of the other, is said to be essential in the practice of discourse. There is no conversation, it is alleged, unless we not only take what the other says to express the integral application of the other’s sensory and mental powers to what he or she has seen and experienced, but also unless we try to see what is true in what the other says. Even without abandoning our liberal concern with the plight of unwed mothers and sick immigrants, we must try to see the valid point the conservative is making. It would seem that respect that initiates conversation is real only at the far end of conversation, when I not only have come to understand the informative content of what he or she has said, but also have come to understand where the speaker was coming from and where he or she stood when formulating it. By an extension of this model of conversation, as moral and altruistic, one constructs a moral interpretation of sexual intercourse. Violence and pain must be excluded. A force hurled at one becomes violence only when it violates our inner space, when it violates our integrity and what we call our ‘‘person.’’ We respect the physical integrity of another by respecting her or his person, and we do so by Violations

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respecting what that other says. If the other says she or he does not want to do it now, or does not want to do this act, these words, taken to be sincere, honest, and truthful, have to be respected in how we act. What is awkward in this morality is that we ourselves, in conversation, do not want to be treated this moral way. We went to Tibet and were deeply troubled. We had gone to expose ourselves to be blown away. Our head is still spinning, and we meet some stranger, a man who, we hope, was there longer and saw more deeply than we did. ‘‘I went to the Potala, to the gompas,’’ we tell him, ‘‘and I walked through room after room crammed with huge gold- and jewelencrusted statues almost all alike, down corridor after corridor frescoed with intricate paintings of religious scenes that duplicated one another endlessly. I saw stupas covered with two tons of gold, I saw thousands of scroll paintings. This is supposed to be Buddhism, which teaches that everything we can see and touch is illusory, and teaches that desire for such things is suffering, and that blessedness comes through a complete liberation from attachment not only to all things we can see and touch but also to this world and this life itself! I felt like Jan Hus in the palaces of the Vatican.’’ If our interlocutor takes it to be paramount to show respect for our honesty and sincerity, takes what we say to contain a truth, then the conversation is nothing to us. What we are on the lookout for is someone who can contest not only what we say but also what we saw and felt and experienced. Who can show us a totally different way to look at the wealth, the superfluous, unproductive art treasures of the monasteries, and the life of professed Buddhists. Who can show us the stupidity in our thinking, who can send us back to really look. If we don’t find such a one in person, we look for him or her in the books about Tibet we search for and read. We may come upon another, a man who does not simply expose to us our obtuseness and stupidity and send us back to the monastery to look again, but exposes also his own mortifications, humiliations, and wounds. Who shows us that after a year, after ten years in a monastery, the sumptuous, extravagant art treasures of the monastery leave him devastated, emptied. The divestment, deprivation, and abnegation of the monks, now that he has tried to join them, to measure his strengths and determination against theirs, leave him abashed, mystified. When we meet such a person, perhaps the conversation does not serve us, is not useful to communicating more intensely with Tibet and its monasteries. But the conversation, where 26

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each does not recognize himself in what he is saying, is a summit, a vertigo, and a black hole of intensity. And what else is erotic craving but a craving to be violated? In voluptuous turmoil, we are not simply left wounded, but shattered. The violent emotions that are aroused, that sense the obscenity in anguish, that push on into it in a momentum that can no longer derail or control itself, sense also the exultation of risking ourselves, of plunging into the danger zone, of expenditure of all our forces at a loss. Violations To enter into contact with someone is not to conceptually grasp that someone’s identity and respect his or her boundaries and inner space. We greet someone with ‘‘Hey, man!’’ The vibrant tone of those words hails in that individual a man, not a child or a mere student or a servile waiter. We address and answer someone in his or her words and forms of speech. We pick up on the tone of the one who addresses us, whose voice resounds in our own. We pick up on the urgent, frantic, panicky, exultant, or astonished tone. To answer the frenetic tone of a young person with the stentorian tone of officious and sedentary life is, before we refuse to understand really what he or she will tell us, to refuse his or her tone—to refuse him or her. The tone of the one who addresses us does not respect, but pervades our inner space. The sounds of that other are in me now, my body has become his or hers. Inhaling and exhaling the air, the subtlety of pheromones, exchanging the denseness of hormonal rhythms, my breath and that other’s commingle in the atmosphere about us. When we attend to someone who greets us, it is not to require confirmation, attestation, certification of our identity. To respond to someone who greets us is to drop our own concerns and thoughts, and expose ourselves to him. It is to expose ourselves to contestation and judgment. Already to respond to her greeting is to recognize her rights over us. Each time we enter into conversation we expose ourselves to be altered or emptied out, emptied of our convictions, our expectations, our memories. That is why so often the most moving, the most unforgettable conversations we have are with strangers, people from another land, another age, whom we have never seen before and will never see again. We seek communication with strangers, with those most unlike ourselves; our most important conversations are with prostitutes, crimiViolations

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nals, gravediggers; we seek to be freed from the carapace of ourselves. Truth and Thought How reckless and violent is the compulsion to open our eyes and face what happens, what is! Philosophers have described truth seeking as a breaking into, a taking apart of things, a violation of all the taboos with which ancient reverence had surrounded them. But to seek contact with reality is to expose ourselves to being not only resisted by the hard edges of things but also pained and exhausted by them. We would not know what happens if we did not know extreme pleasure, if we did not know extreme pain! It is because we sensed that the only way to know what we were capable of, what we cared about, what we feared, was to plunge into insecurity, loneliness, hunger, and cold that we left home to hitchhike across the country. Whenever someone asks us, why do you go live in such wretched places— Haiti, Bolivia, Salvador, Brazil, Zaire, Bangladesh—places whose culture is in ruins, whose people are destitute, diseased, and despairing? we realize that it is because just staying in the safe and comfortable places, at home or in the developed countries, is to skim over reality. Thought is driven by an excessive compulsion, and is itself an excess over and beyond perception. Thought is seeing what exceeds the possibility of seeing, what is intolerable to see, what exceeds the possibility of thinking. ‘‘Just as an emotion grows and swells unto the irresistible moment when it breaks into sobbing,’’ Georges Bataille wrote, ‘‘the fullness of thought bears it on to the point when it becomes a whistling in the winds that beat down upon it.’’1 We push ever further into the maelstrom of ignorance. We cease to believe in God, not believing in ourselves. We anticipate the coming consignment of all the psychology and economics and physics of today to the merely literary status that the science of the Middle Ages has for us. We anticipate the coming consignment of all we know to ignorance and superstition. The People We Talk About We seek truth in conversations. For truth begins in conversations, shared laughter, friendship, and eroticism. But the other is not just another perspective, another point of view, a bearer of other data. How reckless and violent is the will to open our eyes and face what 28

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happens, what is among those others! We would not know what happens among them, if, exposing ourselves to them, we did not know extreme pleasure, if we did not know extreme pain! The curve of a cheek or breast or torso, the robust harmony of the salient muscles, the richness of a complexion, the splendor of a mane of hair draw our eyes irresistibly to policewoman as to an idler, to the street kid knifed and being laid on a stretcher as to the paramedics laying him out. Philosophers and thinkers concerned with how people interact and with how people could best interact have ended up sensing an opposition between the ethical and the aesthetic. We are timid about going up to people who are strikingly handsome to ask for assistance or to offer our friendship, sensing that their awareness of their physical splendor will make it impossible for them to look upon our bodies without some level of distaste and disdain. We sense that people of striking physical beauty, peacocks among us poultry, are not the people we should marry, who will be devoted to raising our children, are not the people with the most insight when we want to discuss our problems, are not going to be the best amateur or professional sociologists or mathematicians or theologians, are not the best people to hire to get the job done. Yet we cannot keep our eyes off them. We cannot stop dreaming of them. Health, not the mere absence of deformity and disease, but the evidence of a biological superabundance overflowing the discipline and training that restrains our forces, fascinates us. Our looks are vitalized by the hale and hearty look on laborers who after a full day of grueling toil run off in boisterous horseplay to games in dusty fields in the dark. Serene and assured in the vigor of our fitness and well-being, we are nonetheless spellbound to watch from our hotel window in Rio de Janeiro the electric storm pounding the stranded cars and flooded streets of the city, and below us, on the stormy beach, strobe-lit by the lightning, teams of Brazilian street kids shouting hits and misses in a game of beach volleyball. Beyond the health that we perceive in smooth and effective biological operations and applied work, we catch sight of a health beyond health, triumphant in the number and quantity of onslaughts, contaminations, and corruptions it passes through, admits into itself, and overcomes. Such is the health of vultures and condors. Such is the preposterous health of the young woman come back from trekking the length of Tibet, the brazen health of the young couple who climbed on bicycles at the Arctic Ocean, and now, a year later, we meet in Tierra del Fuego. Violations

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There is also a tropical vigor of the mind that fascinates us. This fascination is different from the assurance and pleasure we find in witnessing the competence, the mastery of the details of the situation, the calm working out of the solution that we admire in a police officer, a doctor, or an administrator in a department of public works. There is a kind of mind that fascinates us even when running on idle. We perceive a superabundant energy in that mind, which contemplates depravities without flinching, without being contaminated, that rises over them with banter, wisecracks, and laughter. It is the health of mind of the whorehouse madam who has seen everything, believes nothing and no one, and still has a heart of gold and the good sense that the social workers and psychotherapists into whose hands her cronies fall from time to time do not have. It is the health of mind of the cop who grew up in this neighborhood and who knows all the schemes and scams, betrayals and self-deceits of the punks, junkies, dealers, petty and major racketeers of the neighborhood, but still enjoys no one’s company more than theirs in those disreputable bars and stores that are fronts. We are fascinated by youth. Youth is insolent, impetuous, brash. Without cocky impulsiveness, youth is merely impotence. We are delighted by the shameless old woman who spends her widowhood indulging every whim and pleasure, and when she dies, the family attorney discovers that she had just spent the last franc of her husband’s savings and investments. Someone who buys up rubies, Persian rugs, old masters, and insures them or puts them in a bank vault as an investment, is scandalously abusing them. The production of luxury objects is destructive of labor that could have been devoted to something useful. Anyone who destroys his wealth, pouring out champagne like water to his visitors or filling the bathtub with it for a woman he has picked up for an overnight stand in a city he is visiting for a convention, understands luxury products. A man who works hard and uses his wealth to purchase jewelry to adorn himself with, suits tailored in London and shoes hand-made in Rome, and a hundred-thousand-dollar sports car which he drives cautiously and keeps in meticulous repair will be viewed by everybody as a poor jerk who has a great deal of pathetic needs. He will be honored as lucky and sovereign if he takes off his gold chain and puts it around the neck of a waitress at a truck stop, if he drives his sports car at reckless speeds and can honestly boast one day of driving it into the river. 30

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Years after their downfall, tyrants such as Somoza, Marcos, Pinochet are revered and regretted by a third of the populace. We are also reassured by every David who stands before a Goliath, whether his stone fells or misses him. But the power consolidated in a ruler or in a rebel does not mesmerize us, as does the power that exposes itself needlessly to the unforgiving strokes of fate, the fatalities of chance. These are games in which what one loses, if one loses, is completely disproportionate to what one wins, if one wins. One stands to lose everything. The courage that we count on to maintain the corridors, gates, and turnstiles of the social arena fades before the blazing glory of the bravado that defies, provokes, and challenges death in a gratuitous and unrepeatable game. Is it not the intrinsic glory attached to bravado that accounts for the fact that if we find out that someone we know really has never lied, never cheated on a lover, never duped or taken advantage of a friend, never gotten totally wasted, never threw away a fistful of hard-earned money, never made a fool of him- or herself in loving someone who was only toying with him or her, we feel a kind of indifference and even disdain for that person. We watch, fascinated, a helicopter rescue operation, a mountaineer scaling a vertical cliff, a pair of martial artists performing actions intricate, skillful, and effective. But nothing so mesmerizes us as erotic activities. A woman bursting with erotic pride and decorated with brazen ostentation, pumping her way down the corridor of a hospital draws our eyes away from the meritorious and medically effective things the nurses and doctors are doing. Not only our late capitalist, but every civilization has shamelessly pursued a double standard, honoring with their right hand with medals, parades, and statues women who have selflessly waged superhuman struggles to save their children from hard times or crack gangsters, who have saved the neighborhood from developers and the environment from nuclear pollutants, and also honoring with their left hand cabaret performers, vixens over whom diplomats and heads of state lost their heads, gypsies whose fickle hearts could not sustain a love more than six weeks and for whom an endless succession of men left their wives and children. Nothing a male does—a window washer in the wind sixty floors over the street, a fireman climbing a ladder to rescue an invalid from a blazing building, a champion boxer—so fevers the mind as a male flaunting all his virile voluptuousness. The corrida, where the bullfighter, his supple slender body poised like a dancer, his genitals flaunted in the jeweled splendor of his skintight garb, Violations

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provocatively exposed to the horns of the ferocious black bull, is the supreme theater for the glorification of the erotic virility. These are the people we talk about when we get together. They are the people we talk to when we get together. In speaking of the brash youth with his father, we call forth the brash youth in him; in speaking with our suburban neighbors of the vixen performer we saw in the nightclub on our women’s night out, we call forth the glamorous and seductive woman in them. We would never think of speaking with Victoria de los Angelos or Nestor Cerpa Cartolini, the young woman who trekked the length of Tibet or the guy who drove his Alfa-Romeo into the river—we would never think of speaking with them in order to get recognition of the freedom and self-consciousness of our ego, confirmation, attestation, certification of our identity. Nietzsche wrote that whenever one does a good deed, one should take a stick and thrash a bystander, to muddle his memory. Then one should take that stick and thrash one’s own head, to muddle one’s own memory. Should we happen upon one of those people we talk about, we would thrash our heads, to muddle our self-consciousness and memory. Only a street kid dared to go talk with Edson Cordeiro; only an old peasant woman dared to speak with Subcommandante Marcos. To speak with them really we would have be impetuous as youth, insolent and shameless as the old woman who has decided that at her age she can do what she likes. For we know that, were we to venture to go speak with them, we would suffer our ego, our identity to be rent, seen through, seen as laughable. To effectively communicate with those who fascinate us is to break through their integrity, their natures, their independence, their autonomy—to wound them. Communication through these breaches in our and the other’s psychophysical integrity turns in a vertigo, independent of the consequences. Communication is not itself a ‘‘good.’’ It excludes any concern for the time to come. It excludes any concern for our interests. Thus we are drawn to all who suffer. The Pain We Seek In a small town in France, a poor worker returns at the end of a week bringing home his pay in banknotes. A boy a few years of age sees the bills, plays with them and throws them in the fire. The father sees this only when the flames leap high on the stove; his mind bursts into flames, he takes hold of an axe and in one 32

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swing cuts off the boy’s two hands. The mother was bathing their little girl in the next room. She hears the uproar, enters the room, falls at the sight, and is dead. The little girl is drowned in the bath. Having abruptly gone mad, the father runs away, and wanders deranged in the hills. —Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

It’s a news item from the newspaper. In bald sentences, what it says is at the limits of the endurable. To read it is to be shocked, paralyzed, lacerated. There are two states of mind in which this kind of report can obsess us. The one is when we are so full of resentment and hatred for someone or for a whole situation we find ourselves in that we identify with a criminal who seizes an ax and flails at whoever is at hand or takes a gun and shoots at random. But this is not the kind of report that is likely to catch the eye of someone seething with impotent rage. Because it is, like Shakespeare’s King Lear or Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, a story of extreme and tragic love. His tears are transparent to us. We read this brief report with agonizing compassion—it seems to us that no one has ever suffered more than this man. No suffering is more terrible than the suffering of one who has caused the one he loves to suffer, and even to die. We cannot think of it without filling up with an almost unbearable inner suffering ourselves. But something in us makes us want to stay with this horrifying event, torment ourselves with it. We have also known loves that died, and in which we hurt the one we loved. We also have felt miserable, seeing that we were hurting the one we loved. We also broke up, and went away. But after a while we found we were consoling ourselves with other people, seeking to be stroked by friends who liked us, and soon no longer thought about the tears of the lover we had separated from. Before long, we felt bad about that: we realized that we never did love her or him very much, after all, since we were able so soon to forget all the pain we caused her or him. There is a kind of envy for Bataille’s poor worker that we feel, a confused and excruciating envy. We cannot but envy the evidence of real love, the passion that cannot live without the beloved, and would drive one over the brink of madness if one hurt the beloved. When the strength in life draws us to this man, the intense compassion we feel for him opens a lacerating wound in us. We risk being transported further, beyond that point where there are no longer any fixed Violations

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points, into the night of despair and committed to this lethargy and this destiny. Our passionate communication with this man with whom we can make no contact, whom we know about only from a few words in a newspaper, is not a ‘‘good.’’ It smothers any concern for the time to come, smothers any concern for our, or his, interests. Drawn in anguish to this poor worker, we traverse a depth of darkness and the depth of darkness traverses us.

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2

Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics Kelly Oliver

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes Judeo-Christian morality as a result of the resentment of the weak who affirm themselves only by hating others: ‘‘Slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside,’ what is ‘different,’ what is ‘not itself.’ ’’1 God in all His forms and the pious adherence to religion, philosophy, or science are the creations of weak wills who need something transcendent in order to justify and redeem earthly life. The master morality, on the other hand, is not so much the affirmation of difference or an embrace of others as a noble indifference to what is outside, different, not itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche mourns the death of God as the end of security and a stable horizon, but he also celebrates the death of God as the beginning of the power of humans and the value of earthly life. At the end of the twentieth century, our earthly life is in fact threatened by our power to destroy as well as create life. As we harness the power of the earth, we can both destroy the world and all of its inhabitants and create and populate the world with designer life-forms. Technological advances make the slave morality’s no to what is not itself into the threat of the literal annihilation of entire civilizations. Thus, at the end of the twentieth century, ethAn earlier version of this essay was published in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 45–58. 35

ics takes us face to face with the other. Noble indifference is no longer possible. Looking for an ethics of what is outside, different, not ourselves, we insist on the piety of the other, or at least on the divinity or wonder of the encounter with an other. We try to imagine piety without pity.2 God, dead as the source of truth, beauty, and knowledge—dead as the One—has been resurrected as the wholly other—reborn as ultimate difference. Here, we will look at three tales of ethics that return to God in order to attempt to overcome the slave morality’s need to annihilate difference. In each of these three texts, ethics is framed by fatherson relationships, most strikingly the relationship between God and Christ and the relationship between God and Abraham. Ethics and fatherhood are wed in Paul Ricœur’s Conflict of Interpretations, Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, and Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death. Both Ricœur and Levinas reject the Freudian/Lacanian association between father and law, and instead associate fatherhood with promise. For Ricœur, fatherhood promises equality through contracts, while for Levinas, fatherhood promises singularity beyond the law. The tension between equality and singularity, between law and something beyond the law, is what is at stake in Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which describes ethics as a paradox between the universal and the individual, between equality and singularity. Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis is the centerpiece of Derrida’s analysis. If we read The Gift of Death, with its focus on this story of a father and son in relation to Ricœur and Levinas on the question of fatherhood it reads as the culmination of a dialectical tension between the two. And if we read the Abraham story as a legend about father-son relations rather than just a parable of faith, The Gift of Death appears to uncover not just the paradoxical logic of ethics but also the uncompromising logic of patriarchy and paternal authority. Paternity Begets Fraternity In ‘‘Fatherhood: From Phantasm to Symbol,’’ Ricœur describes fatherhood as a battle of wills struggling for recognition. He brings together the perspectives of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and religion to rearticulate the Oedipal situation as a process of recognition (rather than a structure) that moves from the father as phantasm to the father as symbol and replaces images of real murder with sym36

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bolic sacrifice. Through his dialectical analysis, Ricœur himself attempts to articulate a recognition of fatherhood that moves us away from the phantasm of the father as castrator to the symbol of the father as compassionate. Relying on Hegelian dialectics, Ricœur outlines a movement from the Oedipal fantasy of psychoanalysis, where an omnipotent father must be killed so that the son might live, through the Phenomenology of Spirit’s master-slave dialectic, to the Christian religious representation of the loving father sacrificing himself through his son for the sake of all his children. In this higher stage of the dialectic of paternity, the murder of the father is replaced by his sacrifice. Oddly, however, in Ricœur’s dialectic we end up stuck at the level of the master-slave fight to the death, where— without the Hegelian resolution—the only options available to ensure the recognition of the father by the son (or the son by the father) are murder or suicide. Whereas, for Hegel, recognition comes only when the master and slave are willing to risk death but also realize the necessity of avoiding it, for Ricœur, recognition requires death, symbolic if not imaginary. Unlike Ricœur, Hegel knows that mutual recognition cannot be maintained if one of the parties is dead. As Ricœur sees it, recognition does not necessitate avoiding death but rather moving away from the realm of the family and the body to the level of the social and the law. In order for the father-son relationship to be one of mutual recognition the father must sacrifice his absolute authority so that the son might also participate in it. The goal of recognition is equality, which can be achieved only through social contracts that abstract from the particulars of embodied familial relations. Designation, necessary for recognition, is a social operation. It is removed from the realm of the bodily drives that motivate the Oedipal scenario. Designation requires the sublimation of bodily drives into abstract laws that can equalize bodies by turning them into symbols. The move from psychoanalysis to Christianity is a move from a domestic family to a social family: through God the Father’s sacrifice of His son, we all become members of the Christian family; we all become children of God. For Ricœur, God is not the Father because He gives the Law. Rather, the Law, the covenant or contract, enables Him to be recognized as Father.3 Ricœur implicitly rejects the Lacanian association of the Father with the Law or the Name. He claims that there is no name of the father, that ‘‘Father’’ is not a name, but a designation.4 And the father’s proper name is of little significance to his function as father. So, too, the father is not the Lacanian Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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‘‘no’’ or the Freudian prohibition. Rather, the law or covenant is a promise and not a prohibition. Moreover, the law does not originate with the father, but makes his recognition possible. The son does not originate from the father, but the father originates through the designation ‘‘father’’ by the son. The father becomes father only in answer to the call of his son. For Ricœur, God is the original Father, but not until He has been properly designated as ‘‘Father’’ by His son. It is only after Christ calls Him ‘‘Father’’ that God is frequently referred to as ‘‘Father’’ in a significant way in the Bible. Ricœur points out that when God is referred to as ‘‘Father,’’ it is in passages that are not the typical narrative sagas of the Old Testament, but in prophetic texts that announce something. He suggests that, in the Old Testament, God can be identified as the Father of Israel through God’s covenant with Israel. The covenant, that Israel is chosen by God, is both Law and promise. The covenant is a divine contract of sorts, but in the New Testament it becomes the promise of eternal life and the kingdom of heaven. Christ calls God his ‘‘Father’’ as a reminder of this covenant. Ricœur argues that in this sense, the biblical God is not a Father because He begets or creates or because He is an origin; rather, He is a Father because he is a promise. He is the promise of compassion. For Ricœur, the father-son relationship becomes one of mutual knowledge and recognition when, in Matthew 11:27, Christ says, ‘‘All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the son, and he to whomever, the Son will reveal him.’’ Ricœur interprets this passage as the articulation of the mediation necessary for the recognition of the father: ‘‘there is fatherhood because there is sonship, and there is sonship because there is community of spirit.’’5 The father is recognized by the son through the laws of the community. The son’s designation ‘‘father’’ is made possible by those laws that promise the end of murder. In Matthew 11:27, Christ articulates his relationship to his Father in terms of the community and a promise of revelation. The son reveals his father to the community and it is this designation by the son that institutes fatherhood. For Ricœur, the institution of fatherhood requires the sacrifice of the son for the sake of the Father’s other children. Mediated by contracts, the unique relationship between father and son can be annulled such that the force of that relationship applies equally to all other children. Paternity gives way to fraternity. Ricœur’s essay suggests that God’s promise, His covenant or Law, is fulfilled with the sacri38

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fice of His son, which in turn equalizes all God’s children in His eyes. Through the fulfillment of the covenant, through Christ, all of God’s children are brothers. In other words, the contract takes priority away from the bond between father and son; that bond is sacrificed for the sake of equalizing relationships. The father promises that law will replace blood and that the Law will make all men brothers. Ultimately, then, God’s Law is the promise of equality guaranteed through contracts, both divine and social. The marriage contract works as the link between the divine and the social. Sanctioned by God, the marriage contract is recognized by the larger secular social community. The father is a father in the family community that is first recognized as a community through the marriage contract, recognized both by the larger religious and secular communities.6 The marriage contract mediates the father-son relationship, makes it social, and promises equality through contracts. But Ricœur overlooks the failure of contracts to provide equality. While he moves the recognition of fatherhood from the family into the social in order to formulate a notion of recognition between father and son as equals that does not reproduce the power hierarchy of the Oedipal scenario with its murderous revenge, Ricœur does not analyze the inequities in these legal and social contracts that might make this type of recognition impossible. Contracts assume equal parties, but cannot create them; rather the assumption of inequality merely serves to cover over significant inequalities. In order to claim that contracts ensure equality, Ricœur must assume that all of the parties to a contract enter the agreement as equals.7 For, although contracts attempt to ensure equality on some levels, they cover over inequalities on many other levels. For example, the marriage contract (not to mention the social contract in general), which for Ricœur is the contract that defines fatherhood, has a history of defining its parties unequally. Men and women have not been equal parties to the marriage contract or the social contract in general. When Ricœur discusses mutual recognition and equality, they are always only between fathers and sons, fathers and sons who become brothers through the social contract that excludes full participation by, or recognition of, their mothers and sisters. We might wonder about the mother of God, Mary. Is she not mother until recognized by the son? Or is she mother when recognized by the Father, God? Who recognizes her? Her pregnant body suggests motherhood prior to the son’s designation. And if the Father Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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is not father until designated by the son, who is the father of her child before the son’s acknowledgment? Is her designation and recognition of the child’s father irrelevant?8 It is ironic that Ricœur defines the father-son relationship in terms of symbolic contracts that ensure recognition when we consider that many father-child relationships in the United States are mediated by real contracts, child custody contracts.9 In the United States, state welfare agencies spend much of their time trying to track down fathers in order to collect child support. The contracts that mediate these relations do not necessarily result in equality or recognition. In fact, the legal and economic mediation in the relation between father and children can lead to further alienation and resentment. Finally, Ricœur denies the significance of embodiment or physical generation in favor of abstract law/promise. Ricœur adds that to recognize the father with the mother through their contractual union is also to recognize them through their sexual union. Certainly, fatherhood and motherhood are dependent on sexual union (or technological intervention). For Ricœur, sexuality that conceives the family is recognized as the ‘‘carnal dimension’’ of the contract.10 Although he acknowledges the ‘‘carnal dimension,’’ he insists that it can only lead to murder. To prevent murder, we must move beyond bodies and fantasies to symbols. ‘‘Begetting is a matter of nature, fatherhood of designation. It is necessary that the blood tie be loosened, be marked by death, in order that fatherhood be truly instituted.’’11 But Ricœur overlooks that even God’s Law is founded in blood. God’s promise, the covenant, is a promise made on the basis of blood and constantly reaffirmed through blood, blood as a sign of generation and of fertility. There is no Law, no covenant, without blood. The story of Moses, the receiver of the Law, is full of blood—the Passover blood, Zipporah’s circumcision of Gershom, the ox blood after the tablets are given. The promise that Ricœur identifies with Christ and God’s sacrifice, which replaces murder, is marked by blood, Christ’s blood, which is symbolized by wine in the Eucharist. God’s Law, especially as promise, cannot be separated from the body and the blood. For Ricœur, the dialectic of fatherhood reaches its highest stage when the body becomes symbol: blood becomes wine. Then fatherhood is no longer the murderous Oedipal fantasy but a symbol mediated by social laws that guarantee the equality of brothers. Murder gives way to sacrifice, hatred to compassion. Paternity begets fraternity. But isn’t this just another repetition of the psychoanalytic story? 40

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In Totem and Taboo, Freud describes social fraternity as the result of brothers banding together to murder their father, eat his flesh, and stay together through their shared and repeated guilt. The Oedipal situation inaugurates the social, which makes sublimation and repression through guilt possible and necessary. Christian compassion and its foundation in promises, laws, and contracts takes on a different hue when viewed in light of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, which describes Christian compassion as the ultimate cruelty, beginning with legal contracts and ending with unpayable debt and eternal guilt that result from God’s sacrifice. In Nietzsche’s analysis, the sacrificial economy produces more guilt than murder ever could. Rather than equalize the father-son relationship or make all men brothers equal to Christ, God’s sacrifice increases the paternal authority that commands the sons’ obedience and guilt. The promise of equality is nothing more than the bloody ransom offered in exchange for a body already become corpse. Piety as payment.

Paternity as Infinite Singularity Like Ricœur, Emmanuel Levinas proposes a notion of paternity that cannot be reduced to law or threats but that must be a promise. And, like Ricœur, he proposes an ontology of paternity that takes us beyond the Freudian psychoanalysis of paternity, which he claims reduces sexuality and paternity to pleasure and ‘‘egology.’’ Unlike Ricœur, however, for Levinas the promise of paternity is not a promise of recognition and equality, but a promise of nonrecognition, of strangeness, of an open future, of infinity, of singularity. The promise of paternity is not Ricœur’s promise that from a dead father the son will inherit his designation, that the son will also be recognized by his son as father, or the Freudian promise that the son will inherit his power. It is not a promise from the past, a promise that returns to itself. Rather, the promise of paternity, as Levinas describes it, is a promise of an open future, the promise that the son is to his father. Although, in Levinas’s analysis, there is an analogy between death and paternity, fatherhood requires neither murder nor sacrifice. Paternity is a special case of alterity that can inform all other relations. It is the only relation in which the self becomes other and survives. For Levinas, paternity does not reestablish the Hegelian battle of the wills, each seeking recognition from the other. Ricœur’s notion Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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that it does, takes us back to a tragic ‘‘egoity’’ that enables unity at the expense of multiplicity: there is only one king, father or son. For Levinas, paternity does not return us to a battle of wills that reinscribes the subject and turns the self back onto itself even in the operation of self-dispossession and abandonment. Rather, paternity opens up a different structure of subjectivity that opens the self onto the other. The structure of the subject in an erotic relationship moves the self beyond the ego and its exclusivity. Paternity begins with Eros and fecundity. Yet Eros and fecundity are ontologically anchored in paternity. For Levinas, Eros and fecundity have their telos in paternity. Eros is possible because of sexual difference, which is neither a contradiction between two nor a complementarity between two. Eros is an event of alterity, a relationship with what is absent in the very moment at which everything is there. Even in an experience that seems to completely fill the universe with itself, the caress seeks something other. The caress is directed, not toward another body, but toward a space that transcends through the body and a time that Levinas describes as a future never future enough.12 In the erotic relationship the caress is directed toward the future, the forever and always of promises of love, a future that is never future enough to fulfill such promises. The relationship with the other is such a promise, a promise that cannot be fulfilled, a paradoxical promise whose fulfillment would destroy the promise. And this promise is time. For Levinas, time is not constituted as a series of nows; it is not constituted in the present or by an ego. Rather, time is the absent promise in the relation with the other; it is the not-yet, the always still to come. It is the time of love, the infinite engendered through finite beings coming together. ‘‘Love seeks what does not have the structure of an existent, the infinitely future, what is to be engendered.’’(266). Love seeks what is beyond any possible union between two. Love seeks the ‘‘trans-substantiation’’ that engenders the child (266). Engendering the child is an inherent element in the structure of the erotic relationship; the erotic relationship is defined as fecundity. The caress and ‘‘voluptuosity’’ are analyzed within this context of fecundity. Paternity, made possible through a relationship with the feminine, opens the masculine subject onto infinite time and returns him to the ethical relationship. For Levinas, in the masculine erotic relationship, the other beyond the subject’s control is the feminine other; fecundity necessitates a relationship with a feminine other. This feminine other is a prerequi42

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site for moving outside of oneself: ‘‘But the encounter with the Other as feminine is required in order that the future of the child come to pass from beyond the possible, beyond projects. This relationship resembles that which was described for the idea of infinity: I cannot account for it by myself, as I do account for the luminous world by myself’’(267). The trans-substantiation of the father by the son is possible only by virtue of the feminine other. Man needs woman to beget a son. More than this, it would seem, the infinite time opened up between father and son through paternity is possible by virtue of the movement through the cyclical, nonlinear, time of the feminine. Paternity moves the (male) subject outside of time through the mediation of another time, the cyclical time of life. Paternity conquers ‘‘father time’’ by moving through the feminine. Paternity opens the subject onto infinite time in various ways. The discontinuity of generations brings with it inexhaustible youth, each generation replacing the one before it. In addition to this chronology, which stretches indefinitely through time, the ontology of paternity sets up the subject within infinite time. The space between the father and the son opens up infinite time. Not only the discontinuity of generations which promises continued youth, but also the trans-substantiation of the father in the son opens the subject to an other. ‘‘The father discovers himself not only in the gestures of his son, but in his substance and his unicity’’(267). In this way the father discovers himself in the son and yet discovers that his son is distinct, a stranger. Through the trans-substantiation of the I, Levinas says that paternity accomplishes desire. It does not satisfy desire, which is impossible, but accomplishes it by engendering it and by engendering another desiring being, the son. Paternity engenders desire, which is the infinite time of the absolutely other. The time of the other is infinite as compared to the finite time of the self. In relationship with the child, the subject is opened onto infinity: ‘‘The relation with the child—that is, the relation with the other that is not a power, but fecundity—establishes a relationship with the absolute future, or infinite time’’(268). Paternity, with its generation and generations, literally opens onto infinite time, a time beyond death. That future is the infinite desire that is present as a desire for desire itself infinitely extended into a future that is never future enough. What Levinas calls ‘‘goodness’’ is associated with the infinity of desire engendered by paternity. ‘‘In paternity desire maintained as insatiate desire, that is, as goodness, is accomplished’’ (272). Paternity is the link between Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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desire and goodness, Eros and ethics. Since unlike need, it can never be satisfied, erotic desire is accomplished in engendering a son, a son who embodies desire. In this sense, desire engenders itself (269). For Levinas, the desire of the caress in the erotic relationship is ultimately resolved in paternity: ‘‘This unparalleled relation between two substances, where a beyond substances is exhibited, is resolved in paternity’’ (271). From the beyond, from desire, two substances create another desiring substance, the son. More than the continuation of the substance of the father in the son, as the word trans-substantiation might suggest, paternity is a form of trans-substantiation of subjectivity itself. Paternity transforms subjectivity from the subject as ‘‘I-can,’’ who sees himself as the center of meaning and values—the constitutor of the world—to a subject beholden to, and responsible for, the other. This form of trans-substantiation takes us beyond substance. The subject or ‘‘I’’ is not a substance, but a response. The paternal subject is not Husserl’s, Sartre’s, or Ricœur’s virile ‘‘I know,’’ ‘‘I-can,’’ or ‘‘I-will’’ but a response to the other who opens up a radically different time, a time beyond the ‘‘I know,’’ ‘‘I-can,’’ or ‘‘I-will.’’ Levinas says that the relationship with the son through fecundity ‘‘articulates the time of the absolutely other, an alternation of the very substance of him who can—his trans-substantiation’’ (269). The relationship of paternity is unique in that the I breaks free of itself without ceasing to be I; it is the only relationship in which the self becomes other and survives (278). The I breaks free of the ego, of what ties it to itself, so that it can reach out to another, even become another, become other to itself. This process of becoming other to itself opens up the possibility beyond its own possibilities, an openness to an undetermined future. ‘‘Fecundity is part of the very drama of the I. The intersubjective reached across the notion of fecundity opens up a place where the I is divested of its tragic egoity, which turns back to itself, and yet is not purely and simply dissolved into the collective. Fecundity evinces a unity that is not opposed to multiplicity, but, in the precise sense of the term, engenders it’’ (273). In Levinas’s analysis, the father discovers himself in the gestures, the substance, the very uniqueness of his son. This discovery of himself in the son is not Ricœur’s recognition; the father does not recognize himself in his son, but discovers himself, finds himself for the first time. Paternity engenders the father as much as it does the son. Fecundity gives birth not only to the son but also to the father. In relation to his son, who is both himself and not himself, the father 44

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discovers his own subjectivity. As he realizes that his son is distinct, a stranger, he discovers that he too is distinct, even a stranger to himself. Rather than establish the equal and mutual recognition of father and son, or brothers for that matter, Levinas’s notion of paternity establishes the uniqueness of the subject in relationship with an Other. The father/son relationship is not one of law-bound recognition, but of outlaw singularity. What Levinas calls ‘‘paternal election,’’ which chooses from among equals, makes unique precisely by recalling the nonuniqueness of the equals among whom this one was chosen. The father chooses the son after he has had no choice. His love elects this particular child in his uniqueness as the loved one, the one meant to be. In this regard, Levinas suggests that all love for another person must approach paternal love insofar as that love elects the loved one from among all others. This love makes the loved one unique, and makes this love necessary rather than contingent.13 This love is not just for a limited time; it is for all time, for a future never future enough, for infinite time. At this point, we might wonder why the relationship with the lover does not provide the same kind of uniqueness as the father-son relationship. Strangely enough, it seems that, for Levinas, the feminine lover is neither radically other nor the same and both are required for the uniqueness identified with the father-son relationship. It is as much the son’s sameness as the son’s difference that engenders the uncanny otherness experienced by the father in this relationship. While the feminine lover may be unique and chosen by the lover, she is neither other nor the same because she is not fully human. For Levinas, the fecund relationship with a woman has its goal in the child, more particularly, a son. The paternal relationship, however, is higher than the lover’s relationship because it is social. The lovers’ relationship takes place at the level of laughter and caresses and not language proper. Levinas describes the beloved woman as ‘‘silly’’ and ‘‘infantile,’’ her face fading into animality; making love with her is like playing with a ‘‘young animal.’’14 For Ricœur and Levinas, paternity is always described as a father/ son relationship. Even for Derrida in The Gift of Death, the paradox and promise of ethics is represented in the story of a father/son relationship, the story of Abraham. But if fatherhood is a promise for the future, could this future be a daughter? Or does this future have to be a son? Three-quarters of the way through The Gift of Death, Derrida makes a short detour through woman that suggests these quesFatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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tions. He comments on the absence of women: ‘‘It is difficult not to be struck by the absence of woman in these two monstrous yet banal stories [Abraham and Bartelby]. It is a story of father and son, of masculine figures, of hierarchies among men (God the father, Abraham, Isaac . . .). Would the logic of sacrificial responsibility within the implacable universality of the law, of its law, be altered, inflected, attenuated, or displaced, if a woman were to intervene in some consequential manner? Does the system of this sacrificial responsibility and of the double ‘gift of death’ imply at its very basis an exclusion or sacrifice of woman?’’15 Derrida raises these provocative questions about woman as if to trouble his own text, which (apart from these questions) also avoids woman. At least Kierkegaard worries about Sarah. Recall that, for Levinas, the father discovers himself in the son, who is both himself and a stranger. Levinas emphasizes that it is the otherness of the son that pulls the father out of himself toward infinity. Yet it is the sameness of the son that allows the movement without shattering the father’s subjectivity altogether. Ultimately, it is the sameness between father and son that allows for the father to discover himself and his uniqueness through his son. The father identifies with his son. And paternal love is the father’s election of this son from among equal ‘‘brothers.’’ Paternal election makes biology irrelevant. Thus it is not just the biological substance of the son that makes him like and unlike his father; it is something about the son qua son. Should we interpret Levinas literally in his discussion of the paternal election of a son? If so, paternal election provides not only an image of the father’s choice of this particular child but also the image of the father’s choice of a son in particular. The father chooses this son and that election makes him unique; in turn, the son’s uniqueness makes the father unique. Through their relationship, they both are singular. Yet the discovery of their singularity has its basis in their sameness. How can the son be an absolute other if he is also the same? Is it the son’s difference or his sameness that restructures the I through paternity? Wouldn’t a daughter be a stranger child? Because of sexual difference and the nonlinear, cyclical effects of feminine time, wouldn’t the daughter be other enough to open up an infinite future? For Levinas, desire is possible only in a relationship with an absolute other. Paternity engenders desire and thereby returns the erotic relationship to the ethical. And yet doesn’t this paternal desire fall back into need if the son returns the father always to himself?16 46

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For Levinas, it seems to go without saying that the father chooses a son rather than a daughter. But if the father cannot elect a daughter, then the ethics of paternity is an ethics of sameness, a subtle version of the slave morality that cannot say yes to difference. The singularity engendered by paternity is the singularity of the masculine. And, in spite of its illusion that it can, ultimately, without difference, without daughters, mothers, wives, the same cannot maintain itself. The Paradox of Ethics Uncovers Paternal Authority But the distance of the commentary is not neutral. What he comments upon is consonant with a whole network of affirmations which are his, or those of him, ‘‘he.’’ —Jacques Derrida, ‘‘At This Very Moment . . .’’

Negotiating sameness and difference or equality and singularity is at the center of Derrida’s The Gift of Death. Whereas Ricœur presents the father/son relationship as a relation of mutual recognition through law that ensures equality, and Levinas presents the father/ son relationship as a discovery of oneself through a relation to the Other that ensures singularity, Derrida discusses a father/son relationship that puts equality and singularity into conflict. While, for Ricœur, relations are necessarily mediated by contracts, laws, and ethics, for Levinas, ethics is prior to the Law and makes law possible. But, for Derrida, ethics is a paradox between law and the impossibility of law. Derrida suggests that the father has a duty to his son through the Law, which allows for designations as well as names; but the father also has a duty that cannot be named or designated, an absolute duty unmediated by law. These two duties, the duty to respect the equality before the law and the duty to respect the singularity of the individual, conflict. This conflict is the heart of the story of a father caught between his Father and his son, the biblical story of Abraham. Although it remains in the background of Derrida’s analysis, it is significant that Abraham is promised a son, Isaac, in his old age. Since his wife Sarah is too old to conceive, Isaac is a miracle. God promises that Abraham will have a son who will be the father of many generations of Israel. For Abraham, Isaac holds out God’s promise of generations to come. Why, then, does God ask Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Does the promise of fatherhood, the promise of generations, require Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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sacrifice? God, the Father, asks his son for a sacrifice. In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Abraham must give up the ethical or the law for the sake of a higher religious realm. Abraham is in the paradoxical position of believing in the promise of Isaac and believing that he will kill Isaac. Abraham believes the impossible; he believes in what Kierkegaard calls the ‘‘paradox of faith.’’ Thus Abraham is the father of faith. For Kierkegaard, this paradoxical belief moves Abraham out of the realm of ethics and into the realm of religion or faith. For Derrida this paradoxical belief is the core of ethics, which necessarily straddles the universal and the individual (what Kierkegaard calls the ‘‘ethical sphere’’ and the ‘‘religious sphere’’). Out of the focus of either Kierkegaard’s or Derrida’s texts is another crucial factor: there are at least two father/son relationships in this story, Abraham/Isaac and God/Abraham. Once we see the relationship between God and Abraham as another father/son relationship, then we read a different story. Derrida reads Abraham’s relationship to God as the relationship to the wholly other, while he reads Abraham’s paternal relationship to Isaac as a relationship of duty to family and law. This is Abraham’s conflict. Does he do his duty to his son, family, and society, and not commit murder, or does he sacrifice that which he loves to the Absolute, to God? If piety is dutiful obedience, the Abraham story shows both the impossibility and the necessity of piety. Derrida characterizes the dilemma in terms of an absolute duty to God that conflicts with an ethical duty to Isaac, his family, and society. In our exploration of Derrida’s analysis of the Abraham story, we will see what happens when we reinterpret the relationship between God and Abraham as another father/son relationship. The Gift of Death is about the aporia of ethics, responsibility, secrecy, sacrifice, death, gift giving, and faith. At the beginning of The Gift of Death, Derrida uses Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History to link secrecy and responsibility. Following Patocka, Derrida concludes that ‘‘the history of the responsible self is built upon the heritage and patrimony of secrecy, through a chain reaction of ruptures and repressions that assure the very tradition they punctuate with their interruptions.’’17 The secret is a secret inherited from the father, the patrimony of secrecy. The secret is the mystery of orgiastic practices that are repressed and incorporated by/into philosophy. And, as Patocka makes it out, the secret or mystery itself is maternal. Describing the way in which Plato incorporates the mystery, Patocka says ‘‘the cavern is a vestige of the subterranean place 48

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for gathering of mysteries; it is the lap of the earth-mother. The new thinking inaugurated by Plato involves the desire to forsake the lap of the earth-mother in order to set out upon the pure ‘path of light,’ hence to completely subordinate the orgiastic to responsibility.’’18 The earth mother, it turns out, is kept secret by the patrimony from fathers and sons. Derrida tells us that, for Patocka, the demonic mystery is hidden within responsibility and that this mystery is associated with ‘‘orgiastic irresponsibility.’’19 The awakening from the mystery is the ability to keep a secret. The idea is that if one is to keep a secret, one needs to have a sense of responsibility and conscience. Now, if we recall that the mystery and orgiastic irresponsibility are associated with the earth mother and that the secret is a patrimony, then the awakening is the ability of fathers to keep the maternal element a secret. The secret of life is that it originates with mothers and the earth. The secret passed down from father to son is the secret gift of life given by the mother and the earth. But this secret is not articulated. Rather, this is the type of secret rendered invisible through practices of repression and incorporation within the patriarchy. In order for fathers and sons to take responsibility, the mother’s gift of life must not be spoken. In order for fathers and sons to become responsible subjects, they must forget that earth mother is responsible for their very lives. Only if ‘‘she’’ is irresponsible can they be responsible. In Derrida’s text, the father (Abraham/God) gives the gift of death, which turns out to be the same as the gift of life. The gift of death is the willingness to sacrifice that which one loves for an other, to give up one’s own life or the life of one’s son, in this case, for an other. Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, whom he loves (as Genesis reminds us several times), to God. And God sacrifices his son, Christ, for the lives of all of His children. In Christ’s case, the gift of death is put forth as a gift of life.20 Still, to equate giving one’s life for another, or dying so that another might live, or sacrificing that which one loves for the other, with the maternal gift of life is to incorporate and repress that fundamental gift. The rituals and ceremonies of sacrificial sons render invisible the secret maternal sacrifice. But there is no gift of death without the gift of life. In this story, as in many others, the power to give death is the father’s. The father can believe that the gift of death, within his own power, is the same as the gift of life. He can believe that by giving death it is he who gives life. But, as Irigaray says, this belief covers up the truth.21 Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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In order for the father to be responsible, the mother can’t be. But, as Derrida maintains, the father’s responsibility is a paradox. It puts him in an impossible spot. Because of the contradiction at the core of responsibility, he is always guilty and never responsible enough. ‘‘Guilt is inherent in responsibility because responsibility is always unequal to itself: one is never responsible enough. One is never responsible enough because one is finite but also because responsibility requires two contradictory movements. It requires one to respond as oneself and as irreplaceable singularity, to answer for what one does, says, gives; but it also requires that, being good and through goodness, one forget or efface the origin of what one gives.’’22 Responsibility requires that one respond as oneself and respond as all others, as the universal; responsibility requires both confessing that one’s actions originate with oneself and forgetting that one’s actions originate in oneself. Of course, if we reinterpret Derrida’s remarks in light of my hypothesis that the secret of responsibility is the life-giving mother, they take on a new meaning. The life-giving mother is the secret origin of the gift of life that must be forgotten. The guilt inherent in responsibility could be the guilt involved in the matricide that makes it possible for the father/son to claim responsibility (for life). He must respond as if he alone is responsible; he is singularly responsible (otherwise the responsibility is not his). Yet he must forget or efface the origin of what he gives because what he gives, the gift of life/ death, is also from the mother; he must forget that, at its origin, he alone is not responsible (for life). Within the frame of Derrida’s text, this contradiction is the aporia of responsibility. Responsibility requires both substitution and nonsubstitution: ‘‘For responsibility . . . demands on the one hand an accounting, a general answering-foroneself with respect to the general and before the generality, hence the idea of substitution, and, on the other hand, uniqueness, absolute singularity, hence nonsubstitution, nonrepetition, silence, and secrecy.’’23 In other words, responsibility has two sides that come into conflict with each other. On the one hand, to hold someone or yourself responsible is to account for and justify his, her, or your actions. On the other hand, to be absolutely responsible implies that you alone are responsible, that you have a unique relationship to your obligation that cannot be accounted for, justified, or explained; your responsibility , if it is truly yours, is unique and cannot be understood in terms of any universal laws, principles, or language. Absolute re50

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sponsibility requires secrecy because the ‘‘secret’’ obligation defies words; it cannot be spoken even if one were to try. When Abraham is called by God, he answers, ‘‘Here I am,’’ presenting himself to do God’s bidding.24 His words say everything and nothing about his response to God. Because he is answering to God, the Absolute, out of an absolute responsibility, the appropriate response for Abraham is silence. If, however, he were testifying in a court of law, out of a general responsibility, Abraham would be required to speak. In one case, the appropriate response is to speak; in the other, the appropriate response is to remain silent. This is why, when Abraham speaks, he does so (according to Kierkegaard) ironically. When Isaac asks his father, ‘‘Where is the ram for the sacrifice?’’ Abraham replies, ‘‘God will provide.’’ He neither lies nor justifies the situation to Isaac—he both says something and says nothing at the same time. Irony is what is said and not said at the same time. Thus it is not by accident, in an apparent digression on woman in the middle of this text, that Derrida quotes Hegel saying, ‘‘Woman is the eternal irony of the community’’—she is what is said and not said. Ethics is ‘‘an insoluble and paradoxical contradiction between responsibility in general and absolute responsibility.’’25 General responsibility requires the sacrifice of absolute responsibility and absolute responsibility requires the sacrifice of general responsibility. And various philosophers have told us that both require the sacrifice of women. For example, Hegel describes how general responsibility, or ethics, requires the sacrifice of the family, including woman, wife, and sister: ‘‘Human law in its universal existence is the community, in its activity in general is the manhood of the community, in its real and effective activity is the government. It is, moves, and maintains itself by consuming and absorbing into itself . . . families presided over by womankind, and by keeping them dissolved in the fluid continuity of its own nature . . . it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it an internal enemy— womankind in general.’’26 And, for Freud, women are opposed to civilization and any sort of general responsibility or law of society: ‘‘Women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence. . . . The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men. . . . His constant association with men, and his dependence on his relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father. Thus the woman finds herself forced into the background by the claims of civilization Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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and she adopts a hostile attitude towards it.’’27 In these scenarios, duties to law, ethics, and society conflict with duties to women and families. With Derrida’s reading of the Abraham story (following Kierkegaard), we have another conflict of duties between duties to women and family—now seen as part of the law or ethical—and duties to the Absolute, God. Abraham must leave his family behind. He must be willing to destroy his family for the sake of his absolute responsibility to God. It is almost as if generalizing a law of family relations or sexual relations requires reinstating a higher duty so that women and families will once more be sacrificed. If a man’s first duty is not to his society, which requires the sacrifice of women and family, then it is to his God, which requires the sacrifice of women and family. Yet, in Derrida’s reading of (Levinas’s reading of ) Kierkegaard’s reading of Genesis, God is not really outside of the family scene. Rather, in Derrida’s text, God is also figured as a father. The duty to God as a father is not a duty to an absolute and wholly other. Abraham is also a father and through fatherhood he shares something with God. In fact, Abraham inherits the patrimony of secrecy, which he must pass on to his own son, from God. According to the story told by Derrida and Kierkegaard, Abraham’s duty to God the Father is absolute and cannot be justified. Why? Why can the Father command without justification? Why is the Father’s authority without question or accountability? Within patriarchy, isn’t it always the father’s prerogative to issue commands without justification? When the son happens to talk back and ask why, as in the case of Moses, his Father threatens him with death. The father doesn’t have to justify himself. When the child asks, ‘‘Why?’’ it is enough for the father to say, ‘‘Because I am your father, that’s why.’’ Is the command from the Patriarch really the command from the wholly other that resonates from Levinas’s texts through Derrida’s? Insofar as God is figured as Father, He is not wholly other; rather, He is essentially the same in His relation to His son. Abraham’s conflict is not only a conflict between general responsibility to all Others and absolute responsibility to the wholly other God. It is a conflict between duties to Father and son. He has a duty to protect and love his son. He has a duty to obey and love his Father. His Father commands him to sacrifice his son. And, ultimately it is for the sake of his son, for the sake of his patrimony, that Abraham obeys God the Father. Piety protects patrimony. If the son obeys the father’s absolute, yet outlaw, authority it is because one 52

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day he will be the father and inherit that authority. This is the promise of paternity within patriarchy. Once we read God as a father, isn’t the Abraham story another version of Freud’s Oedipal drama, where the son must defer to the father’s authority, must castrate himself, in order to avoid castration? This auto-castration is the ceremony that seals the promise that the father’s omnipotence is to be passed on to his son. As Kierkegaard says, Abraham is ‘‘great by reason of his power whose strength is impotence.’’28 The son’s impotence is demanded in the face of the Father’s potency; but the son’s impotence buys him the patrimony of potency. Derrida indicates at one point that Abraham’s sacrifice of law and family, of everything that is his own, moves him outside of economy. But if his sacrifice is made at the command of the ultimate Patriarch, God the Father, then the son is only protecting what is his own by giving in. His sacrifice is made in the name of fatherhood, for the sake of preserving the authority of fatherhood. He sacrifices the present for the future, his own future and the future of his son. The paradox is that God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, his heir, for the sake of paternal authority and his/His heirs. The paradox is that Abraham is both father (to Isaac) and son (to God) at the same time. He has the authority to take Isaac up Mount Moriah, bind him and raise the knife over his head. Isaac goes along with it because Abraham is his father, whom he obeys and loves, just as Abraham goes along with his Father, God, whom he obeys and loves. Thus Abraham is the father of faith. But Isaac, the son, also has faith in his fathers. He is the one who lays his life on the line with his obedience and faith. The Abraham story is a lesson in the son’s obedience to paternal authority. The father’s responsibility for the gift of life, his authorship, is acknowledged through the son’s obedience. Piety designates authority. Derrida can suggest that the gift of life and the gift of death amount to the same because ultimately it is the father’s gift of the death of the mother that promises life to the son. The son submits to the father because of the promise that, someday, he will inherit everything and take over the position of the patriarch. The promise of fatherhood is made through the sacrifice of mothers and their daughters.29 We hear the echo of Derrida’s haunting questions: ‘‘Would the logic of sacrificial responsibility within the implacable universality of the law, of its law, be altered, inflected, attenuated, or displaced, if a woman were to intervene in some consequential manner? Does the system of this sacrificial responsibility and of the douFatherhood and the Promise of Ethics

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ble ‘gift of death’ imply at its very basis an exclusion or sacrifice of woman?’’30 If the dutiful reverence for the father that we call ‘‘piety’’ were extended to the mother, could it promise an ethics without murder or sacrifice—an ethics that says yes to what is outside, what is different, what is not itself? Is there piety without God? Is there God without patrimony? Can the patrimony from father to son acknowledge matrimony without guilt or pity? Is piety for the One necessarily pity for the Other? Is there compassion without guilt and resentment?

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3

Suffering Faith in Philosophy S. Clark Buckner

Since the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time, with its appeal to explicitly religious categories, phenomenology and post-phenomenological thought has repeatedly demonstrated a distinctly religious dimension. In the United States, this religious dimension to phenomenology recently has been celebrated by leading scholars such as John Caputo and Edith Wyschogrod, while, in Germany, it has been recognized by defenders and critics of phenomenology alike since the 1920s. And in France virtually every leading post-phenomenological thinker, from Paul Ricœur and Jean-Luc Marion to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, has taken up and explored this dimension to phenomenology. In the work of these authors, the religious aspect of phenomenology is treated as essential to it and to the sense of responsibility that sustains its practice. In the early 1930s, this religious dimension to phenomenology found expression in an otherwise unlikely source, Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Here Husserl, the resolutely sober founder of phenomenology, who was first a mathematician and then a philosopher of mathematics, and who understood phenomenology throughout his life to be foremost a matter of providing philosophical foundations for the sciences, gave voice to a passionate need to believe. Against those whom he describes as the ‘‘scientifically minded,’’ Husserl defends the popular lament over a ‘‘crisis in the sciences,’’ as 55

itself definitive of the project confronting twentieth-century philosophy. While the rigor of the sciences could not be doubted—except perhaps in psychology, whose failure to establish itself as a science might be dismissed as a matter of immaturity alone—Husserl contends that the idealization of this rigor in philosophical positivism denied the authority of reason to give order and direction to life as a whole. ‘‘The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced,’’ he writes, ‘‘meant an indifferent turning away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity.’’1 What followed was an experience of profound disillusionment. He continues: The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially after the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of hostility among the younger generation. In our vital need—so we are told—this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence. (6) The denial of reason’s authority to address questions concerning the telos of human existence resulted in a ‘‘collapse of belief in reason’’ (12). Faith in the value of reason was lost and with it, the philosophical ideal that sustained the development of European civilization from its inception in ancient Greece. The crisis in the sciences, writes Husserl, ‘‘concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence’’(5). In its wake appeared the specter of nihilism. ‘‘If man loses this faith,’’ he continues, ‘‘it means nothing less than the loss of faith ‘in himself,’ in his own true being . . . in the form of the struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true’’ (13). In the moment of its accomplishment, the authority of science appeared to be sustained by an irrational faith in reason analogous to religious faith in God. In reason’s overcoming of myth and tradition, its teleology had been taken for granted, even as science denied the validity of such speculative valuation. But, with the loss of this faith, philosophy found itself in the grip, not of a rational conundrum, but of passionate suffering. ‘‘As philosophers of the present,’’ writes Hus56

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serl, ‘‘we have fallen into a painful existential contradiction. The faith in the possibility of philosophy as a task, that is, in the possibility of universal knowledge, is something we cannot let go’’ (17). This is the philosophical truth that Husserl hears in the hysterical lament of the crowd, whose disillusionment with reason and passionate need nevertheless to believe appeared, in the 1930s, to be leading Europe into utter catastrophe. In the very irrationality of their devotion, Husserl declares, philosophers serve the prophetic role of ‘‘functionaries of humankind,’’ who must ask, ‘‘What should we, who believe, do in order to be able to believe?’’ (17). In the Crisis, through the reformulation of his transcendental phenomenology as a philosophy of history, Husserl works to restore faith in the philosophical authority of reason. He works both to reconstruct the dissolution of reason’s authority as immanent to its development and to demonstrate that the speculative teleology denied by the positivist concept of reason is integral to reason, rather than a deviation from it. Reflecting back on reason’s development in the world, Husserl argues that the positivist concept of reason is itself the result of the attempt to construct a theory of experience as a totality, and that the breakdown it brings about is necessary if we are to overcome our naive tendency to accept the immediate givenness of experience on faith. Thus he seeks to satisfy the need to believe by proving it to be proper to reason rather than merely an aberration from it and, in so doing, to restore reason’s authority to address questions of human destiny. In this essay, I examine Husserl’s philosophy of history in an attempt both to address the problem of the need to believe and to situate the religiosity in post-phenomenological thought against the backdrop that it provides. Because he traces the loss of reason’s philosophical authority to a misconception concerning its nature and place in the world, I contend that Husserl falls prey to the very objectivist presupposition of reason’s autonomy that he criticizes in philosophical positivism—and to the very irrationality he seeks to overcome. Indeed, far from embracing his proposed solution to the loss of reason’s philosophical authority, his successors define their approach in direct contrast to it. Where Husserl sees the need to believe as a problem threatening the demise of European civilization, postphenomenological philosophers affirm this heteronomous qualification of reason’s authority as a defense against reason’s overvaluation. They affirm the need to believe as a challenge to reason’s pretense to autonomy; they defend the remainder it reveals as the locus of the Suffering Faith in Philosophy

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possible appearance of value in the world despite the nihilism in which reason’s development has resulted. By reading this affirmation of the need to believe in relationship to Husserl’s Crisis, I work to reestablish the connection between the affirmation of religion in postphenomenological thought and what Husserl discerns as the need for a philosophy of history. With specific regard to Derrida and Levinas, I argue that the religious turn in post-phenomenology expresses the need for the philosophy of history in a post-historical world. By treating the need to believe as if it might simply be affirmed, however, Derrida and Levinas do not defend the problem it presents from philosophical foreclosure; rather, they disavow it. Like Husserl, post-phenomenological philosophers maintain the objectivist presupposition of reason’s autonomy even as they criticize it, by acting as if the primary issue were the validity of philosophical claims to authority, and as if disclosure of the contradictions in reason were sufficient to restore the task of thinking. They deny the practical problem presented by the heteronomous qualification of reason, and hold open the site of philosophy’s proper authority that they otherwise challenge in particular philosophical claims. In conclusion, I attempt to define the task left to philosophy by the failure of phenomenology and post-phenomenology to address the problem of the need to believe. Above all, I contend that the paradoxical demand for a philosophy of history in a post-historical world left in the wake of phenomenology and post-phenomenology requires the relinquishing of the objectivist presuppositions that sustain them both. It requires a genealogical method capable of addressing the problem of the need to believe as a matter primarily of need rather than belief. Phenomenology Husserl begins his argument in the Crisis with a historical examination of the development of modern thought since Galileo. While historical reflection is not foreign to Husserl’s earlier writings, it plays a different, more fundamental role in the Crisis. Where, previously, history provided Husserl with a propaedeutic, designed to orient his readers to the import of his argument, though ultimately external to it, in the Crisis, historical reflection proves essential to the phenomenological method itself. In light of the experience of nihilism, Husserl’s reflections on the history of philosophy reveal to him the prejudicial overvaluation of the theoretical attitude in the tradition as 58

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a whole, including his own earlier writings. Going beyond a merely epistemological critique of the paradoxes of psychologism, the Crisis contends that a historical analysis is required to reconstruct the development of reason’s place in the world and to address the problem of reason’s teleology, denied by strictly formalist thought. As a correlate to this heightened importance of history, Husserl introduces his concept of the ‘‘life-world’’ in the Crisis, calling for reflection on the place of reason in the dynamics of human involvements. His phenomenological method no longer takes as its point of departure the contradictions in psychology as if they were capable of correction through the force of argument alone, but works to resolve these contradictions by reconstructing their development within the dynamics of lived, historical experience. Phylogenesis Husserl contends that the dissolution of the philosophical ideal in the history of modern thought results from an error implicit in the abstraction that also marks the moment of its founding accomplishment: Galileo’s mathematization of nature. In the development of his physics, Galileo abstracts lessons learned from mathematics, and employs them not only to perform measurements within limited fields, but also to account for the constitution of nature in general. Galileo sees the world as a field of res extensae, subject to formal calculations. Through his physics, geometry becomes a method for knowing the real, and the world appears to demonstrate laws of nature. In this way, Galileo succeeds in substituting a mathematical abstraction of the world for the world of sense intuition. What Galileo fails to recognize, however—what Husserl calls his ‘‘fateful omission’’—is the need to reflect back on the original ground of all theoretical and practical life, namely, the immediately intuited world, in whose place there now appears an ideal geometric construction (49). In this way, Husserl contends that Galileo is, at one and the same time ‘‘a discovering and a concealing genius’’ (52). While opening the world to systematic examination, Galileo succeeds simultaneously in obfuscating the basis of his science in intuition. He dresses up the world of lived experience in a ‘‘garb of ideas’’ through which, ‘‘we take for true being what is actually method’’ (51). As a result, philosophy comes to be configured as a unified theory geometrically. Following Galileo’s mathematization of nature, the subject appears for the first time as an interiority set apart from the Suffering Faith in Philosophy

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world. Reason appears problematic in an altogether new way, as a method of knowing the real in need of formal demonstration. And philosophy develops as a critical rather than a speculative practice. While inaugurating this radical critique of subjectivity, Husserl argues that Descartes simultaneously compromises its radicality. Descartes’ reformulation of philosophy as a ‘‘universal mathematics,’’ bears for Husserl a ‘‘hidden double-meaning’’ (78). In his approach to the problem of knowledge, Descartes implicitly maintains the presuppositions of science as if they had already been established. He takes for granted that sensibility points to a realm of what is in itself and that, despite the possibility that the subject might be deceived, there must be a way of guaranteeing knowledge of the real with mathematical certainty. With Galileo’s mathematization of nature, ontology comes to be supplanted by methodology: ‘‘to be’’ comes to mean ‘‘to be measurable’’: with Descartes, ontology comes to be supplanted by epistemology: ‘‘to be’’ comes to mean ‘‘to be known.’’ As a result, Descartes implicitly presupposes the egoistic givenness of the subject as a possible object of knowledge that he works simultaneously to establish as the ground of all knowledge. His rationalism entails its own negation, albeit implicitly, in the development of philosophical empiricism. As distinct from Descartes, what concerns Locke is no longer the question of how the subject’s ideas about the world pertain to the world itself, but rather how the subject’s ideas about the world—and the faculties of reason themselves—come to be constituted in and through empirical experience. Locke develops a new kind of agnosticism with regard to rational knowledge. We can make inferences concerning objects in the world, but we cannot, in principle, obtain representations of things in themselves. Hume carries this agnosticism to its logical limit; he argues that all formal categories of thought are fictions derived from the apparent continuity of phenomena in the world, without any necessary ground. Declaring the ‘‘bankruptcy of objective knowledge,’’ Hume drives the project of establishing its validity on the basis of the self-presence of reason into solipsism (88). While failing to appreciate the full significance of this absurdity himself, Husserl contends that in this way Hume restores the radical moment in Descartes’ philosophy, foreclosed in Descartes’ own thought by the privilege he grants to objective understanding. By presenting a situation in which the exact sciences appear unassailable until attributed to the consciousness of a knowing subject, Hume reveals the need to examine reason in a way that calls into question its 60

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philosophical pretensions to absolute truth, while nevertheless maintaining its internal validity. It becomes ‘‘possible and necessary,’’ to see consciousness, not as immediately given—as a metaphysical posit—but rather as an accomplishment. ‘‘Dogmatic objectivism,’’ writes Husserl, is ‘‘shaken to its foundations’’ (90). In reaction against Hume’s psychologism, Kant succeeds in working out the critical project inaugurated by Descartes’ turn to the conscious subject by distinguishing objective science, as the accomplishment of the subject’s activity within the world of experience, from philosophy, as the exposition of the scope and possibility of experience. In the absurdity of Hume’s empiricism, Kant discerns ‘‘a gulf of incomprehensibility’’ between rational truth and metaphysical objectivity. The ultimate metaphysical presuppositions of knowledge, he concedes, cannot themselves be objectively known. Hume fails to recognize, however, that mere sense-data cannot account for objects of experience; such objects point to a hidden mental accomplishment, which enables them to be known with objective validity. On this basis, Kant distinguishes the empirical subject that appears present to itself in experience, from the transcendental subject, that must be presupposed as a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. By drawing this distinction necessary to maintaining the theoretical validity of objective science, however, Kant still cannot account for what transcendental subjectivity—as something subjective, which, in principle, we still cannot intuit—actually is, and how its functions come about. The fundamental concepts of Kant’s philosophy appear mythological. While recognizing the need to account for the constitution of experience through the synthetic activity of the subject, Husserl contends that Kant presupposes experience to be objective experience, as revealed in particular by Newtonian mechanics. In this way, while bringing about the demise of dogmatic objectivism and radically reformulating its problems, Kant implicitly inherits its privileging of scientific thought. The mythology in Kant’s fundamental concepts expresses his presupposition of the universality of rational objectivity. While accomplishing a systematic critique of reason’s formal functions, Kant fails to interrogate the structures and dynamics of lived experience in and through which theoretical praxis emerges as one among other forms of praxis. The threat of falling into the absurdity of psychologism presents a bar for Kant against doing so. As a result, what allows Kant to establish philosophy for the first time as a rigorous science—namely, his recognition of the division between being and knowing—at the same time, compels him Suffering Faith in Philosophy

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implicitly to construct his philosophical system on speculative grounds. After Kant, Husserl argues that German Idealism continues to suffer from the same speculative mythology that plagues his philosophy. This mythology proves untenable when Hegel’s successful formulation of a systematic philosophy of history reveals the divorce of philosophy from the concrete conditions of experience. With the accomplishment of Hegel’s philosophical system, the fundamental concepts of German Idealism appear to be speculative constructs, resistant to any ultimate clarification. According to Husserl, the backlash against such system philosophies was therefore inevitable. In reaction against Hegel’s demise, Husserl contends that the ‘‘dogmatic objectivism’’ of early modern thought was revived in the ideology of philosophical positivism. Despite its theoretical overcoming in Kant, he argues that this ‘‘dogmatic objectivism’’ nevertheless persisted in the development of the sciences, which, in the years since Hegel’s death, actually accomplished what Hume had only theorized—namely, the disintegration of reason’s authority as a unified totality. By establishing ever greater precision in limited fields, the accomplishments of science transcended the capacity of reason to make sense of experience as a totality, rendering it fragmentary, distorted and ultimately incoherent. Rather than accomplishing the philosophical ideal of the rationally ordered life, the rationalization of the modern world resulted in its dissolution. In this way, for Husserl, the denial of the philosophical authority of reason in philosophical positivism is not therefore incorrect per se, but rather expresses the historical truth in the development of reason. Ontogenesis Reflecting on the history of philosophy, Husserl discerns the return of the radical skepticism with which modern philosophy begins. In the wake of German Idealism and the dissolution of reason’s philosophical authority, he contends that the objectivity privileged by both objectivist (rational and empirical) and transcendental (critical and speculative-dialectical) thought can no longer be taken for granted. The ‘‘naı¨ve validity’’ of the world and the place of the subject within it have become problematical (135). The development of reason has rendered lived experience incomprehensible. The continuity of experience itself, as an objective field standing over and against the subject, can no longer be taken for granted, but rather 62

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must be interrogated from the displaced position of the fragmented particular to which the subject now finds itself relegated. The loss of the philosophical authority of reason requires the suspension of all presuppositions concerning both the truths of the sciences and the constitution of immediately given experience on which these truths are based. ‘‘Not only the scientific objectivity of all actual and possible sciences,’’ writes Husserl, ‘‘but also the prescientific objectivity of the life-world, with its ‘situational truths’ and the relativity of existing objects—has become a problem, the enigma of all enigmas’’ (204). While the need to examine lived experience calls for a suspension of the presuppositions of the sciences and an explanation of their development on the basis of what otherwise appears subjective; the possibility of undertaking any systematic inquiry of lived experience would seem also to require these presuppositions as the basis for any formal study of phenomena on universal grounds. Hence, even though Husserl discerns the need to undertake a systematic examination of lived experience, he confronts an aporia. Is it possible to maintain a notion of the ‘‘objectively true world,’’ if any such notion remains subjectively qualified by the contingencies of lived experience? What becomes of the hypothesis of being-in-itself, pertaining both to objects in the world and to human beings insofar as they exist in space and time? Do not the fundamental tenets of experimental science—which must by definition be able to claim objective universality—come to appear as one among many possible sets of practical hypotheses, which make up the lives of human beings? ‘‘The paradoxical interrelationships of the ‘objectively true world’ and the ‘lifeworld,’ ’’ Husserl writes, ‘‘make enigmatic the manner of being of both. [The idea of a] true world in any sense, and within it our own being, becomes an enigma in respect to the sense of this being’’ (131). In response to the contradictions in modern philosophy, Husserl takes as his point of departure the suspension, or epoche, of all ‘‘the cognitions of the objective sciences, an epoche of any critical position-taking which is interested in their truth or falsity, even any position on their guiding idea of an objective knowledge of the world.’’(135). While what appears initially in light of this epoche is the apparent relativity of subjective experience as distinct from the objectivity of the natural sciences, Husserl contends that this distinction presupposes the idea of the objective world that has been rendered questionable. When conceived independently from the presuppositions of formal scientific inquiry, the world of lived experiSuffering Faith in Philosophy

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ence itself demonstrates a fundamental uniformity. The ‘‘embarrassment’’ presented by the apparent relativity of lived experience, he writes, ‘‘disappears as soon as we consider that the lifeworld does have, in all its relative features, a general structure. This general structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative’’ (139). In the field of lived experience, Husserl argues that objects in the world do not present themselves directly as the substrates of their manifest properties. To the contrary, we become conscious of them in and through the subjective manner of their appearance, without thereby noticing this manner of appearance thematically. By suspending the presupposition of the existence of objects in the world ‘‘in themselves’’ and attending rather to this manner of their givenness—by turning our attention toward how, throughout the alterations in experience, the world comes into being for us—Husserl contends that a series of never before thematically investigated, but nevertheless definitive types appears, both of individual things and of orders of experience, or syntheses, constituting ‘‘an inseparable synthetic totality’’ (145). He argues that lived experience, as distinct from a field of strictly objective things, consists of a network of interrelated phenomena, whose appearance and significance depends on the intentional mode of our involvements with them. All cognitive accomplishments that we carry out in the world, as ‘‘individual, personal or cultural accomplishments,’’ Husserl contends, are predicated on the structures and dynamics of this network of intersubjective intentionalities—this ‘‘life-world’’—and can be examined as such. This unthematized intersubjectivity provides the unifying ground for the sciences. Even though it constitutes the apparent immediate givenness of the world, as such, it remains taken for granted and thus obscured in the history of modern thought. Discovering the possibility of systematically examining lived experience, Husserl claims to resolve the contradiction that, for him, prevents modern psychology from developing as a science. He argues that psychology’s failure to develop as a science represents not merely a partial problem in the history of modern thought—as an aberration or mark of psychology’s immaturity as a specialized field—but a problem immanent to the development of the sciences as a whole. With the demise of philosophy, psychology assumes responsibility for constructing a universal human science, and thus for explaining the constitution of human experience as a totality. Insofar as such a science is defined in accordance with the paradigm provided 64

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by the natural sciences, however, it remains unable to formulate this problem coherently, and collapses beneath the weight of the responsibility to do so. Husserl contends that the reformulation of psychology’s project requires a systematic examination of lived experience that can account both for the development of psychology as a science and for the emergence of the object that it takes as a given. While philosophers previously failed to achieve such a project because of their implicit presupposition of the immediate givenness of experience, Husserl maintains that the breakdown in psychology—the crisis in reason as a totality—has rendered the integrity of experience questionable. Rather than taking its object as immediately given, psychology must be reformulated as a critique of the intersubjective dynamics in and through which the subject comes to find itself situated in the world. And, to work through the sedimented presuppositions of modern thought, this critique of the structures and dynamics that give order to lived experience must include, as it does in Husserl’s Crisis, reflection back on the historical development of reason. The Unity of Reason and the Persistent Problem of the Irrational Husserl reformulates his transcendental phenomenology as a philosophy of history by demonstrating the immanent unity of the phylogenesis and ontogenesis of reason through the process of its dissolution, and by presenting his phenomenological method as a critique of lived experience required by the loss of the subject’s sense of its place in the world. The elevation of immediately given experience to the status of a universal is, for Husserl, the source of both the particular failure of psychology to establish itself as a science and the errancy in reason’s development as a whole. He calls this error ‘‘naı¨ve objectivism.’’ ‘‘The most general title for this naı¨vete´,’’ he writes, ‘‘is objectivism, taking the form of various types of naturalism, of the naturalization of the spirit. Old and new philosophies were and remain naı¨vely objectivist’’ (292). Husserl contends that this naive objectivism, which culminates in philosophical positivism, implicitly expresses the need for teleological orientation it otherwise denies. The elevation of immediately given experience to a paradigm for experience as such is taken for granted as an article of faith, characteristic of the intentional stance in the natural sciences as one among many possible practical comportments in the constitution of lived experience. The denial of the need to believe in objectivist Suffering Faith in Philosophy

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thought is, according to Husserl, characteristic of the belief that sustains it. Discerning this unity in reason’s dissolution, Husserl claims to have reestablished the philosophical authority of reason to address questions about the values that give order and meaning to experience. He claims to have shown that the teleology of human life, rather than being an aberration from reason, belongs to reason as its deepest concern, and the source of its coherence even in the contradictions of objectivism. With the development of the phenomenological method, he writes, ‘‘every ‘ground’ that is reached points to further grounds, every horizon opened up awakens new horizons, and yet the endless whole, in its infinity of flowing movement is oriented toward the unity of one meaning; not of course, in such a way that we could ever simply grasp and understand the whole; rather as soon as one has fairly well mastered the universal form of meaningformation, the breadths and depths of this total meaning, in its infinite totality, take on valuative dimensions: there arise problems of the totality as that of a universal reason’’ (170). By bringing to light the problems of intentionality and the lifeworld, Husserl contends that phenomenology restores the philosophical question concerning the meaning of life, and thus redeems humankind from its nihilistic fate. He claims to have fulfilled the prophetic role that he describes as the philosopher’s destiny by providing a method for reflecting upon the teleology in reason. ‘‘The total phenomenological attitude and the epoche belonging to it,’’ he writes, ‘‘are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then, however, over and above this, bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such’’ (137; emphasis added). However, because Husserl treats the problem of nihilism as the result merely of a misconception concerning reason’s place in the world, rather than as a fundamental qualification of reason’s selfdetermination, he restores the philosophical authority of reason only insofar as he implicitly presumes the autonomy of the subject, and treats the problem in question as if it ultimately stood in only an accidental relationship to reason. By constructing a methodology to address the question of our place in the world as a totality, Husserl presupposes the separation of theory and practice that he purports to challenge in the history of modern thought. Rather than addressing the need to believe as an irrational dependency that qualifies the 66

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self-determination of reason, Husserl disavows this dependency by claiming to answer it with the proper concept of reason’s form and function. Once reason is properly understood, Husserl contends, its authority to address questions concerning the telos of human life is restored. He argues that reason’s philosophical authority faltered only because it was presupposed. Thus it was not merely misconceived; it was never properly formulated as a question. Once reason arrives at its proper, phenomenological maturity, the question of value that previously appeared to mark the limit to its authority now appears to be its ultimate responsibility and the substance that sustains it. The failure of Husserl’s philosophy of history thus lies not in the deficiency of his reflections, which would justify the further pursuit of his project, but instead in the moment of its accomplishment, when the faith that sustains it as a whole makes itself manifest in the mythological character of his fundamental concepts. The central concepts of Husserl’s philosophy of history, intentionality and life-world betray his presupposition of the unity of reason and denial of the problem of nihilism that he purports to address. As a theoretical problem, Husserl’s recognition of the need for a totalizing concept of reason in the contradictions of ‘‘naı¨vely objectivist’’ thought indeed justifies his defense of such a totality; formulated theoretically, however, the integrity of reason is implicitly presupposed. Husserl believes in the philosophical authority of reason as a practical condition of his attempt to justify doing so theoretically. While he is right that the apparent objectivity of immediately given experience comes to be constituted in and through the subjective and intersubjective attitudes with which we engage the world, Husserl is wrong to presume that these attitudes are coherent, and that they might be retrieved through simple self-reflection. In order to make these claims, Husserl must posit a rationality more primordial than the rationality of the modern world and an order of experience more primordial than the dissonance of everyday life. The problem of nihilism is denied by recourse to theoretically necessary but altogether abstract concepts that preserve subjectively, as articles of faith in Husserl’s philosophy, what has been lost objectively in the development of the modern world. The overvalorization of reason that Husserl criticizes in philosophical positivism thus reappears in the fundamental concepts of his phenomenology, and, with it, the irrational commitments that go unexamined in his thought, despite his recognition of the need to interSuffering Faith in Philosophy

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rogate the concrete conditions of the subject’s situation in the world. When defining the significance of restoring the philosophical authority of reason, Husserl contends that ‘‘only then could it be decided whether European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like ‘China,’ or ‘India’; it could be decided whether the spectacle of the Europeanization of all other civilizations bears witness to the sense, rather than to a historical non-sense, of the world’’ (17). While identifying Europe with the project of civilization, in which ‘‘individual men act in many societies of different levels: in families, in tribes, in nations, all being internally, spiritually bound together . . . in the unity of a spiritual shape,’’ his cosmopolitan concept of civilization remains predicated upon a prior exclusion of alien cultures from his notion of what is properly human (273). Hence, in his ‘‘Vienna Lecture,’’ Husserl adds, ‘‘in the spiritual sense the English Dominions, the United States, etc., clearly belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not.’’2 In the reformulation of his transcendental phenomenology as a philosophy of history, Husserl indeed establishes this ‘‘absolute idea’’ borne by European humanity, by revealing the structures of reason at work in the constitution of experience as a totality. He preserves the figure of the autonomous subject and the idea of ‘‘Europe,’’ fundamental to Western civilization, by providing rational grounds on which to account for reason’s situation in the world, and thus justifies the myth of reason’s self-birthing, despite the breakdown it brought about and the heteronomy in the institution and maintenance of reason’s authority that this breakdown reveals. The concepts of intentionality and life-world thus serve to justify the racism and colonialism that Husserl explains are at issue in restoring the philosophical authority of reason. Rather than addressing the problem of the need to believe, Husserl exploits this need to justify his faith in the value and destiny of European civilization on purportedly universal grounds. In the moment of its accomplishment, the image of reason’s authority sustained by Husserl’s philosophy of history thus appears untenable and absurd, and collapses. Post-Phenomenology In the wake of his phenomenology, the crisis from which Husserl begins deepens. Not only does the problem of nihilism appear more 68

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vivid in its repetition, but Husserl’s response to it also appears symptomatic of it. While he still might believe that the contradictions in reason can be resolved through the philosophical reconstruction of reason’s development in the world, his Crisis appears to perpetuate the very contradictions it means to address. While taking up the problem of the irrational and the project of reconstructing the dissolution of reason’s authority, philosophers after Husserl have not therefore attempted to reestablish that authority, but rather have challenged it and its implicit denial of the problem of nihilism. As Derrida argues in ‘‘The Ends of Man,’’ post-phenomenological thinkers inherit what Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger diagnose as the problem of the ‘‘death of the subject.’’ Because these philosophers nevertheless work to restore reason to its proper authority however, Derrida contends that they maintain an unexamined commitment to the value of ‘‘man’’—a faith in ‘‘man’’—that no longer can be taken for granted. ‘‘Despite the critique of anthropologism,’’ writes Derrida, ‘‘ ‘humanity,’ here, is still the name of the being to which the transcendental telos—determined as Idea (in the Kantian sense) or even as Reason—is announced. It is man as animale rationale who, in the most classical metaphysical determination, designates the site of teleological reason’s unfolding, that is, history. For Husserl, as for Hegel, reason is history, and there is no history but of reason.’’3 In opposition to this metaphysical privileging of the subject, postphenomenological thinkers deconstruct the figures of humanity that sustain the authority of reason, by revealing within them an ‘‘originary diffe´rance’’—the interruption of the aberrant, accidental, and derivative—which Derrida is careful to qualify ‘‘could no longer [be called] originary or final in the extent to which the values of origin, archi-, telos, eskaton, etc. have always denoted presence—ousia, parousia.’’4 Affirming the Need to Believe as Such In this metacritique of the Enlightenment, post-phenomenological philosophers affirm the problem of the need to believe directly as evidence of the displacement and dependency of reason. Before formulating any critical question, Derrida argues in Of Spirit, there is a primordial givenness of language, a yes—or what Derrida treats elsewhere as a ‘‘Yes, yes,’’ or ‘‘Amen’’—with which language is adopted prior to, and as a condition of the possibility of, any reflection on it. ‘‘At the moment at which we pose the ultimate question,’’ writes Derrida, ‘‘i.e., when we interrogate (anfragen) the possibility of any quesSuffering Faith in Philosophy

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tion, i.e., language, we must be already in the element of language. Language must already be speaking for us—it must so to speak, be already spoken and addressed to us.’’ ‘‘This advance is, before any contract,’’ he continues, ‘‘a sort of promise of originary alliance to which we must have in some sense already acquiesced, already said, yes, given a pledge [gage], whatever may be the negativity or the problematicity of the discourse which may follow.’’5 The displacement of the subject by this a priori yes qualifies the autonomy of reason otherwise expressed in questioning, by establishing within it a dependency and obliqueness to its own origins. At the heart of rational objectivity, this yes reveals a radical dissymmetry between the particular and the universal, and an unexamined ethico-religious commitment. In this way, post-phenomenological philosophers answer what Husserl discerns as the need for the philosophy of history through their affirmation of religion. The affirmation of religion in postphenomenological thought is a response to the need for the philosophy of history in a post-historical world. In The Gift of Death, Derrida writes: History can be neither a decidable object nor a totality capable of being mastered, precisely because it is tied to responsibility, to faith, to the gift. To responsibility in the experience of absolute decisions made outside of knowledge or given norms, made therefore through the very ordeal of the undecidable; to religious faith through a form of involvement with the other that is a venture into absolute risk, beyond knowledge and certainty, to the gift of death that puts me into relation with the transcendence of the other, with God as selfless goodness, and that gives me what it gives me through a new experience of death.6 The problem of faith betrays to Derrida the failure of history as the rational overcoming of traditional, heteronomous forms of authority, and reveals the dependence implicit in the constitution of reason’s autonomy as an impasse that simultaneously conditions the possibility of its development. He celebrates it as subversive. ‘‘The heterogeneity that we have identified between the exercise of responsibility and its theoretical or even doctrinal thematization,’’ he writes, ‘‘is also surely what ties responsibility to heresy, to the hairesis as choice, election, preference, inclination, bias, that is, decision.’’7 At the same time, this problem of faith reveals to Derrida a responsibility prior to the demands of reason, based not on the universality of concepts, but rather on the breakdown in reason and 70

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displacement of the subject. Responsibility to others, he contends, does not follow from our generic equivalence as rational subjects; to the contrary, such equivalencies deny the qualitative singularity of the individual that precedes rational abstraction. Responsibility follows, rather, from what is alien in the other, what defines the other as singular and so can never be properly conceived. This alterity of the other dislodges the subject from its self-certain authority and burdens it with a responsibility that it cannot possibly exhaust. While challenging the teleology of reason in history, Derrida thus defends the dis-orientation of the subject as the messianic site of the possible appearance of value in experience, despite the nihilism of the modern world. This responsibility to the ‘‘altogether other’’ orients Derrida’s own critical practice of deconstruction and justifies his paradoxical assertion that ‘‘deconstruction is justice.’’8 ‘‘If we are to ‘‘avoid the arrogance of so many ‘clean consciences,’ ’’ he writes, ‘‘we must continually remind ourselves that some part of irresponsibility insinuates itself wherever one demands responsibility without sufficiently conceptualizing and thematizing what ‘responsibility’ means; that is to say everywhere.’’9 In his Totality and Infinity, Levinas presents a similar argument, taking as his point of departure the breakdown that Husserl diagnoses as resulting from the rationalization of the modern world. ‘‘The visage of being that shows itself in war,’’ Levinas writes, ‘‘is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy.’’10 In the eschatology that follows from this totalizing philosophical moment, Levinas contends, what appears is the singularity of the other that, insofar as it is not nullified by the universal categories of politics and philosophy ‘‘institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history,’’ a relationship with the infinite.11 According to Levinas, this infinite relationship is revealed by the non-adequation of theory and practice. It designates the infinite ethical responsibility of the individual for others that both underlies the project of philosophy and is ultimately denied by its abstractions. It is the indeterminate remainder that reveals the ultimate dependency of reason on what lies beyond it, and its ultimate responsibility to this altogether ‘‘other.’’ Where Husserl works to resolve the opposition between the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of reason, Levinas affirms that the impasse between the universal and particular is itself what determines the subject’s orientation in the post-historical world, and that, as such, it serves to sustain the value in existence, as a figure of the divine. Suffering Faith in Philosophy

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The Persistent Problem of the Irrational In the religious affirmation of the death of the subject, however, postphenomenological philosophers disavow the problem of the heteronomous qualification of reason they purport to defend from philosophical foreclosure. Rather than sustaining the loss of reason’s philosophical authority, they deny the problem that this loss presents by acting as if it might simply be affirmed and thus did not present a problem at all. While the disclosure of the contradictions immanent to the speculative constructs of philosophy indeed demonstrates their theoretical untenability, it in no way challenges the hegemony of instrumental reason in the modern world and its denial of the value in human life. Not only does instrumental reason function regardless of any thematically defined telos; in the ideology of philosophical positivism, it denies the legitimacy of any such value.12 Rather than challenging the authority of reason, the deconstruction of philosophical concepts preserves the site of proper authority—once envisioned in what Husserl mourns as the ‘‘philosophical ideal’’—precisely by denying the theoretical validity of any specific articulation or instantiation of it. Through their ritual insistence on the inadequacy of reason to resolve the incommensurate claims of particulars, post-phenomenological philosophers enjoy the satisfaction of the need to believe in the possibility of such an authority by holding the object of their devotion permanently in abeyance, and then disavowing this enjoyment by celebrating their faith as a heretical act of defiance. Deconstructing the objectivist presuppositions informing philosophical concepts (e.g., in Derrida’s critique of the ‘‘metaphysics of presence’’), postphenomenological philosophers implicitly sustain the ‘‘philosophical ideal’’ by calling into question even the value of reason. They distance themselves from the reifications of what they describe as the ‘‘history of metaphysics,’’ and hold open the possibility of a properly philosophical attitude by adopting a strictly negative approach to it—as tarrying with the ‘‘impossible’’ or ‘‘altogether other.’’ At the same time, through their insistence on the indeterminacy that plagues philosophy, post-phenomenological philosophers enjoy the independence of thought despite the problem of nihilism. They stand apart from the contradictions they purport to address, by treating them as abstractly negative ‘‘undecidables,’’ requiring indefinite (if not infinite) reflection, and reify the apparent givenness of experience by insisting on its radical contingency. Through this emphasis 72

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on indeterminacy, post-phenomenological philosophers deny the implication of reason in what it takes to be its object, and suspend the subject in a state of abstract reflection on the contradictions in modern life as (merely) metaphysical aporias. Though they deny the autonomy of reason in principle, post-phenomenological philosophers remain piously devoted to it in practice. They treat the problem of the irrational as a merely epistemological uncertainty, and act as though disclosure of reason’s lack of philosophical authority were sufficient to restore the problem of value as a question. Beyond a hermeneutical strategy, the practice of deconstruction thus presents something like a mystical rite in and through which the subject is sublimely sustained, despite what is shown to be no good reason. Albeit contrary to Husserl’s concepts of intentionality and lifeworld, post-phenomenology also betrays the myth of a primordial relationship that sustains the position of the subject in the world. As Levinas explains: The impossibility of total reflection must not be posited negatively—as the finitude of a knowing subject, who being mortal and already engaged in the world does not reach truth—but rather as the surplus of the social relation, where subjectivity remains in face of . . . , in the straightforwardness of this welcome, and is not measured by truth. The social relation itself is not just another relation, one among so many others that can be produced in being, but is its ultimate event. The very utterance by which I state it and whose claim to truth, postulating a total reflection, refutes the unsurpassable character of the face to face relation nonetheless confirms it by the very fact of stating this truth—of telling it to the Other.13 Rather than addressing the breakdown in experience and displacement of the subject, post-phenomenological philosophers disavow the problems they present by substantializing the loss itself in the reification of their ‘‘undecidables’’ and ‘‘altogether others.’’ In these quasi-conceptual figures, the ideal of the autonomous subject is preserved under the aspect of its passing. ‘‘War can be produced,’’ Levinas continues, ‘‘only when a being postponing its death is exposed to violence. It can be produced only where discourse was possible: discourse subtends war itself. . . . Violence can aim only at a face.’’14 The fact is denied that the nihilism of the modern world—further manifested in the problem of genocide Levinas responds to—renders Suffering Faith in Philosophy

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people faceless despite our self-consciousness of the value of the individual. Rather than addressing the problem of the irrationality of modern life, the effect of this objectivist affirmation of the death of the subject is acquiescence to it. Practically speaking, it is the same effect that follows from Husserl’s reiteration of the positivist overvaluation of reason. Where Husserl disavows the problem of the reason’s heteronomous qualification by arguing that the problem of the need to believe belongs to reason as a question that it puts to itself, acquiescence to the irrationality of modern life is sustained in post-phenomenological thought through the denial of the need for a rational response to the problem of nihilism, and celebration of this deference to the irrational in reason as an act of defiance. Whereas Husserl denies the problem of the need to believe by insisting that it is in fact appropriate to reason, in their religiosity post-phenomenological philosophers enjoy the explicit gratification of this need—in fact answering, ‘‘Amen,’’ ‘‘Yes, yes’’—while disavowing their doing so in and through their insistence on its theoretical unsatisfiability. Conclusion The denial of the problem of the need to believe in the religiosity of post-phenomenological thought reveals the return of what Husserl discerns as the need for a rational response to the irrationality of the modern world. It requires a philosophy of history that can reconstruct the dissolution of the philosophical authority of reason, so that the contradictions within reason might be rationally accommodated. At the same time, however, the persistence of this problem of the need to believe does not sanction the revival of the project of philosophy as such. Post-phenomenologists are right to recognize the immanent contradiction in the attempt to restore the philosophical authority of reason and the violent denial that this entails. The failure of Husserl’s Crisis makes the post-historical character of our modern condition unavoidable and presents a bar against any attempt to revive the philosophy of history. In the wake of phenomenology and post-phenomenology, this paradoxical demand for the philosophy of history in a post-historical world requires that the need to believe be addressed as a matter foremost of need rather than belief. The objectivist presuppositions underlying both Husserl and his successors’ responses to the loss of the philosophical authority of reason must be relinquished. The question 74

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concerning reason’s authority, in fact, must be abandoned altogether. This question, pursued in contrary directions by phenomenologists and post-phenomenologists alike, primarily concerns the validity of reason’s theoretical claims. The question must rather be raised as to what sustains the functioning of reason despite its lack of philosophical authority. This question recognizes the persistent need for rational reflection, without thereby denying reason’s lack of universality. The problem of the need to believe requires a genealogical method that can reconstruct the contradictions immanent to reason, resulting from the heteronomy in its origins. As a matter of need, however, this genealogy must abandon any attempt to surmount the contradictions in reason, as such. It remains limited to explicating the dynamics of reason and to unearthing the problems presented by the heteronomous demands that inform its development and functioning. At the same time, this fundamental qualification of reason does not justify the denial of any and all rational responses to the problem it presents. Rational reflection is required to guard against the overvaluation of reason itself, by bringing to light and acknowledging the need to believe as an affective demand, without thereby promising to satisfy it. The question bequeathed by the failure of phenomenology and postphenomenology concerns neither how to restore belief in reason nor how to subvert such misguided beliefs. Nor does it concern how to answer the need to believe in either the positive or the negative. The problem we face rather concerns how to address the need to believe as a practical, affective problem that plagues the functioning of reason, despite the lack of any satisfactory answer to it.

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4

Becoming Real—with Style Merold Westphal

‘‘Real isn’t how you are made,’’ said the Skin Horse. ‘‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’’ ‘‘Does it hurt?’’ asked the Rabbit. ‘‘Sometimes,’’ said the Skin Horse . . . ‘‘Does it happen all at once . . . ?’’ ‘‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’’ said the Skin Horse. You become. It takes a long time . . .’’ —Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit (emphasis added)

I have not been able to determine from which seminary the Skin Horse has his degree, or at what divinity school he teaches. A thorough check reveals that the American Academy of Religion, for all the great diversity of its offerings, has never devoted a session to his thought. But surely he is one of the leading theologians of our time. He knows that, if the ultimate explanation of our being here is a blind evolutionary process, all it would take to be real would be to show up on the scene (Dasein, perhaps). But if we are made, if the ultimate explanation is an act in which love shares its being with that which has no being, then reality will be a task as well as a gift.1 There is another reason why the Skin Horse is one of our greatest theologians (a title he would surely find embarrassing). He knows 76

not only that the meaning of our being is to become (real), but also that it takes a long time. On this second point, Simone Weil is in complete agreement: There are people who try to raise their souls like a man continually taking standing jumps in the hopes that, if he jumps higher everyday, a time may come when he will no longer fall back but will go right up to the sky. Thus occupied he cannot look at the sky. We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If, however, we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily.2 It does not matter whether we define the task that takes so long to finish as becoming real, with the Skin Horse, or as opening ourselves to union with God, with Simone Weil. For these will turn out to be two sides of the same coin. We are given existence in order to become real; and we become real by allowing God to draw us into communion with the divine life that gave us life. If we are quite convinced that we are already real, either by virtue of a secular ontology according to which we were born real or according to an easy theology according to which the task of becoming real is quickly accomplished, we will move on in search of more ‘‘interesting’’ ideas.3 But if we suspect that we may be, in the immortal words of William James, ‘‘real but not so very damn real,’’4 we will find ourselves put into question by this theology and will respond with questions of our own, sometimes seeking to defend ourselves and sometimes opening ourselves to instruction. In either case, one of the questions high on our list will be, how long does it take to become real? Uninvited to our conversation but apparently having overheard it, Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus, a postmodern theologian of some renown, offers an answer. ‘‘Only he really has style who is never finished. . . .’’5 This little aphorism is sandwiched between a piece of satire and a more serious analysis: For most people, life changes when they have come to a certain point in their searching. They marry, they enter occupations, in consequence of which they must out of decency finish something, must have results (because shame before people bids them to have results; what modesty before the god [Guden] might bid is given far less thought). So they believe that they Becoming Real—with Style

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themselves actually have arrived. . . . So off and on they also engage in a little striving, but the last is merely a skimpy marginal note to a text finished long ago.6 Then comes our aphorism, then this analysis: To be continually in the process of becoming in this way is the illusiveness of the infinite in existence. It could bring a sensate person to despair, for one continually feels an urge to have something finished, but this urge is of evil and must be renounced. The perpetual process of becoming is the uncertainty of earthly life, in which everything is uncertain.7 You become. It takes a long time. To be more specific, it takes so long to become real that we are never finished with the task in this lifetime. We learn a great deal about ourselves by noting whether we find this notion sobering or ‘‘interesting.’’ But before we can explore it out of either motivation, we must address a rather obvious objection. Climacus offers us a phenomenology of piety, describing the dialectical dynamics of ‘‘Religiousness A’’ and ‘‘Religiousness B.’’ But has he not committed a category mistake by introducing the subject of style into such a discussion? After a serious California earthquake, one wit came up with a line that I hope never made it to those digging out from the rubble. ‘‘They had it coming,’’ he said. ‘‘After all, it was California that gave us the notion of lifestyle.’’ If there was a serious undertone to this barb, it lay in the suggestion that to think of life as a matter of style is to trivialize it, to empty it of its possibilities of tragedy and evil, to be sure, but also of its potential for beauty and nobility. In the present context, the objection would take on a Kierkegaardian tone of voice and go like this. Style is an aesthetic category and piety a religious category. But while both the aesthetic and the religious refuse to be confined within the bourgeois morality of Judge William and others who, out of decency, feel they must be finished with life’s essential tasks, they do so in radically different ways. To speak of styles of piety is simply to confuse and conflate what must be kept distinct. Climacus will not deny this for a moment. One of his arguments against the speculative ‘‘piety’’ of Hegelianism is that it is a lapse back into the aesthetic. It is Climacus who transforms the theory of the three stages on life’s way into a two- or fourfold theory with ‘‘Aesthetic and Speculative Objectivity’’ (detachment), on the one hand, and ‘‘Ethical and Religious Subjectivity,’’ on the other. 78

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But Climacus will deny that the notion of style is a monopoly of the aesthetic, and he will do so on the basis of his own phenomenology of religious subjectivity. After all, his own (in)famous notion of truth as subjectivity depends on distinguishing the what of faith from the how.8 By focusing our attention not on the truth of the what, a question whose legitimacy he acknowledges and whose danger he emphasizes, but on the passion of the how, Climacus opens the way to a religious concept of style and makes it possible to define a certain style of piety with his aphorism ‘‘Only he really has style who is never finished. . . .’’ What does it mean that the life of faith is a life never finished, that there is something perennially penultimate about the purest piety? Climacus has his own answer to this question, but we may appreciate it more fully if we sandwich it between the answers of two other authors also found within the Kierkegaardian corpus, Johannes de Silentio and Kierkegaard himself. Silentio’s restaging of the Abraham story serves three functions within Kierkegaard’s authorship: (1) it contributes to the theory of the stages by distinguishing the ethical from the religious; (2) it continues a critique of Hegel that began in The Concept of Irony and will reach a climax in Concluding Unscientific Postscript; and (3) it begins the ‘‘attack upon Christendom’’ that will conclude with the pamphlets eventually published under that name.9 The preface and epilogue stand like bookends, united by the thesis that faith is the task of a lifetime. If the Hegelian system were to suspect as much it would reject such a notion out of hand as an instance of the ‘‘bad’’ infinite or of an Unhappy Consciousness that has long since been aufgehoben. And if complacent Christendom, which loves the system which makes it the goal of history, were to suspect as much, it would reject such a notion out of hand as a kind of, well, bad manners. But Silentio insists. Precisely because he knows how unwelcome his idea will be to ‘‘our age.’’ So in the preface he likens faith to doubt—not the artificial and temporary modern doubt of Descartes, but the doubt of the ancient Greek skeptics. They assumed it to be ‘‘a task for a whole lifetime, because proficiency in doubting is not acquired in days and weeks. . . .’’10 Similarly, in the epilogue, he likens faith to love for precisely the same reason. Just as no one has ever finished learning to love, so no one has ever finished learning to live in faith.11 Becoming Real—with Style

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Learning to doubt, learning to love, learning to live in faith: all are tasks we never finish. We must say learning to live in faith and not learning to believe, for it is clear that Abraham’s faith goes far beyond mere cognitive assent. Like Heidegger, Kierkegaard understands faith with Luther as ‘‘permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.’’12 And, with Paul, he knows that faith involves ‘‘obedience to the faith.’’ (Romans 1:5) Faith involves a cognitive element (hence learning); but the intellectual virtue involved is more like phronesis or sapientia than episteme or scientia. Like the phronimos, the knight of faith has a know-how that requires completion in action. But why does learning to live in faith take so long? Silentio tries to explain by contrasting the knight of faith, first with the knight of infinite resignation and then with the tragic hero. It turns out that the former is an aspect of the latter, but since it is not the essential feature, infinite resignation is treated as a ‘‘preliminary’’ consideration. Knowing that he does not have the ‘‘courage’’ of Abraham, Silentio tries to picture himself in Abraham’s shoes. ‘‘The moment I mounted the horse, I would have said to myself: Now all is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy. . . .’’13 What makes this an act of infinite resignation rather than infinite resentment is that it occurs without bitterness ‘‘in order to find myself and again rest in myself.’’ But this means that infinite resignation is only ‘‘a substitute for faith.’’14 What does Abraham have that Silentio lacks? First, the faith that God will not actually take Isaac from him; more importantly, the faith that even if Isaac is sacrificed, ‘‘God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed. He had this faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago.’’ To have faith is ‘‘to be able to lose one’s understanding and along with it everything finite, for which it is the stockbroker, and then to win the very same finitude again by virtue of the absurd.’’15 For an audience immersed in the literature of romanticism, Silentio replays the story in terms of a young man and the princess he loves, knowing that they cannot be united. He gives her up in resignation and is reconciled to pain. But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith that I will get her—that is, by virtue of the absurd, by virtue of the fact that for God all things are 80

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possible. The absurd does not lie within the proper domain of the understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen. [The knight] was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was the conclusion of the understanding, and he had sufficient energy to think it . . . for the understanding continues to be right in maintaining that in the finite world where it dominates this having was and continues to be an impossibility. The knight of faith realizes this just as clearly; consequently, he can be saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith.16 If this were a discussion of Kierkegaard’s ‘‘irrationalism,’’ it would be important to point out that the absurd here is not inherently absurd but only relative to a finite world from which God has been excluded and to a human understanding that knows how to calculate its way around in such a finite world, taking into account ‘‘the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen,’’ but not the impossible possibility of divine agency. Given the powers of nature and human agency, it is not absurd to hope that one will win the lottery; but it is absurd for our lover to hope for his princess and even more absurd for Abraham to hope for Isaac back from the dead. But ‘‘for God all things are possible,’’ and in Silentio’s account, faith is irrational only in the eyes of a reason that systematically leaves God out of the picture.17 But we are asking a different question: why is faith the task of a lifetime? So far, the answer would be something like this. Faith means having to do with a God who is Wholly Other, impossible in the finite world of nature and human agency in which we find ourselves immediately situated and incalculable for the understanding by which we make ourselves as comfortable as possible in that world. The God of Abraham is so awesomely transcendent that faith can only seem a kind of madness,18 and yet so audaciously immanent as to enter into covenant with us, speaking words of promise and command by which we are to live. Hence You become. It takes a long time to learn to live with such a God. For every domestication, by which we assimilate God to our own world, is idolatry. And this is only preliminary—we haven’t gotten to the heart of the matter yet. Abraham is not only asked to believe and hope the impossible but also to do the unforgivable, to kill his son. Isn’t this murder most foul? At this point, the tragic hero replaces the knight of infinite resignation. For Jephtha, Agamemnon, and Brutus, it is not simply a matter Becoming Real—with Style

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of giving their beloved children up but of doing them in. Yet they remain within the ethical and their acts, actually carried out, are acts of civic virtue. For, in the circumstances in which they find themselves, their duty to their children is trumped by a higher duty to their society. In their pain they know that they have done the right thing. Doesn’t the same analysis apply to Abraham? Isn’t his duty to Isaac trumped by a higher duty to God? Yes, to be sure, and he knows that it will be right to sacrifice Isaac if God really asks him to go through with it. But he does not remain within the ethical; faith is the teleological suspension of the ethical. To understand this crucial phrase, we need to notice that Silentio does not have the Platonic or Kantian ethical in mind, according to which duty is based on the insight of pure reason into eternal truth. For faith to go against such eternal truth would be an absurd and paradoxical madness beyond what either Silentio or his creator, Kierkegaard, envision (though careless readings regularly attribute this view to them). But neither Silentio nor Kierkegaard supposes that human reason is capable of pure intuition into timeless truth. Both work with a Hegelian understanding of the ethical as Sittlichkeit, the laws and customs of one’s people, what Nietzsche calls the ‘‘morality of mores.’’19 Such an ethics is doubly finite: it expresses the values of a particular historical community and it has that community’s flourishing as its highest telos. The higher duty by which our tragic heroes are justified comes from within such an ethics; the higher duty to which Abraham responds does not. As a contribution to the theory of the stages of existence, to the critique of Hegel, and to the ‘‘attack upon Christendom,’’ the teleological suspension of the ethical is a reminder that from the religious point of view the laws and customs of one’s people can never be absolute, the highest possible norm for action. For that would be the idolatry of identifying one’s own social order with the divine order.20 Now it becomes even clearer why it takes so long to learn faith. For Abraham’s God is transcendent not only to the causal order of the all too finite cave in which we live, but also to its moral order. In the language of Aquinas, human law can never simply be equated with either the eternal or divine law.21 But this means that faith cannot be identified with socialization. Coming to grips with my society and its demands on me is not an easy task, and (as Freud and Nietzsche, especially, remind us) the road is bumpy and often painful. But growing up is not the task of a lifetime. It is expected that by my 82

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late teens or early twenties I will have become a respectable, wellmannered, law-abiding citizen who contributes to society through work and perhaps family life and who does not engage in ‘‘antisocial’’ behavior. The assimilation of the spiritual life to this socialization process underlies Climacus’s satire (above) on those who feel that decency requires that they be finished. But Abraham’s God is a radical alterity not only to my own natural particularity but also to my society’s conventional universality. God may make more strenuous demands on me than my society makes; and, as Abraham learned, those demands may go, not merely beyond, but even against what society requires. Those who see in Abraham the father of the faithful may sing hymns of praise to the God who for us and for our salvation graciously comes into our cave from outside through various prophets (or even through a Son; Hebrews 1:1–2); but learning to live with such a God is no trifling task. You become. It takes a long time. To be more specific, learning to live with such a God by diluting the divine alterity and domesticating the wildness of genuine transcendence—that does not take long. We seem to have an almost innate talent for socializing God. But learning to live with Abraham’s God without the diluting and domesticating alchemy that converts God into an idol created in our own image— that is the task of a lifetime. If we turn now to Climacus with our question of why, according to the religious point of view, it takes so long to become real, we get three answers in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: two short ones with a very long one in between. The first short answer concerns objective knowledge. We might think of faith as presupposing historical knowledge (what did Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, the Buddha really teach?). But all such knowledge is approximation, open to refinement, reformulation, even radical revision. It is never final. However confident we may be about various historical beliefs, we are never in a position to say that research and investigation are finished, that the last results are in. If we notice two types of questions here that Climacus does not distinguish, his point will be even more obvious. On the one hand there are the questions of higher and lower criticism. When were these texts written and by whom? Do they reflect the actual teachings of the prophet or subsequent accretions? Have the texts been preserved accurately? And so forth. But even if we could answer these questions definitively (which is precisely what Climacus deBecoming Real—with Style

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nies), there remains the hermeneutical question, what do these teachings mean? How shall we interpret them? People can (and often have) sought to declare the task of interpretation finished. But Climacus would obviously side with those who find such claims to be dogmatic and arbitrary and who would suspect that they constitute a certain kind of power play, what Derrida calls ‘‘hermeneutical violence.’’22 We can also think of faith as presupposing metaphysical knowledge, answers to questions such as who or what is Absolute? what is the proper relation of the finite self to this Ultimate Reality? how does one get into this relation? Partly with satirical questions about whether ‘‘The System’’ is finished or whether we must wait a week or so longer, Climacus argues that we are too embedded in time to be able to see reality sub specie aeternitatis and that the speculative project is as inherently open ended as the historical. You become. It takes a long time because the knowledge on which faith rests is always in process, never finished and final. Climacus’s second short answer to our question comes when he returns, under the heading of ‘‘Religiousness B,’’ to issues raised in Philosophical Fragments and specific to Christianity. Thus he tells us we should speak of becoming a Christian rather than of being a Christian so as not to delude ourselves into thinking that Christian faith, like socialization but unlike the faith of Abraham, is a task we can have put behind us. But just as Silentio finds the faith that is the task of a lifetime in Abraham, who is not a Christian, so Climacus refuses to restrict the style of piety that is never finished to Christian faith (though he most emphatically includes the latter in the former) and often presents Socrates to us as his knight of faith. After all, the notion of style is a formal notion; it has a certain generality that permits a variety of instantiations. So we can turn to his long answer to our question, his generic account of the religious stage. It is a very long answer indeed, separating the two short answers by almost 500 pages (in the Hongs’ translation). This involves turning from ‘‘Objectivity’’ to ‘‘Subjectivity,’’ from epistemic to existential questions and thus, according to Climacus, to the heart of the matter. For even if speculation could fulfill the promises it makes as ‘‘Objectivity’’ (today we might say as the onto-theological project and the metaphysics of presence), the result would not be faith. The believing soul may hope for the beatific vision; but the religious life in the here and now is not a gnosticism whose me´tier is to have completed the 84

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ascent up Plato’s divided line and out of the cave so as to gaze at the Transcendental Signified; it is the existential pathos of one who seeks to relate appropriately to the Eternal while still immersed in time. And this takes a long time. You become. Thus, for faith, Truth is not the Whole over which we preside when we have completed the mediations that constitute the Idea, and thereby come to rest as the selfconscious identity of Thought and Being.23 It is rather ‘‘an objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness.’’24 A threefold existential pathos defines the scene of this appropriation as a scene of perpetual becoming. It is only at this generic site that specifically Christian becoming can take place.25 The initial expression of religious subjectivity is resignation. Here, by contrast with the Abraham story, the issue is not so much God as immortality. The eternal happiness for which the believer (Socrates, for example) hopes is not a just highest good but an absolute good for which we must be prepared to surrender any and every finite, worldly good. ‘‘If there is something he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness.’’26 Thus the task is ‘‘simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to one’s absolute τλοσ and relatively to relative ends.’’27 There is tension, not rest, in such an undertaking. It turns out that our default setting is to be absolutely related to some relative good or to some group of them. Nor is the project or posture easily displaced. Without deserting or damning the finitude in which we find ourselves,28 we must die to the immediacy in which we take that finitude to be ultimate. And this dying must be perpetual. In this twelve-step program, one can never say, ‘‘I have recovered,’’ but only ‘‘I am recovering from my addiction to the finite.’’ This is doubly painful. On the one hand, there is the pain of withdrawal. On the other hand, there is the discouragement of not being able simply to go cold turkey and be done with it. One is always a beginner. You become. It takes a long time. So, unlike the suffering that comes when fortune frowns on us, this suffering is essential to the spiritual life. ‘‘The actuality of [this] suffering means its essential continuance and is its essential relation to the religious life.’’29 If resignation is the initial expression of religious subjectivity, suffering is its essential expression. But guilt is its decisive expression. Climacus insists that this guilt is total guilt. This has a double meaning. First, guilt is total because it is not a matter of isolated acts but rather of the fundamental project Becoming Real—with Style

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of posture from which all our actions arise. It is a matter of sin rather than of sins, and confession will have to take the form, ‘‘I am a sinner,’’ rather than ‘‘I committed three sins today.’’ Since we are never fully and finally free from the immediacy in which we fail to be simultaneously absolutely related to the Absolute and only relatively related to the relative, all of our thoughts, words, and deeds are contaminated by their origin in a heart that is not pure.30 Second, guilt is total because at any point in time when we consciously undertake to amend our ways, we discover that we have always already given our consent to the immediacy from which we must, accordingly, not just recover but repent. Levinas’s analysis of a certain temporality may be helpful here formally, though he is making a point about responsibility, whereas Climacus speaks of fault. Before the Other, Levinas says, I experience ‘‘an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment . . . ‘older’ than the a priori.’’31 Modernity’s autonomous self bites the dust. Neither as the a priori that grounds my judgments nor as the agency that grounds my commitments am I a pure origin. I have always already been placed under a claim and all my theoretical and practical activities are responses of some kind, possibly avoidances, to that claim. Using the term ‘‘proximity’’ for the primordial trauma of being commanded, Levinas writes, ‘‘Subjectivity is not antecedent to proximity, in which [in, or better, out of subjectivity] it would later commit itself. On the contrary, it is in proximity, which is a relationship and a term, that every commitment is made.’’32 Similarly, Climacus sees the self that would undertake to be simultaneously related absolutely to the Absolute and only relatively to the relative as always arriving late, preceded by the self that has already failed in this task. Let us call the former self ‘‘aspiration’’ and the latter ‘‘fallenness.’’ Then we can paraphrase Levinas so as to make Climacus’s point. Aspiration is not antecedent to fallenness, from which it would be a later lapse. On the contrary, it is in fallenness that every aspiration takes place. If aspiration has its origin in fallenness, it may very well be that the resultant virtues will be glittering vices. Climacus’s analysis of total guilt may be a more important contribution to theological reflection on the problem of original sin than the more extended reflections of Vigilius Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety.33 But our concern is with faith as the task of a lifetime. That task is to relate simultaneously to the Infinite and the finite without either confusing something finite with the Infinite or reduc86

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ing the Infinite to something finite. For Silentio that means the teleological suspension of the ethical (the finite embodiment of the right). For Climacus it means resignation, the subordination of all finite goods to the Infinite Good. By extending his examination of resignation through his analysis of suffering and guilt, Climacus helps us to see why, when it comes to resignation, You become. It takes a long time. Suffering signifies the perpetual need for renewed dying to immediacy, and guilt explains the never-yet-finished of suffering in terms of the always-already-fallen of aspiration. Here, too, modernity’s self-sufficient self is exposed as a myth. The closest modernity comes to Climacus’s analysis is when Kant speaks of radical evil. Our propensity to evil is sufficiently strong, in his account, that the task of overcoming it in ourselves is an infinite task. For Kantian piety too, faith is the task of a lifetime. But while Kant insists that we have never finally arrived, morally speaking, he holds that we can make progress in the sense of asymptotically approaching the goal. In Climacus’s account, the basis for this optimism is undermined. It is not that people never stop beating their wives or cheating on their income tax. Rather, by virtue of its totality, guilt is qualitative and not merely quantitative. As long as the spring from which our deeds flow is poisoned, everything that flows from it will be poisoned as well. To invoke the image of Simone Weil, to think that we are closer to flying because we jumped higher today than yesterday is to delude ourselves. But if Climacus is indeed a kind of postmodernist,34 he is a very different kind from Nietzsche, and nowhere is the difference clearer than here. For Nietzsche, atheism is ‘‘a kind of second innocence.’’ Guilt is the ‘‘madness,’’ the ‘‘nonsense,’’ the ‘‘absurdity’’ of faith. The Greek gods are nobler than the Christian God, for while the latter took our punishment, the former took our guilt, enabling us to blame them for our atrocities and to describe them as ‘‘foolishness, not sin.’’35 We turn finally to Kierkegaard himself, in particular to his meditation on Matthew 22:39, where Jesus says, ‘‘But the second commandment is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’’36 As with Abraham, faith is never less than the obedience of faith. In this case the command is to love the neighbor, and it is as if Kierkegaard wants to correct Silentio’s notion that faith is the task of a lifetime because it is like love. Au contraire, my dear Johannes, the link is closer than that. Faith is a lifelong task because it is the task of faith to love. By insisting that love is the how and not the what of our Becoming Real—with Style

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actions, Kierkegaard links this analysis to Climacus’s reflections on a certain style of life.37 Neighbor love is commanded love. As such, it is to be contrasted with celebrated love, of which there are two varieties, erotic love and friendship. Kierkegaard makes basically four points about these two modes of love. First, they are celebrated by the poet. The suggestion is that they belong to the aesthetic rather than to the religious life. Second, they are spontaneous. They do not need to be commanded because they spring naturally from our drives and inclinations. Third, they are preferential. You become a candidate for my erotic love or friendship by being attractive to me in ways that others are not. You offer to my drives and inclinations some satisfaction that warrants preferring you over others. And, finally, for the reasons just given, erotic love and friendship are forms of self-love. For this reason, when two or more are united in erotic love or friendship, they may very well form a ‘‘new selfish self.’’38 By contrast, neighbor love is not celebrated by the poet but commanded by God. This is what makes it an essential moment in the religious life. Far from being a spontaneous satisfaction of my drives and inclinations, it is heteronomous, the sign of a self that ‘‘has the law of its existence outside itself.’’39 Rather than being preferential, it is egalitarian, pointing to the equality of all others in their claim to my love. Thus it is even required that I love my enemy, who is also my neighbor.40 Finally, instead of being a form of self-love, it is a mode of self-denial. The neighbor is ‘‘what thinkers call ‘the other,’ that by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested.’’41 It is only through passing this test that one learns ‘‘proper self-love.’’42 Even without reflecting on what it might mean to ‘‘love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind’’ (Matthew 22:37), this brief sketch of the ‘‘second’’ commandment in Jesus’ summary of the law adds to our understanding of how faith might be the task of a lifetime. We can add Kierkegaard himself to our list of commentators on the theology of the Skin Horse. You become. It takes a long time. But in focusing on this theme, have we not overlooked, even contradicted a second, equally important motif in the theology of our skinny friend? ‘‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real’’ (emphasis shifted). It is plain horse sense to our distinguished theologian that we become real not by loving, but by being loved by someone who is already real in a way we are not. 88

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Simone Weil, we can recall, was fully in agreement. ‘‘If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily’’ (emphasis added). But for Silentio, faith was the task of a lifetime. With Climacus it was all about the striving of becoming subjective. Now, with Kierkegaard—so far—we hear about nothing but the command to love our neighbor. Has Kierkegaard forgotten that we cannot fly? In his dissertation he described life as a gift and a task.43 Shouldn’t the life of faith be a gift as well as a task? There is indeed in our three texts as well as in others from Kierkegaard’s pen, a strong, even one-sided emphasis on faith as a task. This is because he seeks to hold up a mirror to a Christendom he sees as mostly aesthetic-speculative with a thin veneer of ‘‘cheap grace’’ to give the appearance of piety.44 But he is too Lutheran simply to replace the gift of grace with the task of works, even in a book called Works of Love. We could turn to his various ‘‘Discourses at the Communion on Fridays’’ for beautiful and powerful accounts of the gift of the forgiveness of sin.45 But we need not go beyond the text immediately before us. For Works of Love does not begin with the meditations on commanded love. It begins by asking what the ‘‘origin,’’ ‘‘source,’’ and ‘‘ground’’ of human love is, and answers unambiguously that it is God’s love for us. ‘‘How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you!’’46 Kierkegaard resorts to a beautiful image to make his point: Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love.47 Prevenient grace. Anarchic love. Whenever we undertake any project, including the project of loving our neighbor, we find ourselves, not thrown, but always already loved. Climacus tells us that his intention is ‘‘to make it difficult to become a Christian,’’ although he insists he does not want to make it ‘‘more difficult than it is.’’48 Becoming Real—with Style

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Has Kierkegaard called his bluff and introduced the grace motif to make things easier? Not at all. To let ourselves be loved, ‘‘REALLY loved,’’ as the Skin Horse would put it, is not as easy as it sounds. He reminds us that sometimes it hurts. Real love is not the genie whose command is our every wish. Real love is sometimes tough love, and one of the things real love will do is tell us what our best friend won’t tell us. In the present case, we already have before us two of the many reasons why it is not so easy to let ourselves be loved by God, why grace looks like a Trojan horse to self-love. First, at the heart of divine love is the forgiveness of sins. But that can be a welcome gift only to one who is able to acknowledge the need for forgiveness. That is why Anti-Climacus associates the notion of sin and its forgiveness so closely with the notion of offense.49 We instinctively understand this, and ‘‘good manners’’ teach us, when someone says, ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ not to say, ‘‘I forgive you,’’ but rather ‘‘It’s OK.’’ Second, the God who has always already loved us is also the God who has always already put our improper self-love in question by commanding us to love our neighbor. Though both the love and the command are prior to any act on our part (intentional, strategic, altruistic), they are ordered. First the love, then the command; but never the love without the command. And if the love precedes the command, it precedes any fulfillment of the command a fortiori. Hence the language of grace. But now it appears that our second motif, that becoming real is something that happens to you when someone more real than yourself REALLY loves you, reinforces the first motif, You become. It takes a long time. For learning to accept the divine love that unites unconditional acceptance with unconditional demand without diluting or domesticating it to make it more nearly compatible with our own self-love, that, too, looks to be the task of a lifetime, one that makes us perpetual beginners who are never finished. But then, ‘‘Only he really has style who is never finished. . . .’’ In conclusion, two observations about this style of piety. First, it is meant to portray what an authentic, biblical Christianity would look like. Not that it makes any claim to being uniquely Christian. Silentio’s Abraham, after all, was a Jew and not a Christian. And it is Socrates, the Greek, who is the concrete model for ‘‘Religiousness A.’’ Finally, Kierkegaard presents the command of neighbor love in its 90

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New Testament setting, not because he has forgotten that Jesus was quoting the Torah (Leviticus 19:18), but because, as already noted, he had a complacent Christendom as his intended readership. So one needn’t be a Christian to practice this style of piety. Still, Kierkegaard and his readers know that Abraham is presented as the father of the faithful not only in the Jewish Bible but in no fewer than three books of the New Testament, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews; Climacus plugs the specifically Christian account of how we gain an eternal happiness, under the rubric ‘‘Religiousness B,’’ into his account of ‘‘Religiousness A’’ as an especially intense species of this already very intense genus; and Kierkegaard presents neighbor love as Christian love.50 The journey implicit in these accounts takes us back to Socrates and then beyond Socrates to a biblical faith in a God personal enough to love and to command. This God is at once too immanent not to be in such personal relations with the believing soul and too transcendent to allow our wishes, our autonomy, to be the principle of either that love or that command. In short, the style of piety before us is very traditional, at least if we allow the tradition to include the efforts, already begun with the Hebrew prophets, to resist remodeling Yahweh to fit our specifications. At the same time, this is a postmodern piety. For Silentio, the themes of paradox, absurdity, and even madness make it clear that he is no advocate of ‘‘religion within the limits of reason alone.’’ Even Habermas’s attempt to preserve Kantian rationality in a dialogical rather than monological mode is challenged in ‘‘Problema III,’’ where Silentio tries to explain why Abraham cannot build a communicative consensus to justify his act by discussing it with Sarah or Isaac or, for that matter, anyone else. Kantian reason wants to set limits within which God must operate. Habermasian reason draws the secularizing conclusion of such a project by affirming the linguistification of the sacred.51 Neither leaves room for the faith of Abraham. If Silentio also opposes the faith of Abraham to the Hegelian system, it is Climacus who makes clear the onto-theological character of that system. For Abraham, there is a Highest Being, to be sure, but not the kind demanded by onto-theology, one who can render the whole of being intelligible to human understanding.52 Thus, while reality may well be a system for God, it cannot be such for any human self. And it may well be that die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, but only for God, who is the only proper observer of the world-historical totality. Any human metanarrative will be either incomplete and Becoming Real—with Style

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open-ended or dogmatic and arbitrary. Finally, truth is the identity of thought and being, but this is a ‘‘chimera’’ for us, ‘‘not because truth is not an identity, but because the knower is an existing person, and thus truth cannot be an identity for him as long as he exists.’’53 It is precisely for a believing soul too finite in all these ways for the onto-theological project that Climacus sets forth his style of religious subjectivity. Kierkegaard himself also insists on the radical limits of human understanding. In the passage quoted above, comparing God’s love to a ‘‘deep spring’’ that feeds a lake, he continues: Just as the quiet lake invites you to contemplate it but by the reflected image of darkness prevents you from seeing through it, so also the mysterious origin of love in God’s love prevents you from seeing its ground. When you think you see it, you are deceived by a reflected image, as if that which only hides the deeper ground were the ground.54 Here the metaphysics of presence makes way for the mystery of transcendence. Not only God but also the work of divine love in the human heart is hidden from human view. There is more than a little of the negative theologian in Kierkegaard.55 Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous personae would be neither flattered nor threatened by the label ‘‘postmodern.’’ Indeed, they would most likely find the question of their postmodern ‘‘status’’ trivial. But for the contemporary reader the notion of a postmodern, biblical Christianity can hardly seem so. For the thoughtful Christian (or Jewish or Muslim monotheist), there is the suggestion that some of the central themes of postmodern philosophy are not inherently secular and that, regardless of the personal position and writerly intention of their authors, they may have important and legitimate work to do as faith seeks understanding of itself as faith. Postmodernism need not automatically evoke anathemas. For the secular postmodernist, on the other hand, who is more deeply rooted in Nietzsche than in Kierkegaard, there is the possible discovery that there were not as many fatalities in the Nietzschean death of God as had been assumed. If fundamental themes of contemporary postmodern philosophy are not inherently secular, it may be that they confirm the radical finitude of human thought without precluding the radical infinity of the God who is personal enough to love us, to command us, and thereby to make us real, even if it takes a very long time. 92

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Morality without God Charles E. Scott

I would like to address the issues of this discussion by presenting three options. One is clearly theistic, one figures a loss of faith, and one arises outside of a sense of divine presence or of loss of divine presence. I use the word address in order to indicate that I do not have a final judgment to make regarding the advantages of one option over the others, although I find myself oriented by the third. My purposes are broadly descriptive and intended to indicate three kinds of attitude, three affective awarenesses, each exclusive of the other two and each viable now for various people. Only the first option is distinctly religious, but all three are formed in part by attitudes regarding humans’ ‘‘place’’ and meaning in the universe. One persuasion that guides these observations is that a religious response to the enormity of our setting and to the challenges that that enormity presents to human significance is optional in the sense that such a response is not ‘‘natural’’ to humans. Nothing ‘‘material’’ or necessary for humankind is articulated in any of the attitudes, and each figures the present-day optionality of the other two. Consider the sense of distance and empty space that can accompany our experience of starlight. On a clear night, we look up to see uncountable shining lights surrounded in darkness and silence. They An earlier version of this essay was published in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 82, no.3–4 (Fall/Winter 1999): 505–7. 93

shine on us in our raptures and can give us to feel awe before sheer expanse, sheer enormity, vastness beyond narration. They also shine as the infant dies, people cry out in agony, and unrecountable injustices are performed without care and without witness. A vacant coldness can be found with stars even when they lift our hearts and inspire us to sing, and, taken by themselves, they speak to us of nothing moral or right or just even when we are inclined by their shining glory to bow in reverence before the universe. They are not witnesses of human lives. The writer of the Eighth Psalm seems to have been aware of something like this ambiguity in people’s experiences of starlight: O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of they hands; thou hast put all things under his feet. . . . (Psalms 8:1–6) The poet addresses God in this psalm in the form of an encomium: you, Lord, are above the heavens, above the light of stars, above all that is overwhelming in the shining enormity of the sky. Your glory, your shine, outshines all the shining hosts. And from that brilliance you heed us; you have given strength to the weak and have immobilized the powerful who fail to heed you. But the poet is not immune to the power of the starry heavens and their indifference to people. Even when he incorporates a recognition that God is the creator of the universe—‘‘the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained’’—even then, he finds an incipient insignificance before the vast, nonreflecting, unresponding sky: ‘‘When I consider the heavens . . . What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’’ I do not mean to suggest that his faith falters. Far from it. But I do find that, within the context of his faith and the sense of goodness that it provides, the poet also feels a sense of diminishment and insignificance before the sidereal vastness of 94

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night. And it is to God that he looks for the investment of importance in humans, not to the stars, for God, the creator of people and stars and their orders, comes to humans, ‘‘visits’’ them, and gives them also to shine with significance, to have a place of power, even of dominion, in a world in which human beings could seem, without divine attendance, out-gloried and under-appreciated within the awful reach of celestial indifference. The difference that God makes for this poet is absolute. Because of God, and only because of God, are the starry heavens upbuilding for human spirit. Because of God’s ‘‘mindfulness’’ of humans, the glory of stars sheds light on the glory of the One who sheds his light on his creation. Recall some of the facts and theories that are current in our knowledge of stars. It takes light from the star Eta Carinae 8,000 years, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, to reach the earth. The light from it that people now see began its travel across space when Homo sapiens was just beginning to learn how to raise food instead of foraging for it—3,000 years before the earliest pyramids were built. That light—those photons—that strikes our eyes and that is absorbed by our rods and cones has been traveling at an unimaginable speed while all the events of what we know as human culture took place. The universe itself is probably 15 billion years old, and astronomers expect to be able to see the light that marks the beginning of the universe, light that for all practical purposes comes from beyond the reach of our imaginations. We figure it only to lose its meaning, only to cancel the power of our position to know it, only to stand in awe of its extent and power. We use peculiar metaphors to speak of the beginning of our universe: ‘‘Big Bang’’ to speak of its origin, ‘‘cosmic egg’’ to speak of ‘‘the mote,’’ the condensed ‘‘thing,’’ out of the explosion of which the universe came to be. Before our universe came to be, there was no past, no present, no future, no space, no time, no vacuum, no individuated thing—not even dark, which cannot ‘‘exist’’ without light. There was an eruption, perhaps, by which trillions of units of force—of sheer energy—burst forth, originating something else that was also brand new: direction. Energy burst forth as heat, light, pressure, and electromagnetic and nuclear forces ‘‘where’’ there had been no ‘‘where’’ and no time a microsecond ‘‘before.’’ This event is thought to have happened in an instant too small to measure: something so huge occurred in a billionth of a second. Out of that billionth of a second emerged the regularities and patterns of reality. Morality without God

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By means of relativity theory, we are reasonably sure that nothing can travel faster than light (186,000 miles a second) because as something increases its speed it increases its mass. And when it reaches the speed of light, the mass of anything becomes infinite—beyond all measurement—and then it needs infinite or unmeasurable energy to accelerate its speed. But that amount of energy does not exist, so the speed of light is as fast as a mass of energy can go. But no one knows for sure whether light itself has infinite mass and can travel faster than what we now measure as the speed of light because light changes back and forth from mass to pure energy. In fact, no one knows if light has either infinite mass or no mass at all as ‘‘it’’ travels at 186,000 miles per second. It is at least possible that at the Big Bang energy traveled much faster than the speed of light. But no one is sure about that because no one knows when the limiting laws of velocity came to be. Early in the universe’s expansion, stars did not exist, but gravity did exist, forcing the swirling clouds of subnuclear gas to form huge clumps of elementary matter in space. These clumps grew larger and larger as the force of gravity merged and smashed together subatomic particles. These larger, heavier clumps pulled in more and more particles and swirling gasses. Subatomic particles formed atoms, atoms formed molecules, the pressures and pulls increased over unmeasured time, and these larger and larger masses themselves began to turn from the effect of the forces by which matter collected into compacted, highly energized centers. This is the way we know stars to have been born. This knowledge, ‘‘our’’ knowledge, is filled with gaps, hypotheses that push toward their own overthrow by other hypotheses based on further discoveries, by sheer ignorance, and by a tentativeness that on its own terms requires in a pursuit for knowledge neither reverence nor a being that gives meaning to a figure of gigantic wholeness. In this knowledge, there is a stark absence of metaphors of personality in relation to the starry heavens and no suggestion of witness to a moral law, a greater subjectivity, or a definitive teleology; such values, if they interpret this knowledge, must come from a different metaphorical source. There are nonetheless plenty of ‘‘scientific’’ beliefs in it, as well as methodological trust, but neither the beliefs and the trust have, on their own terms, either an eternal object or an eternal life expectancy. I will say later that this tentativeness and the assumptions that call for it—this epistemological boldness with a good bit of self-doubt and expectation for radical transformation built into 96

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it—can be and indeed have been relevant for attitudes toward morality as our perception of our place in the universe shifts out of a religious and theological lineage. I will say that recognition of spaces bereft of connection and meaning and hence bereft of possibility for divine connections among them can play a constructive role in the formation of moral attitudes that do not require divine mystery or authority to compose the world’s occurrence. But first, I would like to return to the psalmist. The psalmist set the context for his consideration of the heavens outside of scientific grasp with the words, ‘‘O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who has set thy glory above the heavens.’’ He knew, as I noted, that stars and starry space do not, when taken solely by themselves, give moral or religious meaning. They do not, when taken by themselves, provide Lordship, covenant, inspired human laws, or the glory of God. God’s glory comes from above the heavens. Otherwise, we would be without help before our enemies, and our lives would seem hopeless. So the entire psalm is given in the context of a God who provides for humans’ glory and honor, and a basis for a true way of life. Without God, we are as nothing before the beautiful, silent, cold distance of the starry heavens; we are minute beings who are lost in the midst of forces and immeasurable enormity if we do not have guidance and testimony beyond ourselves. The absence of God would mean for the psalmist, I believe, a despair that itself is immeasurable and that is bred of human anarchy, violence, meaningless pain, and unrecountable loss. My thought is that God provides for the psalmist and for many other people a source and basis for morality and meaning that is beyond the reach of nonhuman nature and the stark absence of human care in the constantly originating, nonhuman energy of the universe. With God as our creator and guide, we are not alone among the overpowering forces of nonhuman energy. We rather find the space and silence of the heavens to be the sites that disclose God’s creative glory. In this thought we find recognition that the enormity and mystery of the universe provide no adequate basis for religious attitudes. Without God there is nothing true to worship. The universe does not mean anything intrinsically worthwhile for people. ‘‘God’’ alone gives true meaning to the universe, and without God, the ‘‘universe’’ would be a place without hope for the dominion of human significance. Values would be ours alone. That would leave us prey to all the horrors that occur under the day’s sun and the night’s sidereal carelessness. Morality without God

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Consider part of a very different, but perhaps obliquely complementary poem: Matthew Arnold’s ‘‘Dover Beach,’’ written in 1867. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.1

This poem expresses a genre of experience that is now thoroughly familiar. I believe that, like the psalmist, Arnold found no ultimate basis for hope, love, or enlightened truth in a world without God or in a life without faith in God. But in contrast to the psalmist, he finds no wisdom or truth that transcends the world and the universe and that gives us that transcendence that turns bright what otherwise would be a darkling plain. Faith in God is now heard by Arnold only in the vacuum and night of its withdrawal. In the withdrawal of faith he finds as his best moral option a true relation with the one he loves, a relation, I assume, that struggles to be free of betrayal or cruelty, one in which his experience of human love provides him with knowledge of the way people can live at their best. Deeply satisfying human love—a small measure in the enormity of the universe and of faith’s withdrawal—such love in this context of faith’s abandonment is the measure for human circumstances at their best. The dark sadness in this poem expresses, I believe, the pain of lost faith. I do not hear Arnold’s sadness as nostalgia for a time of faith. I hear it arising out of his nonvoluntary and experiential knowledge of life without faith in God, without certainty before the universe’s vastness, but with some hope in faith’s failure, and with a small measure of meaning with suffering. I hear in his sadness his experiential and nonvoluntary knowledge of a world that no longer manifests the 98

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glory and presence of God. I believe that he did not choose to be without faith and that he did not choose his experience of the impossibility of faith. He found himself in a world without God and with only the memory of the power of faith. In that sense his despair was a way of being true to this world instead of running away from it by means of nostalgic images from a time that was passed. But he nonetheless suffered faith’s loss and experienced the loss in mourning and depression. I view the option of welcoming the world’s appearance without faith as one for those people for whom faith in God is not a living possibility, not a possibility that arises in their deepest experiences. For those people who, when faced with the possibility of faithful belief in God, find that they do not have any sense of God’s ‘‘real’’ existence, or find that they do not need even to deny the existence of God in order to be true to their predispositions and experiences, or those who simply remain indifferent or silent before the question of God or no God and look in other directions—for such people as these, I believe that there is the possibility for affirmations of life that are free of Arnold’s sadness. Here is one option among, I am sure, many others for a kind of affirmation that constitutes a basis for a morality without a sense of ‘‘Nature’’ or some specific Being that bestows meaning on the lives of things. We can describe it as one in which an individual releases the appearance of the universe to its enormity with no requirement for further meaning and releases people to their relative smallness and singularity before the celestial vastness. I use the word releases to mean that a person, in experiences of sheer enormity, simply allows enormity to happen as it happens without further meaning. One does not draw conclusions about it and does not look to it for signs or symbols of something else, but rather perceives enormity simply as something that is there: a sort of well-there-it-is encounter. And in the perception of human tiny-ness, one might be astonished that we are and experience astonishment—not at something but astonishment in the experience of being here in the midst of incalculable movement and space (instead, for example, of feeling a need to find by way of confirmation that other humans are ‘‘out there’’!). In this situation, one does not find the ‘‘work of thy fingers’’ or a feeling of the mournful withdrawal of faith. Rather, one finds a lot of emptiness and a lot of existing things and knows oneself to be here now and to be astonished and to find one’s meaning and endurance thoroughly in question in the astonishment. All the facts, explanations, and existing things in the world bear no witness to the force Morality without God

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of astonishment, and all the astonishment in the world, piled high in one place, would not compose an important counter to any fact or explanation—nor would all that astonishment constitute even a gesture with theological or religious meaning—at least not in the mentation that I am describing. People can be quite amazed before starlight with no sense of its meaning anything ‘‘in itself’’ or by virtue of a creator. And people can find themselves and their kind singular in the universe and enjoy their singularity, amazed at how huge it all is, in the midst of knowledge that says how things appear in terms of energy and quanta without a larger purposefulness. Appearances in a context of amazement do not need to mean anything more than appearing, specific lives in the context of their happening. This sensibility, we have seen, can be lived in everyday situations as people find emptiness among all things. Like the starry heavens juxtaposed with the earth and its inhabitants, ‘‘emptiness’’ with things does not do anything. ‘‘It’’ is something like an experience of seemingly empty and immeasurable space—not anything in particular, not the trees that ‘‘it’’ pervades or the humans who find themselves with ‘‘it’’ of the consciousness that ‘‘it’’ infuses. Emptiness is not even ‘‘something’’ we are in. In alertness with ‘‘it,’’ a person can find things strangely both apart and connected by nothing at all in addition to all the specific occurrences that hold things apart and connect them. Events seem to matter only in their happening and to matter considerably at the same time that nothing transcendental fills in the gaps and gives them an immanent backdrop of full and unbroken presence. This sense of emptiness with things can prompt people to live on this tiny planet with passion in the midst of a gappy and spaced-out universe that is without human passion and is not the earth at all. Or being with things and emptiness together can be like concentrating on something intensely so that in the spasm of concentration something comes to a prominence that only the concentration sustains. One can become lost in experience of emptiness, just as one can become lost in the midst of demanding things and everyday preoccupations. The art in this instance is one of perceiving both at once, both emptiness and what is present in its connected particularity. Losing either would constitute a lapse of attentiveness that has implications for the ways we live. I am using the word emptiness as a sign both to indicate the loss of an absolute for human orientation and to indicate a sensibility that can give rise to values and attitudes that embody affirmation of the 100

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world without an absolute that gives it value and universal continuity. Things do not appear that way to many people, and in a sense of emptiness an undespairing positivity toward living and beings can arise. People can find the world appearing with no intimation of an absolute and find in such appearing motivation to discover what most enhances their lives together. With the introduction of the word moral at this point, I introduce the possibility of a morality without a trans-sidereal Lord or an attitude expressed by Arnold’s words, ‘‘Ah, love, let us be true / To one another.’’ I am considering an attitude that is generative of values and evaluations, an attitude that is informed neither by theological reference nor by despair over a loss of faith’s vitality. I suggested that losing either a sense of emptiness or a perceptive association with things in their connected, concrete particularity could constitute a lapse with moral implications. A sense solely of emptiness, which can come with despair as well as with serene contemplation, is without care or concern or attachment in relation to things. By itself, this sense is without love or initiative or a sense of right and wrong or even amazement. It is profoundly inactive, and it composes a sense that nothing ultimately matters, that everything is the same. Nothing seems to happen, and that has a correlate that everything and anything that happens is allowed with something like indifference. When one is lost in emptiness nothing else is taken care of or nurtured or resisted or changed. Nothing makes a difference. But when the sense of nothing—or emptiness—does make a difference when it is countenanced in a conscious relation to the singular, active lives of things, we are taken out of either a depressed or a serene disposition that is governed by attunement to inactivity. And we are also taken out of a sense that the world is composed exclusively of useful things, whether those useful things are only mundane or are holy as well as mundane. Things stand out in their singularity. They stand out in their ‘‘just-so’’ quality, their irreducibility to anything else, in the simultaneous palpability and impalpability of their events. They are connected in their own epiphanies, and that recognition, I believe, can be significant for a morality—although elaboration of that significance is beyond the scope of this essay. When things are known in their pervasive emptiness and their singularity, our moral conduct, the ways whereby we connect with things and use them or value them, is always in question. People and things are not knowable primarily by means of an anchoring generic commonality: ‘‘it,’’ for example, is known as ‘‘this tree,’’ not merely as Morality without God

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an instance of a larger genre. And ‘‘she’’ is known as ‘‘this woman,’’ in her life and feeling and needs and possibilities, with this history and those abilities, as ‘‘this one’’ who comes to pass in these specific ways. She does not occur in this perceptive happening primarily as an instance of the type female or as one of the larger class of citizen or as valuable because someone else values her. All of these things— female, citizen, and value because of another—belong to her and determine who she is. But she is also this singular individual who stands out now from the emptiness that connects her to and separates her from everything else in the world. Questionableness also happens in such singular events. Not only is her event always in jeopardy. My connections with her, too, are always in jeopardy. As I encounter her, I face the question of how I am to be with her in this moment. How am I to receive and address her? How am I now to be with her? These are questions that open to a full range of moral considerations, and here they are questions and possibilities that are based on intense experiences of presence with emptiness (and presence with emptiness is a questionable basis for anything—a basis that is without basis). Undergoing this kind of uncertainty and certainty at the same time is something like finding the earth quite singular in its tiny and uninsured presence in a vast universe and being struck by the question: ‘‘Since this is all we have, how are we to be with it and with each other in our time on it?’’ Should I call this option ‘‘moral’’? Or should I look for another name for an ethos—a way of making a dwelling place—that arises out of mindfulness of emptiness with communal singularities? Whatever we decide to call it, in speaking of it, I wish to speak of an affirmation of things as we find them appearing, an affirmation of what we find of the world by our most determined and experimental knowledge, and of the ways we find things occurring in the world. These affirmations occur in a release of people and things to their epiphanies with emptiness—in an absence of expectation for meanings or glories that transcend worldly occurrences. These affirmations happen in the discovery that life without a religious faith is affirmable in both the absence of infinite meaning and texture and in the interactive singularities of living things. These affirmations have a quality, a metaphor for which we might find in the image of the earth’s life, turning with vast and empty space, space that we do not grasp, traversed by immeasurable, nonhuman energies without which the earth and its inhabitants could not be.

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PART

Philosophy and Its Fictions

II

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How Does Philosophy Become What It Is? Matthew Statler

Piety and the Principle of Noncontradiction The human race will decree from time to time: ‘‘There is something at which it is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh.’’ —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

According to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the most distinctly unfunny thing about philosophy is the principle of noncontradiction. Indeed, we are encouraged as philosophers to respect this most serious and fundamental principle, namely, that ‘‘the same thing cannot at the same time and in the same respect both belong and not belong to the same object.’’1 Aristotle certainly refuses to take the matter lightly, providing eight different proofs and maintaining that the principle holds as a law with absolute psychological as well as ontological governance. With regard to the psychological application of the law, Aristotle insists that our thought and our actions must remain always logically consistent with each other. He proves this point by refutation, asking why would ‘‘a man walk to Megara and not stay where he is with the thought that he is walking to Megara? And why [would] he not walk straight into a well or over a precipice . . . with the thought that it is not equally good and not good to fall in?’’2 Certainly, anyone who is falling off a cliff would have some difficulty debating the point.3 And yet does not the improbable absurdity of 105

this image give us cause to consider the certainty of our own death? If we should wonder sentimentally whether any aspect of the existence we have enjoyed will survive beyond our knowledge of it, we should well consult Aristotle, who argues that the law of noncontradiction has an ontological application as well. In this regard, respect for the law of noncontradiction requires us ‘‘to believe that among things some other substance exists to which neither motion nor destruction nor generation belongs at all.’’4 In other words, while Aristotle’s argument leads us to understand that impious thoughts may very well threaten our own survival, we should nevertheless trust that neither these misjudgments nor anything else could ever destroy that which will eternally remain the same. In strict accordance with the law of noncontradiction then, it remains impossible for anything to be affirmed (A) and negated (ⳮA) at the same time and in the same respect. If we accept Aristotle’s arguments and characterize this impossibility in positive, metaphysical terms, we find that the law of noncontradiction establishes and protects the eternally undifferentiated self-sameness of the same. In turn, this axiomatic self-sameness provides a basis on which all philosophical postulates can depend. To be sure, the establishment of the law itself does not settle all questions about what exactly exists, nor precisely how it may be known. For example, is the true essence of the cosmos ideal, or is it material? Is it directly available to human perception, or is it indirectly known through interpretation? Such dichotomous questions have provided the structure for debates throughout the history of philosophy, and consistent sport has been made of Aristotle’s answers. Regardless, so long as we do not both affirm and deny the same thing at the same time, in the same place and in the same respect, we can make and defend philosophical claims about whatever may exist and however it may be known while continuing piously to respect Aristotle’s foundational principle. But if philosophy were somehow deprived of the principle of noncontradiction, then what would philosophers do? Nietzsche’s Laughter But if one says that all speak alike falsely and truly, then such a man can neither speak nor mean anything; for he says that this is so and not so at the same time. If he has no belief of anything but is equally thinking and not thinking, how would he differ from a plant? —Aristotle, Metaphysics 106

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Nietzsche emphasizes the fact that Aristotle presented his arguments for the principle of noncontradiction in response to questions raised by pre-Socratic philosophers. Whereas Parmenides had inquired into the nature of the physical cosmos as if it were an unchanging and self-similar unity, Aristotle found this conception inadequate to explain the phenomenon of motion, and thus he sought to explain how the static and fundamental unity of the self-same can over the passage of time give rise to change without ever changing itself. By contrast, Heraclitus is purported to have characterized the cosmos as a pure multiplicity, as a chaotic play of differential forces in which any appearance of static unity or self-sameness belies the dynamic movement of differentiation. On this point, Nietzsche notes that ‘‘Aristotle accused [Heraclitus] of the highest crime before the tribunal of reason: to have sinned against the law of noncontradiction.’’5 The crime in question here, the very crime that the ontological application of the law of noncontradiction seeks to disallow, is a rejection of the self-sameness of the same. Phrased more dramatically, Heraclitean philosophy may call for an awareness of all things both as the same, yet, simultaneously and in the same respect, as different from themselves. At this juncture, Nietzsche aligns himself with Heraclitus and critiques the ontological and psychological primacy of the self-same, affirming difference instead. But again, what activities are called for when the so-called philosopher denies the principle of noncontradiction? According to Nietzsche, the habits of thought and action inculcated by the tradition of pious respect for the principle of noncontradiction following Aristotle are extremely difficult to avoid, and thus a primary philosophical activity involves seeking to disrupt them. On this count, one particularly engrained tendency involves drawing an absolute distinction between real and apparent phenomena. For example, in the case that two contradictory phenomena might seem simultaneously to coexist, judgment is called on to distinguish one of them as real and designate the other as merely apparent. In accordance with the principle of noncontradiction, such self-contradiction cannot really coexist simultaneously, and therefore one of the phenomena must be judged apparent. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche examines this ontological application of the principle and claims that ‘‘Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘real’ world has only been lyingly added.’’6 As is well known, Nietzsche recounts the history of philosophy as a series of increasingly empty ficHow Does Philosophy Become What It Is?

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tions, framing them in a parable entitled ‘‘How the Real World at Last Became a Fable.’’ Focusing on specific concepts that appear to enforce the ethical and aesthetic piety mandated of philosophers by the self-same, the ‘‘history of an error’’ begins by identifying the Platonic equation of knowing the good with doing the good. Nietzsche’s fable goes on to implicate the Christian deferment of the good pending an unforeseeable yet certain apocalypse, the Kantian distinction between the empirical facts of physics and the facts of reason, the positivist rejection of the ideal facts of reason and interest in the truth of direct perception, and, finally, the modern realpolitik of scholarly self-interest. Through this genealogical analysis, Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate, on one hand, that the distinction between reality and appearance has been sustained in a variety of speculative milieus. On the other hand, however, the analysis also suggests that the purpose of the distinction as it was drawn by Aristotle—namely, to differentiate those beings that change from Being, which remains the same—has become increasingly diluted in the context of contemporary thought. More specifically, Nietzsche finds that the foundational moment of metaphysical logic—the self-sameness of the same—has been reduced in status as a point of reference from the prime mover of the cosmos to the rational unity of the subject, or worse, to the irreducible and indisputable authenticity of any given personal experience. In this light, the philosophical exercise of judgment to eliminate transitory differences and move up a hierarchy of similitude toward knowledge of an eternal truth appears to end in a tragic (and we might amend, resentful) solipsism. To caricature the elenctic proof from the Metaphysics, we could say that if Aristotle wished to refute critics of the principle of noncontradiction in the discourse of identity politics, he would personally need to throw himself from the cliff. Nietzsche’s question in response to this absurd dilemma is, ‘‘What world is left?’’ The apparent collapse of this primarily dualistic, metaphysical sphere of reference and epistemological justification for knowledge is an issue that pertains equally to ethics. Indeed, in a situation where the elenctic proof of the psychological application of the principle of noncontradiction begins to require not simply logical consistency but also experiential authenticity, following Nietzsche and Foucault, the theoretical and practical dimensions of human activity may simultaneously be considered in terms of power dynamics. In this context,

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the ‘‘history of an error’’ appears somewhat more problematic than a simple mistake—that is, the principle of noncontradiction appears as a patiently cultivated technique that posits a temporally static subject position underneath the extended, ethological surface of human actions. Without settling the question of the agency or intentionality with which such a technique might be designed or cultivated as such, Nietzsche argues genealogically that, from the beginning, this endeavor was motivated by a resentful desire to hold otherwise autonomous people morally and legally accountable for debts that had been attributed to them. Phrased more polemically, the philosopher’s invocation of the law of noncontradiction appears to be motivated by fear and greed: it conceals a discursive tactic through which the right to decide the value of particular cases of human life is arrogated to whomever invokes it most piously, that is, without self-contradiction. Nietzsche uses a metaphor to illuminate this startling claim. Just as when a flash of lightning occurs, it would be absurd to assert that there exists behind the flash something static and essential in the sky that is flashing, namely, ‘lightning’, so, too, it is absurd to claim with regard to humanity that there exists a static and essential ‘subject’ behind every action. More specifically, Nietzsche claims that: ‘‘there is no such substratum, there is no ‘being’ behind doing, working, becoming; ‘the doer’ is a mere appendage to the action. The action is everything.’’7 In this sense, should one particular action seem directly to contradict another action, the philosopher may tend to judge the relative value of these actions by invoking the principle of noncontradiction to determine which action corresponded to the ‘real’ or the ‘apparent’ ethical ideal that seemed to have sanctioned them both. By affirming the action instead of the subject as the point of ethical and epistemological analysis, however, Nietzsche again takes recourse to Heraclitus and situates the philosopher’s activity amid a chaotic play of dynamic forces and effects. In this ontological situation, judgment cannot appeal to the axiom of the self-sameness of the same, and knowledge cannot rely on the principle of noncontradiction to maintain the integrity of any particular object of knowledge, especially including the identity of the subject who would know or be known. Still the question remains, what does the philosopher do without the promise of a principle by which to judge the difference between what changes and what remains the same, and to determine the value of either or both?

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Images of Socrates In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in it, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

When Socratic irony was taken seriously and the dialectic as a whole was confused with its propaedeutic, extremely troublesome consequences followed. . . . Philosophers began to talk like young men from the farmyard. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Whereas the philosopher who does not piously respect the principle of noncontradiction is depicted falling off a cliff by Aristotle, Nietzsche see the philosopher as a child at play.8 With this image, Nietzsche recasts the epistemological challenge that faces philosophers. Rather than invoking the principle of noncontradiction to eliminate differences and arrive at knowledge of the self-same, philosophers should engage in playful processes of differentiation without prejudices toward particular results or outcomes. Similarly, he recasts the ethical challenge that faces them: rather than attributing fault and blame to any subject that may seem to act in contradiction to itself, philosophers should affirm the action in question as a singular event. Nietzsche claims that this innocent, childlike affirmation itself involves a morally unbiased repetition through which entirely new circumstances for action may be created or destroyed. But with regard to this epistemological task of differentiation and this ethical task of repetition, the ontological status of the philosopher remains in question. Phrased impersonally, what takes place in the event of philosophy? Inasmuch as Socrates is portrayed as the first true philosopher of the West, his appearance in the Platonic dialogues presents a compelling yet troublesome figure, one about which Nietzsche expresses considerable ambivalence. On the one hand, Nietzsche completely rejects Socrates and the dialectical method, claiming that ‘‘one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means.’’9 And yet, on the other hand, Nietzsche acknowledges that ‘‘Plato himself is the first magnificent hybrid character. . . . In his ideology are united Socratic, Pythagorean, and Heraclitean elements.’’10 So then, do the Platonic dialogues piously respect the principle of noncontradiction? 110

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Does Socrates/Plato impiously reject it? Might he both affirm and deny the same thing? What is the function of the method of dialectical questioning at this point? Following Nietzsche, other philosophers concerned with this point with have similarly found the image of Socrates to be compellingly ambiguous, and have even gone so far as to claim that this very ambiguity may be understood as a crucial aspect of Platonic philosophy. Heidegger, for example, refers to the paradoxical simultaneity of contradictory phenomena as ‘‘Plato’s doctrine of truth.’’ Heidegger is, of course, aware of the ‘‘doctrine of the Forms’’ generally attributed to Plato that remains fully consistent with the principle of noncontradication,11 and thus he justifies the apparent radicality of his interpretation by claiming that Plato does not, in fact, fully reveal this unstable element of his writing by naming it explicitly within his dialogues. To be sure, although Plato does indeed gesture toward a ‘truth’ that allows irreducible excesses to become unhidden, nevertheless in a certain way Plato still has to hold on to ‘‘truth’’ as still a characteristic of beings, because a being, as something present, has being precisely by appearing, and being brings unhiddenness with it. But at the same time, the inquiry into what is unhidden shifts in the direction of the appearing of the visible form, and consequently toward the act of seeing that is ordered to the visible form, and toward what is correct and toward the correctness of seeing. For this reason there is a necessary ambiguity in Plato’s doctrine. This is precisely what attests to the heretofore unsaid but now sayable change in the essence of truth. The ambiguity is quite clearly manifested in the fact that whereas λθεια is what is named and discussed, it is ␳θτη that is meant and that is posited as normative—and all this in a single train of thought.12 Derrida finds Plato similarly ambiguous, and he also focuses on the capacity of the dialectic simultaneously to reveal and conceal. However, rather than emphasizing the aspect of the Platonic text that seems to invoke the principle of noncontradiction by identifying and establishing the normative accuracy of particular claims to truth, he emphasizes the ethical event of repetition through which the value of life in its various forms is created and destroyed: The true and the untrue are both species of repetition. . . . Thus, on the one hand, repetition is that without which there would How Does Philosophy Become What It Is?

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be no truth: the truth of being in the intelligible form of ideality discovers in the eidos that which can be repeated, being the same, the clear, the stable, the identifiable in its equality with itself. And only the eidos can give rise to repetition as anamnesis or maieutics, dialectics or didactics. Here repetition gives itself out to be a repetition of life. Tautology is life going out of itself to come home to itself. Keeping close to itself through mneme, logos and phone. But on the other hand, repetition is the very movement of non-truth: the presence of what is gets lost, disperses itself, multiplies itself through mimemes, icons, phantasms, simulacra, etc. Through phenomena, already. And this type of repetition is the possibility of becoming-perceptible-tothe-senses: nonideality. This is on the side of non-philosophy, bad memory, hypomnesia, writing. Here, tautology is life going out of itself beyond return. Death rehearsal. Unreserved spending. The irreducible excess, through the play of the supplement, of any self-intimacy of the living, the good, the true.13 Concerned with repetition as well as difference, Deleuze affirms that the two simultaneous directions cited by Heidegger and Derrida are simultaneous aspects of the Platonic text, and goes further to claim that the Platonic text explicitly encourages us to become aware of this very simultaneity: Plato invites us to distinguish between two dimensions: (1) that of limited and measured things, of fixed qualities, permanent or temporary which always presuppose pauses and rests, the fixing of presents, and the assignation of subjects (for example, a particular subject having a particular largeness or a particular smallness at a particular moment); and (2) a pure becoming without measure, a veritable becoming-mad, which never rests. It moves in both directions at once. It always eludes the present, causing future and past, more and less, too much and not enough to coincide in the simultaneity of a rebellious matter.14 Each of the three preceding citations seems to differentiate between restricted and general economies, between limits and limitlessness, between order and disorder, between brightness and obscurity. As such, these differentiations do not produce or arrive at knowledge of what, exactly, Socrates is doing as he walks around Athens asking questions. The differentiations do, however, affirm a certain contradiction between Socrates’ epistemology and his ethics as they are 112

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portrayed in the Platonic text. In more familiar terms, while Socrates seems to be asking questions in order to establish knowledge about, say, civic virtues, nevertheless, paradoxically, he claims that his great wisdom lies in the fact that he alone knows that he knows nothing. At yet, while this knowledge itself might seem to require no further action in order to sustain itself, it is nevertheless at the same time a lack of knowledge, and thus it motivates persistent reengagement in the questioning method. Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze identify this tension as a crucial aspect of the Platonic text that motivates further questions concerning the figure of Socrates. It appears first and foremost that the psychological application of the law of noncontradiction may well lead other philosophers to assume that the meaning of Socrates’ words should be perfectly consistent with his actions. It remains to be determined, following the analyses cited above, whether Socrates’ words and actions in fact stand in direct contradiction to each other, or on what terms such a determination could be made. But in such a situation, would the Socratic method of dialectical questioning involve a process of differentiation that does not aspire to identify a self-same object of knowledge? Would the Socratic method repeat a playful and morally unbiased event of creation and destruction? What effects would such an event have in the domain of contemporary philosophical knowledge and practice? The Divided Line Now we spoke the truth . . . as it presently appears. We have observed it in this condition as similar to the sea-god Glaucus, whose original nature can hardly be seen by those who catch glimpses of him, because old parts of his body have broken off and been pulverized and thoroughly destroyed by the waves, while at the same time other parts have grown on him—shells, seaweed, and rocks—so that he resembles a wild beast rather than what he is by nature, and thus, we observed the soul under such conditions, marred by countless evils. —Plato, Republic

As we inquire here concerning the extent to which the Socratic dialectic may and yet simultaneously may not involve a pious respect for the principle of noncontradiction, one aspect of Nietzsche’s fable requires more detailed consideration. The distinction between reality and appearances is in fact known most broadly as the ‘Platonic dualHow Does Philosophy Become What It Is?

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ism’, and the Platonic text has undeniably helped to sustain a tradition of philosophy in which the self-sameness of the same is invoked whenever truth is appealed to as a standard of adequacy. ‘‘Is this claim true?’’ is a question that inquires implicitly, ‘‘Does this claim accurately represent the way things are?’’ and more reflexively ‘‘Does this appearance of truth resemble our idea of it?’’ As philosophers, we perpetuate this tradition whenever we seek to attain knowledge by avoiding contradiction and multiplicity. And yet, at the same time, following Deleuze, it is important to recognize that this very Platonic distinction between ideas and appearances also involves another more ‘‘subterranean’’ dualism. To address a particularly contentious example, let us turn to the discussion of the divided line in Book VI of the Republic. We recall that Plato’s divided line entails four divisions, and that the line purports to describe an upward movement from ignorance toward wisdom. The first division on the line is that between two different kinds of repetition: simulacral and mimetic.15 In this image, ‘simulacrum’ names the fleeting, shadowy phantasms that appear at the bottom of the divided line, in the darkest part of the visible world. Such simulacra repeat in such a way as to disrupt the movement of knowledge toward the self-same idea at the top of the line. As Deleuze puts it, for Plato ‘‘simulacra are not simply copies of copies involving infinitely relaxed relations of resemblance [but] are precisely demonic images, stripped of resemblance.’’16 ‘Mimesis’, on the other hand, names those images that resemble an idea, however obscurely. Resemblance—the signature of mimesis—should not be seen merely as a subjective, synthetic construction. Rather, in Gadamer’s explanatory phrase, mimesis is for Plato an objective relation that ‘‘refers to the existence of what is imitated or represented.’’17 In other words, when an image repeats in such a way as to recall the self-same idea after which it has been crafted, it repeats mimetically. But what exactly is the significance of that which repeats without recalling the self-same? As the discussion unfolds, Socrates clearly insists that, for Glaucon, and for anyone who seeks to learn how to philosophize, neither the definition of the simulacrum nor the act of differentiation through which its particular significance is nominally determined can serve as the conclusive or ultimate definition of the good that may be attained by the method of dialectical questioning. It seems that the simulacrum cannot satisfy the desire to praise one image of philosophy and blame another. However, just as we recognize that the simulacrum 114

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resists any kind of resemblance and thereby calls the self-same into question, so we repeat the question, what is our image of philosophy? In the context of the Republic, this question takes place in what may be referred to as the ‘‘realm of politics.’’ To borrow and invert an image from the myth that follows the discussion of the divided line, as philosophers we are bound up on all sides by a subjugation to the self-same. This subjugation requires us to continue piously inquiring, for example, whether the meaning of the philosopher’s words should be consistent with the philosopher’s practice. Does our mode of knowing correspond truthfully with our mode of doing? With respect to the philosophers cited at length above, the resentful aspect of this line of questioning is all too familiar. Should we stop reading Heidegger because he was a Nazi? Is deconstruction amoral? If we affirm the simulacrum, does all of life become a meaningless game?18 To question why these questions are so familar is to act politically: when we ask what philosophy would do without the principle of noncontradiction, we call into question the currently accepted images of philosophy. This act of questioning confronts a simulacrum in which philosophy is paradoxically differentiated from itself. What is philosophy? How does philosophy become what it is? However we choose to answer this question, it may not even pertain to the event in which philosophy becomes what it is. We could piously claim that philosophy takes place whenever the principle of noncontradiction is invoked to judge one claim more or less truthful than another. We could impiously claim that philosophy becomes what it is when it generates seemingly impossible contradictions. Interestingly, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze claim that Socrates does both. Does this differentiation of two images of philosophy repeat the mythical event of philosophy in which someone becomes able to see the same thing in a new light? With respect to piety, we can see that it functions ethically and epistemologically in such a way as to inhibit the unexpected appearance of simultaneously contradictory phenomena; in so doing, it forecloses on the playful experience of surprise. Following Nietzsche, we can see that this inhibition takes place in the realm of politics and involves relationships of power. At this level, certain contradictions are manifestly ignored or even sustained, while others are condemned insofar as they threaten to transform existing hierarchies of might and right. Does this political foreclosure inhibit our capacity to judge the greater or lesser value of one image of philosophy or another? On the other hand, what is How Does Philosophy Become What It Is?

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the political importance of the activity that calls itself philosophy if it presents contradictory accounts of its own value? The rejection of the principle of noncontradiction serves provisionally as a strategy; this strategy involves, at a procedural level, the entertainment of impossible coincidences.19 Why exactly would a sunstruck philosopher return to the cave? In deference to the dangerous gambit of walking off a cliff to make a point, Derrida calls this line of questioning a ‘‘strategic bet’’ that takes place only at ‘‘the ends of man.’’ But are we there yet? As philosophers who would recall the playful example of Socrates, we may not necessarily need to answer our own questions—or, rather, we may aspire like Socrates to pose questions that create surprises, and to create myths and enigmas that resist resemblance to the self-same precisely at the point when our political relations desire it most. At the functional level of a written text, this strategy—the identification of simulacral repetition as the originary event of philosophy—serves to ordain a pattern. Regardless of whether this pattern is seen as a logical argument or, alternatively, as a list of contradictory associations, it functions as a pedagogy. As one undergoes such a pedagogy, one formulates questions that may contribute to, change, or even disrupt that pattern. Through this process, certain contradictions may resolve into singular, unitary phenomena, while others may increasingly appear as wise recollections, transformed over time perhaps to become truths. We must therefore begin again with a series of questions concerning how philosophy presently appears. Philosophy and Itself Ephemeral souls, now begins another cycle of birth as the signal of death. —Plato, Republic

With respect to the principle of noncontradiction, philosophy begins with a tradition that has been destroyed, as well as with a newly created context for the activity of differentiation. In the image of the Republic, philosophy begins as it moves both toward and away from darkness, toward and away from light. This contradiction between the two simultaneous movements of philosophy has two immediate and important effects. First, the contrast between philosophy and itself provides for the possibility of a sustained activity; the Socratic dialectic does not become obsolete so long as it does not resolve the 116

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issue of its own origin. Whenever philosophy allows its aporetic origins to slip from view, or ad hominem, whenever philosophers claim to achieve absolute self-transparency, then the activity is disrupted by dogmatisms and pompous declarations of epistemological relevance and ethical necessity. To be sure, philosophy as a reified organizational practice retains its efficacy only to the extent that it piously poses its questions in the idiom of public opinion. And yet at the same time, philosophical questions repeat and sustain the event of learning as they continue to turn that idiom back on itself. In this event, philosophy exposes the aporetic structure of all opinion, especially including those opinions that are debated among people who work as philosophers. Second, the unresolved contradiction between philosophy and itself allows for the distribution of all possible articulations of the meaning of its eventuation across a divided line. If philosophy purports to reflect on itself and its methods in such a way as to present an account of the truths that it can produce, then it takes itself as an object and sunders itself irrevocably. Only then, in the wake of this simultaneous, paradoxical self-contradiction do philosophers properly begin to assess the extent to which they may pursue meaningful inquiry. More broadly, whenever philosophical activity is so divided from itself—as in the image of Socrates—it portrays its own activity as a movement along a line, and it locates particular moments of identity and meaning at specific points on that line. In other words, on the way to knowledge of themselves, philosophers discover first that they confuse themselves with images of themselves, and this confusion calls for a line to be divided. So then, phrased in terms of the question that guides the Republic, how does our idea of the good presently appear? At the point when we might affirm and deny the principle of noncontradiction in contradiction with itself, we begin with an apparently groundless axiom, with an indeterminate contrast between two images, and with a question: how does philosophy become what it is? At this point, we intensify the contrast between two images— philosophy perhaps always involves a polemical form of logos—and Socrates challenges his interlocutors directly to ‘‘take care, lest I deceive you unintentionally with a false reckoning of the good.’’20 Philosophy divides and sunders, even as it unifies and gathers—this activity is sustained only to the extent that it remains consistently surprising. And thus, in Book VI of the Republic, the idea of the good cannot be explained geometrically with a point, an uninterrupted How Does Philosophy Become What It Is?

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line, or a circle. Rather, with the divided line, philosophy assigns itself an accursed share—the simulacral image of itself that, impossibly, does not cease to appear. In this stead, philosophy cannot for the moment give a conclusive account of itself and its origins, and it breaks from itself, or folds back on itself. Philosophy postulates its own origin, and then creates itself again as it constructs this line and divides it. This divided line differentiates images of philosophy. However, the divided line does not serve as a taxonomy in which certain essential and immutable characteristics of the various contemporary images are identified and comparatively distinguished. Neither does it provide an evolutionary, historical, or genealogical account of the processes through which the unchanging, self-same activity of philosophy brings about new images of itself. Rather, the divided line begs the question of the relationship between thinking and being, and defers resolution of the issue pending the performative demonstration of the self-same as a process of dialectic philosophical activity. But how does the idea presently appear? Does the activity of our thinking ever become the same as the being of that which it thinks? On this point, and with respect for the principle of noncontradiction, Socrates demurs: ‘‘You see, I myself really don’t know yet, but wherever the argument, like a wind, tends, thither must we go.’’21

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7

Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction Jason K. Winfree

The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of the origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul. —Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’

The genealogist can no more exorcise the chimeras of origin around which philosophy traditionally performs its most pious dances, than the philosopher can cast out the shadows of his or her soul. Nor does genealogy seek to do so, as long as it is understood as the reflexive art of tracing implications, lineages, and inheritances, for such extirpation would at once neutralize the very possibility of genealogy, denying the lines of descent (Herku¨nfte) that it interprets and exposes. The plurality of these lines of descent is opposed to the unity of origin (Ursprung) and exposes it as chimerical, just as the practice of genealogy is opposed to the idea of universal history, which it exposes as fictive. These oppositions are situated at the juncture of a transformation whose force is best interpreted in terms of the lines of descent through which critique gives rise to genealogy, and through which universal history disintegrates into the work of fiction. Not to be confused with the so-called end of history—an end (telos) that, as such, always belongs to universal history—this disintegration marks a transformation of history and a deformation of the ‘‘ends of man.’’ 119

In his essay ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ (Was ist Aufkla¨rung?), Foucault argues that the Enlightenment is best understood as a particular form of questioning in relation to the present, rather than in terms of a doctrinal content.1 He emphasizes that Kant’s response to this same question is occasioned by a specific moment within a particular conception of history, one that simultaneously serves as the object of analysis for Kant’s writing. The result is an awareness of the status of Foucault’s own project as conditioned by the moment that occasions it and toward which reflection is directed. Any contemporary engagement with the problematic of Enlightenment must take its cue from the reflexivity exhibited over two hundred years ago with Kant’s response to the question posed by the Berlinische Monatschrift. While Foucault is clearly right in his insistence on the reflexive character of the ethos of the Enlightenment, he nevertheless underestimates the importance of its doctrinal elements, for in the case of Kant, at least, these aspects are bound together and condition one another. This follows from the very notion of genealogy, which must consider these so-called doctrinal elements if it is to understand the reversal of forces through which its specific ethos of reflexivity arises. There can be little doubt that Foucault’s interest in the Enlightenment, and in particular Kant’s relation to it, arises as a way of pursuing specifically genealogical questions concerning contemporary thought. And if contemporary thought can be characterized as genealogical in some fashion, then these questions concern a genealogy of genealogy. This demand is twofold. First, it has to do with maintaining the dispersion of genealogy and its difference from that which it reverses, displaces, or selects. Here one would trace the transition from the transcendental to the archeological, and from the universalhistorical to the genealogical. Discontinuity is understood in this case in terms of the fissure between genealogy and the mode of historical engagement and assessment that precedes it. Second, while genealogy must not be understood as exposing a past reactivated in the present, secretly animating and governing the present, this does not mean that it cannot trace the continuity of a certain discontinuity. Both Foucault and Nietzsche insist that genealogy does just this, namely, that ‘‘it fragments what was thought unified [and] shows the heteronomy of what was imagined consistent with itself.’’2 To be sure, the recognition of this fragmentation is what enables the reflexivity of genealogy in the first place, but this alone does not separate it from critique. Rather, the dispersion that interrupts the very values of unity, reason, and teleology gives rise to the difference between 120

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genealogy and history, enabling a transformation of perspective, albeit only insofar as genealogy adopts a different attitude toward this fragmentation than is previously held. In spite of its reflexivity, Enlightenment thought represses this fracture by domesticating it and placing it within proper limits. It is always a matter of understanding violence, of confining and configuring it within a properly delimited teleology. Kant above all recognizes the violence of reason and the problems of heteronomy and discord within his system, but he refuses to allow them to displace the aspiration for unity and the demands of the moral life. It is precisely for this reason, though, that the doctrinal elements of the Enlightenment must not be ignored, for they alone serve as the initial site of this heteronomy. Nowhere is the fracture more interesting and revealing than in those places where it is suppressed. To be sure, the continuity between contemporary thought and Enlightenment thinking emphasized by Foucault can be specified only through an intensification of their shared reflexivity. To the extent that this reflexivity understands itself in each case as historically conditioned, however, this requires that the doctrinal elements of Enlightenment thought, elements that possess a merely ancillary status in Foucault’s account, be addressed. Otherwise put, the moment of reflexivity that genealogy inherits from the Enlightenment, its ‘‘permanent reactivation of an attitude’’ of questioning its historical era, demands that it take account of these elements in their historical specificity.3 Genealogy therefore interrogates the doctrinal elements of Enlightenment thought as a way of interpreting the present, and not simply as an attempt at understanding the past.

Kant and Purposive Universal History A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history of the world in accordance with a plan of nature aimed at a perfect civil union of mankind, must be regarded as possible and even as capable of furthering the purpose of nature itself. —Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’’

‘‘The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the individual’’—but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuGenealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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able whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Universal History and the Ends of Reason Kant, of course, defines enlightenment as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity (Unmu¨ndigkeit). It is both a process and a goal in relation to which reason has a specific function and place. In fact, enlightenment is underwritten by the principle of autonomy birthed by reason, which operates not only in the Critique of Practical Reason, but throughout Kant’s writings: ‘‘Every man’s vocation is thinking for himself.’’4 According to Kant, this self-incurred immaturity is due neither to a lack of reason nor to a deficiency in nature, the two domains constitutive of the Kantian system. It is rather the result of a failure to employ this reason courageously, which Kant also ascribes to a general laziness, which explains humankind’s bondage. Behind these claims lies the complex apparatus of Kant’s teleological conception of universal history. It is a history required by the moral life (of the species) and the consistency of its discharge in and from the sphere of nature. Kant understands history (Geschichte) as an account of the phenomena of nature wherein the freedom of the human will is manifested. In other words, history entails providing accounts of the causality of human freedom within the realm of nature.5 Moreover, Kant insists that these stories (Geschichten) allow us to hope that we might discover a course of progress within the freely willed actions which structure these narratives. History, for Kant, is edifying insofar as freedom manifests itself progressively and purposively.6 If we are to believe Kant’s announcement in the enlightenment text, a consciousness of freedom is beginning to make itself felt in the world of experience, and no doubt with the appearance of Kant’s own writing. However, the edification of this progressive history must contend with its detractors. In spite of and perhaps because of this progress, humankind has not fully freed itself from its self-imposed immaturity. Everywhere individuals appear to act with childish (immature) malice, and nowhere on the level of individual actions does there appear to be a pattern of universal progress.7 That this tension has a place in Kant’s writings and does not stand outside his conception of history—more specifically, that it serves as a catalyst to promote universal and purposive ends—is required if the mechanisms of na122

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ture and the autonomy of the moral life are to avoid parody. Within these texts, as within the history they articulate, discord, war and strife have their proper space, and it is important for Kant that this propriety be maintained. One must mock neither the cunning of nature nor the demands or the ends of the moral life! Discord and cruelty always serve harmony and benevolence in Kant’s conception of history. This is mandated by reason’s rule of consistency, a rule that turns out to be far from consistent, or at least far from submitting to its own demands, but for that reason all the more interesting—we might say, interested—and productive. Kant’s ‘‘Idea for a Universal History’’ and the later ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’ can both be understood as arising from the omnipresent demand of the Kantian schematic for the harmonious concomitance of nature and freedom. It is not enough that Kant indicates in a purely negative fashion, as he does in ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ that humankind’s self-incurred immaturity arises neither from nature nor reason? At some level, it is required that the dissociation of reason and nature from the state of unenlightenment have as its correlate not only their fundamental compatibility, but also their mutual concert in the promotion of freedom. And this project is bound up with the injunction of the categorical imperative in at least two ways. First, insofar as the categorical imperative governs the moral life, it is a matter of harmonizing the life of reason with nature. The telos of history is Kant’s way of effecting this in terms of a synergetic attunement of the two. Nature determines humankind’s natural capacities in terms of its reason, and does all it can to promote the ends of reason through the development of the species, even putting the inclinations to work for this task. Similarly, it is only by way of humankind’s reason that it promotes itself as the end of nature, as the superior species for the sake of which nature is structured in the first place.8 Second, the demand of this very requirement, that is, the demand for harmony, arises from the categorical imperative and the rule of consistency. As Kant puts the matter in ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’: ‘‘Morality as a collection of absolutely binding laws by which our actions ought to be governed, belongs essentially, in an objective sense, to the practical sphere. And if we have once acknowledged the authority of this concept of duty, it is patently absurd to say that we cannot act as the moral laws require. For if this were the case, the concept of duty would automatically be dropped from morals.’’9 But, of course, this would be to destroy the moral law. In other words, the consistency of the moral law demands that it can be effected, that Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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we can act as it requires. Thus the demand for the harmony of reason and nature arises from the categorical imperative itself in order that it remain consistent. As already noted, history in Kant’s sense is one way of acceding to this demand. More strongly though, perpetual peace, which is the very telos of history in this sense, is itself a duty according to Kant. Although the likelihood of attaining it is not sufficient for prophetic claims about the future—it is not a matter of predicting perpetual peace in the phenomenal sphere, not a matter of extending theoretical reason in this fashion—Kant insists that it is nevertheless ‘‘our duty to work our way towards this goal, which is more than an empty chimera.’’10 All of this to say, in Kant’s words: ‘‘A true system of politics [or an adequate account of history] cannot therefore take a single step without first paying tribute to morality.’’11 Let us now inquire into the price of this tribute, and whether anything other than interest is ever paid. Given Kant’s constant invocation of the moral life in the political and historical writings, two points seem particularly salient to the way in which these works are organized. First, Kant understands the postulates of practical reason, such as the immortality of the soul or the existence of God, as inseparable corollaries of the a priori unconditionally valid practical law.12 To be sure, they are no more demonstrated than the telos of history is prophesied, but they are nonetheless inseparably correlative of the moral law, necessary supplements.13 This necessity must not be underestimated nor underesteemed vis-a`-vis the ‘‘ends of man.’’ Kant writes, ‘‘This will, by the fact that it is so determined, as a pure will requires these necessary conditions for obedience to its precept. These postulates are not theoretical dogmas but presuppositions of necessarily practical import; thus, while they do not extend speculative knowledge, they give objective reality to the Ideas of speculative reason in general (by means of their relation to the practical sphere).’’14 Thus, even if there is no demand to believe in the postulates theoretically, they are nevertheless derived from the demands of the moral law and are regarded as necessary in the practical sphere. And it is ultimately the reality of the moral demand, as Kant puts it in the Critique of Practical Reason, that guarantees their necessary but supplementary status.15 The reality of this object of the will and the necessity of the postulates together mandate that they never be understood as mere fictions. Only in this way, deriving from the moral law, are the ideas of reason accredited in some fashion. The idea of a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose, as well as the notion of perpetual peace, should be regarded 124

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in this way. In the case of the former, this is clear to some extent simply from the fact that it is specified by Kant as an ‘‘idea’’ (Idee).16 The second point of particular significance for understanding Kant’s writings on history concerns the harmony and benevolence of the telos of the moral law. Just as virtue and happiness give rise to the antinomy of practical reason, and just as this antinomy is resolved in terms of the priority of morality over happiness, so too is the tension between holiness and benevolence diffused in accordance with the priority of holiness. For, according to Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason, the telos of supreme wisdom, that is, the telos of the knowledge of and conformability to the highest good, cannot be based merely on benevolence with respect to the happiness of rational beings. Instead, it must also conform to ‘‘the restrictive conditions of harmony with the holiness of His will as the highest original good.’’17 This does not mean that the telos of supreme wisdom is not benevolent, but rather, that benevolence is not the sole basis of this telos, any more than happiness is the basis of the moral law. In fact, benevolence is required as part of this telos, just as happiness belongs to the moral law as the second part of the highest good. The demand, in other words, is that benevolence harmonize with and presuppose the supreme good will, rather than provide the basis of that will. Any other sense of benevolence would be self-contradictory, and so selfdestructive. Although the theme of happiness returns explicitly in ‘‘Idea for a Universal History,’’ benevolence appears only obliquely. In his discussion of the relation of humankind’s happiness to the telos of nature, Kant indicates that nature seems to work more for the human being’s self-esteem than for human well-being. Hardships await humankind as it emerges from its self-incurred immaturity. Yet the process of liberation, which is understood by Kant as the emergence of rational freedom, is coordinated with the emergence of this very self-esteem. It is only as humankind recognizes itself as an end in itself, esteems itself as such an end, that it is released from its immaturity and capable of free discourse. In ‘‘Idea for a Universal History,’’ although nature does what it can to expedite this recognition, reason alone is to be responsible for the human being’s happiness.’’18 In other words, it is through the self-esteem that nature does promote that happiness is first made possible. In the language of the Critique of Practical Reason, before being happy, humankind must first be worthy of happiness, even if happiness itself is indefinitely deferred. Just as the apparent antagonism between human happiness and the deGenealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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mands of the moral life is diffused by grounding happiness transcendentally in the moral life, so, too, is the apparent opposition between humankind’s self-esteem and its well-being corrected. Insofar as this self-esteem is both determined by and determines humanity as an end in itself, what is at stake in Kant’s telos is the preservation of humankind. Unlike the Dutch innkeeper for whom perpetual peace is understood as a graveyard, Kant rejects the wisdom of Silenus. If nature seems to work for the human being’s self-esteem and not for human well-being, this does not mean this self-esteem has no relation to well-being. On the contrary, this well-being follows from the human being’s self-esteem, for self-esteem preserves humankind as an end in itself. Kant’s telos in the sense of the goal of history, whether specified in terms of sociability or perpetual peace, is itself benevolent, even if the teleological process leading thereto is not. A hard benevolence, perhaps, but benevolence nonetheless. For Kant insists that the process of Enlightenment moves from worse to better. Everything is organized around the preservation and promotion of humanity as the superior species. The ‘‘ends of man’’ considered in any other manner, for example, in terms of the overhuman or the inhuman, is simply anathema to Kant. Universal History and the Work of Fiction Kant’s texts on history presumably occupy a unique place in this history, for not only do they write about history as a purposive narrative structure, but, at the same time, they also participate in this structure, promoting it, furthering the purpose of nature itself, as indicated in the first epigraph above. Their status is therefore crucial. On more than one occasion, Kant suggests that they must not be understood as works of fiction, an implication that is ultimately fixed in the necessity of the moral law. These discussions of the status of this history must be taken into careful account. The first indication that such a history might be understood as a work of fiction arises in the Ninth Proposition of ‘‘Idea for a Universal History.’’ Following his assertion that a philosophical attempt to work out such a history in accordance with the telos of reason must be both possible and capable of furthering the ends of reason, Kant states: It is admittedly a strange and at first sight absurd proposition to write a history according to an idea of how world events must 126

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develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel could result from such premises. Yet if it may be assumed that nature does not work without a plan and purposeful end, even amidst the arbitrary play of human freedom, this idea might nevertheless prove useful.19 Such a notion would seem strange because ideas, when understood speculatively, are always in excess of proper theoretical delimitation. From the strict standpoint of theoretical reason, such a history could only be regarded as a work of fiction. However, Kant’s suggestion that such an idea might prove useful in the appropriate circumstances indicates its proximity to the postulates of practical reason, those ideas which are useful in the practical sphere but theoretically impotent. More specifically still, though, Kant suggests that this usefulness would derive from the assumption of nature as purposive. The question thus arises, whence the purposiveness of nature in the essay, for, prior to the Ninth Proposition, the essay has done nothing if not articulate this purposiveness vis-a`-vis the ‘‘ends of man.’’ In fact, of course, nature is regarded as purposive by the essay for the sake of the moral life and the triumph of reason in the public sphere. Nature is called upon by Kant to avoid what would otherwise be the wreckage of the categorical imperative on the world-historical political level: ‘‘For if we abandon this basic principle, we are faced not with a law-governed nature, but with an aimless, random, process and the dismal reign of chance replaces the guiding principle of reason.’’20 The principle that must not be abandoned, the principle that guarantees the rule of reason in history, is that ‘‘all natural capacities of a creature are destined sooner or later to be developed completely and in conformity with their end,’’ where the human being’s natural capacity is understood in terms of the possession and effectuation of reason.’’21 The telos of nature is invoked for the sake of the preservation of reason, and thus for the preservation of that creature who among the creatures of this world alone is rational, namely, the human being. One might even say, then, that the purposiveness of nature functions to justify claims such as those made in ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ concerning the emergence of rational freedom, or even to justify the ‘‘Idea for a Universal History’’ itself insofar as the essay understands itself as promoting, marking, and participating in this emergence. Once it is assumed that nature is purposive—and this assumption follows directly from the status of the moral law, as evidenced Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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above—the claim concerning the novel must be reinterpreted, emphasizing now the seeming of the claim. It only seems as if a novel alone could result from such premises; in fact, a quasi-postulate results, that is, something useful within the practical sphere. That this is only a quasi-postulate must not be overlooked, though, for it indicates the danger of Kant’s position. Although Kant suggests that such an idea might be useful, he does not explicitly indicate its necessity, as he does in the case of the postulates. Neither a postulate nor a work of fiction, history is condemned to a netherworld of indeterminacy; lacking the security even of a postulate, Kant’s universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose must nevertheless be defended from the work of fiction, for the moral law itself is at stake. Practically considered, whatever this means in this instance, such a history is not to be considered a work of fiction. Yet, to avoid the appearance of being a novel, Kant’s universal history requires the bifurcation of the theoretical and the practical spheres, the very distinction that the system must overcome if the ‘‘ends of man’’ are to be understood as unified—a unification that, moreover, is supposedly effected on some level by this very idea of history. Kant’s universal history requires the bifurcation of the practical and the theoretical, reason and nature, while, at the same time, functioning to close this chasm. The contrast between history and fiction arises again two years later with Kant’s ‘‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,’’ where he distinguishes conjectural history from the work of fiction. Almost identical language is used as that in ‘‘Idea for a Universal History’’: ‘‘to base a historical account solely on conjectures would seem little better than drawing up a plan for a novel.’’22 Again, it is a matter of what would seem to be mere fiction, although this time Kant does not reinterpret this coupling since it is employed in a different context. As it turns out, conjectures are admissible in the course of historical accounts insofar as these accounts provide the appropriate boundaries for such activity. The remote cause and effect of such a proper historical account allow the gap between them to be intelligibly filled. Of course, this presupposes a standard of legitimate historical accounting from which conjecture is clearly distinguished. Given this, Kant’s claim is simply that one cannot base a history on such conjectures, for this would be merely a work of fiction, and not a conjectural history. Yet one can base conjectures on such a history, and in this case such conjecture would presumably no longer seem little better than fiction. Conjecture thus stands somewhere between legitimate historical accounting and fiction.23 128

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These lines are compromised, however, as soon as Kant further describes historical accounts as genuine records of events that are ‘‘tested by criteria quite different from those derived merely from the philosophy of nature.’’24 What, then, is the status of Kant’s account of history? And not only the idea of a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose, but also the status of his own texts as world-historical announcements of the Enlightenment? Does the process of enlightenment collapse into transcendental illusion? This most dangerous of all questions is necessitated by the fact that Kant now indicates to us that authentic history is understood according to criteria completely other than that of the philosophy of nature. For this is clearly to say that genuine history operates according to criteria other than that used by Kant’s ‘‘Idea for a Universal History’’ to ground the notion of progress, that is, enlightenment. Neither a genuine account of history nor a work of fiction, neither a postulate of practical reason nor conjecture,25 perhaps indeterminate enough to defer the very demand for consistency from which it arises. A history in excess of that demand, unable to apply the rule of consistency from which it arises to itself. A fracture in the very ethos of reflexivity. It is as though Nietzsche’s words concerning nihilism already resound from within this fracture: ‘‘We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.’’26 Genealogy and the Reflections of Nihilism, Blood Meridian and the Return of Reflexivity What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘‘why?’’ finds no answer. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

For even if you should have stood your ground . . . yet what ground was it? —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

If the Kantian Enlightenment ethos fractures in the course of its most proper reflection, what becomes of its reflexivity? Presumably, the fracture in the mirror of reflection would then refract that which is reflected, reflecting back a specter distorted and disfigured. And if this fracture is endemic to the demands of Enlightenment reflexivity as exhibited by Kant, then there has never been anything but this disfigurement and deformation. Without this fracture, there would Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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be no reflexivity since it is by means of the fracture that reflexivity is perpetuated. It is at this point that Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West executes a ‘‘reversal’’ of Kantian history and the conceptual apparatus that gives rise to it. It is and remains a nihilistic text wherein a certain morality collapses in the most violent and questionable manner. Yet it is not the case that Blood Meridian simply despairs of the fracture that infuses this ethos, disrupting not only the ends of Kantian reflection, but also the very demand that occasions it. For Blood Meridian is no lamentation, but rather an affirmative cartography of this fracture. Its nihilism must be understood genealogically in conjunction with the doctrinal content of Enlightenment thought as exhibited in the writings of Kant. Thematically, Blood Meridian retains the ‘‘essential’’ elements of Kantian history: teleology, providence, autonomy, and the privileged place of the human being as suzerain of the earth. Treated genealogically, however, these thematics uproot and dismantle the benevolent telos that belongs to the very idea of a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose. Far from functioning as the fulcra that support and position Kantian history, Blood Meridian’s invocation of these thematics indicates the dehiscence of that history from within the very conceptuality that would serve to guarantee it. As such, the novel eschews all claims to origin, beginning, as it were, in the midst of a wasteland, or in McCarthy’s preferred nomenclature, a ‘‘wilderness’’ or ‘‘desert.’’ When it does speak of origins, it does so parodically and materialistically with references to stone and ore, origins geological and layered, never simple or transcendental. Charting the nomadic course of men with purportedly proper names across borders that cease to exist just as they are transgressed, it is a novel that transmits no truth. A text that stands outside the law, recoiling even upon its own pretense to speak authoritatively, it is a ‘‘book’’ wherein it is declared that ‘‘books lie,’’ a memory that understands itself as fabricated, in short, a simulacral fiction.27 As such, Blood Meridian takes seriously the claims of fiction, the so-called truth of what may tentatively be called the ‘‘fictitious world of Enlightenment thought,’’ namely, the ‘‘truth’’ of the fiction Nietzsche calls ‘‘nihilism,’’ and which Kant avoids at all costs. Blood Meridian does not escape this nihilism, but qua genealogy repeats it differentially, selecting its doctrinal content for something other than tribunal, placing it on exhibition, displaying and playing out its desolation in a theater of cruelty. 130

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Three Cases of Parody Concerning the Doctrinal Content of Enlightenment Thought: On Human Being, War, and Teleology Genealogy of a Fool While it is correct that humanism must be distinguished from the doctrinal elements of Enlightenment thought, it is nevertheless the case that those elements retain the privileged place of the human. This is evidenced in Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative, the telos of Kantian history, and the very distinction of human being from the animal that proves crucial to this conceptuality. Rarely, however, is the reflexivity of Kantian critique rigorously directed toward this distinction; rather, it is presupposed, treated transcendentally as a condition of possibility required for the stability of the entire project. Kant writes, for example: ‘‘Man’s emergence from that paradise which reason represents to him as the first abode of his species was nothing other than his transition from a rude and purely animal existence to a state of humanity, from the leadingstrings of instinct to the guidance of reason-in-word, from the guardianship of nature to the state of freedom.’’28 While no doubt a speculative claim in this context, Kant’s conjecture merely elaborates the most important distinction operative in the Critique of Practical Reason, namely, that of reason and instinct. Without this distinction, which we see here is bound up with the privilege of the human over the animal, the categorical imperative would have no authority at all, which is to say, the ends of history, if we may still speak this way, would no longer correspond to the ‘‘ends of man.’’ At every turn and from every perspective available within the Kantian schematic, the status of the human being is presupposed, privileged, and unquestioned. A genealogy of Enlightenment thought must accordingly problematize this distinction, although not necessarily by means of a simple reversal. Blood Meridian effectuates such a problematization most clearly through the relation of the judge and the fool. In fact, the distinction between the judge and the fool reflects the distinction between the human and the animal, albeit one refracted through the fracture of the Enlightenment ethos. Its lines therefore become blurred, distorted, and ultimately imperceptible. The figure of the judge in Blood Meridian, whom we see at the outset of the novel as a playful albeit malicious liar falsely accusing an evangelist of illiteracy and bestiality, is no judge at all in the Kantian Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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sense. Rather, a parody of Kantian determinative judgment, the judge does indeed subsume the phenomena he encounters under a determinate ‘‘concept,’’ but by no means one that belongs to the faculty of the understanding. This is because judgment in the context of Blood Meridian does not function epistemically, or at least does not do so primarily. Instead, it operates as a principle of value, or rather devaluation and annihilation, one that, from another perspective, is best interpreted as a principle of selection. The maxim that dictates the judge’s actions, and to which the phenomena he encounters are submitted, derives from the principle: ‘‘Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.’’29 This tenet becomes a maxim for destruction when it is combined with two other principles of the judge’s ‘‘metaphysics,’’ namely, that of the ‘‘ultimate authority of the extant’’ (84), and that of the special status of the human being as keeper of the earth. For, as suzerain, the human being’s ‘‘authority countermands local judgments’’ (198), which is to say, it finds itself in conflict with the very facticity of the extant. Everywhere the human being finds its autonomy challenged by ‘‘pockets of autonomous life’’ (199), insulted by the freedom of birds. It is for this reason that the judge spends so much time sketching fossils, artifacts of lost civilizations, traces of history, only to destroy the extant evidence upon completion of his records. In this way, he preserves the extant merely as a memory trace etched into his sketchbooks, thereby dictating the terms of remembrance in accordance with an order of resemblance he institutes, creating history in the midst of its destruction, and so guaranteeing his autonomy. If it is the case, as the judge pontificates, that ‘‘the man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order . . . will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate,’’ then it must be said that the judge not only selects such a thread, but also spins its order from the remnants of the value of autonomy (199). For it is the privileged position of the human being as that being whose authority is to countermand local judgments, which is to say, it is the human being as universal authority—and would Kant have it any other way?—that dictates the charter of this order. That the order is instituted by the human being is the revolutionary force of the judge’s redistribution of the lines of Kantian autonomy. The judge, of course, not only destroys the evidence that he pencils into his sketchbooks. Rather, his maxim applies to Indians and Mexicans—the two groups indiscriminately hunted by his party of scalpers—as well as women and children, and even the company 132

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with whom he travels. Of course, it also applies to animals of various sorts, from the puppies he drowns in the river to the dancing bear killed at the end of the novel. ‘‘There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone,’’ he tells the Kid subsequent to the execution of the bear (331). In fact, there is but one figure in the entire text whom the judge saves, namely, the fool, who appears for the first time in chapter 16 eating his own feces.30 The judge immediately takes interest in him, presumably because he is neither human nor inhuman, hence possessing no proper place at all on the stage of which the judge speaks. The fool’s indeterminate status is of central importance to the genealogical project. To be sure, he comes from a human lineage and even possesses a proper name—James Robert—although no one calls him by it. Living as a domesticated animal in a cage with his own filth, his eyes dull, the fool possesses no speech, and he even appears to be used by the judge for tracking his prey. Yet it is not the case that the fool is treated according to subhuman standards, but rather the reverse: he is the only figure in the entire text who is treated by the judge as an end in itself, which is to say, according to Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative. The problem, of course, is that the fool is precisely not fully human and certainly no rational creature according to Kant’s standards. Devoid of reflection, reason and autonomy, his arms dangling in front of his chest, this apelike figure stands at the crossroads of humanity and animality. He is thus a reminder to humankind that, in the words of Zarathustra, ‘‘Once you were apes, and even now too, man is more ape than any ape.’’31 And it is just this inseparability of the human form and the animal, or more precisely, the fact that this human figure is perhaps more ape than any ape, that leads the judge to preserve it even in the face of the greatest danger and to treat it as if it were an end in itself. In this way, Blood Meridian effects a deformation of the categorical imperative which preserves both the distinction of the human and the animal, and the inability to render this distinction fully present—both the distinction and its effacement. The judge alone preserves the trace, which, as such, is always already effaced, that would separate the human from the animal, and perhaps even distinguish the human from itself. But the very idea of preserving such a ‘‘trace’’—especially insofar as it is depicted here in terms of an ugly, grotesque, feces-smeared quasi-human form—is itself part of McCarthy’s critical-genealogical parody, for again, it is this creature alone, and never a human being, that is treated as an end in itself by the judge. Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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That this parody concerns not only history, but specifically the providential guarantee of its telos, is further evidenced from the uncertain status of the fool, an indetermination that exceeds the humananimal axis. For, if the human being is the image of God, yet not determinatively distinguishable from the animal, then the would-be guarantor of this history is stripped of its transcendence and omnipotence. In other words, that the fool bears a name that is not uttered, an ‘‘unspeakable’’ name, must no doubt be understood as a parody of the very God whose name is also unspeakable, and who alone would guarantee this history.32 The fool, it seems, not only renders imperceptible the line that would distinguish human being and animal, but he is likewise the very image of God thought genealogically, the tainted representation of the value that would determine all proper names. It is as though the telos of Kantian history is guaranteed only by a monkey-god, and so not guaranteed at all. And if it is the case that the geology of McCarthy’s terrain is one of fear, as we will see shortly, then it is also the case that the very rock out of which humankind strikes its existence is put there by this (monkey-)God.33 There is, then, perhaps nothing more terrifying than this universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose. The Sublimity of War and the Dis-placement of Fear In the ‘‘Analytic of the Sublime’’ of the Critique of Judgment, Kant notes, almost in passing, that even war can be sublime ‘‘if carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights.’’34 He means by this that war, like the might of nature, can effect an elevation of the imagination through which the human being recognizes the worth of its vocation even in the face of its physical impotence. In spite of and because of the excess of nature’s dynamis, the human being comes to distinguish its superiority over nature, a superiority that Kant insists is the basis of the self-preservation implicit in the second formulation of the categorical imperative.35 Such self-estimation, however, nevertheless requires a certain degree of safety. For fear in the face of such excess, inasmuch as it would give rise to flight, would prohibit the reflection required to enjoin this superiority, thereby instituting an entirely different order of selfpreservation that would hardly differ from that of the animal. At stake for Kant, then, is a certain sort of preservation and the conceptual apparatus required to guarantee it. ‘‘Perpetual peace’’ must not be understood in terms of the perpetual peace of the grave134

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yard, but rather as the end of human life thought purposively.36 And to the extent that the perpetual peace of the Dutch innkeeper is understood in terms of death, and hence as a condemnation of the struggle of this life, Kant’s reappropriation of the phrase will have to do with a revaluation of that condemnation and a sublimation of the strife to which it objects. In so doing, Kant does not deny the suffering and discord of life, but rather situates it within the larger telos of a universal history. Kant states, for example, that ‘‘the mechanical process of nature visibly exhibits the purposive plan of producing concord among men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord.’’37 In other words, nature employs the discord, strife, and thus also war that dominate human life, and it does so in order to promote that life in the midst of its destruction. Making use of humankind’s asociability and self-serving inclinations, nature promotes the discordant conditions that alone raise human beings out of the pastoral docility proper to sheep,38 thereby making possible for the first time a genuine concord or harmony. In this way, the conflict between reason and inclination that belongs solely to the human being is amplified, setting in relief the unique status of the human. The violence for which this conflict accounts accordingly belongs to the privilege of the human being. It follows from this that Kant, much to his credit, can speak only of the humanity of war, and never of its animality. As a strictly human phenomenon, albeit one that Kant ascribes to nature and not to reason, war operates as a catalyst to the activity of reason and the duty of peace. But the sublimity of war is arrived at only by way of its sublimation. For the very elevation of the human being’s vocation in the face of the immensity of war not only presupposes this vocation insofar as it is invoked at all, but rather, it is for the sake of the preservation of the ‘‘ends of man’’ that war is sublimated in the first place. Viewed from within Kant’s schematic, war can appear as sublime only because it is submitted to a principle of order, one whose origin, however, might be understood as the fear of the destruction of the human vocation.39 Simply put, it is required that war be submitted to a principle of purposiveness if it is not to function as a detractor of perpetual peace and universal history, if human suffering, malice, and the selfishness of individuals’ inclinations are to be anything other than ruinous.40 And Kant insists that such a view in this case is hardly a matter of indifference.41 From the outset, motivated by a fear of collapse,42 the transcendental critique is thus infected with the contagion of the violence of factical life. In Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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order to strip war of its disastrous force—in order that order be preserved—Kant wages war on war, directs his own inclination against inclination. In so doing, he testifies to the reflexivity not only of reason, but also of the transgression that institutes it. Only in this way are the detractors of perpetual peace mastered and made lawful, the freedom of folly set in the service of the freedom of reason, strife in the service of law. Violence thus becomes necessary for the sake of nonviolence, war necessary for peace, discord necessary for harmony, but always and in each case it is this ‘‘for the sake of . . .’’ that dominates Kant’s understanding and directs the sense of this necessity. And it does so for the sake of practical reason itself. It must be emphasized that, in a certain respect, the danger that generates the sublimation of war, and thus also its sublimity, exceeds the distinction between fear and fearlessness required by Kant to recognize this affective capacity of war.43 After all, the preservation of the end of human life depends on and is constructed in part out of the recognition of this danger. The extent of Kant’s flight, which in his own account would then serve as an indicator of the fear that generates his position, is perhaps best indicated in a remark made in ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ In obdurate refusal to admit the crippling effects of war, Kant writes, ‘‘this danger is not in fact very great, for [those crippled by war] would certainly learn to walk eventually after a few falls.’’44 And yet it is not that such paralyzing and ruinous effects are unthinkable for Kant, as is clearly evinced by the rigor and seriousness of his engagement with the problematics of war and suffering. It is rather because the possibility of these effects stands as a serious threat to the Kantian enterprise that his claim is as strong and uncompromising as it is. Put otherwise, while not unthinkable, or more precisely, while not unimaginable, the absolute paralysis of humankind through war is nevertheless inconceivable for Kant, the annihilation and ruination it entails standing outside Kant’s conceptuality, a purported stranger whose conjugal affiliation can nevertheless in no way be denied. In this way, to the extent that the emphatic displacement of such ruination indicates the force of its threat, the sublimity of war testifies not to the strength of the human vocation, as Kant would like to maintain, but to its fragility. Kant’s account of the sublimity of war is thus in no way itself sublime. For, at a minimum, we can no longer determine the extent to which its generative principle is fear or fearlessness, this distinction itself arising as the mechanism by which the threat to systematicity is domesticated. And 136

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yet, in the face of the obliteration of this distinction, the fear of annihilation can only be amplified. It is out of the collapse of such a distinction that McCarthy determines the terrain of Blood Meridian as ‘‘a land of some other order . . . whose true geology [is] fear.’’45 And the judge’s pronouncements concerning the human vocation could not be more disquieting, in contrast to the purported comfort of Kant’s position.46 They arise as a sort of inverted and disabled Kantianism, a parody of the teleological function of war. The pronouncements are initially situated within an agreement with the biblical declaration that ‘‘all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’’ (Matthew 26:52). As in Kant’s ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ the judge’s espousal of this proverb is sustained by a belief in the worth and vocation of humankind.47 Unlike Kant, however, the judge determines this worth and vocation on the basis of war, and not vice versa. ‘‘War endures,’’ he states. ‘‘As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.’’48 War is thus proper to human life, belongs to it alone and in fact distinguishes it from the animal, as is also the case for Kant. Yet now war is also the highest human vocation, a sort of a priori of the properly human, so to speak. Thus, according to the judge, the human being is not born for the sake of itself, and war is not simply a catalyst for the achievement of this end. Instead, the human being is born for the sake of games, chance, and wager—the very immaturity and anarchic disorder so unsettling to Kant—and war is that to which all games aspire.49 In this way alone is the worth of human beings evidenced, according to the judge. To be sure, the value of the game of war is not inherent in the game itself, but rather in what is at stake in the game insofar as it is at stake at all. That the game is a matter of life and death, that the stakes are nothing less than one’s very existence, the value of which does not exceed the right to play the game—this alone guarantees the worth of the human being and its vocation. ‘‘What more certain validation of man’s worth could there be?’’50 War is the imperative, just formal enough that the slaughter may become general, by which the judge and his companions institute their world.51 Clearly, this is no doctrine of manifest destiny, but, on the contrary, the destructuring of the order that alone could give rise to such a doctrine, a parody of the benevolent ‘‘ends of man’’ from which such a notion of history could only arise.52 War is thus transformed from its teleological function in Kant into the all-consuming telos of a Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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history whose meridian is blood. Its status as ‘‘universal law,’’ or what is the same thing for the judge, its status as the ‘‘ultimate game,’’ is due to the fact that it alone unifies existence, ‘‘swallows up game, player, all.’’53 And if this position disrupts and shatters the Kantian vocation of humankind, so, too, does it parody Kant’s account of the sublimity of war. For, in Blood Meridian, war is never safe, and it never references a vocation beyond itself. War alone is universal. ‘‘All other trades,’’ states the judge, ‘‘are contained in that of war.’’54 As the human vocation, war is the condition of life itself, and its stakes are final. The judge even goes so far as to declare it ‘‘god,’’55 thereby displacing even the pretension of a manifest destiny that would separate war as means from the end of a benevolent deity. Teleology, Complex Repetition, and False Coins Blood Meridian’s critique of teleology not only effects the displacement of Kant’s ordering principle, but it also resists reinscription within the order of representation and simple repetition. Deferring to the ultimate authority of the extant, it is as if Blood Meridian declares war to be the extant destruction of the extant, a telos that can be neither affirmed nor delimited since it continually displaces, or perhaps even destroys, itself. If this marks a return of Enlightenment reflexivity, though, it is certainly one stripped of its allegiance to the good will of thought. The providence invoked in Blood Meridian is always one of darkness and night,56 one wherein clear lines of origin are indistinguishable, and thus no providence at all. If the judge’s pronouncements are in no way providential, however, it surely does not follow that they are not fateful. For they are in fact fateful to Kant’s determinations of both providence and fate insofar as they bring a mutated principle of autonomy to bear on this conceptuality. Recall that, according to Kant, providence and fate name the same purposiveness viewed from different perspectives, providence attributing it to the wisdom of a higher cause, and fate regarding such cause as unknown.57 In neither case is purposiveness itself interrogated. Ironically echoing Kant’s insistence on the finitude of human knowing, the judge submits both ideas (Ideen) to the tribunal, not of reason, but of war and its deformed rationality, drawing out their implications in the direction of a Nietzschean amor fati. He states, for example, that ‘‘this enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a 138

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preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one.’’58 That the one who fails to recognize either significance or agency in the principle of war would indeed be dull—perhaps an imbecile, neither human nor inhuman—does not mean that such agency or significance is in fact operative. It may be the case that, again echoing the Kantian position, such significance is nothing more than transcendental illusion, inherent to the structure of human reflection. After all, to anticipate a bit, the judge does declare: ‘‘Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.’’59 More to the point, however, it is simply the case that the judge insists that no argument concerning fate is to be admitted here. And the reason is that the import of the disputes is ancillary to the participation of the disputants in such altercations in the first place. The judge explains: A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof.60 In other words, the law of which the judge speaks in this passage is nothing other than the divergence of opinions, the great moment or force such divergences carry as their conflict is played out on the field of ‘‘history.’’ The new and broader view evidenced by the dead party does not concern whether his views were correct—for example, opinions concerning the teleology of the universe—but the fact that they exhibited themselves most prominently in a game of the highest stakes, one that displaces all claims to right.61 Thought in this way, as a matter of sheer force, ‘‘historical law’’ subverts the moral law at every turn and is thus no law at all according to Kant, but rather utter lawlessness. This lawlessness would then be the condition of possibility for anything like the moral law. Echoing the ‘‘reversal of values’’ charted by Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals, the judge declares: ‘‘Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak.’’62 Its very insistence on its own primacy attests to a still more primary conflict. Kant would thus be a slave not only to his own morality, but also to his inclination toward it. Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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The judge speaks not only against morality, here understood specifically in terms of providence and the preservation of the all too human, but also against the habitual ways of living and thinking that ensure the teleological perspective from the start. The two are indeed closely connected. Interrupting the speculations of his company concerning the divine excision of lunacy from the world, the judge tells them: Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance populated with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tent show whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond all reckoning.63 Thus, with extreme power and concision, the judge displaces the teleological order of history. His speech restores lunacy to the world by way of the simulacral—it once again becomes a world with two moons, strange and undecidable. The calamity of its ultimate destination is unspeakable only because this calamity makes unintelligible anything like an ultimate destination, that is, a telos established within the order of moral representation. Explicitly concerned with the appearance of the world, in fact collapsing all distinction between appearance and reality—‘‘it would appear to you for what it is’’—the judge institutes a new order of reflection, albeit one without depth. In this world, anything is possible, and its order is ‘‘not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part.’’64 But to speak of repetition in this way is to speak of the universality of the singular, the nonexchangeable and nonsubstitutable. The chimeras noted by the judge have neither analogue nor precedent, and so represent nothing. The speech is thus an explicit challenge to the order representation and the priority of identity, affirming instead a world of complex repetition and difference, one not constrained by the priority of an original that would then determine the sense of its copy. The judge’s pronouncements therefore do not represent a ‘‘metaphysics of history,’’ but rather the insistence on an order of pure becoming.65 Finally, when the judge declares: ‘‘The mystery is that there is no mystery,’’ this must be understood neither as an insistence on the perspective of absolute knowing nor as the delimitation of the spurious claims of reason, both of which would belong to Enlightenment 140

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epistemologies. To be sure, prior even to this pronouncement, the judge proclaims simply: ‘‘There is no mystery.’’66 Yet failure to heed the difference of the two declarations is symptomatic of the very order the claims disrupt. Note, first of all, that the difference of the claims concerns the repetition of the mystery that would simply be annihilated according to the rule of identity. And yet the mystery denied in the first proclamation does not simply return in the second. Rather, it is selected out, returning only the form of the question that would accompany such a mystery, one now stripped of its content. For the mystery denied by the first claim is none other than that of providential history and the creationist doctrine that accompanies it. Significantly, just prior to the first remark, holding a giant femur, the judge lectures on paleontology, illustrating his claims by way of analogy, or the order of resemblance. The new recruits to whom he speaks are twice described by McCarthy as ‘‘dull,’’ and they are easily misled by this order, reaching out to touch the giant bone so as to touch the ‘‘temporal immensities of which the judge’’ speaks.67 They are fanatics in Kant’s sense of the term, those who want to see what cannot be seen,68 lacking tact, not knowing when to touch, as it were. The judge’s comment is directed toward them and their fanaticism: ‘‘There is no mystery to it,’’ as if to say there is no content to that temporal immensity which they would make palpably present. After all, the judge holds before them only the trace of what could never be present, the mere ‘‘effects’’ of death. And this is why the judge supplements his initial claim with the observation that it is the desire of those to whom he speaks to be told some mystery, to have revealed to them some secret, to be initiated into some secret order. The problem, of course, is that, so revealed, such a secret is no secret at all, the mystery no longer a mystery. It is as if the mystery demanded by the company of new recruits requires its own extinction. The formulation of the judge’s second pronouncement thus becomes the demand for a genealogy of the nihilism of the company and its demand for presence. ‘‘The mystery is that there is no mystery’’ returns the question of mystery back upon this impossibility. It is indeed a mystery that there is no mystery, which is to say, it is worthy of reflection that the mystery of providential history is no longer sustainable, and, even more, that it was ever thought to be so. The second statement puts the undecidability of the mystery back into play, repeating the claim differentially, refusing the closure suggested in the first formulation—a closure that is in fact determined by the pronouncements of Kant’s providential teleology. And if it is doubtful that such undeGenealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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cidability would any longer be amenable to the language of mystery, all the better. For following some of the judge’s hat tricks around the night fire, even though both the men of the company and the judge know that there are coins and false coins, this knowledge is of no use to them.69

The Reflexivity of Blood Meridian: The Violence of Progress, Books That Lie, and the Work of Memory Even if the excessive violence of Blood Meridian were relegated to a merely rhetorical status, the need for such rhetoric in the first place would be indicative of the order with which it struggles, and this according to the pronouncements of the judge. The violence of Blood Meridian is not simply gratuitous or rhetorical, however, but at its best functions in the specific capacity of an indictment of Enlightenment thought. In one of the most disturbing scenes in the entire novel, for example, the judge is seen holding the bloody scalp of an Apache child orphaned by the company’s attacks (184). Only moments before the scalping, whose brutality arouses the anger of the company of murderers as perhaps no other incident, the judge had been playing with the child, bouncing him on his knee; prior to that, he had even ‘‘saved’’ the boy following the massacre of his entire village. And yet, from what would the judge save the child if not such a brutal death? In fact, the judge allows the child neither to grow into maturity nor to remain a child, as if the latter were even an option. He thus exhibits the collapse of the binary opposition that governs the progress of the Enlightenment ideal, a collapse that is no doubt effected already in the very slaughter of the village, since the maturity that would evolve out of such loss of innocence would surely be other than that indicated by Kant. Unlike Kant, for whom humanity is fully capable of rehabilitation subsequent to its selfinflicted impediments to progress, McCarthy problematizes the exceptional character of human disaster, the manner in which it stands outside a governing law and redemptive conceptuality. He thus replaces/displaces the value of progress with the image of mutation and mutilation—the judge with his giganticism, albinism, alopecia as a genetic anomaly catastrophic to all it encounters, a wild child, insomniac dancer and harbinger of death. If we are disturbed as readers, made uneasy and unsettled, this is the effect of the implications of this genealogy in its struggle with that from which it emerges. 142

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Just as Blood Meridian amplifies the reflexivity of Enlightenment thinking, so, too, does it intensify the violence of that reflexivity, employing it hyperbolically, critically, and of course reflexively. Thus Blood Meridian not only disrupts the Enlightenment ideal of progress, but also intensifies the very fracture that no doubt already belongs to the comportment of Enlightenment reflection. In what will no doubt be the most violent turn of the text, this intensification will render the lines of Blood Meridian’s reflexivity almost imperceptible, and thereby distinguish it for the first time from the benevolently purposive violence of Kantian history. As it traces the fracture that runs through the Enlightenment ethos, Blood Meridian finds its own critique fractured, deferred, and displaced. This finding constitutes the force of its genealogical insight. This process of parodic critique and reflexive recoil is evident in the very passage where the judge declares the ultimate authority of the extant. The company is buying arms for its venture into the wilderness, and a dispute inevitably arises. The judge is called on to arbitrate the disagreement, and specifically to assuage the curiosity of Sergeant Aguilar concerning the origins of the company, and more precisely still, the origins of the black man in the company named Jackson who refuses to shake hands with the sergeant. The judge accordingly speaks to the sergeant of ‘‘anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences (84). The judge, in other words, engages in a conjecture remarkably similar to that offered by Kant in ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ where he describes the forces of nature and war as purposively determining the settlement of peoples in places as remote as the Arctic coast (110). When Jackson demands to know what the judge has told the sergeant, the judge replies, It is not necessary that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. . . . Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning. (85) The judge’s response marks one of the clearest moments in the entire text when the function of parody opens onto a radicalized reflexivity. Its first sentence reflects both Kant’s motivating concern and the apGenealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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paratus by which it is diffused in his works on history, namely, that of the relation of individual folly to a telos of history that operates on and through such individuals, albeit without their knowledge. But it is also pronounced by the judge, and this at least indicates the initial manner in which the apparent allegiance of the comment to Enlightenment history is exposed. It is as if the first sentence, echoing Kant’s own doctrine of history, asks to what extent Kant might unwittingly accommodate a history other than the one he elucidates, and indeed might do so in the midst of his most pious formulations. The idea of a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose would then belong to another history that dissimulates itself amid the very pronouncements of providence and benevolent teleology. This is why the judge continues to note that the authority or force of words transcends the ignorance of those who possess them. On the most immediate level, the force of the words offered to the sergeant transcends his ignorance insofar as they are simply used to procure the very arms that later will destroy Indian and Mexican alike. To the extent that the ultimate authority of the words is demonstrated in blood, however, while at the same time their content mimics a certain Enlightenment conjecture concerning the purposiveness of nature in conditioning the population of the planet in accordance with biblical doctrine, so, too, does the authority of the words transcend the good will of their Enlightenment origins. For while the words appear to be about Jackson, they are also about the history of the West and the manner in which Enlightenment history ends in indiscriminate slaughter, the manner in which it is a history of blood and not progress. If the point is only that the doctrinal content of Enlightenment thought cannot control certain rebellious elements inherent to it, however, the reflexivity of Blood Meridian misses its mark altogether. For, presumably as an inheritor of the Enlightenment, the words of Blood Meridian are likewise unrestrained, ‘‘authoritative’’ beyond their purported significance. What it would mean for the text to recognize this, and even employ it strategically, as it does in the course of its great parodies, could only intensify the reflexivity of its genealogical comportment. The history Blood Meridian accommodates is one of violence, and the text is indeed ‘‘in possession’’ of this fact, even if it does not own it. Two passages in particular serve to illustrate the force of this intensification and the manner in which it doubles back on the text itself, calling its pronouncements into question, or rather, intensifying the question of the text’s pronouncements. 144

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The status of the book is addressed explicitly in Blood Meridian in two separate instances. In the first, cited earlier, the judge declares that books lie (116). It occurs specifically as the judge rejects the invocation of Scripture by the men to counter his own geo-genealogical speculations. To books, which must here be understood in terms of a metaphysics of presence and closure,70 the judge opposes nature. The manner in which the opposition is developed, however, is of crucial importance to both the order the judge contests and the order he upholds. Contra the mendacity of books, the judge purportedly concurs with the men’s belief that at least ‘‘God don’t lie,’’ albeit only to return this claim back on the men in mutated form, its destructive power unleashed. In fact, the judge’s claim both strips the God of the B/book of all purported authority and mastery and, simultaneously, indicates the authoritative effects of the book’s providential pronouncements as they recoil upon its good will. For as he assents, the judge points out a geological formation and suggests that the words of God speak through the ‘‘stones and trees, the bones of things.’’71 To the extent that the geology of Blood Meridian is one of fear, the words of God, which do not lie, would be those which speak inaudibly through the bones and death that pervade the text—the executed bear, the tree of dead babies, the necklace of human ears, the murdered Apache child, the expressionless old woman slaughtered in the street, the entire holocaust of blood that saturates the landscape of the text. The words of God, which do not lie, would then be heard only in the miscarriage of the benevolent providential history, which has everything to do with the closure of the B/book, and so not heard at all as they present themselves, but only in their uncontrollable effects. And the judge makes this clear when he laughs at the company as they fail to understand the parody of his quasi-cosmological argument, and embrace it instead as proselytes of some new order. His laughter is directed toward those men who would fail to hear the voice of God in the midst of the horrific terrain of Blood Meridian, or more precisely, those who would continue to insist that this voice, insofar as it is bound to the B/book, is a voice that does not lie. In this first instance, then, the claim that books lie is directed toward a specific conception of the B/book and the history that accompanies it, where the book of history is opposed to the writing of genealogy. Not only is it declared in Blood Meridian that books lie, but the logic of this claim is itself traced genealogically; the text’s critique is fundamentally reflexive. It therefore offers an account of its own practice vis-a`-vis the very lines of descent (Herku¨nfte) with which it struggles. Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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And this means, of course, that its status as a ‘‘book’’ is bound up with the question of its memory. The second discussion of the truth and falsity of books opens onto the heart of the text, wherein it becomes clear that Blood Meridian is no book at all in the traditional sense, although its veracity will nevertheless always remain a question. In the second instance, the mercenaries gather around a night fire, and the judge is asked what he plans to do with his notes and sketches. In response, he smiles and says that it is ‘‘his intention to expunge them from the memory of man.’’72 How does memory function here, and what precisely is to be expunged? Presumably it is the memory of the things sketched by the judge—his sketches are ‘‘like enough the things themselves’’73 —that is to be destroyed, a memory that would allegedly have some claim to presence by virtue of this likeness. By serving as witness to the things he sketches, the judge dictates the sense of their remembrance, fabricating memories in accordance with the mutated principle of autonomy discussed above. What is remembered is to be re-membered, reassembled, on the basis of the judge’s re-presentations, mere likenesses to the things, and not the things themselves. Indeed, as long as the things themselves are extant (present), the question of their memory is mute; memory is possible only where what is remembered is no longer present. The judge therefore not only expunges the things themselves from the memory of humankind, but also challenges the very notion of memory thought of in this way, namely, as tied to such things as would be represented in their full presence. In so doing, the judge produces out of this absence for the first time a ‘‘genuine’’ memory, one that provides the clue to the memory of Enlightenment thought offered by Blood Meridian. It is, in fact, the memory of that memory, thought according to the metaphysics of presence, the memory of a universal history gone awry. And if this new memory is tied to the representational order of things, this order must not be understood as one of second presentations, nor as the return of a present in its presence, but rather as the return of the movement of dissimulation and dissemination, disruption and deferral, re-petition. For the judge’s sketches are not copies of a model; rather, they are simulacral, overturning both model and copy, instituting a new order altogether, just as Blood Meridian overturns the ‘‘model’’ of the Western novel on which it would supposedly be based.74 To be sure, the judge’s fabrications are tied to an occasioning event, but this is to be understood neither as a model nor in terms of the things themselves from which 146

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the judge draws his likenesses. Instead, the event of fabrication, or simulacral displacement, must be thought otherwise than according to the schema that would privilege both model over copy and the autonomy or authority required to guarantee such privilege in the first place. Here we begin to witness for the first time the force with which Blood Meridian wages war on the Enlightenment ethos from which it emerges, consuming ‘‘game, player, all.’’75 It will, in fact, consume itself. It is, then, not simply the case that the judge creates memory out of a disfigured principle of Kantian autonomy, but rather that the principle of autonomy is itself most radically challenged by the production of this memory. Astute perhaps beyond his own reckoning, a scalper named Webster tells the judge that ‘‘no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everything drawed in a book is so.’’76 The judge’s agreement indicates both a recognition of the limits of his purported autonomy, marred so badly already through its parodic employment, and the mechanism of its production. Acknowledging that he cannot in fact expunge everything, and thereby determine the remembrances of everyone and everything, the judge states that ‘‘every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.’’77 The lack of constraint within the world concerning simple repetition that we noted earlier is thus here recast in terms of a rhizomatic78 tabernacle that serves as an explicit challenge to the autonomous human being who would countermand all local judgments. Unable to put this endlessly complex world in his book, the judge, like others, cannot possibly be suzerain of the world, his judgment incapable of universally countermanding local judgments. Autonomy would thus be the function of a memory, the function of a loss, the symptom of a struggle with passage and decline. In fact, Blood Meridian is less concerned with the content of memory and what is represented than with what might be called the ‘‘dynamis of memory.’’ It is for this reason that the judge is not concerned with whether his memory is correct—whatever that would mean in the present context—but rather with what it can do, with the way in which it configures the present. And this practice of configuration undoubtedly has a pedagogical function both for the judge and for Blood Meridian itself. Following the exchange with Webster concerning memory and representations, in which the mutated principle of autonomy is exhibited as birthed by the memory of displacement, the question arises Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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as to what kind of Indians had previously occupied the territory where the men are camping. In contradistinction to the claim that they are ‘‘dead Indians,’’ the judge offers a parable that thematizes the inheritance of violence, one that doubles back on the text itself, elucidating its relation to its Enlightenment birthright. According to the parable, a harness maker living with his family in the wilds first tries to scam a traveler, and then, shamed as fraudulent, kills him. Between the time of being shamed and becoming a murderer, the harness maker had taken the traveler to his home, where his family had become attached to the young man, such that he dared not tell them of his deed. Instead, he tells them that he and the traveler had been attacked by robbers, and the young man killed. On his deathbed, however, the father confesses his crime to the son; the son is thereby granted the death of his father, exposed as a murderer; the idol of perfection is tarnished and thus dismantled. The son, jealous of the dead man because the traveler had been preserved in his mother’s memory as a son—the son of birthright, after all desires his mother as his own, that is, desires to possess her—then destroys the site where the traveler’s memory had been preserved, scattering the bones and desecrating the grave. The son’s desire for his mother and the commensurate death of his father then open onto his westward travel, where he, too, like his father, proceeds to become a killer of men. And yet this is no stereotypical Oedipal story of the desire for presence and the violence it breeds, even though at stake throughout is the identity and belonging of the son. For violent as it seems, this ending is not tragic; the mother continues with her beliefs, the son continues his journey, and the listeners undergo no moment of catharsis. In fact, the parable does not conclude here, but contains a rider that radicalizes the axis along which the first part functions. For the murdered traveler also had a son, one who never knew his father, a son cheated out of his patrimony and condemned to live before a ‘‘frozen god,’’ an idol without flaws, and so unable to find his way even to become a killer 79 This story (Geschichte), which is also a work of fiction, is offered as an account of what is historically (geschichtlich) forgotten, ostensibly the history of the Anasazi Indians. It is, in other words, a story (Geschichte) that reflects upon what our histories/stories (Geschichten) dis-re-member. Is it to be trusted, or does this story, like the B/book, speak falsely? What memory, and thus also what forgetting, does this story preserve? What lesson does it teach? With the story, the judge moves between the present and past, or rather renders imperceptible 148

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the lines that would all too simply distinguish the two. According to the judge, the Anasazi Indians who once lived where the men now camp are not dead, but they have been forgotten. Like the son cheated out of his patrimony, the Anasazi’s descendants do not know their forefathers. Both cases are understood as ‘‘progressions from a higher to a lower order . . . marked by ruins . . . and a nameless rage’’ (146), where the living are judged by the dead, condemned by their inability to remember. The story, of course, is not only about the Anasazi, for ‘‘what is true of one man is true of many’’ (146), and what is true of the Anasazi is likewise the case for the judge’s company. Their failure to recognize the Anasazi as living is symptomatic of their failure to discern their own place within the history they both espouse and see through to its dissolution (‘‘God don’t lie’’), the sign of the failure of the present to reflect upon itself genealogically. For what is ultimately forgotten here is not the life of the Anasazi, but the forgetting of the forgetting that belongs to the doctrinal content of Enlightenment thought. In this way, the judge’s meditation on the past is transformed into a meditation on the present, and thus on itself, as well as being directed toward the prospects of the future. In the midst of this ruin— which is here understood in terms of the effects of the wreckage of the memory of presence, namely, memory that has forgotten its own forgetfulness—the ex-priest Tobin inquires as to how one should properly raise a child, that is, he raises the question of bringing a human being to maturity (146); it is, above all, an Enlightenment question. For it seems as though both sons are equally disadvantaged, condemned either to violence or to impotence, intensifying the question of a progressive maturity. The judge’s response offers no solace, no redemption, although we must recall here to whom it is offered. He has finished with the dream of false convalescence, and instead remarks genealogically, tracing the structures of this inheritance. The pedagogy suggested by the judge is in fact neither one of natural selection nor one of willful selection, as it might at first appear when he claims that wolves cull themselves, and that to the extent that it is more predacious still, the human being should do the same. It is rather a pedagogy of description that traces the collapse of what Zarathustra would call the ‘‘dragon’’ with its scales of value: ‘‘The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievements. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction

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of his day’’ (147). The memory of Blood Meridian is the memory of this noon, the highpoint of the West and its forgetfulness and repression of the violence that infects it from the outset. And it recognizes its own limits, that its own memory is compromised, that it cannot fit the whole world into a book. As such, it is no B/book, no conveyer of truth at all. Neither, however, does it sacrifice truth for transmissibility,80 but instead interrogates transmission itself, performing its collapse and intensifying its reflexivity. For the stories the judge tells are always implicated in the structures they reveal—structures of violence, forgetting, and re-membering, and of course reflexivity. This is why the epilogue to Blood Meridian, standing outside the story (Geschichte) proper, speaks of a man who progresses over a plain by way of holes he makes in the ground. This ground, the foundation (fundus) as it were, is ‘‘the rock which God has put there,’’ which is to say, the geology of fear that marks the ruins of Enlightenment history. The man then casts a fire into these holes, into the foundation, illuminating it and the ‘‘rim of the visible ground.’’ But he does so only by employing the rock that is then lightened, striking his implement against it so that it sparks. This is the activity of the genealogist, implicated in that which he diagnoses, a mole tunneling through the bedrock of history (Geschichte). ‘‘He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel.’’81 But this is not the end (telos) of the story (Geschichte), for ‘‘they all move on again.’’82 This repetition marks the differential of Enlightenment thought and the genealogy that diagnoses it as nihilism. What, then, of this genealogy?

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Tragic Dislocations Antigone’s Modern Theatrics Tina Chanter Dedicated to the memory of Sarah Kofman

The Modern Tragedy of Ancient Greece Where to begin? In which time, or what place? With modernity or antiquity? And would there be a difference? Is it certain that there would be anywhere for me to begin beyond the tomb, the cave, the womb that suffocates Antigone? Would it be possible to start from anywhere other than the feminine, rather than the masculine? Or would it be possible to start from anywhere other than the masculine? I will try to remain here in the interval between: between the particular and the universal, the feminine and the masculine, the spirit and the law, the private and the public, the blood ties of the familial bond and the civic ties of the political state, between ancient Greece and modernity, between Antigone and Oedipus, between a suffocating space in which Antigone is walled up and the Oedipal desire to know. I will speak from the gap that is the lapse of words, and will not string together in a series the various words Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe employs to designate such a lapse within the An earlier version of this essay was published in Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 75–97. I am grateful to Ewa Ziarek, at the English Department of the University of Notre Dame, for inviting me to present the essay in March 1997, and to the Philosophy Department of Vanderbilt University for asking me to present it at the conference ‘‘Styles of Piety,’’ also in March 1997. Both occasions provided me with the opportunity to reflect on and revise the essay. 151

‘‘spasm’’ of ‘‘paralysis . . . dislocation . . . immobiliz[ation] . . . .prohibit[ion] . . . disten[sion] . . . suspen[sion] . . . diver[sion] . . . collapse . . . regression . . . arres[t] . . . the step back . . . disarticulation . . . caesura.’’1 Antigone marks the absent center, the caesura, of LacoueLabarthe’s speculations. A curious silence surrounds his organizing thesis: the proposition that ‘‘the fundamental text for Ho¨lderlin’s interpretation of tragedy is, in reality, Antigone.’’2 Except for two or three paradoxical and elliptical statements, to which I will return, very little effort is made to support the thesis—which does not cease to organize everything else that is said here—that, for Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Antigone is the tragedy of tragedies. Antigone, and not Oedipus Rex, furnishes the tradition with the most tragic of tragic heroes.3 According to Lacoue-Labarthe, Ho¨lderlin thereby disrupts a long philosophical tradition, stemming from Aristotle, that has granted priority to Oedipus as its most representative hero: ‘‘Oedipus, the ‘incarnation of self-consciousness,’ the embodiment of the ‘desire to know.’ ’’4 What makes Oedipus the model tragic figure, as is known well enough, is the conversion from ignorance to knowledge that he undergoes. In his determination to discover the truth, not only is his innocence transformed into guilt as his true identity emerges, but his reversal of fortune takes the most extreme form. The knowledge of who he is and what he has done necessitates his own exclusion from the very city that, as ruler, he had sought to save; he himself becomes the evil of which Thebes must be cured. If he began as the savior, he comes to represent the threat from which the city must be delivered, through purging and purification, a rite Oedipus is only too willing to take on himself. The paradoxical nature of Oedipus’s accursed quest for knowledge, which begins on the road to salvation and culminates in his own self-imposed exile, the expulsion of the one who sought to save the city from its ills—this contradiction at the heart of the Oedipal identity—is also what makes it so appropriate for philosophy. As LacoueLabarthe says: ‘‘The Oedipal scenario . . . contains the speculative solution. And everything has been prepared here for that absolutization or that paradoxical infinitization of the Subject within which philosophy will find its completion.’’5 Even in his discovery of himself as the cause of defilement, Oedipus preserves the city by removing himself from it, and, in doing so, he makes himself responsible for what he could not have known. He takes on the responsibility of his own unwilling ignorance, and thus, in a reversal dear to speculative 152

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philosophers, his weakness proves to be his strength: his innocence is culpable. Freedom emerges victorious even as it succumbs to the necessity of a fate that is external to him and beyond his control. The productive outcome of the suffering and guilt imposed on him is that he rises above it, not by becoming other than what he is, but precisely by remaining who he is: by becoming himself fully, he is sanctified.6 Sarah Kofman refers to the transfiguration that takes place as the ‘‘pharmaceutical function,’’ both of theater and of theory.7 It is clear enough, then, why Oedipus should be philosophy’s tragic hero: Oedipal innocence turns to guilt, ignorance becomes knowledge, the excessive desire to know leads to a downfall, only to be canceled out by the extremity of a curative resolution. But in what respect could Antigone displace the Oedipal desire to know? Does Antigone embody a poetic moment that interrupts the will to know, and would this interruption amount to a displacement of philosophy by poetry and in this way prepare for the homage paid to the poet by the philosopher (as in the exemplary relationship between Heidegger and Ho¨lderlin)? Is it, as Hegel says, because her knowledge is not self-conscious, but intuitive, that Lacoue-Labarthe can allow Antigone to interrupt the philosophical privilege that the Oedipal will to know has achieved for itself? But what would Hegel’s imputation to Antigone of an irrational, feminine intuition cover up and bury alive? What does Hegel screen or veil, cut off from view, when he reduces Antigone’s ‘‘knowledge’’ to intuition, when he claims that her ethical sensibility is not true ethical knowledge because it does not know itself as such, because it is immediate rather than reflected, because it consists of divine feeling (madness?) rather than well-considered (speculative, determined, mediated) thought? And what does Hegel obscure when, at the very same time and for the very same reason that Antigone cannot be said to properly know, he elevates Antigone to the purest tragic heroine—for hers is a divinely inspired unconscious impulse, an ethical intuition, rather than the enactment of a human law that knows itself for what it is, and is conscious of what it actually does?8 Lacoue-Labarthe’s text, ‘‘The Caesura of the Speculative,’’ spirals around the vortex of Antigone, without ever alighting on the play directly. It is a text set in motion by Antigone, decentered, off kilter, circling precariously on the edge of the tragedy, informed by its abyssal structure, yet never settling on its meaning or providing an interpretation. Pointing beyond itself as a philosophical meditation that Tragic Dislocations

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answers to the theater, refusing to theorize any role for Antigone, it nonetheless allows itself to be governed in an unruly way by the dictates of this tragedy. It acts out the very movement of dispersion it would have otherwise had to articulate. Like a Catherine wheel, not properly centered, sparks fly off from it in all directions, inciting other texts, and other modes of production, an empty center obliquely instigating these productions and dissimulating itself therein. It is not quite accurate to say simply that Lacoue-Labarthe’s assertion of Antigone’s centrality remains unelaborated. Rather, it is the nature of this elaboration that requires comment; perhaps the curious absence with which we are presented lies less in the lack of any supporting analysis for a major thesis of what we presume to be a philosophical text than it does in the disruption of our expectations as to what would constitute philosophical evidence, speculative thought, or dialectics; having announced that Sophocles’ Antigone is the fundamental text for Ho¨lderlin’s theory of tragedy, Lacoue-Labarthe immediately adds, as if by way of explanation, yet in an explanatory clause that precisely confounds our preconceived notions as to what philosophical explanation should accomplish: ‘‘It is Antigone that represents the most difficult and the most enigmatic of tragedies.’’9 The importance of Antigone lies, it would seem, not in any clarity, or rigor it would display as a model of tragedy, but in its enigmatic difficulty. And, we might add, if the desire to know is the hallmark both of Oedipus and of philosophy, Antigone’s desire is more opaque and, perhaps, not fundamentally what is at stake. Perhaps the tragedy for modernity is the very opacity of Antigone’s desire, or the very fact that Antigone’s desire is not up for question, does not become a question, cannot be articulated.10 When Lacoue-Labarthe cites Antigone’s importance for Ho¨lderlin, he does so not by way of a straightforward gesture that establishes this tragedy as foundational, as the ground for all tragic theories, as the uncontested centerpiece for the interpretation of tragedy. Antigone would be a center, but an ‘‘eccentric’’ one—‘‘a kind of pivot.’’11 It would mark the decentering of dialectic, rather than signal its confirmation: it would dislocate speculative thought, rather than consolidate it; its function would be aporetic—it would be a stopping point, an enigma, a caesura. ‘‘I have delayed a bit over Antigone,’’ the author of ‘‘The Caesura of the Speculative’’ concedes, not unaware of his unconventional procedure (223). 154

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The philosopher will ask: what justifies the judgment that Antigone presents us with the enigmatic pinnacle of tragedy? To insist such a formulation, to put the question in a form that seeks justification will inevitably lead to disappointment, and is perhaps already to have missed the point. But if Lacoue-Labarthe resists the traditional assurances that would satisfy philosophy as classically conceived, he does not abandon us completely to metaphor. He offers some clues, obscure and undeveloped though they are, cryptically posed in paradoxical form, or buried in parentheses. Thus we are invited to ‘‘suppose that the Antigone of Sophocles itself were at once the most Greek of tragedies and the most modern’’(222); we are reminded fleetingly, in passing, in phrases closeted in brackets, that Antigone does not adhere to the ‘‘canonical structure’’ of tragedy (226), and that Antigone is ‘‘exemplary’’ in her ‘‘appropriation of a divine position’’ (233). Lacoue-Labarthe is not the first to have noticed that the tragic is integral to the movement of Hegel’s thought: he cites, as an authority on the subject, Peter Szondi, who argues that the tragic is the ‘‘dialectic governing morality.’’12 Nor can Lacoue-Labarthe lay claim to originality in having produced a text that pivots around Antigone, the main feature of which proves to be aversion. The pages that are ‘‘devoted’’ (an appropriate word) to Antigone in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which are acknowledged by Lacoue-Labarthe as programmatic for modernity, present the same symptom. Their devotion is indicated by avoidance. Antigone’s name barely makes it into the text, references are banished to footnotes, and a brief, but famous, quotation (concerning the irony of women) is as close as Hegel gets to discussing the play as such. If the symptomatic avoidance of explicit commentary unites Hegel and Lacoue-Labarthe, their intentions could not be more divergent. Hegel’s attention is taken up with a rigorous demonstration of the truth of the play in terms that are strictly constrained by the logic or dialectic of speculative thought, while Lacoue-Labarthe expends all his energy in not determining the meaning of this singular tragedy. Hegel relentlessly and singlemindedly exploits Sophocles as a resource for his philosophical system, displacing the drama of Antigone with that of the dialectic, and usurping the passionate energy of its heroine in order to justify the superiority of Moralita¨t over Sittlichkeit, individuality over community, masculinity over femininity, and absolute truth over partiality. At the other extreme, Lacoue-Labarthe resists the temptation to speculate, allowing his philosophical powers to be directed by a dramatic impulse that returns us to the stage of Tragic Dislocations

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the theater. The literal theatrics of tragedy govern his reluctance to repeat the philosophical gesture of subsuming tragedy by theory. The reticence he persists in maintaining with respect to any interpretive strategy that would pronounce on the meaning of Antigone’s enigmatic difficulty derives from a deliberate subversion of the philosopher’s claim to know the meaning of tragedy. Instead of advancing the claims of Idealism, he allows an event to disrupt the philosophical will to master tragic effect: he collaborates in the production of a performance. He translates into French Ho¨lderlin’s German translation of Sophocles’ Greek Antigone. An ingeniously simple idea, and one that is astounding to philosophy: to put on a play. If we take the above account at face value, the distance, it would seem, between Hegel and Lacoue-Labarthe could not be greater. Hegel, the master aesthetician, uses tragedy as so much grist for his dialectical mill, while Lacoue-Labarthe proposes to subordinate the philosophical designs of a theory of tragedy to the drama of a modern performance. But perhaps the distance between Hegel and LacoueLabarthe is not so great if the latter is on the right track when he suggests not only that the dialectic—‘‘the mastering thought of the corruptible and of death’’—depends on mimetic representation, but also that ‘‘the speculative process itself [dialectical logic] is founded quite explicitly on the model of tragedy.’’13 This would mean that dialectics invokes the tragic, cathartic (Aristotelian) effect; that dialectic is in fact the ‘‘echo . . . of a ritual’’14; that the hyperrationality of Hegel rests on a subterranean affect. Is philosophy’s model of rationality nothing but a repetition of ritual and sacrificial rite? Contrary to all expectations, does the Hegelian pinnacle of German Idealism rest on none other than the most irrational of moments? Is the rigor of dialectical thought merely an echo chamber for the reversal of fortune that stamps the trajectory of the most renowned of tragic heroes? Would the necessity of determinate negation be anything more than a mimetic representation of the hero succumbing to fate? Does philosophy overcome mimesis, or is it rather the incessant recapitulating of it? To take up these questions would be to outlaw the long lament of Hegel’s overly schematic and oppositional treatment of tragedy, to disavow the accompanying obligatory rejections of Hegel’s totalizing philosophy of reconciliation. To take up these questions would be to ask whether Hegel’s theory of tragedy were not already beholden to a mimetic ritual, originating in Aristotle’s tragic catharsis. A further 156

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question, produced by the same suspicion, would ask whether any alternate reading of Antigone’s potentially disruptive force could ever be maintained without succumbing in its turn to the inevitable dogmatism of dialectical mastery, where all suffering and negativity is made bearable, where even death becomes tolerable as it is negated into its opposite, subjected to the play of mimicry, made into a spectacle, represented as something that can be borne and mastered— overcome. Emmanuel Levinas credits Hegel’s Phenomenology for seeing that death—even if it is finally rendered ‘‘intelligible,’’ ultimately reduced to a moment of self-overcoming, and as such claims its place ‘‘in the world’’—‘‘is not only a moment playing its role in the thought of being.’’15 If Hegel provokes Levinas’s admiration because he manages to think death, and not simply to describe it, death is nonetheless thought ‘‘in the world as a moment of the self grasping itself.’’16 It is just such a philosophical conversion, such an economy of death, that is averted when Lacoue-Labarthe declines to theorize about what makes Antigone the most Greek and at the same time the most modern of tragedies; when he avoids any observations beyond noting the noncanonical status of the tragedy and Antigone’s exemplary transgression of human finitude. Kofman’s Identification with Antigone’s Burial Ritual Lacoue-Labarthe’s ‘‘The Caesura of the Speculative’’ is merely a dress rehearsal for an event that puts to the test the idea that Antigone is at once the most Greek and the most modern of tragedies. And the event has spawned another text. Spinning off on an angled trajectory from the performance, Sarah Kofman begins her review of the collaboration between Lacoue-Labarthe and Michel Deutsch, performed on June 15 and 30, 1978, in Strasbourg, by remarking on the ceremony, the ‘‘ritual’’ preparations of theatergoing: the architectural conventions of theaters, the classical style of the stage, the evening dress of the spectators, in short, the traditions that facilitate catharsis: ‘‘When you go to the theater,’’ she says (in a remark that calls to mind Lacan’s observations to the contrary), ‘‘you come to find [a way] of ‘forgetting’, for the time of the spectacle, your daily cares.’’17 For Lacan, it is the reverse: ‘‘When you go to the theater in the evening, you are preoccupied by the affairs of the day, by the pen that you lost, by the check that you will have to sign the next day.’’ But, he adds, ‘‘you don’t have to worry; even if you don’t feel anything, Tragic Dislocations

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the Chorus will feel in your stead.’’ For Lacan, ‘‘the emotional commentary is done for you. The greatest chance for the survival of the Classical tragedy depends on that.’’18 Such a possibility is not admitted in Kofman’s review of the 1978 production of Antigone, which is also a reading of Lacoue-Labarthe’s ‘‘The Caesura of the Speculative.’’ As theater critic and philosopher—a combination that fuses the two functions of dramaturge and theoretician that Lacoue-Labarthe sees as inseparable for Ho¨lderlin, too—Kofman makes good on the suggestion that ‘‘this Greek tragedy par excellence, translated (repeated, rewritten), by Ho¨lderlin . . . is also as tragedy, the most modern it could be.’’19 The production makes no pretense to be simply Greek: the scenic device uses ‘‘three languages, three rhythms, three epochs’’; the French does not eclipse the German or the Greek any more than the twentieth century encompasses the nineteenth century, in the style of which the actors dress, or ancient Greece, whose syntax is preserved along with ‘‘the infinite distance separating Ho¨lderlin from the Greeks and distancing us from Ho¨lderlin.’’20 Familiar with Ho¨lderlin’s poetic meditations on the near and the distant, and echoing Lacoue-Labarthe, Kofman does not hesitate to add that this distance does not exclude ‘‘extreme proximity,’’21 nor does she hesitate to observe that neither Ho¨lderlin nor Lacoue-Labarthe was ignorant of the ‘‘bankruptcy,’’ the ‘‘untranslatability’’ of all translation, a lapse presented in the ‘‘interval’’ separating us from Ho¨lderlin, and Ho¨lderlin from Sophocles. This separation, this interval marking off our modernity from Ho¨lderlin’s, and Ho¨lderlin’s Greek modernity from Sophocles’ Greece is taken up in a highly specific form by Kofman. It is prepared for in some measure by Lacoue-Labarthe’s endorsement of Rene´ Girard’s view that Ho¨lderlin’s ‘‘obstinate and oppressive questioning (‘at the doors of madness’) concerning tragedy and mimesis cannot be dissociated from his biography’’22; but this endorsement of the relationship between the poet’s encounter with the speculative and his life crisis does not anticipate her own, indirect allusion to the biographical. Her allusion appears most directly in the paragraph immediately following her summary statement of the Greek modernity of Antigone: ‘‘Antigone is at once a Greek tragedy and a modern tragedy; it invents no new form of tragedy and it is not however the reconstitution as such of the tragedy of Sophocles. This is why the fragility of ‘ruins,’ of dilapidation, menaces you ‘at every instant.’ ’’23 Kofman describes the ‘‘disused arsenal, a true military ruin’’(1145) where the production was staged, the impression that the building—‘‘destined for im158

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minent demolition’’—gives of being in a ‘‘shanty town,’’ the ‘‘charred walls, the broken windows . . . the rubble’’ of the terrain that is reminiscent of ‘‘a house bombed in the last war’’(1145–46). She describes the ‘‘dilapidated stairs’’ that replace the ‘‘marble stairway’’ of the more conventional theater, and the ‘‘rails’’ the audience is constrained to hold as they enter an ‘‘infernal world,’’ a ‘‘chthonic, nocturnal world,’’ a ‘‘sinister space in which death roams, a death which would not be ‘recovered’ by some dialectical sublimation’’ (1146). She describes the debris that litters the stage, providing the setting for ‘‘the body of a soldier, Polynices,’’ and then the reference toward which, one sees at once, this description has been leading: describing the opening scene of the performance, Kofman says, ‘‘Antigone informs her sister of her wish to bury the brother she loves so much, Polynices who is outside-the-law. And perhaps because the ‘plot’ takes place in an attic, you think about Anne Frank, of all the Jewish women constrained to hide, to live in clandestine to survive the infernal night. And you think that a Greek tragedy thus translated can still today concern you’’ (1146). The reference exposes the inadequacy of a theory of tragedy that constitutes the power and force of dialectical philosophy by ‘‘rendering tolerable the intolerable’’ (1144). Here, instead of theater as a ‘‘transfiguration in spectacle of all that provokes horror and terror in ‘real’ life’’; in place of ‘‘rendering supportable, and even agreeable what cannot ordinarily be. Regarded head on’’; rather than ‘‘purifying the intolerable, making death economic’’ (1145), the audience is exposed to an abyss. If you are unlucky enough to be seated in the front row, Kofman reports, ‘‘during the whole spectacle your legs [would be] suspended in emptiness . . . you are despite everything in a theater, but in a theater which opens on to an abyss, a gulf, a pit (this is where Antigone will descend to be enclosed forever in ‘the obscure darkness of a crypt,’ in this subterranean dwelling which will serve as a tomb and her wedding bed)’’ (1147–48). The dislocation effected by this ‘‘wholly other scenic space’’ (1145), as Kofman describes it, breaks with the ‘‘cathartic project’’ that Lacoue-Labarthe reads into the very tradition of German Idealism that sought to distance itself from catharsis. Not that the logic of the speculative is ever entirely broken, as Kofman says (and as LacoueLabarthe points out repeatedly in relation to Ho¨lderlin): ‘‘A cathartic project commands the enterprise still, [but] it aims this time not to procure a catharsis through the speculative or the spectacular, but a catharsis of the speculative itself. By means of a certain caesura’’ Tragic Dislocations

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(1145). This is ‘‘a place which singularly displaces the ‘theater’ . . . in the space of the caesura, which breaks [up] ‘representation,’ troubles it and singularly dislocates it’’ (1146). A great deal more could be said about the operation by which the speculative is broken, fissured, rendered aporetic (only to be taken up again). But I want to pursue a biographical thread that will lead us away from this particular text before returning us to it, making way for another cameo appearance by Antigone in an ‘‘Autobiographical’’ text by Kofman, an appearance if not by name, or direct representation, then by an unmistakable image. The text is a brief one, entitled ‘‘Tomb for a Proper Name,’’ in which Kofman relates a dream she had. In the dream, she reads on the cover of a book: KAFKA translated by Sar . . . Ko(a)f. . . . Why, she wonders, had she become the translator of Kafka? She notices how, by associating the letters o with a, the dream produces an ‘‘affinity between my name and Kafka’s.’’ She interprets the dream in terms of her shame about her proper name, the elision being an attempt to ‘‘reestablish what is held to be the correct way of writing my proper name.’’24 She explains, parenthetically: ‘‘The error of a city hall employee, which always delighted me, had distinguished Kofman from Kaufman, more common; and from Kaufmann, which can’t help but suggest commerce, money, shit [caca], the Jew).’’ ‘‘Kof,’’ she goes on, reminds her of ‘‘Ko(p)f’’ (head): ‘‘it allows me to bear a quite proper name, my head held high.’’25 And yet, since the proper name is that of a Jew, this ‘‘incorrect’’ spelling dissimulates ‘‘what is low and dirty.’’ She notices now that the last syllables of her first and last names are omitted, observing that in Hebrew ‘‘ah’’ designates the feminine, while ‘‘man,’’ from German Mann, designates the masculine. And now—this is where Antigone makes her cameo appearance—she asks: ‘‘Isn’t the cutting ‘elision’ the equivalent of a double castration, punishment for the one who meant to deny her blood, to erase her lowly origins, to hold her head high?’’26 Antigone also suffered a double blow, being born of the incestuous union of Oedipus and Jocasta, and being deprived of her mother who committed suicide on discovering the true identity of her husband/son. Antigone will, like her mother, commit suicide—a fate she also shares with Kofman. But un160

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like Antigone, who never once denied her blood ties to Polynices, and who from the beginning of the tragedy speaks out about her ‘‘lowly origins,’’ Kofman’s dream expresses her guilt for not wanting to admit to her true identity. If Antigone speaks of her suffering repeatedly, from the opening lines of the play (‘‘There’s nothing grievous, nothing free from doom, not shameful, not dishonored, I’ve not seen’’), Kofman’s true identity is one that she was required to keep hidden.27 The fact that—rightly or wrongly—Kafka, author of The Trial, has been proclaimed ‘‘the prophet of the Holocaust’’28 might help to explain Kofman’s dream that she translated Kafka. Her hiding would then be necessitated by his truth, her translation an attempt to disguise the meaning of his words—just as she understands the alteration of her proper name. ‘‘Being hidden’’ and being ‘‘locked in a dark closet’’ continue the series of identifications that emerge between Kofman and Antigone.29 In ‘‘Nightmare: At the Margins of Medieval Studies,’’ Kofman interprets another dream, this one about the need to hide not only her name but also her body, her self. This is what she dreams: I am in a room from my childhood, with my mother, my brothers and sisters, at night. A bird enters, a kind of bat with a human head, pronouncing in a loud voice: ‘‘Woe unto you! Woe unto you!’’ My mother and I, terrorized, run away. We are in tears in the rue Marcadet; we know we are in very great danger and fear death. I awaken very anxious.30 Kofman relates this dream in the context of a brief commentary on a book on medieval French in which the lexeme mar plays a prominent role. It is a ‘‘remnant, a relic, a segment of a vanished language’’ that appears at first to be ‘‘strange, unheimlich, unclassifiable, intractable, unmanageable, irreducible’’ but which, through nuanced philosophical argument, the medieval scholar-author renders explicable.’’31 Taking on this puzzling ‘‘mar phenomenon,’’ the author grapples with it until he can make sense of it. He makes it, says Kofman, ‘‘manageable and bearable by reducing it to a part of a mechanical toy that is pleasurable to manipulate,’’ locating it in a ‘‘rulebound, codified game,’’ exhibiting its place in language. The parallel between the medieval scholar making manageable the lexeme mar and Kofman’s reading of ‘‘The Caesura of the Speculative’’ will not have been lost on you. Just as death is rendered bearable by German Tragic Dislocations

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Idealism, subjected to the mastery and domination of the dialectic, just as suffering becomes tolerable, so also this strange and apparently unclassifiable relic of language is fitted by Kofman into a meaningful set of linguistic parameters, made to conform to the rules of language that can be mastered. Nor will you have failed to notice the resonance of Freud’s fort-da game in Kofman’s account of insertion of this lexeme mar into a linguistic system, in terms of the enjoyment of manipulating a mechanical toy. ‘‘Mar,’’ Kofman tells us, as she learned from medieval linguistic scholarship (though she herself is neither a medievalist nor a linguist, as she points out), ‘‘evokes the misfortune of an essentially dramatic fate; a word of hatred or anguish spoken quasi-ritually in certain texts. . . . A masculine formula for love rejected, it is an especially important figure of the feminine lament.’’32 Kofman hears, in her nightmare, the utterance ‘‘Woe unto you,’’ and relates it to the particle mar, a ‘‘segment of a vanished language’’ (12), thus distancing herself from it. Still unmanageable, not yet bearable, she sees it as ‘‘belonging to an entirely other age, to my dark ages’’ (12), thereby establishing a connection between the medieval era and her own ‘‘buried past,’’ which allows her at first only a superficial reading of the dream. This she proceeds to give. She was obliged to take a night flight on a plane on Tuesday (mardi). She was anxious. She associated this anxiety with a ‘‘sinister’’ event of her childhood. In 1943, a member of the Gestapo came to warn her and her mother (her five siblings were already hidden in the country) that they must go and hide: they were on the list to be picked up that night. She and her mother made haste along the rue Marcadet. In her anxiety, she vomited her dinner onto the rue Marcadet. On this first (superficial) interpretation of the dream, which she takes back, reels in, replacing it with a more adequate theory, Kofman suggests that the dream served the purpose of allowing her to deal with the anxiety of having to take a night flight. She had survived before, in the worse situation in which she was deeply afraid; she would survive now: ‘‘Only the spectacle of an old anxiety . . . could allow me to overcome the current anxiety’’ (13). Overcoming the spectacle of an old anxiety, Kofman sees herself as making her present troubles bearable. If this first interpretation would fit seamlessly into the pattern of German Idealism, the model of sublation that informs it is retracted in a second interpretation, which does not follow the edict of repression. Here Kofman adds that, three months later, she discovered that the Indo-European root of the mare of 162

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nightmare is mer—evocative of death, more precisely slow death by eating or suffocation. She tells us: ‘‘When I was bad my mother locked me in a dark closet where ‘Maredewitchale’ was supposed to come, if not to eat me, at least to take me far away from home.’’ She concludes that the ‘‘dream-work was able to condense in one image the two terrifying figures of my childhood: the man from the Kommandantur, the bird of misfortune, and the old sorceress Maredewitch’’ (13). Allowing this reading to stand for a moment, let me suggest that Kofman’s own biography, as she narrates it in another ‘‘Autobiographical’’text, would seem to undermine it. Death and Sacrifice: Eating Her Words Kofman tells us, in ‘‘Damned Food,’’ about a double edict that casts a shadow over her childhood (as Creon’s edict cast a shadow over Antigone’s youth, reflecting the Oedipal curse under the sign of which her birth took place). She identifies this dual edict, first, as the maternal categorical imperative: ‘‘ ‘You must eat,’ said my mother. And she stuffed and stuffed and stuffed us. Not a chance of being deprived of dessert with her.’’ Following Sarah to school with a bowl of cafe´ au lait, her mother takes the teacher ‘‘as witness of my crime: ‘She didn’t eat this morning!!!’ ’’ (8). While her mother engages a categorical imperative in the service of food (you must eat at all costs, at all times), her father tells her: ‘‘You must not eat everything . . . not mix milk and meat, not eat just any meat.’’ Kofman recalls the complication the war introduces to this conflict of interests when there was precious little to eat. On a train to Brittany, during the ‘‘exodus’’ that Kofman was forced to make, the Red Cross distributes cocoa and ham and butter sandwiches. ‘‘ ‘Don’t eat that,’ said my mother. ‘Let the children eat,’ my father intervened, ‘it’s wartime.’ The ham and butter, once decreed impure, I found delicious, now purified by circumstances and paternal authority’’ (8). The circumstances of war purify the impurities of food; paternal authority overrules the maternal taboo. Kofman’s desire is facilitated as she delights in precisely what is prohibited: she eats when her mother tells her not to eat, but she is never hungry, has no appetite, and will not eat when her mother tells her: ‘‘Eat, eat, eat!’’ and feels compelled to report to Sarah’s teacher, ‘‘She didn’t eat!’’ This occasion of eating forbidden food is recalled as one in which her father—a man she remembers as a ‘‘ritual slaughterer, kill[ing] Tragic Dislocations

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chickens in the toilet according to the law’’ (8)—relents his strictly regulated discipline that stipulates which food is permissible and which is under interdiction. It is remembered as a relaxation of paternal authority, but as one that happens to contradict the reversal of the maternal categorical imperative: do not eat this! After relating this occasion, Kofman juxtaposes these two terse statements: ‘‘A few years later my father was departed. We could no longer find anything to eat’’ (8). Just as she had been ‘‘saved’’ by the Red Cross from the maternal categorical imperative, so she is now, she tells us, saved by a woman who looks after her in Paris until the end of the war. The substitute maternal figure ‘‘taught me what it was ‘to have a Jewish nose’ ’’ and ‘‘put me on a totally different diet: the food of my childhood [her mother’s food] was decreed bad for my health, held responsible for my ‘lymphatic state.’ . . . Put in a real double bind,’’ Kofman continues, ‘‘I could no longer swallow anything and vomited after each meal’’ (9). The impossibility of obeying or enjoying any command makes itself felt here, in the absence of both father and mother, and in response to a substitute maternal figure who declares her childhood food bad for her health, responsible for her illness . . . by implication, responsible perhaps for the shape of her nose? The food of her mother, perhaps, is what made her identity illegitimate to the state. If her desire is drawn along by the forbidden Red Cross food that her mother will not allow her to eat, if she wants precisely what is forbidden because it is forbidden, she also wants it because her father is constrained to relax his authority, is put outside-the-law by the war, a war whose circumstances purify the once forbidden food, a war that is responsible for the paternal deportation, as well as for the exceptional paternal authority. When Kofman says, ‘‘I could no longer swallow anything,’’ one thinks of Antigone’s slow death. What governs this double starvation? The death of the father, in both cases? Kofman associates Ho¨lderlin with Creon in her review of Antigone, making explicit a connection, a doubling that Lacoue-Labarthe had left unarticulated as such although—insofar as his interest lies in Ho¨lderlin’s divine aspirations and what is conveniently called his ‘‘madness’’—his entire discussion points in this direction. Antigone, as we saw, brings to Kofman’s mind an association with Anne Frank, an association that, there is no doubt, also stands for Kofman herself, 164

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as a Jewish woman ‘‘constrained to hide in . . . the infernal night.’’ Kofman is thereby identified with Antigone, an association cemented by the references found in her ‘‘Autobiographical’’ writings to her being hidden. Now, if Ho¨lderlin doubles with Creon, and Antigone doubles with Anne Frank—and with Kofman herself—it involves no great leap of imagination to extend the masculine series of associations to produce the connection: Ho¨lderlin, Creon, Hitler, an identification that Kofman would hardly be the first to make, and one that is surely evoked by Kofman’s description of Creon’s manic and depressive tendencies, his ‘‘madness,’’ his lust for ‘‘total power,’’ a tyranny that, she says, Creon ‘‘noisily displays’’ in a ‘‘purely verbal’’ manifestation, but that also ‘‘camouflages under the flood of words and the choleric cries the vulnerability of a malady ready to collapse at the least menace.’’ She adds: ‘‘His affirmation of the megalomaniac, narcissistic ‘‘self would never have been that of a subject, for it is always already worked through . . . the pulsions of death, through a fragility which witnesses metaphorically the shaky scaffolding.’’33 Nor does Antigone escape a certain madness: her appropriation of the divine position and of the right to establish the difference between the human and the divine plays the same somber note as Creon’s pretensions.34 And it is in this madness that Lacoue-Labarthe finds Ho¨lderlin’s identification with Antigone’s heroic figures. Both Antigone and Creon are on ruinous courses, both are doomed. But their positions are not, for all that, symmetrical, although LacoueLabarthe’s reticent silence about Antigone’s importance for Ho¨lderlin also necessitates that he pass over in silence the asymmetry marking their fates. It should not be forgotten that Antigone’s doom is set in motion by her father’s act, and she has never escaped its reach. The patricide and incest committed by Oedipus structures Sophocles’ Oedipal cycle. Antigone’s ‘‘feminine’’ and familial justice is opposed to Creon’s kingly, political, ‘‘masculine’’ leadership; but so, too, Antigone’s familial origins compromise her in a way that makes it difficult to imagine any family she might originate escaping from the doom of the family curse. Antigone’s choice to go to her death childless and unmarried not only represents the claims of divine familial justice; her premature death not only enacts her familial blood bond to her traitorous brother, it also brings to an end the twisted logic that seems destined to work itself through the members of her fated family. Her brothers have killed each other in a contest for political auTragic Dislocations

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thority, and her father has married his mother, so that Jocasta is mother twice over: not only to Antigone, Ismene, Polynices, and Eteocles, but also to their father, Oedipus. Antigone’s father has murdered his own father, Laius, and her mother, Jocasta, has committed suicide, paving the way in this respect for her daughter; Antigone’s brothers have killed each other in mutual combat, and her only remaining family member, Ismene, is afraid to contest their avuncular political figurehead’s wishes. It falls, then, to Antigone to draw to a close this tragedy of tragedies. She must act not only as the pious feminine daughter, but also as the savior of her family. To save the name of her father, to rescue his sullied reputation, means in this extraordinary set of circumstances, not to provide for the continuation of this familial line, not to ensure its progeny, but precisely to cut off the life of this bloodline, sullied as it is by a father’s incest and murder that has infected both the blood of her family and the heart of the city. Is it any wonder that Creon is so relentless in his exertion of an iron rule that forbids the burial of a traitor born of incest? And is it any wonder that Antigone is willing to forgo the possibility of marriage? Who would want such a patrimony sanctified if that were to entail its continuation? When Kofman is presented with the double bind of living in a house presided over by a maternal figure who condemns her childhood diet and defines for her the Jewish identity that her nose represents—confirms an identity that is responsible for her forced hiding, an identity that has condemned her father to death—she responds by a failure to eat, or rather by eating but not being able to keep down her food. The double bind of paternal and maternal authority informing this refusal of food, a refusal to sustain life, also displays itself elsewhere in the rhythm of Kofman’s words. Asked in a 1986 interview whether the inclusion of women in institutions such as the university and psychoanalysis will ‘‘help them to enter the twentiethcentury canon, and if so, will they be in the heart of this corpus or (still) in the footnotes,’’35 Kofman replies: That’s my case, I’m a university professor but only a maıˆtre de confe´rences in spite of my nineteen books—this must be kept in mind. . . . The fact is that in this area few women have done work important enough or original enough to merit a place in any curriculum. That doesn’t mean that I think the difference here comes from anatomy; it comes instead from the education women have received, which generally means that they are 166

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much more submissive to what they have read, more repetitive than innovative, more imitative of a master whom they need to stimulate their research.36 Asked about women’s new importance as producers of literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic writings, and asked whether the recent disciplinary fluidity will blur the categories of men and women, she responds: It is important that both men and women be able to produce in the areas usually reserved for one sex or the other sex, and to this way to blur the boundaries. For example, I write an overwhelming number of philosophical texts in the manner described as masculine, but I also write psychoanalytical and ‘‘Autobiographical’’ texts that are closer to literature. As regards the psychoanalytical production of women, here too, it seems to me, all possible originality in the area is repressed. Lacan dominates in the Freudian school; this school has enormous editorial power; its numerous journals systematically eliminate reporting of work that is not strictly Lacanian or else criticize it because Lacan is not quoted. Only one of my books on psychoanalysis has been reviewed by L’Ane—Un me´tier impossible—only to be censured as ‘‘non-Lacanian.’’ On the other hand, Lacan in person publicly recognized in his seminars the originality and importance of my work; for example, speaking of my Quatre romans analytiques, he said it was ‘‘entirely her own,’’ and he telephoned me after the publication of each of my books—all the while remaining surprised that I did not go to his seminar and was not a ‘‘Lacanian’’ . . . among psychoanalysts I don’t see any female writing of significance. . . . In France, all the women at all known in this area are philosophers as well: me, Monique Schneider, Monique David-Me´nard, for example; as for Kristeva, she came to psychoanalysis very late. Catherine Cle´ment is likewise a philosopher, as is Luce Irigaray.37 The rhythm of Kofman’s assertions and counterassertions in the answers she gives to her interviewers swings between maternal and paternal authority, inhabiting this between, this interval: there are no original women philosophers, there are no women psychoanalysts who are not also philosophers, no psychoanalysts are permitted who are not Lacanians, she herself is not Lacanian, although Lacan phones her every time she publishes a book, to congratulate her but Tragic Dislocations

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also to ask why she is not a Lacanian. Her need to quote the titles she has written, to quote the words of the master, and to cite herself as exemplary, would be remarkable, were it not for the fact that as the author of nineteen books—books on Sartre, Nietzsche, Freud, Nerval, Rousseau, and Kant—she was not even the equivalent of a tenured professor. The universality of her judgments, and the way she undercuts their universality each time she utters them, would be extraordinary were it not for the fact that this swinging to and fro, in a double bind, trying to justify herself as on a par with the male establishment and yet not simply allowing herself to be assimilated to it, were not so very familiar. Here is a woman who does not see herself recognized by her peers, who has to point out to feminist interviewers who ask her what she thinks ‘‘as a Derridean’’ that she is not merely a Derridean; here is a woman who writes with the care of a critic prepared to do the service of reading and rendering attentively the authors she reads, who thinks that women in general remain too imitative to be original thinkers, yet who quotes Lacan as having granted her ‘‘originality.’’ In the face of this, one wonders whether a tragedy concerning an incestuous curse that overshadows Antigone’s life, a tragedy named for Antigone that opens in the wake of a double fratricide, a tragedy that depicts Ismene’s refusal to transgress the law, has lost any of its power or relevance. Antigone’s appeal may be in the fascination she provokes for those who look on, prepared to be fascinated, but perhaps the tragedy of Antigone’s relevance lies in the apparently inescapable and unremitting work of identification, including that of disassociation, that the spectacle she presents so insistently demands. It is therefore unsurprising that Kofman is not alone in her complex series of identifications with Antigone. Luce Irigaray’s use of Antigone as a trope has been labeled ‘‘inconsistent,’’38 though perhaps it is less a matter of the inconsistency of Irigaray’s reading than it is a question of Antigone’s waywardness, her resistance to philosophical categories or literary conventions. Irigaray’s engagement with and deployment of the figure of Antigone can no more be dismissed as mistaken in the privilege it accords to Hegel’s reading of the play than can Kofman’s be dismissed for the privilege it accords to Lacoue-Labarthe’s dramatization of it—unless we deny our filiation to the modern era of tragic interpretation, which bears the heavy stamp of Hegelian dialectics and the sons who follow in this line, even as they seek to disrupt its continuity. And if Lacoue-Labarthe is right when he insists on tracing this filiation through German Ide168

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alism back to Greek philosophy, not only to Aristotle but even to Plato, then to respond to the Hegelian Antigone is also to read philosophy as the master discourse, a dialectical mastery that reflects Aristotelian catharsis. Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that, for Ho¨lderlin, the only modern tragedy can be a translation of, or deconstruction of the Greek, a reperformance of Greek tragedy that does not seek to conceal the distance of modernity from ancient Greece. Need we be reminded that the possibilities harbored by such re-performances can be radical, given their reversal, for example (and this is not just any example in the context of a discussion of Antigone), of the convention observed by the ancients of having even the parts allotted to women played by men? As Claire Nancy suggests, despite everything, perhaps Antigone’s claim on us is a symbolic claim: Sophocles did not go so far as to make Antigone a woman fit the accomplished sense of the term. Neither married, nor mother, intact—in every sense of the word—better known to the dead than to the living, Antigone is more a voice than a spokeswoman for femininity, and it is perhaps this more symbolic than effectively incarnated status that lends her strength. Nonetheless, her opposition to Creon is, at least for him, perceived as coming from a woman because it is on these grounds that he challenges her, refusing to have his rules dictated by a woman who, by her sex, is allotted to submission. . . . She challenges (according to the etymology of her name: she who is born to rise up against) man’s unilateral institution of new laws.39 Antigone’s uprising consists in her insistence upon carrying out what Gillian Rose calls, in Mourning Becomes the Law, that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries, which must occur when a loved one is lost—so as to let go, to allow the other fully to depart, and hence fully to be regained beyond sorrow. To acknowledge and to re-experience the justice and the injustice of the partner’s life and death is to accept the law, it is not to transgress it— mourning becomes the law.40 That mourning becomes the law is not excluded by the dislocation Lacoue-Labarthe marks with the caesura of the speculative. It is in this tragic dislocation that Antigone’s symbolic importance lies. And it is in the space of this caesura, within a stage set that spirals around Tragic Dislocations

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the abyss of Antigone s tomb, that Kofman allows a uniquely modern association to take place, when she names Anne Frank an Antigone, thereby substituting yet another proper name for her own. Unable to stomach anything, unable to introject permanently, to incorporate food, or to successfully sublate her father’s death, a death that is abandoned by a nation-state that saw his/her religion, his/her race, his/her Jewish identity as unpalatable, Kofman vomits. What has been buried inside her cannot be sustained within her body. She vomits her food onto the rue Marcadet in a symbolic refusal, a denial of her father’s death. A melancholic symptom, mourning becomes not so much the law as its impossibility (which is not to deny that it is precisely the law). Mourning ‘‘becomes’’—in the decorative sense of adorning—the law, but it also becomes—in the sense of undergoing the transformation of and by the law—subject to it. Turning inside out Hegel’s sublation of Antigone, one could say that woman occupies once more the position of a ‘‘jewel in the crown,’’ the king’s crown. She thus becomes nothing more than a precious stone, an object to be thrown around, albeit carefully, and with the precision of a master craftsman. If Antigone decorates, beautifies the law, by her insistent burial ritual, she also becomes the object of the law, subsumed by it, absorbed into it, eaten up by the King of Thebes, transfused through the texts of German Idealism, transfigured from the one who oversees the hearth, the ashes, the spirit of the dead—eaten up and spewed out by the dialectical machine, a residue of the system, a mess, a little horror. Abjection. As we gather up the pieces, cleaning up after Antigone, we find fragments among the remains she leaves to us, fragments to recollect ourselves, piecing ourselves back together. A continual process, this reconstituting of the flesh. As the body fails us, we try to overcome its frailty. We desperately hold together our disparate parts, we come back to ourselves, we impose order on chaos, we master the dispersion that threatens to overtake us again and again at every moment, we raise ourselves up, out of the dust of ruins, after Antigone, named eloquently by Carol Jacobs as ‘‘mother of the dust.’’41 Between the grave and the light, between the dark crypt and the laws of the city: suspended, in an interval, a caesura, inhabiting the space of the between.

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9

A Touch of Piety The Tragedy of Antigone’s Hands Michael Naas For Nicole Loraux

‘‘When it comes to Antigone, everything has already been said and we come too late in the game.’’1 So late do we come that it seems presumptuous, if not actually impious, even to try to lend a helping hand, let alone speak with any authority on the work that has already been done or the game that has been played out. Though we can try to forget that we are touching here on an almost sacred work of art, what Hegel called ‘‘one of the most sublime, and in every respect most consummate works of art human effort ever produced,’’2 it is impossible to ignore that it was Hegel who said this or that his, Ho¨lderlin’s, Heidegger’s, Lacan’s, and Irigaray’s comments on this tragedy have given rise to an enormous literature and innumerable scholarly debates. No matter how one approaches the Antigone, no matter where one decides to enter into the game, there is certain to be some giant there at the gate to greet you, and unless you are well armed and properly clad you run the risk not only of taking a blow or two but of being slain out of hand, your kleos, or glory, stolen away and your corpus abandoned unceremoniously on the critical battlefield, unburied and unmarked. Hence I begin by repeating an anxiety and offering an apology, trying to gain a bit of solace by citing another’s anxiety and using the An earlier version of this essay was presented at a conference on Antigone organized by Joan Copjec at the State University of New York at Buffalo in April 1997. 171

veil of quotation marks to hide my own uncertainty. ‘‘When it comes to Antigone, everything has already been said and we come too late in the game.’’ Indeed, not even this observation is mine but Nicole Loraux’s, the opening line of her essay ‘‘La main d’Antigone,’’ ‘‘Antigone’s Hand,’’ an essay from 1986 that will form the basis of almost all my remarks on the questions of touch and piety in Sophocles’ Antigone. Though Loraux is essentially interested in this essay in what she calls a simple ‘‘fact of language’’—the fact that Sophocles in the Antigone plays a whole family of words beginning with auto- (the most important being ατχειρ) off the various meanings and registers of autos—she is able to draw from this linguistic fact a series of propositions concerning the ways in which men and women act and are acted on in Greek tragedy, the ways in which gender determines various modes of activity and passivity, acting on others and acting on oneself, in murder and suicide, for example, within the Sophoclean tragedy. I thus propose in what follows to extend Loraux’s comments on the Antigone to the other six Sophocles plays in order to come up with the most comprehensive hypotheses possible concerning the role of the hand and the hand’s touch in Sophoclean tragedy in general and the Antigone in particular. I hope then to be in a better position to say something about the nature of piety in Sophocles, about the relationship between hands and the pious or impious deeds they perform. I will conclude by arguing that, in Sophocles, piety— εσβεια—is first and foremost an affair not of the heart but of hands, an affair, in the end, of the feminine hand, of an infinitely delicate and almost wholly ungraspable hand that does its remarkable work while leaving hardly a trace. While I hope to add supplementary detail to Loraux’s analyses, I readily accept the role of handmaiden to her and her work in this essay. She will be my guide throughout here, my eyes and my staff, even my crutch—for her analyses of Antigone and of the role of women in Greek tragedy in Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman and elsewhere are some of the most provocative and philosophically astute I know.3 In deep admiration, then, I lend her a hand so as to ask how the great questions of reverence and piety in Sophoclean tragedy may come down to the qualities of a woman’s touch. My thesis will thus be that when it comes to Antigone one can profitably temper a headier meditation on the great themes of law and authority, piety and impiety, obedience and transgression, state decree and individual duty, simply by asking about Antigone’s hands, about those delicate, fragile hands that found the force to per172

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form the almost imperceptible and yet eminently pious act of burying her dead brother when all other hands quaked in fear, and that silently took the life that animated them by wrapping a veil around that so very slender and vulnerable neck. The hands, or hand, that can be so easily passed over, neglected or forgotten, in the philosophical and literary tradition in which this tragedy has been passed down because it is so easy to convince ourselves that we come too late in the game. For when it comes to Antigone, everything has indeed already been said, but Antigone’s ever so light and pious touch, her magic touch, is still somehow there, unseen and untouched—and the trick, I will argue, is to watch the hands.4 The Begriff of the Hand What, then, is a hand for Sophocles, a hand as such or the hand in general? What is the Begriff, so to speak, of the hand? Though the Greek word for hand—χερ—is first uttered by women in the Antigone, by Ismene and Antigone, it is uttered in relation to men. Ismene says in the opening lines of the play that Polyneices and Eteocles are dead ‘‘by double fratricide,’’ or, as Andrew Brown translates it, by a ‘‘double blow [διπλ χερ]’’.5 Indeed the hand in Sophocles is, first and foremost, a dealer of blows, an instrument of action. It is the organ with which deeds—some glorious and some not—are done. It is sometimes in fact little more than a synecdoche for such deeds of power and might.6 In the Ajax, for example, the chorus speaks of Ajax and all the ‘‘deeds his right hand [χερον] wrought.’’7 The hand or arm—since Sophocles rarely distinguishes between these—is the wielder of swords and bows, the instruments and arms of war; it is that with which, as we say, one fights amain. It is with the hand that glorious deeds on the battlefield are done, epic deeds, or else, in the world of tragedy, deeds of daring and vengeance. The Delphic oracle tells Orestes at the beginning of the Electra how to deal ‘‘the avenging blow [χειρς]’’ against Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, setting up the moment when Orestes might emerge from Agamemnon’s palace triumphant with ‘‘gory hands [φοινα χερ].’’8 As the hand is the sign and repository of might, it is sometimes enough just to invoke the hand and its potential in order to produce an effect. Odysseus says to Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes, ‘‘See’st my hand [χερα δεξι ν] / Upon my sword-hilt?’’9—implying that the hand, especially armed, has a range of possibilities, a sphere and scope of action to be respected or feared. A Touch of Piety

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Yet the hand that is capable of glorious deeds and rightful vengeance can also be the agent of ignoble betrayal and base action, lending itself to evil deeds or letting itself be deceived or even manipulated, sometimes even by a god. So it is in the Ajax, which opens with a play of hands and a search for feet. When Athena comes to Odysseus in the beginning of the play to help him track Ajax, who had stolen in on the Achaeans at night with the intention of killing them but was deceived by Athena into slaying the Achaean herds instead, she affirms that Ajax is indeed the guilty one, his ‘‘hands [χρας] . . . besmeared with gore.’’10 When she then sees that Odysseus has lost Ajax’s footprints, the trail of those guilty hands, she actually offers to guide him to Ajax—and guide him with her hand, with the hand, as Odysseus says, ‘‘that ever guided and shall guide my path [κυβερν#μαι χερ]’’ (34–35).11 Hence the hands that commit glorious deeds can also commit ignoble ones, becoming stained with the blood of their crimes, the marks of the battlefield or of a just vengeance turning into the stains and pollutions of murder and gore. The gods can lead one to glory or to ignominy. Whereas Athena lent Odysseus a helping hand, she spurred Ajax on ‘‘to turn his reeking hand [χερα] against his foes’’ (772). Having discovered too late his folly and his shameful deed, Ajax laments, ‘‘Almost at grips with them [ατος χερ], in act to strike—/ [Athena] foiled me, abused me by a frenzy fit, / Imbrued my hands [χερας] with blood of these poor beasts’’ (451–53).12 The hands thus identify the culprit, the author of the deed; Ajax’s victims are slain by his own hand [ατχειρ (57), χειροδ ϊκτα (219)], allowing him to be caught, as it were, redhanded. Pointing out the fateful and fatal results of Ajax’s deception, Athena thus warns Odysseus not to be too prideful in his ‘‘might of arm [χειρ% βρθεις],’’ not to trust too much in the strength of hands (130). Much of the drama of Sophoclean tragedy thus revolves around the fact that the hand can turn or be turned against itself, its power used for unnatural, unholy, or impious ends, or else used to undo the very power that made it powerful in the first place. Having used the ‘‘puissance of his arm [δεινν χρας]’’ (366) to gain glory and renown, Ajax turns his hand against himself and falls on Hector’s sword, the sword that should have won him greater glory but that, as Ajax says, brought him disfavor among the Greeks from the very moment he took it in hand (661). In the Trachiniae hands are again the organs with which one fights and wins glory, though there too they turn against themselves, the 174

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activity of the hand undone by something the hand has done. While it is with the skill and might of his hands that Heracles slays the monster Nessus with his bow,13 this victory is later turned to defeat as the poison that is culled from the wound of the beast ends up destroying Heracles, attacking, first of all, the very organs of his power and might. After he dons a cloak smeared with the poison, it is first and most poignantly Heracles’ hands that are ruined. Just after speaking of the ‘‘toils and burdens of these hands [χερσ%],’’14 and just before enumerating their achievements and glorious deeds, the dying Heracles turns to his own hands and addresses them as they disintegrate before his very eyes. ‘‘O hands, my hands [& χρες χρες], / Arms, breast and shoulders, once all puissant . . .’’15 Hands are thus invoked at the very moment of their undoing; maimed, handicapped, Heracles must now call on his son to lend him a hand, to be his hands and do his bidding.16 When Philoctetes in the tragedy that bears his name is subdued by Odysseus’ men, his hands bound, he, too, complains: ‘‘O hands [& χερες], how ill ye fare, made prisoners. . . .’’17 For it was with those hands, in possession of the famous bow of Heracles, that Philoctetes won glory and was able to keep himself alive while crippled on a deserted island.18 Indeed, the final third of the Philoctetes might be read as an elaborate mise-en-sce`ne of Philoctetes’ hands, of hands that might perform great deeds when they hold the bow of Heracles but are powerless without it, hands that will have mastered the bow’s action at a distance but can do nothing when the bow is more than an arm’s length away.19 At the beginning of the Philoctetes, Neoptolemus tells his men that Philoctetes will ‘‘prove no match [χειρ'σεται]’’ for them (92) because of his crippled foot, that he will be unable to resist them by force of hand. Though he still possesses the deadly bow of Heracles—and the drama of the play consists in trying to trick Philoctetes into giving it up—his curse`d foot has made him easy prey, the hand’s power being undone by the crippled foot. This allows us to propose a first opposition with regard to the Sophoclean hand: If the hand is essentially active in Sophocles, since it is with it that one acts and marks, that one makes one’s mark, the foot is essentially passive, since it is on or through it that one is acted on and marked— sometimes even cursed, doomed, or fated. Ajax leaves footprints for Odysseus to follow after the work of the hand has been done; Philoctetes is so racked by pain from his festering wound that he asks Neoptolemus to take ‘‘a sword in hand’’ and cut off his ‘‘curse`d foot’’ A Touch of Piety

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(747–48); and Oedipus, of course, has his own Achilles heel: marked by the pins once driven through his feet—even his name is marked by feet and his renown by a knowledge of how many feet man walks on in the morning, afternoon, and evening of his life. As opposed to the vulnerable and often afflicted foot, the hand is thus first of all an armed, powerful hand, one capable, as Nicole Loraux has noted, of spilling blood. But when the hand is not armed, when it is not acting at a distance through some instrument, it is capable of establishing and affirming relations among men through pledges and pleas of supplication. Philoctetes asks for Neoptolemus’ right hand in a pledge to protect his famous bow (942) and bring him from the island safely home (813, 1398); Heracles asks his son Hyllus to pledge with his right hand to carry him to the mountain and lay him on a funeral pyre (1181); Oedipus asks Creon at the end of Oedipus the King to pledge his hand to take care of Antigone and Ismene in his absence, and he obtains a similar pledge from Theseus at the end of Oedipus at Colonus.20 Finally—and we are here edging ever closer to Antigone—it is with the hand that one pays respect to the dead or carries out the last wishes of the dying, actions that are most often characterized in terms of piety. Heracles asks that Hyllus himself [ατχειρα] carry him to the shrine of Zeus and lay him on a funeral pyre.21 Assured by Heracles that he will not be committing an act of patricide but, in fact, a deed of healing (1209), Hyllus eventually agrees, but refuses to light the pyre ‘‘with [his] own hands’’ (1214). It is with the hands, then, that one bids the dead farewell and leaves a final impression on their still sentient corpse. Teucer, Ajax’ brother, asks the young son of Ajax to put his hand in his father’s and kneel as a suppliant, ‘‘with locks of hair as offering in thine hand’’ (1172–74). He tells him to ‘‘draw near and lay / Thy little hands on this cold clay; / Though thy help may not be much, / Thy sire shall feel thy loving touch’’ (1410– 11). Hands thus piously touch the newly deceased, though they may also be called on to bury him. Whether armed with a spade, shovel, pick or ax,22 or else bare—and, as we will see, this may make all the difference in hands—the hand is what buries or lays a body to rest. The Feminine Touch Though the hand plays an important role in affirming human relationships by means of pledging, supplicating, and burying, it functions overwhelmingly as an organ of power, might, and vengeance. 176

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One is thus tempted to say that the hand in Sophocles is, in a first moment, a male thing, a male organ. And yet women too have hands—normally two of them—and in Sophocles’ tragedies they use them a great deal. They use them, however, for such different purposes that one might in fact wonder whether their hands are not of another sort, another Begriff, whether the female hand is not so different from the male that the two of them do not even form a pair. If the virile hand strikes, attacks, and penetrates, the female hand offers, soothes, and pays respect. Chrysothemis bears in hand [χερον] gifts for Agamemnon’s tomb, while her sister Electra lays offerings on the shrine of Apollo and Jocasta presents with her hands gifts at the holy shrines.23 If the female hand ever strikes, it is not to deliver a blow against another but to beat the breast in mourning or lamentation.24 Whenever hands are bearing the dead or paying them respect in a Sophoclean tragedy, one can bet that these are female hands, or else the hands of a boy who has yet to attain power or of a man whose power has already been destroyed.25 In the grove at Colonus, the blind Oedipus, no longer able to connect the activity of the hand to an object seen at a distance—his mastery undone, his hands, one might say, now feminized—is told by the elders to offer libations and olive branches to the gods with ‘‘undefiled hands [(σων χειρ#ν].’’26 If we accept, for the moment, the thesis of a male and a female hand, then we will have to admit that there is in Sophocles, as in Aeschylus, at least one woman with a decidedly male hand— Clytemnestra, who is accused along with Aegisthus of plotting against and slaying Agamemnon.27 This is the exception that proves the rule of thumb: Men kill and women bury, men spill blood and women clean it up. When Electra tries to persuade Chrysothemis to kill Aegisthus by speaking of the kleos they would gain in life and death were they to succeed (986), no one—not Chrysothemis and especially not the audience—can take this plan seriously. Echoing Ismene in the beginning of the Antigone, Chrysothemis reminds Electra that she is not a man and is no match in battle, that is, in might of hand, for a man (997–98). Like Ismene, Chrysothemis shows practical regard for power and law and so advises ‘‘submission to the strong’’ (396), prompting Electra to say that she will go it alone and kill with her own hand (ατοχειρ μοι) both Aegisthus and her mother (1019). But even Clytemnestra had Aegisthus to help her kill Agamemnon, so that Chrysothemis’ counsel not to pursue the plot seems motivated, unlike Ismene’s similar counsel at the beginning of A Touch of Piety

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the Antigone,28 more by the recognition of its impossibility than out of fear of its consequences. Covering an exposed corpse with handfuls of dust is a daring and difficult deed when it is to be carried out under the watchful eyes of the king’s guards, but slaying with one’s own hands a king and queen in their own palace is, for a woman, simply out of the question. Electra’s hands are thus those of a devoted sister and not a murderer. Electra dreams of being like her mother—and so dreams of being a man—but cannot quite pull it off. There is, then, in the Electra, a sort of duel of hands, murderous hands pitted against loving ones, the hands of a mother who in principle should protect her son pitted against those of a sister trying to play the role of nurse and mother to her brother. But while Electra’s hands save and nurture, they also long for a vengeance that they themselves cannot carry out without their male counterparts, that is, without her brother’s hands that she once saved. As Clytemnestra knows, it was Electra ‘‘who from my hand [*κ χερ#ν] didst steal / Orestes and convey him safe away,’’ handing him over to a servant who bore him away from Mycenae.29 The drama of Electra thus revolves around these saving hands welcoming home the hands that they once saved, hands that will return to kill the ones whose murderous hands once turned on Agamemnon. This final joining of hands is dramatically deferred in the play by the false report of Orestes’ death. Thinking Orestes to be dead, her right hand, so to speak, buried ‘‘in a strange land . . . far away’’ (867), Electra concocts the desperate plan to slay their father’s murderers with her own hands (ατχειρα) (955). Up until the moment she hears of Orestes’ death, Electra never seriously considers taking things into her own hands, such deeds being beyond what a woman is thought capable. Seeing the urn that supposedly contains Orestes’ ashes, Electra says, cognizant, no doubt, that she alone can never execute her desires, ‘‘In my very sight / lies palpable [πρχειρον] the burden of my woes’’ (1116). Like Antigone, Electra wishes to touch her brother one last time, to take the urn of ashes in her hand (1120), but, unlike Antigone, she is unable to realize her greatest desire and take vengeance on Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. Orestes was her only hope; without him she is crippled, short-handed. She thus laments holding ‘‘a dusty nothing in my hands’’ (1129) and grieves over the fact that the funeral rites for her brother were performed by ‘‘foreign hands [*ν ξναισι χερσ]’’ (1141) rather than her own ‘‘loving [ones] [*ν φλαισι χερσν]’’ (1138). 178

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Speaking to Orestes as if he were dead—though he is in fact right there before her in disguise—Electra says she will die unwed and unavenged, living life as if in a foreign land,30 condemned to suffer under Clytemnestra as she protests the death of her father and the irreverence that is shown him (1195). But with the discovery that Orestes is still living and has returned to Mycenae, Electra is able to give herself over to an embrace, saying first to her brother whom she recognizes through the signet ring, ‘‘O happy day [& φλτατον φ#ς],’’ and then, ‘‘Thy voice I greet,’’ and finally, coming closer, ‘‘My arms embrace thee [+χω σε χερσν]’’ (1223–24). Perhaps even more than Antigone, then, Electra is all hands, but her hands are always paired with those of another, her brother’s, and she awaits the return of those hands as if they were her own. When Electra meets the old servant who bore Orestes away on the day of Agamemnon’s death, she speaks not simply to him but to his hands: ‘‘O hands beloved [& φλταται μ,ν χερες]!’’ (1357). Like Philoctetes and Heracles, Electra apostrophizes hands, though these are, remarkably, the hands of another, the hands into which she had entrusted Orestes, the ones that nurtured and protected him in a foreign land and made possible this final rejoining of hands and the promise of vengeance. The hands return to form a pair, in order to strike and carry out a plan that Electra alone could never execute. Though Electra thus resembles Antigone in her devotion to her brother, she must ultimately rely on her brother in order to act. Her own handiwork, the saving of Orestes, simply preserves the possibility that one day his hands will return to do what neither her nor her sister’s hands could have done. Like just about every other Sophoclean tale, the story of Deianira in the Trachiniae begins and ends as a tragedy of hands. While ferrying Deianira across the sea, the monster Nessus touches her with his ‘‘wanton hands [ματααις χερσν],’’31 provoking Heracles to shoot him with a fatal arrow. With his dying breath, Nessus tells Deianira to gather up the blood from his wound in her hands and preserve it as a charm to secure Heracles’ love (573). When, years later, Deianira learns of Heracles’ love of Iole, she takes what she believes to be a love potion but is in fact a poison and smears it with her hands on a robe that she herself, as she points out, had woven by hand (535, 600). It is thus through Deianira’s handiwork that the great Heracles is undone—beginning, as we have seen, with his hands. Yet there is clearly nothing noble or glorious about this deed; neither the means of the death (a charm rather than an arm) nor the motivation (an unwitting poisoning rather than an act of revenge) warrant any A Touch of Piety

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glory. Deianira is as much a dupe or victim of her own hands as Heracles. Indeed the only action for which she can be held responsible and that makes her resemble to some degree a man is that by which she turns an armed hand against herself in bloody suicide. As the nurse reports, Deianira kills herself ‘‘by her own hand [ατ-ν διη.στωσε]’’ (881). ‘‘Herself upon herself she did the deed [ατπρς α/τς χειροποιεται τ δε]’’ (891).32 ‘‘Could woman’s hand [χερ] perform so bold a deed?’’ (898) the chorus asks, amazed that a woman could spill her own blood—even if, in the wake of Heracles’ demise, her suicide might also be read as little more than the willing sacrifice of a faithful wife for the beloved husband whom she has unwittingly destroyed.33 The Self-Mutilating Hand The hand thus turns against itself, or returns in a movement of autoaffection or autoimmunity to strike or maim the self: that is the whole story, as Loraux brilliantly illustrates it in ‘‘La main d’Antigone,’’ of the Oedipus cycle. Whether we are talking about an Oedipus who strikes himself as if he were another, or about an Eteocles and a Polyneices who strike one another as if they were one and the same, the Oedipus plays stage the very question of identity itself through Sophocles’ masterful exploitation of what Loraux calls the ‘‘maddening polysemy’’ inherent in the Greek word autos. Hence Oedipus the King opens with Oedipus, the one who has been marked in the foot, declaring that he who once struck Laius with his hand will be revealed and punished. Initially heartened by reports that the king was killed by many hands rather than one,34 Oedipus is relentless in trying to expose ‘‘the murderer [τν ατχειρα]’’ (231), to track the ‘‘assassin [ζητ#ν τν ατχειρα το1 φνου λαβεν]’’ (266),35 before, as he says, he himself is struck by this ‘‘assassin hand [χειρ]’’ (141). Little does he know, of course, that he is forcing his own hand, that he has in fact cursed himself, cursed his own hand through his own tongue. When Oedipus is finally revealed as the murderer, it is thus on his own hands that he looks in horror: ‘‘With these hands [χερον] all gory I pollute / The bed of him I slew’’ (821– 22).36 Fulfilling the Delphic oracle, he shed, as he says, ‘‘with my own hands [χερσ] the blood of my own sire’’ (995, 1400).37 Devastated, Oedipus eventually turns a hand against himself and, as Ismene puts it in Antigone, strikes ‘‘his own two eyes with a self-punishing hand [ατς ατουργ# 3 χερ].’’38 Though Apollo was in some sense re180

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sponsible, says Oedipus, ‘‘the right hand [ατχειρ] that dealt the blow / Was mine, none other.’’39 It is after these revelations and this blinding that Antigone enters on the scene in Oedipus the King for the first time—and enters, we could say, by way of hands. The blind Oedipus asks to touch his daughters with his hands. With his eyes no longer able to orient his hands and their activities, the hands themselves are now forced to see, though their vision carries no further than the fingertips. Oedipus thus introduces his daughters onto the stage, where they will remain spoken to but silent throughout the rest of the play, seen by the audience and touched by Oedipus but heard by neither. Oedipus says: ‘‘Could I but blindly touch them with my hands [χερσ] / I’d think they still were mine, as when I saw.’’40 ‘‘Let me clasp you with these hands [χρας] / a brother’s hands, a father’s hands.’’41 Sophocles thus recalls a fact about hands that is all too easy to forget: While hands can perform all sorts of activities, from killing and seeking vengeance to supplicating and pledging, they can also simply touch. If Oedipus the King thus closes on Antigone’s silence, and on her father’s hands, her brother’s hands, reaching out to touch her, Oedipus at Colonus opens with Oedipus being led by the hand by Antigone, guided by a daughter’s hand, a sister’s hand. Though the Greek word χερ is itself rarely uttered in the play—not even in the lines I am about to cite—Antigone’s hand would be on the scene, her ‘‘main mise (over Oedipus) en sce`ne’’ from start to finish. Oedipus says to Antigone, ‘‘Thy hand then,’’ and Antigone responds, ‘‘Here, O father, is my hand. . . . Follow with blind steps, father, as I lead.’’42 Antigone and Ismene have thus become Oedipus’ ‘‘crutches,’’43 a role Antigone relinquishes only at the very end of the play when her blind father regains a sort of vision of his own in the grove at Colonus, a vision that is preceded by a final laying on of hands.44 It is in Antigone, then, with the number of hands in the house of Labdacus severely reduced, that the Sophoclean tragedy of hands reaches a point of crisis or climax. The confrontation of the play is set up, as we know, by the fact that the two sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polyneices, have slain one another, the former while defending the city of Thebes and the latter while trying to conquer it. The confrontation between Ismene and Antigone in the very beginning of the play, and that between Antigone and Creon later, is set up by this double fratricide, or, rather, this double suicide wherein each brother uses the hand of his sibling to kill himself. Ismene says of these events, demonstrating that the Sophoclean OediA Touch of Piety

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pus cycle can best be understood by counting or counting backward on one hand, ‘‘Thirdly our two brothers on one day, each miserably slaying his own kin, with hands [χερον] raised against one another brought about their mutual death.’’45 The hand turns against itself, each brother lending to the other his own murderous hand. As Creon says of Oedipus’ sons, ‘‘they have been killed on one day by a twofold fate, striking and stricken in the pollution of kindred murder [ατχειρι].’’46 Two pairs of hands, or, better, two hands that once formed a pair, are thus temporarily severed from one another, one forced to live and act outside of Thebes while the other lives and acts within, until the day they meet at the city limit, at the seventh gate, there momentarily to embrace and then quickly fall asunder, one to be buried within the confines of Thebes in a public burial and the other to be abandoned outside the city walls unburied. Two pairs of hands, or two hands that could have complemented one another to form a pair, end up turning upon one another because neither could live with the other having the upper hand.47 It is this tragedy of hands that structures the entirety of Antigone, with the opposition between a male and a female hand leading to the tragic confrontation between Creon and Antigone. ‘‘Lend me a hand [χερ] to bear the corpse away,’’ Antigone asks Ismene, who, like Chrysothemis, refuses out of fear for the power of the state, choosing life, as Antigone later says, while she chooses death.48 Complaining, in some of the most celebrated lines of the play, that Ismene is scorning the laws of heaven, Antigone says that she alone will carry out her ‘‘dearest [φιλτ τω 3 ]’’ brother’s wish and provide him with a burial.49 Although this sisterly or motherly act would be performed, according to what has been argued above, with more of a female than a male hand, it would not attain what might be called the ‘‘degree zero of the feminine’’ precisely insofar as it is still an act or activity. In her confrontation with Creon over the relationship between the eternal laws and the laws of state, Antigone and Creon are still joined, as it were, in a common struggle. They are inexorably paired, the female with the male, locked in a hold that depends on the unyielding grip of both; two hands, two principles, two headstrong protagonists. Because the female is here in the grips of the male, defined dialectically in relationship to the male, one should not be surprised to find what has been taken to be the most distinctive and noble characteristic of Antigone, her unrelenting obedience to the eternal laws, repeated elsewhere in Sophocles—in other women and, in fact, in men. 182

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Electra, for example, accuses the Myceneans of not reverencing and honoring the dead, particularly her father, Agamemnon, while she herself is praised for obeying divine law.50 In a scene from the Ajax that closely parallels the confrontation between Creon and Antigone, Agamemnon and Menelaus prohibit Teucer and Ajax’s other kin from burying the dishonored Ajax. Not unlike Creon, Menelaus warns them to ‘‘bear no hand [χερον] in raising up the corpse,’’ while Teucer, not unlike Antigone in the well-known lines that Hegel is fond of citing, claims Menelaus to be abusing the ‘‘laws of heaven [δαιμνων νμους]’’ in not allowing Ajax to be buried.51 But, whereas both Electra and Teucer are, in a sense, rewarded for their obedience to divine law, Antigone is not. Electra is vindicated and avenged through the return of Orestes, and Teucer is able to bury his brother Ajax because of the intercession of a mediator who defuses the head-to-head—and what threatens to be a hand-tohand—confrontation. When Agamemnon, in words reminiscent of Creon, says to Teucer, ‘‘Never with tempers such as yours could law / Be firmly based,’’ Odysseus—who is neither king nor next of kin—intervenes to argue Teucer’s side and speak in favor of burying Ajax in accord with the ‘‘laws of heaven [θε#ν νμους].’’52 In the Antigone, no such resolution is reached, and none seems possible, for Creon and Antigone are at an impasse, deadlocked and inseparable, two sides of the same pair of hands. On the one hand, the laws of the state, on the other, those of the gods. As Karl Rheinhardt puts it, they are ‘‘demonically bound’’; indeed the very ‘‘essence of the tragedy,’’ as Charles Segal argues, is ‘‘that the one figure seems to generate the other, that the two coexist as complementary parts of a whole.’’53 When Creon first hears that his edict has been disobeyed, he threatens the guards with crucifixion and death if they do not find the ‘‘perpetrator [ατχειρα]’’ of the deed.54 When he discovers the perpetrator to be, to his great surprise, a woman, the bride-to-be of his own son, it is not only his own position and authority within the state that is threatened but the patriarchal authority of the state itself. ‘‘No woman shall be master while I live,’’ Creon declares. Neither the household nor the state can be ruled by a woman’s will; were Antigone to go unpunished, she and not he would prove to be both the man in the family and the sovereign in the state.55 Creon thus remains untouched by the appeals of both Antigone and Haemon for justice, untouched by the works of the hand as well as by the words of the tongue. If, in Sophocles, one acts and makes A Touch of Piety

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one’s mark with the hand, it is up to the tongue to temper and control these actions of the hand. Odysseus admits in Philoctetes to having learned that the tongue is sometimes more powerful than the hand, persuasion sometimes more effective than force. He says to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus that while he too was once ‘‘slow of tongue and forward with my hand’’ he has learned with time that ‘‘mightier than deeds of puissance is the tongue.’’56 The hand must sometimes allow itself to be swayed or tempered by the tongue. But, in the Antigone Creon will not allow the tongue—any tongue, and especially not that of a woman or a boy, even if it be his own son—to force his hand. Creon thus stays the course, piloting the ship of state with a steady hand until there is no turning back, and the state is shipwrecked. Having found and punished the perpetrator, the one who did the deed with her own hand [ατχειρ], Creon himself becomes guilty, accused of killing his own son. For, when the messenger comes to report that Haemon is dead, ‘‘his blood shed by no stranger hand [ατχειρ],’’ it is possible, as Loraux explains, for the chorus to hear in the word ατχειρ not only ‘‘by or of oneself’’ but ‘‘by the hand of a next of kin,’’ that is, ‘‘by no stranger hand,’’ which explains the chorus’s question, ‘‘What mean ye? By his father’s or his own [χερς]?’’57 ‘‘His own [ατς πρς α/το1],’’ the messenger replies, ‘‘in anger for his father’s crime.’’58 Haemon thus turns a hand against himself by running a sword through his side in the presence of his father. Though Creon had finally ordered his men to take axes and picks in hand to unearth Antigone,59 his order had come too late; he had already, in effect, killed his own son through his son’s own hands. As Creon carries Haemon’s body toward the palace, the chorus cries: ‘‘Here comes the king himself with a clear token in his hands [χειρς]—a disaster not caused, if we may say it, by a stranger, but through his own fault.’’60 With the impression of his son’s corpse still fresh in Creon’s arms [χερεσσιν], a messenger comes with word of yet another bloodied hand, that of Eurydice, Creon’s wife, who ‘‘with her own hand [ατχειρ] . . . stabbed herself to the heart.’’61 Knowing that his unyielding hands have come through son and wife to strike the things he holds most dear, Creon cries out, ‘‘What is in my hands [χερον] is all amiss, while there an unbearable fate has leapt on my head [*π% κρατ].’’62 When the hands go down the head is soon to follow; when the hands perform impious deeds it is not long before fate leaps down on the head. That fate is the very logic of Sophoclean tragedy. 184

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The Unpaired Hand At the end of Oedipus the King and Antigone, hands turn fast on their owners in the house of Labdacus, bloodied hands that strike with knife or sword or brooch: Oedipus, Haemon, Eurydice—these suicides or self-mutilations are all acts, it would seem, of a more or less virile hand, a hand that penetrates and spills blood. But if you are counting, there are still two suicides in Sophocles we have yet to touch upon, two that are still outstanding or, rather, pending, and this will make all the difference in determining the nature of a woman’s touch. In Oedipus the King, Jocasta dies ‘‘by her own hand [ατ- πρς α/τς],’’63 but, curiously, is not said to die ατχειρ. In ‘‘La main d’Antigone,’’ Loraux concludes, after a magnificent analysis of the different modalities of reflexivity involved in the Greek autos, that Jocasta does not die ατχειρ because there is no bloodshed in her death. Hers is a bloodless death, her suicide by hanging—a death reserved essentially for women in Greek tragedy—a feminine act, which is to say, hardly an act at all.64 And the same is true of Antigone—the same and, I would argue, even more so the same. Though Antigone boasts of the kleos she will gain by burying her own brother [ατ δελφον] and her act of daring is at first thought to be that of a man, with Creon asking when he first hears of the deed, ‘‘What man has dared to do this?’’ the deed is done without instruments, with hands that simply sprinkle dust,65 hands that are thus not only not masculine but hardly human hands at all. Working almost invisibly, bare and barely leaving a trace, Antigone’s hands are almost superhuman, supernatural, hands endowed with a magic touch. As Carol Jacobs points out, the unique nature of Antigone’s ‘‘ethical performance’’ is that her gesture is not quite a burial, recuperable within a Hegelian logic, but a covering with ‘‘the thinnest veil of dust,’’ an ‘act’ that is barely distinguishable from a work of nature, incomprehensible to those around her and perhaps even to herself. When she is finally discovered by Creon’s guards beside Polyneices’ corpse, Antigone is thus compared neither to a man committing heroic deeds nor to a woman obeying divine law but, rather, to a mother bird screeching as its young are being pulled from the nest.66 Without instruments, and perhaps even without hands: The guards remark that there was ‘‘no sign [4σημος] that human hands [χρσος] had been at work,’’67 causing the chorus to suspect the workings of the gods (278–79). Creon thus condemns to death—to a A Touch of Piety

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living death—the one who, unaided and unarmed, had, as he puts it, ‘‘touched [θιγο1σαν] the body’’ (771). Descending into what she calls her ‘‘living tomb / An alien midst the living and the dead’’ (850– 51),68 Antigone addresses the dead Polyneices and speaks one last time of her own barely human hands: ‘‘For with these hands [ατχειρ], I laved and decked your limbs / In death, and poured libations on your grave’’ (900–2). Here, then, Antigone’s deeds are said to have been done with her own hands [ατχειρ], and it is Antigone herself who speaks of this act before being shut up in her silent tomb. But when her death is later recounted by a messenger, it, like Jocasta’s death, does not involve the spilling of blood and is not described in active terms, but is, rather, simply recounted as having been undergone, its unique character underscored by all that is lacking in the description of it: ‘‘We looked, and in the depths of the tomb we saw the girl hanging by the neck, suspended by a woven noose of fine linen.’’69 Neither seen nor described, Antigone’s death, the silent and bloodless taking of her life, just hangs there before us, like her corpse—at the degree zero, I would be tempted to say, of female deaths, with hardly a hint of activity in it, hardly a trace of the virile hand. Loraux writes: ‘‘Antigone, Jocasta: two deaths . . . two silences in tragedy.’’70 Neither an Electra who seeks revenge through male hands nor a Deianira or Eurydice who spills her own blood in suicide or sacrifice over a man, Antigone appears most like other Sophoclean characters, either male or female, when she argues before Creon the righteousness of her actions. With Creon, Antigone appears as the left hand inextricably bound to the right hand of power, condemned to a confrontation with it. Her death is thus, on the one hand, the predictable result of that confrontation—her stony tomb evoking, as Loraux argues, the lapidation to which Creon had condemned the perpetrator earlier on, her death as much a murder by Creon as a suicide.71 In this sense, her death is less hers than Creon’s, her last act not really her own act at all. And yet in this dialectic of action and reaction, activity and passivity, there is something about Antigone that escapes not only Creon’s grasp but our own—and that is her silence, however much it might be co-opted, and her touch that leaves no trace, however much it might be recuperated within a logic of activity and passivity, however much the self-effacing character of her hand might itself be effaced. Loraux ends her essay ‘‘La main d’Antigone’’: ‘‘[Antigone is] much more than a story of words: It is the tragic play of the same on the same, right up until the very self in the house 186

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of Labdacus is lost, right up until the very effacement of Antigone’s hand.’’72 Antigone’s hands are not virile hands; they do not act and they do not mark. At the limit, they are not even female hands that might join with virile hands to form a pair. Touching others and yet leaving no trace, turned against themselves and yet effacing all signs of their activity, neither touching the ground nor lifted up to the heavens but suspended—pending—somewhere between, Antigone’s hands can scarcely be glimpsed. More passive than the most passive of female hands, and yet more powerful than the most active of male hands, capable through their disabling power to bring a state to its knees, Antigone’s hands elude the very Begriff of the hand. And perhaps that is the very essence of a woman’s touch—this woman’s touch—as well as the mark of her piety. The Piety of Touch In light of the foregoing analysis of the work of hands in Sophocles, it is perhaps now possible to offer a hypothesis about the nature of piety in these plays: Related essentially to acts of private ritual and worship, to acts of burying and reverencing the dead and dying (and, by extension, the gods who watch over these acts), piety is essentially a feminine thing, a question of feminine ‘‘style,’’ even if the style of piety most distinctive in Sophocles—that of Antigone—ends up defying the very category of the feminine. An analysis of piety in Sophocles will, I think, confirm this hypothesis. As we might expect, the language of piety is employed most frequently in relation to women, particularly young women, such as Electra and Antigone, and when it is used in relation to men they are men who have either yet to gain power or, more likely, who have already lost it. A concern for piety can thus be found in the exchange between the dying Heracles and his young son Hyllus, in the words of this same Heracles at the end of the Philoctetes, in Creon before his rise to power, in Haemon as he confronts his father and his authority, and in Oedipus after his fall. But, in those who possess power, piety is rarely invoked, and is so only to be scoffed at or refused, as if having power made it impossible to be pious. In the Ajax, Sophocles makes explicit this opposition between private or individual acts of piety and public authority when he has Agamemnon say to Odysseus, after the latter has advised him to provide a proper burial for Ajax, ‘‘ ’Tis hard for monarchs to show piety [εσεβεν].’’73 As in the A Touch of Piety

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Antigone, piety is opposed to power, private obligations toward family and the gods in conflict with the exercise of public authority. In the Trachiniae, the dying Heracles asks his son Hyllus to obey his oaths to him, to demonstrate his piety [εσεβεν],74 by marrying Iole, the mistress who led to his father’s demise. Though he initially refuses, claiming that what his father calls ‘‘piety’’ is the height of impiety,75 Hyllus ultimately agrees when Heracles swears that this is the gods’ will. In the Philoctetes, the language of piety is evoked most fully near the end of the play as Heracles advises Philoctetes and Achilles to ‘‘reverence [εσεβεν]’’ the gods of Troy when destroying their city and laying waste to their land, since ‘‘all else by Zeus my sire is less regarded’’ and ‘‘piety [εσβεια]’’ never dies.76 Not surprisingly, the Sophocles play in which the language of piety is most prominent besides Antigone is Electra. There, too, piety is shown to be a characteristic of women, of younger women concerned about the proper way of treating the dead. Early in the play, Electra bemoans how Clytemnestra and Aegisthus have dishonored her dead father, Agamemnon: ‘‘Farewell to reverence and awe [α5δ6ς . . . εσβεια],’’77 she complains. Like Antigone, Electra decries the state’s neglect of the dead and disrespect of kin; and like Ismene, Electra’s sister is slow to join her in carrying out her pious deeds. Electra tells Chrysothemis that by seeking revenge they will win, ‘‘First, from our dead sire, and our brother too, / A name for piety [εσβειαν].’’78 Like Antigone, Electra stands alone in her respect for divine law. When Orestes prepares to avenge Agamemnon by killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Electra prays to Apollo to show ‘‘how the gods vindicate impiety [δυσσεβεας].’’79 Hence Electra, too, has a touch of piety, a flair for pious deeds, even if, as we shall see, Antigone turns out to be the paradigm case—the paradigm and, as a result, the stunning exception. Though the language of piety is virtually absent from Oedipus the King, Creon says near the end of the play as he gazes upon the blind, wretched Oedipus: ‘‘It is seemly [εσεβ#ς] that a kinsman’s woes / Be heard by kin and seen by kin alone.’’80 Creon’s respect or even reverence for Oedipus’ wretched state at the end of the play helps underscore the great changes Creon will have undergone by the time of Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. Whereas Oedipus in Oedipus the King speaks of himself as wretched, as unholy or ungodly [σεβ], he applies this same epithet to Creon in Oedipus at Colonus when Creon, now reigning in Thebes, comes to bring a transformed Oedipus and his daughters back to the city.81 188

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In Oedipus at Colonus, the language of piety returns in force as Antigone becomes more central to the action and Oedipus, old and blind, becomes ennobled in his wretchedness and sanctified in his newly acquired respect for holy and pious deeds. Near the beginning of the play Oedipus says to Antigone: ‘‘Guide me child, where we may range / Safe within the paths of right [εσεβας].’’82 Having been laid low by fate and the gods, Oedipus has a newfound trust that ‘‘the eye of heaven beholds the just [εσεβ] of men’’ and that, among the ‘‘unjust [δυσσεβες],’’ no one finds escape.83 Oedipus knows that he has become hallowed in his misery, ‘‘a holy and godfearing [εσεβς] man’’ whose coming to Athens actually bodes well for this pious and godfearing state.84 Godfearing, Oedipus is himself now feared by those who look upon him; respectful of the gods, he is now in turn respected. Having lost the power of the state, Oedipus now speaks with an almost divine authority. Though Creon in Antigone speaks of loyalty to men85 and reverence for the gods (304), he sophistically argues that, by honoring Polyneices, Antigone is dishonoring Eteocles. When Antigone argues that ‘‘to reverence [σβειν] kith and kin can bring no shame’’ (511),86 Creon responds, ‘‘Why cast a slur [δυσσεβ] on one by honoring one?’’ (514).87 Whereas Creon advises his son not to ‘‘sanction [σβειν] lawlessness’’ by supporting Antigone’s cause, Haemon defends Antigone against Creon’s charge of impiety and contends that his father can justify his rights and authority only at the price of dishonoring the gods (730–31, 744–45). As the tragedy unfolds, Creon’s position becomes more inflexible, his power—and along with it his impiety—all the more brazen. Echoing Agamemnon’s words in the Ajax, the chorus summarizes the confrontation between Creon and Antigone, ‘‘Piety is piety, perhaps [σβειν μ,ν εσεβει τις]; but breach of authority cannot be tolerated by one in whom authority resides.’’88 As Antigone’s exit from the stage approaches, the references to piety multiply. Antigone pleads her case explicitly in terms of piety and yet, seeing that her actions will win her only death, she demonstrates less than total conviction that what she has done is indeed pleasing to the gods. She says she is aware of having transgressed no ‘‘ordinance of heaven’’ but that no man and, most poignantly, no god has come to save her. As she says, her ‘‘piety is impious deemed [δυσσβειαν εσεβο1σ’]’’89—by men, certainly, but perhaps even by the gods. As she leaves the stage to be buried in the bridal chamber/prison/tomb where Haemon is soon to find her hanging lifeless, A Touch of Piety

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Antigone utters her very final words—words of and about piety, words spoken, it seems, neither to men nor to the gods, neither for the present nor even for the future, words of and about piety directed at an audience for whom Antigone shall remain not so much a striking example but the absolute exception: ‘‘Martyred by men of sin, undone. / Such meed my piety hath won [εσεβαν σεβσασα].’’90 Piety is thus pursued all the way to the nether regions where doubt is not dispelled by knowledge but is, in fact, made only more acute. The pious act—which, as we have seen, is barely an act, a bare act committed with bare hands—is carried out not in the guiding light of some ethical principle or law, whether human or divine, but always in the dark, in the midst of some night or living tomb. Though piety begins for Antigone, as for Electra, with the injunction to honor kin, to respect divine law concerning the treatment of the dead, though it begins as a way or style of acting that comes into conflict with public authority and power, the hand that caresses contending with the hand that strikes, the pious gesture is ultimately carried out with a hand that does not form a pair, a hand that is as a rule far too uncertain, far too passive, too unlike a human hand, in fact, to act as a rule or law. The pious hand thus always acts outside or beyond the law, beyond human law but also beyond the divine. Though such a hand might still guide us through the night, it will always do so blindly, at the limits of its own effacement, and perhaps even unbeknownst to itself. It is only at this price that it can touch us so deeply—and leave within us the impression of an inimitable style.

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PART

Deconstruction and Religion

III

10

The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida John D. Caputo

Everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all. —Johannes de Silentio

Only write what is impossible, that ought to be the impossiblerule. —Jacques Derrida

In his notebooks of 1976, Jacques Derrida proposes to himself the task of describing his broken covenant with Judaism in a work that would ‘‘leave nothing, if possible, in the dark of what related me to Judaism, alliance [alliance, covenant; Hebrew: berit] broken in every respect.’’1 For Derrida is Jewish without being Jewish, Jewish sans Judaism, married outside Judaism, his sons uncircumcised, he an atheist. Of this broken covenant, this breach of an alliance that stretches ‘‘throughout thousands of years of Judaism,’’ he says—now the time has changed to 1989 and this note has been stitched into ‘‘CirAn earlier version of this essay was published, under the title ‘‘A Passion for the Impossible,’’ as the introduction to John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 193

cumfession’’—‘‘that’s what my readers won’t have known about me,’’ with the result that he has been ‘‘read less and less well over almost twenty years, like my religion about which nobody understands anything.’’2 Personne ne comprend rien! No one, not even his mother, who was afraid to ask him whether he still believed in God, understands his religion or his broken alliance. His mother, Georgette Safar Derrida, like Saint Monica, worried herself half to death over her son, quotiens abs te deviare cernebat, ‘‘each time she saw him wandering away from thee,’’ praying all the while that ‘‘the son of these tears,’’ filius istarum lacrymarum, Jacques/Augustine, would not be lost.3 Still, Derrida says, his mother must have known that ‘‘the constancy of God in my life is called by other names,’’ and that even though he does indeed ‘‘quite rightly pass for an atheist’’ with respect to the God of the orthodox faiths, still he has an ‘‘absolved, absolutely private language’’ in which he speaks of God all the time.4 To understand the ‘‘religion’’ of Jacques Derrida, about which no one understands anything, not even his mother; to understand the covenant cut in his flesh at circumcision, the broken alliance and ring (alliance) that manages still to bind him (se lier) to Judaism— ‘‘without continuity but without rupture’’—while also seeing to it that he is read (se lire) less and less well; to understand Jacques Derrida as ‘‘the son of these tears,’’ even as a man of prayers and tears, like a Jewish Augustine from El Biar; to understand the (cir)confessions of Jacques de la rue Saint-Augustin—all that is the point of the present study, its daunting—impossible—task.5 It is an amazing scene, as if, to our surprise and embarrassment—or even to his: has he not surprised himself?—we have stumbled upon Jacques Derrida at his prie-Dieu, coram deo, alone before God, his head bowed, his eyes swollen with tears, unaware that we are observing him! Too late have I loved thee, he seems to sigh.6 An improbable, unlikely, impossible hypothesis: Jacques Derrida has religion, a certain religion, his religion, and he speaks of God all the time. The point of view of Derrida’s work as an author is religious— but without religion and without religion’s God—and no one understands a thing about this alliance. Little wonder. What is this link that does not quite hold yet does not quite break, between ‘‘my religion’’ and this leftist, secularist, sometimes scandalous, post-Marxist Parisian intellectual? He has his whole life long been ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming’’ over the arrival of something ‘‘wholly other,’’ tout autre, praying and weep194

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ing over, waiting and longing for, calling upon and being called by something to come. Day and night Derrida has been dreaming, expecting, not the possible, not the eternal, but the impossible.7 All his life long he has been setting a place for Elijah, his namesake, making notes for a ‘‘book of Elie.’’ As Jacques says to Derrida, as ‘‘Jackie’’ says to Jacques, and I will not presume to intervene in this dialogue, to interrupt this self-affection, which evidently gives him considerable pleasure, except to graph it a little: you have spent your whole life inviting calling promising, hoping sighing dreaming, convoking invoking provoking, constituting engendering producing, naming assigning demanding, prescribing commanding sacrificing.8

Six times three, eighteen ways to pray and weep, to dream of the innumerable, to desire the promise of something unimaginable, to be impassioned by the impossible.9 Eighteen ways to begin by the impossible, to be set in motion by the prospect of the unforeseeable, by the call of something that calls us before we open our mouths, to be sought by something, I know not what, that seeks me out before I seek it. Eighteen chapters of a work that could be called variously ‘‘Derrida’’ or ‘‘Deconstruction,’’ the ‘‘Book of Circumcision’’ or the ‘‘Book of Elijah,’’ ‘‘Dreaming’’ or ‘‘Desiring.’’ Or perhaps, simply, ‘‘Passion.’’ Six times three ways to think and write, eighteen prayers or performatives, eighteen openings and reopenings, eighteen ways to make or keep a promise, to be promised in advance, like a newborn who cannot yet speak for himself; eighteen ways to act or suffer or expect, to read literature or do architecture, to practice law and do justice, to do the truth (facere veritatem), which means to put justice before truth, passion before representation, eighteen ways to teach and to learn, in short: to do whatever you need, whatever you are needed to do. Six times three instructions in the religion without religion of Jacques Derrida, in a new alliance. What we will not have understood about deconstruction, and this causes us to read it less and less well, is that deconstruction is set in motion by an overarching aspiration, which in a certain analysis can be called a ‘‘religious’’ or ‘‘prophetic’’10 aspiration, what would have been called, in the plodding language of the tradition (which deconThe Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida

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struction has rightly made questionable), a movement of ‘‘transcendence.’’ Vis-a`-vis such transcendence, the immanent is the sphere not only of the actual and the present, but also of the possible and the plannable, of the foreseeable and representable, so that deconstruction, as a movement of transcendence, means excess, the exceeding of the stable borders of the presently possible. Deconstruction is a passion for transgression, a passion for trespassing the horizons of possibility, which is what Derrida calls, following Blanchot, the passion of the ‘‘pas,’’ the pas of ‘‘passion.’’11 What we will not have understood is that deconstruction stirs with a passion for the impossible, passion du lieu, a passion for an impossible place, a passion to go precisely where you cannot go.12 Deconstruction is called forth in response to the unrepresentable, is large with expectation, astir with excess, provoked by the promise, impregnated by the impossible, hoping in a certain messianic promise of the impossible.13 This is the stuff of what can be called, not ignoring certain precautions (for he rightly passes for an atheist), Derrida’s ‘‘religion,’’ ‘‘my religion,’’ his new alliance—his, Jacques’s, Jackie’s. Deconstruction begins, its gears are engaged, by the promptings of the spirit/specter of something unimaginable and unforeseeable. It is moved—it has always been moving, it gives words to a movement that has always been at work—by the provocation of something calling from afar that calls it beyond itself, outside itself. Settling into the crevices and interstices of the present, deconstruction works the provocation of what is to come, a` venir, against the complacency of the present, against the pleasure the present takes in itself, in order to prevent it from closing in on itself, from collapsing into self-identity. For, in deconstruction, such closure would be the height of injustice, constituting the simple impossibility of the impossible, the prevention of the invention of the tout autre. Deconstruction is a passion and a prayer for the impossible, a defense of the impossible against its critics, a plea for/to the experience of the impossible,14 which is the only real experience, stirring with religious passion. By ‘‘religion,’’ I mean a pact with the impossible, a covenant with the unrepresentable, a promise made by the tout autre with its people, where we are all the people of the tout autre, the people of the promise, promised over to the promise. Hear, O Israel (Deuteronomy 6:4), you are the people of a call, constituted from the start by a call, a solicitation.15 Deconstruction is a child of the promise, of the covenant, of the alliance with the tout autre, of the deal cut between the tout autre and its faithless, inconstant, self-seeking fol196

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lowers who are in regular need of prophets to keep them on the straight and narrow and to remind them of the cut in their flesh, to recall them to the call that they no longer heed. Derrida’s religion meets the most rigorous requirements of Johannes de Silentio’s delineation of the traits of the religious, where to make a pact with the possible is mere aestheticism, and with the eternal, mere rationalism, while expecting the impossible, making a deal with the impossible, being impassioned by the impossible, is the religious, is religious passion. The ultimate passion of thought, Johannes Climacus says, is to discover something that thought cannot think, something impossible, something at the frontier of thought and desire, something paradoxical. That is what gives it passion—otherwise it is a ‘‘mediocre fellow.’’16 Will deconstruction then have been a Jewish discourse, marked by the mohel’s blade, in an analogy with the question posed by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi to Freud about whether psychoanalysis is a Jewish science, which Derrida follows in ‘‘Archive Fever’’? If psychoanalysis is Jewish without Judaism, even without God, it is not Freud’s atheism that proves an obstacle to this hypothesis, Yerushalmi says, but rather his ‘‘closure of the future,’’ his ‘‘hopelessness,’’ his ‘‘nonfuture.’’ ‘‘Jewishness here,’’ Derrida comments, ‘‘comes down, in its minimal essence . . . to the openness of the future.’’17 If so, then is not deconstruction very Jewish, albeit without God? Derrida’s religion is what we will not have known about Derrida and deconstruction, and our ignorance of it, he says, has led us to read him less and less well. For he has broken one deal to make another, broken one pact to form another, been a Jew sans Judaism ‘‘sans continuite´ mais sans rupturae,’’ in order to enter into a new alliance, a new covenant (convenire) with the incoming (invenire), which ‘‘repeats’’18 the movements of the first covenant in a religion without religion. Deconstruction repeats the structure of religious experience,19 that is, of a specifically biblical, covenantal, Abrahamic experience, according to the strange logic of Blanchot’s sans, which is no simple negation. Deconstruction regularly, rhythmically repeats this religiousness, sans the concrete, historical religions; it repeats nondogmatically the religious structure of experience, the category of the religious. It repeats the passion for the messianic promise and messianic expectation,20 sans the concrete messianisms of the positive religions that wage endless war and spill the blood of the other, and that, anointing themselves God’s chosen people, are consummately dangerous to The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida

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everyone else who is not so chosen; it ceaselessly repeats the viens, the apocalyptic call for the impossible, but without calling for the apocalypse that would consume its enemies in fire and damnation; it repeats the work of circumcision as the cut that opens the same to the other sans sectarian closure; it repeats Abraham’s trek up to Moriah and makes a gift without return of Isaac, sans the economy of blood sacrifice, repeating the madness of giving without return; it repeats the movements of faith, of expecting what we cannot know but only believe—je ne sais pas, il faut croire—of the blindness of faith sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir21 in the impossible, but without the dogmas of the positive religious faiths. What we will not have understood about deconstruction, unless Derrida tells us, unless he gives it to us as a gift and springs it on us as a surprise, is that deconstruction repeats the prayers and tears of ‘‘Jackie,’’ ‘‘a little black and very Arab Jew,’’22 who played truant from Hebrew school in order to dream of the impossible. (While rightly passing for an atheist.) What we will not have understood about Derrida, which causes us to read him less and less well, is precisely his tormented alliance, his broken pact and covenant with ‘‘thousands of years of Judaism.’’ For deconstruction arises from ‘‘a certain experience of the promise’’ sans the dogmatics of any particular faith,23 where ‘‘experience’’ is taken not in Husserlian terms as the presence of the given but in Abrahamic and messianic terms as the expectation of something unrepresentable, running up against the unforeseeable, a certain absolute experience. The passion of this promise is the very heart of deconstruction, the heart it has in a heartless world. This promise is the passion of deconstruction, provoking the prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida, the ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming,’’ the religion, the religious aspiration of deconstruction. Deconstruction transpires in the ambiance of an aspiration and expectation, in the time of a promise; it is driven mad by a passion for the promise, by an impossible deal, by a covenant cut with the tout autre. What we will not have understood about deconstruction is its passion for God, for ‘‘my God,’’ his, Jackie’s. The question is not whether there is a de´sir de Dieu, a passion for God, in Jacques Derrida. Who could ever doubt that? Where would we find someone so hard of heart, so parsimonious and pusillanimous, so slow to tears, so unfeeling and insensitive, as ever to imagine that? The question is, rather, the one put by his North African ‘‘compatriot’’24 Saint Augustine: ‘‘What do I love when I love [my] God?’’ Upon the ground198

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less ground of this beautiful and bottomless question, which is as much a sigh and a hope and a prayer as a question, quid ergo amo, cum deum [meum] amo? Derrida’s life and work is an extended commentary. ‘‘Can I do anything other than translate this sentence by SA [Saint Augustine] into my language,’’ he asks, ‘‘the change of meaning and of reference turning on the meum?’’25 To what do I pray, over what do I weep, when, in my language, I pray and weep to my God? For what am I ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming’’ when I hope and sigh and dream of my God? For what am I ‘‘inviting calling promising’’ when I invoke my God? For what do I call when I call, in my language, viens? By what am I impassioned in my passion for God? To what am I promised, to what do I consent, in this pact with the impossible? What do I expect when I expect the impossible? Has Derrida ever been able to do anything his whole life long other than try to translate this question? Did not this question first sweep down upon on him many years ago, on the rue Saint-Augustin in Algiers, and has it not rolled over his works ever since, for more than thirty years now? Is this question not a powerful wind that blows from thousands of years of Judaism? Is it not as old as the streets of Algiers, as old as Augustine, as old as Amos, as old as old father Abraham himself? Does it not belong to a past that was never present? Does not the power of this question, like a question put by Qoheleth, disturb everything, overturn every idol of presence, every graven image, making every constituted effect tremble in insecurity? Does not the passion of this question make everything questionable, opening the doors and the barriers of everything that wants to keep itself closed, opening even the graves of the dead to let their specters soar, disturbing everything that wants to rest in peace, stalking the world with ghosts? And does not the abyss of this question make utter nonsense of the Heideggerian dogma, to which all the epigones and acolytes in the Church of Freiburg bow their heads in thought-less assent, in un-thinking intolerance of biblical texts, that faith in God puts questioning to sleep? Does not the thought beyond thought of God, quid ergo amo? come over us like a distant thunder that grows louder and louder until at last, holding our hands over our ears, we no longer know who we are or what we love, cum deum [meum] amo? until everything wavers in insecurity and we tremble before I know not what? Who am I? Who are you? What is coming? Viens, oui, oui. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida

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We will have read Derrida less and less well, understood less and less of the provocation of Derrida, of the events that the name ‘‘Derrida’’ provokes, if we have not heard the promise of this question and the question of this promise. For the promise sweeps over ‘‘Jackie,’’ a weepy little child whom the adults teased because it was easy to make him cry, even as it sweeps over ‘‘Derrida,’’ a philosopher of international stature, a leftist Parisian intellectual, a secularist and an atheist, who is even known to have penned a sometimes slightly lewd and scandalous passage or two, even when he is writing about Saint Augustine, which seems simply sinful. Then, sweeping over Derrida, the promise comes to us, so long as we let it come. The passion of the promise resonates in every sentence he writes, yes, and in every fragment of a sentence, yes, every word and shard of a word, every play and, yes, every argument. We will read him less and less well unless we hear the yes that punctuates and accents the text, the yes to the promise that resonates throughout all his works, a yes first, a yes last, a constant yes. Oui, oui. The yes comes from him to us, to ‘‘you’’ (he means us), and to him from a distant time and place, from who knows where. He is ‘‘convoking invoking provoking,’’ we are responding, yes, language is happening, il y a la langue, the impossible is happening, yes, the tout autre is breaking out.26 Yes, yes. Oui, oui. Amen. That is Derrida’s prayer, yes, amen, a very old and ancient Hebrew word. Amen to the God of amen (truth; Isaiah 65:16), the God of yes, ‘‘Jah’’-weh, yes first and last, yes, yes, according to an Irish/German, Catholic/Jewish/Islamic, slightly atheistic prophetic tradition. Viens, he prays, ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming,’’ as if he were waiting for Elijah, who has promised to come, ‘‘inviting calling promising,’’ calling upon Elijah to come again.27 Even like the early Christians who were waiting for the kingdom to come. Come, Adoˆn Ye´shoua. And this ‘‘come’’ came to Derrida before he knew what had come over him; it overtook him before he knew what had happened.28 It took him by surprise, before he even knew that, as he was saying viens as he may have thought for the first time, he was in fact citing the last verses of the Apocalypse to John, re-citing an ancient Christian prayer, the closing prayer of an old book. He was reciting, ‘‘repeating,’’ all the ancient prayers that have breathed over Judaism ever since Abraham packed his bags and headed out for who knows where, solicited by the tout autre. 200

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The sails of deconstruction strain toward what is coming, are bent by the winds of l’avenir, by the promise of the in-coming, of the in-venire, of the wholly other, tout autre, l’invention de l’autre. The prophetic, messianic bent of deconstruction, its posture of expectancy, its passion for the impossible, which is always and structurally to come, runs deep. So deep that if the Messiah ever showed up, in the flesh, if as Blanchot recounts someone were to recognize him living incognito among the poor and the wretched on the outskirts of the city (or in the bowels of the inner city), the one question we would have for him is ‘‘When will you come?’’ For the passion for the impossible is precisely not to be quenched. The one who is coming, the just one, the tout autre, can never be present. He must always function as a breach of the present, opening up the present to something new, to something impossible. Were the horizon of possibility to close over, it would erase the trace of justice, for justice is the trace of what is to come beyond the possible. The law of the impossible, the ‘‘impossible-rule,’’ is never to confuse his coming (venue) with being present,29 never to collapse the coming of the just one into the order of what is present or absent. By focusing this study on Derrida’s Jewish alliance, the covenant without continuity but without rupture that he has been working out in his more recent writings, we are also able to resituate Derrida’s confrontation with negative theology, something that was visited upon him early in his career and has continued even into the 1990s. For as long as we center everything on Derrida and ‘‘negative theology’’—a ‘‘European, Greek, and Christian term’’30 —important as this issue is, the question of Derrida’s religion, of the heart of ‘‘my religion,’’ of his prayers and tears, remains somewhat out of focus. For it is important to see that Derrida’s religion is more prophetic than apophatic, more in touch with Jewish prophets than with Christian Neoplatonists, more messianic and more eschatological than mystical. His writing is more inscribed by the promise, by circumcision, and by the mark of father Abraham than by mystical transports, more like Amos and Isaiah than pseudo-Dionysius, moved more by prophetico-ethico-political aspiration than by aspiring to be one with the One. The non-knowing, the ‘‘without knowing’’ (sans savoir, what he calls in Cinders ‘‘the passion of non-knowing,’’31 la passion du non-savoir) of deconstruction has more to do with bearing an ethico-political witness to justice than with the docta ignorantia. As he himself says, the most important thing of which he is not speaking in ‘‘How Not to Speak’’ is his own Jewish Arab The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida

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provenance; he is the most apophatic of all when he speaks of Greeks and Christians instead of Jews and Arabs.32 Still, that does not excuse us from carefully following the confrontation with negative theology, which represents deconstruction’s first brush with theology. For this classical discourse on the name of God, this desire to efface the trace of this very name, praying God to rid it of ‘‘God,’’ is close to Derrida’s desire for the impossible, and it will be of no small import to follow the path that is traced in Derrida’s works from an apophatic to a prophetic passion. By rooting the present study in passion, in prayers and tears, in ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming,’’ in lingering over Derrida’s later, more autobiographical pieces, I have, I confess, blurred the borders between ‘‘Derrida’’ and ‘‘deconstruction,’’ between ‘‘Jacques’’ and ‘‘Derrida,’’ between ‘‘Jackie’’ and ‘‘Jacques.’’ For such confusion I accept full responsibility, if there is one, although I would also pass the buck to him, too, for he is always speaking of himself without speaking of himself.33 For the undecidability between these two is the condition of a decision that each of us, one by one, must make. We must, on our own, sort out how much of this is buried in the streets of El Biar, embedded in the prayers and passions of a little black and very Arab Jew, and how much of this is ‘‘everybody’s autobiography.’’34 To what extent am I too, or you, ‘‘hoping sighing dreaming,’’ impassioned by the impossible, caught up in a deal with the tout autre? I will always be a little lost, betwixt and between the appropriating proper name of Jacques and the circumcised signature that opens to the other. For the one cannot be insulated from the other, not if we are going to speak of the prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida, of the passion of Jacques Derrida, seeing that ‘‘deconstruction,’’ ‘‘la’’ de´construction, if there is any such thing, cannot sigh or pray or weep or bend a knee or ever feel a thing. I will move unsteadily and unstably, circumspectly, between the shibboleth of the singular circumcision of Jackie, which happened only once, in 1930, in El Biar, and something of more general interest, something iterable and repeatable. But this more general structure, which is borne on the wings of repetition35—and here is all the difficulty—cannot take the form of an essence or a universal. It cannot be the effect of an epoche (which means a cutting off) of his circumcision. It is too Jewish to be catholic (katholou), even though it proceeds sans Judaism. It is not as if we are seeking some sort of invariant transcendental, some uncircumcised, Hellenistic eidos, some essentia sans circumcision. Even if it is borne on the wings of repeti202

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tion, this ‘‘religion’’ cannot circle high above us in an essentialistic, Hellenistic sky, like the aigle of savoir absolue, some bloodless transcendens soaring beyond us bloodied mortals below. For then this Jewish bird would be cooked (cuit).36 We cannot excise or cover over deconstruction’s circumcision when Derrida’s whole idea is to expose it. Deconstruction feels with a bleeding, circumcised heart in the midst of a heartless world, hears with a bleeding, circumcised ear, writes with a heart and an ear for the other, speaks with circumcised words. Indeed, at the risk of giving endless scandal, of sending my secular academic colleagues into a dead swoon, I will say that for Derrida, deconstruction is circumcision, where circumcision cuts open the same to the event of the other, thus constituting the breach that opens the way to the tout autre: ‘‘the breach necessary for the coming of the other (a` la venue de l’autre), of an other whom one can always call Elijah, if Elijah is the name of the unforeseeable other for whom a place must be kept.’’37 The circumcision of deconstruction cuts it off from the absolute, cuts off its word from the final word, from the totalizing truth or logos that engulfs the other. Deconstruction proceeds not by knowledge but by faith and by passion, by the passion of faith, impassioned by the unbelievable, by the secret that there is no secret. It is called forth by a promise, by an aboriginal being-promised over to language and the future, to wander destinerrant, like Abraham, underway to who knows where. Deconstruction proceeds in the dark, like a blind man feeling his way with a stick, devoid of sight and savvy, of vision and verity, sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir where it is necessary to believe, where the passion of faith, la passion du non-savoir,38 is all you have to go on. Je ne sais pas. Il faut croire: that is how the Memoirs of the Blind concludes, if that is a conclusion.39 I myself will conclude this introduction with a prayer and a plea, by begging the pardon of my academic colleagues, imploring the forgiveness of my secularizing friends, for whom the only blasphemy is infidelity to Nietzsche,40 whom I will have shocked and traumatized by this provocative scene of Derrida weeping at his prie-Dieu, by all the events that this scene provokes. Forgive me, one and all, forgive me everything, as I forgive you, but also, I beg you, je vous prie, lend me your ear for this other. To which I add an argument from authority, purely in the interests of reading: Derrida himself has said, these are ipsissima verba, that by forgetting the promise and the alliance we have read him less and less well.41 The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida

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Derrida at prayer (all the while rightly passing for an atheist)? Derrida weeping? Derrida’s de´sir de Dieu, his passion for God, for the tout autre? Derrida bowing his head and saying, Amen, oui, oui? A circumcised Derrida? A messianic deconstruction? An apocalyptic, prophetic deconstruction? A deconstruction that has not lost faith? Derrida, the follower of father Abraham and namesake of the prophet Elijah? Derrida reading e´criture (sainte), glossing the stories of Babel and Abraham, of the shibboleth and Tobias? And not by chance or incidentally, but regularly, rhythmically, repeatedly, irresistibly, as if in response to something calling to him from afar, as if returning to and repeating something deeply provocative at work in his writing that he does not know how to avoid? A Derrida who has perhaps surprised not only Geoffrey Bennington but himself? Is that not a little too other, too tout, too autre? How could I? How could he? Je ne sais pas. Il faut croire.

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11

God: Poison or Cure? A Reply to John D. Caputo David Wood

This is a reading that will move many old Derrideans to tears, make dyed-in-the-wool deconstructionists tremble, and drive more Dionysian fellow travelers to pray that John Caputo is wrong about Derrida, or that they had misheard or misunderstood what he is telling us. Derrida a ‘‘religious thinker’’?1 Who has strayed from the path, Derrida or Caputo? Or could it be us? Allow me to recall, if I may, the early Derrida’s account of the standard structural move constitutive of the metaphysical tradition. It is essentially a refusal of the instability of meaning that flows from the diacritical, differential, textual, and contextual condition of all meaning, all signification. This refusal takes the positive form of positing, projecting, hypostatizing what he called a ‘‘transcendental signified,’’ a fixed point, a stable ground, outside language, outside the text. It would be a bit like responding to relativity’s demonstration that position and velocity are relative in space by saying that the problem could be solved if one measured everything from one’s neighborhood church, as if that were somehow an exception. Examples of such a transcendental signified would include the functioning of terms such as ‘‘subject,’’ ‘‘reality,’’ and ‘‘experience,’’ but the exemplary case would be God, who in principle stands outside the world, even to the point perhaps of having created it. Has Derrida now embraced this God of onto-theology? If so, would it really be surprising that he has been ‘‘read less and less well over almost twenty years’’? 205

In a way, we are faced with a dialectical advance on the scandal of Derrida’s ethics. Like Sartre before him, Derrida was plagued for years with questions about the ethical dimension of his work; indeed, in the early days, he treated its lack of any ethical orientation as a virtue. When he began to be able to say that deconstruction is justice, or is responsibility, debate flared as to whether he had bolted on a Levinasian reading of the Other, for which ethics would be first philosophy, or whether he was simply drawing out the implications that deconstruction had always had. If deconstruction was advancing, it looked to some as if it was following the lines of ascent Kierkegaard had mapped out from the aesthetic to the ethical. And yet Derrida’s ethical never was the universal, but always moved beyond the ethical, beyond obedience to the rule, to the recognition of the impossibility of algorithms for decision making. And this took him immediately into the kind of territory that Kierkegaard called ‘‘religious,’’ a space beyond ethics, or an ethics of the beyond. Caputo’s presentation of Derrida’s religiosity is impressive, written from the heart, or deeper. His drawing together of the religious implications of some of Derrida’s later work—notably, ‘‘Circumfession’’—has the special virtue of allowing us to pose more pointedly than ever the questions that Derrida raises for us. The two central questions I would like to focus on here are (1) the relation between philosophy and autobiography; and (2) the ‘‘reduction’’ of religiosity. To add a little water to these crusts: 1. We are accustomed to suppose our life is one thing and our thinking is quite another, logically distinct. Bad people can write good books, and vice versa. And to start to blur this line is to invite infestation by various fallacies. But one can and perhaps should distinguish what is logically distinct from what is in other ways importantly connected. An apple falling from a tree to the earth is logically distinct from the principle of gravity, but that shows us that logic is not everything, not that there is no important connection. Derrida, as have other philosophers before him, dramatizes his own life to serious philosophical effect. What are the rules of this game? 2. My major concern, however, is the status of the religious after Derrida. For it is all very well to call Derrida a ‘‘religious thinker,’’ but, after Derrida, the meaning of ‘‘religious’’ has arguably changed. And we need to be as clear as we can about what is going on here. There is in philosophy a history of people giving reductive accounts, which would honor the religious only in a shrunken and perhaps un206

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recognizable form. Caputo says that Derrida is offering us an account of religious experience, not of institutionalized religion. The big question for me is this: is our sense of religious experience as religious actually disconnectable from religion as an institution? Is not the very idea of religious experience a categorization, an interpretation of certain kinds of experience, which might be thought of differently? Let me suggest an analogy. When Lacan described philosophy as a discourse of mastery, I immediately protested—that this was not true of most of the philosophers in whom I was interested— Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. Lacan could reply that psychoanalysis was a discourse that had nonetheless preserved certain possibilities of thought and being against inveterate tendencies towards mastery characteristic of much traditional philosophy or perhaps, our interpretations of the tradition. Suppose that what we call ‘‘religious’’ experience is not in fact a special realm of experience, but merely the typically rejected residue of philosophy’s construction for itself of a space of thought, one that should be challenged at base. Suppose, in other words, that the very idea of religion is an artifact of philosophy’s failure to realize its own possibilities. The very fact that, with certain honorable exceptions (e.g., William James), empiricism is deaf and blind to religious experience would be a symptom of this. I will argue that Caputo’s remarks just as plausibly lead to what I am calling an ‘‘artifactual understanding’’ of the religious as to any, however displaced, resurrection of its significance. On my first central question, let me say something about philosophy and reflection on one’s personal life, and the supposed need to keep them separate. Derrida, after Wittgenstein and Nietzsche (and now illuminated by John Caputo), shows the limitations of this doctrine, and here I will make some short schematic points. First, to repeat, those who insist on the importance of keeping things separate (such things as truth and life) misunderstand the point at which it is important to keep things separate. We need to distinguish between logical connectedness, in some narrow sense, and all kinds of other connectedness—conceptual, exemplary, existential, and so on. We can maintain the former without dumping the latter. If we do not grasp this, then much of what Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Derrida wrote—not to mention Augustine, Rousseau, and others—was a hysterical display of self-importance, rather than exemplary attempts to make sense of a singular existence, of the singularity of existence. Of God: Poison or Cure?

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course, in some respects, biography would do just as well as autobiography. Think of Sartre on Saint-Genet or Flaubert. What is distinctive about what we could call ‘‘ongoing biographizing’’ is that it is part of what it is describing, it is a vital contribution to the production of a reflective life. What I mean by ‘‘exemplary attempts’’ is that Kierkegaard and the others recognize, not that they, or their lives, are from the outset specially worthy of reflection, but that the opportunities for a passionate appropriation of life’s possibilities come one at a time, and there is a connection between the intensity with which one does this and its relevance for others. When a philosopher says ‘‘I,’’ the finger always points both ways: this I, and any I. For every I is some such this, and if one cuts the diamond of subjectivity at the right plane, one can become both more personal and more universal at one and the same time. When Kierkegaard talks about subjectivity, he is not just talking about himself. But we can be more specific about why an individual life is an important arena for reflection. To understand the significance of key philosophical concepts and issues, we need to grasp the space or scope of their application. Many of those most central to philosophy have to do with our negotiation of fundamental limits—to knowledge, to identity, and so on. A reflective life is one marked by the attempts to come to terms with, to incorporate, or appropriate, reflection on those limits into the course and significance of one’s life. Caputo shows Derrida struggling with his Jewish, Algerian, religious inheritance, making something, as Sartre put it, of what had been made of him, and recognizing, acknowledging, affirming such a structure as our universal fate—that we must begin, not by choosing, but by acknowledging fundamentally involuntary determinations, a deep passivity, our facticity. To continue beginning, we have to recognize both our finitude and our mortality. Recognizing these things means not just allowing that they are true, but that they offer us access to intensities, to levels of understanding, to ways of Being-in-the-world that they alone make possible. Mortality is, first, a limit and, then, an opportunity. One could never demonstrate one’s commitment to a value by risking one’s life if one was immortal. One could never pledge oneself to another if all decisions were reversible. My point is that we need the scope of a life for these concepts and categories to come alive. By ‘‘come alive,’’ I mean for their significance to be adequately displayed, unrolled. Reflection on ‘‘one’s own life’’ can in this way be a beacon to others’ understanding of these concepts, even if part of that understanding 208

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is a recognition of the need to submit to or experience the exigencies they prescribe, rather than master their truth. Moving now to my second central question, the status of the religious, let me directly confront the thrust of Caputos’s essay with two brief allusions. The first is to an extraordinary essay Sartre wrote in 1962, ‘‘The Singular Universal,’’2 which seems to me to be the silent precursor to Derrida’s The Gift of Death. It is Sartre’s homage to Kierkegaard, the funeral oration of an atheist to a God-fearing man. Sartre concludes with such remarks as ‘‘Kierkegaard is our adventure,’’ and that Kierkegaard had taught him the significance and difficulty of ‘‘becoming an atheist.’’ The implication of this last remark is that, once we focus on ‘‘becoming,’’ the gap between atheism and theism narrows considerably, even to the point at which the dispositions reflected in the word becoming shade into the religious itself. My second allusion is to Wittgenstein, who wrote (in his Notebooks) that ‘‘we have the feeling that we are dependent on an alien will. Be that as it may, we are at any rate in a certain sense dependent, and that on which we depend we can call God.’’ He goes on to say, ‘‘God in this sense would be simply fate, or, what comes to the same thing, the world independent of our will.’’3 I mention this remark because it gives us a transparent analysis of how we can begin with an experience, reflect on it, affirm its structure and not its content, and then monitor our own introduction of the word God. If Caputo is right, one interesting difference between Wittgenstein and Derrida is that Wittgenstein’s religiosity seems mystical, while Derrida’s is messianic. That distinction may not stand up. Wittgenstein identifies ‘‘running up against the limits of language,’’ not with mystical rapture, but with ‘‘Ethics.’’4 But what they certainly share is a leaning to what we could call a structural reduction of religious discourse, to the point at which the relations it exposes are what is important, not the entities involved. More to the point, might not religious experience and discourse be artifacts of the failure of the philosophical project thus far? So that, if we were to conclude, as John Caputo does, that Derrida is a religious thinker, might we not essentially be regressing, bearing witness to an abortion of the deconstructive project, allowing its genealogical drive to give way to reverence? And if Caputo is right in following Derrida along this track, then might we not, then, have to sacrifice Derrida to preserve deconstruction? I will argue, very schematically, that what we call ‘‘religious experience’’ is a certain kind of recognition of the limits and contingency God: Poison or Cure?

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of that construction we call the ‘‘autonomous subject.’’ But given that such a subject is a fiction (albeit a powerful, socially sustained, and operative fiction), religious experience itself needs to be genealogically interpreted, to be ‘‘deconstructed.’’ We need to show that it is an artifact of an earlier error. The central motifs of Caputo’s reading of Derrida are those forms of passivity, expectancy, finitude that come packaged as passion, promise, prayer, hope, love, trembling—experiences of the unrepresentable, of the impossible. Caputo details and documents the way in which Derrida thinks of transcendence immanently, as we might say, as transgression, transgression here meaning a kind of openness to the breaking open of every finite form of investment, even those that most deeply make us what we think we are. If I am right, however, the intensity of these experiences, the driving power of messianic expectancy, rests on false forms of closure of the subject. The overwhelming power of such passions reflects the folly of the original subject’s self-experience. And given that Caputo wants to contrast his approach to that of his Nietzschean friends (and worthy enemies), it is worth noting that, when Nietzsche writes, ‘‘I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a down-going. . . . I love him whose soul is lavish, who neither wants nor returns thanks: for he always gives and will not preserve himself,’’5 he is showing us how it is possible to deconstruct the self-subsistent subject by harnessing the longing and projective resources of ‘‘love,’’ without going religious. Can Caputo turn his back on this? Derrida himself seems to be poised on a precipice between a reductive strategy that translates the religious into modes of ‘‘immanent’’ nonrelational relationality, and one in which he is embracing the religious. In The Gift of Death, for example, he writes, ‘‘God . . . is that structure of invisible interiority that is called in Kierkegaard’s sense subjectivity.’’ And again, ‘‘God is the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but not from the exterior.’’6 The ‘‘I’’ that sheds tears blurs its vision, abdicates the throne of knowledge. Suffering, which, as Hobbes observed, joins men and animals in a common fate, is not merely something an ‘‘I’’ undergoes; it can put the very self-subsistent autonomy of the ‘‘I’’ in question. If, as Caputo might gather from either Heidegger or Nietzsche, God and the subject are made of the same metaphysical cloth, is it not imperative to grasp the opportunity to suspend both, rather than to acknowledge a relation between them? 210

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Near the end of his book Prayers and Tears, Caputo writes: ‘‘For Derrida, God is not an object but an addressee, not a matter for theological clarification but the other end of prayer, given not to cognition, but to passion.’’7 As another example of the reduction of God to a relation, this is revealing and convincing. But notice also the contrast between cognition and passion (between savoir and croire, knowledge and belief). When Kierkegaard talks of the need for a faith beyond reason, we cannot help noticing that what he understood by reason was heavily colored by Hegel’s account of reason. Might not faith, the need for a leap of faith, be an artifact, an artificial supplement to an account of reason that itself needs correcting? And why should we not suspect as much here? Can we still talk about ‘‘cognition’’ as if we were still in the grip of faculty psychology? Do we not, in other words, need even more urgently to improve, correct, enrich our understanding of knowledge rather than supplement it with passion? Is it not really a failure on Derrida’s part to allow us to suppose that such an avenue of thought has a future? And do not references to aporia, to the impossible, all commit the same error, of confirming the limitations they mark the need to transgress? Is not the impossibility of choosing here just a weakness of thought? There is, it seems to me, a response to my whole line of argument. The account of the subject Derrida gives in ‘‘Eating Well’’ is one locked into complex historical, social, and psychological structures for which he provides us with the mnemonic: ‘‘carnophallogocentrism.’’8 But we may say of this what he had previously said of the closure of metaphysics, or of logocentrism, that being able to demarcate its limits does not free us from its influence. This suggests a more general way forward, one that could acknowledge everything I have said about the artifactuality of religious experience, but insist that the autonomous self-subsistent subject, far from being a specific isolable concept in a web, is much more the pattern of the web itself, the shape of our being in the world that no amount of hard work on Tuesday morning will undo. We may suppose it bound up with the specific forms of social relations the West has invented, or with the inevitable conceptual dulling of everyday existence. Either way, religious experience, whatever its formal artifactuality, would be a constant reminder of the fallibility and contingency of every conceptual structure we erect, every limitation of our responsibility. But however troubling, that does not excuse us from the task of constantly examining the very idea of the religious.

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Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears Reading John D. Caputo’s Ethics Edith Wyschogrod

How can one write an ethics without appearing to command the Other? Is not an ethics always already written from the standpoint of God, as it were? ‘‘Do Thou examine the motives upon which thy actions shall be based and act upon a maxim that thou would’st will to become a universal law.’’ Or, ‘‘Assess the outcomes of thy actions and comport thyself accordingly.’’ More modestly stated, in writing an ethics, one creates a macro, it would seem, a system of keystrokes that is entered into the memory of one’s computer, and then orders, ‘‘Execute.’’ Baudrillard might say playfully that ‘‘the ethicist is the software engineer of the moral life.’’ Whatever the idiom in which ethics is currently inscribed, an ethical work seems to sway perilously within a command structure, a metalevel dialectic that cannot be transcended: ‘‘Be thou deontologist or consequentialist,’’ even when the idiom is that of situation or narrative ethics unless transcended in a way to which Caputo’s work Against Ethics points.1 Is not the act of writing itself the demand to read? Not if one writes a-scriptically, writes without writing. Must an ethics then avoid natural language, be written in code, if it is to be a-scriptic and, if it is to be effective, must it then be decoded, so that it may penetrate the fabric of human existence? A code may be a system of equivalences, for example, information can be transcribed as 1s and 0s to become portable and the condensed bits then decoded in accordance with a system of commensurable items. Like dried food, infor212

mation enters in a ‘‘natural’’ state, is dehydrated, and emerges again in its ‘‘original’’ form. A code may also be a system of laws, of general rules, decrees, or principles to be applied to particular cases. Such general rules function as distillates that must be expanded upon and enlarged. The very advantage of both types of code—accessibility of the message when the code is mastered in the first case; applicability of the message to particular cases in the second—disqualifies code as the a-scripting we are looking for in ethics. Codes enter into a universal structure of communication, a system of undeconstructed signifiers. Caputo’s ethic does not evade the command structure of ethics, yet does not fall into the various traps inherent in coding or in the dyadic structure of ethical reflection. How must an ethics be written if it is to address one ethically, he asks? Such an ethic must resist ethics. Who commands and who is commanded is hidden, a concealedness that cannot be a concealing/revealing in Heidegger’s sense. Instead, this counterethics is written with the hand of Johannes de Silentio ‘‘in implacable and ironic opposition to Heidegger’s originary ethics.’’2 It is thus shrouded in secrecy and, if a secret is to be a secret, it is not the truth of phenomena that is sought, but that which is other than truth and being, in this case, the Other who is, qua Other, concealed from me. The challenge is how to divulge the secret without divulging it. Thus, in a much cited passage, Derrida writes: ‘‘There is a secret of denial and a denial of the secret. The secret as such denies itself as secret separates and already institutes a negativity; it is a negation that denies itself . . . de-negates itself.’’3 This de-negation is ‘‘essential and originary,’’ both obscuring itself and appearing to the one with whom it is shared, partitioning itself within itself, denying itself. In an ethics that is secret, ‘‘the name of God can only be said in the modality of this denial.’’4 Perhaps Caputo (like Derrida) does not want to endorse just this particular denial. Can an ethics that legislates without legislating, one that remains secret, be dialectical? John Caputo mentions riding back and forth on a monorail between Levinasian Ethics and Deleuzian Nietzscheanism. In fact, his work might be viewed as a secret diary of this journey: learned, jagged, witty, one in which kindness restrains the wills to power that might otherwise run amok in it. Yet what is frightening about a monorail is not the monotonous alternation between destinations, its dialectical quality in mechanical guise, but rather the carriage’s screeching to a halt somewhere along the way, swaying over the chasm that monorails are designed to breach and leaving Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears

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one alone with one’s secret. But that is precisely what an Ethic of ethics that is not a metaethics must ‘‘be’’: dangerous, unmoored, a secret that cannot belong to a monadic self, unpossessable, or, as Derrida would have it, a secret that dissimulates in divulging itself. Perhaps the secret of the monorail is hidden in its destabilizing effect, its challenge to the Heideggerian Da. As long as Caputo swings to the side of Nietzsche, he can deterritorialize in the manner of Deleuze until he is struck by the thought that deterritorialization in its concreteness is the situation of those forcibly nomadized, the wretched of the earth, a realization that sends Caputo careening to the Levinasian side, the side of the Other. Here one ought to stay, the constraint of the Kantian imperative still weighing upon even the most deconstructed nonjuridical alterity. In developing this alternation, Caputo distinguishes among differences. ‘‘Deleuzean difference in the sense of diversitas—diversity, variety, variety and variegation,’’ heteromorphic difference, is the love of different forms.’’5 Whereas Deleuze posits difference without the opposition of the other, Nietzsche struggles with the other, Caputo affirms. But far outweighing this distinction is heteronomic difference, an allusion, not to a multiplicity of forms, but to alterity, the invasion of an exteriority that disrupts schemes of totalization. Is not the ‘‘custodian’’ of this alterity Dionysus with a beard and a tallith (prayer shawl) as described in Caputo’s depiction of Abraham of Paris? Caputo finds it impossible to live with Nietzsche’s exclusion of a space for the writing of the des-astre or with Nietzsche’s mocking of the joys and sorrows of the great unwashed summed up in one of Nietzsche’s most troubling passages: One day my name will be associated with the memory of something monstrous [Ungeheures]—a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far . . .—Yet for all that there is nothing in me of a founder of religion—religions are affairs of the rabble.6 The recurring sameness: Levinas and Nietzsche, Nietzsche and Levinas, might lead Caputo’s addressees to look more favorably upon the unsettling between, neither a specular vantage point, nor yet an exercise in an existential teetering-over-the-abyss that Caputo astutely questions. Perhaps the Deleuzian expression, a theophanic plane of immanence, a nonplace for an ethics, best describes this be214

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tween. The use of the phrase ‘‘the place of ethics’’ is to be read sous rature so as to preclude a return to philosophical business as usual. Caputo’s between is then the nonspace of secrets in which to experience an encounter of incommensurables. Why a plane of immanence? Why theophany? Consider first what the ‘‘between’’ is not. It is not the scene of mediation in Hegel’s sense—for had not Levinas shown that it is preposterous to imagine that ethics can be sublated, and had not Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva exposed Hegelian totalization as concealing difference? As for an affirming account of the plane of immanence, consider Deleuze’s description. A plane is inseparable from concepts in that it secures them; concepts are events, not essences: they are created by philosophy. What could possibly secure a concept? Thought’s reflexiveness: the plane is the ‘‘image thought gives itself of what it means to think.’’ The hand is the hand of Deleuze, but the voice is the voice of Heidegger. Deleuze continues: ‘‘Thought demands only movement that can be carried to infinity, or the movement of the infinite.’’7 Is this not a left-handed Heideggerian swipe by Deleuze against Levinas in that the infinite is now subject to thought rather than the converse? Quien sabe? Have I unintentionally turned back toward traditional philosophy by way of appealing to primordiality claims in describing the between of Caputo’s monorail? Not if, as Deleuze asserts, ‘‘The plane of immanence is, at the same time that which must be thought and cannot be thought . . . the nonthought within thought . . . the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside [an outside that is inside].’’8 Is this not the discursive space of the secret and of Caputo’s impatience with the History of Being? Does he not tell us at the start, ‘‘under [his] little shibboleth, ‘against ethics’ ’’(4), that ‘‘obligation’’ is not safe? But when thought is spoken of as the nonplace of the between, has Levinas not been betrayed? Earlier I referred to theophany’s consorting with the secret. In so doing, one must resist Kierkegaardian inwardness and the appeal to Abraham through suspension of the ethical by reading Abraham through Levinas and reading Levinas against himself. Consider first, as Caputo holds, that Heideggerian es gibt (il y a) ‘‘it’s happening without why’’ (232) is the horizon, as it were, out of which obligation arises. Yet Levinas’s concept of the il y a, faceless being that assaults us as sensory inundation and as the nonplace of faceless gods poses Nietzschean ‘‘cosmic stupidity’’ against the infinity of the person (236). A thorny issue this: how, if the il y a is the horizon out of which obligation emerges and Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears

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therefore requisite for obligatoriness, can the il y a also thwart obligation? Does it (somehow) replicate the uncontainability and excessiveness of the infinite? Does the il y a, more originary than the time scheme of work and thought, repeat the nontime of alterity? As formless, does the il y a mimic the an-iconic character of the Levinasian face that proscribes violence? Who, then, does Abraham become in the light of these considerations? Abraham does, and is done to, in accordance with the call of the altogether Other. Kierkegaard’s Abraham is either a murderer from the standpoint of ethics or a knight of faith but a Levinasian Abraham (and, to a certain extent, Caputo’s), must be blind to the face of Isaac without becoming a knight of faith. Instead, if Levinas (here read also Caputo) is to remain Levinas, when Abraham thinks he hears a bas kol (heavenly voice), he is sucked into the maw of the il y a, not as the horizon of ethics, but as faceless being. If this is so, Abraham is not a sinner but, like all who are lured by the il y a, a pagan. ‘‘The effect of Levinas’s great eulogy to Abraham,’’ writes Caputo, ‘‘of his great me voici . . . carried out the greatest deconstruction of ethics since Johannes de Silentio decided to break his silence about the father of faith’’(14). Does the Levinasian face after all function as a supradiscursive natural theology in which case Abraham is guilty but not a sinner, someone whom we must regard from the standpoint of justice as if Abraham were another Susan Smith?9 But, if Father Abraham succumbs to the pagan gods of his father, Terach, of the city of Ur whom the text of the Midrash describes as a maker of idols, then the story is a tale of theological conflict rather than of a squaring off between ethics and faith. On the theophanic plane of immanence what gives itself to thought is the undecidability of ethics. Is it the Other or faceless being that summons? If this is Levinas’s Abraham, there is nothing to help in the face of this undecidability. Confronted with this undecidability, does one not, then, want some protection to preclude having one’s back broken, as it were, by what we envisage as the demand of the Other? As Caputo tells us, obligations are our affirmations of infinite worth attaching us to the least among us, placing our mortal selves at the service of the other: ‘‘Obligation is like a felt shock or blow that strikes me down . . . lays me low, producing a kind of disequilibrium in me’’ (27). I continue to be obligated despite the ambiguity of the call. Doubleness, a prior condition of the secret, and Anfechtung, are the very preconditions of 216

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ethics: the il y a and the Other enter into a game of reflections that ethics cannot escape. But even if this is so, it could still be argued, one is moved by destitution and pain. The Good beyond being (if one can speak meaningfully of Good) does not itself appear but mandates that the violence be ended and the hungry fed. Is there any gain in all of this? Yes, we can say good-bye to the battle between de-ontologists and consequentialists on the analytic side of the philosophical divide because the Good gives itself both as the demand of alterity and as alterity’s consequences. (In this, Caputo perhaps differs from Levinas’s recent remark, ‘‘It is in saintliness that the human begins; not in the accomplishment of saintliness, but in the value.’’) An ancillary benefit of the ethic Caputo depicts is that such an ethic need result, not in psychological ambivalence, but rather in a certain humility before this undecidability. Caputo’s hammering home of the stitched-together quality of our lives also suggests a novel reading of narrative ethics. The standard view is that the depiction of exemplary lives takes us on inferential walks, as Umberto Eco might put it, leading us to prepackaged ideals of perfection. Yet exemplary lives are not merely triumphs but agonies, stylized to be sure, because anguish must be given in comprehensible icons, like those we click on in our new technologies. Caputo shows that the dream of perfection embodied in exemplary lives is riddled by difference, ‘‘contaminated de-mythologized heroes,’’ as he calls them. But how are we to read Caputo’s critique of the dream of the pure life, of icons of perfection unriddled by difference? Here we may note that when narratives of such lives address our own, we rehearse the same story over and over again or appeal to a chain of narratives that reinscribe the same motifs in new contexts. Are we then compelled to enter an inert and lifeless legacy of narrative, a legacy that postmodern thought has deconstructed? Not if we read Deleuze’s Nietzsche for whom repetition is an arising of the same from the different rather than the instantiating of an identity. ‘‘Repetition appears as difference without a concept express[ing] a power peculiar to the existent,’’ says Deleuze.10 For Nietzsche, nihilism is overcome only by the belief in the being of becoming, a being identified as recurrence in the celebrated apothegm ‘‘That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being,’’ a recurrence that is not a movement of repetition, an endless miming of the same, but, rather, the return of difference. What if it is not Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears

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being but ethics that reformats the world of becoming over and over again as Caputo demonstrates, each life one in which every other is other than another? No life into which alterity enters can be the same as another. Perfectly cloned lives are pure parody, as the serial paintings of Andy Warhol demonstrate. Yet—and here Caputo’s emphasis on the everyday pulls us out of literary examples back to the hors texte of real life—sociocultural forces professionalize expressions of generosity and self-giving. Thus, for example, the easing of suffering has now become the province of medicine. Saint Julien l’hospitalier could kiss the sores of the leper, the Boddhisattva could transform her- or himself into a rabbit to feed the hungry jackal, but today high-tech medicine intervenes in the lives of the sick with a quite different sort of cost-benefit ratio. Trained relief workers are sent to the world’s trouble spots. Can the concept of singularity intrinsic to Caputo’s ‘‘against ethics’’ support ethico-political discourse? Should we not try to reconfigure systems so that they are nontotalizing but holistic? Deleuze treats this problem by thinking of wholes as temporary organizations: ‘‘It is possible to think that we have found a solution; but a new curve of the plane, which at first we did not see, starts it all off again, posing new problems . . . The plane takes effect through shocks’’ that pose new conceptual challenges.11 Such a plane precludes immediate intuitive knowledge of the world and avoids the sheer immediacy that worries Caputo. While escaping ethical intuitivism, Caputo’s ethics derives affective power from its descriptive richness. Alterity is not an abstraction or even the stylized face that is read as destitute but rather the body as cut, bleeding, festering, malodorous. In the context of the brain/ consciousness dispute, cognitive scientists hope that, by naturalizing consciousness, conscious phenomena will be liberated from an oppressive metaphysical matrix. Decoding the language of affects, sensations, thoughts, and memories, and encoding them as brain processes would render this position plausible. Other body processes might also be interpreted as information systems, for example, those of genetic coding. But this replacement is precisely the source of Caputo’s worry, one shared by an earlier generation of Husserlian phenomenologists such as Erwin Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, and now by Lyotard. The distinction between life-world and laboratory, between experience and information theory, unsay one another. Caputo’s ethic can, however, bypass the ontological bifurcation implicit in this discussion. Without denying phenomenological materiality— 218

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experienced flesh is material—the body always already imposes an ethical demand. This emaciated body is given as a charge to feed it. The conflict between the body coded as information and the experienced densities of flesh can be held in tandem because the body’s materiality is always already embedded in an ethical ‘‘structure.’’ Caputo’s book opens the possibility of another sort of query, how one can do the opposite of what the face commands—‘‘Am I to see a face in someone who holds a gun to my head?’’ Levinas thinks this question can be answered by distinguishing between authority and force, that force is the will of every being to maintain its existence (not merely to exist but to exist incrementally because existence of the self is needed for action). Authority is the command to refrain from violence. Yet one must (in accordance with Caputo’s Nietszchean side) remain uneasy with this solution, for how can authority that is powerless be authority at all? Caputo argues further that, within the context of justice, life is justified, not as an aesthetic, but as an ethical, phenomenon. Still, I want to own up to a longing for aesthesis, a wish expressed in a televised interview with a Japanese hibakshi survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The man, deeply disfigured, had re-figured this disfigurement in describing his experience: ‘‘I cannot forget the colors,’’ he said. ‘‘They were unimaginably beautiful.’’ The aesthetic refinement of Japanese culture is not enough to account for such words from the abyss, this openness to aesthesis in the face of total nothingness. Can this longing for the aesthetic be re-con-figured in the language of ethics? Caputo has perhaps ‘‘got it right’’ in saying: ‘‘When obligation happens it happens with a lot of other things, the ethical, the political, the aesthetic, etc., belong to a grammatological surface . . . to a multiplicity of collateral intertwined, not easily distinguishable events.’’12 To read Caputo’s book The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida is to enter the life, the work, the ‘‘text’’ that is Jacques Derrida. It is also the discursive equivalent of pausing before an Italian Mannerist painting, perhaps a work of Carlo Crivelli, that depicts a saintly suppliant praying and in tears. One can only stand in awe and admiration of its innovations in perspective, its power to evoke proximity to and distance from its subject. How are we to reveal the secret of the proper name ‘‘Jacques Derrida’’? Caputo’s work is what Geoff Bennington describes as ‘‘pure appellation of the pure other, absolute vocative . . . which would not even call for calling implies distance and difference.’’13 If, by contrast, the proper name were in fact a reThose Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears

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ferring term, one might envision the name ‘‘Jacques Derrida’’ as designating four theses Caputo puts forward in this extraordinary work. First thesis: Derrida is a man of faith in both an Augustinian and Kierkegaardian sense. Faith is a passion for the impossible, for a Messiah whom one expects and whom one beckons, ‘‘Viens,’’ but who does not come. Thus longing and anticipation are the affective modalities of this faith, the same as those of Hebrew prophecy. Derrida, heir of Abraham and Elijah, has as his self-appointed task, not admonishing a sinning Israel, but rather chastising a philosophical tradition whose self-assurance has become coercive and that requires deconstruction. Interwoven in this prophetic persona are the strands of Derrida’s birth in El Biar in Algeria (Islam), his Jewish family (Judaism in an attenuated form) and his education as a European (Franco-Christian), a description that clearly runs counter to the received view that Derrida is a secular thinker or a death-of-God theologian. Second thesis: deconstruction is out to save science, literature, and law by excavating their conditions of possibility—not to undermine them. Thus Derrida is both heir and critic of the Kantian enterprise, an enlightener of the Enlightenment, rather than the nihilist he is alleged to be both by his conservative and his radically historicist detractors. Third thesis: Derrida is an ethical thinker who is concerned with alterity, the other human being, but who, unlike Levinas, refuses to interpret alterity as the wholly other. Instead the tout autre must be explored at the interface of language whose dissimulations must be deconstructed and the silence of the tout autre. Fourth thesis: Derrida’s concern with negative theology has led to an identification of deconstruction with negative theology. when in fact negative theology is dependent on a prior notion of full presence, whereas deconstruction undermines full presence. Derrida both saves and undoes apophatics, the silences of negative theology. In this extraordinary new work, Caputo shows that the tropes of Derrida’s early writings—diffe´rance, arche- writing, brissure, and so on—are incorporated into discussions of more recent Derridean texts, ‘‘Archive Fever,’’ Cinders, the essays on circumcision, and Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. Brilliant analyses abound: Caputo considers Derrida’s account of Patocka, the Czech religious thinker who is seen in terms of economy, an economy of faith so that faith becomes a system of credit, a trading off of giving and forgiving. He goes on to ponder Derrida’s question ‘‘Can there be genuine gifts or does 220

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economy cannibalize generosity, swallowing up the gift?’’ Can gifts be counterfeited? How does the theme of circumcision with its traditional and psychoanalytic resonances bear upon such echt Derridean motifs as writing and autobiography? Taken together, does Caputo’s reading of these Derridean texts constitute an act of naming, naming Derrida? And if so, is one of these names not ‘‘the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’’ as the title of Caputo’s splendid work suggests? Perhaps this description may also be applied to Caputo, who writes perceptively and with heart, with Christian caritas, Hebrew rachmanut, and Buddhist karuna, a doubleness expressed in the lines of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘‘Eyes and Tears,’’ cited by Derrida in his work on blindness: ‘‘How wisely nature did decree / With the same eyes to weep and see! . . . Thus let your streams o’erflow your springs, / Till eyes and tears be the same things: / And each the other’s difference bears; those weeping eyes / those seeing tears.’’14

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13

Derrida and Dante The Promise of Writing and the Piety of Broken Promises Francis J. Ambrosio

In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida,1 John Caputo argues convincingly that in Derrida’s more recent writings we discover, to our surprise, that he has ‘‘gotten religion’’ or, more accurately, that it has gotten him; indeed, that it already had him in the beginning. The ‘‘cut’’ that deconstruction traces copies the style of the cut of the circumcision made by the mohel in Derrida’s flesh. As a mark, Derrida reads this cut as a shibboleth, the mark of a two-edged sword that cuts both ways, that is, ambivalently. The ambivalent mark of the cut is the ‘‘bind’’ of a promise destined always to be broken, a covenant that always requires keeping. ‘‘Piety’’ means being caught in this bind; prayers and tears are the style, prefigured by the cut, of its expression, which for Derrida and all of his tribe, is writing. Writing is the mark of promises made, broken and kept with style: Yes! Come! The argument made in this essay is that Caputo’s reading of Derrida’s piety is not only a thoroughly believable thesis, but one that we should have been expecting for a long time now because it is strictly necessary; though, of course, necessity is always one of the most surprising of recognitions. Anyone who sustains a commitment with enough style to become identified with it, has by that very fact ‘‘got religion’’ in the most primitive and important sense of the word (Socrates is a good example, relevant to Augustine, who Caputo thinks is particularly relevant to Derrida). Derrida’s commitment to deconstruction, certainly stylish enough for him to be identified with it and 222

it with him, has the structure of all religious conversions: recognizing that one is caught in the bind of an ambivalent promise. This is the blood lineage that Derrida shares with Abraham, Elijah, Socrates, Yeshua, and in a particular way, with Augustine. This essay attempts to add one more evidential link to this chain of familiarity by showing that, through his relation to Augustine, Dante Alighieri’s style of piety, as expressed in his Commedia, closely parallels Derrida’s, particularly in that both involve the promise of writing, broken and kept, that the prayers of both are expressed in the form of a question— ‘‘Whom do I love when I love my God?’’—and that the tears of each are tears of repentance. More specifically, the essay will compare the piety of Derrida and Dante in terms of the following themes: (1) prodigality, the broken promise of writing; (2) piety, the keeping of the promise in the form of the question ‘‘Whom do I love when I love my God?’’; (3) conversion, the call of the Other heard as the memory of a woman; (4) prophecy, the hope of writing; (5) con/circumfession, shedding tears of repentance; (6) forgiveness, the redemption of the debt of broken promises expressed as the love of writing; and (7) vision/blindness, on the joy of seeing the face of God . . . and living. Finally, the essay turns to a consideration of the question, what difference might this relationship of significant difference amid enduring similarity regarding their styles of piety have for our understanding of Derrida, Dante, and ourselves. One disclaimer: the following essay is a purely occasional piece. The occasion is a further reflection on some of the issues raised in Caputo’s reading of the religious element in the writing of Derrida in Prayers and Tears. In what follows, not only the principal thesis, but also the texture and grain of its working out, done in Caputo’s own style of fine craftsmanship, is deeply and, it is hoped, recognizably ingrained. As an occasional piece, it would not be possible to do anything other or further than what Caputo has done, without presuming on the reader’s familiarity with his sketch of Derrida’s profile, seen from the ‘‘religious’’ perspective, as a supplement. Further, it is necessary to presume some level of familiarity with Dante Alighieri and his great poem. What results will certainly be no more than a pair of sketches, perhaps even caricatures, of two faces, profiled in writing. The hope of the present writing, itself something of a gesture of piety, an act of reverence, if you will, is to occasion a celebration, a small local festival in honor of the patron saints of two very different styles of writing, whose effigies, on occasion, are carried out in Derrida and Dante

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procession by the locals of each camp, each to meet the other face to face on some hallowed place. A small ceremonial ritual, a minor feast day, a certain style of piety. Two Pious Men Because piety seems to have gone out of style these days, at least for now in the West, perhaps Caputo is right to say we should be surprised to find Derrida a pious man. But perhaps it is also true that we should not be altogether surprised. After all, much that happens should not happen, at least in some sense. Here the sense might be that much of what does happen, but should not, occurs in situations where the basic realities of living—dying, for example—have fallen into neglect and have been forgotten. Certainly, this happens among us, even though it should not. However difficult it is to abide death among us, to keep death in mind, it is nonetheless necessary. This implies that piety, too, is necessary: it seems that piety is nothing other than taking death seriously, letting it take its place among us, the living, and memorializing it appropriately—ritual burial might be the oldest ‘‘culture.’’ But is this true—that piety is necessary, that humans need it in the strongest sense, that is, need it to be human because piety means taking death seriously and death is necessary because we need it? Hypothesis: to be human is to live through language, through and through—through and in and on language. Language is the place where human living and dying occurs, at least insofar as life and death have any meaning for us. Language is ‘‘where’’ and ‘‘how’’ and ‘‘why’’ human existence takes place. Without language, human living and dying are meaningless. As humans, language is our place, our homeland. It is our property, insofar as we ever could have any— because death takes place there, too, though improperly, taking away our proper place, our propriety. Death is improper, but necessary. The oldest trick in the book, indeed, much older than any book, before every culture and the origin of every book, the belongingtogether in tension of opposites: life needs death, death needs life, light needs dark, male needs female, in order to be meaningful, which is the only way to be that makes any sense. The relation is strictly necessary; the law of the ‘‘other’’ is the ‘‘law’’ of language: meaning is relation and language takes place as meaning. But what of religion? Piety would seem to be the proper virtue of religion. Indeed, but why? Meaning, all meaningful articulation, 224

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needs its other, its necessary, original and improper ‘‘opposite.’’ Silence. Silence is the other of meaning, necessarily, because silence is not simply the absence of words, potentially meaningful. Silence calls for meaning; it invites meaning by addressing human beings, soliciting a response by disrupting life as death—as silent as the grave. Meaning is stirred up in us as expression when death squeezes the life out of us, like wine from grapes. Silence is the divine in language because it has the initiative; it is the ‘‘arche,’’ the first and the ruler, the giver of the law of language. Silence, enclosed and contained, needs to provoke a response. The response takes place in and through and as the articulation of human identity. In response to silence, we become who we are, responsible for our death. This necessary relation of human existence to the divine is ‘‘religion’’ in the basic sense. Human life is necessarily religious (Derrida asks, what decent human being does not want (need) to love his/her god?). In this most necessary sense, however, the divine is not ‘‘god,’’ and religion is not theism of any sort. God is much younger than the divine: Zeus is third generation, we are told, and it was long after Abraham was bound to the covenant that Moses asked for the divine name, which for a long time still, no one was allowed to speak or write. No, religion is the human relationship to divine silence, the divine initiative that occurs as the silence of language takes place and enshrines itself among us. One way of speaking (!) about divine silence might be as ‘‘mystery.’’2 An improper etymology: mystery, from the Greek, muthos, word/story; steresis, privation, the lack of a proper capacity, for example, sterility. Divine silence happens to human beings as the suffering or passion of mystery taking our breath, and thus the possibility of speaking, away; it happens as the deprivation of a necessary meaning. This conscious awareness of being cut off and cut short, of not having the whole story, lacking the beginning and the end (Derrida—literature is always already happening) is the origin of the ‘‘self,’’ the self-consciousness of being circumscribed by a secret without truth, the truth that there is no truth, because the ‘‘whole truth’’ is impossible, meaningless. Mystery literally takes our words away, in the radical sense—it sterilizes us, not post factum, but originally. It makes the spilling of our seed—words, dissemination— endlessly insufficient to our need. Divine mystery takes place improperly as death, as the death which is the birth of language, shutting us up, making us in its own image and likeness, but ecstatically so. We celebrate divine mystery/death ritually, liturgically; we worship its invitation to express ourselves, to pour ourselves out, Derrida and Dante

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ejaculating the seed of life endlessly into the secret tomb/womb of the earth, the seed’s grave and the place of fertility. Sexuality is the original liturgical ritual. Masculine and feminine are the inflected rhythm of language. Adam and Eve are the first children of divine mystery; language’s first proper names, and naming is their first order of business; they go about properly and improperly, so it seems. But still, what of piety—the proper virtue of religion, taking divine mystery seriously? The story of another pious man, Socrates. We know the story, so far as it goes, of the provocation he receives from the oracle at Delphi: ‘‘There is no one wiser than Socrates.’’ Response: ‘‘What does the god mean? Why does he not speak more plainly? I am only too conscious of having no wisdom at all. Yet the god says I am the wisest of men. He cannot be telling a lie; that would not be right for him.’’3 Startling! An act of original faith, expressed in the idiom of a particular religious culture. It gives us the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the way faith, the original religious response, expresses itself: as a question of meaning supported by an act of trust. ‘‘What does the god mean? He cannot be lying.’’ Socrates gets back behind the oracle, as he must do, by recollecting the question behind the statement, the silence from which ‘‘no one wiser’’ emerges. Where did this come from, and where on earth is it going? But not just that: Socrates will go along with it because he must. It must be true, and therefore binding, because, if the voice of divine mystery were to be the father of lies, if it were to speak with the serpent’s forked tongue, then nothing at all could be trusted and all responsible questioning would fall dead. Life would not merely be changed, but ended. Chaos. All would be only silence and death—and that would be absurd. The oracle’s pronouncement articulates the silence of divine mystery by inscribing itself into Socrates’ life, which naturally leads to his death, as the story goes. He is marked with and identified by the question to which he now becomes responsible, the fundamental religious question, which addresses itself to us right at the beginning of the story: What do you say? How will you speak, live, and die? As if speaking and living and dying were meaningful or absurd? As if they were all bound up with an ‘‘Other’’ in the reciprocity of a relationship that binds and holds together and holds up; one, in short, to which one can entrust one’s whole ‘‘self’’? Or as if speaking and living and dying were a bad joke, a Sisyphean labor, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing? The fundamental religious question initially has to do not with the existence or name(s) of god(s) but with faith, and faith’s 226

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origin in a question, as a question: is human existence as a whole, in its original and final condition, meaningful or absurd? Or to say the same differently, is the silent mystery of the divine other, whose silence is always addressed to us and soliciting us wherever we turn, to be trusted to tell a truthful story, though never all of it, or must we be on guard, suspecting a lie? Am I at home in the cosmos, in life and death, or am I a stranger? The question of faith begins the long story of human personal identity, which, of course, is the only way language happens. Nothing ever happens except as language, and language happens only as the personal stories, without beginning or end, of human lives and deaths. The world is composed entirely and exclusively of the fabric of these stories, loosely woven from their threads of meaning. Thus the question of piety has gotten under way, a first step: to be pious is to take the divine seriously, to respond in faith to its silent mystery as a question to which we become responsible in life and death, without beginning or end. Piety necessarily begins with faith, the willingness to participate in the initiative of the other, to entrust ourselves to the relationship with divine mystery. But the proper virtue of piety is to go on from there, to take further steps. Socrates’ piety is enacted as pilgrimage: he begins by trusting that the god is truthful, so that the message must be true, but impossible. He knows that he does not know—faith yields knowledge, specifically, selfknowledge. What, then, can the god mean by this impossible truth? Piety requires that the expression of divine mystery be attended to, celebrated, worshiped. Pilgrimage: on the way to worship. Socrates’ worship takes the form of participatory questioning, philosophical conversation, first with himself, then, in justice, with his fellow citizens. His piety sets his direction, the way he will go on in life; in so doing, it sets out the markers that trace his way, gives it its style. It is his way of going on in life toward death. To have style is to go your own way. Piety is the stylus with which we mark out the path of our pilgrimage, trace the figure of our identity as persons; piety is the ‘‘how’’of faith. Piety is strictly and necessarily personal: both the same and different for everyone. Human stories, lives, and deaths, too, are strictly personal. They are told by and written with the style of one’s piety. Socrates’ style of piety is distinctly Greek: questioning as the worshipful celebration of a cosmos ordered to intelligible truth, where human beings can make themselves at home through self-knowledge. Caputo tells us that Derrida’s style of piety is ‘‘Jewgreek,’’ expressed Derrida and Dante

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in a Latinate idiom. Jewish piety is different from Greek: philosophical questioning is a scientific affair, universal in the sense that it goes the way of questions that mark the boundaries of what is taken to be the same for all persons. Individuality is a matter of fate, necessity worked out to fit the scale of the particular, miniaturized, so to speak, and therefore not to be taken too very seriously, certainly not personally. Jewish piety, on the other hand, turns on partiality and difference; it is all quite personal, strictly I-Thou. Jewish piety is not about truth, except insofar as truth binds in the form of a covenant between individuals. Here, too, gods do not lie, but when they speak, it is in the form of command: ‘‘Do not eat; get up and go.’’ ‘‘Write these laws on your minds and hearts.’’ ‘‘Go tell my people.’’ But partiality is the mark of the Jewish God, the dialect in which this piety expresses itself. ‘‘I have chosen you from among the people(s) and set you apart; so cut yourself apart, cut a part of yourself as a mark of my partiality toward you, of how I have encircled you with my covenant, of your separateness from all but me, and to mark you as different.’’ Circumcision is the distinguishing mark of Jewish piety. It is, literally, the stylus mark of this style of piety. It marks off the bind and bond that takes place in the covenant, a very particular place. It is very unscientific, not at all universal, quite different, somewhat strange. It is a style that is not at home in the world, at least not just anywhere. It has only one Promised Land, one homeland. But the promise keeps getting deferred; the Messiah, he who is to fulfill the promise, is also always he who is yet to come, faithful but different, not here, not yet, not among us, a wanderer, an exile, most present in being cut off, usually by death, in the widow and the orphan for example. The Messiah is always other, mysterious; the God-bearing image, not graven, but deferred, of a promise always broken but faithfully kept. Strangely partial for divine mystery after so much history, so much to say, so much written, so much spoken and written history that never seems to come to an end. It does not just keep on going, but keeps unraveling, getting tied up in knots, ending up in deadly binds, yet the promise never comes to anything or anyone, not even the chosen, or so it seems. Hard to get these two styles of piety together, Jew and Greek. Yet it happens; it happened to Derrida, Caputo tells us. How? First, because it seems to be necessary—the tension of opposites, the need of the other—it should not be surprising that it would be mysterious. Mystery is the most necessary of all; the greater the need, the more mysterious. Furthermore, what is strictly necessary and mysterious 228

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is divine in origin, hence must be taken seriously. Faith, finding itself in exile in the desert of mystery, must find a way of going on, and thus undergoes a second displacement, pilgrimage. It happened to Abram, the road leading to covenant. It happened to Socrates, the road leading to philosophy. It seems to have happened to Derrida: not at home with being different in the Jewish style, at least not among Arabs and other Jews, not at home with being a stranger in that particular place, he has to cut a different bargain with the other, the Greek other. It is not the first time; many others have done it before him. In fact, a whole culture had grown up on this particular cut, Latin/Roman by name. Virgil told the story of how it first happened; Augustine taught the Romans how to be Catholic, and seems to have taught Derrida something along those lines, at least enough to pass for a Jewgreek French philosopher/atheist. The culture of Roman Catholicism, in all its magisterial splendor, was for a long time the Teacher par excellence of how this Jewgreek bargain gets cut. It was the first teacher of the trick of three, the Trinity, the Three-in-One, the other Other, in whose name alone the impossible/possible Jewgreek bargain gets cut. Derrida’s pilgrimage turns out to be along a well-worn path, yet still different, quite particular. He learned to speak Jewgreek in Paris, tutored in spirit by Augustine, from whom he has perhaps picked up a bit of a Latin/ Roman, Catholic accent, though probably there would be those who would protest this characterization. In Paris, he so mastered the style, that he became a magister himself, teaching in an idiom of his own, turning the trick so well that he managed to pass as something other than a Jew, a Greek, or a Christian. He managed to pass as an ‘‘atheist.’’ But, while that is a respectable style of piety in general, it is nonetheless generic, and Caputo’s claim is that Derrida’s atheism is only skin deep, that you can cut it away and still be left with a very stylish, if highly stylized, stylus, capable of cutting a very distinguished figure. According to Caputo, Derrida’s stylus has traced a personal identity that is not just that of ‘‘stranger,’’ who quickly becomes familiar enough to be recognized as ‘‘the stranger.’’ The atheist is a familiar type of ‘‘the stranger’’ in the Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Greco-Roman West, for example, Socrates. For Caputo, Derrida’s stylus is genuinely ‘‘other,’’ uncanny, disturbing, a little mysterious with a hint of the divine, the one who has the initiative, about it. Contention: Derrida’s distinctive style of piety emerges from his being constantly on pilgrimage. There is no via diritta for him from Derrida and Dante

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which to go astray, but his condition is errant, nonetheless. The destination is the impossible: the impossibility of the Messiah arriving; the impossibility of there being history without writing; the impossibility of the writing ever ceasing because the promise of writing is endlessly deferred, and the fabric of writing endlessly unraveled by the history it traces; the impossibility of justice, the impossibility of forgiveness. This a-destination makes it very Jewish in style, a piety of passion for the impossible. Derrida‘s pilgrimage is, however, also distinctively Greek in its style of piety. It bears the mark of the real impiety of Socrates: his pilgrimage is cosmo-metropolitan, it keeps to the boundaries of the city where people gather to live, because the city is the cosmos. The city is the uni-verse, where everybody speaks the same language, more or less, so they cannot very well get away from or very effectively pretend they do not understand what you are talking about, even though they try. Socrates’ style of impiety was to talk about justice and citizenship to people who thought they knew already what they were talking about, and to do so in such a way that their familiar style of language went limp on them and would not do what they needed it to do. But then again, Derrida’s pilgrimage is unmistakably RomanLatin in its idiomatic, idiosyncratic style of expression. With all due respect to Derrida’s Augustinian credentials, he is, for all the world, an even more original likeness of Saint Paul than of Saint Augustine:4 an itinerant Jew talking to Greeks in their own language about the unknown god—a scandal to Jews and a stumbling block to Greeks. He wends his way to Rome to become, with time and the spur of Constantine and Augustine’s dream of empire, magisterial (with a streak of protest), teaching the more original form of the trick of three than the version Augustine formulated in De Trinitate, the trick of always being other to the other. This is the trick of setting up a flow of exchange that is uneconomical, a circulation of gift giving and receiving and return without condition, expiration or warrant, a reconciliation with no reckoning but the impossible allowance of forgiveness. Paul preached it in Rome, and all along the way, under the name of ‘‘resurrection.’’ A simple question really: not ‘‘Who was Jesus?’’ but always ‘‘Who is Jesus?’’ Jesus, the Other to both our living and our dying; faithful companion and ally to the living and the dead. Jesus as the Other of all others, whose name is love: ‘‘He (everyone, us) who abides in love, abides in God, and God in him’’ (cf. John 15:5, 9). Love as other to both us and God—or death. Augustine confesses the resurrection when he forms his question, 230

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‘‘What do I love when I love my God?’’ In ‘‘Circumfession,’’ Derrida, too, confesses that his God is named by love, love of the living in the face of death. Death as the other face of the other. Death does seem to give the other an other face. But it seems purely impossible that the gift of death as Derrida understands it and the gift of resurrection as Paul and Augustine understand it are somehow the same despite a real difference, marked by two very different styles of piety. It would certainly be too easy to leave it at that. Yet how to go along with the question faithfully, to take it seriously? That would require entrusting ourselves to a guide who is experienced in both styles of piety. Two Pilgrims’ Progress Premise: Derrida the pilgrim would recognize Dante Alighieri, who also identified himself with the pilgrim style of piety, as familiar yet strange enough to provoke his instinct to extend hospitality, to treat him as a companion with whom sharing a sustaining meal would be congenial. The bread of the meal would be ‘‘forgiveness,’’ plenty to chew on; the wine would be expressed as writing the impossible. A love feast: companionship memorialized in an exchange of gifts, ritually celebrated in the presence of a third, a divine other, the liturgy of worship tracing out the itinerary of a pilgrimage set in motion by the impossible promise of writing toward an impossible destination, the writing of love. Mile markers on the pilgrims’ way: prodigality; fidelity; conversion; prophecy; con/circumfession; forgiveness; vision. Prodigality Promises are always acts of prodigality; they participate in the character of hope, they are literally expressions of hope. What is promised is something im-proper—not yet one’s own property to give away. They are excessive, beyond the means of an economy of exchange. They are tokens of the gift of hope. In Christianity, hope is one of the theological virtues, a divine gift of grace. In Derrida’s parlance, that would be the gift of death, which to paraphrase, would raise the question, in what do I hope when I hope in my God. Derrida’s hope in ‘‘Circumfession’’ is hope in the promise of writing, writing undertaken, promised in the face of death: the face of his own death, of his mother’s death. He hopes to confess his circumcision, the indelible mark in his flesh of the promise, not his own, but one Derrida and Dante

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that has a claim on him nonetheless. An impossible promise, an impossible claim: ‘‘Do you see the stars? I will make of you a great nation, more numerous than those’’ (cf. Genesis 12:2, 22:17). A prodigal promise: not just economic optimism—many from one—but many from none—impossible. Derrida is the problem child of an impossible promise, and he is in the situation of having to write his promise, the promise written in his flesh. As a child of father Abraham, he has to make his apologies (Greek for the Latinate-Hebrew ‘‘con/circumfession’’) for who he is and is not to mother Sarah/Georgette before he dies (Caputo knows this story quite well).5 He is the prodigal son of the promise; like all of his nation, he cannot be at home in the hope of a Promised Land that is still to come, not yet. The promise of writing in the face of death is born of the gift of hope and is therefore impossible, like all gifts. Dante finds himself in a similar bind: he concludes his first ‘‘book,’’ La Vita Nuova (every bit as loose a construction as anything bound under Derrida’s signature), with an absolutely impossible, absolutely prodigal promise: to write of his lady, in the face of her death, what has never been written in verse of woman before.6 Dante, too, is the child of a promise: in this book, he is born again into a new life, the offspring of a divine promise, not his own, into which he is conscripted by a divine patriarch—the god Amor. At the age of nine, and again at eighteen (after Augustine, Dante is the master of the trick of three). First, he is dominated, then ravaged by this divine name, a victim of divine violence, which is then imposed on his lady, Beatrice—his heart has been cut out of him, and Amor gives it to her with the command to take and eat. A very bad dream, which ends badly, though Dante manages to forget for a time—until her death a few years later. The parallel to Isaac/Derrida is too disturbing not to mark: translated and transcribed this would be the equivalent of the unspeakable demand that mother Sarah/Georgette swallow the severed foreskin of her son’s circumcision. It is an archetype, everybody’s bad dream, the particular form, in this style of poetry, of the blood sacrifice and consumption that is the mark of divine violence written into every religious covenant in one form or another. Disturbing, but strictly necessary, or so it seems. Violence and transgression seem to be written into promising as a form of the Gift, the Secret, divine mystery. The promise of the father, God, means death for the son of that promise, and the son’s mother must swallow it—hence the ‘‘son of these tears.’’ For Dante, the promised writing turns out to be the Commedia, which hopes to redeem the 232

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prodigal debt of the promise of the Vita Nuova. In the early days of his promising youth, Dante read the dream of heart eating as a vocation to poetry and circulation. He wrote up the dream and circulated it among fellow poets inviting and receiving marginal commentary. It is only when Beatrice speaks to him again in the face of death at the end of his earthly pilgrimage that he learns what he must confess—learns how bad the taste in her mouth of the heart that he hoped to give her in writing actually had been; how much there was in the writing which he promised and with which he identified himself that needed to be forgiven. His Commedia is the written confession of the prodigal debt of his promise of writing—a promise that had been squeezed out of him when he was still a child, and had become caught up in the violent bind of the divine gift. It could only be redeemed by writing the impossible—writing a new death for the writing of a ‘‘new life.’’ Fidelity What could it mean to keep an impossibly prodigal promise? How does one keep what is, twice over, not one’s own: what has been received and promised as a gift? This remains a question, necessarily. Sometimes a promise can be kept by letting it turn itself into a question, which is itself an expression of hope, ‘‘What do I love when I love my God?’’ for example. Because most styles of piety hold that faith, hope, and love belong together, we might seem to be on the right track. In fact, it seems that keeping a promise means following the trace marks, being on the trail of a doubly impossible destination. The question points out the path of a journey to be taken. In the case of divine promises, prodigal promises of the impossible, these journeys are pilgrimages. Pilgrimage was in fact a very popular way of keeping a vow or sacred promise in Dante’s world, and Abraham was the first whose prodigal state of exile was turned into a pious pilgrimage by divine command, a journey so impossible and so questionable that it prompted Sarah to laugh—but that was before things got serious. Derrida’s question in ‘‘Circumfession’’ is also Dante’s question in the Commedia—their way of keeping faith with and entrusting their way to their impossible promises. Or rather—both get their question directly from Saint Augustine. ‘‘What do I love when I love [my] God?’’ Dante’s Commedia is owed just as directly to Augustine’s Confessions as Derrida’s ‘‘Circumfession’’ is. The first words of the poem Derrida and Dante

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tell us that clearly: ‘‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . .’’ ‘‘In the middle . . .’’ It all begins in the middle. Literature and life alike have always already happened. It is a journey, cammin; mysterious, without beginning or end. And it is ‘‘our life,’’ always ‘‘mine’’ for all of us; it never happens any other way. We all belong to this tribe, necessarily, Everyman and Everywoman. But the beginning of this journey is not promising, because Dante says he is lost, the direct route (via diritta) has vanished. Perhaps we are as surprised to hear that there is a direct route for this journey, a right way of keeping prodigal promises, as Dante seems to be to find it disappeared. But Dante got it directly from Saint Augustine, ‘‘I was without, but you were within.’’ Nel mezzo—within, at the center, the necessary, impossible starting point that makes all the circumstantial, circumferential points possible. The direct(-ion of the) way. The center is the secret point which can measured only by the number/name that cannot be spoken or written.7 The center point is the point on which everything else turns; the crucial point, the critical point, the point where the point enters and begins to make the cut, the decisive cut on which depends life and death. This is the point at which Dante finds himself, ‘‘mi ritrovai,’’ or, more accurately, refinds himself, comes to himself again, wakes up. He says later he was full of sleep when he strayed from the path. He further says he wakes up to find himself again, ‘‘per una selva oscura,’’ in a dark, obscure wood (literally, per/through, in the midst of, through and through, thoroughly). In and through, by means of, the journey through the dark wood. The wood: the forest/desert; the place of exile, paradise lost, original sin: the uncanny place where we cannot be at home; the un-Promised Land. He found himself there again. Always there, in the middle, at the center. Dante got this from Saint Augustine as well, ‘‘factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii’’ (I have been made to myself a land of difficulty and sweat and tears ). He found the center of himself, his identity, the ‘‘truth’’ to which the question of human identity—‘‘Who am I?’’—directions all persons: ‘‘quaesti mihi factus sum’’ (I am become a question to myself). He found his ‘‘soul’’ there, which he had all but lost, by tracing back his steps to where he went astray, where he got cut off. The soul is the starting point of every pilgrimage, of every human journey whose divine origin and destiny is taken seriously. It is the center, the point where the point enters, where the cut originates. The soul is the slit: the eye through which one sets one’s sights; the ear to which the silence of divine mystery addresses itself, soliciting a response, inviting 234

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us to tell the story of who we are on the way to making ourselves through our journey to God—or death. Dante puts it thus: Ah, how hard it is to tell what that wood was, wild, rugged, harsh; the very thought of it renews the fear! It is so bitter that death is hardly more so. But, to treat of the good that I found in it, I will tell of the other things I saw there.8 From the beginning, the journey is taken in the face of death—a difficult friend, rude, rough, stubborn. From the beginning the journey has about it the whiff of death; it awakens fear and trembling ‘‘in the blood.’’ Yet Dante’s starting point, in the center/soul of himself, is where the highest good begins to shine forth and reveal itself in the telling of the tale,9 a tale told through the writing. Here Dante, like Derrida, acknowledges the Augustinian doctrine ‘‘facere veritatem in amore’’ (to do the truth in love). This is also the doctrine of freedom, ‘‘ama, et fac quod vis’’ (Love, and do what you will). The journey is taken in the face of God—or death, or love. The trick of three: these three are one—the other, the self, and the exchange of gifts between them. Identity and freedom are the path their journey traces, its question marks. This is why Caputo says of Derrida’s vade mecum, ‘‘What do I love when I love my God?’’ that in the articulation the emphasis falls on the ‘‘my.’’ The love of God reveals itself beginning with the coming to himself (always again) and the response of Yes! Come! God—or death; Yes! My truth! Freedom to do the truth by expressing it in the writing of the story. God incarnate in the word of a personal story of the doing of a poetic pilgrimage. The parallel with the case of Derrida seems almost straightforward. He comes to himself again in Paris, in the middle of his exile/flight from El Barib. He has left behind the land of the broken promise and the death of its God. He has followed a different path, a path that went astray and now he finds himself lost in the thicket/desert/chora of deconstructed stories. Diffe´rance, the path that strays. But, at an uncertain time, he stops and turns to face that death, or God, or his lady-mother, or himself, the truth/soul of who he has made himself in writing, and he takes his stylus in hand and rewrites the journey differently. In a newly pious style, he tries to tell of the good (God) that has always been inviting, calling, promising, hoping, sighing, dreaming . . . and which he found there in the dying/writing of the old story of the ‘‘new life.’’ This new story is a story of prayers and tears, which is why it has been underDerrida and Dante

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stood less and less well. Apparently, the further he journeys, the less well marked the trail becomes, the harder he becomes to trace—at least for some. Just like Dante, Derrida writes differently when he catches the whiff of death and feels the fear of it in his blood—his death, God’s death, his lady-mother’s death.10 Thus, for both, the story begins with a gesture of fidelity, of keeping faith in the promise of writing, a coming to oneself again in the face of death in an act of trust that there will be a way out, a way to go on writing the good that one finds there nel mezzo. Conversion Confessions are stories of conversion: one confesses the truth that one has done when one reached turning points. Augustine identifies three turning points in his journey. Allegorically, each of the three stages of Dante’s journey through the ‘‘afterlife’’ (after death, after facing death), Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, unfolds in the direction of a conversion episode that initiates his movement into the middle of that ‘‘region,’’ where the region itself opens up as a distinct perspective from the one central point of the soul. A conversion is a metanoia, a change of ‘‘mind’’ or attitude, a new bearing or stance or posture of freedom. In the present context, the relevant fact is that for Augustine, Dante, and Derrida, the turning points are marked by the call of a beloved lady, the God-bearing image, and the efficacy of the call has much to do with fidelity; it is the constancy of the calling that supports the keeping of the promise in the face of death. For each man, the promise is in the keeping of a woman whose face brings them face to face with death, and thus turns their face in a new direction on the journey of life. For Dante, the first conversion, which leads him into the Inferno, is effected by a story told by his ‘‘guide,’’ his guardian angel or patron saint of writing, Virgil. When Virgil tells him he must first descend in order to ascend, a strategy he and Augustine share, Dante’s old prodigality shows itself in a hasty promise to follow him, which almost immediately deconstructs itself into a different story. Dante whines to Virgil: ‘‘But I, why do I come there? And who allows it? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul; of this neither I nor others think me worthy. Wherefore, if I yield and come, I fear that the coming may be folly. You are wise; you understand better than I explain it.’’ 236

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And like one who unwills what he has willed and with new thought changes his resolve, so that he quite gives up the thing he had begun, such did I become on that dark slope, for by thinking on it I rendered null the undertaking that had been so suddenly embarked upon.11 Virgil’s response is to reveal more of the story, the story of the person(s) behind his voice: a feminine trinity of heavenly women— Beatrice, Saint Lucy, and the Virgin Mary, the universal mother and ‘‘mediatrix of all grace.’’ Writing in the tradition of Courtly Love, Dante casts Virgil as the chivalrous courtier who cannot refuse anything to a woman of noble virtue, especially when that virtue is raised to the perfect power of three, reaching to the very limit of the silence of divine mystery. Virgil tells the story of his sending as a mirror image of the story of another calling, the Annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary, who is, in her turn, now the initiator of the vocation that reaches Dante through Beatrice and Virgil, and begins to turn him in a new direction. Virgil, recounting his solicitation by Beatrice, explains: ‘‘When she had said this to me, she turned her eyes, which shone with tears, making me the more eager to come; and so, even as she wished, I came to you and rescued you . . . What, then, is this? Why, why, do you hold back? Why do you harbor such cowardice in your heart? Why are you not bold and free, when in Heaven’s court three such blessed ladies are mindful of you, and my words pledge you so great a good?’’ As little flowers bent, down and closed by chill of night, straighten and all unfold upon their stems when the sun brightens them, such in my faint strength did I become; and so much good courage rushed to my heart that I began, as one set free, ‘‘oh, how compassionate was she who helped me and how courteous were you. . . . By your words you have made me so eager to come with you that I have returned to my first resolve. . . . So I said to him and when he moved on, I entered along the deep and savage way.12 The image literally speaks out of the earth, the oldest of the old, the renewal of life in the face of death, the uneconomical dispensation of life as ‘‘grace,’’ as gift. Not the ‘‘cycle of life,’’ of day and night, of seasons, where there is no real death or life but just the play of forces, just alteration. Here, there is help and change, conversion, a new diDerrida and Dante

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rection resolved. ‘‘O blessed she that stooped to take my part.’’ The gift of the other, after death. Derrida mirrors it (the image is of course reversed) in ‘‘Circumfession’’ when he recalls a scene of his mother, ‘‘she was holding my hand,’’ on the way to nursery school, and wishing to stay with her, he invents an illness, but is left nonetheless: whence the tears when later in the afternoon, from the playground, I caught sight of her through the fence, she must have been as beautiful as a photograph, and I reproached her for leaving me in the world, in the hands of others, basically with having forgotten that I was supposed to be ill so as to stay with her, just according to our very alliance, on of our 59 conjurations without which I am nothing, accusing her in this way of letting me be caught up by school, all of those cruel mistresses.13 Derrida, but also Dante, bereft by Beatrice’s death in the Vita Nuova, lost and abandoned in the Dark Wood before Virgil’s revelation of her call. Abandonment and Call: opposite experiences to be sure, but possible only within the same relationship. Possible only where both abandonment and rescue are real possibilities; only where there is love, which is, of course, impossible. The constancy of the call that keeps the promise is the voice of the Other/woman who speaks in memory and beckons to turn around and remember again in a new way. Prophecy Conversion marks the turning point of faith into hope. Prophecy is a voice of hope regarding what might, or might not, be coming. Prophecy predicts judgment; it reminds us of the necessity of judgment concerning where and how we stand in the face of the other, God/ death. Prophecy takes place as the announcing of the need for judgment regarding identity—‘‘Who have I been, who will I be?’’ ‘‘Who am I when I ask what do I love when I love my God, now that the voice of God has called me and turned me around in the person of my other/god, my lady who bears God’s image because she helped me?’’ In Dante’s poem, Virgil begins to teach the pilgrim how to speak prophetically for himself by showing him how to read the structure of prophetic discourse, which usually comes in the form of the writing on the wall, in this case the inscription over the Gates of Hell, 238

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which marks the point where his way turns into judgment. The writing articulates the impossible shock he must undergo in passing through them: Through me you enter the woeful city, through me you enter eternal grief, through me you enter among the lost. Justice moved my high maker: The divine power made me, the supreme wisdom, and the primal love. Before me nothing was created if not eternal, and eternal I endure. Abandon every hope, you who enter.14

Of course, it is impossible to go on without hope; hope means going on. But Virgil teaches Dante that the writing contains a difference of meaning that depends for its significance on where one stands in relation to the ‘‘finality’’ of judgment. Virgil tells him that here he must finally put aside all distrust, every cowardly fear. He must begin to judge—not the other(s) whom he will see, but himself in the face of the other(s). The discourse of prophecy is always ironic; it is infected by difference. It means both what it says and other than it says. By passing through the Gates, Dante enters in to the places of final judgment, and by seeing those who have been judged by God/ death, he begins to learn how to judge himself in the face of God/ death. Paolo and Francesca’s story of their reading of the book, for example, illustrates the ironic structure of judgment. Their decision to stop reading, their refusal to allow the Other of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere to speak to them and interpret their story differently for them, constitutes their damnation. They lose themselves to themselves and one another. They close up their identities within the rigid, frigid howling circulation of the whirlwind, which silences all language with its unspeakable roar. Hearing their final words, ‘‘that day we read no more,’’15 Dante describes his own response, ‘‘I fell like one whom sleep seizes.’’ Paolo and Francesca fell asleep in each other’s arms and were murdered by her husband, his brother. Dante, like them, falls into something like sleep. Shocked by the finality of God/death’s judgment on these two, he is set back almost to where and whom he was when he came to himself again to find that he was lost. In them, he finds himself—lost. To stop reading now in the moment of judgment, to refuse to allow the Other of the story to tell Derrida and Dante

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one’s own story differently, to close off the meaning of the writing: this is to choose death finally, not as the other of life, but against life, death in life, so that life becomes Hell, no exit from oneself in the face of the other. Coming to himself again, Dante begins to understand how he is to read the ironic text of judgment and how to go on writing his own judgment. The judgment is in the going on. Now he also begins to understand Virgil’s prophetic words as they stood before the Gates of Hell: ‘‘We have come to the place where I have told you we will see the wretched people who have lost the good of intellect.’’16 For the good of intellect is judgment, knowing how to use the Yes! and the No!, the punctuation marks of history. The stories of prophetic judgment bend and twist and writhe, descending into the abyss of judgment, with Dante recognizing more consciously himself-in-the-other, the other in himself and cataloguing in his unapologetically scholastic way the full range of impossibly possible ways that hope can be lost. The sum of these recognitions is that Hell is the place of refusal—refusal of the Other, certainly. But, in one specific way, through all its modalities, the final refusal of the Other is the refusal to seek forgiveness. Paolo and Francesca, by refusing to admit an Other in their story, become incapable of responsibility for their identities in that story. No responsibility, no hope of forgiveness, that is, of the story being given a new meaning by the grace of another, ‘‘who can do what he wills.’’17 Before undergoing the conversion for which this growing selfknowledge prepares, Dante has two final encounters, one human, one superhuman, which form the poem’s final word about the finality of judgment as refusal: the story of Count Ugolino and the un-story of Satan. Dante comes upon Ugolino frozen up to his neck in ice, with just enough room to turn his head to gnaw at the nape of his neighbor’s, Archbishop Ruggieri’s, neck. Partnered in political betrayal, Ugolino was double-crossed by Ruggieri and is now caught up in an eternal vendetta, the gnawing hunger for revenge that knows no satiety. Ugolino recounts how he and his four sons were locked in the ‘‘Hunger Tower’’ in Pisa to be starved to death, how, so as not to disturb them further, he turned his heart to stone, and refused to speak to his children. Misinterpreting his signs, they offer him their own flesh to eat. Despite the dying cry of one, ‘‘Father, why do you not help me?’’ he dumbly watches them perish, one by one without a word, until he goes blind and falls to groping over their bodies, now futilely calling their names. Then silence, when ‘‘fasting did more than grief can do.’’18 Consumed by insatiable hunger for 240

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revenge, Ugolino betrays his sons and starves them to death—not physically, but for want of a word of forgiveness on which they could have fed their deaths, giving a meaning, saving their father’s name. This episode, together with that of Satan, completes the ironic discourse of the Inferno on prophetic judgment: as infernal parodies of the Eucharist and the Cross, they situate us at the point of most profound tension between love as gift and hatred as betrayal, between yes and no. Both are real possibilities for Dante, however impossibly ‘‘otherworldly’’ they might finally be. Saint Augustine takes the same view when speaking of the two thieves crucified with Christ, ‘‘Do not despair, one thief was saved; do not presume, one thief was damned.’’ Impossibly, the gift of love, which is freedom, contains both possibilities ambiguously within itself. Judgment, even when final, remains a secret for living human beings and for the Living God. Caputo tells us that Derrida’s religion without religion is prophetic and messianic, too—with a difference. From the early encounter with negative theology, the ambiguity of diffe´rance, which is strictly necessary, asserts itself: in response to the claim that diffe´rance is the God of negative theology, Derrida responds, ‘‘It is and it is not.’’19 Yes and No. Both are real possibilities, although each is impossible because the two can occur together only within language, and nothing that happens in language is final. Finality is altogether other than language, at least human language, the language of the living. But what language do the dead speak, the others of the others? It would seem that death brings speaking and writing to an end, at least with regard to telling one’s own story. But what other story could one possibly tell? And if another were to try to pick up the thread of the story, well, that certainly would be another story. Thus the finality of the judgment comes in the face of death, which puts an end to the story, even if it is a secret and ambiguous ending. Dante seems to avoid getting stuck in the dilemma about the finality of judgment in a way quite similar to Derrida: he inscribes it into language; he writes the end back into the middle of the story, and so allows it to go on. For Dante, his pilgrimage through the final (impossible) possibilities of during a little less than life, the beyond life, the other-of-life, occurs a week of fictive earthly time in the middle of his life. After the pilgrimage is over, after he has ‘‘seen God’’ (or someone) face-to-face, he returns exactly (almost) to where he first realized that the ‘‘direct route’’ had disappeared. Nel mezzo. He has come full circle, but in the process the circle has become de-centered, and he must begin again to trace the path that does not stray. Caputo says, ‘‘For Derrida, negDerrida and Dante

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ative theology is an event within language, something that happens to language, a certain trembling or fluctuation of language.’’20 In no sense is Dante’s theology negative; if it were a theology, it would be an affirmative one. But the Commedia is not theology, though it has theology in it. It is a poem that begins and finally ends, not with an Absolute Being, but in the middle of life—in the face of death. Prophecy happens in language about the ambiguous possibilities of an impossible but necessary final judgment in answer to the question ‘‘Who am I when I ask what do I love when I love my God?’’ Con/circumfession Prophecy goes on tracing its way, hoping to read the marks of judgment regarding human identity. Confession is the filling up and welling over of that hope, the expression of identity discovered in sighs and tears. Caputo tells us that Derrida has for a long time now been sighing prayers and shedding tears, expressing his hope to confess himself before death finalizes the story. Dante, after the conversion that turns his world upside down at the end of the Inferno, begins a long climb up Mount Purgatory, through nights and days, dreams and labors, through passion and action, through all of the opposites that are the curriculum by which this ‘‘school of contemplation’’ runs its course. Having been bar mitzvahed by Virgil, so to speak, confirmed in his adult capacity for self-judgment by his surrogate father, Dante is led by Matilda, the ‘‘other’’ woman, standing in for all the ‘‘other women’’ in Dante’s life, whoever they might be, to the edge of a river, where he witnesses an allegorical ‘‘pageant of the church,’’ a lengthy train of signifiers who serve to put Beatrice, the one who is coming, in her proper place, that is, allegorically in the place of the Eucharist in the procession. In this play of signifiers, she is the sacrament, she signifies the Christ who is the gift of food and drink that gives new life in the face of the old death; ‘‘I am the truth, and the way, and the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, even though he dies, shall live; and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die’’ (cf. John 11:25–26). Impossible. But Dante had believed it impossible to face death, Beatrice’s, his own, the death of the writing he had promised and with which he had hoped finally to identify himself. (For now, we are still talking about Dante, not Derrida and Georgette, or Augustine and Monica.) Badly shaken, Dante feels his blood trembling, remembering when, as a child, he first saw Beatrice, herself a child. He turns to 242

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Virgil, his father/mother,21 only to find himself bereft. Beatrice now speaks; she names him ‘‘Dante’’ (for which impropriety—allowing his own proper name to get out of his control in his own writing—he immediately apologizes to the reader, abashed). She makes it clear that now she is father/mother to him, she makes him a child again, herself playing the role of both Adam and Eve, so that he immediately recognizes that he himself can no longer play the child and must take on the role of Adam for himself. He must unlearn the lesson that ‘‘Original Sin’’ taught the race, to shift the responsibility for one’s own story to another. If he is to be forgiven, he must undo in himself the evil Adam/Ugolino did; he must not refuse responsibility for his own story, as if to say, ‘‘the woman gave it to me, and the serpent to her, and I did eat.’’ That is neither confession nor circumfession. But he does not face up immediately. She continues, ‘‘Because Virgil leaves, do not weep, do not weep yet, for you must weep for another sword’’ (30, 50–57). The story has to be rewritten, before it can be wept and forgiven. The rewriting is the forgiving and the tears are the ink, the transubstantiated sacrament of the blood this sword releases with its cut. The sword of her words, her version of the story, is keen and double-edged; she uses it to circumcise his heart: For a time I sustained him with my countenance: showing him my youthful eyes I led him with me turned toward the right goal. So soon as I was on the threshold of my second age, and had changed life, this one gave himself to others. When from flesh to spirit I had ascended, and beauty and virtue were increased in me, I was less dear and less pleasing to him and he turned his steps along a way not true, following false images of the good which pay no promise in full. (30, 121–32) ‘‘This one gave himself to others.’’ Yahweh’s message to the whole tribe through the prophets: you gave yourselves to others. Other gods, idols, other laws, other nations. The spirit of Yahweh/Jehovah lives on in Beatrice, the jealous lover. But also the Spirit of Jesus, of Resurrection—‘‘on the threshold of my second life . . . and had changed life . . . and ascended [to] beauty and virtue increased in me.’’ She has him roped about the neck and is tightening the noose. The sword of her words is cutting him short, cutting him to the quick, cutting him off without recourse. ‘‘I was less dear and less pleasing to him and he turned his steps along a way not true, following false images of the good which pay no promise in full.’’ Derrida and Dante

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You Judas! You lowest of the low, you devil’s food! I spit your name out of my mouth, for only Satan could abide the taste of you on the tongue. After the so-called God of your love raped my mouth with the eating of your (false) words made (false) flesh of your false heart, you betrayed me for thirty pieces of silver, for tokens of an economy that can never pay promises in full. Pay promises—of writing, to say of me in writing what never has been said of woman before. You will write me? With what tool? With the flesh and blood of your heart? But where will you lay your hand upon it, how will you find it in you now that you made me swallow it whole in the picture show of your dream. Never been said of ‘‘woman’’—of the ‘‘other,’’ woman! What could pay that promise in full? Nothing! Except perhaps what I myself, will give you as gift, par-don, the gift of forgiveness. ‘‘For I am Beatrice, I am’’ (30, 73),22 the God-bearing image in writing of death, of life in the face of death. Behold, I am doing a new, impossible thing. I will write you! I will write your confession for you, name you as the one—guilty of what you did. I will let you see yourself through my eyes, which for a long time have been filled with tears for you. But you must sign it in your own name, which is impossible, so that you may make your mark, in your own style, in tears for blood, and words for flesh. ‘‘Say, say if this is true: to such an accusation your confession must be joined!’’ Confusion and fear, together mingled, drove forth from my mouth a Yes such that eyes were needed to hear it. . . . So did I burst under that heavy load, pouring forth tears and sighs, and my voice failed along its passage.’’ (31, 5–21) But prayers and tears are not enough: the words are necessary. Beatrice needs what had been promised: what had never been said in writing of woman before, not since Adam; the truth—what he had done, who he was. ‘‘Weeping I said, ‘‘ ‘The present things [cose presenti], with their false pleasure, turned my steps aside, as soon as your countenance was hidden’ ’’ (31, 34–36). Like Dante’s confession, Derrida’s circumfession is not original, but simply a rewriting of an old story. It is both individual and general (Everyone’s); it occurs on the edge of the cut (sin, in Dante’s metaphor) between this (my) world and the other(’s) world. It faces up to that cut, both with fear and trembling and with shame and anguish. There must be shame and anguish; otherwise, there would be no tears and prayers. But shame and anguish over what? Surely, there is a difference between Dante’s black-hearted betrayal of Be244

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atrice and Derrida’s dutiful and concerned (and just a little black) solicitude that Georgette not die before he has shown her the marked stylus, the style of his piety, which for years and years now has been less and less understood. Dare we listen to this intimate moment of prayer and confession and conversation between dying mother and dying son? No, it is not necessary because we already know. Derrida tells us he does not need anyone else to accuse him, ‘‘as though the other me, the other in me, the atheist God . . . left the slightest chance for the guilty party to save himself, even if it were by the ruse of avowal as asked for pardon.’’23 Thus to write is to ask her pardon: ‘‘One always asks for pardon when one writes.’’24 Every text is then a certain confession, for writing and for failing to address her, for betraying his address to her. Her—My God—the Other; the God-bearing image. If, indeed, Derrida’s work has taken a new heading over the years, undergone a sea change, a conversion, if it has gradually become clearer that he has got religion, or it has got him, then perhaps it has been, and has taken as long as it has, because he has been doing the long purgatorial work of repentance. Perhaps he has been preparing for justice to come to him, to be done to him, the impossible justice of an impossible forgiveness, which can happen only when he faces up to the death of his (m)other, the death of the story she has been writing in him for 59 years (or more), the gift he has been refusing (perhaps, a little; not for us to judge) or laboring/dreaming of allowing to happen, the gift of her second age, the book of the dead. No one knows; not even Derrida. It is a secret. A secret, yes! But, nonetheless, it is his secret truth that he has done, the truth that he has lived that there is no secret truth. He has become the secret, and the keeper of the secret. Perhaps the time has come to do justice and circumfession because, impossibly, there is Georgette and there is Derrida, there is the writing and there is the question, ‘‘What gives here?’’ Who has done what to whom (in whose face)? If there has been a betrayal, it can only have been in the writing, and if there is forgiveness it, too, must necessarily happen in the writing. Caputo puts it this way, ‘‘His death, the death of the other, his death for the other, are not philosophical objects—he has no truth to deliver here, no philosophemes to defend—but matters for confessing, for doing the truth. Death is a deed, not a thought, Johannes Climacus said. . . . He is trying to learn how to die.’’25 If this book does not transform me through and through; if it does not give me a divine smile in the face of death, my own Derrida and Dante

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and that of loved ones, if it does not help me to love life even more, it will have failed.’’26 Forgiveness/Pardon The forgiveness, like the betrayal, is in the writing. To be forgiven, the writing must go on, face to face. After Dante’s confession, Beatrice requires him to listen again, now with circumcised ears and heart, as she continues to rewrite his story: Still that you may now bear shame for your error, and another time, hearing the Sirens, may be stronger, lay aside the seed of tears and listen: so shall you hear how in opposite direction my buried flesh ought to have moved you.27 ‘‘How in opposite direction’’—a new heading, yes, but also a heading ‘‘from the other.’’ Whatever self-knowledge is possible, more or less, happens as confession written for us, in us, in the opposite direction, that is, by the (overbearing) other. The only adequate response is to face up to it: ‘‘Since you are grieved through hearing, lift up your beard and you will receive more grief through seeing. . . .’’ beneath her veil and beyond the stream she seemed to me to surpass more her former self than she surpassed the others here when she was with us; and the nettle of remorse so stung me there that of all other things, that which had most turned me to love of it became most hateful to me. Such contrition stung my heart that I fell overcome: and that which I became she knows who was the cause of it.28 Unconscious again now, after the long struggle for consciousness, Dante undergoes the ritual death of baptism in the river and passes through the waters in the arms of Matilda, the other woman. On the other side, Beatrice’s handmaids address a prayer to her (as Saint Bernard will address a prayer to Mary before the final vision), ‘‘Turn, Beatrice, turn your holy eyes upon your faithful one,’’ was their song, ‘‘who has moved so many steps to see you. For, grace, do us the grace to unveil to him your mouth, that he may discern the second beauty which you conceal.’’ O splendor of living light eternal! Who has ever grown so pale under the shade of Parnassus or drunk so deep at its well, 246

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that he would not seem to have his mind encumbered, on trying to render you as you appeared, when in the free air you did disclose your self, there where in its harmony that heaven overshadows you!29 Having died in the waters of baptism, having been baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, Dante is resurrected in the face of Beatrice; in her eyes and in her mouth are incarnated both the divinity and humanity of his God, whose name cannot be spoken or written, but whose face is now unveiled to him in her face. It is the same for Derrida. By the end of his ‘‘Circumfession,’’ his story, his identity in writing, has been rewritten from/by his (m)other, Georgette. In writing, he is trying to survive, to face up to the death—or God—in her face: to withdraw from death by making the ‘‘I’’ to whom death is supposed to happen, gradually go away, no, be destroyed before death comes to meet it, so that at the end already there should be no one left to be scared of losing the world in losing himself in it.30 Here, face-to-face, he finds the unspeakable ‘‘name’’ of his God, which is his name for the history of his passion, provoked by the cut/ sin in his world, in himself, incarnated as the (other’s) death. For that death, he now feels an impossible passion of love: [Death] the only ally, the most secure, it’s to death that already I owe everything I earn, I have succeeded in making of it, as I have with god, it’s the same thing, my most difficult ally, impossible but unfailingly faithful once you’ve got him in your game, it costs a great deal, believe me, a great deal of love.31 Derrida’s resurrection—in writing. The need to go on living, writing, in the face of death—spilling blood/seed, disseminating, circumcising, cutting. It is impossible to say the truth, but not to do the truth. The truth can be done by identifying it, identifying with it, by writing the (m)other into one’s own story. For Derrida, pardon/forgiveness is also impossible, but doable. Here we find him trying very hard to do it—in writing, trying to find its name in the face of death, trying to resurrect its name so that it can go on being done in writing. In his circumfession, he writes his pardon by inscribing the name of his mother into his story, revealing its impropriety: that his story is her story; that his writing is a forgery (something he has been conDerrida and Dante

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fessing all along, but which somehow has not been understood). The story was being written over the erasure of his signature, which is the erasure of hers, the story of prayers and tears that come(!) from her. ‘‘I weep from my mother.’’32 Caputo says a confession does not take place except in the register of love and forgiveness. Vision/Blindness In their meeting, Beatrice has shown Dante how to see himself through her eyes, to write her on his mind and lips and heart. At the beginning of the Paradiso, she begins the process of teaching him to see all of reality through her eyes in the face(s) of the other(s). Dante is still in the same place, at the center, nel mezzo, but now his seeing is transformed, or as he says ‘‘transhumanized.’’33 The poetics of the Paradiso turn on the metaphor of light, ever increasing light and ever growing vision. Even the episodes of blindness that punctuate Dante’s growing sanity of sight prove prelude to the final spectacle of the Empyrean. There is a fascinating and complex interplay between Dante and Beatrice’s journey in the Paradiso and the itinerary Derrida traces out in Memoirs of the Blind. Its space is his own version of the ‘‘celestial realm,’’ the Louvre/l’ouvre, the open kingdom of art, where Derrida envisions the unfolding of a curriculum in not seeing, on how not to see, or to see that we do not see in l’ouvre. Derrida is in heaven here, his own highly im-proper heaven, writing the joy of the eyes— blindness and tears. This relationship between Paradiso and Memoirs sets up a certain counterpoint to the relationship between ‘‘Circumfession’’ and Purgatorio. Caputo characterizes the two works by Derrida as a sort of sibling rivalry, or more accurately, a brother/sister pairing, still tense, but with a difference—a kind of Hebrew Antigone story, which has its own style of piety. That brother/sister pairing fits well with the couple Dante and Beatrice form as she guides him toward the final vision of God. The now reunited ‘‘lovers’’ of the Vita Nuova are become Adam and Eve beyond the Fall and Redemption, all that masculine and feminine can (im)possibly become for one another. The masculine/feminine byplay in Derrida coupling is less cosmic, but still focused on the eyes, on seeing or not seeing and tears, still binocular in its perspective: two kinds of blindness, structural and sacrificial; two kinds of paintings, self-portraits and scenes of blind men and weeping women; all positioned for intercourse. Derrida comments, ‘‘In Christian literature, 248

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there is no self-portrait without confession.’’34 Although he is immediately referring to Augustine, through Augustine, the identification with Dante is certain. Furthermore, beyond confessional self-portraiture, we saw in the Purgatorio/‘‘Circumfession’’ scenes that confessions are always written in us by the other, that confession means to do the truth—to write (or paint) it—by facing up to the death of the other, which gives us back the lives we are always losing in the cut (because we are born blind, ‘‘Original Sin’’). Life is given back with a difference, however, resurrected into the face of the other who has now been transformed into a second age, incarnated in the flesh of our doing—in the case of Dante and Derrida—in writing. That Dante’s vision of Paradise and Derrida’s Louvre exhibition are the ‘‘same’’ place might seem a bit of a stretch; it is therefore worth noticing how much like a painting gallery Dante’s portrayal of the heavenly realm really is. The whole marvelous planetary journey and celestial vision takes place in Beatrice’s face and through her eyes, she who is the medium of his own self-portraiture. All he ever sees is her face, and all he sees in her face is himself—with a difference. Derrida seems to agree; his treatment of structural blindness, particularly the structure of seeing that makes self-portraiture a special case of the blind (or the dead) leading the blind, suggests that self-portraits are portraits of the other in us. Further, what Dante sees in heaven are other faces, the other faces of the other. As has been true all along his pilgrimage, all he sees is himself in the other(s) and the other(s) in him. Even the final transformation of his sight that occurs when he bathes his eyes in the river of light35 prepares him first for his final sight of Beatrice, returned now to her proper place in the White Rose, which itself is the rose window of the heavenly cathedral composed of myriad faces of saints old and new: I saw faces all given to love, adorned with the light of Another, and by their own smile, and movements graced with every dignity.36 Then he turns to find Saint Bernard, who presents him to Mary enthroned, she who is the door, the cut, through which the divine passed into the human, and through which now the human passes into the divine. The writing—the poetry—in this final movement, the last four cantos, stretches itself to its limit, to its death, as Dante mourns its passing: If what has been said of her so far as here were all included in a single praise, it would be too slight to serve this present Derrida and Dante

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turn. The beauty I beheld transcends measure not only beyond our reach, but I truly believe that He alone who made it can enjoy it all. At this pass I concede myself defeated more than ever comic or tragic poet was defeated by a point in his theme; for, as the sun does to the sight which trembles most, even so remembrance of the sweet smile shears my memory of its very self. From the first day when in this life I saw her face, until this sight, the continuing of my song has not been cut off, but now my pursuit must desist from following her beauty further in my verses, as at his utmost reach must every artist.37 Prayers and tears to the end. The blind spot cannot be cured, but we can learn to see through our tears. That is what Dante is learning to do in Paradise, learning to see through the eyes of Beatrice, which are bathed in tears for him, even if now they are tears of joy; the two are the same. This learning to see through the other’s tears, the other/s who has/ have become the eyes of our lives in the face of death, is the form the ‘‘final vision’’ takes in the Paradiso. Because, in Dante’s Christian imagination, Mary is this tout autre, it is through her eyes, the eyes of pieta`, that this seeing occurs. The vision, as Dante writes it, unfolds within the poverty-stricken, bankrupt economy of language, in language’s last gasp, its death rattle, which Dante has been more and more confessing and mourning as the climax approaches, and with which he is now about to be identified. First, the final trick of three: the divine, impossible economy of circulation without return and thus without end, the necessary creativity of dissemination, the necessary ‘‘first and last’’ without which there can be no middle, the necessary opposites without which there can be no cut; the necessary Other. Then self-portraiture, done through the blind spot bathed in tears, a self-portrait of one who has learned to see oneself through the tears of another in the face of death: That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in Thee as reflected light, when my eyes had dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me depicted with our image within itself and in its own color, wherefore my sight was entirely set upon it. As is the geometer who wholly applies himself to measure the circle, and finds not, in pondering, the principle of which he is in need, such was I at the new sight. I wished to see how the image conformed to the other circle and how it has its place therein; but my own wings were not sufficient for that, save that 250

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my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power failed the lofty phantasy; but already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel is evenly, by the Love moves the sun and the other stars.38 What does Dante see when he peers impossibly into the abyss of colorful silence? He sees Resurrection: word made flesh, divine and human identified with the mark of death. He sees Everybody, pictured in ‘‘our effigy,’’ framed by the circle and square, the irreconcilable opposites (the cut, broken, irregular, angle and the uncut, smooth round circulating) both measured out by the secret name/ number that cannot be spoken or written, but can be done: by writing or drawing, or painting, or father/mother, son/daughter, brother/ sistering. Then, the story breaks off without end and goes back to the beginning, in the middle, to go on rewriting itself, deconstructing itself. Just as Derrida keeps his head low, keeps rewriting himself under the nose of Bennington in ‘‘Circumfession.’’ Finally, Derrida sees the same thing that Dante did, though, as he must, he sees it differently. He sees resurrection certainly; he sees himself going on without end, disseminating himself in writing, becoming the father of a great nation (with many tribes), the child of the promise, the prayerful weeping child of Sarah/Monica /Georgette, facing up to death, learning to see through his tears, learning to enjoy being enjoyed by other, the son, the secret and the public others, the Benningtons who are doing their best to read him. He is down there trying his best to incarnate and resurrect himself, to go on writing, to re-write himself, to self-portray himself, not to betray himself. Meanwhile, Bennington is up there doing his best to re-incarnate him (which is not resurrection), to portray him, to betray him, to catch him out and capture him in a lifelike portrait, which turns out to be a death mask. Epilogue: Canterbury Tales, or, Stories Told on Pilgrimage—Just for Laughs Styles of piety are personal—necessarily so. Personal piety, personal styles of personal piety. Caputo says Derrida is a pious man, and his style of piety is ‘‘Jewgreek’’ (Latinate and a little atheistic). The Greek style is universalist: that is the ‘‘necessary’’ part. The Jewish style is particularist, strictly so; that is the ‘‘personal’’ part (although strictly speaking, it would be more accurate to say that is the ‘‘existDerrida and Dante

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ing individual’’ part; persons are both universal and particular; same and different). Dante’s style of piety is Jewgreek as well, in that it is Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman or what might be called ‘‘Catholic’’ (sometimes under protest). Dante’s style is ‘‘medieval’’ (high medieval, to be sure; high enough to see into the next valley where the Renaissance is getting under way). Derrida’s style is ‘‘postmodern’’—if that means anything. Dante’s piety is enacted as pilgrimage, a way of taking the divine mystery seriously, of being responsible to it. Derrida is a pilgrim on his own way, in the mode of a-destination and errancy. Two pious men, two pilgrims; we can imagine an occasion when they might happen to meet, perhaps on the way to a festival. Perhaps they go along together for a while, exchanging a romantic epic religious poem for some yarns that keep unraveling, just for laughs certainly, to pass the time on the way to something much more serious, but also as memento (mori) of their occasional companionship, before going their separate ways. Remarkable: so much the same; so wildly different. Such a curious story. What are we to make of it? Who knows how people will look at it sometime in the future, hundreds of years from now? Maybe some pagans/locals will make up a story about these two meeting sometime in the distant past. The story might catch on, and after a while, they might begin to celebrate a festival to commemorate it each year. Who knows how these things get started, these pious practices, or how the centuries shape them?

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14

Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God A Response John D. Caputo

I work my way through things by writing. So, whenever I read what others have written about my work, whenever what I have written is read back to me by others—never, of course, without a gloss—it is as if the inert pages of books and journals have come to life and begun to talk back to me (and sometimes even to bite back). It is as if something that is structurally private, written in solitude, my most secret thoughts, meant only for me and God—like Augustine confessing to God in writing, ‘‘cur confitemur deo scienti,’’ (Why do I know anything at all?) (Why do I confess to God, who knows all?) to God who knows everything already—have now to my surprise become a public matter, flushed out in the open for everyone to see. I am honored by the attention paid to my work by Francis Ambrosio, David Wood, and Edith Wyschogrod, and embarrassed by their generosity. If what they say of my work is not true, it is at least an illusion that I would like to entertain—until the next departmental meeting I attend where all such illusions are dispelled. Let me begin by saying that, by ‘‘piety,’’ I mean to stand before God, coram deo, like Augustine in the Confessions, making myself a question unto myself in front of God Who has counted every tear in my eyes, every hair on my head. The question that I am made unto myself (quaestio mihi factus sum)—rather than one that I abstractly ‘‘pose’’—is what do I love when I love you, my God? In general, I think that what goes on in our lives is more like faith, faith without 253

truth, than the disputatiousness of reason; more like hope, hope against hope, than the scurrying about of programming and longterm planning; more like love, love without why, than developing interpersonal skills. At one point in her essay, Edith Wyschogrod wonders what I would do with the ‘‘name of God.’’ Where would the name of God be inserted into this religion without religion? Would this be a religion without God? The question of the name of God is the right question, the religious question, the question I am. But I do not take this to be a question of whether we believe in God or not, or even of whether what we believe in is God or not. I assume the ‘‘name of God,’’ always and from the start. Rather, the question is Saint Augustine’s question, ‘‘What do I love when I love [my] God?’’ (quid ergo amo, cum deum [meum] amo). Who would be so hard of heart, so cold and unfeeling, so incredulous and unbelieving, as not to love God? Who would deprive themselves of the love of God, of the name of God? The difficulty is rather to find what it is that we love when we love God. ‘‘My God’’ is the secret that is first, last, and constant; ‘‘my God’’ is what keeps me up at night, pacing the floors. Can I do anything, as Derrida asks, other than repeat that question day and night?1 I have arranged my responses in an order that will best allow me to keep my eye on that question.

Deconstruction’s Diamond Cut I am very grateful indeed to David Wood for his discussion, which, as always, is clear, incisive, and probing. Wood makes two excellent points in his commentary. With the first, which has to do with the nature of autobiographical texts like ‘‘Circumfession,’’ I entirely agree. One of the things that people like Augustine, Rousseau, and Kierkegaard—and more lately, Derrida, although he would blush to be added to this list—must be thinking when they write their various and very personal confessions is that their confession is in some ways everybody’s confession, that their story is everybody’s story. The fact that these books are read again and again proves that they are more or less right about that, whatever the explanatory ‘‘logic’’ behind it. If for a flat-footed formal logician, autobiography commits the fallacy of a hasty generalization, then so much the worse for flat-footedness. To use Wood’s superb image, to which I will have occasion to return, ‘‘if one cuts the diamond of subjectivity at just the right plane,’’ one 254

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can simultaneously light up what is most uniquely personal and also sweepingly universal with one blow. But what is Derrida (like Kierkegaard and Augustine) confessing or circum-fessing from his secret heart of hearts? That he has all along had a religion about which no one knows anything, not even his mother, that he prays all the time, that he is like Augustine a man of prayers and tears. That brings us to Wood’s second point about religiosity, which is the point that makes him squirm. As indeed it should; it is supposed to make him (and ‘‘Geoff’’ up above) and every careful reader of Derrida squirm. Squirming is what deconstruction is supposed to do to you; it is not supposed to make you sit back, relax, put your feet up, light up a cigar and feel affirmed and confirmed that your most cherished assumptions are rock solid, like money in the bank. Garden-variety deconstructors take an inordinate delight in making everyone else squirm. They delight in tormenting the orthodox of all sorts—in disturbing orthodox physicists and metaphysicists and religionists, unsettling all those who think there is something definitively centered and settled out there if only we can measure it or let it take our measure, or if only we can get out of the way and let it speak, for itself, from itself, as it is in itself. Deconstructionists delight in cutting right-thinking phallo-philosophers down to size, watching them squirm when they are shown to be up to their ears in literature, held firm by the force of the letter, that phallo-philosophical reason is not quite what it cracks itself up to be. Fair enough. Great fun. But suppose some prankster comes along and shows these same intrepid deconstructors that they, too, are not quite what they are cracked up to be, not quite the demystifying demythologizers they make themselves out to be? Suppose this rogue says that there is a widespread rumor in circulation that they are known to pray, that there are reports from the most reliable of witnesses that they have been seen with a tear in their eye looking wistfully toward heaven? And even—don’t ask me how this got out—that the men among them have been circumcised? That makes them squirm. But why should they squirm? Why worry when a text like Derrida’s is translated and recontextualized and reinscribed within another context, when it is shown to have hitherto unsuspected or only vaguely suspected interweavings with other discourses? Why not think that this interweaving will be productive, not only for deconstruction, but for the ‘‘target’’ text, that it will loosen and reanimate the texts with which it comes in contact? Why worry if Derrida’s discourse is contaminated Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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by other discourses, like those of religion and faith? Does not Derrida’s argument about the irreducibility of the letter and the differential play mean that the borders between philosophy and literature, or other discourses, are porous, and that only institutional police can prevent border crossings? Is not contamination one of the things deconstruction loves and does? Or does that go only for literature? Is this permissible only for literature? Do deconstructors not mind being contaminated just so long as this is confined to literature and poetry? Are they comfortable with only one kind of contamination? Is it just by religion that they do not want to be contaminated? Is that what makes them squirm? Are they being very fastidious about the things by which they will allow themselves to be contaminated? Let us get down to business. Wood argues that religion arises as an artifact of philosophy, a residue of the failure of the classical philosophical project. Traditional philosophy turns on a mistaken belief in the autonomy of the subject, and religion arises as a way to counter and undermine the autonomous subject. But once the philosophical misconception of the autonomy of the subject is undone or deconstructed, we are relieved of the need to counter it with religion, and something like Nietzsche will do very well. So, if Derrida has taken a religious turn, then he has aborted his own project, which is or includes the deconstruction of the autonomous subject, the successful completion of which would obviate the need to restore religion as a counterforce, there being nothing left to counter. Derrida would be making use of ‘‘religious’’ structures like faith and the messianic only because he retains an idea of reason and philosophy that he himself has undermined, the former feeding parasitically upon the latter. To respond to that very probing point, for which I am very grateful, allow me first to back up a little bit. Viewed from one side, deconstruction is delimitation and displacement, an endless work of showing how there is no transcendental signified, no center, no stable resting point outside the text, a work of exhibiting the bottomless deconstructibility of things. But viewed from another side, deconstruction is affirmation, the affirmation of the ‘‘undeconstructible’’ (which is a remarkable enough expression, if you let yourself think about it), the affirmation of the experience of ‘‘the impossible,’’ of the coming, or in-coming of the other (l’invention de l’autre), a longing or desire for a Messiah who is always to come. Viewed from the first side, deconstruction looks a lot like Nietzsche and establishes friendly relations with literature; viewed from the second, it looks a lot like religion. Since the first view has been nearly worked to death 256

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in the literature and is just about the only thing anybody ever hears about deconstruction, in Prayers and Tears, I thought I could put my sabbatical to better use if I viewed things from the second side. Mark Taylor made the first approach to Derrida in terms of religion, but his Derrida and his religion still looked like Nietzsche.2 So my idea was to set out the religion in Derrida so that it actually looked like religion, not like Nietzsche, but then not exactly like religion, but like a religion without religion, which meant not only without ‘‘institutional’’ religion, which Wood mentions, but without any determinate doctrinal content. Clearly, this is not likely to give the local rabbi or pastor much comfort that religion was making a comeback, and that his pews would soon be overflowing with worshipers, which would soon occasion an inevitable uptick in overflowing collection plates. After all, I would be the first to insist that Derrida rightly passes for an atheist. Still, looking like religion at all would be enough to make sharp-witted deconstructors like Wood squirm, enough to reduce them to tears and hope that Caputo was wrong, which would satisfy me that I had used my sabbatical well. Nunc dimittis servum tuum. So, when Wood says that ‘‘religion’’ (let us all agree in passing that any one thing called ‘‘religion’’ is a fiction) arises from the delimitation of the autonomous subject, that is half true, the Nietzschean half. The other half is that it arises in an affirmative way from a movement of hope and expectation for a messianic age, which also includes a movement of mourning that these dead will not have died in vain. That gives deconstruction an ethico-politico-messianico-religious edge, with generous borrowings from Benjamin and Levinas, which is the tone I think that Derrida lately tries to strike, and which I was certainly trying to strike for him. The delimitation of the autonomous subject is only half the job; the other half is the constitution of the responsible subject, the heteronomous subject of the claim of the other—not the nominative ‘‘I’’ subject, but the subject in the accusative ‘‘me,’’ the subject as the hearer of the call of the coming of the other. It is perfectly true that you can displace the autonomous subject in some other way, in the Nietzschean way described by Wood, where the ‘‘gift’’ means that forces inwardly build up and accumulate to the point that they can no longer be contained but spill over and explode in an excess of giving without return. That’s one way to go— the ejaculatory, orgasmic, or phallic way. A second way is to give, not what you can no longer contain within yourself, but what you need for yourself, in response to the approach of the other—to give what you do not have and cannot afford to give. Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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The first way, the more phallic way, displaces autonomous subjectivity but it does so very imperfectly and can do only limited service in this regard. That is because it does not have a true ‘‘other,’’ nothing radically heteronomous that interrupts the inward accumulation of forces and elicits a ‘‘response’’ from them, for, on Nietzschean terms, every response is seen to arise from a bent, tormented ‘‘reactive’’ force. The second way is not ejaculatory but responsive, ‘‘religious’’ in the sense I am developing in Prayers and Tears, less phallic and more circumcisional, less explosive and more cut down to size by the coming of the other. Nobody says you have to be religio-responsive. To each your own. And I am not against orgasms. I have spoken ‘‘against ethics’’ but far be it from me to come out against orgasms. But it seems to me that you get more work done in overcoming autonomous subjectivity, if that is what you really want, by the affirmation of the coming of something radically other than by an orgasmic discharge, which seems to me still a tad too auto- and phallocentric. Would it be too impudent, too impious, to say you get further in the direction of overcoming subjectivity by the coming of the other than by the coming of the same? Wood is quite right to say, and with this I am quite in agreement, that, once you have recognized the proximity of religion and deconstruction, religion will never be the same. Oui, oui. That indeed is my point, one of them, at least, in Prayers and Tears. Religion, too, comes unstuck, is also forced to squirm, is made to see the contingency of its constructions, the relative determinacy, constructedness, and deconstructibility of what it loves when it loves its God, of what I love when I love my God, remembering what Wood has told us about the universal force of the word ‘‘I’’ if it is cut at the right angle. Derrida makes his cut on the fault line between the concrete or determinate religious messianisms or Abrahamic religions and a more general, formal messianic structure or messianicity, which has the effect, in my view, of describing deconstruction as having the structure of a religion, the structure of messianicity, but not the determinate content. The opposite, or one opposite, and in my hypothesis the best opposite, of an autonomous subject is a prayerful praying circumcisional circumfessional subject who utters what Jean-Louis Chre´tien calls a ‘‘wounded word.’’3 If I am right about Derrida in Prayers and Tears, then the difference between Derrida and a very religious writer like Augustine is not to be found in the fact that Augustine prays and weeps while Derrida does not (which I think is what Wood hopes and prays is the difference) since Derrida tells us 258

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he is a man of prayer (which makes Wood squirm). The difference lies in the relative determinacy of the terms in which Augustine gives voice to his prayers and tears, or to his wounded words. It lies in the proper names, the specific texts, the determinate historical tradition and community in union and communion with which Augustine prays his prayer. For Augustine confesses his faith in the name of Jesus, which is a proper name above every name, at the sound of which every knee should bend on earth and in heaven. And Augustine says, ‘‘Our father,’’ the father of this community of faith, the father of us who have been praying here together from Abraham to the present. But Derrida’s prayer is conducted in the desert, in a desert chora, so that there is no such proper name known to him, no name that cannot be translated into or replaced by some other name, so that in some deep and deadly serious sense he does not know what he is praying for. ‘‘Democracy,’’ ‘‘hospitality,’’ and ‘‘justice’’ are only the least bad names we have now for something that is to come, something so unforeseeably to come, that in the expression the ‘‘democracy to come,’’ the ‘‘to come’’ is more important than the ‘‘democracy,’’ for we do not know if what is coming will be or should be called ‘‘democracy.’’ The structure of prayer, the gesture of hope and aspiration (and of mourning), simultaneously borrows upon religion and makes religion tremble. It borrows and reinscribes the confessional and circum-fessional character of Augustinian prayer. In a sense, it represents an even purer prayer than Augustine’s. For Augustine has the content and the comfort of praying the prayers of an ancient community, which, to a certain extent, compromises its faith-fulness and gives it a certain assurance. So, too, the Augustinian ‘‘God’’ and the ‘‘subjectivity’’ that is correlate to it—which Wood rightly says (and I agree with him on this point) should be made to tremble—belong to the relatively determinate God and subjectivity on the Augustinian side of the comparison, and constitute a sphere of only ‘‘relative’’ secrecy. But Derrida’s call, his ‘‘Viens, oui, oui,’’ both as regards the one who calls, if there is one, and what he is calling for, tremble in a chora space and give testimony to an ‘‘absolute’’ secret. Derrida does not know who he is, or if he is one, or what is what, and he is only being quasi-Augustinian, Augustine’s Confessions providing him with a lush and autobiographically suggestive point of departure for making a different point about an absolute secret. Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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Thus, even if we did ‘‘finish’’ deconstructing this PaulineAugustinian-Kierkegaardian tradition of subjectivity-and-God, as Wood desires, the issue would not be what Wood hopes for, no religion at all, but rather what Derrida calls a ‘‘religion without religion.’’ If we dissociated Derrida from the determinate features of the Augustinian tradition with which he is rhetorically associating himself in ‘‘Circumfession,’’ we would not be left with ‘‘reason’’ and ‘‘knowledge,’’ updated and redefined, sans faith, sans passion, sans religion. Rather, we would be left with something that is neither religion nor philosophy, neither faith nor reason, but rather a faith without faith and a reason without reason, a more radical, chora faith and hope in something undeconstructible, which has the structure of a religion without religion. That undeconstructible I know not what is to come is the point, the stylus tip and goad, of deconstruction, that unnameable in whose name deconstruction is undertaken, which holds the white light of the undeconstructible against the deconstructibility of the present, which makes the present tremble in the name of what is to come, s’il y en a. My hypothesis in Prayers and Tears is that it is just because he is marking off the structure of a religion without religion, repeating religion precisely without the doctrinal contents of the determinate and determinable faiths, that Derrida’s story in ‘‘Circumfession’’ is indeed everybody’s story, the story of all, whether they rightly pass for theists or atheists, Jews or Christians, or whatever they rightly pass for. To return to Wood’s felicitous phrase, for which I thank him very heartily, to my mind, Derrida has cut ‘‘the diamond of [hope and aspiration] at just the right plane.’’ Those Seeing Tears Edith Wyschogrod’s essay is very much a meditation on my work by which I myself have been instructed, in which I have learned a great deal in particular about Against Ethics. In her comments, this book has been read back to me by someone who has thought long and hard about these matters and shown the rest of us the way to write about them. By relating the book to Deleuze on the ‘‘theophanic plane of immanence,’’ she has put what is going on Against Ethics in a new light, one that I did not myself quite appreciate. She has extended the reach of this book, deepened its grasp of things, made it look good, better than it is, made it look respectable, despite its insouciant, disreputable discourse. My idea in writing Against Ethics was to de260

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limit ‘‘ethics’’ in order to make ‘‘obligation’’ possible. I have found it necessary to deny ethics, to paraphrase Kant, in order to make room for obligation. ‘‘Ethics,’’ after all, is a very philosophical idea—the Christian right will be saddened to hear that the word is not to be found in the New Testament, for example (at least I can’t find it!)— while ‘‘obligation’’ has to do with the singularity of the situation in which what we call ‘‘ethical’’ events continually transpire. When Wyschogrod says that when it comes to writing an ethics, the way to write is to ‘‘write without writing,’’ she displays her usual perfect pitch for hearing what is going in my texts. For according to the marvelous logic of the sans, the ‘‘without’’ does not obliterate but liberates, breaking down the shell in order to let the life break out. I feel a wonderful kinship with Edith Wyschogrod’s work, and I follow her lead as best and as well as I can. No one who has read both Saints and Postmodernism and Against Ethics—and, of course, we both hope that your number is as great as the stars in the heaven and the sands on the seashore—can miss their inner affinity, despite their different styles. I would like to think—and this would be a high honor for Against Ethics—that these books will be seen as cousins, even siblings, sister and brother, under the same Abrahamic tent. This is true, above all, in the symmetry between her analysis in Saints and Postmodernism of a ‘‘fault line’’ between philosophers of difference (Levinas, Blanchot, Derrida) and philosophers of the plenum (Deleuze, Guattari, Genet) and my distinction between heteromorphism and heteronomism in Against Ethics.4 By heteromorphism I mean a more Nietzschean affirmation of diversitas, the polymorphic variety of the forms of life that we can celebrate and affirm, while, by ‘‘heteronomism,’’ I mean a more Kierkegaardian and Levinasian affirmation of alterity, from alter, the ‘‘other one,’’ what is (almost) ‘‘wholly other,’’ which breaks in on the centripetal forces swirling within the same and compels them outward, turning the same toward the coming of the other. I am thus distinguishing between the ‘‘invention of the other’’ in the sense of the production and multiplication of diverse forms of life, ‘‘dreaming of the innumerable,’’ as Derrida says, and the ‘‘invention of the other’’ in the sense of the in-veniens, the incoming of the other who breaks in on the same. But the distinction is not a simple binarity—nothing is simple—and it is not a matter of choosing between them, as my impudent image of a Dionysian rabbi illustrates, but a matter of moving about in the space between them. Now if I am not mistaken, this Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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distinction organizes the space in which Wyschogrod and I move about. This is a distinction that is pertinent to the discussion we have just conducted with David Wood, in which I maintain that Wood is advocating a more heteromorphic way of displacing autonomous subjectivity, which is all well and good, and I am not against polymorphism, but that the heteronomous responsible subject constitutes a more radical way to displace autonomy, while also adding that it is not a question of choosing between the two. In entitling her commentary ‘‘Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears,’’ Wyschogrod has captured an image that ties her work to mine, and Derrida’s work to Levinas’s, and all our work to that of Saint Augustine, who is surely the weepiest philosopher the West has known. ‘‘See in what a state I am, see what a mess I am [ecce ubi sum],’’ Augustine writes. ‘‘Weep with me and weep for me [flete mecum et pro me flete].’’ ‘‘But do thou, O Lord my God, hear me and look upon me and see me and have mercy on me and heal me [tu autem, domine deus meus, exaudi et respice et vide et miserere et sana me] in whose eyes I have become a question to myself [in cujus oculis mihi quaestio factus sum], and that is my infirmity [et ipse est languor meus].’’5 I do love that, and, like Augustine, I wonder why tears can give us joy. It should not go unnoticed that both Heidegger and Derrida have commented on Augustine’s Confessions, and both have singled out Book X for special attention. Heidegger’s analysis, very brilliant and groundbreaking, seizes upon the quaestio mihi motif, the terra difficultatis, what I called in Radical Hermeneutics the ‘‘difficulty of life.’’ The Augustinianism that emerges from Heidegger’s lectures is the philosophy of cura that turns on a being struggling for all its worth with the trials and tribulations of temptatio, with the trials of life, the life of trial. From these lectures the outline of resolute Dasein emerges in full clarity from the Christian soldierism he finds in the Confessions. Heidegger loved the Pauline image of the Church Militant armed with the breastplate of faith and the helmet of hope. But the Augustine who emerges from Derrida—to whom Wyschogrod and I are both drawn—is a man of tears, pleading for mercy and help, not authentic Dasein but weeping flesh. His eyes are blinded by tears and, in that blindness, he sees with the eyes of faith; in that weeping, he has such healing as is to be had. Our Augustine is more Derridean than Heideggerian, more in need of healing (cura), than a man (sic!) of care-and-struggle (cura).6 262

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Edith Wyschogrod has not confronted or interrogated Against Ethics so much as she has grafted certain new lines upon its surface, wired it up in a more complicated way, for which I am very grateful. But, in the course of underlining the salience of four critical motifs in Against Ethics, she has also raised certain questions. 1. Wyschogrod has adeptly conceptualized this book as an effort to write without writing, to write ethically without writing an ethics, to write against the grain of the desire of ethics to command and spell out duties, to write a counterethics, an ethics without or against ethics, where writing is meant to preserve and cultivate the fragile shoot of obligation while renouncing the towering grandeur of ethical conceptuality. Here obligation has the structure of the secret. The secret must be kept, for ethics cannot prescribe what is to transpire in those secret transactions between flesh and flesh, even as the secret must be divulged as a secret, revealing that something, let us say, obligation, is at work there, something that brings us up short. Obligation takes place in a nonplace, a secret place of incommensurables. The dilemma of such writing without writing about ethics is as old as Aristotle, who warned us, at the beginning of a very fine book about ethics, that you can write a book about mathematics but not about ethics, not strictly speaking. That is because ethics—which treats of what I am calling obligation—deals with the tode ti (τδε τ), with the hoc aliquid (this particular thing), which is where life breaks in and the book leaves off, where singularity erupts and the cool winds of concepts are stilled. The transactions of obligation take place beneath the radar of philosophical concepts. A similar dilemma was experienced by Johannes Climacus, who wanted to write about poor existing individuals. What, then, of the ‘‘professionalize[d] expressions of generosity and self-giving,’’ Wyschogrod asks—trained relief workers and HMOs, for example—in which singularity is assigned to institutions, which have rules and regulations? I would say that rather than simply pronouncing a Jeremiad upon these institutions, we should remind them and ourselves of the gift. I would argue, again in keeping with Derrida’s logic of the gift, that the gift does stand outside in simple or pure exteriority to the circle of exchange (economy, institution). Instead, it sets the circle in motion, preventing teaching, health care, or social work from being degraded into a pure contract, producing what she calls ‘‘holistic’’ rather than ‘‘totalizing’’ institutions. Institutional structures are the only way things get done, but they must be kept continually off guard, off balance, Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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porous, and punctuated by the gift. In this model, the contract turns on the gift—for if it does not turn, it grinds to a halt—even as the gift is inevitably turned into a contract. As the title of a recent collection of interviews with Derrida bears out, deconstruction is always a matter of ‘‘negotiating’’ differences—between the gift and economy, between hospitality and protecting one’s home, between Levinas and Nietzsche, between the prophets and the philosophers, between ‘‘Jew and Greek.’’ As Derrida said a long time ago in ‘‘Violence and Metaphysics,’’ we live in the difference between these two, between these twosomes, let us say, a difference that is called ‘‘history.’’ 2. That is also why it is important to attend to what I called, somewhat impishly, the ‘‘shuttle’’ that is run between Abraham and Dionysus, the undecidability, the fluctuation between Dionysus and Abraham, between Nietzsche and Levinas, because as I would say to David Wood, these two are not simply exterior to each other and there is no need to choose between them. Wyschogrod has seized upon this point, again with perfect pitch, for which I am very grateful. For, without it the whole book, whose style invites misunderstanding, is misunderstood. Critics of this book have tended to let one of the two terms dominate over the other: so my excessively conservative, sometimes Catholic friends have found the book to be a despairing nihilism which has succumbed to an extravaganza of relativism and anarchism. Others, like Charles Scott, have found it weighed down by the heavy burden of the ascetic ideal.7 Too frivolous and light and lacking in gravitas? Too weighed down by the spirit of gravity? But Wyschogrod has perfectly preserved the tension in the finite event of obligation, which I meant to depict in the image of Abraham of Paris, a Dionysus with a beard and tallith. She is sensitive to the structure and the danger of a finite event, which she figures in the image of a monorail that screeches to a halt and sways over the chasm, which beautifully extends my image in a way I did not originally have in mind. Obligation flares up momentarily against an endless night, like a falling star; it happens in the finitude of a transaction between flesh and flesh, in which flesh calls out to flesh. Obligation happens in the nonspace between Dionysus and the rabbi, between the tohu wa bohu (formless void [Gen. 1:2]) and the God of Genesis, between the play of forces and the face, between apeiron and l’infini, between the il y a, which is a great cosmic stupidity, and responsibility to the other. That is why I am happy to accept her reminder of the irreducibility of the aesthetic, of the work of art, 264

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because, as Lyotard says of Levinas, the ethical is not the only language game. What becomes of Abraham in this analysis, Wyschogrod asks? Does this not make Abraham look different, in danger of being ‘‘sucked in’’ by il y a, as she says, like a pagan worshiping the elements? In this view, Abraham is not so much being asked to ‘‘suspend the ethical’’ for the purposes of the ‘‘religious,’’ which is the way Kierkegaardian stages this scene, as he finds himself faced with a conflict with the voice of God and the facelessness of being, of il y a, of the creator God or the tohu wa bohu, of which il y a is a transcription, so that he does not know who or what calls him. For how does he know who or what this voice is that calls to him from the abyss and to which he says, ‘‘Me voici,’’ in his best French? Is it God or the anonymous abyss, which is of course the binarity with which Genesis opens up? Thus conceived, Wyschogrod argues, Abraham’s dilemma does not reflect a battle between ethics and religion, as in Kierkegaard, but a struggle between competing religions, competing Mesopotamian myths about the origin of things. That is a suggestive point. The reinstatement and rehabilitation of the tohu wa bohu, the formless void that God forms in Genesis, which has disappeared from view in the later metaphysical accounts of creatio ex nihilo, is something that interests me greatly these days. Apart from its Scriptural credentials, for it belongs to the letter of Genesis, it has received powerful phenomenological support from Levinas’s striking analysis of its ‘‘anonymous rumbling.’’ And apart from both of those considerations, the tohu wa bohu gives us a sense of a God who has to dominate something truly other than God, which gives the created world a more resistant sense of reality and alterity. If we hold on to the tohu wa bohu, the result is that the world is not a place in which God always gets his way. The face of the other is a trace left behind by God who withdraws from the world, leaving an unstable mark on the chaos. From the face there issues a command that is easily lost or ignored, whose faint call is easily drowned out by the anonymous rumble. For the face arises in a world formed from a formless void that ceaselessly stirs beneath the surface of form. 3. Wyschogrod has also identified the genealogy of this phenomenology beyond phenomenology, of this anti-phenomenology of what she calls the ‘‘cut, bleeding, festering malodorous’’ body, in classical phenomenology itself, of which it is the impudent, ungrateful heir, a kind of heretical variation. I do not know how to describe what I do Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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as ‘‘phenomenology,’’ if phenomenology retains its classical protocols of intuition and givenness, but since I do not know how to philosophize except phenomenologically, I must insist that what I do is a kind of dissident and heretical phenomenology. I think the same thing is true of Derrida. How else can we describe his descriptions of the gift, forgiveness, hospitality, and so on? To this point, Wyschogrod has added the welcome insight that such an (anti-)phenomenology makes an ethical cut across the opposition of the lived body and the body reduced to genetic information and brain processes, which is something I simply was not considering but which I gladly embrace. 4. Finally, Wyschogrod has identified my preoccupation with the texture of ordinary life, with the broken narratives, the interrupted stories that keep starting all over again, the web of little things, the minima moralia of everyday life that are stitched together in those of us who manage to get through the day even as they are torn asunder in those of us whose prayers and tears call out for help. What, then, of the lives of the saints, which she has thematized in Saints and Postmodernism? This puts them in a slightly different light, as stylized, highly edited fictions that are sustained by the willful suspension of disbelief, petits re´cits that must be reinserted into the torn fabric of everyday life. We should understand that saints are people, no less ill tempered and self-willed than the rest of us, maybe more, but a little less narcissistic, advocates of a more open, hospitable narcissism, which makes them stand out against the rest of us like stars against the night sky. Pilgrims of Piety We can all be grateful to Francis J. Ambrosio for making an unexpected connection between Derrida and Dante. For Ambrosio, these two unlikely fellow travelers are feeling their way in the dark toward a mystery, each pilgrims of piety—to the point that Ambrosio stages a fanciful meeting between the two men on the road to Canterbury. Ambrosio’s work is an index of a line of inquiry that I applaud, of a possibility that is opened up once one overcomes the mistake of treating Derrida as the sworn enemy and reckless destroyer of the classics—in particular of religious classics. That is a prejudice against Derrida that is based, I might add, on an almost perfect ignorance of his texts (nothing is perfect).8 One does not need to say that Derrida deserves to stand alongside Augustine or Dante, to take his place among the immortals of the 266

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ages; he would certainly blush to hear that said about himself. None of us knows whether, when the hourglass of history is turned once again and things reconfigure still one more time, his texts will have that kind of endurance. We do not know, not yet, whether Derrida’s story really is everybody’s story. But, in Prayers and Tears, I have been arguing that he is at the least something of our Augustine, an Augustine for us turn-of-the-century post-secular post-metaphysical Jewgreek confessors who do not know what we love and confess when we confess and love our God. My wager, bet on top of the wager between Derrida and Bennington, is that Derrida reproduces the journey of Augustine, or at least of a certain idiosyncratic version of Augustine, for an age in which the structures both of institutional religion in general and of the specifically Christian imagination have lost their grip, at least for the intellectuals (since religion shows no signs at all of abating in the popular culture, at least in the United States). My wager is that Derrida evokes a response from whatever is still religious in us, whatever is still religious in a post-religious, post-secular age, where, by ‘‘religion,’’ I mean something that is detachable from the positive doctrinal content of Judaism, Islam, or Christianity (to stick to the children of Abraham), which is what Derrida calls ‘‘religion without religion.’’ Whether that will last for a thousand years is not my concern or my responsibility; it is enough that Derrida has tapped into something and draws nourishment from something of classical importance. Ambrosio’s wager is that Derrida is our Dante, or at least an avant-garde and impudent version of Dante, who can be viewed as revisiting the site from which Dante’s poetry issues. Ambrosio is trying to take us by surprise rather in the way that Jackie tries to outflank Geoff. Am I surprised? Yes and no. I am indeed surprised that Dante and Derrida are alike pious pilgrims, but then again I am not surprised that I am surprised, at least, I cannot say I am lost for words (never fear). I should have predicted that something as unpredictable as this would happen. That is, if I am right in Prayers and Tears, then one ought, in principle, to be able to undertake this sort of comparison; it ought in principle to be possible to relate Derrida’s texts in sustained and serious way with the likes of a classic like The Divine Comedy. If I am right, then we should be prepared to be overtaken by something for which we cannot be prepared, like the daring venture that Ambrosio undertakes. For he dares, at once, to scandalize many if not most deconstructionists, who will bridle at the association of Derrida with Dante’s religious imagination, and to Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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scandalize as well the world of Dante scholarship, which will bridle at the very mention of the name of Derrida in their sober scholarly midst. He pursues a dangerous strategy that is calculated to please no one. I can only wish him well on his wager and hope that those who know the texts of Dante better than I do will find themselves thinking better of Derrida and thinking differently about Dante. When I write my own confessiones or retractiones, one of the most scandalous things I will be forced to confess is that, in the course of three generations, from Napoli to Philadelphia, the Italian language was allowed to disappear from my family, which deprives me of the ability to read Dante’s Italian. But, beyond that scandal, I must also confess my perfect, well, almost perfect, incompetence to discuss Dante even in translation, and hence to comment on Ambrosio’s analysis of Dante, except to express my admiration and gratitude to him for it and to say that I found it both fascinating and surprising. He has delineated an impressive series of analogies and correspondences between texts that are tremendously different, yet strangely interconnected. By extending the analogy between Jacques/Georgette and Augustine/Monica to include Dante/Beatrice, he widens the scope of the analogy of the son of these tears and what Mark Taylor calls the ‘‘(m)other,’’ the woman who also bears the image of God, and thus ushers the Virgin Mary into this already strange and crowded stage. With almost systematic rigor, Ambrosio identifies analogous structures of promise, questioning, conversion, hope, tears of repentance, forgiveness, and blindness. What are we to make of this astonishing parallelism? My limited skills permit me to comment upon this matter only one-sidedly, from the side of Derrida, to see what light it throws on the attempt I made in Prayers and Tears to resituate Derrida’s work within a religious context. Let me raise only one point, concerning blindness, which is symptomatic of a general question that I have about the relationship that Francis Ambrosio is unfolding for us. In general, whenever Derrida’s texts are entered into association, mutatis mutandis, with classical religious texts, one must remain alert to a general and massive mutation. By this, I mean that Derrida is a pilgrim who, in a very serious sense, is lost, errant, who does not know where he is going, for whom there is no unique name—‘‘God,’’ for example—that cannot be translated into or reduced to some other name. If he were to be found among the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, he would be like a pilgrim who never heard of Canterbury and is not convinced that Canterbury is the place he needs to go. Thus, while Plato talks about 268

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the Good beyond being, Derrida likes to say that he is interested in the chora beneath being. If Derrida is a pilgrim, he is a blind pilgrim who needs a walking stick. Now to the questions I have on this point. Is the blindness that Ambrosio finds in Dante the blindness of the beyond being, a river of light, a celestial blindness that comes of being blinded by a sun of unbearable brightness, as in Marion’s saturated phenomenon, and hence a certain beatific vision of Beatrice, and whether this is not different from the blindness Derrida is speaking of, his chora blindness, where there is no light or sun, where one is blinded, not by the splendor of the secret, but by its darkness, by the secret that there is no secret? I suspect that it is. And if this difference is symptomatic of what divides Derrida and Dante, then I would want to know what difference this difference makes for Ambrosio’s analysis, how this difference affects the other correspondences he has unearthed. Conclusion How else to conclude than with questions, we who are questions to ourselves, where piety means to make ourselves a question before God? Of what do I dream when I dream of my God? What do I desire when I desire my God? For what am I praying? Over what am I weeping?

Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God

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Notes

Introduction S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 21. 3. Nietzsche, Science, 232. 4. All biblical quotations in this volume are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Violations Alphonso Lingis 1. Georges Bataille, Œvres Comple`tes , vol. 6 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1973), 295. Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics Kelly Oliver 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 36. 2. The word piety is an early form of pity. The English word piety comes from the old French piete. The popular form in France was pite´, ‘‘pity.’’ The word pity can mean compassion, to be sorry for, to grieve or regret, to feel remorse for one’s own wrongdoing, to repent; in modern use, it implies contempt for someone inferior to oneself. 271

3. Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. Robert Sweeney, ed. Don Idhe (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 49. 4. Ibid., 485. 5. Ibid., 491. 6. Ibid., 480. 7. John Brenkman, Straight Male Modern (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), 45, points out that Ricœur assumes that contracts take place between equals. 8. My thanks to Lisa Walsh, who pointed out that, whereas in the United States, the mother identifies the father at the hospital for the birth certificate record, in France, the father has the legal right to ‘‘recognize’’ (reconnaıˆtre) the child as his or not (the mother’s recognition of the father has no legal hold). 9. Although I cannot develop issues around child custody laws here, I present a more detailed analysis of child custody laws in this same context in Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1997). 10. Ricœur, Conflict, 480. 11. Ibid., 471. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 254. Hereafter cited in text. 13. In Oliver, Values, I diagnose the attempts of both Ricœur and Levinas to cover over the contingent and chance aspects of paternity as a fear of what I call an ‘‘abject father.’’ 14. Levinas, Totality, 263. 15. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 75–76. 16. Some of his contemporaries have criticized Levinas for sacrificing the feminine for the masculine subject’s ascent into the ethical relationship through paternity. See Catherine Chalier, Figures du fe´minin: Lecture d’Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: La Nuit surveille´e, 1982); Luce Irigaray, ‘‘The Fecundity of the Caress,’’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), and ‘‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,’’ The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 17. Derrida, Gift, 7. Emphasis added. 18. Ibid., 11. 19. Ibid., 20. 20. In ‘‘When the Gods Are Born,’’ the last section of Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Irigaray argues that Christ’s suffering on the cross and his bleeding side are masculine appropriations of the mother’s suffering and the blood of childbirth through which she gives life. 272

Notes to Pages 37–49

21. Irigaray makes this argument in ‘‘Belief Itself,’’ in Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 22. Derrida, Gift, 51. 23. Ibid., 61. 24. Responsibility is a matter of response. In both German (Verantwortung) and French (responsabilite´), responsibility comes from respond (antworten, re´pondre) and has a stronger sense of ‘‘answer’’ than in English, where respond and answer are different words. The Latin respond⬍mac⬎ere means ‘‘to answer’’ and, in the legal sense, ‘‘to answer one’s name or be present before the law.’’ 25. Derrida, Gift, 61. 26. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 288. 27. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 50–51. Emphasis added. 28. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), 31. 29. One of Diacritic’s reviewers made the interesting comment that, if fatherhood is defined in terms of exogamic rather than endogamic relationships, then the feminine circulates differently, and mothers and daughters have different exchange values. 30. Derrida, Gift, 76. Suffering Faith in Philosophy S. Clark Buckner 1. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 6. Hereafter cited in text. 2. Edmund Husserl, ‘‘Vienna Lecture,’’ as quoted in Husserl, Crisis, 273. 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘The Ends of Man,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Allan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 122. 4. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Diffe´rance,’’ in Margins, 9. 5. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 129. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority,’’ trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge Press, 1992), 15. 9. Derrida, Gift, 26. Notes to Pages 49–71

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10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 11. Ibid., 22. 12. On this point (instrumental reason’s denying the legitimacy of any thematically defined telos), post-phenomenology and philosophical positivism are in agreement. 13. Levinas, Totality, 225. 14. Ibid. Becoming Real—with Style Merold Westphal 1. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 276. 2. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 194. 3. ‘‘The interesting’’ is perhaps the preeminent aesthetic category in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, esp. in the (in)famous conclusion, ‘‘The Seducer’s Diary.’’ See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987) 1:9, 9n12, 339, 345–46, 351–52, 368, and 437–38. 4. William James is said to have thought that, for his colleague Josiah Royce, the world had only this kind of quasi-reality. 5. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘‘Philosophical Fragments,’’ trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:86. 6. Ibid., 85. 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Ibid., 199–204. 9. I have interpreted Fear and Trembling along these lines in Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), chap. 5, and Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’’ (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996), chap. 3. 10. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 5–7. 11. Ibid., 121–23. 12. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology,’’ in The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 10. 13. Silentio treats faith as a virtue to which other virtues belong. On faith as courage, see Kierkegaard, Trembling, 33–34, 48–49. 274

Notes to Pages 72–80

14. Ibid., 35. See also p. 43, where Silentio says that ‘‘in infinite resignation [the knight] is reconciled with existence’’ and p. 45, where resignation is a movement ‘‘which in its pain reconciles one to existence.’’ 15. Ibid., 36. 16. Ibid., 46–47. 17. Whether calling itself ‘‘Reason’’ is sufficient to validate such a mode of thinking is a question Climacus will pose in Philosophical Fragments. See Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). Insofar as Abraham is presented as a hero in Fear and Trembling, the ultimacy of human understanding as stockbroker of the finite is at least implicitly put in question. 18. Kierkegaard, Trembling, 17, 23, 76–77. Like Climacus in Philosophical Fragments, Silentio alludes to the passage in the Phaedrus where Socrates speaks of ‘‘the superiority of heaven-sent madness over man-made sanity.’’ Plato, Phaedrus, trans., 244d. 19. For textual support, see the discussions referred to in note 9. 20. Hegel seems to make such an idolatrous identification when he says that ethical life (Sittlichkeit) can be ‘‘the most genuine cultus.’’ See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 194. 21. For the distinction between the eternal and divine laws, see Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 91, aa.1 and 4. 22. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ’’ in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992). 23. This formulation of Truth, Idea, Thought, and Being could be taken as a definition of logocentrism expressed in Hegelian language. 24. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1:203–4. 25. This is the heart of Climacus’s ‘‘attack upon Christendom.’’ If we think of this scene or site as both spatial and temporal, it is possible to see in it the differing and deferral that Derrida combines in the notion of diffe´rance. Neither the eternal happiness for which the believer hopes nor even the believer’s own proper relation thereto is ever simply here or now. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Diffe´rance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 26. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1:393. 27. Ibid., 1:387. See also ibid., 1:407, 414, 422, 431. 28. While the Stoic knight of infinite resignation may cultivate detachment in order to make resignation possible, Silentio insists, regarding Abraham, that ‘‘the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher.’’ Kierkegaard, Trembling, 40. 29. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1:445. See also 1:436, 443, 447, 451, 460, 499. Notes to Pages 80–85

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30. Kierkegaard, Fragments, 53. Climacus alludes to the saying of Lactantius (echoed in Augustine) that the virtues of the pagans are glittering vices since they do not originate from a right relation to God. Similar references are found in Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 86, Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 46, 82, and Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 53, 196, 269. In these passages, as in the section of Fragments before us, Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous personae make it clear that, in their view, we are all pagans. 31. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 101. 32. Ibid., 86 33. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 138–55. 34. See note 5. 35. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. , second essay, sections 19–23. See Nietzsche’s hymn to the ‘‘innocence of becoming’’ in Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. , ‘‘The Four Great Errors,’’ sections 7–8, and similar references in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), sections 552, 765, and 787. [AU: Please provide publication data for translations of first two Nietzsche works and confirm or correct those for third work] 36. For Kierkegaard’s three meditations on this commandment, see Kierkegaard, Love, 17–90. The points made below occur repeatedly like leitmotifs throughout these pages. 37. Ibid., 13. 38. Ibid., 56. 39. Ibid., 38. Kierkegaard uses the phrase ‘‘the self that ‘has the law of its existence outside itself’ ’’ in the Kantian sense to signify the self given over to its drives and inclinations, praising commanded love as independent by contrast to the self-love that is ‘‘dependent in a false sense.’’ But this implies that there is a true sense of dependence, as in Levinas, signifying that the command in question is not the product of self-legislation. 40. Loving my enemy, who is also my neighbor, poses the same dilemma that arises for Levinas. Every Other has an equal claim on me, and yet, as a practical matter of fact, I cannot respond equally to all. But neither Kierkegaard nor Levinas allows this dilemma to become an excuse for lapsing back into preferential love. 41. Kierkegaard, Love, 21.

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42. Ibid., 18. This notion of ‘‘proper self-love’’ is necessary to the commandment (Leviticus 19:18; Matthew 22:39), which tells us to love our neighbor as, not instead of, ourselves. 43. See note 1. 44. The term ‘‘cheap grace’’ comes, of course, from another Lutheran thinker. See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 1959). 45. See Søren Kierkegaard, Without Authority, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 109–44, 161–88, and Christian Discourses; The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 247–300. 46. Kierkegaard, Love, 8–10, 3. 47. Ibid., 9–10. 48. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1:557. 49. Kierkegaard, Sickness, esp. 83–87 and 113–24. 50. I have argued that Works of Love and other later works of Kierkegaard such as Practice in Christianity, For Self-Examination, and Judge for Yourself describe a ‘‘Religiousness C,’’ in which Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus go beyond the account of Christianity given in Postscript. Christ is no longer just the Paradox to be believed but the Pattern to be imitated. See Merold Westphal, ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B,’’ in George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, eds., Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1992), chap. 7, and Westphal, Becoming, chap. 14. 51. I have discussed the relation between Kierkegaard and Habermas on these issues in Merold Westphal, ‘‘Commanded Love and Moral Authority: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate,’’ Kierkegaard Studies, Yearbook 1998: 1–22. 52. I have argued that the critique of onto-theology does not exclude the theism that affirms a personal Creator in Merold Westphal, ‘‘Overcoming Onto-Theology,’’ in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999). 53. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 1:196. The first two contrasts between the infinity of God’s knowledge and the finitude of our own are found on pp.118, 158, and 141. See also Westphal, Becoming, 114–15. 54. Kierkegaard, Love, 10. 55. See David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Morality without God Charles E. Scott 1. Matthew Arnold, ‘‘Dover Beach,’’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1983), 794.

Notes to Pages 88–98

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How Does Philosophy Become What It Is? Matthew Statler 1. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. H. G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1979), 1005b 19–20. 2. Ibid., 1008b 13–18. 3. It is no accident that the theoretical axiom that seeks to ground all philosophical knowledge also serves as the practical limit condition for the knowledge of any individual philosopher. What would philosophers say if they could somehow speak from beyond death? Why is Er’s testimony presented in the last book of Plato’s Republic (614b–621b) in the form of a myth, and why does the myth itself depict a cycle of reincarnation? It may be helpful to note that the ominously existential character of this distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge was perhaps not as troublesome for Aristotle as it may seem for us. Hans Gadamer, in The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 1998), 19–20, writes that ‘‘Greek philosophy knows only ideas and knows nothing of self-consciousness. The concept of nous is but an early manifestation of reflexivity as such, and this reflexivity does not yet have the character of modern Cartesian subjectivity. This, of course, only defers the problem.’’ In Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 13, Jacques Derrida recasts this historical deferral in temporal terms, citing Aristotle’s Physics (217b) as a means of introducing ‘‘the common arguments’’ (dia ton exoterikon logon) from Heidegger’s Being and Time into a discussion of the question of his own death as ‘‘the impracticable.’’ In any case, by raising the question of piety in the context of the philosopher’s vital attachment to the principle of noncontradiction, we here follow Gadamer’s lead toward the incipience of something that does not know in advance which way to proceed. 4. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1009a 37–39. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. Marianne Cowan (Washington, D.C.: Regenery, 1962), 52. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Viking, 1990), 46. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1989), 45. 8. This path of thinking has been traced in detail through the Platonic text by Bernard Freydberg in The Play of the Platonic Dialogues (New York: Peter Lang, 1997). Freydberg expands on Sallis’s interest in the philosophical significance of the performative mythos in the dialogues. See John Sallis, Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1975). 9. Nietzsche, Twilight, 57. 10. Nietzsche, Greeks, 34–35. 11. On this point, Nietzsche’s unwillingness to allow the image of Socrates to overcome this fault attributed to the Platonic text seems to support 278

Notes to Pages 105–11

Heidegger’s allegation that the eternal return of the same is in fact a metaphysical concept par excellence. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). 12. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,’’ trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 177. 13. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 168–69. 14. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1–2. 15. Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shovey, in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), 509d. 16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 127. 17. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 11. 18. A recent reformulation of this entire line of questioning in explicitly political terms may be found in Slavoj Zizek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (New York: Verso, 2001). 19. We could here use the term ‘‘tactic’’ instead of ‘‘strategy,’’ following the line of argument developed by Michel de Certeau in The Practices of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 40: ‘‘Strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulation an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed. [Whereas] dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading shopping and cooking are activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses and surprises: clever tricks of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong,’ an art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf, hunter’s tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and warlike discoveries.’’ 20. Plato, Republic, 507a. 21. Ibid., 394d. Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction Jason K. Winfree 1. Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ (Was ist Aufkla¨rung?), trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 42. 2. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Reader, 82. Notes to Pages 111–20

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3. Foucault, ‘‘Enlightenment?’’ 42. 4. Kant’s entire project must, on his own terms, be understood as moral. At various places, the need to unify the system is understood in moral terms, as required for the consistency of the moral maxim. Insofar as Kant understands his writing and his place in history as exemplary of Enlightenment thought, as contributing to a release from self-incurred immaturity—be it in the sphere of the domain and extension of reason and morality or understanding and nature—his very project must be understood in moral terms. For the progress made by the resolution of the antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason is no less significant vis-a`-vis the release of humankind from its self-incurred immaturity than is the formulation of the categorical imperative in the Critique of Practical Reason. In fact, the resolution of the antinomies can be understood as the application of the categorical imperative to the theoretical sphere. The philosopher has a duty and obligation (a) to understand the proper place of freedom, or at least to show that there is such a place, and (b) to understand the workings of nature in such a way that the world is granted intelligibility, for example, that the principle of causality in nature function in such a manner that the world can be understood as an ordered system and not the parody of a malicious God. 5. ‘‘Whatever conception of the freedom of the will one may form in terms of metaphysics, the will’s manifestations in the world of phenomena, i.e., human actions, are determined in accordance with natural laws, as is every other natural event. History is concerned with giving an account of these phenomena, no matter how deeply concealed their causes may be. . . .’’ Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,’’ in Kant: Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41. ‘‘Morality, as a collection of absolutely binding laws by which our actions ought to be governed, belongs essentially, in an objective sense, to the practical sphere. And if we have once acknowledged the authority of this concept of duty, it is patently absurd to say that we cannot act as the moral law requires.’’ Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Perpetual Peace,’’ in Political Writings, 116n11. We must, therefore, suppose that we can act as the moral law requires, and that a discharge of such actions into the phenomenal sphere must therefore be possible. 6. ‘‘History . . . allows us to hope that, if it examines the free exercise of the human will on a large scale, it will be able to discover a regular progression among freely willed actions.’’ Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 41. ‘‘. . . for such a plan opens up the comforting prospect of a future in which we are shown from afar how the human race eventually works its way upward to a situation in which all the germs implanted by nature can be fully developed, and in which man’s destiny can be fulfilled here on earth. Such a justification of nature—or rather perhaps of providence—is no mean motive for adopting a particular point of view in considering the world.’’ Ibid., 53. ‘‘We may therefore offer the following advice: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of pure prac280

Notes to Pages 120–22

tical reason and its righteousness, and your object (the blessing of perpetual peace) will be added unto you.’ ’’ Kant, ‘‘Peace,’’ 122. 7. See Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 41. 8. Kant poses the question in ‘‘Idea for a Universal History’’ specifically in terms of how we are to conceive of our supposed superiority as a species. And he suggests that ‘‘the only way out for the philosopher, since he cannot assume that mankind follows any rational purpose of its own in its collective actions, is for him to attempt to discover a purpose in nature behind this senseless course of human events, and decide whether it is after all possible to formulate in terms of a definite plan of nature as a history of creatures who act without a plan of their own.’’ Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 42. Of course, the very activity of ‘‘discovering’’ such a plan is understood by Kant in terms of a duty (see Kant, ‘‘Peace’’), and hence the rational activity of giving an account of such history. Clearly, this history is a history of reason. 9. Kant, ‘‘Peace,’’ 116. To be sure, Kant’s remark is made with reference to the compatibility of morality and politics, but the essay is quite clear that the telos of the political is promoted within and by nature. 10. Ibid., 114. Emphasis added. 11. Ibid., 125. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 129. 13. ‘‘We shall seek to establish the grounds of that possibility [of a connection between the condition and the conditioned, morality and happiness] primarily with respect to what is immediately in our power, and secondarily in that which is beyond our power but which reason holds out to us as the supplement to our impotence to [realize] the possibility of the highest good, which is necessary according to practical principles.’’ Ibid., 126. 14. Ibid., 139. Emphasis added. 15. ‘‘The objective reality of a pure will or of a pure practical reason is given a priori in the moral law, as it were by a fact, for the latter term can be applied to a determination of the will which is inescapable, even though it does not reason on any empirical principles.’’ Ibid., 57. And again, ‘‘practical reason is concerned not with objects in order to know them but with its own capacity to make them real (which does require knowledge of them), i.e., it has to do with a will which is a causal agent so far as reason contains its determining ground.’’ Ibid., 93. 16. Kant makes this point expressly vis-a`-vis perpetual peace: ‘‘Its relationship to and conformity with an end which reason directly prescribes to us (i.e., the end of morality) can only be conceived of as an idea. Yet this idea is indeed farfetched in theory, it does possess dogmatic validity and has a very real foundation in practice, as with the concept of perpetual peace, which makes it our duty to promote it by using the natural mechanism described above.’’ Kant, ‘‘Peace,’’ 190. 17. Ibid., 138. Notes to Pages 122–25

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18. Ibid., 43. 19. Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 52. 20. Ibid., 42. 21. Ibid., 42–43. 22. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History,’’ in Political Writings, 221. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Kant’s idea for a universal history cannot be regarded as conjecture because it is not circumscribed adequately by a legitimate historical account with its remote causes and effects. By virtue of its telos, it projects itself beyond any such properly historical restraints. This is evinced in Kant’s text, for example, insofar as no level of appeal to the strife and discord that he clearly recognizes as comprising much of history can serve to destabilize the course of this telos. Kant’s telos, and so his conception of history, is circumscribed by the moral law alone and its demand for consistency, not by a history in relation to which it merely fills in the gaps. 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 12B. Emphasis original. 27. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 116. 28. Kant, ‘‘Conjectures,’’ 226. 29. McCarthy, Meridian, 198. Hereafter cited in text. 30. It will be recalled that, although the judge does not kill David Brown or Toadvine in the desert when he first shoots at the Kid, he may nevertheless be charged with their deaths. For it will also be recalled that when the Kid is finally captured, the judge visits him in jail and indicates that he has told the authorities that the Kid is responsible for the massacre of the Yumas. When the Kid is released from jail after telling the authorities the location of the gold stolen by the mercenaries, he sees Toadvine and David Brown hanging in the town square. Presumably, without his cooperation, the Kid would be hanging with them. And insofar as we know the judge promoted the Kid’s death, which would have occurred alongside those of members of his former company, so, too, may we infer that the judge has had a hand in the deaths of David Brown and Toadvine. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 124. 32. Kant, of course, recognizes that God alone can guarantee such a history insofar as he makes continuous reference to ‘‘providence.’’ Also, I have Idit Dobbs-Weinstein to thank for reminding me of the unutterability of the name of God in the context of parody. 33. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 337. 34. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 263. 282

Notes to Pages 125–34

35. Ibid., 261. 36. Kant, ‘‘Peace,’’ 93. 37. Ibid., 108. 38. Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 45. 39. Insofar as we cannot determine whether war arises from fear or from fearlessness, the extent to which Kant flees this violence is also undecidable. To be sure, he represses it, such that it is a sort of quasi-flight, his text occupying an indeterminate space that destabilizes the distinction he employs to account for sublimity of violence. 40. Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 42. 41. Ibid., 53. 42. See note 4 and the quote from ‘‘Idea for a Universal History’’ in note 5. [AU: Please confirm or correct as emended] 43. See Kant, ‘‘Peace,’’ 113. 44. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in Political Writings, 54. 45. McCarthy, Meridian, 47. 46. In Kant’s own words, his position ‘‘opens up the comforting prospect of a future in which we are shown from afar how the human race eventually works its way upward to a situation in which all the germs implanted by nature can be fully developed, and in which man’s destiny can be fulfilled here on earth.’’ Kant, ‘‘Idea,’’ 53. Emphasis added. 47. ‘‘The proverbial saying . . . (let justice reign, even if all the rogues in the world must perish),’’ Kant writes in ‘‘Peace,’’ 133, ‘‘may sound somewhat inflated, but it is nonetheless true. It is a sound principle of right, which blocks up all the devious paths followed by cunning or violence.’’ This is clearly a philosophical exposition of the principle that those who live by the sword also die by the sword. Kant grounds this position, moreover, in the vocation of the human being, as should be clear from the first section of his essay. ‘‘All actions affecting the rights of human beings,’’ he goes on to write, ‘‘are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public.’’ Ibid., 126. 48. McCarthy, Meridian, 248. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 249. 51. Ibid., 152, 155. 52. For an account of the judge as spokesperson for manifest destiny, see Robert L. Jarrett, Cormac McCarthy (New York: Twayne, 1997), 77–78. Along with mistaking the figure of the judge as a spokesperson for manifest destiny, a title more appropriately applied to Captain White, Jarrett also misunderstands the judge as a spokesperson for rational egoism. Such a view collapses once the edifice of such egoism, namely, autonomy, collapses, as it clearly does. In both cases, Jarrett’s misunderstanding derives from a caricatured view of the Enlightenment ethos. 53. McCarthy, Meridian, 249. Notes to Pages 134–37

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54. Ibid., 249. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 106. 57. Kant, ‘‘Peace,’’ 108. 58. McCarthy, Meridian, 249. Emphasis added. 59. Ibid., 242. 60. Ibid., 250. 61. Thus the resolution of the Kantian antinomies would hold less interest for the judge than the fact they they occupy such a central place in Kant’s project. 62. McCarthy, Meridian, 250. 63. Ibid., 245. 64. Ibid. 65. See also Vareen Bell, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 116 – ff. For an extensive account of the relation of the order of pure becoming to that of a metaphysics of history, see Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Thomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), esp. chaps. 3 and 5. 66. McCarthy, Meridian, 242. 67. Ibid., 251. 68. Kant, Judgment, 275. 69. McCarthy, Meridian, 246. Hereafter cited in text. 70. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), ‘‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,’’ 6–26. 71. McCarthy, Meridian, 116. 72. Ibid., 140. 73. Ibid., 141. 74. Blood Meridian is not, then, a ‘‘Louis L’Amour rewritten with a bloody pen,’’ as suggested by Sven Birkerts in the New Republic. Sven Birkerts, as quoted in David Rubel, ed., The Reading List: Contemporary Fiction (New York: Agincourt Press, 1998), 212. Robert L. Jarrett more subtly understands Blood Meridian as a revisionist Western. Yet, if in the novel, qua revisionist, some belief in the Western is still operative, as in the case of revisionist history (which remains committed to history teleologically understood), then Blood Meridian would not even be a revisionist Western. 75. McCarthy, Meridian, 249. 76. Ibid., 141. 77. Ibid. 78. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘‘Rhizome,’’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25. 79. McCarthy, Meridian, 145. Hereafter cited in text. 284

Notes to Pages 138–47

80. As Walter Benjamin has said of Kafka. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Some Reflections on Kafka,’’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 144. 81. McCarthy, Meridian, 337. 82. Ibid. Tragic Dislocations: Antigone’s Modern Theatrics Tina Chanter 1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘The Caesura of the Speculative,’’ in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 208–33. 2. Ibid., 219. 3. Hegel would follow Ho¨lderlin in recognizing Antigone as the tragedy par excellence, at least insofar as he sees Antigone as the purest of tragic heroes. 4. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Caesura,’’ 216. 5. Ibid., 217. 6. If, at first, Hegel’s justification is obscure in claiming that ‘‘ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more inexcusable, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes,’’ it becomes less so when read against the background of Hegel’s description of heroic figures and the way in which ‘‘it is the honor of these great characters to be culpable.’’ G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 284, and Aesthetics: Lectures on the Philosophy of the Fine Arts, trans., T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 2:1215. The task of heroic figures is to be completely what they are, nothing more, and nothing less. 7. Sarah Kofman, ‘‘L’espace de la ce´sure,’’ Critique 379 (December 1978): 1143–50. 8. Unlike ethical substance, which appears in the community as the human law that is ‘‘conscious of what it actually does,’’ the Divine law ‘‘has the form of immediate substance or substance that simply is.’’ Hegel, Phenomenology, 268. Ethical Spirit is expressed in its immediacy in the family, which is a ‘‘natural ethical community.’’ Now, this immediacy has two sides to it. It is ‘‘on one hand the inner Notion or general possibility of the ethical sphere in general, but on the other hand equally contains within it the moment of self-consciousness.’’ Antigone embodies the immediacy of ethical substance in burying Polynices, acting in accordance with the Divine law, and on behalf of the family. She thereby gives meaning to the ‘‘general possibility of the ethical sphere in general.’’ Ibid. Antigone does not attain to consciousness of ‘‘what is ethical’’ despite having ‘‘the highest intuitive awareness of what is ethical.’’ Ibid., 274. Hegel gives as the reason Antigone ‘‘does not attain to consciousness of [what is ethical], or to the objective existence of it, [is] because the law of the Family is an implicit, inner essence Notes to Pages 147–53

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which is not exposed to the daylight of consciousness, but remains an inner feeling and the divine element that is exempt from an existence in the real world.’’ Ibid. 9. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Caesura,’’ 219. 10. As Antigone says, ‘‘it is my nature (ephyn) to join in loving, not in hating.’’ Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago University Press, 1954), 523. Politics is not her province: the family is. In her obedience to the tradition of honoring the dead through burial rights she observes her familial duty, a loyalty that is underscored by the ignominious fate of the particular family line that is hers, and by the fact that there is no one left but her to perform the deed. Since Ismene declined Antigone’s entreaty that she help bury Polynices, Antigone has spoken as if Ismene does not exist—she is all alone in the world and friendless. In the figure of Antigone, the family finds its proper function in burying the dead. Antigone epitomizes Obedience to her familial descent and the duties it implies. Hegel thinks that the family has its proper sphere of action in observing the rights of the dead. And so for him, Antigone is observing her nature when she buries Polynices. That is why she is the supreme tragic hero in Hegel’s view. 11. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Caesura,’’ 220. Hereafter cited in text. 12. Peter Szondi, On Sexual Understanding and the Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 15 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 54. 13. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Caesura,’’ 208, 209. 14. Ibid., 209. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, La mort et le temps, ed. Jacques Rolland (Paris: L’Herne, 1991), 103, 91. 16. Ibid., 99, 105. In this respect, insofar as death becomes a ‘‘moment in the appearance of the world’’ and is rendered ‘‘intelligible’’ to the survivor, Hegel’s account suffers, according to Levinas, from the same fault as Heidegger, for whom the death of the other is an intraworldly event. Ibid., 54. 17. Kofman, ‘‘L’espace,’’ 1143. 18. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Potter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1992), 252. 19. Kofman, ‘‘L’espace,’’ 1147. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid.; cf. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Caesura,’’ 231. 22. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘‘Caesura,’’ 233. 23. Kofman, ‘‘L’Espace,’’ 1147. Hereafter cited in text. 24. Sarah Kofman, ‘‘Autobiographical Writings,’’ trans. Frances Bartkowski, Substance 49–50 (1986): 9. 286

Notes to Pages 154–58

25. Ibid. Later the story is amended—see Frances Bartkowski’s introduction to Kofman’s ‘‘Tomb for a Proper Name.’’ Ibid. 26. Ibid., 10. 27. Antigone recalls her suffering again before going on to specify her relationship to Polynices with reference to her mother: ‘‘who lives in sorrows many as are mine how shall he not be glad to gain his death? And so, for me to meet this fate, no grief. But if I left that corpse, my mother’s son, dead and unburied I’d have cause to grieve as now I grieve not.’’ Sophocles, Antigone, 463–68. 28. Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 109. 29. Kofman, ‘‘Autobiographical,’’ 8, 13. 30. Ibid., 10. 31. Kofman’s use of the word unheimlich recalls Heidegger’s designation of Antigone’s essence as ‘‘unheimlich,’’ which he translates as ‘‘demon’’ in his reading of Ho¨lderlin’s poem ‘‘Der Ister.’’ See Martin Heidegger, Ho¨lderlin’s Hymn ‘‘The Ister,’’ trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1996. 32. Kofman, ‘‘Autobiographical,’’ 11. Hereafter cited in text. 33. Kofman, ‘‘L’espace,’’ 1150. 34. Ibid. 35. Alice Jardine and Anne Menke conducted the interview as one of a series that they held between May 1986 and November 1987. See Alice A. Jardine and Anne M. Menke, eds., Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-’68 France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 6. 36. Ibid., 107. 37. Ibid., 109–10. 38. See Luisa Muraro, ‘‘Female Genealogies,’’ in Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford, eds., Engaging with Irigaray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 317–33. 39. Claire Nancy, ‘‘The Tragic Woman,’’ in Mireille Calle-Gruber, ed., On the Feminine, trans. Catherine McGann (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), 100. 40. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 36. 41. Carol Jacobs, ‘‘Dusting Antigone,’’ MLN 111 (1996): 910. A Touch of Piety: The Tragedy of Antigone’s Hands Michael Naas 1. Nicole Loraux, ‘‘La main d’Antigone,’’ Me´tis 1–2 (1986): 165. Translations of foreign-language quotations are my own unless otherwise noted. 2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), 2:215 Notes to Pages 158–70

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3. Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 4. Much of the following has also been enriched by Carol Jacob’s magnificent essay ‘‘Dusting Antigone,’’ in MLN 111 (1996): 889–917. 5. Sophocles, Antigone, 14. I have used the two-volume Loeb Classical Library edition of the Sophocles plays, Sophocles, ed. and trans. Francis Storr (London: Heineman, 1939) throughout, except in the case of Antigone, where I have also used Andrew Brown’s translation, Sophocles: Antigone (Warminster, England: Aris and Phillips, 1987). 6. Cf. Sophocles, Electra, 1091–93. 7. Sophocles, Ajax, 618; cf. ibid., 439, 489–90; in Philoctetes, 324, Neoptolemus, feigning anger at Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus, says, ‘‘O that my wrath might vent itself in deeds [χειρ]’’ (324). 8. Sophocles, Electra, 37, 1422. Entering Agamemnon’s palace after an absence of many years, Orestes, says the chorus, carries ‘‘death new-whetted in his hands [χερον].’’ Ibid., 1394; cf. ibid., 1495. 9. Sophocles, Philoctetes, 1255; cf. Ajax, 729. 10. Sophocles, Ajax, 10; cf. ibid., 43. Hereafter cited in text. 11. As for the hands of other gods, Oedipus says he will know the time for him to leave is near when thunder and lightning appear from Zeus’s ‘‘unconquered hand [χειρςφ τς νκτου]’’ (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1514–15). Ares is said to have struck ‘‘right-handed [δεξιχειρος]’’ (Sophocles, Antigone [Brown], 140). 12. Cf. Sophocles, Ajax, 97, 229, 372. 13. Sophocles, Trachiniae, 566; cf. ibid., 265. 14. Ibid., 1047. 15. Ibid., 1089; cf. ibid., 279, 1102. 16. Cf. ibid., 1066, 1109. 17. Sophocles, Philoctetes, 1005; cf. Ajax 70, 115. 18. Cf. Sophocles, Philoctetes, 1059, 1110, and 1150; for the relationship between the hands and the bow, cf. ibid., 655. Hereafter cited in text. 19. When Philoctetes complains that the bow was constrained to leave his, its master’s, ‘‘loving hands [φων χειρ#ν]’’ (ibid., 1124, 1128), Neoptolemus attempts to remedy the injustice by returning the bow, saying, ‘‘Take from me [χειρς *ξ *μς] thy bow. . . . Reach hither thy right hand’’ (ibid., 1288, 1291–92). 20. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1510; Oedipus at Colonus, 1632. The hand also plays a role, though less prominent, in uttering prophecies and supplications; see Sophocles, Ajax, 751, and Oedipus the King, 760. 21. Sophocles, Trachiniae, 1194. Hereafter cited in text. 22. Cf. Sophocles, Ajax, 1404 23. Sophocles, Electra 326; cf. ibid., 431–32, 458, 1378; Oedipus the King, 901, 912. 24. Ajax, 631. 288

Notes to Pages 171–75

25. A possible exception to this would be the disguised Orestes holding in his ‘‘hands [χερον]’’ the brass urn in which he claims Orestes’ ashes are contained (Sopholces, Electra, 54). But the context makes it clear that he is carrying an instrument of ruse rather than genuinely paying his respects to the dead. 26. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 469–70, 483. Sophocles, Electra, 207; cf. ibid., 126, where the chorus suggests a division of labor: ‘‘By her betrayed and slaughtered by her mate [κακ38 τε χειρ% πρδοτον].’’ Hereafter cited in text. 27. Sophocles, Antigone, 61–62. 28. Sophocles, Electra, 296; cf. ibid., 601, 1132, 1347. Hereafter cited in text. Compare this to the spiriting away of Oedipus, when the messenger from Corinth reveals to him that Polybus was not his father, that Polybus ‘‘took thee from my hands [τ#ν *μ#ν χειρ#ν λαβ'ν], a gift’’ (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1022–23). 29. While the hands of men risk being subdued by other hands, women must fear falling into foreign men’s hands; Tecmessa considers this possibility as she thinks about a life without Ajax (Sophocles, Ajax, 490). 30. Sophocles, Trachiniae, 560, 565. Hereafter cited in text. 31. Cf. ibid., 1132. There is already a hint of this turn against the self earlier in the play when Deianira notices that the wool on which she has put the charm disappears, ‘‘self-consumed [*ξ α/το1 φυνει]’’ (ibid., 677). 32. Nevertheless, Deianira comes to resemble through this final act one of the most virile of all Sophoclean characters—Ajax. Shamed by his deeds, Ajax plants his sword in the ground and falls on it (Sophocles, Ajax, 830). When the chorus asks, ‘‘By whose hand [χειρ] did he thus procure his death?’’ (ibid., 908), Tecmessa replies, ‘‘By his own hand [ατς πρς α/το1]’’ (ibid., 908–9). 33. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 106, 123, 292, 801, 845. Hereafter cited in text. 34. Cf. ibid., 348, 560. 35. Cf. ibid., 811. 36. Cf. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 975. 37. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 52. 38. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1329–31. 39. Ibid., 1469–70. 40. Ibid., 1480–81. 41. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 173–74, 183; cf. ibid., 200, 328, and Ajax 542. When Creon and his men lay their hands on Antigone to take her back to Thebes by force, Oedipus cries out for her hands, ‘‘Thy hands [χερας], my child!’’ (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 843; cf. ibid., 1009). 42. ‘‘So these two crutches shall no longer serve thee for further roaming [(δοιπορσ3ηςπ]’’ (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 849; cf. ibid., 1108). In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus comes to be identified with the blind prophet Notes to Pages 176–80

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who guides in being guided. Tiresias says in Antigone (989–90, 1014), ‘‘The blind man cannot move without a guide’’; ‘‘As I guide others, so the boy guides me.’’ 43. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1611, 1638–39. Taking leave of his daughters, Oedipus ‘‘folded his arms [χερας] about them both’’ and laid ‘‘blind hands’’ on them. The play concludes with Theseus ‘‘shading his eyes from some awful sight’’ with ‘‘upraised hand [χερ]’’ (ibid., 1651), the hand that Oedipus wished to touch but ultimately did not for fear that his own hand was too wretched to be touched (ibid., 1130). 44. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 55–57. 45. Ibid., 170–72. 46. When Polyneices complains in Oedipus at Colonus of being ousted by Eteocles’ hand, Oedipus curses him and says he will be slain ‘‘by a kinsman’s hand [συγγενε χερ%].’’ 47. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1297, 1387. 48. Sophocles, Antigone, 43, 555. 49. Ibid., 81; cf. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1410. 50. Sophocles, Electra, 236, 249–50, 1093. 51. Sophocles, Ajax, 1047; Antigone, 453–57; cf. Ajax, 1129–31. 52. Sophocles Ajax, 1247, 1343; cf. ibid., 1384. 53. Charles Segal, Interpreting Greek Tragedy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 139. This phrase of Karl Rheinhardt is cited by Segal in this same passage. 54. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 306. 55. Sophocles, Antigone, 525; cf. ibid., 484, 579, 648, 660–62, 667, 756. 56. Sophocles, Philoctetes, 96–99. Though Odysseus, who says in the same play that his one concern is always to prevail (ibid., 1054), is talking more about persuading than being persuaded, more about swaying others than being himself swayed, he gives voice to the fundamental opposition in Greek tragedy between force and persuasion, bia and peitho. 57. See Loraux, ‘‘Antigone,’’ 177. 58. Sophocles, Antigone, 1175–76. 59. Ibid., 1109. 60. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 1257–60; cf. ibid., 1279. 61. Sophoces, Antigone, 1298, 1315. 62. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 1343–44. 63. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1237. 64. See Loraux, ‘‘Antigone,’’ 190–91. 65. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 248; cf. ibid., 424, 439, 503. 66. Jacobs, ‘‘Antigone,’’ 896, 901. Jacobs (ibid., 910) goes on to write of this scene: ‘‘In her role as mother, once again, [Antigone] neither preserves the family nor serves the state—the ‘two highest ethical powers’ posited by Hegel: and it is precisely in this neither nor that another mode of ethics is, if not conceived, then staged as an unrevealing rite of unintelligible frenzy.’’ 290

Notes to Pages 180–84

67. Sophocles, Antigone, 251–52. Hereafter cited in text. 68. Cf. Sophocles, Philoctetes, 1018. 69. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 1220–21. 70. Loraux, ‘‘Antigone,’’ 191. 71. Ibid., 193–94. 72. Ibid., 196. 73. Sophocles, Ajax, 1350. 74. Sophocles, Trachiniae, 1222. 75. Ibid., 1245–46. 76. Sophocles, Philoctetes, 1441–44; cf. ibid., 85, 402, 1053, and 1289. 77. Sophocles, Electra, 250; cf. ibid., 589–90, 307–8. 78. Ibid., 968–69; cf. ibid., 464, 589–90, 981. 79. Ibid., 1384. 80. Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 1430–31; cf. ibid., 700, 830, 884. 81. Ibid., 1382, 1441; Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 824. 82. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 188–89. 83. Ibid., 279–81. 84. Ibid., 287–88; cf. Theseus at ibid., 636. Intent, it seems, to demonstrate the piety of ancient Athens and of Theseus who will offer hospitality to Oedipus, Sophocles has Oedipus call Athens the ‘‘most devout [θεοσεβεστ τας],’’ or pious, of states (ibid., 260; cf. ibid., 1007, 1125; cf. the chorus at ibid., 187, 1558). 85. Sophocles, Antigone, 167, 301. Hereafter cited in text. 86. Cf. Antigone’s words in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1191–92. 87. Cf. Sophocles, Antigone, 516. 88. Sophocles, Antigone (Brown), 872–74. 89. Sophocles, Antigone, 924. 90. Ibid., 941–42. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida John D. Caputo 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession: Fifty-nine Periods and Periphrases,’’ in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 154. 2. Ibid. 3. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), IX, ix, 22; III, xii, 12. 4. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 155–56. 5. I embrace from the start Mark Taylor’s homograph ‘‘tears/tears’’; one can always read ‘‘tears’’ as cries and cuts whenever I write ‘‘the prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida.’’ See Mark Taylor, Tears (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). This is an essay about Derrida, not about Judaism. I am not Jewish, nor am I trained in Jewish studies, and I will Notes to Pages 184–90

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leave it to others better prepared than I am to explain the roots in the Jewish tradition of the prophetic and messianic themes I am identifying, as best I can, in Derrida’s more recent work. That is something I would very much enjoy reading, as I enjoyed Susan Handelman’s book on the earlier work of Derrida. I am, however, deeply interested in the biblical tradition, particularly in the prophetic tradition and in ‘‘Jesus the Jew.’’ Like Levinas and Derrida, I am interested in measuring the shock that biblical categories deliver to philosophy, to metaphysics, to onto-theo-logic, to what is called ‘‘thinking.’’ 6. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 324. 7. The last paragraph of Of Grammatology is devoted to dreaming, and the last sentence is a citation from Rousseau’s Emile: ‘‘I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake.’’ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 316. Expecting the impossible is but one of many points of intersection of Derrida and Kierkegaard and his pseudonymous personae, a theme to which I will return again and again, repeatedly, obsessively, compulsively. In Johannes de Silentio, who is delivering a eulogy to father Abraham, the possible is the aesthetic; the eternal is the rational; the impossible is the ethico-religious. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 6:16. 8. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 314. ‘‘Jackie’’ is the name Derrida was given at birth, in keeping with a practice common among Jewish Algerians in the 1930s to give their children the names of American movie stars and heroes. When he began to publish, he took the French and Christian ‘‘semipseudonym’’ ‘‘Jacques,’’ erasing more things than he can say in a few words. See Jacques Derrida, Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 343–44. 9. In ‘‘Choreographies,’’ Derrida speaks of ‘‘dreaming of the innumerable,’’ of his ‘‘desire for a sexuality without number,’’ adding that ‘‘what is dreamt of must be there in order for it to provide the dream.’’ See Derrida, Points, 108. In a later correspondence, commenting on these remarks, Derrida explains that this dream makes reference to ‘‘that ecstasy that consists in thinking, in order to love it, the impossible’’; the very fact ‘‘that I think I am desiring what I cannot know, the impossible,’’ bears witness to this desire, even were this dream to be ‘‘false.’’ Ibid., 164–65. Derrida ‘‘dreams of an idiomatic writing,’’ and dreaming—dreaming and promising—institute speech and writing. See ibid., 119, 136. 10. ‘‘It is possible to see deconstruction as being produced in a space where the prophets are not far away . . . I am still looking for something [in a] search without hope for hope. . . . Perhaps my search is a twentieth cen292

Notes to Pages 193–95

tury brand of prophecy? But it is difficult for me to believe it.’’ Jacques Derrida, as interviewed in Richard Kearney, ed., Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 119. 11. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Pas,’’ in Parages (Paris: Galile´e, 1986), 53. 12. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit and trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey Jr., and Ian Maceod (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 1995), 59. 13. ‘‘No one has ever said that deconstruction, as a technique or a method, was possible; it thinks only on the level of the impossible and of what is still evoked as unthinkable.’’ Jacques Derrida, Me´moires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 135. Me´moires for Paul de Man is an extended commentary on memory and the promise, on the impossible promise, in mourning and memory of Paul de Man. If the promise has a certain messianic structure that de-structures the present and prevents the present from closing over, then all the moves made in deconstruction turn on the structure of a certain messianic promise. Our task is to meditate what a ‘‘certain messianic promise’’ might mean. See Jacques Derrida, Politics, Theory, Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 219. 14. ‘‘Deconstruction has often been defined as the very experience of the (impossible) possibility of the impossible, of the most impossible. . . .’’ Derrida, Name, 43. See also John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), which treats the theme of the impossible in chapter 3 and throughout. 15. Derrida identifies the same structure at the heart of Heidegger’s thought, of a Zusage ‘‘before every question,’’ that is, of a being promised over to what addresses us, ‘‘a sort of promise or [the English translation mistakenly says ‘‘of’’] originary alliance [alliance originaire]’’ to which thinking has all along said yes, ‘‘before any question.’’ Jacques Derrida, On Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 129n. If the structure of alliance and promise goes to the heart of Heidegger’s thought, and if that is a thoroughly Hebrew structure, un he´ritage he´braı¨que, then, as Marle`ne Zarader argues, Heidegger’s thought is structured from within by something he tried systematically to suppress and exclude, the Hebraic, which guides in advance his interpretation of the Greeks and in particular of the question, was heisst Denken? See Marle`ne Zarader, La dette impense´e: Heidegger et l’he´ritage he´braı¨que (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990) 83–91. As Zarader notes (p. 126), Derrida suggests something similar about Heidegger in terms of Christian theology (see Derrida, Spirit, 110–13), as also of ‘‘my friend and coreligionary, the Messianic Jew,’’ and maybe even the Moslem. 16. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, in Writings, 7:37, 44–45. Notes to Pages 195–96

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17. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,’’ trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (summer 1995): 34. 18. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago University Press, 1995), 49. 19. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 168. 20. If this sounds a little like the ‘‘Preface’’ to Totality and Infinity, like Levinas’s ‘‘eschatology of messianic peace,’’ so be it; see Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 22. Derrida himself sketches this ‘‘proximity’’ in Kearney, Dialogues, 119–20; see also Richard Kearney, Poetics of Modernity (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 158–59. 21. Jaques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago University Press, 1993), 129. Derrida, ‘‘Pas,’’ 25. 22. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 58. 23. Derrida, Specters, 89. 24. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 18. 25. Ibid., 122. Derrida has edited Augustine’s words slightly; see Confessions, X, vi. Deconstruction is always meant to be something affirmative; ‘‘I would even say that it never proceeds without love. . . .’’ Derrida, Points, 83. 26. Jacques Derrida, Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 296. 27. Ibid., 284. 28. Jacques Derrida, Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 162. 29. Jacques Derrida, Points de suspension: Entretiens (Paris: Galile´e, 1992), 55n. 30. Derrida, Name, 47. 31. Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 75. 32. Jacques Derrida, Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Howard Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 122. 33. Derrida, Name, 144 n14. 34. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 311. 35. In ‘‘Back from Moscow, in the USSR,’’ Derrida describes his project in Jewgreek terms, as a certain miscegenation of Greek and biblical themes, mixing Greek myths and Judeo-Christian narratives, mythological and ‘‘Mosaic-messianic’’ models, to let them struggle with each other, in order both to escape them and restore them, aiming to repeat them and to ‘‘interrupt repetition,’’ so as to bring about ‘‘the completely new advent of the unique, of absolute singularity, in other words . . . the beginning, finally, of history.’’ Derrida, Politics, 226. 294

Notes to Pages 197–201

36. ‘‘De`s qu’il est saisi par l’e´criture, le concept est cuit’’ is the epigraph to Bennington and Derrida’s Jacques Derrida. 37. Derrida, Word, 294–95. 38. Derrida, ‘‘Pas,’’ 25; Cinders, 75. 39. Derrida, Blind, 129. 40. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 177. 41. This insistence, I must say, is stronger than his more guarded responses in earlier interviews: in 1981, when Richard Kearney asks him how important his Jewish beginnings were for reading his works well (Derrida, in Kearney, Dialogues, 107); in 1982, when he says that his ‘‘Algerian childhood was too colonized, too uprooted,’’ ‘‘that he received there no true Jewish education,’’ and that he does not know the Talmud—although perhaps ‘‘it knows me’’ (Derrida, Points, 80); in 1986, when he says that the Jews of El Biar were ‘‘a community cut off from its roots,’’ and he received no ‘‘true Jewish culture’’ ( ibid., 205), and when he says that he has always had ‘‘a feeling of exteriority with regard to European, French, German, Greek culture,’’ but that he hesitates to call this place of exteriority ‘‘Judaism,’’ although the name of such a place is what he is always looking for (ibid., 206). God: Poison or Cure? A Reply to John D. Caputo David Wood 1. Since this essay was written, much has been published on the question of Derrida’s religiosity, and it has become more pressing. After Caputo’s Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and the various Villanova roundtables and conferences, we now have Derrida’s Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), which collects his papers on religion from 1980 onward. In his endorsement of this book, Mark C. Taylor describes Derrida as ‘‘one of the most provocative ‘religious’ thinkers of our time.’’ Everything hangs on the scare quotes. Is Derrida retrieving for philosophy the categories of response-ability, of negative capability, of otherness, that religious discourse has preserved through hard times? Or is he making dangerous common cause with those who, as Kierkegaard so poignantly complained, would exploit faith for institutional purposes? Though perhaps inde´cidable, formally speaking, the issue is in practice all too often clearly decidable. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘‘The Singular Universal,’’ in Josiah Thompson, ed., Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1972), 230–65. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, as quoted in Cyril Barrett’s excellent Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 100. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘‘On Heidegger on Being and Dread,’’ in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 80–83. Notes to Pages 201–205

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5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1966), 44. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 108. 7. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 289. 8. See Jacques Derrida, ‘‘ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject? An Interview with Jacques Derrida,’’ with Jean-Luc Nancy, in Eduardo Cadava et. al., eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (New York: Routledge, 1991), 212. Those Weeping Eyes, Those Seeing Tears: Reading John D. Caputo’s Ethics Edith Wyschogrod 1. John Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 2. Ibid., 133. 3. Jacques Derrida, as quoted in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology, with a conclusion by Jacques Derrida (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 95. 4. Caputo, Ethics, 133. 5. Ibid., 59. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘Why I Am a Destiny,’’ in Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 326. 7. Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37. 8. Caputo, Ethics, 59. Hereafter cited in text. 9. It may be recalled that, in a recent, much-publicized case, Susan Smith was tried and found guilty of murdering her children. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 13. 11. Deleuze, Philosophy? 82. 12. Ibid., 274 n2. 13. Geoff Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoff Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 105. 14. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 128–29. Derrida and Dante: The Promise of Writing and the Piety of Broken Promises Francis J. Ambrosio 1. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 296

Notes to Pages 209–15

2. At one point, Caputo identifies mysterium with divine truth revealed by God. Ibid., 290. It should be clear in this context that the sense of mystery being evoked and recovered here is quite distinct from this usage; in fact it is tout autre. 3. See Plato, Apology, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 21a–b. Note that, mutatis mutandi, the story is the same as Abram’s in Genesis 12. 4. Caputo recognizes this in Prayers, 323–24. 5. See John D. Caputo, ‘‘The Story of Sarah,’’ in Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 139–46. 6. Dante Aligheri, La Vita Nuova, xlii. 7. The ‘‘number that cannot be spoken’’ here is, of course, the irrational number represented by the Greek letter π. The significance of the undecidable relationship that this number represents figures centrally in the ‘‘final vision’’ with which the poem concludes. 8. Dante Aligheri, Inferno 1, 1–4. All quotations from the Commedia are from the translation by Charles Singleton, The Divine Comedy, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). 9. Ibid., 1, 12–18. 10. Dorothy Sayers calls Beatrice Dante’s ‘‘God-bearing image’’; Georgette seems to play that role for Derrida, as Saint Monica did for Saint Augustine. 11. Dante, Inferno 2, 31–42. 12. Ibid., 2, 115–42. 13. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession: Fifty-nine Periods and Periphrases,’’ in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 272. 14. Dante, Inferno 3, 1–9. 15. Ibid., 5, 138. This line ironically mimics Saint Augustine’s account of the moment when he took conscious responsibility for his own need to seek forgiveness. For him the realization also took the form of ‘‘reading no more’’ but in his case because he was now ready to confess the Other who was the author of his story. See Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 12. 16. Dante, Inferno 3, 16–18. 17. Ibid., 3, 94–96. This is the first occurrence of the circumlocution that, throughout the Inferno, Dante uses to refer to God, whose name cannot be mentioned among the damned, but which in fact remains unuttered through the poem. For Dante like Augustine, the truth of God is in the doing of love. 18. Ibid., 33, 75. 19. Jacques Derrida, Derrida and Diffe´rance, ed. David Wood (Warwick, England: Parousia Press, 1985), 130. 20. Caputo, Prayers, 11. 21. See Dante Aligheri, Purgatorio 30, 41–54. The economy with which Dante accomplishes this transference of identity of the ‘‘parental unit’’ in Notes to Pages 216–39

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both of its genders from Virgil to Beatrice is matched by the poetic sweep of its implications. Hereafter cited in text. 22. The evocation of the divine name, in all its unutterable, untranslatable ambiguity, as it was given to Moses from the burning bush, is clear and clearly intended. 23. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 216. 24. Ibid., 45. 25. Caputo, Prayers, 299. 26. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 77. 27. Dante, Purgatorio, 31, 43–48. 28. Ibid., 31, 67–90. 29. Ibid., 31, 133 –45. 30. Derrida, ‘‘Circumfession,’’ 190. 31. Ibid., 172–73. 32. Ibid., 119. 33. Dante Aligheri, Paradiso, 1, 70. 34. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 117. 35. Dante, Paradiso, 1, 70–90. 36. Ibid., 31, 49–51. 37. Ibid., 30, 16–33. 38. Ibid., 127–45. Laughing, Praying, Weeping before God: A Response John D. Caputo 1. See John D. Caputo, On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001) for an extended meditation on this question. 2. See my review of Mark Taylor’s Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) in Research in Phenomenology 212 (1988): 107–14; see also John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 16. 3. Jean-Luis Chre´tien, ‘‘La parole blesse´e: Phe´nome´nologie de la prie`re,’’ in Phe´nome´nologie et the´ologie (Paris: Criterion, 1992), 41–78, and ‘‘The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,’’ trans. Jeff Kosky, in Phenomenology and the ‘‘Theological Turn’’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001) 147–75. 4. See Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); see also John D. Caputo, Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), chap. 3, 42– 68, and 263 n63. 5. See Saint Augustine, Confessiones, X, 33. The translations from Augustine’s Confessions are my own. 298

Notes to Pages 239–54

6. See John D. Caputo, ‘‘Toward a Postmodern Theology of the Cross: Heidegger, Augustine, Derrida,’’ in Merold Westphal, ed., Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 202–25. 7. See John D. Caputo, ‘‘Infestations: The Religion of the Death of God and Scott’s Ascetic Ideal,’’ Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995): 261–68. 8. Rightly understood, Derrida’s texts are avant-garde repetitions of the oldest of the old, contemporary rehearsals of ancient philosophical questions and of venerable spiritual exercises. To be sure, Derrida is not serving up old wine in new bottles, but repeating with a difference, saying for us, or for our future, what can or might be said now, if we return to these ancient sites, if we ask again, ‘‘What do I love when I love my God?’’ He does not ask or answer this question the way Augustine did but it is enough that he revisits it, communicates with it, re-poses it for us today. Derrida allows the power of the Confessions to stir again within us in a special way, a way that standard Augustinian scholarship, as precious and indispensable as it is, does not.

Notes to Pages 257–66

299

Index

Adorno, Theodor, 5, 8, 10 Aeschylus, 33 Ambrosio, Frank, 253, 266–69 Aquinas, Thomas, 82 Aristotle, 105–108, 110, 152, 156, 169, 278 Arnold, Matthew, 98–99, 101 Augustine, Saint, 194, 199–200, 207, 220, 222–23, 230, 232–34, 236, 249, 253, 255, 258–59, 263, 268

Cocteau, Jean, 18 Crivelli, Carlo, 219

Bataille, Georges, 28, 32–33 Baudrillard, Jean, 212 Bell, Vareen, 284 Benjamin, Walter, 285 Bennington, Geoffrey, 204, 219, 251, 267, 273, 292 Birkerts, Sven, 284 Blanchot, Maurice, 196, 201, 261 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 276 Butler, Judith, 6

Dante Alighieri, 223, 231–52, 266–69, 297–99 David-Menard, Monique, 167 De Certeau, Michel, 279 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 9, 110, 112–15, 213–15, 217–18, 260–61, 284, 296–97 De Man, Paul, 293 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 7, 9, 10, 36, 45–53, 55, 58, 69–74, 111–16, 168, 193–211, 215, 219–25, 228–33, 235–36, 238, 241–42, 244–45, 247–49, 251–52, 254–62, 266–69, 272–73, 275, 278, 292–99 Descartes, Rene´, 60, 79, 278 Deutsch, Michel, 157 Dobbs-Weinstein, Idit, 282

Caputo, John D., 55, 205–24, 228–29, 235, 241–42, 245, 248, 251, 293, 294–99 Chretien, Jean-Louis, 258, 299 Clement, Catherine, 167

Foucault, Michel, 5, 10, 108, 119–21 Frank, Anne, 159, 164–65, 169 Freud, Sigmund, 20, 36, 38, 41, 51, 53, 82, 162, 167–68, 197, 273 Freydberg, Bernard, 278 301

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 114, 278 Galileo, 59–60 Genet, Jean, 261 Girard, Rene´, 158 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7 Guattari, Felix, 9 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 10, 91 Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 7, 15, 37, 41, 51, 62, 78–79, 82, 91, 153, 155–57, 168–71, 211, 215, 273, 275, 285 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 7–9, 55, 69, 80, 111–13, 115, 153, 171, 207, 210, 213, 215, 279, 286, 293–94 Heraclitus, 7, 106, 109 Ho¨lderlin, Friedrich, 152–54, 156, 158–59, 164–65, 169, 171 Horkheimer, Max, 5, 10 Hume, David, 60–61 Husserl, Edmund, 4, 21–22, 55–74, 218, 273 Irigaray, Luce, 167–68, 171 Jacobs, Carol, 170, 185, 288, 291 James, William, 77, 207 Jardine, Alice, 287 Jarrett, Robert, 283, 284 Kafka, Franz, 161, 285 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 7, 61–62, 69, 82, 87, 91, 108, 120–39, 141–44, 147, 168, 220, 261 Kierkegaard, Søren, 3, 7, 8, 36, 46, 48, 51–53, 76–92, 197, 207–11, 213, 216, 220, 245, 254–55, 262, 265, 296 Kofman, Sarah, 151, 153, 157–70 Kristeva, Julia, 215 Lacan, Jacques, 36, 157–58, 167, 171, 207, 215 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 151–59, 164–65, 168–69 Langer, Lawrence, 287 Law, David R., 277 Levinas, Emmanuel, 36, 41–47, 52, 55, 58, 71–74, 86, 157, 213–16, 219, 261, 264, 272, 274, 276, 29–95 302

Index

Locke, John, 60 Loraux, Nicole, 171–72, 184–86, 290 Luka´cs, Georg, 4 Luther, Martin, 80 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 218 Marion, Jean-Luc, 55 Marvell, Andrew, 221 Marx, Karl, 3, 4 McCarthy, Cormac, 129–34, 137–50 Menke, Anne, 287 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 218 Muraro, Luisa, 287 Nancy, Claire, 169 Nerval, Gerard de, 168 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–3, 7–8, 35, 41, 82, 87, 92, 105–11, 113, 115, 120–22, 129, 130, 133, 138–39, 149, 168, 203, 207, 210, 214, 217, 256–57, 264, 296 Parmedides, 106 Patocka, Jan, 48–49, 220 Plato, 8, 48, 49, 82, 85, 108, 110–18, 169, 275 Rheinhardt, Karl, 290 Ricoeur, Paul, 36–41, 44, 47, 55 Rose, Gillian, 169 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 168, 207, 254 Royce, Josiah, 274 Sallis, John, 278 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 44, 206, 208 Sayers, Dorothy, 297 Schelling, Friedrich, 7 Schiller, Friedrich, 7 Schneider, Monique, 167 Scott, Charles, 264, 299 Segal, Charles, 290 Shakespeare, William, 33 Socrates, 9, 85, 91, 110–18 Sophocles, 151–58, 164–66, 168–70, 171–89, 275 Strauss, Erwin, 218 Szondi, Peter, 155 Taylor, Mark, 292, 295, 299

Warhol, Andy, 218 Weil, Simone, 77, 89 Westphal, Merold, 274, 277 Williams, Margery, 76–78, 81, 83–85, 87–88, 90 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 207, 209, 296 Wood, David, 253–57

Wyschogrod, Edith, 253–54, 260, 262–65, 299 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 197 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 279 Zarader, Marlene, 294

Index

303

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series John D. Caputo, series editor

1. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. 2. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification. 3. Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. 4. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality. 5. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited: Ju¨rgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth. 6. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition. 7. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation—Essays on Late Existentialism. 8. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. 9. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. 10. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. 11. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurensten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. 12. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. 13. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy.

14. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition. 15. Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Franc¸ ois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chre´tien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricœur, Phenomenology and the ‘‘Theological Turn’’: The French Debate. 16. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. 17. Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson. 18. Jeffrey Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. 19. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. 20. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. 21. Merold Westphal, Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith: Overcoming Onto-Theology. 22. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice. 23. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter. 24. Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. 25. Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. 26. Jean-Louis Chre´tien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. 27. Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays. 28. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. 29. Phillip Goodchild, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. 30. William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. 31. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. 32. Jean-Louis Chre´tien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. 33. Jean-Louis Chre´tien, The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport. 34. D. C. Schindler, Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation. 35. Julian Wolfreys, ed., Thinking Difference: Critics in Conversation.

36. Allen Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter. 37. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers. 38. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Ho¨lderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Towards a New Poetics of Dasein. 39. Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible. 40. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan. 41. Charles P. Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood. 42. Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology ‘‘Wide Open’’: After the French Debate. Translated by Charles N. Cabral. 43. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, eds., Givenness and God: Questions of JeanLuc Marion. 44. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. 45. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. 46. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomenology of Prayer.