Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge

TRAVERSING THE IMAGINARY

Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Founding Editor

General Editor

James M. Edie

†

Anthony J. Steinbock

Associate Editor

John McCumber

T R AV E R S I N G T H E IMAGINARY Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge

Edited by Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis Foreword by Richard Kearney

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2007. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Traversing the imaginary : Richard Kearney and the postmodern challenge / edited by Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis ; foreword by Richard Kearney. p. cm. — (Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2377-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8101-2377-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2378-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8101-2378-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kearney, Richard. 2. Philosophy, Modern—20th century. 3. Philosophy, European—20th century. 4. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Gratton, Peter. II. Manoussakis, John Panteleimon. III. Kearney, Richard. IV. Series: Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy. B945.K384T73 2007 192—dc22 2006026882 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Foreword Richard Kearney

ix

List of Abbreviations of Works by Richard Kearney

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Introduction: The Miracle of Imagining Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis

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Part 1. The Dialogical Imaginary On Stories and Mourning Paul Ricoeur

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Terror and Religion Jacques Derrida

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On Social Imaginaries Charles Taylor

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Ethics of Narration Martha Nussbaum

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Intellectuals and Ideology Noam Chomsky

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Part 2. The Political Imaginary Intellectual Adventures in the Isles: Kearney and the Ireland Peace Process Dennis Dworkin

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Reimagining Ireland, Britain, and Europe James M. Smith

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Traumatized Sovereignty Anne O’Byrne

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Imaginings, Narratives, and Otherness: On Diacritical Hermeneutics John Rundell “I Tell You No Lie”: Truth Commissions and Narrative Jerry Burke

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Part 3. The Narrative Imaginary Double Trouble: Narrative Imagination as a Carnival Dragon David Wood

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Heretic Adventures Terry Eagleton

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Beyond Postmodernism: Reflections on Richard Kearney’s Trilogy Jeffrey A. Barash On the Role of the Oneiric in Testimonial Narrative Eileen Rizo-Patron Truth, Ethics, and Narrative Imagination: Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge Mark Dooley

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Afterword Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust Richard Kearney

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Notes on Contributors

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Foreword Richard Kearney

It is somewhat daunting, and delicate, to preface a volume on one’s own work. The twin extremes of self-regard and self-effacement are difficult to avoid as one seeks a poised middle voice—one that may, it is hoped, pay due honor to one’s interlocutors, commentators, and critics. In what follows, I endeavor to trace something of my own intellectual itinerary as it traverses the three imaginaries explored in this volume: the dialogical, the political, and the narrative. The dialogical imaginary is where we start. My first book, published in English in 1984, was titled Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers; two other volumes, Poétique du possible and Heidegger et la question de Dieu, had been previously published in French. The 1984 volume contained a number of critical exchanges with philosophers I had worked with during my formative years as a doctoral student in Paris: Paul Ricoeur (my thesis director from 1977 to 1980); Emmanuel Levinas and Stanislaus Breton (both mentors to me during my time in France as well as examiners on my jury de thèse at the University of Paris in 1980); and Jacques Derrida, who had become one of my central partners in the hermeneuticdeconstructive debate that was already preoccupying me in the late seventies and early eighties. Ricoeur considered me too deconstructive at times; Derrida, too hermeneutic. Levinas felt I was overly aesthetic (inordinately susceptible to the lures of imagination!), while Breton warned me against being too ethical. It was healthy cross-examination from all sides. And ever since, I have been of the persuasion that a “conflict of interpretations” is a bracing lesson in philosophical apprenticeship. To be caught in intellectual cross fire and to survive—however scarred!—is a salutary initiation in conceptual humility. And where humility was conferred, so too, I dare hope, was a modicum of attentiveness, vigilance, and tolerance. In an appendix to the 1984 Dialogues volume, I wrote, “Our being-inthe-world (qua Dasein) is revealed historically in and through language as a dialogical being-in-the-world-with-others (qua Mitsein).”1 And I went on to cite Hölderlin’s line: “Much has man experienced / since we are a dialogue / and can listen to one another.” These sentiments and references ix

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seem to me today, in retrospect, somewhat portentous, but the basic claim is one that I would still endorse. Most of what I have learned philosophically has come to me through critical exchanges with others. This is, of course, a central tenet of hermeneutic practice as promoted by my mentors Gadamer and Ricoeur. Thus it seems fitting that this volume should begin with a series of conversations with five contemporary philosophers who have exerted a formative influence on my thinking over the years. Let me say a word about each. Charles Taylor was my teacher and thesis director for my master’s degree at McGill University in Montreal (1975–76). This was when I first began my work on the philosophy of imagination, following the Greek and biblical roots of the term—phantasia and yetzer—through a genealogy that led right up to the contemporary concepts of fiction, fantasy, and imagining. Taylor was a masterful pedagogue who conducted seminars with great panache and gave a lot of time to his graduate research students. He possessed a singular ability to combine philosophical questions with political ones (not surprising, given his role as a founding member of the Canadian socialist party, the New Democratic Party, and his experience of running for the Canadian premiership against Pierre Trudeau). Taylor’s analyses of Hegel and Heidegger in particular were especially brilliant and confirmed me in my chosen field of inquiry—phenomenology. As my master’s thesis reached its completion, Taylor advised me to transfer to the University of Paris to carry on my doctoral research on the phenomenological investigations of imagination. Since I was focusing more and more on the work of Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, why, he asked me, not go directly to these sources? That same year, having completed my master’s with Taylor, I secured an International Traveling Studentship from the National University of Ireland, which permitted me to move to Paris. Our conversation in this current volume, titled “On Social Imaginaries,” is, for me, a characteristic sample of our shared commitment to investigate the often-neglected workings of the social and political imaginary as it deeply informs our lived everyday world. It is also a token, I like to think, of our ongoing dialogue and friendship, following as it does on several other discussions, public and private, held over the years—and in some instances televised and published.2 In September 1977, I moved to Paris, where Paul Ricoeur kindly agreed to serve as my doctoral supervisor and director. His legendary seminars were held at the Centre Phénoménologique et Herméneutique at Avenue Parmentier. The center housed the Husserl Archives in Paris, which Ricoeur directed, and hosted a weekly seminar at which Ricoeur presented his research work to us, his graduate students, and to many of his colleagues. It was there in the late seventies that I first met such thinkers

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as Otto Pöggeler, Walter Biemel, Jean Greisch, Françoise Dastur, Jeffrey Barash, Jean-Luc Marion, Stephan Strasser, Peter Kemp, François Courtine, and, of course, Emmanuel Levinas (whose last seminars I subsequently followed at the Sorbonne in 1978). This international gathering of scholars from all over the world was where I was fortunate enough to cut my teeth on detailed phenomenological and hermeneutical analysis, gaining familiarity with the research methods that were to guide my own “traversal of the imaginary” over the following decades. Poétique du possible, my doctoral thesis with Ricoeur, defended in 1980 and published in 1984, owes more than I can say to what I learned during those three years at the Ricoeur seminars. And the same goes for the subsequent volumes The Wake of Imagination (1987), Poetics of Imagining (1991), and Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (1995), texts that developed and amplified the basic arguments and hypotheses of the earlier research. I am so deeply indebted to Ricoeur as teacher, guide, and friend that it would be impossible to express my gratitude adequately in a foreword of this kind. Suffice it to say that his intellectual presence has pervaded almost all of my philosophical writing and teaching over the past thirty years. From the very start, our relationship assumed a “dialogical” form. In addition to the question-and-answer format of the Paris seminars, and the three volumes I published in response to Ricoeur’s work, I was privileged to conduct a number of critical exchanges with Ricoeur over the years.3 These ranged from our published discussion, “Myth as the Bearer of Possible Worlds,” in 1978 to a series of five later dialogues that appeared in different volumes during the next three decades.4 These culminate with Ricoeur’s contribution to this volume (sadly, one of Ricoeur’s last publications), in which the then ninety-three-year-old Ricoeur responds, with typical generosity and curiosity, to my recent work on narrative imagination, On Stories. A third dialogical partner featured in the opening section of this volume is the late Jacques Derrida. The master of deconstruction was also a seminal influence on my work on the imaginary. And again, our intellectual exchanges took on a dialectical guise from the start. In 1982 in Paris, we held our first spirited conversation on the theme of deconstruction and the Other; and this initial engagement was, I believe, deepened and expanded over the years through a number of written and recorded face-offs—what the Germans call Auseinandersetzungen —in Dublin, at Villanova University, in New York, and elsewhere. These encounters were always cordial and congenial, if candid about the differences between us. Indeed, I recall one dramatic moment during a skirmish in one of our three roundtables at Villanova, when Derrida actually came to my rescue! I was within a hairsbreadth of being lynched by a zealous bunch of

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Derridean disciples—for some question I raised concerning the ethics of undecidability—when Derrida intervened with this gracious pardon: “Richard Kearney’s difficulties with my work are my own difficulties with my work.” He saved the day, for me at least, and I am grateful to him, for this small gesture and for so much more. This gratitude extends, of course, to the care and concern Derrida brought to our final dialogue together in New York, in September 2001, just weeks after 9/11. These last words exchanged—at least publicly— between us on the subject of a new thinking about politics and God betray, yet one more time, Jacques Derrida’s remarkable generosity as he responds to my work The God Who May Be and to other questions I put to him that day. A final project to pursue these terminal questions in a volume of dialogues or trialogues ( John D. Caputo was also to have participated) to be conducted in France in the summer of 2004 had to be canceled, alas, due to his fatal illness. I like to think, retrospectively, of our dialogue in this volume, “Terror and Religion,” as a postscript to our twenty years of shared intellectual traversals. Though Derrida distrusted the term postmodern more than I do, it is probably fair to say that in these contemporary questionings of God and war the standard discourses of modernity and postmodernity convene and clash in curious ways. Finally, a few words on my other two interlocutors on the dialogical imaginary in this volume. My exchanges with Martha Nussbaum on the role of narrative imagination in ethics, literature, and politics began as late as 1993. Our first encounter took the form of an extended conversation, “Ethics of Literature,” broadcast on Irish television and subsequently published in States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind (1995). Our critical sharing of views then—and in subsequent conversations in Dublin and Cambridge, Massachusetts—confirmed me in the view that narrative was a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral and political commitment. It also fortified my conviction that reaching across intellectual barriers to thinkers working on matters of imagination in the analytic or Anglo-American tradition can be hugely rewarding. Her concluding credo to Love’s Knowledge impresses me still: “Perhaps in the attentive conversation of philosophy and literature with one another we could hope to find, occasionally, mysterious and incomplete, in some moments not governed by the watch, some analogue of . . . the aim for grace.”5 My dialogues with Noam Chomsky, beginning with our 1993 exchange “The Politics of Language,” also first published in States of Mind, have been equally rewarding. Chomsky’s incisive analysis of the role of political imagination in ideology, propaganda, and the media’s “manufacture of consent” is one that acutely influenced my own thinking in such

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works as Postnationalist Ireland, On Stories, and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. Moreover, the extraordinary concern that Chomsky displayed, during our numerous exchanges in Dublin and Boston, to address matters of injustice and untruth in such disparate regions of the world as Northern Ireland, East Timor, Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East never failed to impress me. And, last, the personal welcome that he and his wife, Carol, extended to me and my family when we moved from Dublin to Boston in the late 1990s—where our political and philosophical conversations continued apace—is something for which I am deeply thankful. Noam Chomsky never ceases to remind me that the practice of the intellectual engagé is by no means confined to continental thinking.

If the opening section of this volume serves as testimony to some of the intellectual debts and influences I have accrued on my intellectual itinerary over three decades and two continents, the next two sections might be said to represent central aspects of my work with fellow colleagues. I count here both those of my own generation, such as Eagleton, Barash, Rundell, and Dworkin, and upcoming scholars of a younger generation, such as O’Byrne, Rizo-Patron, Smith, Dooley, and Burke. The second section of the volume, “The Political Imaginary,” comprises five chapters by thinkers who reflect on current problems of sovereignty, nationalism, globalism, and the crisis of the nation-state. These sometimes contest, other times corroborate, my own analyses of these matters—especially in my political writings Postnationalist Ireland, Navigations, and On Stories. But in all cases, a recurring concern for these authors, as for me, is the key function of narrative imagination in both the history of politics and its contemporary practice. The third and concluding section of the volume, “The Narrative Imaginary,” continues the inquiry into the more specific areas of literature and culture. Wood and Eagleton explore the role of narrativity and history in my fiction, Rizo-Patron compares and contrasts this role with the work of Gabriel García Márquez, and Dooley and Barash apply it to the current controversies on postmodern truth and fantasy. The fact that the contributors to this volume hail from three different continents (Europe, America, and Australasia) and more than eight different countries is for me a source of additional gratification, for it shows that thinking about imagination is always a work in progress and knows no barriers. It extends not just across disciplinary boundaries but across cultural and geographical ones as well. In traversing the imaginary we learn—for better or for worse—how to dwell in lands without frontiers. My afterword to this volume, “Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce

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and Proust,” seeks to show how narrative imagination may, through a series of repetitions and retrievals, lead from trauma and disenchantment to insight and equanimity. This concluding piece signposts the research terrain toward which my current thinking is heading. Before signing off, I wish to say thanks finally to the two brilliant young scholars John Panteleimon Manoussakis and Peter Gratton, whose unstinting diligence, intellectual stamina, and editorial deftness over the last three years have brought this volume to fruition.

Notes 1. Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: A Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1984), 127. These dialogues were republished as part 2 of Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). 2. See, for example, “Federations and Nations: Living Among Others,” first recorded in Dublin, in 1991, for Irish public television and subsequently published in my Visions of Europe (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1992) and again in my States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind (New York: New York University Press, 1995). 3. See Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishers, 2004), as well as my two edited books, Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Praxis (London: Sage Publications, 1996) and Les métamorphoses de la raison herméneutique: Autour de Paul Ricoeur (Paris: Le Cerf, 1991). 4. The dialogues with Ricoeur appeared in both my authored and my edited works: The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1982), Dialogues, Visions of Europe, States of Mind, and On Paul Ricoeur. They are all reprinted in Debates. 5. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 284.

Abbreviations of Works by Richard Kearney

AF

Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s: Cultural, Political, Economic, ed. Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1988).

GMB

The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

OS

On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002).

PI

Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998).

PM

Poetics of Modernity: Toward a Hermeneutic Imagination (New Jersey: Humanity Books, 1995).

PNI

Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1996).

SGM

Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Ideas of Otherness (London: Routledge, 2002).

SO

“Strangers and Others: From Deconstruction to Hermeneutics,” Critical Horizons 3, no. 1 (2002): 7–36.

TN

Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

WI

The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

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Introduction: The Miracle of Imagining Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis

In The Wake of Imagination, Richard Kearney shows that the concept of imagination has a complex genealogy in the Western tradition. In the Platonic corpus, imagination (eikasia) is nothing other than an imitation of the visible world, which is itself a mere shadow of the forms. Against Plato, Aristotle argued that “imagination [phantasia] is the process by which we say that an image [phantasma] is presented to us,” and that “the soul does not think without a mental image.” Imagination, in short, for Aristotle, was the passage between sense experience and reason. Nevertheless, Aristotle agreed with Plato that “imagination is mostly false,” and the Greeks, for the most part, used phantasma as a “reproductive rather than a productive activity . . . [an] imitation rather than origin” (WI, 12). In a sense, the imaginatio of the Latin writers combines the meaning of the Greek phantasma with the negative connotations of the Hebrew yetzer. The latter term denotes a human creativity whose first use marked the fall of humanity into history. This creativity is a usurpation of the divine Yetzirah, and Adam and Eve’s eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge marked the beginning of time. By this action, humanity not only gained knowledge of good and evil but, just as important, also could remember the past and project itself into the future through its creative activity. The freedom of human beings, Kearney remarks, “to choose between good and evil, and to construct one’s story accordingly, is thus intimately related to the yetzer as a passion for the possible” (WI, 42). For the most part, though, the Talmudic and Catholic traditions missed the possibilities characterized by this freedom, emphasizing the imagination’s capacity for evil, as set out in Genesis 6:5 just before the coming of the Flood: “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination [yetzer] of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” Theologians such as Augustine and Bonaventure combined this biblical suspicion with the Platonic belief that the imagination was harmful to the soul’s search for truth. Even Aquinas, who, like Aristotle, considered the imagination a go-between for the soul and bodily perception, considered the imagination corruptive, often leading human beings to

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confuse images and reality. “Demons are known to work on men’s imagination,” he wrote, “until everything is other than it is.”1 During the modern period, there was a shift from considering the imaginary as reproductive of sense perception. From the rationalist (Descartes and Malebranche) and empiricist (Hobbes, Locke, and Hume) traditions to the productive or creative power of the imagination in Kant, German idealism, and especially the nineteenth-century Romantics, the imagination was no longer tethered to reality as sense perceptions. “Meaning no longer required the orthodox mediations of reality to prove itself. It became its own guarantee—the immediate invention of imagination” (WI, 157). Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, outlined two forms of imagination: the first takes in experience at an unconscious level, and the second uses the images derived from the first to create new worlds. The agent of this imagination is a “finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (WI, 157). Both of these models of the imagination—the mimetic and the productive—have been called into question in the contemporary “parodic” period. After the linguistic turn, we can no longer say that we think wholly in terms of images, and the idea of a human being as the center of creativity has fallen out of favor in the wake of the death of man described at the end of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. The death of imagination is not just a philosophical concern. The omnipresence of digital media has called into question, for Jean Baudrillard and others, the distinction between image and reality to the extent that the existence of the Gulf War (and perhaps even more so, the second Gulf War) as a “real” phenomenon can be called into doubt. In this way, there is no original meaning behind any image, let alone a meaning centered in a self-present subject, and each image refers only to other images in a disseminated field of imagery. Plugged into media cultures in Matrix-like fashion, Kearney’s call for a hermeneutic retrieval of imagination may seem quaint. In spite of the many different terms for the imagination in the history of philosophy (e.g., eikasia, phantasia, imaginatio, Einbildungskraft), Kearney points out that each has something in common with the others: They all refer, in their diverse ways, to the human power to convert absence into presence, actuality into possibility, what-is into somethingother-than-it-is. In short, they all designate our ability to transform the time and space of our world into a specifically human mode of existence (Dasein). This is the “miracle of imagining.” (PI, 4)

Calling attention to this “miracle,” Kearney is not some reactionary blind to historical and philosophical changes around him; rather, he is a

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critic of traditional mimetic theories of imagination that appeal to a referent or to the autonomous subject. Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics argues for a middle path between the extremes of the Romantic individual and the nihilist versions of the postmodern. Kearney’s third way, echoing Julia Kristeva, acknowledges that the subject is already a stranger to itself, while remaining attuned to the ethical implications of the narrative imagination. For Kearney, the radical changes in media technologies have the potential to advance, not erode, imaginative creativity: “The new technologies of virtualized and digitized imagining, far from eradicating narrative, may actually open up novel modes of storytelling quite inconceivable in our former cultures” (OS, 11). In short, Kearney aims to combat the view that the subject is powerless in the face of technological sign systems: Curiously, the collective term “the imaginary” survives to some extent the philosophical decline of the subjective term “the imagination.” This former term increasingly carries the connotation of an impersonal entity. The “imaginary” is seen as a mere “effect” of a technologically transmitted sign system over which the individual creative subject has no control. In a colloquium held in January 1986 in the Beaubourg Centre in Paris . . . Max Gallo anxiously observed that we are living in a society “traversed by an imaginary which comes from nowhere and which we no longer master.” (WI, 251)

If the imaginary has survived the death of the imagination, then Richard Kearney’s writings have traversed it once more, telling another story, confronting the gods and monsters in others and in ourselves. Narrative imagination, Kearney argues, is not “always on the side of angels” (PM, 106). Nevertheless, it does enable us to “disclose dimensions of otherness,” dimensions that are both “multiple and traversable” (PI, 255; SGM, 11). This type of traversing is a “welcoming of what is different [dialegein]” (PM, xvi). In this way, Kearney has brought the subject of imagination—and ancillary terms such as narrativity, possibility, and storytelling—to bear on critical debates in fields as diverse as philosophy, political theory, and literary criticism. From a “poetics of the possible,” “narrative matters,” and a host of other tropes circling around the question of imagination and its link to thinking the (im)possible, Kearney has marked his distance from a metaphysical—some would say onto-theological—tradition that has, for the most part, regarded the imagination as inimical to reason’s search for truth. Contrary to Descartes’ claim that the “imagination is on no account necessary to [one’s] essence,” Kearney has argued persuasively that the creative capacity of the imagination is central to being human, despite

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the role of the movements of deconstruction and postmodernism. “Imagination lies at the very heart of our existence,” he wrote in Poetics of Imagining; “we would not be human without it” (PI, 1). This volume begins with a series of dialogues with a number of leading philosophers and young scholars. Many exchanges, debates, and disputes took place at international conferences, sessions, and close encounters, including the International Association for Philosophy and Literature at Stony Brook, New York; the American College of Greece, Athens; and the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, Halifax. This volume is divided into three parts: “The Dialogical Imaginary” stages debates with Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, and Noam Chomsky. “The Political Imaginary” takes up cultural conflicts in Ireland, Africa, and the Middle East. Finally, “The Narrative Imaginary” reevaluates the role of imagination in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and fiction.

Part 1: The Dialogical Imaginary In “On Stories and Mourning,” Paul Ricoeur argues that the notion of sorrow must be added to any discussion of narrative and action. Action, Ricoeur suggests, is coupled not just with narrative but also with “the work of mourning” elucidated in Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” Ricoeur extends his meditation on mourning to the contemporary loss of authority in the political field, arguing that we must not “underestimate mourning” at the political level. Mourning, he argues, provides people with an ability to begin again “in such a way that we may overcome obsessive or compulsive repetition.” Marking the careful balance between memory and forgetting, Ricoeur notes that the “invisible root” of any community is the act of telling stories. Ricoeur concludes with an account of Kearney’s conceptions of imagination and narrativity in relation to his own work. In the course of his essay, Ricoeur provides a summary of his own itinerary in the shadow of major intellectual movements, from existentialism to deconstruction. In “Terror and Religion,” Kearney and Jacques Derrida discuss the promise of reconciliation, whether between different factions in South Africa or between the United States and the post–9/11 Islamic world, as well as the role that imagination is called to play in an era of terror and trauma. Kearney and Derrida cross the differences between them in discussing the specter of khora as the locus or nonlocus of difference and differentiation, as the il y a beyond being, which may or may not be another name for God.

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Charles Taylor reflects on the multiple “social imaginaries” at work in recent crises, from the events of 9/11 to the decline of Europe’s political power. Part of the process of coming to grips with such events, Taylor argues, is recognizing that a “multiplicity of modernities” and “social imaginaries”—the implicit structures by which communities organize themselves—need not be anchored in a “single process by which Europe is a paradigm.” Once recognized, “the real positive work of building mutual understanding can begin.” Continuing with the theme of intercultural understanding, the dialogue between Kearney and Martha Nussbaum, in “Ethics of Narration,” takes up the connections among education, imagination, and social justice. For Nussbaum, Aristotle’s recognition that what we deem socially and ethically relevant, on the basis of spatial proximity, needs to be counterbalanced by an ethical cosmopolitanism. This cosmopolitanism would extend the rights and economic privileges that one expects for one’s own community to poor and socially disadvantaged communities throughout the world, while also providing a corrective to marginalizing ideologies in political discourses at home. In “Intellectuals and Ideology,” a discussion over the manufacture of narratives by those in power, Noam Chomsky and Kearney debate Chomsky’s view that there is an unchanging human nature that longs for freedom. The great danger, as Chomsky sees it, is that without a conception of an immutable human nature, intellectuals often fall into the trap of totalitarian ideologies (a pathology of the image’s fatal attraction) in which it is possible for one part of society to constitute the humanity of others. In order to combat dominant ideologies, Chomsky argues, we must find ways to form communities resistant to the dominant narratives that are too often supported by the educated elite. The issue leading all of these discussions is the role of the imaginary in the structuring of culture and society. Each of these figures, thinking in the wake of 9/11, is particularly concerned about the place of mutual understanding, reconciliation, and the experience of sorrow in the dialogical imaginary.

Part 2: The Political Imaginary The category of the political seems far removed from the imaginary. The phrase “political imaginary” would appear oxymoronic. Whether discussing war and peace, the crises of poverty across the world, or the political troubles in Ireland, the stakes could not be more “real.” But as Kearney demonstrates in Postnationalist Ireland, On Stories, and Strangers,

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Gods, and Monsters, considerations of the political are never removed from questions of narrative and storytelling, which raise important concerns about the stories we tell ourselves about the founding of our states and communities or stories we tell about the enemy in the heat of war.2 In “Intellectual Adventures in the Isles,” Dennis Dworkin provides a history of Kearney’s direct interventions in the Ireland peace process, reading his practical engagements alongside his theoretical work on narratives and community building in Postnationalist Ireland and On Stories. At the center of Kearney’s engagements—both political and philosophical—is a critique of the modern notions of sovereignty in Rousseau and the French revolutionaries as well as in recent nationalisms. According to Dworkin, Kearney’s emphasis on mapping out postnationalist spaces and identities has presaged and aided Ireland’s incipient postnationalist movements. Drawing on a range of recent historical sources on Irish and British identity, Dworkin argues that it is possible to reimagine Ireland beyond a simple opposition with Great Britain and beyond the foreseeable demise of the nation-state as the locus of Irish identity. Like Dworkin, James M. Smith, in “Reimagining Ireland, Britain, and Europe,” pushes Kearney to think more about the role of British nationalism in the Irish troubles. Missing from Postnationalist Ireland — which was originally titled Postnationalist Ireland, Postnationalist Britain— is an engagement with the nationalist ideologies of Great Britain. Smith suspects that while diverse citizens of Northern Ireland might accept the postnationalist future set out in Postnationalist Ireland, this acceptance is unlikely in the Republic of Ireland. Anne O’Byrne follows up on Dworkin’s and Smith’s essays in “Traumatized Sovereignty,” investigating Kearney’s “sustained phenomenology of Ireland.” Concentrating on the irreconcilable territorial claims of the competing forces in Ireland and Britain, O’Byrne worries that the trauma of sovereignty, whose symptom is the often self-inflicted suffering of the Irish people, will make the plotting of a common narrative extremely difficult, if not impossible. The answer to the question, what is Ireland? marks an interminable hermeneutic task—especially as postnationalist sites such as the European Union hold increasing sway in the formation of Irish identities. John Rundell’s essay, “Imaginings, Narratives, and Otherness,” maps Kearney’s passage from poetics to ethics. Rundell argues for Kearney’s ethics of otherness sustained by a diacritical hermeneutics as explored in the introduction to Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. Between ethics and poetics are new imaginative spaces that animate discussions of a neverrealizable horizon of sensus communis. In “I Tell You No Lie,” Jerry Burke maintains that just because story-

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telling is integral to the political does not mean that each narrative of historical wrongs is equally valid. Discussing the politics of narration in terms of recent events in South Africa and elsewhere, Burke, following Kearney, argues that there must be a way to assess better from worse interpretations of history. The problem of historical interpretation has become especially important in light of both the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s final report and events in Northern Ireland. Reading Kearney’s On Stories along with the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Burke argues that an important test for one’s own historical narratives is the degree of openness to the historical narratives of others. For Burke, a historical narrative closed to the voices of others fails to get at the truth of historical events, whether discussing the Holocaust of Jews during the Nazi period, the paramilitary violence of the British and Irish troubles, or the death squads of apartheid-era South Africa. In each of these cases, there is grave political importance, Burke suggests, in discerning better from worse interpretations of history. Each of these essays testifies to the place of the political imaginary in contexts around the world. The postnationalist imaginary confronts the political realities driven by the interminable hermeneutic obsession with nationalist identities.

Part 3: The Narrative Imaginary Narrative matters. Telling stories, Kearney argues, is crucial to our very humanity; it is an unavoidable task in our ethical, philosophical, and political lives. For Kearney, narratives must be open to the impossible, to reinvention and rearticulation. “Narrative,” Kearney writes, “is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness” (OS, 158). Part 3 begins with two responses to Kearney’s novels Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level. David Wood questions Kearney’s ability to stave off the “dark side” of narrativity by pointing to the narrative paradox by which one can argue against narrative only by using narrative. For Wood, Kearney’s works of fiction confirm that narratives do not meet on a field of narrativity but rather on a space opened by polemos. Wood, in his “perverse” reading of Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level, argues that the narrative success of these books is a philosophical problem for Kearney. There is no resolution to the novels, Wood claims; they open up onto another kind of imaginary: an uncanny or disruptive imaginary. As does Wood, Terry Eagleton, in “Heretic Adventures,” notes that Kearney’s novels are filled with doubles and twins. One such twin is Jack

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Toland, from Walking at Sea Level. Toland is an academic in Montreal studying his namesake, John Toland (the eighteenth-century Irish thinker). There is more than one set of twins here, Eagleton argues. Like John Toland, Kearney is a philosopher reigning from the provinces, happy to mingle with Europe’s avant-garde. For Eagleton, both Toland and Kearney share a distrust of traditional notions of identity. Jeffrey A. Barash argues that Kearney’s trilogy, Philosophy at the Limit, marks a proper adjustment to postmodern ethics. For Barash, postmodern conceptions of alterity have tended to lose sight of the empirical others around us by focusing instead on abstract otherness. Barash argues that the narrative hermeneutics found in Kearney’s work offer a means for thinking about otherness without giving in to what he considers a brand of relativism found in certain versions of postmodernism. Kearney’s work, he says, provides hermeneutical standards by which to recognize the differences between gods and monsters, between hospitality and fanaticism. In “Gabriel García Márquez and Richard Kearney on the Role of the Oneiric in Testimonial Narrative,” Eileen Rizo-Patron investigates the role of the oneiric imagination in testimonial literature. Drawing on Kearney’s trilogy, Rizo-Patron reads Gabriel García Márquez’s Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. She argues that García Márquez’s narrative shows that testimonial literature cannot be easily distanced from imaginative fiction given the enigmas of oneiric experience present in both forms of narrative. Mark Dooley’s “Truth, Ethics, and Narrative Imagination” takes Kearney to task for alleged traces of metaphysical realism in his work. Dooley argues for a “good” postmodernism in which the claims of philosophy’s linguistic turn are taken seriously. Unable to think outside of language, we must abandon the hope that any one narrative can be truer to reality than another. But this does not mean, Dooley argues, that we need to abandon ethics or indeed the hopes of a social democratic left, which Dooley identifies with Kearney. Narratives matter because they open a space of contestation and a poetics of the possible. Narratives challenge the hegemony of identity and raise the ethical question of alterity. Since the time of Plato, philosophy has underprivileged narrative in the name of higher philosophical essences and ideas. What Kearney and his interlocutors’ works show is the importance of narration and stories: the stories we tell ourselves about our nations and identities, and even the stories philosophy tells us about itself. Rethinking the place of narrativity opens up another thinking of the political and the philosophical. Finally, it points to the central importance of traversing the imaginary in order to challenge the bounds of what we once thought was possible.

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Notes A number of the contributions published in this volume have previously appeared in the following journals: Philosophy Today, The Irish Literary Supplement, and The International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 1. Summa Theologica 5 (New York: Christian Classics, 1981), 147. 2. See, for example, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 111–15.

TRAVERSING THE IMAGINARY

Part 1

The Dialogical Imaginary

On Stories and Mourning Paul Ricoeur

The Sorrow of Life Stories “All sorrows may be borne if you may put them into a story or tell a story about them.” Hannah Arendt uses Isak Dinesen’s beautiful proverb as the epigraph to “Action” in The Human Condition.1 This chapter is based on the remarkable theme of the “disclosure of the agent in speech and action” (HC, §24), followed by its corollary: it is in narrative that the disclosure of the “who” is fulfilled, thanks to the weaving of the web of relationships between agents and the circumstances of action. What is lost, at least for a moment (it is explored a little later in “the frailty of human affairs” [HC, §26]), is the burden of these sorrows in the epigraph. Hence my question: what resources does the “story” have to make sorrows bearable? It is in examining this question that I would like to enrich and reinforce the conclusions of Richard Kearney’s On Stories. I will do this by adding the adjective acting to that of suffering, referring to the acting and suffering person. This topic is not absent in On Stories. The three case histories explored by Kearney—Joyce’s Dedalus, Freud’s Dora, and Spielberg’s Schindler—are about sorrows, whether they be the torments of hysteria or the unspeakable horror of the death camps. In this way, sorrow is in each case the answer to the question that opens the book: where do stories come from? However, in none of these cases does the story make sorrow bearable: Molly’s final soliloquy in Ulysses does not achieve this effect. Similarly, Dora is not cured (perhaps because her case was used to verify a theory that would take shape more so in Freud’s biography), and the suffering of extermination exceeds the resources of narrative—cinematic as much as literary. If sorrow is neither absent nor resolved in Kearney’s journey through personal narratives, it goes no differently in the national narratives and archetypal images: the founding myths of Rome, the humiliating representations of the Irish by the British, the distorted relationships of Americans and their others—the border crossings that prove to be the source of an alienation that makes neighbors into strangers.

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What then can I add to this ensemble of stories generated by the innumerable figures of sorrow? I propose a reflection on the capacity to bear, to endure, that is generated by narrative. A void remains to be filled in the concluding chapter of On Stories, “Narrative Matters.” This chapter centers, like Arendt’s “Action,” on the relationship between the narrative and the acting person. Kearney shows himself to be concerned by the postmodern critique of traditional narratives, whether fiction or history (coinciding paradoxically, though for opposite reasons, with the negationist criticism of the Shoah). At stake is the persistence of the very capacity to narrate in a time of fragmentation and the dispersion of human experience in its totality. In his response, Kearney finds support from what seems to validate the persistence of the capacity to narrate, exemplified in the perennial nature of the categories of narrative theory drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics; it is the link between narrative and action that is at the center of the theory, which is a matter of mythos, mimesis, or catharsis. The basic argument is that life itself is in search of narrative “because it strives to discover a pattern to cope with the experience of chaos and confusion” (OS, 125). Cast in these terms, Kearney’s argument leaves me enough leeway to join suffering to action. However, following Aristotle, what is said of life is recentered on action in order to introduce the topic of mimesis, the mimesis of action, by virtue of the thesis taken from the anthropological part of the Nichomachean Ethics, according to which action “is always conducted in view of some end” (1094a2). One can thus affirm that “each human life is always already an implicit story” (OS, 137). But does not sorrow come to cast its shadow on the teleological version of human action that secures the primacy of action in the theory of narrative? Does it not place in doubt the assertion according to which it would be the life of each person that would “always already” be an implicit story? My suggestion here is that the arguments that follow the definition of narrative as “mimesis of action” or “acting persons” would emerge reinforced by the addition of suffering to action, whether it be a matter of redefining mimesis as “re-creation,” catharsis as “release,” phronésis as “wisdom,” and finally ethos as an “ethics” concerned with a persisting selfidentity, which endures through a life of memories, projects, and one’s presence in the world. How would this widening of the referential base of narrative be carried out? It would need to recapture the theme of mourning by revealing its narrative component. To this end, I will rely on the rapprochement, suggested in my La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli,2 between what Freud says in “Mourning and Melancholia” about the distinctive features of mourning compared with melancholia and Freud’s comments in “Recollection,

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Repetition, and Working Through” on the distinctive features of recollection when “working through” frees it from repetition. But, as Kearney has done in On Stories, I will not make psychoanalysis the only resource for a reflection on the narrative component of mourning. Psychoanalysis operates under the restrictive conditions that comprise the rule of “telling all,” the abandon of free association, the role of transference and countertransference. I want to hold up the experience of analysis as a model and guide concerning the ways of facing tragedy and sorrow in the normal circumstances of life, those of ordinary neurosis. It was these circumstances of tragedy that I took as my reference point in “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” included in Figuring the Sacred.3 I return to my attempt to learn a lesson from the rapprochement between “Mourning and Melancholia” and “Recollection, Repetition, and Working Through.” The title of the first essay does not evoke narrative at all but introduces the idea of the work of mourning, onto which I will graft my theme of the work of narrative as applied to sorrow. The situations to which mourning reacts are situations of sorrow: the loss of a loved one or of an abstraction set up in place of this person. As for the “work of mourning,” it consists of this: “the testing of reality, having shown that the loved object no longer exists, requires forthwith that all the libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to this object. Against this demand a struggle of course arises.”4 There follows Freud’s description of the “large cost of time and cathectic energy” that this obedience of the libido to the orders of reality requires, in spite of the continued existence of the lost object in psychic intimacy. The detailed realization of each order laid down by reality is the work of mourning. Is it not to a work of memory that the work of mourning can in its turn cathect? Is the feeling of mourning not based on complaints that melancholy has transformed into “plaints” (Ihre Klagen sind Anklagen)? Is it not these complaints and accusations that narrative struggles to tell differently? This suggestion finds support in Freud’s second essay. Here it is the tendency to act out (passer à l’acte), which Freud sees as a “substitute for memory,” that occasions a transition toward narrative. The patient, Freud writes, “does not reproduce the forgotten fact in the form of remembering but in the form of action; he repeats it, obviously without knowing that he repeats it.” Freud explains the phenomenon in terms of the link between resistance and the compulsion for repetition. This is where the obstacle to remembering resides. It is then the “translaboration” or “working out” that makes recollection a work, the work of memory. Is this not, once again, a contact point for a narrative that should be called a labor of narrative? Does this work of narrative not lie in the transition between what I call in Time and Narrative the “configuration” constitutive of emplotment

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and the “refiguration” of life by the practice of narrative? The work of narrative would thus be the narrative form of “working through.” It is in widening this breach in the direction of the work of mourning, with which all acting and suffering beings are confronted, that I return to Kearney’s closing statement in On Stories in order to amplify it and reinforce it (OS, 156). Yes, “all sorrows may be borne if you may put them into a story or tell a story about them.” But narratives that are able to make sorrows bearable and to make us able to endure them constitute but one element of the work of mourning. Peter Homans, in The Ability to Mourn, shows that this work, which all of psychoanalysis seeks to explore, extends from the whole of our archaic and infantile beliefs to our disappointments and disillusions, and in general to everything in our existence that bears the mark of loss.5 Loss is the overarching pattern into which sorrow fits. It is this that I implied in my 1986 essay on evil. It spoke initially about mourning to address speculative explanations in the form of theodicy and evoked a broken dialectic, perhaps close to what Kearney is developing in The God Who May Be. The essay continued by referring to work carried out in the field of action (evil is that which must be fought) and completed in the transformation of feeling: at this point I evoked the work of mourning put at the service of appeasing the complaint. It is here that the work of narrative constitutes an essential element of the work of mourning understood as the acceptance of the irreparable. My conviction is that the final chapter of On Stories, “Narrative Matters,” emerges reinforced by the addition of suffering to acting, of sorrow to praxis. It works better than ever thanks to this expanding of the ways “of making our lives into life-stories” (OS, 129).

The Crisis of Authority QUESTION:

One of the main arguments in On Stories and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters is that we live in a time of crisis—crisis of imaginative identity, crisis of imagination, crisis of legitimation, crisis of authority. In American and Western society, we have witnessed the collapse of a number of major national and international institutions—from the Catholic Church (due to the abuse scandals) and corporate capitalism (Enron and Wall Street post–9/11) to the basic practice of the United Nations with regard to the Iraq debacle. How do you think philosophy might best respond to this climate of crisis? PAUL RICOEUR: A key problem today is authority. Authority is disappearing from our world. When Hannah Arendt asks, “What is authority?”

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she immediately adds, “What was authority?” But what has vanished? I would say it is the right to be ordered or obeyed without having to be legitimated, because the great problem of authority is legitimation. After the 1970s, there was a suspicion of anyone having authority. This crisis laid bare the very structure of authority, which is the role of hierarchical relationship among equalitarian relations—or to put it in a spatial metaphor, a vertical relationship crossing a horizontal one: living together as equals on the one hand and obeying orders on the other. Authority has to be legitimated. It is the capacity to give reasons in a crisis situation. Before, of course, one had to give reasons, but in a sense, authority worked by a kind of social inertia because it was learned. The antiquity of authority was considered enough because it had a long past in itself. Authority relied on memory. Nowadays people need explanations for authority. In his book On Justification, the French sociologist Luc Boltanski argues that today everyone must be able to justify what she or he does, and that this necessity to be justified in each situation is new. In the past, the very fact that there was “authorized” authority meant “it was so.” But today authority is always in question. As we say in French, Qui t’a fait roi ? We always look for another authority behind authority. It is regressive. Where is the end point? Is there something indefinite in authority or a kind of ultimate point where something will be authorized by itself? It is the lack of this ultimate point of reference that defines our modern situation. To go beyond these generalities, I should distinguish between some typical situations, because authority does not work the same way according to different circles of allegiance. Following Luc Boltanski, we may distinguish between five or six different “worlds” or “cities.” Concerning the grammar of grandeur, we could say that in a traditional society the model would be the king. But in a modern democratic society, what is the paradigm of grandeur? We are not “great” in every respect. We are great according to certain rules of estimation. In a city of creativity or inspiration, for example, among artists and writers, the paradigm of greatness is the recognition of creativity, and we have many criteria for this. It has to do with the capacity to produce something new. But if you speak of the city of fame, if you speak of sports, for example, a great cyclist, you are great according to quite different rules—for example, recognized performance, because fame here is to be recognized in the opinion of others. You are not necessarily great in domestic relationships, because fame is something larger than the family. Still, in our modern society, the model of the couple involves what the Greeks would have called the oikos, the home. The relationship between father, mother, and child is one part of it; the relationship between the sexes another. In medieval society, for the traditional aristocracy, for

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example, we could say that the model of the home was prevalent. The French or British court was both a house and the central power. The model of the home absorbed the political relationship. Then in the merchant bourgeois relationship, the capacity to exchange, and to invent new modes of exchange, became the prevalent model of the city. Today the Internet is the typical model of a world expansion of the relationship of merchants. Everything is merchandise. QUESTION: Where does authority reside now? RICOEUR: Today political relationships are part of our system, but only partial relationships in the sense that we are not always concerned with voting, giving our opinion in opinion polls, or taking part in political meetings. But we remain citizens; the authority of the state still obtains. It concerns only part of our activity, but at the same time it is the condition of all the other relationships of the modern nation-state—this is especially so in Europe. Here the problem of authority is brought to its extreme because there is no end to the problem of legitimacy. What makes the authority of the governing power from Hobbes and Machiavelli to Hegel, for instance, is the recurring question, who or what possesses the right to corrupt others? Because the problem of authority becomes that of sovereignty —what is so supreme that there is nothing higher? Then we come back to the core problem: what makes legitimate a hierarchical relationship in our democratic tradition of equality? This was the problem of Tocqueville in Democracy in America. Coming from Europe, where there was the presupposition of aristocratic superiority, he encountered a society in America where there was no theoretical supremacy, no superiority. Where, therefore, was the recognition of superiority to come from? That was Tocqueville’s question. And then, we have Rousseau, of course, speaking of the “labyrinth of politics.” Today we have the additional question of international authority. We know how the nation-state works, but the state is afraid of political authority. It has limits of its own; its space is closed. There are two central features of the nation-state. On the one hand, we have the fact that the state has appropriated and absorbed the evils of revenge, as Hegel and Max Weber say. It has the monopoly on violence, the power to implement its decisions, whereas international society today doesn’t have this power. It relies only on goodwill, especially the goodwill of the great powers. Already we have a silent progression of the international lobby, particularly after the great criminal trials of the middle of the twentieth century—Nuremberg, Tokyo, Buenos Aires—where the tyrants were judged by the victors. The winners of the Second World War were able to establish a tribunal having a certain authority. I think this is a new phenomenon: the idea that criminal laws could cover the entire globe. As in the Pinochet case, we see how for the first time all the other states have a right

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to say something about what happens within the boundaries of the Chilean state. We recognize that nation-state sovereignty is not absolute; it has rules to follow. The first rule of the sovereign state is to provide security for all its members. In tyrannies, the state has failed to provide this security, and this failure gives a right to all the other states to intervene. You have now an international right of intervention in the affairs of particular nations. This involves a certain external limitation of sovereignty. There was a time when after a certain period a crime was forgotten, but now even decades later you can be judged. This was only made possible after the victory of the democratic states over the Nazis on the one hand and the Communist tyranny on the other. This is new and positive. We can judge people who were guilty many years ago because there is a world public opinion. QUESTION: How is world opinion linked to the question of authority? How does it work? RICOEUR: We could say that there is a trial going on at the level of authority beyond the tribunals. The sentences of tribunals have to be recognized by public opinion. It is in this process of recognition that something new happens. Before, we did not have this global judgment, this support of international opinion. Maybe it existed within certain quarters in the eighteenth century, under the French intellectual domination of Europe—to a certain extent at the time of the Enlightenment for instance—but today we are witnessing a new world enlightenment. If we turn, on the other hand, to the whole question of regionalism in the emerging federal project for a Europe of regions, we encounter the problem of the internal limitations of the nation-state. Here we witness the growth of intermediary powers at subnational levels and two systems of limitation: the international limitation of the absoluteness of sovereignty and the regional limits to state sovereignty from within. We now have a very complex system and many options, from a plurality of subsystems, as in federal states such as Germany or the United States, to the very subtle conjunction between regional governments and national governments in a country such as Spain, between the Catalans and the Spanish state, or in Italy between several regional authorities. France is arguably the most resistant to this plurality of substates. Sorting out the various relations between international, national, and subnational power is a good example of practical wisdom in the political field. Take finally the quarrels between one province and another in Canada: this cannot be decided from outside. It is a negotiation between powers and the peoples concerned. The big problem is whether they are consulted in a free and fair way. QUESTION: Authority also involves the crucial question of legitimation and legislation, doesn’t it? RICOEUR: Yes, indeed, and this arises at critical moments in the life

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of a state, usually after a civil war or constitutional crisis. In France, we had seven or eight procedures of amnesty, for example, after the commune in 1871, after the First World War, after the war of Algeria. Sometimes this can involve a big lie—“nothing happened.” Yet, it can also be a way of saying we are not in war as a way of preserving peace. I would say it is a matter of official forgetfulness, institutional forgetfulness, un oubli institutionnel. Americans use the word pardon. When Gerald Ford gave a pardon to Richard Nixon, it was a remnant of a regal right, the right of grace, but in Europe it has disappeared. In France, only the president of the republic is allowed to give such a pardon; we call it grâce. It is a remnant of the right of the king. It was already criticized by Kant in his theory of rights, where he says that le droit de grâce is a privilege of the king but, if used for the benefit of culprits, would be a great injustice because the victims would be deprived of the right to be recognized and the law would be despised. A purely utilitarian practice of amnesty would be a way of saying the war did not appear, that the war between citizens did not occur; it would be a way of effacing le tort, the harm done. Such amnesty would be a denial of harms. We are not allowed to speak about it. The first model of this is to be found in the Greek city in 403 b.c. There was a decree in Athens: you will not speak about the evils (ta kaka). There was an oath that you took not to speak, notice, or even remember. It was a censorship of memory. It was a “big lie,” because the harm done and the suffering were not recognized. There was an injustice because there was a lack of recognition. It was a harm done to truth. It is interesting to see in a Greek tragedy how it is that poetry preserves the memory of suffering. In all the great tragedies, we have the problem of the harm of the powerful and the memories of great families and so on. We could say that politics starts with the prose of peace pitted against the poetry of war. There is a kind of truthfulness in the preservation by poetry of the memory of harm and suffering, which is often denied in the prose of political life. At one level, then, this forgetfulness, this amnesty of crimes of the past, is not a good thing. It seems better to remember. There is the work of mourning. Amnesty and forgetfulness may prevent mourning. They can prevent a second suffering of harm done but also the suffering of mourning, which is a working-through, a creative process. I make an allusion again to the important essay by Freud “Mourning and Melancholia,” where he speaks of the necessity of preserving mourning from being swallowed up by melancholia. When we prevent mourning, we succumb to melancholia, as we see in Europe, after the French Revolution, when there was a law of forgetfulness with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, after which we had the spleen of the Romantic generation. As such, it is not harmless to implement amnesty. It is at the best

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un moindre mal, a lesser of two evils. Two great sufferings are prevented, hate and revenge, at the expense of the suffering of memory, and the liberating power of this suffering. But we should not underestimate mourning. It is a way of giving people the right to start anew, by remembering in such a way that we may overcome obsessive or compulsive repetition. It is a matter of the right balance between memory and forgetting. QUESTION: And what role might narrative have to play here? RICOEUR: Narrative has a crucial role. I speak, especially now, of narrative at the public level, because collective memory and collective identity are based on stories concerning the founding events, and because founding events have civil dates whereby memory is both created and preserved by telling stories. As a result, history has the function of adjudicating commemorations in a kind of public ritual. Does this found authority? All kinds of authority are ways of telling the story and repeating and therefore preserving what I call the social inertia of the past by providing a kind of effectiveness of the past. In spite of all the changes in one’s society, this is a matter of preserving the invisible roots of community by telling stories.

The Power of the Possible QUESTION:

A central theme explored in Kearney’s trilogy (On Stories, The God Who May Be, and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters) is the relation between narrative imagination and “possibility.” While dealing with primarily the eschatological and ontological notions of the possible, ranging from Cusanus to Heidegger and Derrida, you have dealt with this theme in a number of your writings and have expressed recently the wish to write a last book—if you have the time and energy—entitled L’homme capable. What sorts of things would you like to explore in such a book? RICOEUR: As I get older I have been increasingly interested in exploring certain metaphysics of potency and act. In Oneself as Another, I broach this in my analysis of the capacity to speak, narrate, and act. This phenomenology of the “I can,” in turn, brings me to Aristotle’s attempt in the Metaphysics to outline metacategories of potentiality and actuality in line with his commitment to a plurality of meanings of being. In this respect, I no longer subscribe to the typically antimetaphysical Protestant lineage of Karl Barth (though it is true that in early works like The Symbolism of Evil I was still somewhat under this influence). If I am on the side of metaphysics here, it is, admittedly, in the somewhat minority camp of those who prefer the categories of possibility and actuality to that of

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“substance.” If the mainstream and official tradition of Western metaphysics has been substantialist, this does not preclude other metaphysical paths, such as those leading from Aristotle’s dunamis to Spinoza’s conatus to Schelling’s and Leibniz’s notions of potentiality (puissance). Here we find a dynamic notion of being as potency and action—Spinoza reformulates substance as a substantia actuosa—which contrasts sharply with the old substantialist models of scholasticism or the mechanistic models of Descartes. This is a matter of dynamism versus mechanism, and the idea of a dynamic in being that grows toward consciousness, reflection, and community. Here I think it is important to think of ontology in close rapport with ethics. That is why in Thinking Biblically, I endeavor to unravel some of the ontological and eschatological implications of the “I am who I am” episode in Exodus 3:14. We encounter in this passage a notion of being alien to the Greek usage. Its translation into Greek language and thought signals an alteration of the existing meaning of being to include new notions of being-with, being-faithful, being-in-accompaniment with one’s community or people (which is precisely what Yahweh promises Moses when he says “I am he who will be with you”). Now Aristotle had never considered this signification of being when he wrote the Metaphysics, but that didn’t and doesn’t prevent the enlargement of Greek ontology to accommodate and respond to such “other” meanings: a better solution it seems to me than setting up an unbridgeable antagonism between Hellenic and Hebraic meanings of being and then having to choose one or the other. What I explore in Thinking Biblically is a sort of philosophical theology or theological philosophy—not an easy task in a contemporary intellectual culture that still wants people to say whether they are philosophers or theologians and is uncomfortable with overlaps. This recent return to religious thinking is intimately linked with my growing interest in the whole field of action and praxis, which increasingly drew me away from the abstract universalism of Kant toward a more Aristotelian ethics of the “good life” (bien vivre). And of course I would not deny for a moment here the important Heideggerian analysis of “care” and the whole post-Heideggerian retrieval of Greek thinking. Not that I have ever found my ontological feet in any final or absolute sense. It is no accident that the title of the last chapter of Oneself as Another is in the form of an interrogation rather than an assertion: “Towards Which Ontology?” There I try to explore possibilities of an ethical ontology beyond the Heideggerian model of ontology without ethics and the Levinasian model of ethics without ontology. By trying to think ethics in terms of action (praxis/pragma) and action in terms of being as potency and act, I am seeking ways beyond the either/or of Heidegger and Levinas. The ultimate

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purpose of hermeneutic reflection and attestation, as I see it, is to try to retrace the line of intentional capacity and action behind mere objects (which we tend to focus on exclusively in our natural attitude) so that we may recover the hidden truth of our operative acts, of being capable, of being un homme capable. If hermeneutics is right, in the wake of Kant and Gadamer, to stress the finitude and limits of consciousness, it is also wise to remind ourselves of the tacit potencies and acts of our lived existence. My bottom line is a phenomenology of being able. QUESTION: It is remarkable that you should begin your philosophical career by reflecting on the nature of l’homme faillible (fallible man) and conclude by shifting the focus to l’homme capable. One might have expected it the other way around. Could you tease out a little more what you mean by this idea of a phenomenology of “I am able” (une phenomenologie du je peux)? As you know in my own work on the possible, from Poétique du possible (1984) to The God Who May Be (2001), I have been trying to develop a post-Heideggerian hermeneutics of possibility inspired, in part, by Heidegger’s reversal of the old metaphysical priority of act (energeia) over potency (dunamis). I wonder if our respective paths are not converging more and more on this question. RICOEUR: I believe that the ontology and analogy of action that I am trying to think through plays itself out on the basis of a differentiated phenomenology of “I can speak,” “I can act,” “I can narrate,” and “I can designate myself as imputable.” What all these instances of “I am able to . . .” articulate is the basic capacity of a human being to act and suffer. I am interested here with an anthropology of potency and impotency (puissance et impuissance ). In one sense, what I find intriguing about Spinoza’s notion of conatus is that it refuses the alternative between act and potency, between energeia and dunamis. For Spinoza, each concrete thing or event is always a mélange of act and possibility. I would be closer here to Spinoza or Heidegger than to Aristotle, for what is the meaning of an “architect in potency,” to take Aristotle’s example, if it is not already an architect who is thinking architecturally, making plans, preparing to realize a building project and so on? I would hold to the idea of a profound continuity between dunamis and energeia, since energeia is the ergon and this, as we know from the Ethics, can be translated as the “task.” Whether being an architect, doctor, musician, et cetera, is exercised or not, it remains an ergon. As such, possibility as a “capacity” to realize a task is by no means the same thing as possibility as an abstract or logical virtuality—think of the sprinter poised on the starting block. There are different modalities of the possible: the possible that is not yet possible, the possible that is on the way to being realized, the possible that is already a certainty, and so on.

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QUESTION: Unlike Aristotle, then, who argues that we can only know possibility through actuality, you would say that “attestation” is already a way of knowing possibility (puissance)? RICOEUR: Yes, I would say that, and I think this has important ethical consequences. I would insist, for example, that certain people who are deprived of their rights or means to exercise their capacities—such as the imprisoned or the mentally ill—nonetheless are worthy of respect because they still possess these capacities as possibilities. Likewise, if I say that I can speak a certain foreign language, I do not have to be actually speaking it to have this capacity or skill. Or indeed when it comes to language generally, it is true that I can speak and use all sorts of different words and constructions, even if I am not actually doing so and will arguably never be in a position to speak all of language. Here it might be useful to rethink the Aristotelian notion of dunamis and Spinoza’s notion of conatus in rapport with Leibniz’s notion of appetites—possibility as a dynamic tendency or inclination. These philosophers, and Heidegger and Kearney, too, of course, offer great resources for a new thinking about the possible. However, my own interest in these questions is ultimately inseparable from the moral question—how do we relate a phenomenology of “being able” to the ethical events of immutability and attestation? I might even concede here a point made recently by my young colleagues Dominico Jervolino and Fabrizio Turoldo, that my thought is not so removed from certain religious and biblical issues as my standard policy of “conceptual ascetisicm” might have been prepared to admit in the past. I am not sure about the absolute irreconcilability between the God of the Bible and the God of Being (understood with Jean Nabert as primary affirmation or with Spinoza as substantia actuosa). The tendency of modern French thought to eclipse the Middle Ages has prevented us from acknowledging certain very rich attempts to think of God and being in terms of each other. I no longer consider such conceptual asceticism tenable. QUESTION: Would you say that there is a difference between your early and late thinking? RICOEUR: Is there a difference between the beginning and the end? It’s true that I have changed in the last fifty years. I have read many new books and the whole philosophical climate has altered in all kinds of important ways. I began in an era of existentialism, I traversed structuralism, and now I find myself before a “post-I-know-not-what,” deconstruction, et cetera. A long life like mine has meant passing through a great variety of philosophical landscapes, and negotiating with my contemporaries— sometimes friends, sometime adversaries—is each time different according to the specific nature and singularity of the encounter. And yet, perhaps history will link these different situations in some way.

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Notes This transcript of Paul Ricoeur with Richard and Anne Kearney and Fabrizio Turoldo is from a conversation that took place in Paris in July 2003. The introductory section, “The Sorrow of Life Stories,” was translated by Boyd Blundell. 1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Henceforth cited as HC. 2. Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 3. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pellauer (New York: Ausburg Fortress Publishing, 1995), 249–61. 4. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Collected Papers 4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press, 1971), 154. 5. Homans, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Terror and Religion Jacques Derrida

RICHARD KEARNEY:

In your debate with Dominique Janicaud in Heidegger en France (2002), you talk about deconstruction as being a preference for discontinuity over continuity, for différance over reconciliation.1 These two traits are always at work in your thought. I was wondering, at the practical level, what this preference might mean in terms of the current crisis in our political imaginary. In the wake of September 11, there is much talk of the West versus Islam. In Northern Ireland, there was much negotiation over decommissioning of arms. And there are all these tensions between Pakistan and India and, of course, between Palestine and Israel. My instinct here is to ask, don’t we need reconciliation in these areas of the world? It is perhaps a naive question but also a pragmatic one. What I am really saying is, where could a hermeneutics of reconciliation meet the deconstruction of différance on these issues—the issues of agreement, consensus, and resolution among enemies? JACQUES DERRIDA: It is a very good question. First the quick answer: of course, politically and socially speaking, I have nothing against reconciliation, and I think we should do whatever we can to reach a reconciliation worthy of that name, be it the end of war, the end of violence, and so on. And I think, since you gave us these examples of what is going on today in the world—with a war that is not a war in the classical sense, a terrorism that is not terrorism in the classical sense—all these forms of new violence that challenge the old concepts of war, terrorism, and even nation or state, given, then, the fact that you referred to these examples, of course my political choice will be toward reconciliation. But a reconciliation that would not be simply a compromise in which the other (as it is always the case) in this or that way loses his or her singularity, identity, desire, and so on. This would be a reconciliation also that would not be simply a sort of deal in order to take advantage of the other. So, if there were a reconciliation that could be just, then of course I would be interested in reconciliation. Each time my choice will be on the side of life and not of death. Now, if we try to do justice to both sides of all the examples you cite, I suppose, we would have to acknowledge that many think that 18

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they act for a just cause. Those who hijacked the airplanes on 9/11 or those who spread the anthrax think probably that their actions were provoked by an act of terrorism from the opposite side, an act of state terrorism on the part of the United States. So, if there were a kind of reconciliation that would signal a stop, which could bring violence to a halt and reach an agreement or a common conviction, then why not? But if reconciliation is just a pretext for a cease-fire so that tomorrow violence can start again, the violence of the one trying to prove that it is stronger than the other, then I would be very reluctant. Since we cannot avoid the reference to 9/11 and since I have difficulty starting any public speech or discussion without reference to these unspeakable events that have been named after that date, I think that today the type of violence is such that there will be no reconciliation before violence stops. KEARNEY : Is that a precondition? DERRIDA : Let me say that I do not find the United States innocent, but, given what is going on, whatever the purpose might be, we cannot reach a reconciliation before this type of violence (either through military or police agents) stops. But the terrain has changed. Assuming that we manage to identify the criminals behind these attacks, let’s say, bin Laden or some of his followers—and capture them or kill them, this would not change the situation. The terrain of reconciliation requires a radical change in the world—I would say a revolution of some sort. Any reconciliation worthy of that name requires not only that someone stop the violence through military or police force, or, as they call them, the peacekeeping forces. It requires more—a political change in the minds of the strongest. KEARNEY: But who is the strongest? DERRIDA: In the present situation, the strongest becomes the weakest, and the weakest the strongest. Take, for example, the case of biological weapons, which, by the way, as we all know, were initially provided by the United States. If you only read, among other sources, Noam Chomsky’s book on rogue states, you will see that the United States provided Saddam Hussein with the skills as well as the substance.2 That’s why some people are so nervous about Iraq, because they know that Saddam has the substance and the ability to create it. That’s why I said that no one is innocent in this affair. Nevertheless, being myself on the side of democracy, democracy to come, I only wish one thing: that the process of radical reconciliation—implying a total transformation of the political situation— would start with a major cessation of all violence. Although I remain suspicious of American policies, I think today they cannot do anything else but protect themselves and try to destroy the source of this terrorism, a terrible but unavoidable thing. Now about reconciliation itself, for

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everything said so far was at the level of the current political situation. On a more radical kind of reconciliation, beyond the political—the political is just a layer—I would not suspend every relation with the other for the sake of hope, salvation, or resurrection (I have been reading your admirable book these days on this subject). This is perhaps a difference between us: this indeterminacy of the messianic leaves you unsatisfied. To speak roughly, you, Richard, would not give up the hope of redemption, resurrection, and so forth—and I would not either. But I would argue that when one is not ready to suspend the determination of hope then our relation with the other becomes again economical. KEARNEY: Because hope interprets this relation in terms of horizons of expectation, imagination, and interpretation? DERRIDA: My feeling is, and this is not political—when I am political, juridical, and perhaps ethical, I am with you—that when I try to think the most rigorous relation with the other I must be ready to give up the hope for a return to salvation, the hope for resurrection, or even reconciliation. In the pure act of giving and forgiving, we should be free from any hope of reconciliation. I must forgive, if one forgives. KEARNEY: Unconditionally? DERRIDA: Unconditionally, without the hope of reconstituting a healthy and peaceful community. That’s where reconciliation is for me problematic. When I am for any kind of negotiating between these unconditional and absolute thoughts and the conditional, then I become juridical and political—then I am of course with the side of the best possible reconciliation—which is, nevertheless, always very difficult. Reconciliation is difficult. It has to be negotiated through transactions, analyses of contexts and times, unpredictability of all kinds. But at least we have the feeling of a possible compromise. That is what is happening in life. KEARNEY: To come back to the conclusion you drew earlier, let me play devil’s advocate. When you say we cannot have a genuine, radical reconciliation worthy of the name until we cease violence, this seems disturbingly reminiscent of certain phrases made, for example, by Ariel Sharon of Israel, who refuses to speak with the Palestinians until we have peace, or the unionists in Northern Ireland saying, “We cannot talk to Sinn Féin until they put away their guns.” I can understand, of course, the logic behind that, but it seems like asking for the impossible too soon, and not accepting the muddiness and murkiness of political situations. The Palestinians are slow to abandon the use of arms unconditionally until they see what is going to happen, and so on. Deconstruction’s position is, as I understand it, that nothing is pure: everything is contaminated, mixed, and ambiguous. And so, we will never reach a point of pure nonviolence where we can have reconciliation, unless we compromise. Isn’t it impor-

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tant, therefore, to accept some kind of negotiated settlement before we reach perfect peace and nonviolence? DERRIDA: I totally agree with you. Perhaps what I said was oversimplified. That is why reconciliation in the political sense always occurs during some lasting violence. Now when I mention the fact that the Americans have to respond to the events of 9/11, I did not exclude that they have already transformed the situation. On the one hand, they said that they were ready to help poor Afghans by dropping food and providing similar kinds of humanitarian aid; and, on the other hand, they are already discussing the prospect of a Palestinian state. You remember, perhaps, Sharon saying, “We do not want to become the ‘Czechoslovakia’ of today.” Before World War II, peace was made with Hitler at the expense of Czechoslovakia, and Sharon is afraid that, if the Western coalition needs to expand to include more Arab states, this could happen at the expense of Israel. I do not judge anyone here. Perhaps the United States is making a terrible mistake in what it is doing. I cannot judge. Since television is under censorship, we cannot really know. In fact, what I say is simply that the United States could not remain immobile. It couldn’t say, “Let’s wait and see.” It had to do something, whether we call it retaliation or just an attempt to stop the terror. At the same time, without waiting for the total destruction of the violent adversary, the United States has already promised, at least, that it would change its policy. I think it is trying to change, however indirectly, but the premises are very complicated. Americans ask, “Why do they hate us?” They will have to try to understand these feelings of hatred and try to change them. I hope that the European allies—because we will have to come back to Europe on this issue—exercise pressure on the United States, that not only the States, but the whole Western world should change its policy toward the Arabs, if only in order to demonstrate that they are right when they say that bin Laden does not represent Islam or the Palestinians. If they want this to be true, they have to take a number of steps. And I don’t mean that they will necessarily have to stop the violence, but even before that and at the same time with that, they will have to start changing their policy. KEARNEY: Pursuing this question of the other and the European as a sort of middleman, between the Middle East and America, I take it you are suggesting that because Europe has a much closer relationship with the Mediterranean world and Arab culture generally, it is more aware of all the different variations of Islam, and that Europe has, therefore, an obligation to try to communicate this understanding to America and to mediate between East and West, as it were. When U.S. citizens ask, “Why do they hate us?” they are asking for an answer. So we, in Europe, might be able to help “translate” between the two. We might be able to serve as a

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sort of hermeneutical equator, allowing the adversarial horizons to converge or crisscross, a sort of bridge or chiasmus. I attempt to raise similar issues in my book On Stories, in which there is a section on the construction of national narratives. I try to explore how Rome was founded on the exclusion of the Etruscans, how the British and the Irish constituted themselves within a dialectic of otherness with each other, and then how America founded its new world identity on the basis of imagining its own particular other—starting with the native “Indians,” then going on to the slaves, immigrants, and finally “aliens” as the other (there is an obsession with aliens from outer space). After 9/11, there was a front-page headline in Newsweek, “A Nation Indivisible.” The other had struck again. It seems to me that there was an immediate need to put a face on it, to conjure up images, to situate it geographically, to identify enemies out there because to have enemies within was so disturbing. Perhaps that is why the subsequent anthrax scare was so disturbing. Once the other is also located within the nation, it is harder to project the other back “out there.” How do you see this dialectic playing out? DERRIDA: There are at least two or three questions in what you have said. First, a vast problem—let’s call it “translation.” Can Europe help in translating? I think there are two ways to look into things, to estimate what is going on here. First, there is the short one: to understand the premises of the cold war. We are still paying the price of the cold war because it is precisely for that reason—the reason for having an enemy—that the United States had to surround itself with so many nondemocratic countries as allies. At the same time there was this polarity, and by means of this polarity, the United States had made a number of terrible mistakes in strategy that have boomeranged. So now we face these consequences of the cold war. We shouldn’t forget that bin Laden was trained according to American models. The longest way will be the study of the history and embodiment of Islam. How can we explain that this religion—one that is now in terms of demography the most powerful—and those nations that embody its beliefs, have missed something in history, something that it has not shared with Europe, namely, enlightenment, science, economy, development? They are poor countries. Even if some Arabs are extremely rich by virtue of the oil industry, they still do not possess the necessary infrastructure. What is, then, that which places them economically on the “wrong” side? Is it their religion? Now, of course, I am oversimplifying. But it took some centuries during which Christianity and Judaism succeeded in associating with the techno-scientific-capitalistic development while the Arab Islamic world did not. They remained poor, attached to old models, repressive, even more phallocentric than the Europeans (which is already some-

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thing). Without an understanding of history, without a new kind of historical investigation about what happened with Islam during the last five centuries, we will not be able to understand what is going on today. KEARNEY: You have several references in your work to monotheism as Judeo-Christian-Islamic. You always reintroduce this last hyphen that many of us forget, and that complicates in a very refreshing way the scenario. You remind people that Islam shares a common monotheistic heritage in religion and philosophy (see, for example, the case of Avicenna and Averroës). At its inception, Islam did not look so alien to us. DERRIDA: In my short essay “Faith and Knowledge,” I ask the question of Islam in relation to the other religions.3 We have the JudeoChristian couple as opposed to Islam, but, on the other hand, we have the Judeo-Islamic couple as opposed to Christianity. The death of God is Christian. Neither Jew nor Muslim would ever say that God is dead. There is, then, this confrontation between the three Abrahamic traditions. If we want seriously to understand what is happening today, we have to go back to the origins and ask what has happened since the Middle Ages. Why, in spite of the fact that the Arabic world has incorporated Western scholarship, science, and culture, has it not developed socially, historically, as Europe has? I do not have an answer to that. But if we do not go back to this period, we cannot make sense of today’s situation. KEARNEY: Does that statement include Buddhism and Hinduism? These religions did not seem to have such a problem. DERRIDA: No. I’m not sure that we could call them, strictly speaking, religions. This is a point that I make in “Faith and Knowledge” about the mondialatinisation of the word religion. KEARNEY: Maybe it is because Islam, in its origins, is somehow more connected with us here in Europe. The departure from us (the West and Europe) came at a later point. The battle of Vienna, when the Islamic forces were defeated by the Germans and the Poles, was in 1682. It has not been long since Islam was at the heart of Europe. The Balkans, Spain, and Greece—Islam was until relatively recently a part of us and we were a part of it. DERRIDA: It is, without doubt, a great civilization, a great culture. Nevertheless, they did not articulate the possibility of what we define as power, as techno-science, capitalism. KEARNEY: How do we raise this question of Islam while avoiding Huntington’s binary thesis of the good Western empire against the evil Islamic empire? How do we avoid the reemergence of dichotomies in our global “social imagery”? DERRIDA: I think there is the expressed wish in Islam and among Muslims, among theologians, to dissociate Islam from a more violent

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form. I know that there is this desire to come back to an Islam that would be totally devoid of violence. These differences, however, within Islam cannot be developed efficiently without a development of the institution of the political, of the transformation of the structures of the society. Of course, we will always find an interesting Muslim scholar or theologian who will say, “Islam is not bin Laden.” But these people remain powerless because what has power is precisely this nondemocratic, violent regime. It is a strange situation today. Well, I think Europe, not the old question of Europe, the spirit of Europe, Husserl’s Europe, Heidegger’s Europe, not even the European Community, or the Europe of Tony Blair, but perhaps there is something in Europe today, a possibility of taking a certain distance from both sides (the United States and Islam) even if there is an alliance in NATO, there is something in Europe that can or should avoid these theocratic struggles, the theocratic duel. In order to give some image of this schema, I would return to the question of the death penalty that, as you know, obsesses me. Imagine that bin Laden is captured by the United States as a foreign soldier or enemy. They could judge him, then, according to their own laws of justice and probably sentence him to death. Or would he be transferred to an international penal court according to the new law of the United Nations? In that case, he couldn’t be sentenced to death, because the new International Criminal Court has of course judged crimes against humanity, crimes of war, but it cannot enforce death or pass the death sentence. This case locates the difference between, let’s say, the spirit of Europe and the United States. The fact that the European Community has abolished the death penalty makes a difference—a real difference and a difference in principle. KEARNEY: If, say, British forces took bin Laden, they couldn’t extradite him to the United States. DERRIDA: No, they couldn’t and they shouldn’t. Nor the French— they will never extradite someone to a country where the death penalty is accepted. Whether bin Laden would be killed as a soldier, as an enemy, or judged as a terrorist. All these concepts are now shaken. To come back to the last part of your question about the refoundation of a sovereign, single nation. I am struck by the new reunification of this country. Speaking of assimilation, the African Americans of this country are now fully Americans, at least for the moment—as long as they are against bin Laden. Perhaps one day, people will consider 9/11 as the refoundation of the United States. Because, precisely, the United States was struck by an unidentified enemy, not a state, not an individual (it is not bin Laden himself, alone). This attack has become the center for a new foundation of the nation. This aggression has rebuilt the nation; this terrible scar has provoked such a self-defense that it serves almost as a reconstitution, an economy,

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a sort of therapy, and so on. Americans are becoming reconciled with themselves. There is reconciliation with immigrants and other underprivileged groups of society. You have probably seen a television advertisement where a number of people of various backgrounds and nationalities announce to the camera, “I am an American.” It is amazing and it is true. You cannot but admire this wonderful thing going on, despite all the tragedy and all the hypocrisy, there is still an idea of democracy. No doubt. I remember when I was here [in the United States] in 1971, in Baltimore. The “war with blacks” was terrible. There were rebellions in prisons, terrible violence. I thought that there would be a real revolution. And they succeeded through violence, because a number of black militants, leaders of the black community, were killed. The despair was terrible. But after the depression they started with the act of integration, with the struggle for civil rights. There was progress. It is always not enough, of course. There is always a lot of hypocrisy: racism, for example, still exists. And yet, the idea of this progress cannot be denied. KEARNEY: This polarization works. Much of the Islamic world seems to have forgotten, on a popular level, a sort of a fraternity with the West. On the other hand, the Americans are certainly a reconciled, rejuvenated nation once again. In terms of these polar extremes—“complementary enemies” playing off against each other, both calling each other the “Evil Empire”—I would call the European position a middle one, a hermeneutics of mediation and imagination. But I suspect that you would be slow to use any of these terms: hermeneutics, imagination, or mediation. That is what I would endorse. But your tendency is to focus more on the gaps and holes. Such a focus is an absolutely indispensable move. But not the whole story. I suppose, if there is a difference between us—I mention this in the fourth chapter of the God Who May Be—it is a difference of emphasis rather than of kind. Maybe it is because of my experience of Northern Ireland. DERRIDA: We will need lots of time to make these traits more specific. I think that there is already an act of mediation in Europe. Although Europe is predominantly Christian, Europe as a community is less theocratic than the United States. Europe is more secular, and by being the ally of the States and being more attentive and respectful to difference than the States, it could, and I hope that it will, play a role of mediation. It should exercise some pressure on the United States. I agree with you on this level. Europe is not this factual, Christian Europe simply led by Christianity— this is something that needs to be reelaborated. And here we come to the difference between you and me. It is easier to think of what I put under the word khora in Europe than in any other place in the world. Now, it may also happen in some parts of the United States, but this will be the

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dimension of Europe in the States. Something may happen in the United States thanks to some American thinkers. But it would have to do with a way of freeing yourselves not from a God who may be but rather from a God that is in the direction of what I call khora. When I say khora I am not excluding anything, but I am referring also to the politics of khora, the absolute indeterminacy, which is the only possible groundless ground for a universal, if not for reconciliation, at least for a universal politics beyond cosmopolitanism. KEARNEY: I suppose I could see the God-who-may-be emerging from khora, from that space. If I had to try to locate it, this god, I would place it somewhere between the God of messianism and being on the one hand and khora on the other. The God-who-may-be hovers between these two. It is not identical with khora. This is the sort of dialogue I develop throughout The God Who May Be with you and Jack Caputo. I am aware of our differences on the issue of how one speaks about God. For me, it is a hermeneutic problem: how do you imagine, speak, name, narrate, and identify a God without falling back to metaphysics and onto-theology— and yet without saying “God is khora.” DERRIDA: I never said that. KEARNEY: I know you never said that, but you see the problematic. DERRIDA: I try to address these various issues by reading your book The God Who May Be. The differences between us are so thin that we cannot in a short discussion do justice to them. These thin and sometimes imperceptible differences or nuances could be translated into politics. But we cannot reduce them to that. I felt very close to everything you said in this book. Up to a certain moment where you yourself rigorously define the thinnest difference, that is, on resurrection. I am not against resurrection. I would share your hope for resurrection, reconciliation, and redemption. But I think I have a responsibility as someone who thinks deconstructively. Even if I dream of redemption, I have the responsibility to acknowledge, to obey the necessity of the possibility that there is khora rather than a relationship with the anthropo-theologic God of Revelation. At some point, you, Richard, translate your faith into something determinable and then you have to keep the “name” of the resurrection. My own understanding of faith is that there is faith whenever one gives up not only any certainty but also any determined hope. If one says that resurrection is the horizon of one’s hope then one knows what one names when one says “resurrection”—faith is not pure faith. It is already knowledge. That’s why, sometimes, you call me an atheist. KEARNEY: Someone who “rightly passes for an atheist.” DERRIDA: Sometimes I would argue that you have to be an atheist of

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this sort in order to be true to faith, to pure faith. So it is a very complicated logic. KEARNEY: In The God Who May Be, I say, “where the religious so offends, I would call myself a seeker of love and justice tout court” (GMB, 6). DERRIDA: Me, too. A seeker of love and justice. It is not that I am happy with this. It is a suffering. KEARNEY: For me this is the crux of the dialogue between hermeneutics and deconstruction. My diacritical hermeneutics is different from Gadamer’s and Heidegger’s, and even Ricoeur’s in certain respects. But one of the key debates that I have tried to explore and develop in The God Who May Be and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters is the hermeneuticdeconstructive interface. One thing that I would like to mention here on the question of God is something you said in Villanova that I very much identified with. During the roundtable discussion, you said, “If I am interested in God, it would be the god who is powerless.” DERRIDA: Absolutely. First of all, I would like to tell you that I found your book powerful: it is powerful in its powerlessness. I was impressed and grateful to see what is happening with the history that we share, and we share twenty years now. Your book formalizes questions in a way that is absolutely wonderful. I read your book in agreement all the time—with this tiny difference, on the question of the power, the “may-be.” There are two ways to understand the “may.” “I may” is the perhaps. It is also the “I am able to” or “I might.” The “perhaps” (peut-être) refers to the unconditional beyond sovereignty. It is an unconditional that is the desire of powerlessness rather than power. I think you are right to attempt to name God not as sovereign, as almighty, but as precisely the most powerless. Justice and love are precisely oriented to this powerlessness. But khora is powerless too. Not powerlessness in the sense of poor or vulnerable, but powerlessness as simply no power. No power at all. KEARNEY: Can we, to juggle Heidegger, kneel and pray before khora? DERRIDA: No. This is precisely the difference. But, I would immediately add that if we are to pray, if I pray, I have at least to take into account that khora enables me to pray—that spacing, the fact that there is this spacing, a neutral, indifferent, impassible spacing that enables me to pray. Without khora there would be no prayer. We should think that without khora there would be no God, no other, no spacing. But you can address a prayer only to something or someone, not to khora. To come back to your question, I have nothing against all these things—reconciliation, prayer, redemption, and so on—but I think that these things would not be possible without this indifferent, impassible, neutral, interval spacing of khora. The “there is” beyond being.

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Which is prior to all differences and yet makes difference

possible? DERRIDA:

Yes. And this can lead to a new political imaginary? Another kind of cosmopolitanism? DERRIDA: Beyond cosmopolitanism, since cosmopolitanism implies a state, a citizen, the cosmos. Khora opens up a universality beyond cosmopolitanism. That’s where at some point I am planning to examine the political consequences of the thought of khora, which I think are urgent today. And if, one day, there will be a reconciliation between the terrible enemies, it would be because of some space, of some khora. An empty mutual space that is not the cosmos, not the created world, not the nation, not the state, not the global dimension, but just that—khora. KEARNEY:

Notes This conversation took place in New York City on October 16, 2001. 1. Janicaud, Heidegger en France, vol. 2, Entretiens (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2001), 89–126. 2. Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (London: South End Press, 2001). 3. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–77.

On Social Imaginaries Charles Taylor

richard kearney: I thought we might begin with the question of the social imaginary. You argue that modernity involves a revolution in our social imaginary. You speak more specifically of “old forms of mediacy” giving rise to “new images of direct access.” This in turn raises questions of identity and language and, by implication, the idea that the emergence of a new state or nation involves a dialectic between the past as a backwardlooking vision and a future project based on self-determination. What exactly is the role played by the social imaginary in this kind of political scenario? charles taylor: I am very interested in developing here Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an “imagined community.” 1 Certain kinds of communities require that their members have a shared understanding of themselves, which links them together and gives them a sense of common agency. I think he is quite right to use the term imagination here, since we are not concerned with a theoretical process. The people who are actively engaged in constructing their community may have no theory or concept of what it is they are doing. They may have never heard of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Karl Marx. Humans operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves. Their common understanding of what they are doing operates more at an imaginary or symbolic level. It is taken for granted when we have an election, for example, that there is a certain sense about a collective decision to form a new government, and without this prior sentiment, which I am calling the “social imaginary,” the government would forfeit its legitimacy. How do we get to the point where we are capable of making such a decision for ourselves? In the term social imaginary, the term social operates doubly, so to speak: it is the imagination of society by society. I am also borrowing here from Cornelius Castoriadis’s idea that the social imaginary occurs at the moment when we reimagine moments of freedom, autonomy, change—when we innovate by reinterpreting. I am trying to suggest that it is not just at the moment of innovation that the social imaginary operates, but all of the time. It is 29

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something we presuppose as agents in a social world. Looking at most of our political or cultural practices, we can see that there are “background understandings” we need to have in place for them to work, such as the practice of putting certain Xs on a ballot paper in an election as part of a collective exercise in self-legislation. kearney: We call this “imaginary” because large parts of this process are tacit and prereflective? taylor: Yes, because it is embedded in all kinds of paradigm stories, images, and ideologies that we carry around with us. kearney: Forming a kind of habitus or tradition or communal memory? taylor: Indeed, and the term social imaginary captures and covers all of these media of transmission while also denoting the specific potential for creative reinterpretation of the past in light of some new or future project. What I’m trying to get at with this term, social imaginary, is something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged way. I want to speak of social imaginary here rather than social theory because there are important differences between the two. I speak of imaginary because I’m talking about the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms; it is carried in images, stories, legends, and so on. But it is also the case that theory is often possessed by a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. This leads to a third difference: the social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. It often happens that what start off as theories held by a few people may come to infiltrate the social imaginary—first elites, perhaps, and then the whole society. Our social imaginary at any given time is complex. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of one another, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. What has fascinated me in my recent work on modern social imaginaries is how certain imaginaries are correlative to certain clusters of practices. kearney: Could you give some examples? taylor: Take again our practice of choosing governments through general elections. Part of the background understanding that makes sense of our act of voting is our awareness of the whole action, involving all citizens, each choosing individually, but from among the same alternatives, and the compounding of these microchoices into one binding,

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collective decision. Essential to our understanding what is involved in this kind of macrodecision is our ability to identify what would constitute a foul: certain kinds of influence, buying votes, threats, and the like. This kind of macrodecision has, in other words, to meet certain norms if it is to be what it is meant to be. If a minority could force all others to conform to its orders, it would cease to be a democratic decision, for instance. Implicit in this understanding of norms is the ability to recognize ideal cases, such as an election in which each citizen exercised to the maximum his or her judgment autonomously, in which everyone was heard, and so on. Beyond the ideal stands some notion of a moral or metaphysical order, in the context of which the norms and ideals make sense. The social imaginary extends beyond the immediate background understanding that makes sense of our particular practices. This is not an arbitrary extension of the concept. Just as the practice without the understanding wouldn’t make sense for us, and thus wouldn’t be possible, so this understanding supposes, if it is to make sense, a wider grasp of our whole predicament: how we stand to one another, how we got to where we are, and how we relate to other groups. This wider grasp has no clear limits. It is in fact the largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation. It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines because of its unlimited and indefinite nature. That is another reason for speaking here of an imaginary and not a theory. The relation between practices and the background understanding behind them is therefore not one-sided. If the understanding makes the practice possible, it is also true that it is the practice that largely carries the understanding. At any given time, we can speak of the repertory of collective actions at the disposal of a given group of society. These are the common actions that individuals know how to undertake, from the general election, involving the whole society, to striking up a polite but uninvolved conversation with a casual group at the reception hall. Now, there are three clusters of practices that particularly concern me with regard to understanding the emergence of modernity: (1) economies as practices of exchange involving some kind of lawlike pattern; (2) the public sphere as a space of free discussion outside of political power in which public opinion in the strong sense of the word is formed (media, newspapers, coffeehouses, and so forth, as discussed by Habermas in The Structural Formation of the Public Sphere; and (3) our imagining of ourselves as “peoples.”2 In the first, we come to see our society as an economy, an interlocking set of activities of production, exchange, and consumption, which form a system with its own laws and dynamic. Instead of being merely the management of the resources we collectively need in the household or state, the “economic” now defines a way in which we are

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linked together, a sphere of coexistence that could in principle suffice to itself, if only disorder and conflict didn’t threaten. Conceiving of the economy as a system is an achievement of eighteenth-century theory, with the physiocrats and Adam Smith. Coming to see the most important purpose and agenda of society as economic collaboration and exchange is a drift in our social imaginary that began in that period and continues to this day. From that point on, organized society was no longer equivalent to the polity; other dimensions of social existence are seen as having their own forms and integrity. “Society” has been unhooked from “polity,” and now floats freely through a number of different applications. The second cluster, the public sphere, is a central feature of modern society; everywhere it is in fact suppressed or manipulated, it has to be faked. Modern despotic societies have generally felt compelled to go through the motions. The public sphere is a common space in which the members of society meet through a variety of media—print, electronic, and also face-to-face encounters—to discuss matters of common interest and thus to form a common mind about these. I say “a common space,” because although the media are multiple, these are deemed to be in principle intercommunicating. The common space is the locus of a discussion potentially engaging everyone (although in the eighteenth century the claim was only to involve the educated or “enlightened” minority) in which the society can come to a common mind about important matters. The public sphere, then, is a locus in which rational views that should guide government are elaborated. This comes to be seen as an essential feature of a free society. But, one might ask, is this new in history? Isn’t this a feature of all free societies? No, there is a subtle but important difference. Let’s compare the modern society with a public sphere with an ancient republic or polis. In the latter, we can imagine that debate on public affairs may be carried on in a host of settings: among friends at a symposium, between those who meet in the agora, and then, of course, in the ecclesia where the thing is finally decided. The difference is that the discussions outside this body prepare for the action ultimately taken by the same people within it. The “unofficial” discussions are not separated off, given a status of their own. With the modern public sphere, there is a space of discussion that is self-consciously seen as being outside of power. It is supposed to be listened to by power, but it is not itself an exercise of power. The extrapolitical status is not just defined negatively, as a lack of power. It is also seen positively: because public opinion is not an exercise of power, it can be ideally disengaged from partisanship. In other words, with the modern public sphere comes the idea that political power must be supervised and checked by something outside. The third [cluster], imagining ourselves as a sovereign people, is the

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third in the great connected chain of mutations in the social imaginary that have helped constitute modern society. kearney: How does this notion of the “people” or “peoples” fit in with the notion of modern revolution? taylor: The very idea of a people or nation is a collective agency determining how we behave day to day but also how we bring about change in our society. So the idea of modern revolution is that at a certain point this agency, which has somehow existed outside of any particular law structure, can actually determine what the law structure is going to be, as in 1787, for example. And then that carries on, election after election, republic after republic, state after state. But what really fascinates me is how this revolution occurs at the level of the social imaginary. The notion of a sovereign people starts off as a theory, and then gradually infiltrates and transmutes social imaginaries. How does this come about? We can distinguish two rather different paths. I will define them here as ideal types, recognizing that in real historical developments they are sometimes difficult to disentangle. On one hand, a theory may inspire a new kind of activity with new practices, and in this way form the imaginary of whatever groups adopt these practices. Or else the change in the social imaginary comes with a reinterpretation of a practice that already existed in the old dispensation. Older forms of legitimacy are colonized, as it were, with the new understandings of order, and then transformed, in certain cases, without a clear break. For the most part, people take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices. These are made sense of by the new outlook, first articulated in the theory; this outlook is the context that gives sense to the practices. Hence, the new understanding comes to be accessible to the participants in a way it wasn’t before. It begins to define the contours of their world and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention. But this process isn’t just onesided: a theory making over a social imaginary. The theory is glossed, as it were, given a particular shape as the context of these practices. Like Kant’s notion of an abstract category, becoming schematized when it is applied to reality in space and time, the theory is schematized in the dense sphere of common practice. The process does not need to end here. The new practice, with the implicit understanding it generates, can be the basis for modifications of theory, which in turn can inflect practice, and so on. kearney: Could you spell that out by giving the example of the revolutionary creation of a modern nation-state? taylor: The early modern revolutions—in the 1640s, the French civil wars, or even the American Revolution at its outset—are all carried out on a quite different understanding, namely, a sense that this political protest is being made in the name of some past constitution, the ancient

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rights of Englishmen, and so forth, which has been violated by the present and needs to be retrieved. The understanding is that if there is a collective agency involved in this work of reestablishment, it is because there was a previously existing law that bestowed on them a legitimacy that they are now trying to win back. The United States is a case in point. The reigning notions of legitimacy in Britain and America, those that fired the English civil war, for instance, were basically backward looking. They turned around the idea of an “ancient constitution,” an order based on law holding “since time out of mind,” in which Parliament had its rightful place beside the king. This older idea emerges from the American Revolution transformed into a full-fledged foundation in popular sovereignty, whereby the U.S. Constitution is put in the mouth of “We, the people.” This was preceded by an appeal to the idealized order of natural law, in the invocation of “truths held self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence. The transition was easier because what was understood as the traditional law gave an important place to elected assemblies and their consent to taxation. All that was needed was to shift the balance in these so as to make elections the only source of legitimate power. kearney: So these premodern revolutions were essentially backward looking or conservative? taylor: That is right. The American Revolution is a critical case because when it came to establishing the U.S. Constitution in 1787, it was a question of retrospectively reinterpreting what they had done in the name of a “people” who strictly speaking didn’t exist before. The revolutionary forces were mobilized largely on the basis of the old, backward-looking legitimacy idea. This will later be seen as the exercise of a power inherent in a sovereign people. The proof of its existence and legitimacy lies in the new polity it has erected. But popular sovereignty would have been incapable of doing this job if it had entered the scene too soon. The predecessor idea, invoking the traditional rights of a people defined by its ancient constitution, had to do the original heavy lifting, mobilizing the colonists for the struggle before being relegated to oblivion, with the pitiless ingratitude toward the past that defines modern revolutions. At the same time, this projection backward of the action of a sovereign people wouldn’t have been possible without the continuity in institutions and practices that allowed for the reinterpretation of past actions as the fruit of the new principles. As such, the preamble to the Constitution—“We, the people” and so on—is in fact a speech act revisited on a group of agents who didn’t necessarily understand at the time that they were acting as a collective agency, that is, as a distinct people different from the British nation or government that they were revolting against. It is almost as if the American “people” are invented as a nation by a law or legislative

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body that comes to be after the event, that is, after the revolution itself. It’s a sort of creative rememoration of the event after the event—a temporal paradox of rereading the past through the present, a sort of historical bootstrapping. Derrida has asked the question, who gave these people the right to define themselves as a people? Who gives the authority to the people to invoke the people as their own authority? kearney: What is specifically modern about this social imaginary? taylor: It is the element of invention. Prior to modern revolutions like the French, changes would have taken place in society in terms of an explicit reference to something that preceded and transcended the society—be it the monarchy, the great chain of being, or some other metaphysical or theological system. This is what I call an “action-transcendent founding,” wherein the traditional law is a precondition of any common action, at whatever time, because this common agency couldn’t exist without it. By contrast, in the modern period, common agency arises simply in and as a precipitate of common action. For the premodern, legitimacy was never really a question. kearney: Do you see the French Revolution as more “modern” than the American in this respect? taylor: I do, in the sense that the American Revolution justified itself by appealing back to the rights of Englishmen in a sort of conservative rebellion. From the very beginnings of the French Revolution, from the famous serment des jeux de paumes, the revolutionaries were already invoking the forward-looking idea of la nation. This soon develops in turn into the creation of the assemblée nationale. This invocation of popular sovereignty is crucial. And it is largely unprecedented. If we go back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, there are people who say that Locke’s theoretical account of the social contract is really the same thing. But in 1688, everything was done after King James had fled and been replaced to make it seem like a backward-looking legality. Even the word revolution still retained its original meaning here of orbits going around and returning, literally revolving back to their original place. The big breach with this way of thinking comes in the eighteenth century, in part, with the establishment of the American Constitution and then more explicitly with the French Revolution. The impossibility, remarked by all historians, of bringing the French Revolution to an end came partly from this, that any particular expression of popular sovereignty could be challenged, with substantial support. Part of the terrifying instability of the first years of the Revolution stemmed from this negative fact, that the shift from the legitimacy of dynastic rule to that of the nation had no agreed meaning in a broadly based social imaginary. The transition can only come off in anything like the desired sense if the “people,” or at least

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important minorities of activists, understand and internalize the theory. But for political actors, understanding a theory is being able to put it into practices in their world. They understand it through the practices that put it into effect. These practices have to make sense to them, the kind of sense that the theory prescribes. What makes sense of our practices is our social imaginary. What is crucial to this kind of transition is that the people (or its active segments) share a social imaginary that can fill this requirement, that is, which includes ways of realizing the new theory. kearney: Does this breach between premodern and modern social imaginaries involve a different perception of time? taylor: Certainly. The modern social imaginary, which comes into its own in the eighteenth century, involves an atomistic conception of society as predicated upon individuals who have a direct and equal access to power—in contrast to the traditional view that legitimacy had to appeal to some mediating figure (the king, God, law, nature, being, and so forth). And this involves a move from the old conception of time as belonging to some original time of the great beginning, in illo tempore, as Eliade puts it, to a very different notion of temporality—secular time as opposed to higher, sacred, or liturgical time, that is time shaped and patterned by eternity. This new conception of change in terms of profane time is part of the massive shift in our understanding of society. This is why I am tempted to use the term secular, in spite of all the misunderstandings that may arise, because it’s clear that I don’t only mean “not tied to religion.” Its exclusion is much broader. For the original sense of secular was “of the age,” that is, pertaining to profane time. It was close to the sense of “temporal” in the opposition between the temporal and spiritual. Premodern understandings of time seem to have been multidimensional. Time was transcended and held in place by eternity, whether that of Greek philosophy or that of the biblical God. In either case, eternity was not just endless profane time, but an ascent into the unchanging. Modern “secularization” can be seen from one angle as the rejection of higher times and the positing of time as purely profane. Events now exist only in this one dimension, in which they stand at greater and lesser temporal distance, and in relations of causality with other events of the same kind. The modern notion of simultaneity comes to be, in which events utterly unrelated in cause or meaning are held together simply by their co-occurrence at the same point in this single profane time line. Modern literature, as well as the news media, seconded by social science, has accustomed us to think of society in terms of vertical time slices, holding together myriad happenings, related and unrelated. Our medieval forebears would have found this difficult to understand, for where events in profane time are very dif-

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ferently related to higher time, it seems unnatural just to group them side by side in the modern relation of simultaneity. This carries a presumption of homogeneity that was essentially negated by the dominant time consciousness. kearney: Is there a downside to the more egalitarian understanding of time and society? taylor: It certainly involves an element of “disenchantment,” the eclipse of the world of “magic” forces and spirits. There is an abolition of the view that the sacred could be localized in a privileged place, person, or moment in history. The sacred notion of time had to go because it entailed the correlative idea of a transcendent order preexisting our human decisions. The sacred idea of order mediated by king or emperor— prevalent in the Middle Ages and running right down to the curious seventeenth-century notion of the divine rights of kings—had to be deconstructed for the modern idea of human agency, as origin and end in itself, to emerge. We have to distinguish between a formal and a material mode of social embedding. On the first level, we are always socially embedded: we learn our identities in dialogue, by being inducted into a certain language. On the level of content, what we may learn is to be an individual, have our own opinions, attain our own relation to God, our own conversion experience. The great disembedding occurs as a revolution in our understanding of moral-social order. What is curious about the American Revolution is that while it did not reject the religious justification for revolutionary action, it marked a radical disenchantment with the medieval Catholic paradigm of order, which privileged certain persons and places as sacred and sacramental. It was a typically Protestant view that each American—and the American people as a democratic whole or republic—was carrying out God’s will in his or her actions and decisions. The French Revolution would go further still in rejecting even the idea of a Protestant religious justification, ushering in a more radically secular view of things. kearney: Such that while one might say that both revolutions were anticlerical as such—a rejection of the metaphysical and theological systems of medieval Catholicism—the French Revolution and, of course, the Russian Revolution were antireligious in a wider sense, and in many instances more openly humanistic and atheistic. What legitimate role then, if any, might remain for religion in the modern social imaginary? taylor: In several campaigns of modern revolutionary nationalism and republicanism—in a largely Catholic Poland or Ireland for example—the idea of a religious order continues to play a strong role. But with these few exceptions, what we are really dealing with is the demise of

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Christendom: the end of la chrétienété as an ideal of civilization or society. This is an extremely difficult and painful process for many. If there is a certain greatness in this gesture, there is also a great risk. kearney: Where in particular? taylor: Take the idea of the religious Right in America. This returns us to the fundamental question of identity and modernity. From the very beginning, several of the American founding fathers held the view that they were carrying out God’s purpose. The normative idea of rights was itself seen as grounded in God’s providential design for us. This is something that liberals like Rawls and Dworkin ignore. There is a sort of civil war going on between the liberals and conservatives regarding the actual nature of the American order. And the Rawlsian notion of overlapping consensus does not sufficiently account for the fact, it seems to me, that there is a huge proportion of the population that feels it has signed up to a very different notion of what the good society, the right society, is—that is, an order created and legitimated by God. One sees this difference coming to the fore, for example, on issues like abortion or the right to have, or not have, prayer in public schools. As such, there is this unofficial and largely unacknowledged civil war going on based on two very different views about the relationship between belief and unbelief and the very moral order that is said to inform the Constitution as the foundational legal document binding all Americans. By contrast, the reason that Canadians, for example, can reconcile their constitutional allegiance with a lot of compromises and peace deals on a whole range of moral issues is that they don’t have the same unspoken supposition as Americans that their laws somehow incarnate and represent the Shining City on the Hill, the New Jerusalem, and so on. As such, it is very difficult for many Americans to learn to split the difference on these complex issues. There is an underlying absolutism in their legalistic and constitutional culture. kearney: Bordering on litigious extremes at times, it seems, veering toward a certain constitutional dogmatism? taylor: Yes. Canadians would solve ninety percent of the constitutional problems regarding the separation of church and state that so bedevil Americans. Give a little bit here; take a little bit there. But if one believes that there has to be one right answer to this, then there is going to be a lot of tension between the views of North Georgian Baptists and Manhattan liberals. These kinds of issues are absolutized and considered to be an integral part of the normative order itself. Now, this is not playing according to the rules of the Rawlsian game, of course, which seeks to desacralize the commonly accepted laws.

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kearney: How does this relate to your argument that there are different kinds of political identities in the world that function differently by virtue of their social imaginaries? taylor: It comes back to my overall interest in “multiple modernities,” particularly in understanding how modern societies like America and France have quite different notions of what it means to be a people and a republic—a difference based on the distinct social imaginaries that informed their revolutions. These differences, with regard to religion, authority, time, and so on, operate even today. While both have universalistic pretensions and seemed squarely on the side of modern secularism and humanism, the reality is not so simple. Both are convinced that they have the final formula, and this is one of the main reasons they often can’t stand each other. You have someone like Regis Debray declaring that if it is good for France, it is good for the world. On the other hand, Bush believes that if one is not with the United States, one is not on the side of civilization. No wonder there is conflict and tension between the two countries. But the notion of multiple modernities also extends beyond the West to an understanding of how other states like China and India also have very different social imaginaries. What is most fruitful here is not just to look to their constitutions—as it happens, India and Canada, for example, have very analogous constitutional arrangements at the level of federal and regional government—but to look to how their social imaginaries (economic, public sphere, and nationhood) work in heterogeneous ways. kearney: How does all this relate to what is going on here in your native Quebec? taylor: The big question here is how far one can go in becoming a self-respecting nation without becoming a full-fledged state. Everybody else has a state, why don’t we? Many people would argue—and you and I would agree about this, I think—that the idea of multinational states is actually a very good thing. And we believe that this might eventually accommodate people’s genuine need for recognition, dignity, and identity. People in Quebec can get quite irrational about this, just as in the United States people get irrational about the issue of church and state. We might say that if the American question is more about constitutionalism, the Canadian is more about nationalism. Almost every country has its own particular crisis or conflict based on some particularity of their social imaginary. That is why I would argue that we are dealing with a plurality of modern identities, not a homogenous system. That is why I agree with Will Kymlicka’s objection to Rawls and Dworkin that they ignore the phenomenon of multinationality. This ignores the reality, in the American

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case, of the indigenous peoples of North America, in the name of some abstract universalistic theory. Not to mention what is going on in Quebec, or Catalonia, or even Scotland. kearney: It is as if certain American theorists of the Rawlsian persuasion neglect how one’s particular context or social imaginary deeply influences the way one sees political problems and the way one thinks about them. They appear to neglect the hermeneutic question, d’où parlez vous? From what perspective are you speaking? A certain AngloSaxon view is presented as the worldview. Would you go so far as to suggest that the social imaginary of a particular society actually predetermines the way people behave and think within that society? taylor: I wouldn’t talk of determinism, because people’s actions and understanding relate to each other in complex and reciprocal ways. Any particular change in the narrative of a nation or the practices of a people will almost invariably find an equivalence in some alteration of its social imaginary. It works both ways. kearney: It’s bilateral? Even multilateral? taylor: Yes. kearney: How would you account for the clash of social imaginaries that took place on 9/11? Whatever one’s views of al Qaeda terrorism, can one respond to the pained question of many Americans—why do they hate us?—by seeking to identify the underlying social imaginary that fuels the grievance of so many non-Westerners toward the West? taylor: While the threefold model of a social imaginary—economy, public sphere, popular sovereignty—that informs the West cannot be transplanted neatly into Eastern or Middle Eastern societies, it is probably true to say that certain aspects do translate into these societies. I refer here to what René Girard calls le cachet de la victime, which certainly operates today in Palestine and in many other Muslim cultures. We have suffered; therefore, we have the right to strike back. We have been looked on with contempt; therefore, we have a right to be angry—the pridehumiliation phenomenon. Then there is a certain self-understanding of Islam as the ultimate conqueror. There is something deeply wounding for many Muslims in their sense of subjection to Western values in recent centuries. One reaction to this is reactionary—that is, we need to go back and restore that great religious civilization. Another reaction is to try to reform or bring Islamic culture more into line with contemporary Western culture. There is probably no denying that our Western consumer and media culture has undercut many of the traditional values of Islamic culture, which are not necessarily just Koran-inspired or theocratic, but operate on a broader level. kearney: Is it fair to say that if we in the West have witnessed the

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transition from a transcendence-based Christendom to a modern secular culture, we have not witnessed the same thing in the Arab world? If there is a residual difference in the social imaginaries of East and West, how do we avoid the pernicious Huntington thesis that we are inexorably condemned to a “clash of civilizations”? taylor: I think the massive error of the Huntington thesis is to construe this conflict as a clash between civilizations rather than a clash within civilizations. There will never be a universally accepted version of Islam. If bin Laden is trouble for us, he is even more trouble for Pakistan and other Islamic societies that do not buy into his extremist version of Islam. If we eventually wake up, I think we would recognize how much our own Western world is divided between very different interpretations of what Western civilization is about. Supporters of Berlusconi or Le Pen, for example, have views that are diametrically opposed to other views of a good society. We have our own demons to wrestle to the ground, just as the Muslims have theirs. kearney: You are clearly acknowledging a fundamental plurality of social imaginaries. Would you ever consider the possibility of a utopian model of Kantian universalism, a sort of federalist world of perpetual peace where the diverse social imaginaries of the world might unite? Do you believe we could ever realize such a thing as a global social imaginary in which all the citizens of the world could participate? taylor: That is so far beyond the horizon of present possibility that it is hard to imagine. First, we ought to recognize that the social imaginaries of various cultures in the world are still significantly heterogeneous—even with growing convergence of institutions. The goal is to try to achieve some kind of peaceful coexistence where there might be agreement on some public norms (if still a far cry from Rawls’s “overlapping consensus”). A position where the majority of one social imaginary can converse with the majority of another would be a huge achievement. kearney: Is this the role of the United Nations and international agencies or of the public sphere of the media? taylor: Look at the recent crises in the Middle East or Afghanistan. Who is going to intervene or act here? Well, everybody. The Muslims who have a better grip on what is really good in Islam have a big job to do. But we make things a lot worse by expressing policies that have contempt for this other culture and even perpetuate and propagate derogatory images through the popular media. Although we can’t rush in and propose a solution to the problem of Islam, we can certainly queer the pitch by showing a real comprehension for what is going on. That is a responsibility for us in the general public and for the media. If we were living in the Middle Ages, this wouldn’t matter at all. But we are living in a modern age where

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images and arguments circulate globally in the public sphere and have a huge impact on the way people think and imagine. We could help by contributing to a greater sense of understanding. Where Catholicism was the old bugbear of the secular modern Protestant West, it has been largely replaced by Islam—this makes real comprehension all the more difficult. We are being invited to understand the role that religion can play in a social imaginary in a way that is no longer really operative for the modern secular West, at least in terms of the official rhetoric. It is going to be a real uphill struggle, given the conflicts between cultures and within them. kearney: One might invoke here Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” as a possible model for this intercultural conversation, where the distinct language game of each community undergoes profound change as it enters into contact with that of its opponent. I would like to return here to the whole question of the recognition of identity. In Morality of Nationalism, you argue that the modern context of nationalism is also what turns its search for dignity outward.3 No human identity is purely inwardly formed. The other always plays some role, but it can be just as a foil, a contrast, a way of defining what we are not, for better or for worse, for example, the way the aboriginals of the newly “discovered” world figured for post-Columbian Europeans. The “savage,” the other of civilization, provided a way for Europeans to define themselves, both favorably (applying “civilized” to themselves in self-congratulation) and sometimes unfavorably (Europeans as corrupted in contrast to the “noble savage”). This kind of other reference requires no interaction. Indeed, the less interaction the better, or else the stereotype may be resisted. This dialectic of self and other is also something, as you know, that I’ve recently applied to the role narrative plays in the constitution of national identities, especially in On Stories and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. How would you relate this crucial problem to our discussion of the social imaginary? taylor: I would argue that identity politics arises within a specific kind of social imaginary. It is not prevalent in all kinds. More exactly, the preoccupation with identity is intimately related to the rise of Romanticism, expressivism, and Western nationalism. Because of this, I think it would be inappropriate to apply this to the global scenario. Now, of course, certain bits of the specifically Western paradigm of identity have filtered through to non-Western societies, but it is a mistake to think it has been completely assimilated. This is highly complex. At the moment, we would be ill advised to look at the whole world as an analogue of our modern Western society and our concerns for issues of identity and selfhood. kearney: To return to the events of 9/11, couldn’t one say that America was suddenly united in face of this attack from the other and thereby

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retrieved a sense of national identity that even the Constitution or the dollar could not provide? It was as if the American media obsession with extraterrestrial enemies was reterritorialized once again in terms of an empirical human enemy, namely, bin Laden and al Qaeda. The rush of patriotism that overwhelmed the nation could be read accordingly as a sort of spontaneous recovery of national identity analogous to the inaugural energy and effervescence that many experienced at the time of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, as if this modern multiethnic nation of migrants and emigrants was suddenly reconciled in terms of a common cry: “We are all Americans now!” taylor: True. But I feel very ambivalent about that. One thing that constantly astonishes me is how so many Americans took this as a patriotic national issue rather than viewing it as a complex international problem. For example, when Bush thanked Canadians for helping the United States, I felt like saying, “Thanks for what?” This is our issue too. This belongs to all of us and needs to be sorted out by all of us. kearney: In other words, it is not reducible to a Bush versus bin Laden melodrama—a sort of national Punch and Judy show, or worse a Jerry Springer media debacle? taylor: Exactly. One of the main reasons why I feel uncomfortable with the thesis that we had Hitler, then Stalin, and now we have bin Laden as our national adversary is that with these historic enemies there was never a felt need to understand what made them tick. Nazism and Stalinism were for us in the West unequivocally evil forces. But now, there could be nothing more counterproductive than to apply the same template to the Afghanistan or Middle East situation. It is not necessary that we need to understand the depths of bin Laden’s soul, but we do need to understand that large portions of the populations in Pakistan and Palestine and other Arab nations feel a deep ambivalence toward the West, even though they might not want to condone the murderous attack of 9/11. We need to know what makes those people tick. We need to figure out what stress in their lives is propelling them to have a certain defiance toward the West, while not approving of indiscriminate violence toward civilians. That’s why it troubles me to see how many Americans regard any call to understand the adversarial position as automatically an act of treason. That seems to me a suicidal response to the suicide hijackers of 9/11. I see this kind of American booster patriotism as a short road to destruction. The slide-rule application of the Second World War and cold war template to this current crisis is in my view nothing short of disastrous. Indeed, if people had listened to the more reasonable voice of Clemenceau and Keynes in these previous war scenarios, we might not have witnessed so many millions dead.

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kearney: Is this one of the reasons you put modernities in the plural? To suggest a complexity and diversity of approaches to situations of crisis and conflict that resist being subsumed or explained away under a single common paradigm? taylor: Yes. I think it is a great error to think that our modern social imaginary here in the West—based on the assumption that there is a necessary convergence among the citizen state, mobility, secularism, the public sphere, individualism, the application of technology to industry, and so on—is automatically applicable to every other emerging culture or society. The convergence of these elements in every society is not axiomatic or self-evident. My hunch is that we have to speak of multiple modernities, different ways of erecting and animating the institutional forms that are becoming inescapable. We need to get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm. We understand the European model as the first, certainly, and as the object of some creative imitation, naturally, but as, at the end of the day, one model among many, a province of the multiform world that we hope (a little against hope) will emerge in order and peace. Then the real positive work of building mutual understanding can begin. Indeed, it is even salutary to go through our own story again and again to see that the whole cultural package didn’t have to be that way; it could have been otherwise. Indeed the differences between the unfolding of the French and American revolutions themselves indicate a crucial diversity at the heart of our own narrative history. It is ironic that the more powerful Europe became, the less tolerance existed for disparate voices and views. Eighteenth-century figures like Montesquieu and Burke actually score better than nineteenthcentury figures like Marx or John Stuart Mill, who have quite a dogmatic and homogenizing vision of things: you are with us or against us. The idea of a single modernity is in my view riddled with bad theory. It leads to the ruinous view that all these “other” peoples are just inferior versions of us. They have no voice and so they shouldn’t talk back. kearney: The goal is a conversation between different modernities. But would you say that your plea for a pluralism of modernities is compatible with the view, which you also hold, that beyond the procedural models of justice so cherished by our liberal Western thinking there are also substantive issues of the good that need to be borne in mind? taylor: I think that within the West, what many people call secularization really means pluralization, that is, the end of Christendom, the flowering of a wider number of different spiritual options, and the development of many kinds of communities developing around these options in civil society. It isn’t a purely linear move from belief to unbelief so much as a radical pluralization of different ways of believing or not believing.

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While I agree with much of the political liberal thinking about “overlapping consensus,” I think that what it turns out to be will differ greatly from society to society, including societies within the West. I think that what we need to avoid is the idea that there is one de facto normative view of a free and flourishing society and that all other views are subordinate to this. I do not subscribe to a certain strand of liberalism that claims that unbelief—uncommitedness on questions of transcendence, neutrality on the substantive issue of the good life—is the only really correct standard. This hails from a certain conviction, dating back to Auguste Comte, Ernst Renan, and others, that a postconfessional, postreligious age is the only form of enlightened life. kearney: A sort of scientific positivism of nonbelief? taylor: Yes. But then you have other kinds of liberal Western thinking that are less dogmatic on this question and that try to take into consideration the different coordinates and considerations regarding a whole host of issues, from the relation between church and state to questions of citizenship, economics, and equality. This is where the authentic legacy of a post-Christendom secular society resides in my view—in genuine pluralism. A preparedness to make concessions and compromises in order to accommodate a diversity of views—a realization that there can be many shifts, schisms, revivals, declines, revolutions, occurring and coexisting in this world of ours. And that is why the liberal Rawlsian view of overlapping consensus between differing convictions is in fact at variance with the dominant persuasion of political liberalism that the arguments from reasonableness give you sufficient grounds to predict what the overlapping consensus should endorse. This latter brand of political liberalism is guilty of an astonishing error, it seems to me. It promotes a particular master argument regarding the reasonableness of a certain kind of overlapping consensus, which ignores the very language game it is operating from. kearney: That kind of political liberalism neglects its own hermeneutic presuppositions or social imaginary, so to speak, presenting itself as a neutral universalism. taylor: Yes. But I think that if the later Rawls followed the logic of his liberal model of overlapping consensus to its end, we would have a genuine pluralist picture that we could work with. But we have a long way to go. kearney: How might this political journey relate back to the question of a more specifically religious pluralism that we were mentioning earlier in relation to modern secularism? taylor: Think back to what it was like in 1500 and all the astonishment and wonder that so many people experienced in their lives. Today, many are closed to the transcendent, especially in intellectual, academic, and scientific circles. Ask yourself how that is possible, how can this kind

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of closure be sustained? This is why I choose to interpret the modern term secular to mean not the total absence of religion but the fact that religion can occupy different kinds of places and, as such, remain compatible with the idea that social action takes place in profane time. As such, I find what you are doing in The God Who May Be quite fascinating in that you show how the modern position of closure can deconstruct itself and open out again in all kinds of interesting ways. I like that a lot, particularly the way in which you connect key narratives of modernity with certain religious narratives from the Scriptures. You show that it is in the very nature of Christianity to generate forms of secularism and then to find itself imprisoned in them and have to find ways out again. What I am trying to show in my own project on secularism is how the genius of Latin Christianity actually gave birth to forms of secular normative order and civic rights. But when this detailed moral code itself becomes the be-all and end-all of one’s spiritual life, one is terribly impoverished and cannot escape the suspicion that there is something missing. We long for something more. That is the paradox we are seeking to address. We find this paradox already in many passages of the Bible and again in Matthew 25, where we read that God is interested not in sacrifice and ritual but in sheltering the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in social justice. This is part of the great inner dynamism of Christianity. This drive is to realize in the fullness of secular life and institutions the injunction to social justice called for in the Scriptures. It also connects up with Ivan Illich’s Corruption of Christianity, where he argues that the moral-political secularism of Christianity is both the creation and nemesis of Christian life. What I see your book doing is tackling these paradoxes of our secular world and showing that we combine an ethical commitment to justice with a specifically religious desire for transcendence. kearney: The key message for me in the burning bush epiphany is that transcendence speaks in multiple voices and invites us to a plurality of interpretations in Judaism, Christianity, and no doubt also in Islam, which cannot be reduced to a single dogmatism. That is what most intrigues me about Rashi’s reading of Exodus 3:15 as “I-Am-the-One-WhoShall-Be-With-You”: the idea that the divine is a promise, unconditional in its loving but conditional in terms of what response we as humans make to its promise of a kingdom. Etty Hillesum captures this for me when she says, shortly before she dies in a concentration camp, “We must help God to be God.” If we can reinterpret our monotheistic narratives in this way— from a new phenomenological and hermeneutic perspective—I think we can open up new dialogues between the spiritualities of the West and East (I am thinking especially of the Buddhist and Hindu religions) as well with those of the Middle East (to bring us back to our discussion above).

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If we do, perhaps the project of multiple readings of divinity can then in turn link up with the project of multiple modernities.

Notes This conversation took place in Montreal on April 30, 2002. 1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1991). 2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Formation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 3. Charles Taylor, “Morality and Nationalism,” in The Morality of Nationalism, ed. Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42.

Ethics of Narration Martha Nussbaum

richard kearney: In several of your works, including Love’s Knowledge, Poetic Justice, and “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,”1 you suggest that the narrative imagination can have a very benign empathic function in bringing different people together. Citing Marcus Aurelius, you speak of the importance of “getting into other people’s minds” and “reaching across national barriers.” I am with you on all of this. Let us give priority to world citizenship over national citizenship in our civic education. My question is, however, whether we can have effective “cosmopolitan narratives.” Is not narrative, by its nature, linked to the idea of personal or national identity? Is it not always rooted in some particular time and space? Homeric? Biblical? British? French? American? Not to mention Joycean, Jamesean, Wolfean, and so on? In other words, could we have a form of narrative imagination that would foster a sense of cosmopolitan civic empathy, while also sustaining an attachment to particularity and passion? Is this not the problem with Habermas’s postnationalist appeal to a “constitutional patriotism,” for example, which contrives to overcome our nationalist prejudices? Is such an approach not too abstract and anonymous to mobilize concrete human emotions, images, and actions? In short, does it not suffer from too much Kant and not enough Aristotle, or, to put it another way, too much reason and not enough imagination? martha nussbaum: First of all, I do not advocate completely uprooting local attachments. In the new preface to For Love of Country and, at greater length, in a new essay that is shortly to appear in Daedalus,2 I say that the Stoic project of replacing local loyalties with cosmopolitan loyalties is a grave psychological error. We need the local to give meaning to our lives, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius shows us that life without erotic attachments to lovers, sports teams, nation—all this is a life empty of urgency, a life that increasingly looks like death. As Aristotle said, criticizing Plato’s project of removing the family, “There are two things above all that make people love and care for something: the thought that it is all theirs, and the thought that it is the only one they have. Neither of these will be present in that city” (Politics, 1262b22–3). And he 48

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goes on to say that motivation will be at best “watery” when people don’t have the exclusivity of attachment that characterizes families. I think we need to keep the family, the local region, and the nation. Second, I think that there is a moral argument for giving national sovereignty considerable importance in any scheme of global justice that we could recommend. (This is a large theme in my current work on global justice.) As Grotius saw already, the act of a people in giving laws to itself is a significant expression of human autonomy. And the fact that each people will do this to some extent differently is itself an expression of autonomy. So a world state, which would be bad for other reasons, would also be bad because it would remove this area of human freedom, and no world state could be sufficiently responsive or accountable that it would count as a decent expression of the autonomy of all the world’s people. I therefore favor policies that protect national sovereignty against the forces of globalization that increasingly undermine it. Notice that this is an argument about the state, which is the structure and legal order of a nation, not about the nation seen as an ethnic entity. Having said that, though, I can now say that both attachment to one’s own and attachment to the nation-state need to be constrained by a sense of what we owe to all human beings, and, indeed, to all animals. Most parents recognize that the extra love they give their own children should not spill over into a wish to defeat other people’s children and should be somehow made compatible with the wish that all children have a decent standard of living. So too with the nation: the extra love we give our own has to be brought into line with the moral wish that all the world’s people would enjoy an appropriate minimum living standard. This will mean redistribution from richer to poorer nations. Are there narratives that explore these cosmopolitan obligations? Yes, in many ways. First of all, there are all the narratives that show the defects and dangers of narrowly partisan loyalties: tragedies of civil war, stories of ethnic conflict and genocide, stories of nationalism run amok. Then there are stories of lives in other places, through which we expand our imaginations to take in the predicaments of people different from ourselves. In Poetic Justice, I focused on narratives of racial difference, but of course there are also narratives that expand our sense of what life is like outside our borders. The growing interest in fiction written in India is a very hopeful sign, though I would add that we shouldn’t just focus on those whose first language is English. We should be translating the great Bengali writers, such as Mahasweta Devi, Taslima Nasreen; even Tagore has not had translations that are adequate from a literary viewpoint. Finally, there are tragedies of the human predicament, which should enhance our understanding of suffering wherever it occurs. I think that

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many Greek tragedies are just such narratives. When we respond to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, we gain an understanding that is pertinent to issues of pain and disability in our own world; when we respond to Euripides’ Trojan Women, we see something about the vulnerability of women’s lives in time of war that is as pertinent to contemporary Bosnia and Gujarat as it was then to the Athenian treatment of the women of Melos. These works, notice, are not less gripping because of their rather abstract characters. They are if anything more gripping because of it. Aristophanes’ Frogs, which makes fun of the Euripidean interest in the minutiae of daily life, suggests that too much concrete context would in fact diminish the tragedy, make it less emotionally gripping. I think he was wrong about Euripides but right about the general point. kearney: I concur with ninety-nine percent of what you say, so let me try to unravel the one percent of potential disagreement. While both of our theories of narrative argue for a balance between the global and the local, I suspect that your accounts of narrative tend to emphasize its role as an empathic bridge builder between differences, therefore as a drive toward the shared and ultimately universal. By contrast, many narrative theorists today—especially those inspired by thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre or Jean-François Lyotard—tend to see narrative as an agency of multiple and incommensurable identities. This seems to betray a preference for communitarian rather than liberal values, for local, historically conditioned virtues over abstract rights, for traditions over norms. When you speak of the family, the nation, and other forms of “attachment to one’s own,” I read this (perhaps wrongly) as something added to your more basic commitment to narratives that go beyond identities and differences. Is this not the tenor of your praise of “cosmopolitan obligations” that transcend stories of civil war, ethnic conflict, narrow nationalism, and so on? Is this not the premise underlying your celebration of classic Greek authors like Sophocles and Aristophanes? I repeat: I know that you want to strike a balance between the two functions of narrative—as local and cosmopolitan—but I can’t help thinking that your heart and head are really with the latter, the former playing the role of a necessary countervailing supplement. So my question is this: do you not, in the heel of the hunt, privilege the cosmopolitan over the differential force of narrative? nussbaum: This is a hard question to answer, since I think that the cosmopolitan function actually requires engaging with what you call the “differential force” of narrative; that is, understanding the specific history and situation of people very different from oneself is a crucial part of becoming a responsible world citizen. That is why my writing on education focuses so much on the need to study other cultures and minority traditions within one’s own culture. The rationale I give for these studies, how-

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ever, is the cosmopolitan one, and not the one that sees these studies as merely a way of affirming a minority identity. Thus I think all students should read Ralph Ellison and Mahasweta Devi in order to be better citizens, and that is not the role for them that the defender of identity politics would have. To that extent I agree with your formulation. kearney: But how can you be so sure that literary narratives make people better citizens? What about all those highly poetic and aesthetic minds (writers and readers) that have been well capable of ethical and political irresponsibility? In short, are you not, Martha, endorsing an overly optimistic view of narrative as ethical enhancement, as an inevitable enlargement of minds and sensibilities? And does this not run the risk of underestimating the more destructive tendencies of narrative—for example, as agency of ethnic closure, propaganda, prejudice, and illusion? nussbaum: I think this would be a misreading of my position. I’m optimistic not about narrative per se but about the role that certain specific types of narratives might have in certain specific situations. Of course, I recognize, and stress in Poetic Justice and even more in my writings on feminism, that narrative can have a destructive side (see, for example, my essay “Objectification,” in Sex and Social Justice 3). I just choose to focus on the narratives that I think are valuable, since my goal is to commend them to philosophers seeking adequate accounts of citizenship and moral reasoning, and also to educators seeking adequate accounts of the liberal arts curriculum. I do not think that reading Dickens will magically make people good. I recognize, as does Wayne Booth, that narratives are only one psychological force in a person’s life, and that their tendencies are often defeated by other forces. kearney: Do you think, then, that narrative can be considered as either a necessary or a sufficient condition of ethics? nussbaum: I think that for the best sort of goodness, narrative is necessary, in the sense that a cultivation of the imagination of another person’s predicament is necessary for goodness. There are pretty good people who don’t have much imagination, but one cannot trust them outside of the framework of their usual rules and assumptions. That, I think, is what Henry James is saying in his portrait of Bob Assingham. In Upheavals of Thought, I develop the more general thesis that narrative is a powerful force for overcoming some common crises in child development, and thus close to necessary, anyway, for the development of a healthy personality. Certainly, narrative is never a sufficient condition of ethical goodness. How would one know which narratives to trust, except by a constant dialogue between narrative and ethical theory (or religious creed, or whatever)? kearney: Well, your last sentence here raises the vexed question of

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criteria. How do we critically judge or adjudicate between different kinds of narrative if, by chance, we do not have access to “ethical theories” or “religious creeds”? Take the hypothetical example of an illiterate atheist who is surrounded by conflicting narratives with competing value claims. How is he or she to discern or discriminate? You add in parenthesis, “or whatever.” I wonder what this “whatever” might cover in addition to religious beliefs or philosophical norms? Would it require reference to some kind of innate natural reason or sympathetic instinct (à la Rousseau or Hutcheson)—an intrinsic nobility that might guide us in our ethical choices of narratives? Or could the role of testimony and witness have a role here? (We know the stories are good or bad by their fruits.) I personally think this question of criteria is crucial when it comes to defending an ethics of narrative.

Notes This exchange took place between Boston and Chicago in April 2003. 1. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review 19, no. 5 (1994). The article is available at http://www.soci.niu-edu/~phildept/kapitan/ nussbaum1.html (accessed May 19, 2006). 2. Nussbaum, “Compassion and Terror,” Daedalus (Winter 2003): 10–26. 3. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Intellectuals and Ideology Noam Chomsky

richard kearney: What, in your view, is the usual role of intellectuals in the formation of our “social imaginary”? noam chomsky: Their social role is usually social management of one kind or another—the management could be teaching or direction or politics or corporate managers, but the people we call intellectuals, the people who have the accumulating intellectual tradition in their hands, are people who are generally in a directive role. Now when you are directing, it’s satisfying to be able to feel that there is no moral barrier to your dominating other people; you’re free to dominate them as you like. kearney: Would this be in conformity with a certain pernicious tendency toward social engineering and the production of social consent where you persuade people to behave in certain ways? chomsky: If people have no fundamental human nature (as most of our intellectuals claim), then there’s no barrier to social engineering; there’s no moral barrier to it. As such, you can have Skinner’s Walden 2, because there’s no moral barrier to molding people in accordance with one’s will. By definition, the person who holds this view is always good and has everybody’s best interests at heart. Now, if the people have no intrinsic nature of their own, there is no moral barrier to the authority of intellectuals, to domination. On the other hand, if people have a fundamental nature, and if part of that nature is a need for and a right to freedom and independence, then the directive managerial role is an illegitimate interference with their rights, and that puts bounds on you and, in effect, restricts your own authority to command and dominate. It’s obvious that people who accept the latter point of view will simply not be in domineering positions. kearney: I see the logic, yet I have a problem with it in the following respect: If this is true, why do not the masses resist by virtue of their human nature and their desire for freedom and justice? Why do they not reject this indoctrination, this management of their “social imaginary,” this engineering of consensus and consent? It is a question I have often raised while reading your books. There seems to be a sort of circle. On the 53

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one hand, you’re saying there is a freedom innate in us, and yet you’re also saying there are these managerial classes, who for reasons of power and investment, are seeking to control us. You say that the United States is one of the most indoctrinated societies in the world, the free press and media in the United States serve propaganda interests, and that there’s thought control and image control in operation, which conceals the truth (such as the concealing of the invasion of South Vietnam, or the Contra campaign in Nicaragua). On the one hand, you seem to argue that our political imagination is manufactured and manipulated; yet, on the other hand, we are free and responsible for our thoughts and actions. But surely, we are either pawns of a system and we are indoctrinated, or else we’re not. We can’t be both, can we? chomsky: There are several facets to this. For one thing, there is the question, to what extent do people succumb to external power? I think from the vantage point of the privileged sectors where we are, it looks as if they’re succumbing, when in fact they are not. There are many ways of resisting power, and people find all kinds of ways of doing it (children in school, people on the streets, and so on). They may not be able to organize to overthrow authority or even be able to identify it very coherently, but it doesn’t mean that they’re not resisting it. A worker on a slowdown is resisting it; a child who finds a way not to obey some ridiculous instruction is resisting it. In fact, sometimes resistance takes astonishing forms. For example, take Central America in the last ten years, with popular organizations resisting extraordinary terror, violence, and slaughter. It reminds one of Rousseau’s comments about complacent Europeans who have no right to talk about freedom since they do not understand what half-naked savages understand, and you can see that from their actions. There’s certainly an attempt at indoctrination and there’s a system of indoctrination, but the question of its success is another matter. I think it’s generally the case that indoctrination is even more successful among the “educated” sectors. Take Vietnam as an example: to this day, despite all the indoctrination, which is uniform, about 70 percent of the American population, when asked for an opinion on the war, say it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” Now, among educated sectors, virtually no one says that. If you try to find that position articulated anywhere in the spectrum of established expression, it’s not there—nor was it ever there at the height of the antiwar movement. That’s not the only case. The general public may be disorganized, uncontrolled, ineffective in their resistance, but they do resist. In his Principles of Government, David Hume asked the question: how can people be governed? He observes that force is always on the side of the governed, that the general public has force on their side. He says that it’s true in the most despotic regimes as it is in the freest. You cannot con-

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trol people unless they agree to it. So how does it happen that people are willing to be governed? He replies that it must be that their opinion is controlled, and in relatively free societies, like his own at that time, it is true. The freer the society becomes, the more necessary it is to control people’s opinion. kearney: It sounds as if what Tocqueville called “soft despotism” has in fact come to pass, and that it is not so much in the order of coercion (restraint of movement and so on) as of opinion, or what thinkers like Ricoeur and Taylor call the “social imaginary.” Yet that doesn’t seem to tell the full story. Salman Rushdie was a victim of a death decree, but nobody in the United States has issued a death sentence on you, and you have said things that are just as subversive of your culture and society as Rushdie has said of his. chomsky: Well, Iran is not a society that is free; there you control people by force. The United States is free, more than Hume anticipated, and the other centers of power just don’t have the means to coerce. They do, therefore, in more sophisticated ways try to control thought, and that doesn’t involve assassination. They don’t have the capacity, nor is it an efficient way. It involves other means and, among educated sectors, it certainly works—there’s little doubt about that. Among the general public it is not at all clear that it works. I think that the method of control of people in a country like the United States is, in a broad brushstroke, something like this: the more educated, the more indoctrinated you are—the more you are immersed in the system of propaganda. The less educated you are, the more isolated you are. If you look at the general public, they’re isolated from one another; they’re alone. Each person is alone in front of the television set and there is very little in the way of associations among them or cooperative endeavors, and so on. One of the striking things about the United States is that almost every constructive development—whether it’s ecological or third world solidarity—goes back to the churches. One of the reasons is that’s all there is. kearney: Then, what is to be done? How does one escape from this dilemma? Can we work—in addition to church work—to produce some kind of political-social vision where people can connect or reorganize again? Can we redeem and reorient our political imaginary? chomsky: I think we should understand exactly what the public relations industry understands. kearney: And what exactly is that? That to control you have to isolate people? chomsky: Yes, and to oppose such isolation, we should bring people together to form exactly those organizations the manufacturers of opinion are trying to destroy. U.S. labor history is interesting in this respect—

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it is a very violent labor history, much unlike Europe. There were hundreds of workers being murdered by security forces in a period when European workers had already gained basic rights. There has been a big assault on unions since. Now there are reasons for this. Unions, however corrupt they may be, are one of the few means by which relatively powerless people can pool their resources (meaning not their money but their intellectual and emotional resources) and act in voluntary association to induce change. American business is highly class conscious; it sees itself as fighting a vicious class war and it wants to contain this. Those who want to change the world should recognize these truths and try to rebuild and strengthen popular grassroots organizations, whether they are in the workplace or through some other common interest, for example feminist interest, environmental interest, or whatever it may be. They should also expand their own moral sphere. After all, we are responsible for future generations. We are responsible for hundreds of millions of people suffering throughout the world. We can act in ways that will change the structure of power, dissolve it, and expand this sphere of justice and freedom. kearney: In some of your recent books—The New Military Humanism and 9-11 for example—you argue that certain events in Kosovo, the Sudan, Nicaragua, Turkey, and so forth, are narrated in such a way as to constitute an official history that involves what you call a “memory hole” of selective amnesia.1 A certain narrative version is presented as “fact” or “truth”; the very distinction between history and story is thus eroded. What is, in your view, the most effective way of responding to this erosion of remembrance and record, especially in an age where consent and opinion is increasingly forged by the media? chomsky: I doubt that the media have much to do with it. In my opinion at least, it is the task of intellectuals, historically, to subvert history in the service of power. There are a few exceptions, such as Edward Said, but throughout history, they are rare. On the manufacture of consent, it’s hard to prove rigorously, but I think there is reason to believe that educated intellectuals are the prime and most willing victims. There are some rather striking examples, including those you mention, though I suppose nothing in recent years compares with Vietnam. For thirty-five years, about two-thirds or more of the population has kept to the view that it was “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” not “a mistake.” Overwhelmingly— and this has been investigated—educated elites opposed the war on what they proudly described as “pragmatic grounds”—a mistake that cost us too much. That was, again, dramatically obvious in the reaction to Robert McNamara’s hideous book,2 something I wrote about a few times, though I cannot imagine that it could be understood by more than a handful of people in the faculty clubs or editorial offices. True, there is an effect of

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manufacturing consent, for example the fact that when asked to estimate Vietnamese casualties, the median estimate in the United States is one hundred thousand, which is as if Germans estimated Holocaust victims at two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand. Yet, it is still the province of educated intellectuals to suppress, completely, what this implies about the intellectual and moral culture they supervise. How to combat it? The usual ways, expecting the usual stream of vilification, lies, and the normal depravity that disfigures the intellectual culture. But other people can be reached, as the popular reaction to Vietnam or Porto Alegre indicate.

Notes This conversation took place in Boston in 2002. 1. Chomsky, 9/11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 46. 2. McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Vintage Books, reprint edition, 1996).

Part 2

The Political Imaginary

Intellectual Adventures in the Isles: Kearney and the Ireland Peace Process Dennis Dworkin

In Postnationalist Ireland and related work, Richard Kearney deconstructs the language of the Anglo-Irish conflict while conceptualizing the ground on which a resolution could take place. Kearney imagines a postnational space in which overlapping local, national, and regional identities are given expression through multiple sites of political sovereignty inside and outside the Isles.1 Though Kearney’s ideas have been conceived in relationship to an ongoing debate regarding the construction of Ireland’s political imaginary, they are equally important for British studies and politics as well. His analysis is founded on the belief that Irish and British nationalism are “Siamese twins,” and thus must be deconstructed together. He also regards the “specter of Irish nationalism” as “Britain’s return of the repressed,” which “compels it to look in the mirror and see its own cracked image” (PNI, 11). Scholars and critics have noted the importance of Kearney’s work on postnationalism for Irish studies and politics. However, less attention has been paid to its implications for discussions and debates beyond the Irish Sea. In this context, Kearney’s writings can be viewed as part of a broader intellectual landscape in which national identity, nationalism, and possibly postnationalism are at the center of political and intellectual discussions in the Isles. I say the Isles here, rather than simply Britain, because reimagining the component parts of Britain, or more precisely the United Kingdom, entails reconfiguring the relationships in the entire archipelago. Given the historical antagonism between Britain and Ireland, and the different intellectual cultures that they have produced, intellectual discussions between them have not been in abundance. However, some discussions are beginning to take place. A theoretical space is being produced from contributions on both sides of the Irish-British divide. In this essay, I discuss the most important discursive shifts relevant to national61

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ism and cultural identity, placing Kearney at the center of these transformations. My aim is to sketch some of the elements of what a postnationalist and contemporary intellectual history of the Isles would look like.

The Problems of British Identity Nationalism as a discourse did not figure prominently in Britain until the 1960s and 1970s. With the exception of sporadic murmurings from the “Celtic fringe” (a name that says it all), Britain was not supposed to be a place where nationalism flourished. British decline changed that. The combined effects of the loss of empire; frustrations at defining a world role; relative, if not absolute, economic decline; and increasing numbers of black and South Asian immigrants have produced a sense of precariousness and insecurity, a belief in the vulnerability of the British state, and a breeding ground for challenges to received cultural identities. As the singer Billy Bragg expresses it in “Millennium Song,” Take down the Union Jack, it clashes with the sunset And put it in the attic with the emperor’s old clothes. Britain isn’t cool you know, it’s really not that great, It’s not a proper country, it doesn’t even have a patron saint, It’s just an economic union that’s past its sell-by date.2

In recent years, there has emerged a small industry of popular political writings scrutinizing the crisis of Englishness or Britishness. In the best-selling book The English: A Portrait of a People, Jeremy Paxman draws together decline, Englishness, and the end of empire: “The belief that something has rotted in England is widely held: a people cannot spend decades being told their civilization is in decline and not be affected by it. . . . The English put their faith in institutions, and of these, the British Empire has evaporated, the Church of England has withered away, and Parliament is increasingly irrelevant.”3 Paxman points to an identity crisis grounded in cultural, imperial, and political decline, but he also recognizes that discourses of decline have themselves played a constitutive role in the making of postwar English identity and the fragmentation of Britishness. On this site, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, black and South Asian Britons, supporters of intensified European integration, and advocates of constitutional reform have challenged not only the legitimacy of the British state but also the very meaning of Britishness itself. Such a reading of Britain is advanced in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain,4 which envisions a multicultural British

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identity, signified by the computer-generated photograph of a black Queen Elizabeth II on its cover. In The Day Britain Died,5 Andrew Marr’s travels in Britain reveal that Britishness means nothing in Scotland and a mass of confusion south of the border. That Marr’s book accompanied a BBC television series and Marr himself would subsequently become the BBC’s political editor suggests a transformation in cultural identification at the heart of the establishment. What Marr discovered in his individual travels is borne out by surveys undertaken in the mid-nineties. Respondents throughout Britain were asked about their perception of national identity. Of those interviewed in Scotland, more than 60 percent saw themselves as “more Scottish than British”; in Wales about 40 percent claimed “Welshness over Britishness” (and this is likely an underestimate, given the large number of people of English background living in Wales); and in England, about 25 percent of the respondents saw themselves as being “more English than British.”6 The fact that almost half of those surveyed in England viewed themselves as equally English and British, while only about a quarter of the respondents in Scotland and Wales viewed being Scottish or Welsh as no more important than being British, confirms what many commentators have suggested. In Scotland and Wales, people tend to have a fairly clear perception of the distinction. In England, the difference between Englishness and Britishness tends to blur. Indeed, in England there is a tendency to view being English and being British as the same, which, of course, from the Scottish and Welsh viewpoint, is the root of the problem. There are perhaps two remaining groups in the United Kingdom that still embrace a British identity with any enthusiasm: (1) unionists in Northern Ireland whose allegiance to the Protestant tradition of William of Orange—or King Billy—is based on an image of Britishness unique to Ulster and (2) significant numbers of blacks and Asians, living in England, who have a stake in the British political system but feel estranged from the dominant English culture. Black and Asian Britons might embrace a British identity with greater ease than the Welsh or the Scots, but their self-identification is by no means unproblematic. In this context, let us consider The Future of MultiEthnic Britain.7 Commissioned by the Runnymede Trust, an independent think tank, this report was produced by a committee of twenty-three prominent academics, journalists, writers, and professionals. Its chair, Bhikhu Parekh, is a political philosopher of Indian birth who has lived in Britain for forty years and in 2000 was awarded a life peerage. New Labour publicly blessed the commission. Indeed, at its public launch, Jack Straw, the home secretary, said it was setting off with “a very strong wind. We are going to take it very seriously.”8 When the Parekh Report was published, “seriously” is precisely what

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the government ended up not taking it. Despite hundreds of pages of analysis and recommendations on numerous subjects, the media and the political right focused on the report’s few pages analyzing the meaning of British identity, claiming that the report equated Britishness with racism. In fact, what the report argued was that British identity had been historically racialized: for black and Asian Britons it was inscribed with collective memories of imperial domination. It called for widening the scope of— rather than rejecting—Britishness, and it advocated, among other things, a recasting of British history so that it was germane to a multicultural society. Defending the report in the Guardian, Stuart Hall, a member of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, wrote, “We did say that, historically, the idea of Britishness carried ‘largely unspoken racial connotations’—meaning that, in common understandings, the nation is usually imagined as white. . . . We nowhere suggested that this was destined to remain so until the end of time.”9 Among the many condemnations, Jack Straw’s was perhaps the most significant. Acknowledging the merit of many of the report’s recommendations, Straw distanced himself from its observations on British identity. “Unlike the Runnymede Trust, I firmly believe there is a future for Britain and a future for Britishness.” For Straw, the report’s sentiments were symptomatic of the Left’s lack of patriotic feeling: “Given the tendency of some of the Left to wash their hands of the whole notion of nationhood, it is perhaps not surprising that some people’s perception of Englishness and Britishness became a narrow, exclusionary, conservative one. That’s a view of Britishness that I don’t recognize.”10 In part, Straw’s response can be seen as part of New Labour’s eternal quest to produce a political line that is palatable to middle England. However, his comments should also be seen in relationship to fears that, having set the devolution train in motion, Blair and company might not be able to control it. Straw’s reaction underscores the crisis in Britishness that is being played out not only in the mass media and the serious press but also at Westminster itself. The deconstruction of British identity has taken place on several fronts. Within cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s probing of black British identity has been inseparable from his understanding of the unraveling of dominant ideas of Englishness and Britishness. For Hall, decline has produced anxieties among the English. For minorities, though, it has meant greater self-possession. Of the black British he writes, “There is no longer a prevailing sense that what is British constitutes an ideal to which black culture might want to aspire or assimilate. Thus it is the very meaning and stability of Britishness itself that has been inflected by black culture. It’s this reversal which signifies a culture confident in its own difference.”11 Historians likewise have been engaged in deconstructing Britishness. In a

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standard historical account, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, Linda Colley views Britishness as being produced by its historical relation with otherness.12 Britishness, she argues, was the product of building a Protestant nation, notably through the more-than-century-long struggle with Catholic France (culminating in the Napoleonic Wars). It was produced in the process of creating a worldwide empire in which the ethnic differences between the English, the Welsh, the Scots, and sometimes the Irish were displaced by a common British identity. This was reflected, for instance, in the critical role that the old ethnic minorities played in the empire’s expansion and reproduction. Being British was a political identity: a Briton could be a citizen of Edinburgh, a Lowlander, or a Scot. When the conditions for its existence began to unravel, Britishness began to unravel as well. Colley’s work is part of a broader movement among British historians, for whom the English people can no longer be treated as if it constitutes the whole of British history. Historians such as Hugh Kearney have been at the forefront of writing four-nation histories and the history of the Isles.13

Reinventing Ireland If debates on national identity and nationalism in Britain are relatively recent, this is certainly not the case in Ireland. The problem there has been quite the reverse, as two forms of essentialized and fixed nationalist formations, Irish and British, have fought a life-and-death struggle, which has tended, as is clear from more than thirty years of political strife in Northern Ireland, to overwhelm alternative forms of political definition. The Good Friday Agreement is undoubtedly a major step forward, and the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) largely symbolic gestures of putting weapons beyond use have momentarily solidified the peace process. The fourth return of direct rule since the treaty’s adoption makes clear that there is a long way to go. There is, however, a widespread feeling that there is no alternative. Yet Northern Ireland remains dominated by two segregated and hostile communities. Efforts to produce cross-community relations and a space for alternative forms of identity are struggling to take root. The republic has reinvented itself as the Celtic tiger. A service-based economy that has thrown itself open to the European Union and the globalized economy, Ireland has established itself as the software, computer, and network center of Europe. In the 1990s, it was the fastest-growing economy in the European Union, if not the Western World, although the cost of such expansion has been high unemployment and growing

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income disparities. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, is mired in a postindustrial malaise, intensified by civil war. It has suffered from a shrinking manufacturing sector, the highest unemployment in the United Kingdom, and a chronic dependency on public sector employment. Still, like the republic, the North is increasingly enmeshed in the world economy and dependent on outside investment. According to Peter Shirlow, the middle classes in the North and the South increasingly possess transnational identities “in which relationships with London, Brussels, Washington, and Tokyo predominate over a previously strong association with their respective parts of Ireland.”14 For Neville Douglas, the North can no longer be adequately described in binary terms. He views it as “a society in transition,” which has seen a “decline in the blind acceptance of derogatory stereotypes” and where identity “evokes answers of greater diversity, complexity, and subtle caveats.”15 In deconstructing nationalist mythology, Ireland’s revisionist historians have at times skirted dangerously close to letting England off the hook, a charge that is bolstered by the fact that they have spent a disproportionate amount of their time dismembering the republican and the nationalist, rather than the loyalist and the unionist, ideologies. A complementary but contrasting development has likewise played a significant role in problematizing Irish identity is the Field Day project. Founded in Derry in the early 1980s as a theater company, the project has subsequently published pamphlets and books and produced an ambitious three-volume revision of the Irish canon, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.16 In the preface to its first pamphlets, the directors say they see the project as contributing “to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths, and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation.”17 Where historical revisionists tend to view the Anglo-Irish conflict as historically contingent, writers associated with Field Day view it as a colonial relationship whereby Irish nationalism is overdetermined by its British other. The idea of Ireland, Declan Kiberd suggests, is “largely a fiction created by the rulers of England in response to specific needs at a precise moment in British history.” The Irish notion of England, on the other hand, is “a fiction created and inhabited by the Irish for their own pragmatic purposes.” Field Day’s inspiration was a united Ireland, but it does not stand for a monolithic nationalism. “Our desire,” as Seamus Deane puts it, “would be to create through Field Day, and through certain kinds of writing and theatre, a vision of . . . the cultural, social, political unification that is possible in Ireland between all the different groupings and sects” (IFD, iii). The Field Day project contends that Ireland’s crisis is bound up with language and discourse, and critics such as Kiberd have been influenced by

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postcolonial theory. Field Day writers have engaged in a deconstruction of the dominant discourses, regarding the mystique of Irishness as an impediment to realizing a pluralist and united island.

Kearney’s Postnational Response Richard Kearney’s Postnationalist Ireland is in dialogue with this recent work, The Field Day Anthology. Kearney has insisted on considering national identity as an “imagined community” that has tended to constrict rather than incorporate the several different legacies—cultural and ethnic—that have contributed to Ireland. “In the case of the Irish cultural nation this requires acknowledgment of the Viking, Norman, Scots, and Anglo-Saxon contribution alongside those of the ‘ancient Celtic race.’ Thus we might say that the exclusivist equation of ‘Irish Irish’ with Gaelic and Catholic by D. P. Moran and other fundamentalists in the first decades of this century was in fact a betrayal of the full complexity of Irish culture” (PNI, 6). As one of the original editors of Ireland’s Field Day, Kearney argues that Irish nationalism cannot be thought of in isolation, that its meaning is defined by, and defines, its British twin. “Far too often,” Kearney writes, “the sins of nationalism have been laid exclusively on the Irish side, with the result that Britain’s implication in the nationalist quarrel is conveniently occluded. This, I would argue, has been one of the most ingenious ploys of British (or more particularly English) nationalism: to pretend that it doesn’t exist, that the irrational and unreasonable claimants to sovereignty, territory, power, and nationhood are always others” (PNI, 9). Kearney understands British nationalism and the historical relationship of Ireland and Britain in terms drawn from recent four-nation historical approaches and the new critical scholarship on Britishness and the Isles. From Linda Colley, Kearney adopts the idea that Britishness is a historical identity that competes with local, national, and regional forms of identification and is defined in relationship to its others. From Hugh Kearney, Kearney finds historiographical grounds for thinking in terms of an interrelated history of the Isles. Similarly, Kearney evokes Thomas Nairn, who claims that the British state is in an interminable crisis, to argue that the situation calls for a reordering of the relationship between Britain’s component parts.18 Like Nairn, Kearney views the advent of the devolved parliaments—Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland—and mounting pressures toward European integration as helping this process along. Kearney’s point of departure for conceiving of a postnationalist Ireland is his imaginative effort to think beyond the Anglo-Irish binary

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opposition, which means thinking about what makes the opposition lethal in the first place: conflicting claims of sovereignty. Sovereignty, he claims, is founded on early modern efforts to defend absolutist monarchical claims over a territory. Rousseau and the French revolutionaries reworked it so that its source was the people, and nineteenth-century nationalists further massaged its meaning so that it referred to a particular ethnic group rather than a citizenry. What remained constant through all these shifts was the contention that sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. In situations in which more than one ethnic group claims it, no resolution is possible. For Kearney, the troubles in Northern Ireland are an example of this. At the heart of the conflict are two irreconcilable claims to absolute sovereignty. For British nationalists, Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom; for Irish nationalists, it is part of the republic. As Kearney points out, the idea that the people, defined as the nation, must have a sovereign territory and state is incompatible with Ulster’s pluralist nature. Kearney advocates disentangling the nation from the state in order to conceptualize sovereignty in a pluralist way, thereby accommodating multiple identities in a given society. Kearney is moving on to postnational ground. Kearney conceives postnationalism as an intellectual and political space that can overcome the limitations of nationalism without overthrowing it altogether. “Surely,” he writes, “what is required as we approach the millennium is a transition from traditional nationalism to a postnationalism which preserves what is valuable in the respective cultural memories of nationalism (Irish and British) while superseding them. Postnationalism is not Pol-Potism. It does not solicit a liquidation of the past but its reinterpretation or Aufhebung ” (PNI, 59). Kearney argues that specifying the postnationalist terrain entails making several distinctions: between different forms of nationalism, between nationalism and nationality, between the nation and the state, and between the nation-state and other forms of political organization. He believes that postnationalism has affinities with the more decentralized political structures and identity politics that are part of the postmodern world. But this is as far as he goes. Rather than defining postnationalism in purely theoretical terms, Kearney begins to sketch its conditions of existence and how it might be realized, employing Ireland as a specific case. Kearney’s ideas on postnationalism have developed in relationship to the ongoing political discussions regarding the Irish troubles, beginning with a proposal that he and Bernard Cullen made to the 1983 Forum for a New Ireland. The Irish taoiseach and Fine Gael leader Garrett Fitzgerald initiated the forum, but the leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), John Hume, placed his stamp on the proceedings. Undertaken at a time when Sinn Féin threatened to displace the SDLP as

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the principal voice of northern nationalists, it represented an ambitious effort by nationalist parties (excluding Sinn Féin) in both the republic and the North to create an all-Ireland or majority nationalist position that set the framework for a dialogue with Britain on Ulster. The forum rejected violence, insisted that the Republic of Ireland be central to any resolution in the North, and acknowledged northern Protestants’ right to cultural and political expression. Arguing that a resolution in Northern Ireland was impossible without acknowledging the claims of both the nationalist and the unionist communities, Kearney and Cullen proposed Irish and British joint sovereignty, making it possible for citizens to hold either a British or an Irish passport. The New Ireland Forum put forward three alternatives: a unified, a federal, or a co-sovereign state. Despite the innovative nature of the forum, its launch proved that the old divisions in Irish nationalism were still rife. While Garrett Fitzgerald suggested that a unified state was the preferred option, Charles Haughey, the leader of Fianna Fáil, referred to it as a conclusion rather than an option.19 For her part, Margaret Thatcher was even more emphatic, proclaiming in a speech at Checkers that each of the options was “out.” 20 Yet despite its reception, the forum played an indispensable role in facilitating the discussions that would produce the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The Kearney-Cullen proposal represented an important but failed attempt at thinking beyond the limits of nationalism—failed because, as Kearney himself admits, the unionists “resisted the principle of dividing or diluting sovereignty in an Anglo-Irish context.” A more ambitious effort at defining the new terrain can be found in the introduction to his edited collection Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s. Here, Kearney grapples with the implications of the Anglo-Irish agreement, the Single European Act, and the communications revolution in popular culture and the new media. “Ireland,” he writes, “can no longer be contained within the frontiers of an island. . . . In short, our fate as a nation is increasingly influenced by international happenings and accords. . . . ‘Ourselves Alone’ is a catch-cry of the past. But how do we decide our future?” (AF, 2). In this transformed context, Kearney imagines a settlement of the Ulster issue within a new Europe where the borders between Britain and Ireland are displaced by “a federation of equal and democratic regions.” He views this shift as part of a more general movement in which autonomous nation-states are supplanted by a “society without frontiers” (AF, 7). “The more we transcend national boundaries the greater the need for decentralized regional government. What we are talking about then is not the liquidation of nations but their supercession (Aufhebung ) into a postnationalist network of communities where national identities may live on where they belong—in languages, sports, arts, customs, memories, and

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myths—while simultaneously fostering the expression of minority and regional cultures within each nation” (AF, 17). This is an early expression of Kearney’s understanding of postnationalism. His use of a hyphen—postnationalism rather than postnationalism—suggests a tentativeness at this juncture. Yet, what he advocates bears an unmistakable resemblance to what he proposes in Postnationalist Ireland. Kearney’s description of the “post-nationalist” political space is among the first deployments of the term in the English language. It is difficult to trace the term’s origins, but Kearney’s use of it is connected to his participation in 1980s discussions on postmodernism; postnationalism represents an analogous shift in thinking about the relationship between national identity and politics. Jürgen Habermas likewise (though unknown to Kearney at the time) makes use of the idea in the 1987 speech “Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West.” Habermas imagines “the self-assertion of national forms of life through power politics” being displaced by the “universalization of democracy and human rights.”21 He argues that we can overcome the tragic consequences of xenophobic forms of cultural nationalism while at the same time acknowledging the multicultural nature of civil society by adopting radical versions of democracy sustained by “constitutional patriotism.” A reworking of the idea of civic nationalism, constitutional patriotism involves shifts in the forms of what constitutes nationalist expression. The flag, for instance, frequently perceived as a sacred symbol of the nation, is reinvented as a symbol of representative democracy: burning it is not by definition an act of desecration, although it can still be understood as an injustice.22 Habermas views postnationalism as an attempt to decouple a unified cultural identity from the constitution and the state. He clearly has affinities with what Kearney means by postnationalism. Habermas’s acknowledgment that “the beginnings of a post-national identity linked to the constitutional state could develop and stabilize only within the framework of more general tendencies extending beyond the Federal Republic” accords with Kearney’s understanding of postnationalism as a phenomenon that goes beyond the borders of the nation-state (TNC, 256). However, writing in the Irish context, in which sovereignty itself is disputed, Kearney goes beyond Habermas. It is not just that states must create new political forms—constitutional patriotism—appropriate to a multicultural society. It is the nation-state itself that is problematic: simultaneously too large and too small to be effective in a rapidly changing world. Kearney’s views are in fact closer to those of John Hume, whom Kearney had worked with since the time of the New Ireland Forum. Despite the paradox of a nationalist leader embracing a postnationalist position,

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Hume, like Kearney, has reconceived Ireland and the Anglo-Irish conflict by viewing them in a European context. Similarly, Hume has advocated a Europe of federated regions, notably in his Report on Regional Policy, a report endorsed unanimously by the European Parliament in 1987. Kearney has endorsed Hume’s vision of a “new republicanism,” articulated in Across the Frontiers and edited, of course, by Kearney. Hume describes it as the development of processes which allow people to preserve their culture, rights, and dignity; to promote their well-being and have a means of controlling the forces which will affect their lives. Rather than being any reversal of the national destiny, this will allow us better to fulfill our potential as a people; to contribute to our world; to rediscover the cultural interactions between Ireland and Europe; to reinvolve ourselves in political relationships with those on the continental mainland and to enjoy properly the inchoate European outlook and vision which was lost in our oppressive and obsessive relationship with Britain. It maintains the necessary synchrony between the scope of democracy and economic and technological circumstances.23

At the New Ireland Forum, Kearney proposed dual sovereignty as a way of resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland. Subsequently, he reframed the idea in two ways. First, he recast it in light of the republic’s and the North’s—and for that matter the entire United Kingdom’s—increasingly closer ties to the European Union. In a cowritten submission to the 1993 Opsahl Commission, “Northern Ireland’s Future as a European Region,” Kearney advocates an interdependent Europe that takes the “principle of subsidiarity” seriously and sees Ulster as part of a democratic association of regions under the umbrella of a more decentralized European Union. “The emerging Europe,” he writes, “has a unique opportunity to be truly democratic by fostering notions of sovereignty that are inclusive rather than absolute, shared rather than insular, disseminated rather than closed in upon some bureaucratic center. Northern Ireland could be a testing ground” (PNI, 78). Kearney proposes a European union of regions that would allow for one to “be Irish and British (in Ulster), Spanish and British (in Gibraltar), Spanish and Catalan (in Catalonia), Basque and French (in le Pays Basque), Arab and French (in Marseilles), Flemish and Belgian (in Northern Belgium), Swiss and Italian (in Tyrol)— while being European in all” (PNI, 60). Kearney has also reconceptualized the Anglo-Irish relationship as part of “a federation of equal and democratic regions” in the Isles (AF, 7). In a 1995 proposal (cowritten with Robin Wilson) for the Forum of Peace and Reconciliation, he argues for a Council of Islands of Britain and Ire-

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land. Produced in the context of the paramilitary cease-fires, the emergence of Sinn Féin as a key participant in mainstream political discussions, and overt American and European support for the peace talks, the proposal argues for a council that envelops the “totality of these islands,” supersedes British and Irish claims to unitary sovereignty, and might evolve toward “a federal British-Irish archipelago in the larger context of a Europe of regions” (PNI, 11). Kearney and Wilson find historical precedent in such a venture (always important in Irish debates) in decentralized forms of ancient Celtic government in which the local kingdom (tuatha) was the fundamental political unit. More to the point, they took as their model the Nordic Council, which since being founded in 1952, according to Kearney and Wilson, has resolved Scandinavian territorial disputes and facilitated the growth of a “highly successful network of transnational communities” (PNI, 92). The Nordic Council was important for Kearney and Wilson not only because it was transnational but also because it created Europe’s only demilitarized zone: the Spitsbergen Islands and the Åland Islands. They looked forward to the time when analogous arrangements in the Isles could produce a similar status for Northern Ireland.

Toward a New Cartography of the Isles Published a year before the Good Friday Agreement, Postnationalist Ireland has something of a prophetic air. Kearney was not unique in his support for a joint-sovereignty solution—John Hume vigorously supported it—but he was certainly an early advocate of it, and his proposal at the New Ireland Forum became part of the final report. Indeed, the Good Friday Agreement goes beyond what Kearney proposed in 1983, allowing Northern Irish citizens to have not only the choice of Irish or British citizenship but also the option of choosing “both.” The agreement has a European dimension as well, although considerably attenuated as a consequence of unionist opposition to weakening the province’s position within the United Kingdom. The agreement calls for the North-South Ministerial Council “to consider the European Union dimension of relevant matters, including the implementation of EU policies and programs and proposals in the EU framework.”24 It likewise cites European issues as a suitable task for the British-Irish Council. The most dramatic instance of the timeliness of Postnationalist Ireland is in connection to the Good Friday Agreement’s third strand, the proposal for a British-Irish Council of Isles whose aim is “to produce the harmonious and mutually beneficial development of the totality of rela-

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tionships among the peoples of the British and Irish islands.” The BritishIrish Council—otherwise known as the Council of the Isles—was established as a consultative body whose members include the British and the Irish governments; the devolved parliaments of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; and the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. That the birth of the council began as a concession to the unionists for accepting the cross-border North-South Ministerial Council should not serve to minimize the accomplishment. David Trimble is often credited with the idea, although the Irish Times suggested that it came from the progressive unionists. In fact, the idea has a complex intellectual history. Yet it certainly shares the spirit of Kearney’s proposal in Postnationalist Ireland. Writing in the Irish Times (with Simon Partridge) after the proposal for a council became part of the peace talks, Kearney portrays it as a means of “finding an imaginative and structured institutional form of expressing the reality that the peoples of these islands are—through internal migration and cultural borrowing—‘intermingled.’”25 The people include the old ethnicities of the Isles, black and Asian Britons, the growing Chinese community in Northern Ireland, and immigrants to a “more selfconfident” republic. In response to James Anderson and Douglas Hamilton’s contention that the existing British-Irish interparliamentary body provided the East-West link desired by unionists and that the analogy of the Nordic Council was inappropriate and a distraction,26 Kearney and Partridge provide a twofold response. First, they argue that the Nordic Council model was never to be taken literally. Since it had had been rooted in older civil institutions, they “drew parallels between this association and the extraordinary density of civic links between these islands.” Second, they point out that the existing East-West link, the British-Irish interparliamentary body, was hated by the unionists because of its association with the Anglo-Irish Agreement.27 The Council of the Isles launched in London in December 1999, following the establishment of the Northern Irish executive. Its first meeting was greatly delayed as a result of the various snags over IRA disarmament, and it was only held in November 2001 following one of many breakthroughs regarding that issue. It is expected that the council will be concerned with several issues: the environment, tourism, transport, organized crime, and e-commerce. Though Northern Ireland has returned to direct rule, the Council of the Isles still functions. It is unclear what role the British-Irish Council will have in the governance of the archipelago, whether it will implement policy or function as a coordinating body among different participants. In addition, the Good Friday Agreement leaves open the possibility of members of the group reaching agreements among themselves without approval by the entire

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council. Several constituencies appear to have a stake in keeping the Council of the Isles alive. For the New Labour government, the council is one more plank in its federalist strategy of a revived Britain, and it foresees the council providing a regional Isles voice with regard to the European Union. For the devolved Scottish parliament, the Council of the Isles provides another venue for expression of its autonomous identity and strengthens ties with the Republic of Ireland. Northern Irish unionists regard the council as providing a counterbalance to the North-South Ministerial Council and as bringing the Republic of Ireland into a more intimate relationship to the union. As Graham Walker argues, these interests appear to be nationalist rather than postnationalist in inspiration.28 But it should be recalled that nationalism and postnationalism are not necessarily incompatible. Rather, postnationalism extends nationalisms (as national identities) into regional and transnational arenas, transforming them in the process. In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, Kearney investigates the relationship between identity and otherness: those encounters with strangers, gods, and monsters that challenge and produce the boundaries of the self while simultaneously haunting our cultural unconscious. Encounters with strangers, gods, and monsters potentially provide secure identities, but in our current situation, the transition between a modern and a postmodern world, Kearney argues that we once again need “new cartographies.” As he puts it, At Land’s End once more, we require novel mappings of uncharted realms, lest we slip over the edge into the abyss of the unknowable. The familiar dragons and demons have been replaced with different ones, of course. . . . But no less terrifying for that. And no less challenging. Strangers, gods, and monsters will always be with us. There will always be limits to what we can say or tell. But rarely has the call for new paths of interpretation and action been more urgent. (SGM, 230)

What Kearney says in the context of his dialogical hermeneutics is germane to the contemporary plight of the Isles. In a world whose signposts are increasingly ambiguous—one whose strangers, gods, and monsters no longer are fixing national identities in the old ways—the Isles require new maps to accommodate complex cultural identities and shifting political relationships in a world that is increasingly shaped by the forces of globalization. Richard Kearney—along with others—has been at the forefront of creating “new cartographies” in the Isles. Kearney has mapped out a postnationalist space that allows for multiple expressions of identity—local, national, and regional—ultimately foreseeing the demise of

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the nation-state itself. The polarized communities in Northern Ireland cannot ultimately be coerced to cooperate. Nevertheless, Kearney and others have helped create the political conditions that make that cooperation feasible.

Notes A version of this paper was presented at a conference held by the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada at Reno in April 2002. I would like to thank all the participants in the conference for their feedback, especially Joseba Zulaika, the director of the center, and Joseba Gabilondo. I owe the latter a particular debt of gratitude for conversations that we had regarding postnationalism in general and Richard Kearney’s work in particular, in the fall of 2002. 1. There is a growing feeling that “British Isles” will not do as a description for the entire archipelago, given the imperialist associations with British. “Atlantic Isles,” “North Atlantic Isles,” and the “Irish and British Isles” are among the descriptions that have been put forward as substitutes. I have settled on “the Isles,” one of the terms in use and certainly the most general term possible. Norman Davies has used it in his recent best-selling history The Isles, although it may not always be clear which isles are meant. It probably helps to be in Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Belfast, or Cardiff. 2. Bragg, “Take Down the Union Jack” (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Electra Entertainment Group, 2002). 3. Paxman, The English: A Portrait of a People (London: M. Joseph, 1998). 4. Alibhai-Brown, Who Do We Think We Are? Imagining the New Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2000). 5. Marr, The Day Britain Died (London: Profile Books, 2000). 6. David McCrone, “Scotland and the Union: Changing Identities in the British State,” in British Cultural Studies, ed. D. Morley and K. Robins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 97–108. 7. Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, The Future of MultiEthnic Britain: The Parekh Report (London: Profile Books, 2000). The report can be accessed at http://www.runnymedetrust.org/projects/meb/report.html (accessed May 20, 2006). 8. Philip Johnston, “Piece of Political History Catches Up with Straw,” Daily Telegraph (London), December 12, 2000. 9. Hall, “Letter: That’s Not What We Said,” Guardian (London), October 31, 2000. 10. Alan Travis, “Be Proud to Be British, Straw Tells Left,” Guardian (London), October 12, 2000. 11. Stuart Hall, “Aspirations and Attitude: Reflections on Black Britons in the Nineties,” in New Formations 33 (1998): 38–46. Quotation on page 40. 12. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000).

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13. See Hugh F. Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 14. Peter Shirlow, “Class, Materialism, and the Fracturing of Traditional Alignments,” in In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography, ed. B. Graham (London: Routledge, 1997), 87–107. Quotation on page 105. 15. Neville Douglas, “Political Structures, Social Interaction, and Identity Change in Northern Ireland,” in In Search of Ireland, 151–73. Quotation on page 168. 16. Seamus Deane, Andrew Carpenter, and Jonathan Williams, eds., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991). 17. Seamus Deane, ed., Ireland’s Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985), vii. Henceforth cited as IFD. 18. See Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: NLB, 1977); and After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland (London: Granta, 2000). 19. Gerard Murray, John Hume and the SDLP: Impact and Survival in Northern Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998), 136. 20. Paul Routledge, John Hume: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 201. 21. Jürgen Habermas, ed., The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 256. Henceforth cited as TNC. 22. My discussion here is indebted to Martin Matusˇtik’s Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). 23. John Hume, “Europe of the Regions,” in AF, 56. 24. Adrian Guelke, “International Dimensions of the Belfast Agreement,” in Aspects of the Belfast Agreement, ed. R. Wilford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 257. 25. Richard Kearney and Simon Partridge, “How the Nordic Countries Resolved Conflict,” Irish Times, January 15, 1998. 26. James Anderson and Douglas Hamilton, “Council of the Isles,” Irish Times, February 13, 1998. 27. Richard Kearney and Simon Partridge, “Council of the Isles,” Irish Times, March 2, 1998. 28. Graham Walker, “The British-Irish Council,” in Aspects of the Belfast Agreement.

Reimagining Ireland, Britain, and Europe James M. Smith

Richard Kearney’s Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy reads differently today than when it was first published.1 The political climate at the time proved particularly receptive to Kearney’s summons to rethink the “totality of relations” between Britain and Ireland, in keeping with an overall move toward a more federal and regional Europe (PNI, 11). Despite the suspension of the Northern Ireland Assembly, ongoing since 2002, and the stalled negotiations relating to the decommissioning of arms by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), events over the past few years render Kearney’s summons less “wishful thinking” and “utopian”—as earlier critics suggested—and more reflective of the complex, continually changing, and often-contradictory politics of identity and culture in Ireland, Britain, and Europe.2 Back in 1997, Kearney’s summons was not based solely on the sudden, but much welcomed, restoration of the IRA cease-fire. Rather, a range of curiously interrelated events resulted in a particularly amenable reception for Postnationalist Ireland. The British Labour Party’s impressive return to power was followed one month later by the collapse of the Irish Labour Party’s support in the general election. The seamless continuity on Northern Ireland policy between John Major’s and Tony Blair’s governments, evident in their willingness to allow the Orange Order to march at Drumcree, was ruptured, less than one week later, by the latter’s surprise decision to reroute further controversial marches away from nationalist communities. Finally, Blair’s decision to make good—almost immediately—on his promise of devolution for Scotland and Wales was counterbalanced by the Conservative Party’s election of the Euro-skeptic William Hague, rather than the pro-European Kenneth Clarke, as the new party leader.3 Arriving in this fluid context, Kearney’s call for “a surpassing of the modern nation-state model” in favor of a postmodern, postnationalist, and postsovereign analysis of the Northern Ireland problem was not only significant but also timely (PNI, 20). 77

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Kearney’s proposed solution to the Northern Ireland problem stemmed from what he saw as the “chronic sovereignty neurosis” fueling relations between the islands of Britain and Ireland (PNI, 178). He pointed to the unfeasibility of having a United Kingdom and a United Ireland at the same time. This scenario demanded a unilateral surrender of one sovereignty to the other. Kearney’s alternative recommended a simultaneous renunciation of both claims and an attendant reimagining of relations beyond the absolutist and unitary nature of the nation-state. Kearney’s postnationalist solution, therefore, was a Council of Islands of Britain and Ireland that would evolve toward an Irish-British archipelago in the context of a Europe of Regions. The distinct elements in such a proposal demand further explication. First, Kearney’s Council of Islands of Britain and Ireland is modeled along the lines of the Nordic Council. Established in 1952, this council, comprising five nations and three autonomous regions, shared sovereignty in a manner that has resolved a number of territorial disputes in the Scandinavian Peninsula. The council’s highly successful network of transnational communities also led to the declaration of both the Spitsbergen and the Åland Islands—once bitterly contested between Sweden and Finland—as demilitarized zones (PNI, 180–81). Kearney asks whether Northern Ireland might not become, under a similar arrangement, Europe’s third demilitarized zone. Decentralization of British and Irish political power would, he claims, be crucial to the operation of such a council: “arguably, the North would take its place on an equal footing alongside Scotland, Wales, the republic, and England (itself regionalized into North and South). Each would function as a quasi-autonomous, albeit interconnected, region under the overall aegis of the council” (PNI, 93). In the same manner, each of the constituent regions would “retain and reaffirm its existing identity because of increased levels of participatory democracy in local and regional government” (PNI, 93). Participatory democracy entails not just a shift in political power downward from the nation-state to local governments (subsidiarity); a second element is what Kearney suggests is a simultaneous shift in power outward toward a transnational council. Consequently, a Council of Islands of Britain and Ireland can only work in the wider context of a European Council of Regions. This new European architecture would help compensate for the “democratic deficit” at the heart of the European Union by insisting on local participatory democracy, guarantees for minority rights, economic development, and cultural diversity (PNI, 77). The legitimacy of such an architecture would not be undermined, secured as it would be by, among others, the European Council of Ministers and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. As Kearney

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points out, both Britain and Ireland have already accepted the necessary key principles of “pooled sovereignty” (PNI, 95), “subsidiarity” (PNI, 89), and “regionalism” (PNI, 60–61) in signing the Single European Act, the European Charter of Local Self-Government, and the Maastricht treaty, respectively. If the above discussion reflects Kearney’s central thesis, his book, which may appear eccentric in its structure at first glance, is unified in its warning as to the dangers of exclusivist, ideologically rigid nationalism to contemporary European societies. Kearney’s warning is not openly expressed until the final two pages of his postscript, where he reproduces Hannah Arendt’s argument that “the obsessional equation of national independence with state sovereignty is a recurring impediment to peace” (PNI, 187). The “avoidance of war,” therefore, legitimizes Kearney’s call for rethinking and reimagining political, cultural, and philosophic paradigms in ways that are “hybrid” and “mongrel,” “pluriform” and “diverse,” “regional” and “cosmopolitan” (PNI, 188). Moreover, because the commitment of this book is first and foremost concerned with Northern Ireland and, to a lesser extent, with Ireland’s place in Europe, the dangers of exclusivist, ideologically rigid nationalism in the Irish context pervade its three sections: “Politics,” “Culture,” and “Philosophy.” The section on politics is noteworthy for the genealogies Kearney provides for key political terms that besiege Irish cultural studies, such as nationalism, sovereignty, republicanism, and postnationalism, in all their variants. In addition, Kearney points out that his book is not a repudiation of all forms of nationalism, but rather an effort at discriminating between kinds: “civic and ethnocentric, resistant and hegemonic, those that emancipate and those that incarcerate, those that affirm a community’s genuine right to self-identification and those that degenerate into ideological closure, xenophobia, and bigotry” (PNI, 57). Kearney argues incisively that Irish and British nationalisms are, in fact, “Siamese twins” (PNI, 9). He asserts, “far too often, the sins of nationalism have been laid exclusively on the Irish side, with the result that Britain’s implication in the nationalist quarrel is conveniently occluded. This . . . has been one of the most ingenious ploys of British (or more particularly English) nationalism: to pretend that it doesn’t exist” (PNI, 9). Finally, this section concludes with Kearney’s three joint submissions, reflecting the evolution of his thinking, to a series of forums set up to explore possible solutions for Northern Ireland: a joint-sovereignty proposal submitted to the New Ireland Forum (1983), a Europe of Regions proposal submitted to the Opsahl Commission (1993), and the Council of Islands of Britain and Ireland proposal submitted to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation (1995). The section on culture warns Irish people not to think of themselves

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as “Celtic Crusoes,” for to do so ignores the “basic cultural truth that cultural creation comes from hybridization not purity, contamination not immunity, polyphony or monologue” (PNI, 101). This warning is echoed in Kearney’s reading of myth as “an ideological strategy for inventing symbolic solutions to problems of sovereignty” irresolvable at the sociopolitical level (PNI, 109). Like nationalism, myth is not repudiated out of hand. Rather, it too is separated out into myths that emancipate, operating as an empowering symbol of identity, and those that incarcerate, degenerating into bigotry, racism, and fascism. The section concludes with Kearney’s essay on contemporary Irish poets who resort to utopian uses of myth in response to the ideological myths of the nation-state. Kearney depicts the latter with Ireland’s myth of motherland. His reading of Irish poets makes evident how utopian myth involves challenging and transforming such grand narratives by a process of estrangement. According to Kearney, Irish poets such as Kinsella, Heaney, Durcan, McGuckian, and Muldoon rediscover home away from home; they reread “native myths of sovereignty” from “a foreign place,” and consequently, they become both regionalist and cosmopolitan in their cultural identity and affiliations (PNI, 123). Kearney’s section on philosophy, by bringing together George Berkeley, John Toland, and John Tyndall (Irish philosophers and scientists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), effectively substantiates the importance of attaining a postnationalist Ireland. All three writers challenge, he argues, exclusivist definitions of Irishness. Emanating as they did from a pluriform, diverse culture that was at once regional and cosmopolitan, their “doubleness” was often at odds with both Anglo-Irish colonial and native-Irish cultural nationalism (PNI, 163). Kearney himself fell afoul of such narrow-minded and sectarian nationalism when, in his 1985 publication, The Irish Mind, he included essays on Irish thinkers such as Molesworth, Hutcheson, Clayton, Dodwell, Skelton, and Toland. Jeremiah Newman, then bishop of Limerick, singled out the inclusion of John Toland as a thinker who did not “represent the Irish mind as such” (PNI,160). Furthermore, the bishop reasoned that Toland’s “rational skepticism regarding church doctrine” rendered him more suitable for inclusion in histories of “English philosophy”—this despite Toland’s birth as an Irish Catholic in Gaelic-speaking Donegal (PNI,160). Ultimately, the bishop declared that Kearney’s book was “devoted . . . to a type of thinking that is anything but typically and traditionally Irish” and, as such, contributes to “changing . . . our Catholic inheritance” (PNI,161). Like Berkeley and Tyndall, Toland transgressed rigid ideological criteria of Irishness. Kearney includes such Irish thinkers again in Postnationalist Ireland, not only as the necessary corrective to Bishop Newman’s ethnocentric nationalist thinking but equally to suggest how the Irish mind “is at

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its best when it resists ideological uniformity of any kind, celebrating openness and experimental curiosity and questioning” (PNI, 176). Kearney is adamant in his conclusion that Ireland’s greatest thinkers were “migrants” who “crisscross[ed] national frontiers, creeds, and cultures” and who were, above all else, both regional and “cosmopolitan” (PNI, 176). Kearney’s “Postscript: Towards a Postnationalist Ireland” not only reiterates the major tenets of what has come before but it does so in a manner that is at once fervent and convincing. Traversing various European arenas of national conflict—Britain, France, ex-Yugoslavia, and the ex– Soviet bloc—Kearney suggests how exclusivism can result in ethnic intolerance and the emergence of “nationalism against nationalism,” that is, the return of the repressed (PNI, 184). Fearful that such phenomena would emerge in the Irish-British context, Kearney rejects the notion of “primordial nationality” and closes his argument with a final reminder to the “citizens of these islands”: “Every nation is a hybrid construct, an ‘imagined’ community which can be reimagined again in alternative versions. . . . In the face of resurgent nationalisms fired by rhetorics of purity and purification, we must cling to the recognition that we are all happily mongrelized, interdependent, impure, mixed up” (PNI, 188). Kearney’s thinking and much of the scholarship that informs Postnationalist Ireland is admirable. Nevertheless, criticisms do come to mind, and, perhaps unfairly, they appear more clearly with the passage of time. Kearney has admitted elsewhere that his book was initially to be entitled Postnationalist Ireland, Postnationalist Britain but such a label was deemed cumbersome. This decision remains regrettable, especially given Kearney’s failure to address the resistance to a postnationalist Britain from within Britain. Despite successive electoral victories by the Blair-led Labour Party, one can still question which element of Kearney’s proposal would create a greater response in the halls of Westminister, a Council of Islands of Britain and Ireland (regionalism) or a Europe of Regions (federalism)? Labour’s “common-sense” approach to the euro, as outlined in the party’s 2005 general election manifesto, betrays its dissembling position on greater European integration. The Conservative Party’s opposition to the European Constitution, articulated in its election manifesto, at least is consistent and unabashed by comparison. By the same token, opposition to the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland continues to simmer as a point of contention between the two main parties in Britain, and this too still presents difficulties for Kearney’s proposed Council of Islands. In terms of Northern Ireland, Kearney’s optimism for a Council of Islands perhaps underestimated unionist and republican resistance. David Trimble, himself a longtime Euro-skeptic, and his Ulster Unionist

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Party (UUP) were roundly defeated in the 2004 general election, an election that cemented the reemergence of the anti–Belfast Agreement Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and its leader, Ian Paisley.4 On the nationalist side, John Hume, a committed believer in a Europe of regions, did not contest his long-held Westminster seat, and while his Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) just about held its own, they were still eclipsed by the more republican agenda of Sinn Féin, led by Gerry Adams.5 The emergence of Sinn Féin as the majority nationalist party in Northern Ireland was even more apparent in the local government elections. These results must be recognized, at some deep-seated level, as a challenge to the Belfast Agreement, or, at the very least, a recalcifying of unionist opposition to the rethinking of “the totality of relations” between Britain and Ireland heralded by Kearney’s Postnationalist Ireland.6 Only time will tell how the DUP and Sinn Féin, in their more firmly established positions of leadership, will respond to pressure from London and Dublin to restart the stalled peace process. Postnationalist Ireland fares much better when one considers developments in the Republic of Ireland since 1997. Kearney’s optimism proved justified in terms of the near-uniform support for the surrender of sovereignty necessarily entailed in what he initially proposed and what the Belfast Agreement set in motion. The constitutional referendum to ratify the agreement revealed how peripheral were those who would flatly reject “tampering” with Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution because of their commitment to a thirty-two–county Irish Republic.7 Similarly, fears that the referenda would reveal a sizable minority resistant to any further dismantling of Irish sovereignty to Europe because of perceptions of the latter’s more liberal social agenda failed to materialize. The coincidences between Kearney’s book and the events leading up to and immediately following the Good Friday Agreement may have benefited from the sudden evaporation of long-held frustration that the North was still impacting the growth and development of southern society. The then-seeminglyindomitable Celtic tiger economy tended to perpetuate a sense that all was right with the world if you lived south of the border, and a proEuropean integration stance remains a hallmark of southern Irish society to this day. Ironically, therefore, Postnationalist Ireland does a much better job anticipating what a postnationalist Republic of Ireland looks like. Northern Ireland politics, on the other hand, continue to stymie Kearney’s paradigm for positive change. To be fair, Kearney points out that his own analysis is “largely conceptual/representational/paradigmatic” in character and needs to be supplemented and grounded by more “empirical/material/socioeconomic analyses” of research scholars, including those by Kevin Whelan, Tom Bar-

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rington, and Liam O’Dowd, among others (PNI, 203n). Without question, Kearney’s book makes very important contributions to debates on Irish-British relations, and, as such, it demands due attention from the Irish cultural studies community. Kearney’s joins recent work by Declan Kiberd, Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, and Stephen Howe, among others, as scholarship that informs an Irish context with theoretical analyses by the foremost critics in cultural studies today. Ultimately, Kearney’s book is reflective of a way of thinking, and a way of rethinking, that is admirable, expansive, and rigorous. Given the ongoing and ever-evolving situations in Northern Ireland, Britain, and Europe, the vision of Kearney’s postnationalist Ireland proves less “wishful thinking” and “utopian” than appropriate and timely.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this essay appeared as Smith, “Re-Imagining Ireland, Britain and Europe,” review of Postnationalist Ireland, by Richard Kearney, The Irish Literary Supplement 16, no. 2 (1997): 23–24. Like Kearney’s book, the original review reflected that period of uncertainty and promise in the Northern Ireland peace process between the termination of the IRA cease-fire (February 9, 1996), the first election of Tony Blair in Britain (May 1, 1997), the IRA’s renewal of the cease-fire ( July 20, 1997), and the signing of the Belfast Agreement (April 10, 1998). This revised version stays true to the tenor of the original, but I update some events that were only proposals at the time of writing, and I revise the final paragraphs to infer how Kearney’s book reads in light of the most recent political developments in Britain, Northern Ireland, and the republic. 2. See Proisias O’Drisceoil, “In Search of a New Consensus,” review of Postnationalist Ireland, by Richard Kearney, Irish Times, December 28, 1996; and Roy Foster, “A Change of Mental Furniture,” review of Postnationalist Ireland, by Richard Kearney, Times Literary Supplement, April 11, 1997. 3. Iain Duncan Smith replaced Hague as leader of the party in 2001, and Michael Howard, in turn, took over the leadership in November 2003. Howard has announced his intention to resign “sooner rather than later” after the most recent Tory electoral defeat (May 2005). Opposition to greater European integration, and specifically opposition to ratification of the European Constitutional Treaty, has remained a consistent Conservative Party policy throughout this era. 4. The DUP increased its percentage of the vote by 11.2 percent, gaining four seats in Westminster and bringing its total to nine seats. The UUP saw its percentage of the vote drop by 9.1 percent, losing five seats in Westminster and leaving it with only one member of Parliament in London. 5. The SDLP lost 3.5 percent of their vote, but they held onto three seats in Westminster. Meanwhile, Sinn Féin increased their vote by 2.6 percent, picking up an additional seat and bringing their total to five seats.

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6. In the aftermath of the election, DUP leader Ian Paisley stated that the results had seen the burial of the “so-called agreement.” See “DUP Issues Warning at Westminster,” BBC News Online, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/ 4535503.stm (accessed May 16, 2004). 7. The nineteenth amendment that introduced changes to Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland, as required by the 1998 Belfast Agreement, passed with a massive majority: 94.39 percent voted in favor of, with only 5.61 percent against, the proposed changes. The referendum in Northern Ireland to accept the Belfast Agreement also passed, but not with the same overwhelming majority: 71.12 percent voted in favor, while 28.88 percent voted against.

Traumatized Sovereignty Anne O’Byrne

Richard Kearney is well known as the author of The Wake of Imagination and considerations of the various strands of European philosophy and dialogues with continental thinkers, but he has also long been engaged with the public life of Ireland. He edited The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1982 and 1987), submitted a proposal on the “problem” of Northern Ireland to the New Ireland Forum at Dublin Castle in 1983, and submitted others to the Opsahl Commission in Belfast in 1993 and to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin Castle in 1995. He published Myth and Motherland in 1984, edited The Irish Mind (1985), published Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1988), edited Across the Frontiers: Ireland in the 1990s (1988), and published Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (1996). The list is by no means exhaustive, but what it amounts to is Kearney’s sustained phenomenology of Ireland. Those writings have included treatments of Irish philosophers (Berkeley, Toland, and Tyndall); detailed analyses of Irish writing, including fiction by Yeats and Joyce, to be sure, but also by Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and John Banville; drama by Tom Murphy and Brian Friel; and poetry by a list of Irish poets too long to give here. His writings include examinations of Irish cinema and painting, excursions into Irish history (e.g., the Easter Rising of 1916), interrogations of the institutions of Irish life (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church), and considerations of Irish political life. What is more, none of this work has been divorced from a personal intellectual involvement in that life. This is a personal practice, a lived and lively engagement with the phenomenon Ireland, a practice that is conducted both up close and in detail, from a distance and en gros. The question he poses is this: what is Ireland? It is a question that, not long ago, would be answered with little hesitation in terms of nationhood, national territory, statehood, and national sovereignty; not long before that, it would be answered in terms of people and race. Now, thanks to the changing shape of Europe, thanks to the prosperity that has turned Ireland from a producer of emigrants to one with increasing numbers of 85

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immigrants, thanks to recent shifts in the various positions that go to make up the Northern Ireland problem, but especially thanks to the work of engaged intellectuals like Kearney, a response in those well-worn terms is hardly possible. The question is as provocative as ever, and there are still those who feel compelled to reinforce (or enforce) their responses with bombs and gunfire; thankfully, though, their numbers have dwindled. It is plain to the rest of us, meanwhile, that this is a question that can only be answered with hesitation and perhaps with more questions, but always with the knowledge that each answer will itself be questionable, which is to say that each answer must return to the questioner as a question. My specific question here is the following: In a phenomenology of Ireland, what role can the concept of sovereignty play? How can it help us see what Ireland is? And then, so what? (The “so what?” silently accompanies all philosophical questions, but I make it explicit here because Kearney’s work refuses to allow it to remain silent.) At the beginning of Postnationalist Ireland, Kearney presents a brief genealogy of the term sovereignty. In the beginning, as the Latin superanus, it meant “supreme power,” the ultimate authority or overseer of order. In the sixteenth century, Bodin took it up as absolute sovereignty in which the sovereign king made the laws but was not himself subject to them, and this was further developed by Hobbes. Locke and Rousseau propelled the shift to popular sovereignty in the seventeenth century, with the French constitution of 1791 pinning down the concept further by adding the qualification national, yielding the term national sovereignty. In the nineteenth century, England saw the development of the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, while the United States established a principle of constitutional sovereignty. While each adhered more or less closely to Rousseau’s dictum—“sovereignty is one, indivisible, unalienable, and imprescribable”—Kearney also sees in them evidence of an evolution of the concept that paved the way for a pluralist version (in which power is recognized as residing in several centers at once) and a dual version (in which power is shared between, for example, a single federal power and among many local powers). This eventually makes possible a radical undermining of Rousseau’s claim and the entry of such terms as pooled sovereignty or shared sovereignty into our political vocabulary. I will examine this concept of sovereignty in the light of the most sovereign of all rights; the right to wage war. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in “War, Law, Sovereignty—Techne,” this is the most sovereign right because it allows a sovereign to decide that another sovereign is the enemy and to set about conquering him, which is to say, destroying him, relieving him of his sovereignty.1 Talk of war is indeed appropriate to Northern Ireland (albeit controversial). As Kearney puts it, “the twenty-five-year war in

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Ulster epitomized the clash of irreconcilable territorial claims” (PNI, 2). I would add that these were also irreconcilable sovereign claims. But in Northern Ireland it is a matter of competing claims emerging within one political state, and this is the source of controversy over calling the troubles a war; to do so is to recognize the sovereignty of those (the nationalist paramilitaries) who have declared war on the established sovereign power. I argue that what has happened in Ireland amounts to a trauma for the sovereign nationalist community. There has been personal trauma on all sides, but the phenomenon of a traumatized sovereignty is, though related, a different matter. I ask, in addition, if Kearney’s recent work on narrative suggests a possible therapy for this trauma. Just as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in the hope of bringing healing, what forum for the recounting of narratives might help heal the wounded sovereignty in Northern Ireland?

Trauma In Transitions (1988) and again in Postnationalist Ireland (ten years later), Kearney deals in detail with this controversy over the sovereign stakes of the troubles as they came to a ghastly head in the early 1980s with the deaths of ten republican prisoners in Northern Ireland; they died as a result of their hunger strike for recognition as political prisoners or prisoners of war. He wisely begins his analysis yet earlier, however, with the Easter Rising of 1916. That was a time when the whole of Ireland was ruled directly from London, and a small group of Irish paramilitaries took over the general post office and a number of other buildings in Dublin and read a proclamation declaring Ireland a republic. On one level, it was a claim to sovereignty in Nancy’s terms, a declaration of war on another sovereign. On another level, the insurgents could have no hope of destroying British sovereign claims to Ireland by force of arms. What they could achieve, they would achieve by suffering. Their triumph came when the British army brought a gunboat up the river Liffey and shelled the post office; it came when the group occupying Boland’s Mills replied to the offer of surrender, “We came here to die, not to win”; it came a week later when the leaders of the rising were executed by firing squad, in prison. I describe this insistence on suffering as a symptom of traumatized sovereignty. It was a sovereignty that, despite democracy, despite the speeches of the Irish parliamentarians in London, despite the deaths of Irish soldiers in the British army in Flanders or in the Dardanelles, could

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not have its claim heard in any way other than the performance of suffering. In the same way, the traumatized psyche cannot express itself. It cannot tell its story; it can only undergo its trauma. Only by drawing this fire, only by suffering in this way, only by martyrdom could the claim find expression. The word martyr, after all, means “witness”: by dying, they bore witness to their sovereign claims. The hunger strikers of 1981 were the direct inheritors of this rhetoric. Sean MacBride put it most strikingly: the campaign by the hunger strikers for recognition of their political status relied “more on integrity and courage than on what politicians and lawyers term reason and common sense” (TN, 226). The formulation makes me queasy, since it is a short step from there to the standoff between Romanticism and Enlightenment, between a politics of land and people (Land und Volk), and a politics of the rights of man as if, whatever we did, we had to choose one or the other. Yet it does dramatize an important point: if we think of ourselves as having to choose and if we do choose the path of Enlightenment, rights, reason, equality, and democracy, we must be aware that it is not a choice without costs. Even as we embark on the process of telling our respective stories, filling our public space with an array of little narratives, there is no guarantee that all stories will be heard nor that all stories can be told. Put another way, although Northern Ireland is a democracy with a long democratic tradition, high levels of electoral participation (with voter turnout sometimes threatening to exceed a hundred percent), and, generally speaking, the conditions under which democracy is supposed to thrive, it managed to be a deeply unjust society because, at the same time, it was home to both a healthy, robust, even triumphal sovereignty and a traumatized, silenced sovereignty. Kearney analyzes the hunger strikes in terms of a political (or military) logic that is eventually swapped for a mythic logic of suffering. Translated into the terms I have adopted here, the IRA was waging a war whose aim was the destruction of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland; its sovereign claim (on behalf of the nationalist community of the province) found its expression in acts of war. We must bear in mind that this is normal behavior for a sovereign. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, some ten years into the war, substantial numbers of activists were in prison as a result of their military activities, and public support was waning in the face of the civilian deaths that resulted from those very activities. It became clear that the acts of war were not being seen as such; instead, they were being branded terrorist or criminal acts and not expressions of sovereign right. It was not a matter of the nationalist community abandoning its desire to assert its sovereignty—surveys conducted at the time showed continuing support for the aim of a united (sovereign) Ireland—but rather of its balking at the price that violence exacts. The military cam-

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paign was failing as an exercise of sovereign right and as an expression of a claim to sovereignty. What was something forced outward (an expression) was now forced inward as the groups of IRA prisoners turned their violence on their own bodies. Instead of the loud and vivid statements made by bombs, gunfire, and spilled blood, this was a statement by refusal (refusal to eat), a muted statement (one’s voice literally weakens with hunger, and while the prisoners did write, their writings could only be smuggled out of the prison with great difficulty, to be published only later), a statement made by long suffering, and eventually a statement made in silence. At the same time, we see symptoms of another trauma in another location. During the republican prisoners’ hunger strike, some among them became candidates in the general election to the British parliament in Westminster, and Bobby Sands and Owen Carron were elected members of Parliament. Kearney assesses the phenomenon like this: IRA activists can be denounced for their campaign of bombing and killing by the majority of the nationalist community and yet acclaimed as martyrs by this same community once they are harassed by the British security forces, censored, tortured, imprisoned, and assassinated. (TN, 234)

The very people who rejected the activities of Bobby Sands the terrorist could vote for Bobby Sands the hunger striker. It is the doublethink of those who can bring themselves neither to renounce unequivocally their sovereign rights nor unequivocally to lay claim to them. To renounce them would be for the community to continue to suffer merely injustice, but unheroically, with no comforting thought that there is recompense to come, or that one is suffering to a end; to lay claim to them is to lay claim to the right to violence.2 This is a sovereignty that can speak but that can only speak in contradictions, which is to say, in ways incomprehensible to reason. This can be put in Lyotard’s vocabulary, as Kearney invokes it in Postnationalist Ireland. For Lyotard, what postmodernity makes possible is the deposing of the grand narrative, leaving a space that is instead appropriately filled with little narratives. It is no longer a matter of the grand narrative giving the measure against which all others are to be judged; rather, little narratives can be judged only with reference to one another. Yet narrative (récit), the writing or recitation of events, the telling of stories, remains the sine qua non. My concern is this: What becomes of an event that cannot be captured by narrative? What becomes of a suffering whose story cannot be told in a way that makes sense? What becomes of a wound that resists healing? What becomes of a trauma that is never overcome?

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In South Africa, in the aftermath of apartheid, it was just this concern that led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. What is most significant is that this was a political initiative, an attempt to provide a political solution to what was a political as well as a social and deeply personal problem. That is to say, it provided a public framework in which the work of recovery could begin. I will come back to this. Kearney, meanwhile, points to certain political developments that, though never designed to address the trauma of Northern Ireland, have contributed to a rethinking of sovereignty there, and thus, in their own ways, represent a political movement toward recovery.

Politics and Recovery The narrative laid out in Postnationalist Ireland goes a long way toward reassuring us that Northern Ireland is no longer the home of a wounded or traumatized sovereignty. Kearney points out that even as its communities became ever more embroiled in the ancient business of wounding and being wounded, Britain and Ireland became engaged in Europe’s great enlightenment project, a project for which Kant (in the spirit of the essay “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” [1795]) could have written the script. In 1973, both countries joined what was then known as the European Economic Community, and, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, have become ever more closely involved with their European neighbors. As this process progressed, the issue of sovereignty came to be explicitly addressed, particularly in the debate over the ratification of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1988 and again in the debates around the Nice Treaty referenda in 2001 and 2002. By ratifying the SEA, both Britain and the Republic of Ireland compromised their nation-state sovereignty, agreeing to a sharing of sovereignty with all the other members of the European Union. In this, Kearney sees the beginnings of a redistribution of sovereignty that opens new ways of imagining the future of Northern Ireland. If sovereignty is being passed from the nation-state up to the level of the European Union, might it not also be passed down to the level of regions or provinces (or, as in the case of Scotland and Wales, countries)? Might this not finally be the way in which the various claims to sovereignty in Northern Ireland can be heard? As he points out: [Ian] Paisley and [ John] Hume, while implacably at odds on the issue of national sovereignty, were almost invariably at one on the regional

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issues of agricultural policy, fishing quotas, social cohesion funding, etc. The lesson? That unionists and nationalists can agree at the regional and European level, but not on the national level. (PNI, 16)

How then to proceed? It would be necessary to diminish the significance of nation-states and to allow sovereignty to drain from there to these other levels. The two sovereign nation-states involved, Britain and Ireland, have been willing and eager to operate in these terms: Britain has already (in an independent process) devolved power from Westminster to Scotland and Wales; the Republic of Ireland has relinquished its constitutional claim to the territory of all the island of Ireland; neither government has quailed at setting up the intergovernmental councils and conferences specified by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That is to say, the two nation-states involved have proved willing to shift emphasis and control down to the regional level. Those who have historically held sovereign right, and who have long been recognized as doing so are easily persuaded to pool and share sovereignty. However, those who have had their claims to sovereign right denied or ignored are more attached than ever to the concept of the wholeness of sovereignty. In Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and, perhaps most deeply of all, in the Irish American communities of the United States, there are those who cannot relinquish the goal of a united, sovereign Ireland, and there are also those who will tolerate no dilution of British sovereignty there. In May 1999, Gerry Adams declared that “for Irish Republicans, the struggle for full independence and sovereignty is not over.”3 Rory Dougan of the dissident republican group, which is pointedly named the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, has said, “The Irish Problem is Britain’s denial of Ireland’s national sovereignty.”4 In January 2001, Geraldine Taylor of Republican Sinn Féin could tell a New York radio show host: “They surrendered the war: they surrendered to the British establishment.”5 Such talk is not easily dismissed, particularly since the elected assembly in Northern Ireland continues to have its activities suspended regularly, and, after much hopeful talk about the shifting, the construction (and de-construction and re-construction) of identities, the old traditional tribal lines come to be drawn again and again.

Narrative and Recovery In the face of such statements, which I read as symptoms of an enduring trauma, Kearney’s work does suggest another possible solution. In

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On Stories, he endorses the “affirmative view of narrativity advanced by theorists like Ricoeur, Taylor, Rorty, Macintyre, or Nussbaum” and asserts that “every human existence is a life in search of a narrative” (OS, 129). The faith in narrative is great and the argument appealing. He writes, “We are born into an intersubjective historicity which we inherit along with our language, ancestry, and genetic code” (OS, 154). We are part of very many stories before we even know to start putting together our own narrative, and, as we begin to conduct our lives, each action can be understood as an episode in the unfolding of our particular life story. Yet if our lives always already have a plot, as Kearney claims, it can be a plot only in the most minimal sense that it has a beginning, middle, and end; the content of a life, including birth and death, is easily—and perhaps primarily— experienced as a jumble of contingent, inexplicable, disconnected events, and it is part of our life’s work to find our plot. My claim has been that there are circumstances in which that work is blocked, as in the event of trauma. In the concluding chapter of On Stories, Kearney examines this topic using the categories of Aristotle’s Poetics—mythos (plot), mimesis (re-creation), catharsis (release), phronésis (wisdom), and ethos (ethics)—and three elements of that analysis are particularly relevant for the question of traumatized sovereignty and the fate of Northern Ireland. First, under the heading of catharsis, he takes up the possibility of narrative helping to work through memory and providing an occasion for release. What is vital, however, is to decide what or whose memory is being worked out and how. Second, under the heading of ethos, he deals with the problem of fractured identity that is experienced, for example, by Holocaust survivors who find it all but impossible to tell their stories; it may be the case that, in Northern Ireland, the stories that need to emerge cannot be told because of the opposite problem, that is, the problem that identities have been too tightly woven and too firmly bound to monolithic social and religious identities. Third, he works through the relation of fictional and historical narratives and our capacity to tell the difference. I argue that in the absence of a formal tribunal, we must look for a framework that provides a public context for recovery in history and fiction, that is, in the works of Northern Ireland’s novelists and filmmakers, poets and artists.

Therapy When Aristotle speaks of catharsis, he is referring to the audience’s experience of being purged thanks to the fear and pity evoked by the drama,

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but Kearney, in the example of the Armenian massacre survivor Michael Hagopian also wants to speak of the cathartic effect for one who was involved in an actual, historical horror. As a baby, Hagopian was hidden by his mother and as a result escaped the massacre of the inhabitants of his village in eastern Turkey by Turkish soldiers in the summer of 1915. It was part of a campaign of genocide that has yet to receive the world attention such deeds demand and that the Turkish government continues to deny. Eighty years after the fact, Hagopian produced a documentary film, Voices from the Lake, that was a tapestry of testimonies to the massacre and included long-hidden photographic evidence that in 1915 some ten thousand bodies were deposited in the lake near the village where he was born. Kearney writes, “In allowing these suppressed voices to speak at last after more than eighty years of silence, Hagopian permits a certain workingthrough of memory, if by no means a cure” (OS, 142). The example needs more attention than Kearney gives it, and it is important to try to be clear about what or whose memory is being worked through here. How does catharsis function in this case? First, the institutional memory of the Turkish national forces does not appear to have been worked through, because the institution remains silent or continues to deny. It apparently remains unconvinced or unmoved by such narratives. Second, since Aristotle speaks of catharsis as the experience of spectators, Kearney’s treatment of the “working-through of memory” would seem to suggest that the audience’s memory is involved. Yet the Western European or North American audience of the film is likely to have no memory or even knowledge of the event to work through—so absent has information on that genocide been from its cultural milieu—and in any case is hardly in need of a therapy or cure. Yet that audience, by spectating on the drama played out in the film, can experience both fear at the horror and also a pity that allows it to empathize with those who have suffered. But, of course, the claim is more pointedly relevant when applied to those interviewed for Hagopian’s film, people who, after very many years, were given the occasion to tell their stories. Telling is not itself enough; one must see that one’s story is not falling on deaf ears or being met with further denial. These witnesses saw their accounts of events corroborated by others, saw photographic evidence made public, and had their narratives recognized. This might be Kearney’s point: “Catharsis is a matter of recognition, not remedy” (OS, 142). As Aristotle would have it, the audience recognizes itself in the sense of seeing itself mirrored or revealed in the performance on stage. The case of the testimonial performance of the Armenian witnesses on film is a matter of personal rather than dramatic narrative concerning autobiographical and historical rather than fictional events. The recognition of the audience is also the recognition of

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the suffering of those witnesses in the sense that at last their experience is acknowledged. Kearney’s warning is well noted: “[This is] by no means a cure” (OS, 142). Those who tell their stories in the aftermath of trauma, often after years of silence, do not automatically reap the therapeutic benefits, and such benefits may come only with time. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established with the aim of encouraging disclosure (truth) as a means to facilitate healing (reconciliation), but it soon became clear that the experience of those who testified was not simply one of relief and recovery. Brandon Hamber writes, “The long-term ability of a once-off statement or public testimony to address the full psychological impact of the past is questionable. Some survivors and families of victims only began to experience a range of psychological problems months after their testimony.”6 What becomes necessary are traumarecovery services for individuals, and the British government and indeed the European Union have made resources available for such services in Northern Ireland, though Marie Smyth argues that those resources still fall short of what is needed.7 In any case, Brandon Hamber notes that this is one of the easiest political options; no one will object on political grounds to such services. What a public commission has done in South Africa, however, is provide a political framework in which victims “can begin to understand, integrate, and create new beginnings for themselves” (DTH, 134). But Michael Ignatieff reminds us that it is a mistake to speak about the psyche of a nation as if it were the same as individual psyches. A victim’s own work of recovery is surely hampered if she is given the additional burden of representing her community’s victimhood and recovery. At the same time, it is important not to leap from the individual to the level of sovereignty, as though a sovereign nation or people were just like an individual, complete with a conscience, identity, and memory.8 The figure of Michael Hagopian can help us think this through. He was too young to remember the massacre, though the implication is that he experienced its traumatic aftermath as an Armenian orphan and as a member of an ethnic group that, as such, was the victim of terrible and unacknowledged violence. He is not another victim telling his story. Instead, he is one who provides the framework in which his fellows tell their stories. His film provides the occasion for their narratives and, one hopes, the beginning of their recovery. This is the relevant model. The task of the political institution is to provide a public framework in which individual recovery work can begin to happen, in the full knowledge that the progress of those individuals is often “haphazard and slow” and will often lag behind the political demand to bury the past (DTH, 137).

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Identity Kearney argues that narrative must also have a moral function, since it is through narrative, understood together with human agency, that we each come to construct an identify for ourselves. When that work is blocked or bypassed, the result is what I call an unformed identity. Langer has argued that many Holocaust witnesses can provide no account of the events they experienced that fits with our usual theories of action and responsibility, because such trauma victims are diminished selves, people whose very identities were shattered by the particularities of their experiences. In Northern Ireland, the problem would seem to be the opposite. Rather than identities that are dangerously fractured, the issue is the phenomenon of identities that are dangerously complete. Growing up in a Catholic nationalist or a Protestant unionist community in Northern Ireland in the past forty years (and more), one quickly learned to identify oneself primarily as belonging to one’s political community. One received an identity rather than having the opportunity to build one. Kearney quotes Langer’s argument that some survivors of the Holocaust cannot build a whole identity because they are “trying to come to terms with memories of the need to act and the simultaneous inability to do so that continue to haunt [them] today” (OS, 153). If this is acknowledged as an abnormal experience of identity, then those experiences in which identities are received as unquestionable and monolithic must also lie beyond normality. Kearney is wary of any attempt to dissipate the subject, and he does not share the view that it must be surpassed under our new conditions of postmodernity. Rather, he sees his narrative model of selfhood as responding to “antihumanist suspicions of subjectivity while preserving a significant notion of the ethical-political subject” (OS, 152). He would agree, I believe, that any life narrative is a work in progress and will involve changes and retellings that allow for the development of an identity. I would argue that the very need for narrative is an indication of an originary disjunction, a necessary split in identity that makes it possible to stand apart from oneself and tell the story of oneself. A monolithic identity has covered over this gap, and the story that it tells is finally not one’s own story but the one received, in the case of Northern Ireland, from one’s historical community. This is one way of explaining why the Alliance Party, the one political party that refused to align itself along nationalist– unionist lines, was doomed to attract only a tiny following. Providing more hope, it has been one of the most striking features of political discourse in Northern Ireland since the beginning of the peace process that class and gender identities have become topics for debate. Though this is not the case for everyone, there are those whose

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sense of self remains unthinkingly complete, those for whom every challenge brings a more entrenched and assured sense of who they are. If there is an ethical question here, it is this: when might such a sense of identity become culpable? The inability to question it may spring from fear and from deep trauma, but such is the ethical quagmire of such wretched situations that a victim may also be a perpetrator. Langer argues that the narrative memories of the Holocaust have no moral function; such testimony occupies an amoral space. How many of us would be willing to say the same of those who continue to commit acts of violence?

Histories Yet stories come in various forms, and history is just one form among many. Though never tempted to move to what he terms the extremes of postmodern irony, where history is regarded as nothing more than a series of fabulations (a few true facts with stories spun around them), Kearney is keenly aware that we cannot know the past with absolute certainty and that any account we give of past events will be presented according to the rules of storytelling. He acknowledges—indeed insists—that historical and fictional narratives are related, but he is careful to specify their relation: they both invoke a kind of narrative understanding that is best described using the Aristotelian term phronésis. It is a form of understanding that is neither absolute nor relative but “something in between” (OS, 150). Phronésis is what we use to follow a narrative and to know the difference between fiction and history and to appreciate both the fictional nature of history and the historical nature of fiction. Yet Kearney refuses to confine its use to matters of epistemology. The controversy that rages between relativists and positivists over the relation of history and fiction centers on the question of which is most accurate, that is, which lies closer to how things “really were.” Kearney reminds us that not only truth but also justice must be served: “We need to invoke as many solid criteria as possible—linguistic, scientific, and moral—if we are to be able to say that one historical account is more ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘just’ than another, that one particular revision of history is more legitimate than its contrary” (OS, 146). In the case of Northern Ireland, that is to say that every community must have its opportunity to tell its story, and it is for us and for the entire community to judge. Yet in order to make possible judgment according to “many solid criteria,” the entrenched tradition of judging according to the single criterion of loyalty to one’s religious and political community must be overcome. This overcoming is certainly

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under way—the peace process would have been impossible without it— but, as I have argued here, it is by no means complete. It has not been undertaken in all sections of the community; it is unclear how successful it has been in any section, and it is inevitably a faltering endeavor that will never follow a continuous, progressive trajectory.

Art of Recovery Northern Ireland does not and, I predict, will not have a truth and reconciliation commission. It may be possible to open public inquiries into particular incidents, as has happened in the case of the Saville Tribunal dealing with the events of Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, when British forces shot and killed fourteen civil rights marchers in Derry, but the conditions for a fully fledged commission are not in place. What are the requirements? The Bloomfield report (a document produced by Kenneth Bloomfield, Northern Ireland victims commissioner) stated that a commission is possible “only in the context of a wide-ranging political accord.”9 Reading such a statement in the heady days following the signing of the landmark Good Friday Agreement in 1998, one could imagine that such accord was in place, but the years that followed have shown that there is still a great deal of discord, and that such accord as there was never reached as far as necessary in the first place. Terence McCaughey provides a more detailed account of what would be needed for reconciliation. He argues that there must be (1) either the bloody-mindedness to choose to treat the troubles as either a religious or colonial or racial-linguistic or class conflict or, alternatively, a capacity to deal with it in all these terms; (2) a willingness to begin not with atrocities but with the spectrum of complicity that must include the Protestant and Catholic middle classes and the Catholic Church; (3) an independent ombudsman or victims’ advocate; (4) an agreement to provide restoration and reparation; and (5) a forum for the unheard.10 Marie Smyth adds the need for a change from an ingrained political culture of victimhood and the ability to provide incentives (such as the promise of amnesty) to encourage the armed parties to take part. Of these, none of the structural requirements has been fulfilled, and the conceptual requirements (such as McCaughey’s initial choice) indeed seem unfulfillable in principle. In the absence of an official, explicitly political forum for reconciliation, how can the overcoming of traditions of unthinking community loyalty be helped along its way? How can the work of troubling and reshaping identities in Northern Ireland be supported? How can the thera-

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peutic work of telling stories be encouraged? How can a sovereign begin to overcome its persisting trauma? A large part of the work must fall to the arts, from the work of Northern Ireland’s Nobel Prize–winning poet to the activities of local community arts groups, and it is work already under way. To properly support this claim would require differentiating the various tasks involved (as with the Hagopian documentary discussed previously, except in far greater detail and with attention to the particulars of any chosen examples). It would involve examining the structures within which the arts happen in Northern Ireland and would require attentive readings of particular works, bearing in mind all the questions around distinguishing between public and community and fine arts, along with the specific questions of the interplay of a public framework for recovery and the private work of healing. The case of the visual arts is a particularly complex example that would reward deeper investigation. It has been a long time since Michael Farrell produced his Madonna Irlanda: The Very First Real Irish Political Picture in 1974 and, in comparison, contemporary art in Northern Ireland seems decidedly apolitical. Philip Dodd, selector for the Perspective 99 show at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast, commented that he had expected a great deal of political art to be submitted for the competition, but there was none. In response, Aidan Dunne writes, It is noticeable that the artists who gave the established image of contemporary Northern art its political edge have moved on in various ways. Certainly Willie Doherty is still there in Derry and still dealing with the same realities, but his work has become more complex in itself and more complex in terms of the frames of reference and, as it happens, this might be said to apply to the younger artists as well: their work is political but often obliquely so, and not so directly locked within the confines of the Northern problem.11

That is to say, visual arts in Northern Ireland have been through thirty years of intense and inevitable politicization, an apprenticeship that has produced both political and artistic sophistication. In comparison, the ongoing work of the Derry community muralists known as the Bogside Artists, though explicitly focused on recovery, seem spurred by a particularly naive faith in the telling of history. The group writes, Our sympathies are with all of the people who have suffered in Northern Ireland whatever their class, creed, politics, or belief systems. We believe that only when both communities of Catholics and Protestants have

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confronted the wounds they have inflicted on each other, and on themselves, can there be the possibility of healing or forgiveness. To tell it like it is and was is vital to this catharsis. . . . It is the intention of the Bogside Artists to complete the project they embarked upon in 1994—to construct for the Bogside a panoramic history of the troubles on the gableends of an entire street. When finished in 2004 this will be an open-air gallery of unique significance in the world with a spectacular view of all twelve murals to be had from the city walls. The final painting of the series will be a Peace Mural, a fitting curtain on a long history of conflict.12

As Kearney’s work on history and fiction has shown, having sympathy with all who suffered on the one hand may not be compatible with telling it like it is on the other. Artists must be and largely are more selfconscious about the very artfulness of art and the inevitable difference between “how it was” and any representation of those events. Indeed, perhaps the most powerful representation of the most traumatic event to happen to Derry in the course of the troubles is Paul Greengrass’s 2002 film Bloody Sunday, which cannot avoid the consciousness of its place between fact and fiction, specifically because it is a dramatized documentary. Where literature more broadly speaking is concerned, the title of young author Robert McLiam Wilson’s acclaimed Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other might remind one of the title of Farrell’s early political painting, but it may also signal something different: a far more complex relation to the political, a relation that includes a determination to eschew the political but at the same time an incapacity for doing so.13 The same struggle has long been in play, though in very different ways, in the work of Seamus Heaney, from the collection North to “Crediting Poetry,” his Nobel Prize–acceptance lecture.14 Meanwhile, Paul Muldoon, in his book-length poem Madoc, deals with what he describes as the basically unethical situation in Northern Ireland by writing about the imagined exploits of eighteenth-century poet-explorers in the Susquehanna Valley.15 Finally (my comments about the Derry muralists notwithstanding), analyzing the role of the arts in Northern Ireland before the cease-fire, during the peace process, and today also means asking why community arts are more active and more widespread in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. Many local projects have already long operated as communal coping mechanisms, such as women’s writing groups, and, more recently, have explicitly taken on the work of overcoming the legacy of the troubles. The New Belfast Community Arts Initiative, established since the cease-fire with the support of the Belfast city council, provides a platform for challenging traditional divisions and

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community rivalries and addressing political, social, economic, and environmental problems.16 It has produced, among other things, The Belfast Wheel, a cultural diversity mosaic in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, and “Strangers Next Door,” a project enabling local residents to express their experiences of living along Belfast’s peace lines. As Helen Gould reports for the Netherlands-based European Platform for Conflict Resolution and Transformation, there have been some groundbreaking community theatre initiatives which have enabled the people of Belfast to review their history from different perspectives. “The Stone Chair,” set in a Belfast graveyard, looked at the Troubles from the perspective of those who lay buried there. It inspired another group to investigate the history of their own predominantly Catholic area, Dock Ward, resulting in several productions which have made an enormous contribution to raising morale in the local community. One of the great, transformational experiences, it is said, is enabling Protestant people to play Catholics and vice versa.17

Conclusion It has not been my argument that Northern Ireland is fated to remain on the brink of violence or that the trauma of a sovereign cannot be healed. I do claim that personal trauma is not the same as sovereign trauma, which in turn is not properly understood as the sum of many individual hurts. It is, rather, an essentially political phenomenon. It would seem to be important that the people of Northern Ireland find the space in which to tell their stories, and the arts are already providing some of the public, or at least social, framework in which the personal work of recovery can begin. Yet this is only a beginning. I have argued that the continued rumblings from dissident paramilitary groups indicate that it has long been, still is, and will continue to be dangerous to neglect the powerful role played in Northern Ireland by sovereignty. This concept certainly cannot be absent from a phenomenological examination of Ireland. The population of the republic has voted to surrender parts of it; the government is engaged in pooling it; Northern republicans are struggling for it; intellectuals are arguing that it’s time to go beyond it. Kearney’s analysis is persuasive, and it does seem to be time to move beyond this notion, but doing so will remain impossible so long as we fail to acknowledge a limit. It is the limit beyond which fall those who

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remain fiercely attached to the claim to sovereignty even when there are good grounds for believing that justice would best be attained by abandoning the concept; it is the limit beyond which fall those who cannot recount their stories; it is the limit beyond which fall those whose traumas ensure that their expressions of a claim to sovereignty still appear (if at all) in the form of contradiction, paradox, and nonsense. So what? My consideration of sovereignty and narrative has traveled alongside Kearney’s analysis, shifting away now and again to make room for the concept of traumatized sovereignty and approaching it again by attending to the narrative work (broadly speaking) of the arts. What does it add? How might it enrich a phenomenology of Ireland? What does it indicate regarding what is to be done, that is, the question of recovery? My hope is that the sketch that I have offered here can be refined and developed in order to shed light on the extent to which the arts can give the framework for healing and to serve as the reminder of a limit: a limit to the persuasiveness of Europe’s enlightenment project for those embedded in a standoff like the one at Garvaghy Road, a limit to the appeal of prosperity through globalization to those whose aspirations remain determined by the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 or the Easter Rising in 1916, a limit to the work of reason alone, a limit to the possibilities of phenomenology, and a limit to our confidence in solutions.

Notes 1. Nancy, “War, Right, Sovereignty: Techne,” in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 101–44. 2. I cannot pursue this here, but it is remarkable how the latter is facilitated by the instituting of military rituals in the life of nation-states, from the guard of honor to the military funeral for a head of state. 3. Adams, “Adams Stresses His Organisation’s Main Themes Are Liberation, Emancipation, and Empowerment,” Irish Times, May 10, 1999. 4. Gerry Moriarty, “Trimble’s ‘Obvious Compromise’ Outlined as Means to End Logjam,” Irish Times, October 19, 1999. 5. Radio Free Eireann, WBAI (New York), January 27, 2001. 6. Brandon Hamber, “Does the Truth Heal?” in Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice After Civil Conflict, ed. Nigel Biggar (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2000), 155–76. Henceforth cited as DTH. Quotation on page 135. 7. Marie Smyth, “Putting the Past in Its Place,” in Burying the Past, 125–54.

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8. Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), 169. 9. Kenneth Bloomfield, We Will Remember Them: The Report of the Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner (Belfast: The Stationary Office, 1998), 37–38. 10. Terence McCaughey, “Northern Ireland: Burying the Hatchet, Not the Past,” in Burying the Past, 261–65. 11. Aidan Dunne, “Art and Ignominy,” Circa (Autumn 1999): C89. 12. William Kelly, Tom Kelly, and Kevin Hasson (Bogside Artists), “Conflict in Northern Ireland,” Get Underground, http://www.getunderground.com/ underground/galleries/gallery.cfm?Album_ID=69 (accessed January 8, 2003). 13. Robert McLiam Wilson, Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999). 14. Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), and “Crediting Poetry,” Nobel Institute, http://nobel.se/literature/laureates/1995/heaney .lecture.html (accessed January 8, 2003). 15. Paul Muldoon, Madoc: A Mystery (New York: Noonday Press, 1991). 16. See the policy page of the New Belfast Community Arts Initiative, http:// www.newbelfastarts.org (accessed May 21, 2006). 17. Helen Gould, “The Arts’ Contribution to Peace in Northern Ireland: Encouraging the Community to Have Fun,” European Platform for Conflict Resolution and Transformation, http://www.gppac.net/documents/pbp/7/7_n_irel.htm (accessed May 21, 2006).

Imaginings, Narratives, and Otherness: On Diacritical Hermeneutics John Rundell

In his trilogy, Philosophy at the Limit, and especially in its third volume, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Richard Kearney has reflected on the ways that real or imagined people are turned into something to be vilified, subjected to hate, or exterminated.1 What emerges from Philosophy at the Limit is a double-sided strategy that wishes to account for the way in which relations between the self and others take demonized or ethical forms. For Kearney, the imagination responds to others in ways that are either monstrous or empathetic. The imagination also opens onto the possibility of something ineluctable in terms of human experience. This chapter begins with the question of imagination before addressing Kearney’s concern with the narrativity of otherness from the vital vantage points of closure and openness.

“The Very Edge of Hermeneutic Understanding” Strangers, Gods, and Monsters represents a radicalization of Kearney’s dialogic encounters with interpretations of the imagination that occurred in his earlier work.2 In The Wake of Imagination, for example, the imagination was interpreted in a genealogical fashion in order to challenge the conventional view, stretching from Plato’s Republic to the Enlightenment, which equated imagination with fiction, fantasy, and thus an essential untruth in relation to reality. The Wake of Imagination was a sustained attempt to view imagination, in the wake of Romantic and Heideggerian insights, as a core of the human condition, which our experience of time, politics, and ethics toward others cannot do without. In Poetics of Imagining, Kearney 103

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defends the imagination from the vantage point of ethics through his formulation of the hermeneutical or narrative imagination. This was done in the context of encounters with philosophers who considered imagination variously as a productive act of consciousness, an original synthesis that precedes the sensible and the intelligible, and an instrument of semantic innovation. Kearney’s notion of the narrative imagination is a contribution to a more general hermeneutical view that sees “imagining [as] a mode of being-in-the-world which makes and re-makes our Lebenswelt by disclosing new possibilities of meaning” (PI, 9). Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, read in conjunction with The God Who May Be and On Stories, represents a radicalization of this unfinished series of encounters. Kearney views the imagination in more than semantic terms. In his critical encounter with deconstruction, the imagination’s status as a fundamental ontology or eschatology is also raised. (Kearney speaks of an onto-eschatology.) Kearney’s more recent work can be read as an encounter between the later, more language-oriented Heidegger that deconstruction has claimed as its own and the legacy of the Heidegger of Being and Time with its Kantian emphases on transcendental acts of the “productive imagination” (Dasein). In the fifth chapter of Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Kearney discusses the enigma of indeterminacy through a reading of Plato’s khora. In the Timaeus, Plato, as Kearney notes, reflects on the problem of a primordial origin from which all things emanate. At a point in the text, Plato is forced to confront the limits of categorization and rational thinking, and effectively has to “begin again.”3 In attempting to elucidate a narrative of cosmology in creative terms, and after exhausting the metaphors of natural creation, maternity, fire, and the carrier into which perfumes are distilled, Plato posits “an invisible and formless being which receives all things, and in some way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible” (T, 51b). This invisible, formless, and ineffable being is conceived in not only autopoetic and self-generative terms but also spatially in a threefold way. First, for Plato, the space of ineffability “holds” all beings and images that are subsequently created. Second, these beings, images, and thoughts are only a fleeting sense of what was originally meant and can only be referred by other images and thoughts. As he indicates, “for an image, since the reality after which it is modeled does not belong to it, and it exists ever as a fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another [that is, in space], grasping existence in some way or another, or it could not be at all” (T, 52e). In other words, there is no direct path to this original creation. Third, according to Plato, there is a permanent space or gap between “nonreality” and the reality of images, beings, and thoughts. There is a space of and for meaning and its creations, and yet meaning itself is

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never fully grasped or soaked up when it takes concrete form. Space here thus refers to the gap between meaning and understanding. Moreover, the “where” of this space is equally indeterminate. For Plato, it is neither in heaven nor on earth. Moreover, his reference to the space of the dream is a desperate attempt to capture metaphorically its allusive sense as the space of the creation of meaning itself. Kearney’s radicalization of his earlier work coexists with his ongoing critical dialogue with the philosophy of différance and poststructural psychoanalysis. For Kearney, poststructural interpretations of Plato’s reflections on khora, notably those by Jacques Derrida and John Caputo, represent possible yet problematic avenues for reworking the theme of the ineffable that stands on the edge of understanding. Derrida and Caputo discover in Plato an image of khora as wholly other: radicalized différance. It is an abyssal indifference to every determination, which falls short of words, and is, hence, nonmetaphorical. It is archaic, formless, and nameless. Caputo presents it in spatial terms—“as desert-like, without properties or genus.”4 There is no possible redemption here. Deconstruction resists a move toward theology because such a move would represent a closure of possibilities. Kearney argues that because deconstruction lands, ultimately, on this abyssal indifference to every determination, its result is not only a noncommittal prevarication but also, and more important, a position that remains outside the everyday ethical claims of human suffering. Kearney’s critique of Derrida and Caputo’s approach revolves around the deconstructive celebration of an endless nonplace that is “that dark night of waiting in the il y a without exit and response” (SGM, 204). This il y a is the dark night of absolute formlessness in which meaning can never take shape and arrive. Kearney develops a threefold response to the deconstructive claims regarding khora. According to Kearney, there is nothing to be celebrated, because in khora one cannot feel or think toward anything, especially toward another or oneself. Moreover, for Kearney, both Derrida and Caputo establish an overly schismatic division between the phonocentric tradition of God/fusion/union/presence/essence and the other of khora/difference/writing/pharmakon (SGM, 208). This kind of dichotomy prevents us from seeing khora as an open site of originary possibilities. Against the backdrop of the shortcomings of deconstruction, Kearney’s move to a hermeneutics of possibility signals an attempt to thematize the tension between closure and openness of the khora. This underpins his notion of the narrative imagination in which spatiality becomes either an enclosing haunting space of fear or a space of open encounters with others. Kearney couples this insight with a spatially conceived eschatology in

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which a hermeneutics of God or religiosity is portrayed as a relationship that is also derived from this space of possibilities. In what follows, I will concentrate on Kearney’s reflections on the spaces that humans inhabit in either closed or open forms.

The Space of Closing Possibilities: The Fear of Others It is now considered uncontroversial in continental philosophy that social spaces, as well as subjects, are constituted in terms of alterity, that is, in terms of distinctions between insiders and outsiders, us and them, the same and the other, the familiar and the strange.5 In those cases where sameness is emphasized, alterity can either be absorbed or integrated into the same (for example, under the myth of national identity), or it can be pushed away, ignored, or actively excluded. Here alterity becomes invisible in acts of social closure. In the case of an emphasis on alterity, sameness can be either ruptured in acts of generosity or decentered entirely in a celebration of difference. Here sameness (even the idea of a common humanity) can become forgotten in acts of joyful openness. In order to capture the difference between the two sets of emphases, Kearney makes a twofold distinction between “aliens” and “others.” Alienation refers to the experience of estrangement associated with discrimination, suspicion, and scapegoating when sameness is emphasized at the expense of alterity. Otherness refers to “an alterity worthy of reverence and hospitality” when alterity is welcomed beyond the same (SGM, 67).6 What interests Kearney is how the content that fills the spaces between insider and outsider, the familiar and the strange, is created. The khora can be posited as an enigmatic void and experienced in a fearful manner—fearful of everything, of alterity, of oneself. This means that Kearney can be interpreted as suggesting that khora becomes a space for fearful possibilities that are projected onto others, who are made into aliens. In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Kearney draws on the psychoanalytic work of Julia Kristeva, who equates Plato’s khora to the primordial, preformal, and preintelligible space of the “semiotic” unconscious. In contrast with Lacan’s psychoanalytic ontology of signification, which is identified with the law of the father, khora, for Kristeva, is identified with a primordial, presymbolic matrix associated with the infant-maternal bond that denotes borderlessness and fusion, a world before the formation of the ego. According to Kristeva, this world is constitutive for the subject and yet has to be repressed in order that a move can be made into the sym-

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bolic or social order. Khora is, then, a “strange space” where the drives associated with the maternal bond are banished and become subject to disgust and horror. They become abject. This makes khora not only the fluid, indeterminate, presymbolic realm of the unconscious beyond regulation but also a realm that has been abjected and turned into something abominable, which must be turned from as a function of socialization. According to Kristeva’s psychoanalytically derived claim, we all inhabit a no-man’s-land (pun intended), one of the feminine jouissance of Irigaray or Cixous. It is an abject land that is at once turned against the self, sublimely monstrous, perverse, and largely unknown.7 From this perspective, alterity is interpreted as our estranged self that haunts us in the shape of the alien. For Kearney, Kristeva’s work ushers in an explanatory model for the creation of aliens that are then demonized and vilified. As he suggests, at this fundamental level, Kristeva’s work, especially in Strangers to Ourselves, “expresses the universal experience of a deep unconscious malaise with ‘others’ arising from the repressed rapport with the internally housed ‘primal scene’ that informs our psyche” (SGM, 76). Nonetheless, Kearney regards psychoanalysis as unable to tell the entire story. Kearney’s worry is that concrete histories and the vicissitudes of hateful othering are subsumed within this metapsychology. In other words, psychoanalysis tends to project this unconscious psychological drama onto the screen of society as a whole, and thus makes the assumption that there is a seamless movement between the two. Kearney alerts us to the need for a diacritical perspective that encompasses and acknowledges the specificity of the social-historical necessary to account for the creation of social narratives, and not just narratives that are psychically driven (SGM, 78). Although Kearney argues that narratives work at both the individual and the social levels, there is a suggestion in his work, especially in On Stories, that narratives have their own logos and mythos, irreducible to their predetermining conditions. He makes an anthropological claim that we are stories, arguing that “without [the] transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life [zoe¯ ] could ever be considered a truly human one [bios]” (OS, 3). Narratives also provide the temporal connection between past, present, and future, thus constituting our historicity. This is irrespective of what forms (myth, epic, sacred history, legend, saga, folktale, romance, allegory, confession, chronicle, satire, novel) and subgenres (oral and written, poetic and prosaic, historical and fictional) the “narrative imperative” takes. In this sense, all societies create and draw on narratives in order to make sense of the basic existential questions of

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origins, identity, and history. Narratives, then, fulfill a double function, according to Kearney, as bearers of social-historical meaning understood by those who are part of real or imagined communities and as places in which individual needs, desires, and secrets meet and clash with socially mediated ones and may thereby engage in semantic innovation and recreation. Narratives disclose a space of intersubjectivity, and not only ineffable intrasubjectivity. As Kearney points out, stories constitute social actions that make the human world sharable: “Every story shares the common function of someone telling something to someone about something. In each case, there is a teller, a tale, something told about, and a recipient of the tale. And it is this crucially intersubjective model of discourse which . . . makes narrative a quintessentially communicative act” (OS, 5).8 As such, narratives open onto intrasubjective and intersubjective imaginings, and thus provide privileged insights into both their secrets and potencies. They disclose surplus meaning.

A Genealogy of Mythos-Mimesis For Kearney, the theorization of the narrative as a genre begins with Aristotle, who formulated narrative in terms of mythos (plot), mimesis (recreation), catharsis (release), phronésis (wisdom), and ethos (ethics) (OS, 128).9 Its legacy remains with us in such contemporary thinkers as Ricoeur, Taylor, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum, although for Kearney, Aristotle and Ricoeur remain the exemplary figures. Kearney reinterprets mythos-mimesis as a way of telling a fable in the form of a crafted structure. In this sense, it is not a simple techne, but poiesis, a way of making individual and social events into meaningfully conveyed life histories. Moreover, these imaginative descriptions never remain the same but undergo constant redescription. The original story and the empirical reality are not only recounted, but also magnified, changed, and topicalized in the activity of mimetic creation. Mimesis is never passive but is indicative of a narrative-hermeneutical circle of a prefiguring context, a configuring of “textuality” (whether oral or written) in the act of telling, and a refiguring, as the narrative encourages us to turn from the text back to action (OS, 133).10 By entering this narrativehermeneutical circle, an actual world is re-created that may become a possible one, which both connects and distances fiction from life in order to confirm or change the latter. In this act of mimetic re-creation or “creative retelling,” Kearney

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argues that a space is opened up, however minimally, between living and recounting, demarcating the narrated world from the lived one (OS, 132– 33). What is curious here—if Kearney’s analysis of narrative in On Stories is combined with his analysis of aliens in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters— is that mythos and mimesis together can also function as a narrative that closes over this open space on the basis of fear and sameness. It is in this context that the critical anthropology of René Girard’s work becomes important for his analysis because, as he points out, it concentrates on the way hatred is cultivated, not based on unconscious abjection, but as socially located practices of purgation and persecution. For Girard, these myths of scapegoating are rooted in real, historical events. For Kearney, the important aspect of Girard’s analysis is that it points to a dynamic of social narration that grounds the formation of social identity on the basis of an internal relation between scapegoating and solidarity. These dovetail, according to Kearney, in an act of social enclosing in the way communities, both past and present, narratively construct their identities on the basis of a dialectic between sameness and alterity. Here alterity is not simply pushed away or fought against in act of war against an external other. It also has an internal social function. Myths are socially created narratives that attempt to cement solidarity in shared acts of persecution. Their social function lies in the way that they address and attempt to resolve a social crisis by identifying, scapegoating, and then sacrificing the scapegoat on the altar of social solidarity.11 In this sense, myths are creative in that they lift historical events out of the mundane and place them in a timeless narrative of the “social sacred,” to use Durkheim’s phrase here. Aliens, in Kearney’s generic category, are necessary features of real and imagined communities, for they not only show us where boundaries are, but they also serve as representative bearers and the recipients of social violence. Myths are at their most enclosed when they become subject to sublime and terrorist interpretations—when they become evil. As Kearney notes in On Stories, societies or historical communities are at their most vulnerable and dangerous when they actively forget their narrative origins. Here it is not simply a matter of forgetfulness. These societies congeal themselves through acts of social enclosure that take place at the level of their societal self-creation and understanding, which altogether obliterate distinctions between sameness and alterity. They become omnipotent and totalitarian, and thus foreclose the space between what is socially created and sharable, and thus what is interpreted from a variety of perspectives.12 Moreover, these societies attempt to step out of time either by positing an absolute point of origin from which identity stems (such as the gens or the nation) or by disrupting the relation between past and present in

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the mistaken idea that the world can begin anew. Here, no narratives can save us. There are only the timeless, exterminating imaginaries of the Holocaust and the gulag—the void of khora.

Open Encounters: Oneself with Others However, the exterminating imaginaries are not the end point of metanarratives, and their experience is not only the void of khora. The narrative imagination is always poised to crack the abyssal space open and forge other possibilities beyond it, whether or not these possible encounters are with the past, the present, or some unknowable future. For Kearney, “the gap is an indispensable and unsurpassable horizon of our infinite hermeneutic horizon” (PM, 77).13 It is important that the recognition of our temporal condition opens onto the possibility of acknowledging that we exist with others, and that these others are ineffable in terms of their uniqueness. This comes to the fore in The God Who May Be. For Kearney, ineffable uniqueness is captured under the terms persona and prosopon, which he sets in the context of an onto-eschatology.14 In this sense, he makes a distinction between “person,” which refers to the qualities of sameness shared between people (e.g., biological and psychological characteristics), and their ineffable otherness or unique and inimitable singularity (persona). Moreover, this singularity is a surprise; it can neither be fully controlled nor fully captured, either categorically or metaphorically. In this way, it is radically open. This openness is also born of a dialectic of recognition. The persona of the other is the limit to my power. Further, it brings home to me that I have no power over him or her. In this way, it is a recognition of the contingent relational existence between unique persons irreducible to one another in terms of their horizons of possibilities; the persona, for Kearney, is “the quasicondition of the other remaining other to me even as s/he stands before me at this moment” (GMB, 13). It is “quasi” in that the person is a being in time, a contingent being, and also a being that has a transcendent quality of irreducible alterity. We are more than roles, more than caught up in the web of social actions. As he says, “persona is the in-finite other in the finite person before me” (GMB, 17). It is on this basis of the other qua persona that diacritical hermeneutics or, more concretely, the critical narrative imagination becomes mobilized. Detachment and reflexivity occur in this space between person and persona, which forces open a new space of possibilities. Narratives, for Kearney, have an open form not just in terms of a poetics of myth (mythos-

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mimesis) but also in terms of an ethics of catharsis, phronésis, and ethos. Narratives are the collective spaces in which we take responsibility for past and present actions. Here the diacritical being-oneself-as-another (Ricoeur) is given substance as being-oneself-in-relation-to-others, and is the basis for Kearney’s Aristotelian-hermeneutical response to his unease concerning not only deconstruction’s indifference to the suffering of others but also its vacillation on questions of ethical judgment.

Between Poetics and Ethics Catharsis or working-through means, for Kearney, that in the wake of monstrous and horrific crimes, the dead are not irrevocably dead. They are remembered. Narratives that are cathartic encourage us to sympathize with those who have undergone fate-filled, unexpected, or inexplicable deaths and to be simultaneously unsettled by them. Cathartic narratives increase the range of sympathy beyond our immediate world as well as amplifying the emotional economy of narratives beyond that expressed in everyday life. Moreover, we do not stand in the victims’ shoes in acts of overidentification. Rather, a gap is preserved in genuine cathartic narrative between the literal and the figural, which creates both awe and sufficient distance to grasp its meaning (SGM, 103–5; OS, 137–42; PI, 243). Kearney’s point is that in the act of telling and retelling traumatic events, either in biographical or fictional-dramatic forms, a failure of the narrative imagination is averted.15 Cathartic narratives are acts of ethical sensibility in which absent or forgotten persons and events are made present again, even if momentarily. In Poetics of Imagining, this capacity of ethical sensibility was termed the “testimonial imagination,” which is the capacity to bear witness, even if this witnessing comes from “exemplary narratives” that are part of our cultural legacy and tradition (PI, 228). In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, this theme is revisited in critical debate with the postmodern category of the immemorial (Lyotard, Levinas, and Derrida). Yet a cathartic narrative may not be enough qua telling and remembering to provide for judgments, that is, the ability to discern between good and evil actions, good and evil persons. According to Kearney, acts of practical understanding are also needed. As he points out, certain narratives invite practical understanding to engage in “thought experiments which may help us see connections between ethical aspects of human conduct and fortune/misfortune” (SGM, 101). These thought experiments involve “the practical art of understanding,” as Aristotle would

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say. In this sense, judgments are approximate: universals are only present in the sense that they are enacted in particular, often exemplary narratives rather than being transcendentally constituted. Ethical narratives evoke a never-realizable horizon of history, a sensus communis, which provides the capacity for phronetic discernment. As Kearney points out, the utopian horizons of ethically oriented narratives are “open-ended goals which motivate a free variation of possible worlds. They are not preestablished or predetermined. They are tentative, provisional, and fragile. The universality of the u-topos derives from the fact that it is the possession of no one and the possibility of everyone” (PI, 227). Ethics is the narrative space of the open-ended possible. The provisional nature of ethical narratives makes them capable of a generosity denied in closed narrative forms. It is possible to forgive and pardon in an open narrative. In addition, in the spirit of persona, forgiveness is a surprise because it comes out of the space of the possible, which was, prior to this act, impossible. For Kearney, it is intimately linked to a utopian imaginary emerging in the gap of concrete lived experience or common sense: “pardon has its reasons that reason cannot comprehend” (SGM, 106).

Imagining Spaces There is a tension in Kearney’s recent work between deconstruction and diacritical hermeneutics. As we have seen, deconstructionists privilege a notion of alterity as the indeterminate and undecidable other of signification, that which cannot be imagined, narrated, or named (khora). In this sense, they continue Plato’s allusiveness regarding the nature of the khora space of meaning. If we follow Kearney’s unease regarding deconstruction’s strategy of irreducible difference, there is a shift of emphasis to that of a time-space, not of pure, indeterminate khora, but of narrative encounters in both closed and open forms. Closed encounters create aliens; in open encounters, we meet others. This places the weight of the meaning of the imagination on the idea of the encounter in the first instance and also makes it immanent in ethically oriented reflection. In this context, Kearney could be said to follow Heidegger’s construction of Dasein, in which imaginings and especially open ones are inseparable from everyday human existence. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger acknowledges that the timeless and transcendentally conceived power of the faculty of understanding, as found in Kant, ultimately rests on the power of productive imagination to create schematic

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and temporal representations. In this sense, for Heidegger at least, the productive imagination is a creative surplus “outside” the faculty of understanding and, more importantly, a surplus that is oriented to the activity of “worlding.” It possibilizes the world. Kearney interprets this possibilization to mean that the “schematizing power of the productive imagination . . . transforms the manifold of experience into a certain spatial/temporal unity” through which “each person, thing, or event can be identified” (PI, 226). Without this capacity for an imaginative synthesis of past, present, and future, there would be no ethical agency and no sensus communis of commonly shared goals. As we have seen, for Kearney, empathy, moral sentiment, and practical wisdom are intimately linked to the narrative imagination in both his early and his late work. The stakes are high. The postmodern imagination has often reduced imagining to an empty shell of simulation and repetition.16 In sum, the crucial tension evinced in Kearney’s work between khora (deconstruction) and the narrative imagination (hermeneutics) revolves around one question: does the poetic dialogue between self and other issue in the collapse and self-absorption of meaning or an openness toward world relations?17

Notes This essay is dedicated to refugees, especially those languishing between worlds, in never-ending camps and holding centers. 1. In addition to Kearney’s The Wake of Imagination and Poetics of Imagining, see M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (London: Oxford, 1953). 2. The title of this section is taken from SGM, 193. 3. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 47e. Henceforth cited as T. 4. John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 97. See also Kearney’s discussion of Caputo’s work in SGM, 197–205, 282–83. 5. In the sociological tradition, see the works by Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, and Zygmunt Bauman. 6. The first part of Strangers, Gods, and Monsters addresses the construction of alterity in terms of aliens. 7. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (London: Harvester, 1991). See Kearney’s discussion of Kristeva’s work (SGM, 72–78, 89–91, 194–96; SO, 14–19). 8. See Kearney’s remark on Tolkien (OS, 158n5). 9. In light of our discussion of khora as an ineffability caught between closure and openness, though, we will leave to one side, momentarily, catharsis, phronésis, and ethos.

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10. See also his “Hermeneutics of Myth and Tradition (Ricoeur II),” in Poetics of Modernity, 80–91. 11. See Kearney’s discussion of Girard’s work in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, 36–45; “Strangers and Others,” 19–27; Poetics of Modernity, especially chap. 10; and “Myths and Scapegoats: The Case of René Girard,” Theory, Culture, and Society, 12 (1995): 1–14. 12. See On Stories, 80–82. In Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Kearney also argues that cultural-intellectual narratives, such as Zˇizˇek’s, that deploy the category of the monstrous sublime close the space between representation and interpretation, and are thus really or potentially totalitarian (SGM, 98). 13. In this context, Kearney reasserts Heidegger’s insight in Being and Time that, for this rupture to occur, narratives must exist within the temporal horizons into which humans are thrown and that constitute them. Kearney restates this insight in another form in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters in response to the horrors of the timeless void. As we have seen, timeless khora may function as a void of enclosure or as a background condition that sets in motion narrative creations because the subject encounters time. For Kearney, melancholia is a condition that accounts paradigmatically for such an encounter. He takes as his cue Heidegger’s existential account of the classical myth of Saturn in Being and Time rather than Freud’s psychoanalytic version in “Mourning and Melancholia.” In section 42 of Being and Time, Heidegger reconstructs the way this classical myth tells the story of the origins of humankind, molded by Care from a piece of clay but imbued with the spirit of Jupiter. Saturn intervenes in the quarrel between Care and Jupiter, who are unable to bestow a name on this newly formed creature. He, however, bestows the name homo, which indicates humankind’s split existence between heaven and earth, a split that is mediated but never healed in time. More strongly stated, Saturn throws us into time. As Heidegger puts it, “the decision as to wherein ‘the primordial’ being of this creature is to be seen, is left to Saturn, ‘Time.’ Thus the pre-ontological characterization of man’s essence expressed in this fable, has brought to view in advance the kind of being which dominates his temporal sojourn in the world, and does so through and through” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1962], 243). In other words, time envelops us, it is our “ocean” and the only condition through which we can construct a world, meet with others and ourselves. This temporal dominance is something, though, from which we wish to turn away and flee—it causes a dissonance, a dread, and an anxiety. In this reading, we are caught between two worlds—we can fall toward timelessness, into a nothing, or we can fall toward time. And yet, as Heidegger goes on to say, this dread of confronting our embeddedness in time, and thus our finitude, is the very experience that individualizes us and casts us toward possibilities of an authentic existence. As Kearney puts it, the Saturnine mood of gloomy melancholia delivers us from a tranquilized existence and delivers us to ourselves alone. However, as he goes on to argue, it is not only a capacity for being alone that is at issue here; being alone with ourselves, as Winnicott has noted in another context, is also a capacity that enables us to be with others as themselves. Kearney’s strong claim is that melancholia is the back-

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ground existential condition located at the level of the psyche, which establishes the human possibility for reflexively recognizing that we exist only as temporally residing animals and implicitly or intuitively, at this stage at least, with others. 14. Kearney’s work on the alterity of otherness is a step toward the way he establishes a hermeneutic possibility toward God. Kearney draws on epiphanic moments such as the burning of the bush, the transfigurative narratives of Christ on Mount Thabor, and the story of divine-human love in Song of Songs. Here it is interpreted from the vantage point of “this-sided” encounters with embodied humans as others. For an alternative account that shares some affinities with Kearney’s, see also A. Heller, An Ethics of Personality (London: Blackwell, 1996). 15. Biographical cathartic narratives include those of the Holocaust and war survivors, and fictional-dramatic narratives are Oedipus Rex and Anna Karenina. 16. However, in working within this dichotomy, Kearney’s insight in his recent trilogy regarding the nature of imagination itself is sometimes occluded. This insight, though, can be pursued from a position other than deconstruction, one that is posited in terms of a philosophical anthropology. Like Kearney’s notion of narrative imagination, this anthropology makes imagining an activity of human selfresponsibility at a primary ontological level. In order to pursue this insight in a register of philosophical anthropology, I mention the work of Castoriadis as an invitation to another critical dialogue. Castoriadis’s work can be viewed as a response to Heidegger’s on the question of the imagination. In Castoriadis’s view, the creative dimension of the imagination is the constitutive and defining characteristic of the human animal. More specifically, the subject is constituted through two imaginaries that, in terms of their deployment, coexist and compete within any social subject, and yet are irreducible to each other. These imaginaries are the radical imaginary of the psyche and the social instituting and instituted imaginary of society that attempts to make a social individual who inhabits a particular place, time, and social formation. Castoriadis takes as his cue Kant’s often quoted sentence on the productive imagination from Critique of Pure Reason: “The imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith [London: Macmillan Press, 1978], 165, B152). See also my “Creativity and Judgement: Kant on Reason and Imagination,” in Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity, ed. Gillian Robinson and John Rundell (London: Routledge, 1994), 87–117. See also Castoriadis’s “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” in the same work. He reads this to mean that the imagination has the power to create that which would otherwise not be present. Moreover, this indicates the imagination’s irreducibility to a category of either functional schematization (in Kant’s cognitive scheme) or a schematization that is oriented in the first instance toward time (Heidegger). For Castoriadis, there is a constitutive gap between the dysfunctionality of the imagination and the forms through which it is represented, as well as between the ways through which it takes institutional shape. It is in this space between the imaginings and their (unstable and reinterpretable) symbolic and institutional forms that new forms emerge and take shape. (See Castoriadis’s “Time and Creation,” in World in Fragments, ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis,

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[Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997], 374–402, in which he states, “the new eidos, the new form is created is created ex nihilo as such. . . . This does not mean that it is created in nihilo or cum nihilo. . . . [Humans] create the world of meaning and signification, or institution upon certain conditions. . . . But there is no way we can derive either this level of being—the social historical—or its particular contents in each case from these conditions. . . . Creation entails only that the determinations over what there is are never closed in a manner forbidding the emergence of other determinations,” 392–93.) Thus, these creations are other than what was there before, separate and undetermined by them, yet leaning on but not reducible to a preexisting context. Castoriadis’s reworking of the imaginary dimension entails that it is simultaneously one that concerns both the production and the multiplicity of, and the relations between, these imaginary creations. According to Castoriadis, there is “a heterogeneous multiplicity of co-existing alterities” that emerge from or in poetic imaginary space, “space unfolding with and through the emergence of forms” (396). In Castoriadis’s view, the emergence of new forms and constellations is an activity of the permanent “othering” of any self of its self as well as of others. Moreover, they may or may not be closed and autistic or open to the world and capable of reflexivity. For Castoriadis, reflexivity is a second-order activity, which itself emerges from the dysfunctionality of the radical imaginary. 17. This aspect has been discussed in my “The Imaginary Turn in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension,” Critical Horizons 2, no. 1 (2001): 61–92; and “The Hermeneutic Imagination and Imaginary Creation: Ourselves, Others, and Autonomy,” Divinatio 8 (Autumn–Winter 1998): 87–110.

“I Tell You No Lie”: Truth Commissions and Narrative Jerry Burke

Richard Kearney’s On Stories is both inspirational and aspirational. It is inspirational because I share Kearney’s desire to distinguish better from worse interpretations of history. Kearney resists the slide from narrativity to relativity. As he puts it, “to admit we cannot narrate the past with absolute certainty does not mean endorsing the arbitrariness of every narrative” (OS, 147). Kearney claims that narrative promises those who aspire to historical truth “a form of understanding that is neither absolute nor relative, but something in between” (OS, 149–50). Kearney’s account is aspirational since it is not quite clear how this “in-between” position might be defended. I draw on the resources of philosophical hermeneutics to flesh out this in-between position. In On Stories, Kearney explores the problems raised by the ineluctable narrativity of various forms of historical testimony. In this chapter, I extend Kearney’s discussion by considering truth commissions as mechanisms for dealing with the past. I argue that a Northern Ireland truth commission would have a constructive role to play.

Narrative, History, and Fears of Relativism Kearney argues that Aristotle’s notion of mimesis is best translated as “creative retelling” rather than “imitation” because the pretold life is already “on the way to narrative”; it is tacitly emplotted (OS, 133). In other words, human action is more than mere physical movement. Like a narrative, human actions and lives are themselves cumulative and oriented (OS, 131). Given the narrativity of human existence, the role of mimesis or fictional storytelling is not a matter of imitating something fixed. Instead, its role is to enrich and amplify our sensibility by opening perspectives inaccessible to ordinary perception and exposing us to new possibilities 117

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inherent in the narrative structure of our everyday lives (OS, 132–33). Kearney argues that historical narratives are never merely literal but are always also figurative. Constructing historical narratives involves selecting and sequencing relevant events, using both emplotment and perspective. Kearney tells us that the mimetic role of narrative is never absent from the telling of history (OS, 136–37). Kearney’s account of historical research is similar to Arthur Danto’s position in Analytical Philosophy of History and Narration and Knowledge.1 Danto argues that historical events only become meaningful, and often change their meaning, when reconstructed within narratives that take subsequent events into account. As Habermas puts it in his analysis of Danto’s position, historical events “cannot be represented without being related to other events that follow them in time. . . . Narrative accounts describe an event with the aid of categories in terms of which the event could not have been observed.”2 To illustrate this point, Habermas asks us to consider the claim that the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618 (LSS, 156). This statement presupposes the occurrence of subsequent events up to the Peace of Westphalia. Hence, “when we speak of the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, we are thinking about the events of the year 1618 from the retrospective point of view of a war that ended thirty years later” (LSS, 157). According to Danto, historical meaning always involves this kind of “retroactive realignment of the Past” (NK, 168). Historical meaning is always the outcome of a narrative structure that is imposed upon events from a subsequent position. This position is the present context of the historian. It is naive to assume that there can be a disinterested understanding of a historical event. To illustrate this point further, Danto asks us to imagine a machine that he calls “the Ideal Chronicler” (NK, 149). This machine records all events at the moment they occur and stores them for retrieval. Danto argues that the record of the Ideal Chronicler will always remain incomplete. For example, such a device will not be able to record, in 1618, the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War. According to Danto, there is nothing one might call a pure description in contrast with something else to be called an interpretation. Just to do history at all is to employ some overarching conception which goes beyond what is given. And to see this is to see that history as an imitation or duplication of the past is an impossible ideal. (NK, 115)

Danto draws rather skeptical conclusions based upon his analysis. In Narration and Knowledge, Danto argues that the imposition of a narrative

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organization on events “determined by the topical interests of this human being or that” means that historical research “involves us with an inexpugnable subjective factor” or “an element of sheer arbitrariness” (NK, 142). Kearney resists this kind of slide from narrativity to relativism, but he doesn’t do enough to articulate what lies between the extremes of absolute certainty and anything-goes relativism. Kearney argues that narrative must be combined with scientific evidence in the telling of history, but I worry that Kearney simply combines unhelpful extremes rather than genuinely moving beyond them (OS, 135–36). When Kearney’s focus on narrative begins to sound too relativistic, he points out that there must be a role for scientific truth and evidence in historical research (OS, 145–46). Nevertheless, he maintains that we cannot appeal to some absolute criterion of “pure facts” (OS, 148). For Kearney, we must acknowledge that history is mediated through narrative. Using the example of David Irving’s denial of the Holocaust, Kearney illustrates why both extremes are unhelpful. Kearney points out that some deniers of the Holocaust base their denials not on relativism—the argument that the history of the gas chambers is merely one narrative among others—but rather on the claim that historical accounts of the Holocaust are not objective enough (OS, 148). I share Kearney’s desire to develop a philosophical outlook between the extremes of absolute certainty and absolute relativism. In what follows, I supplement Kearney’s account by exploring Hans-Georg Gadamer’s argument that we can still distinguish between better and worse interpretations, although absolute certainty is ultimately unattainable.

Gadamer’s Criterion of Openness Whereas Kearney focuses on how social action and historical events become meaningful within the context of larger narratives, Gadamer focuses on the situatedness of the interpreter. These are two sides of the same coin. The idea of an interpretation-free description of some historical event requires the idea of the historian being able to “extinguish” the influence of his or her historical embeddedness. This other side of the coin is the focus of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer is critical of the Enlightenment prejudice against prejudice. One of Gadamer’s main claims in Truth and Method concerns the prejudiced character of all understanding.3 Gadamer focuses on how interpreters from different cultures or within different traditions of interpretation will understand the same

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text or text analogue, such as a historical event, differently because of the different questions, expectations, and interests that they bring to the process of interpretation. If all interpretations are conditioned in this way, then how can we be sure of the legitimacy of our interpretations? Like Kearney, Gadamer is aware of this problem. He responds by claiming that we cannot stick blindly to our own foremeanings about the thing if we want to understand the meaning of another. Of course, this does not mean that when we listen to someone or read a book we must forget all our foremeanings concerning the content and all our own ideas. All that is asked is that we remain open to the meaning of the other person. (TM, 268)

This openness is an aspect of “the fore-conception of completeness” (TM, 293–94). Since all interpretation is conditioned by the foremeanings of the interpreter, Gadamer argues that interpreters must assume that their texts consist of a unity of meaning; better interpretations succeed in integrating more parts of the text into a unified or coherent interpretation. Gadamer claims that the foreconception of completeness “implies not only this formal element—that a text should completely express its meaning—but also that what it says should be the complete truth” (TM, 294). There are two aspects, then, to the criterion Gadamer uses to distinguish good from bad interpretations. First, all relevant aspects of the text or text analogue must fit into a coherent interpretation. Second, given the prejudiced character of all understanding, only by being open to what the text is saying, and by being open to other interpretations of the text, will we be able to confirm or revise our prejudices. Better interpretations start from the assumption that we have something to learn from the texts we are interpreting, that we can be educated by the other interpretations of those texts. If we do not take seriously what the text and its interpretations are saying, then we will never place our own foremeanings at risk, and then we cannot be confident of the legitimacy of our interpretations. Gadamer talks of an openness to learning from texts, and the different interpretations of those texts, handed down to us by tradition, but surely there must be some limit to this openness. Habermas has developed a critique of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics along these lines (LSS, 172–74). Habermas argues that when it comes to the social sciences, an approach that advocates an openness to the interpretations of others is ignoring, or underestimating, the extent to which social and eco-

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nomic relations of domination may be distorting the self-understandings or interpretations of some of the participants in social and political dialogue. Paul Ricoeur takes a similar tack in Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences, arguing that in certain situations “the hermeneutics of selfunderstanding [must] take the detour of causal explanation.”4 Given the influence of Ricoeur on Kearney’s work, similar considerations likely motivate his desire to combine narrative truth and scientific truth.

Warnke’s Critical Standard In Legitimate Differences, Georgia Warnke articulates an alternative route, providing hermeneutics with a critical edge. Warnke argues that interpretive openness, when properly understood, might itself be sufficient to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate interpretations: The conditions of interpretive discussion already include criteria of openness that exclude those interpretations of our principles, history, and practices that serve to suppress the interpretations of others. We have no access to that which we are trying to understand except through our interpretations of it. Insofar as those interpretations are grounded in . . . historical horizons, we also have no access to a critical perspective on our own understanding . . . except by taking seriously interpretations that differ from our own. Hence, only by opening and maintaining access to alternative interpretations and by guaranteeing the availability of a critical purchase on our own understanding, can we assure ourselves of either its continued adequacy to the issues at stake or the ability to develop it in keeping with what those issues and their ongoing history demand. Interpretations that in their content require the suppression of other interpretations preclude just this guarantee.5

It is this last point that interests me. Kearney worries that an approach to historical research that emphasizes narrative may be unable to respond to so-called historians who deny the occurrence of the Holocaust (OS, 148). The point to notice about Holocaust deniers, though, is that they are Holocaust deniers. They are offering an interpretation of historical events not open to the voices of those who witnessed and lived to tell the world of this horror. The content of deniers’ interpretations ignores or suppresses the interpretations of others. The purveyors of these interpretations seek to shut down the only conditions that would allow them to feel confident about the adequacy of their interpretations. By drawing on

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Gadamer’s criterion of openness, Warnke provides us with an account that can acknowledge the narrativity of historical research but can still dismiss the claims of Holocaust deniers as illegitimate. As Warnke puts it, “any interpretation . . . the content of which leads to the exclusion or silencing of another interpretive voice must be rejected because it threatens or restricts the alternatives only against which we can continue to develop our own interpretations” (LD, 157).

Truth Commissions The philosophical problems raised by the denial of the Holocaust parallels the interpretive dilemmas faced by those coming to terms with the past in transitional political circumstances. Martha Minow points out that “the mass atrocities of the twentieth century, sadly, do not make it distinctive. More distinctive . . . [is] the search for and invention of collective forms of response.”6 One response has been the establishment of commissions such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Given Kearney’s conviction that “the untold life is not worth living,” this essay concludes by exploring some interpretive issues raised by truth commissions (OS, 156). The South African TRC provided a space for victims to tell stories of apartheid in their own words in a public, yet supportive, setting. These stories challenged official accounts of the past, which from a hermeneutic point of view are to be regarded as illegitimate. A complex tapestry of victims’ stories challenged those accounts that sought to deny human rights abuses during the apartheid regime. South Africa’s TRC was established during the negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy as part of a compromise between members of the National Party, who wanted a blanket amnesty for officials of the apartheid regime, and members of the African National Congress (ANC), who wanted the equivalent of Nuremberg trials against the former officials.7 The TRC was empowered to grant amnesty to individuals, but only if they disclosed the full details of their participation in human rights violations, and only if they could show that their actions were politically motivated. The perpetrators who applied for amnesty had to disclose the details of their atrocities in public and face questions from victims and their families (TRS, 148–49). Granting amnesty for truth was seen as essential if the new democratic regime was to achieve a full account of the apartheid regime. At the same time, one gets a sense that in the case of the South

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African TRC, many of those involved came to feel that the truth of South Africa’s history was unattainable. The TRC had a mandate to investigate human rights violations between 1960 and 1994, but two of those involved in writing up the commission’s final report admitted that, due to limited resources and time constraints, the picture presented in the report was far from complete.8 Other critics have argued that the focus on human rights violations meant that the TRC was bound to present a partial picture from the beginning. The TRC focused on political acts that violated human rights, and so it never dealt with the economic beneficiaries of the apartheid system. Women who bore the brunt of oppression through forced removals, past arrests, and other acts of systematic apartheid violence were not identified as victims. The stories of state or paramilitary attacks against female activists as well as the wives and partners of other victims were seldom told. The TRC’s focus on state repression deemphasized the complex nature of violence within communities, such as the attacks between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party between 1990 and 1994. Brandon Hamber argues that focusing on fatalities deemphasizes psychological and physical injuries that are part of “the intricate story of living in a repressive environment typified by extensive military patrols and constant surveillance.” Hamber suggests that the “so-called uncovering of the truth can, perhaps inevitably and even unconsciously, serve to obscure a number of other truths.”9 Still, Villa-Vicencio and Verwoerd, who were involved in writing up the final report, argue that even if the TRC did not establish a complete picture of what happened in the past, it managed to reduce the number of lies about apartheid that could be circulated unchallenged (CR, 289).10 A hermeneutic approach argues that interpretations of the past are illegitimate if they ignore, suppress, or deny the interpretive voices of others. A truth commission makes the most sense in responding to denials of a historical past. A number of commentators understand the “truth” of truth commissions as a response to lies and denials. In On Stories, Kearney seeks to articulate an account that combines forensic truth with narrative truth. These same versions of truth are referred to in the TRC’s final report11 as well as in the writings of Alex Boraine, the commission’s deputy chairperson (TRS, 151–52). Similarly, André du Toit argues that the TRC project involved two senses of truth: truth as a disclosure of political atrocities and “truth as acknowledgment.”12 Truth as acknowledgment involves challenging official denials of abuse as a means for restoring victims’ civic and human dignity. Du Toit points out that South Africa denied that it held political prisoners, denied it committed torture, and claimed that deaths in detention were the result of natural causes. Du Toit argues that

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the effective refusal to acknowledge the existence of . . . [atrocities] in public amounts to a basic demonstration of political power. For the victims, this actually is a redoubling of the basic violation: the literal violation consists of the actual pain, suffering, and trauma visited upon them; the political violation consists in the refusal (publicly) to acknowledge it. The latter amounts to a denial of the human and civic dignity of the victims. For the perpetrators, it likewise serves to define their power: not only are they in a position to do terrible things to others, but they can do so with impunity. (MF, 133)

Du Toit argues that letting the victims tell their stories in a nonadversarial setting and having their stories publicly acknowledged allowed for the restoration of the victims’ civic and human dignity.

Truth Commissions and Northern Ireland Richard Kearney has written extensively on the social and political challenges facing contemporary Northern Ireland.13 If it focuses on challenging denials, then a truth commission might have a constructive role to play in Northern Ireland. A main way of dealing with the past in Northern Ireland has been the 1997 establishment of a Northern Ireland Commission for Victims. Kenneth Bloomfield headed this commission, and he completed his report We Will Remember Them in April 1998. Critics claim that this report paid too much attention to victims of paramilitary violence and not enough to the victims of state violence.14 This is seen as a result of the fact that the commission was established and run by officials of the British state. While many Irish nationalists and republicans, in particular, interpret the Northern Ireland troubles as part of a national liberation struggle, British officials and unionist politicians refuse to interpret the troubles as anything other than a clear-cut struggle between state security forces and terrorists. In 2001, there was a disagreement in Northern Ireland’s assembly about who should be classified as victims of the troubles. Iris Robinson, of the Democratic Unionist Party, declared that victims should not include those killed by the security forces. She said, “By victims I mean those who have suffered as a result of terrorist violence.”15 Since truth commissions challenge denials, this is the kind of imbalance to which a truth commission in Northern Ireland could respond. During the last thirty years, more than 3,500 people have died as a result of political violence in Northern Ireland. More than 3,000 of these deaths were caused by paramilitaries, but about 350 died as a result of actions by the security forces under disputed circumstances. Maggie Beirne of the

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Campaign for the Administration of Justice points out that paramilitary organizations usually claim responsibility for the deaths they cause. Hence, the primary role of a truth commission in Northern Ireland should be to challenge government denials of wrongdoing in the case of the 350 deaths caused by security forces. However, she admits that it would appear strange to the general public if there were investigations of deaths by the security forces, but no investigation of the more than 3,000 other deaths.16 Truth commissions inevitably face accusations of partiality by those who do not like their mandates and findings. One way the South African TRC responded to this worry was by attempting to forge a common or shared memory of South Africa’s past (TRS, 153). Providing a space for officially acknowledgement of a plurality of views about the past is a better response to worries about partiality, especially in the case of Northern Ireland. Part of the reason why South Africans focused on forging a common memory was because they saw the South African TRC as part of a nationbuilding project. Alex Boraine lists the pursuit of “national unity” as one of the goals of the TRC. Indeed, the act of Parliament that gave birth to the TRC was called the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Bill. No such concern need inform the creation of a Northern Ireland truth commission. Northern Ireland’s Belfast Agreement of 1998 was a transnational, rather than a national, agreement. It did not establish a new set of national political institutions. It created political institutions on the British-Irish archipelago that gave expression to the conflicting national aspirations of Northern Irish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists. While Northern Ireland will remain British for the foreseeable future, new North-South and East-West institutions dilute the Britishness of Northern Ireland. These institutions express and protect northern nationalists’ sense of Irish identity within a British Northern Ireland. While Northern Ireland may one day be united with the Republic of Ireland, these same North-South and East-West institutions have the potential to dilute the Irishness of a future united Ireland.17 We therefore have two reasons to be critical of the focus on forging a common or shared memory in the case of South Africa. First, if the primary role of a truth commission is to challenge denials, then the attempt to come up with an authoritative account of the past asks too much of a truth commission. Second, the attempt to forge a common memory seems particularly inappropriate in the case of Northern Ireland, given the transnational nature of the new political dispensation in the region. In the case of Northern Ireland, plurality, rather than commonality or singularity, is the most appropriate response to worries about partiality. One striking feature of different nationalist and unionist accounts of Northern Ireland’s history is that they tend to be histories of victimhood that see their own side as the exclusive victims. Encouraging a plu-

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rality of voices to speak about Northern Ireland’s past would winnow out illegitimate accounts by challenging histories of exclusive victimhood. While more than one account of Northern Ireland’s past may be legitimate, the only legitimate accounts are those that recognize that members of the other community have also been victimized. By providing an official space for victims to tell their own stories, a Northern Irish truth commission could accomplish the following results: First, such a commission could uncover more information about the high number of unionist victims of republican paramilitary murders. Second, a truth commission could respond to the concerns of the relatives of those killed by the security forces in disputed circumstances and for which there have been only four convictions.18 Third, a truth commission could investigate allegations that members of the security forces colluded with loyalist paramilitary organizations. Fourth, a truth commission could officially acknowledge the extent to which northern nationalists have themselves been victimized by paramilitary groups from their own side.

Conclusion A hermeneutic approach to dealing with the past in Northern Ireland encourages initiatives that are less concerned with coming up with the true, canonical, and complete account of what happened in the past and are more concerned with challenging accounts of what happened that ignore or deny the voices of others. Initiatives such as the victims’ hearings at the South African TRC have the potential to challenge illegitimate interpretations of Northern Ireland’s history, but this is not the same as coming up with a finished and uncontested account of the past. Metaphors of openness rather than metaphors of closure are more appropriate when it comes to characterizing the goal of a Northern Irish truth commission. As Kearney puts it, the storytelling will continue. When it comes to dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, the goal is figuring out how to “turn the page without closing the book.”19 Such a way of dealing with the past, then, would help us to distinguish between good and bad interpretations of history.

Notes An early version of this essay was presented as a commentary on Richard Kearney’s “Narrative Matters” at the Morality and the Arts Conference at the University of California, Riverside. “Narrative Matters” is the concluding chapter of On Stories.

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1. The original 1965 text of Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History is reprinted in chapters 1 to 12 of Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Henceforth cited as NK. 2. Jürgen Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences, trans. S. W. Nicholsen and J. A. Stark (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1988), 155. Henceforth cited as LSS. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. and rev. Joel C. Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 276–77. Henceforth cited as TM. 4. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 264–65. 5. Warnke, Legitimate Differences (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 36. Henceforth cited as LD. 6. Minow, “The Hope for Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?” in Truth v. Justice, ed. Robert Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 235. 7. Alex Boraine, “Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: The Third Way,” in Truth v. Justice, 143–44. Henceforth cited as TRS. 8. Brandon Hamber, “Remembering to Forget: Issues to Consider When Establishing Structures for Dealing with the Past,” chap. 6 in Past Imperfect: Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland, Guatemala, and South Africa, ed. Brandon Hamber (Derry/Londonderry: INCORE, 1999). Quotation on page 4. The entire book is available from INCORE at http://lugh.incore.ulst.ac.uk/home/publication/ research/dwtp/index.html (accessed May 21, 2006). 9. Charles Villa-Vicencio and Wilhelm Verwoerd, “Constructing a Report: Writing Up the ‘Truth,’ ” in Truth v. Justice, 279. Henceforth cited as CR. 10. See also Michael Ignatieff, “Articles of Faith,” Index on Censorship, 25, no. 5 (1996): 110–22. Ignatieff claims all that “a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse” (113). 11. South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Final Report (Cape Town: South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998), part 1, chap. 5, 110–14. 12. Du Toit, “The Moral Foundations of the South African TRC: Truth as Acknowledgment and Justice as Recognition,” in Truth v. Justice, 132. Henceforth cited as MF. 13. See, for example, Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland. 14. Michael Bradley, “Additional Aid for Conflict Victims Welcomed,” Irish Times, April 4, 2001. 15. “Truth Commissions: A Comparative Assessment, An Interdisciplinary Discussion Held at Harvard Law School in May 1996,” in Truth Commissions: A Comparative Assessment, ed. Henry J. Steiner (Cambridge, Mass.: The World Peace Foundation, 1997), part 3, p. 2. 16. Mapping Troubles-Related Deaths in Northern Ireland, 1969–1998, 2nd ed., ed. Marie Therese Fay, Mike Morrissey, and Marie Smyth (Derry/Londonderry: INCORE, 1998), 28. 17. For more on the transnational aspects of the Belfast Agreement, see

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Jerry Burke, “On Walzer’s Hermeneutics of Justice, Gadamer’s Criterion of Openness, and Northern Ireland’s Belfast Agreement,” Irish Political Studies 14 (1999): 1–22. 18. Brandon Hamber, “A Truth Commission for Northern Ireland?” in Past Imperfect, 2. 19. Bill Rolston, Turning the Page Without Closing the Book: The Right to Truth in the Irish Context (Dublin: Irish Reporter Publications, 1996).

Part 3

The Narrative Imaginary

Double Trouble: Narrative Imagination as a Carnival Dragon David Wood

In “Narrative Imagining,” the epilogue to his Poetics of Imagining, Richard Kearney revisits the ethical challenge posed by what he calls narrative imagination to the extreme representatives of irreferential postmodernism (Baudrillard and Faurisson) and also to the fractured discursivism of Lyotard, Foucault, and Vattimo. His strategy is to focus on the ethical baby being thrown out with the postmetaphysical bathwater. The central argument is that narrative understanding—especially but not exclusively in its literary sense—is the handmaiden of a certain phronésis, offering us imaginative variations of the human condition while allowing us an idea of what sense might be made of a human life. To the extent that it broadens our notions of the connectedness of our own life, it allows us to construct our own identity through the “synthesis of heterogeneity.” To the extent that it offers us access to the lives of others, it educates our analogical and emphatic capacities to relate to others. Kearney gives us a hermeneutic feast, to which Aristotle, Ricoeur, Nussbaum, Kant, Arendt, MacIntyre, Taylor, Benhabib, and even Joyce are invited guests. Narrative imagination supplies a sense of the kind of connectedness and interconnectedness of selfhood that would make promising and ethical responsibility to the other possible, taking the self as a socius within and without: “The narrative model of identity thus revives the age-old virtue of self-knowledge, not as some self-regarding ego but as an examined life freed from narcissism and solipsism through a recognition of our dialogical interdependence vis-à-vis others” (PI, 248). Kearney’s own powers of “synthesizing the heterogeneous,” weaving a common (though uncommonly plausible) story out of these threads of narrativity, is quite exceptional. What I would like to focus on, however, is the way he deals with what we might call the dark side, the underside, of narrative. I will first discuss his account in these theoretical texts, and then 131

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look at the way the dark side gets treated in his own narratives, which will, I believe, offer further support for some of my doubts.

Kearney’s acknowledgement of the problems and difficulties of narrative is impressive and important. But the first major concern I have is one that Kearney notices at various times but does not obviously resolve. In the epilogue to Poetics of Imagining, it appears as the problem of flexibility: “A fundamental fluidity and openness pertains to narrative reading once we are prepared to recognize that it is always something made and remade. Societies which admit that they constitute themselves through an ongoing process of narrative are unlikely to degenerate into self-righteousness” (PI, 249). In “Narrative and the Experience of Remembrance,” he makes a similar claim more strongly, that this openness and indeterminacy follows from the recognition that one’s identity is fundamentally narrative in form. He concludes with a cautious “in principle”: “This is why, at least in principle, the tendency of a nation toward xenophobic . . . nationalism can be resisted by its own narrative resources to imagine itself otherwise.”1 Kearney will shortly point out how narrative is central to the “conflict of interpretation” and does not necessarily lead to healing. But it is important to stress this rather than underplay it. Those who tell and repeat identity stories, whether they be Zionists or Orangemen, are clearly aware of the narrative dimension of their sense of identity; but the idea that such narratives might be revised or rewritten in such a way as to allow reconciliation with a counternarrative is not only not implied by a narrative base identity, it may precisely be excluded. Identification with a particular narrative, even acknowledgement of the fact of others’ narratives, may lead to war just as easily as to peace—the desire to kill those who tell a different story. What this suggests is that narrative consciousness and the kind of imagination that Kearney shows narrative can feed are nonetheless logically and often practically quite distinct. The move that allows him to connect the two is a specific consciousness of narrativity, a grasp of oneself and others as narratively constructed identities. But this consciousness of narrativity is not a narrative consciousness. Kearney variously describes it as flexibility, recognition, a certain transcendence— imaginative capacities, in other words, distinguishable from narrative that only come into a temporary alliance with narrative, like two men in a carnival dragon costume. My question, then, is this: Is narrative imagination more of a name for the fortuitous overlap of narrative and imagination, masquerading as an elaboration of the ethical responsibility of narrative? Is not narrative naturally a creature with two heads, good and evil? Kearney’s way of dealing with this problem is to subject explicitly the

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narrative self to self-questioning, “never to forget its origins in narrativity,” to endorse the twin importance of the hermeneutics of affirmation and suspicion, and finally to wrap up these responses in the narrative paradox. The narrative paradox is that objections to narrative draw on the narrative form to make their point, whether through the stories that Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud use to teach us about the ulterior ends served by the stories we tell ourselves, or the role of Edward Said’s counternarrative, the corrective role of subversive narratives, and so on. Kearney even yokes in Samuel Beckett’s strategies of decompositing narrative: “Even when narrative imagination is narrating the death of narrative imagination, it is still narrating” (PI, 251). What follows are some of my worries with this position. First, I wonder whether the way in which the idea of narrative imagination is coming to the rescue here is not an attempt to try to build imagination into narrative rather than allowing this relation to be recursively problematic. The production of counternarratives does not merely confirm narrativity; it reopens the space of narrative contestation, a space not governed by narrative but by polemos. As I see it, narrative imagination is an attempt to recover the power of narrativity to stage this conflict. Second, Kearney interprets the narrative paradox as a confirmation of narrative, but I think this involves a reduction of the performativity of such paradoxes, and it closes down serious questions about the role of narrative form. Regarding performativity, Beckett tells stories to subvert storytelling. How does this confirm narrativity? Could it not be an ironic demonstration of our dependency on narrative form or a dramatization of the pathos of narrativity in a world that ultimately does not make sense? Could not “narrative” function like a ladder one pushes away once used, or a persistent conventional frame containing forces that destabilize the very idea of the “synthesis of the heterogeneous”? It is this that I want to explore in a brief look at Kearney’s pair of novels, Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level. I will try to show that these narratives fail to contain the issues they raise, issues that ultimately contest the status of narrative. If Kearney had not complicated the picture in his political writings, I would be tempted to speak of his double existence, as a philosopher and a novelist. Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level form a pair, a double achievement. I am tempted to recount their plots so that those of us for whom the pleasure of reading these books is still to come may know what they are about. Why do I hesitate? Not just for fear of spoiling their reading pleasure. In fact, I hesitate because it would seem to suggest that the plot, the narrative core, is what is essential to these texts, thus (apparently) trapping me again in the narrative paradox. The traditional alternative, of course, would be to discuss the themes with which the narrative is occupied. We

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can give minimal satisfaction to both these approaches by quoting some of the jacket material: From Sam’s Fall: “After a happy childhood in Cork in the 60s, twins Jack and Sam Toland become boarders at the Columbanus Abbey school. Jack is favored by its charismatic abbot, yet it is Sam who stays on as a novice, enlisted in the abbot’s quest for the lost universal language of God. But as his twin discovers, Sam struggles to resist the allure of Jack’s lover, Raphaelle, and his soul becomes a prize to be fought over by equally determined antagonists.”2 From Walking at Sea Level: “Twelve years after the death of his twin brother, Jack Toland is still running from the past. Estranged from his Swiss wife, Raphaelle, and with a university post in Montreal, his thesis on the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher John Toland has stalled and he’s drinking heavily. Then, out of the blue, Raphaelle summons him to Geneva to look after their young daughter and promptly disappears. Jack’s subsequent pursuit of her takes him from Switzerland to Paris, and on a journey through history, legend, and myth which forces him to confront his twin’s ghost, and delivers the missing piece in the puzzle of John Toland’s life.”3 Each story, as such, is driven by a search, a quest, for both knowledge and self-knowledge. In each case, a complex interweaving of dreams, traumatic memory, and various devices (such as diaries) for rendering the past and the experience of the other make these writings triumphs of temporal layering and interweaving. The fundamental dimensions of narrative imagination are demonstrated: identity is constructed through narrative; narrative “synthesizes the heterogeneous”; the lives of others illuminate our own lives (both close to us, and those more distant, such as Carpocrates, Gallen, Columbanus, and Toland, who are all real historical figures whose theology is brought to life in these pages). In addition, the border crossings between historical, literary, and lived narrativity are brilliantly negotiated. All this is to say that Kearney’s novels mirror his accounts of narrative imagination in The Wake of Imagination, Poetics of Imagining, Poetics of Modernity, and “Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance.” But what is the status of the narrative frame? The force of the narrative paradox is that it suggests that there is (quite properly) no escape from narrativity, and one suspects that the reason for this has to do with the temporal articulation of human life. We may rightly be relieved from a certain poverty of presence by such accounts, which draw on the synthetic power of both language and imagination to produce unities of sense out of heterogeneous elements. It will rightly be said that certain sorts of truth only arise through such syntheses of difference. The idea of a good life, a fulfilled life, only makes sense after such narrative syntheses.

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At this point, it is tempting to admit that there are certain dangers here of which we need to be aware, such as allowing narrative to be co-opted by intolerance. The suggestion is that it is imagination that will provide the prophylactic antidote, assuming, that is, that imagination is not equally subject to the same dark forces. Let us just remind ourselves that we do not need to fall into the narrative paradox in introducing these novels. We could describe them thematically as meditations on duality, history, and religion, or on “the attempt to overcome duality,” or “the battle against oblivion,” and we could add to these themes those of jealousy, the passion of asceticism, and so on. We could at this point attempt to resurrect something of the spirit of Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, for whom time and narrativity are something of an illusion generated by the articulation of powerful binary oppositions: born from man versus born from the earth, good versus evil, life versus death, and so on. The response that both Ricoeur and Kearney (and indeed I myself) have made to such a view is that the significance of these binary elements is itself inseparable from what Heidegger called our being-towards-death, such that the true illusion is thinking that one has banished narrative or reduced it to an illusion. However, there is something about this structuralist approach that still haunts our thinking, and I think it allows us to open up a far more disturbing possibility than Barthes or Lévi-Strauss ever contemplated. I want to argue this point in a perverse reading of Kearney’s book Walking at Sea Level. I mentioned earlier the theme of duality. But it is not a theme in this book; it is an obsession, a contagious obsession. It is my contention that the narrative success of both books may also be their philosophical weakness, that they subordinate the question of the double to the narrative logic of the will to truth, and that this gives us an illusion of resolution. The real secret of Kearney’s (and Toland’s) battle against the double is that it is a battle against another kind of time, a time transversal to that of narrative, and perhaps also another kind of imagination. The double is the engine of development in both novels. Jack and Sam Toland are twins, rival brothers, hence themselves examples (doubles) of all those other fated twin brothers that stud history. Fate and accident bring about a reversal in their relative fortunes. When Sam drowns, Jack is haunted by Sam’s research project, Sam’s love for his wife, and his uncertainty over the paternity of his daughter. Raphaelle, his photographer wife, in love with both men, becomes obsessed with the question of twins, anthropologically, historically, and mythically. These characters are also obsessed with the way this issue of the twin permeates theology, especially the Irish tradition. Is God just on the side of good, or does he also include evil? Is God one, or doubled? Is God’s spirit opposed to matter, or, as in

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Toland’s pantheism, identical to matter in space? If evil is part of God, what does that require of us humans? It is not just the characters who are obsessed by the double; so too is the author. One can hardly turn a page without the double appearing somewhere, whether it’s Jack’s shrouded copulation with Charmaine Le Monde in a quiet part of an airport, in which they resemble a “doublebacked beast,” or the leitmotifs of two fish in the aquarium, two trees, a newspaper report about Siamese twins, and so forth. At the same time, temporal duality surfaces repeatedly in the theme of repetition: Toland’s revival of the twin-God idea, various real and imaginary repetitions of the theme of drowning, the return to St. Gallen and the return to the library. In addition, there is Jack’s addiction (to cocaine, alcohol, and cigarettes) in which a repetition-compulsion is tied directly to the question of oblivion and death, finally breaking up his marriage to Raphaelle. Finally, there is the conceptual thematic pulse of deception, double cross, duplicity, betrayal, two-timing, and so on. As I see it, Kearney sets up his novels in such a way that despite the extravagant bursting-forth at every turn of duality, the double, and the structure of repetition, the uncanny unsettling transversal logic that this ushers in is dealt with, settled, resolved. Jack does discover the truth that Emilie is his daughter, that one has to learn to live with the hole in being, and that forgiveness involves a mutual understanding of our deep fallibility, which nicely illustrates the central theme of “Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance,” the ethical significance of witnessing, attestation, and discovering the truth about the past. But the narrative resolution of Walking at Sea Level falls short, I believe, of the pathos of Beckett’s “We can’t go on. We must go on” (quoted approvingly by Kearney). Consider, for example, the resolution of the book’s intellectual adventure. It turns out that John Toland, the real seventeenth-century author of Christianity Not Mysterious, on whom Jack Toland is writing his doctoral dissertation, is a secret reviver of the Carpocratian heresy, which argues that it is necessary to do evil to experience all sides of God’s creation, in order to be able to live fully in his image. Jack also ensures that his contemporary followers who run a child porn ring are jailed. Here I think we have a successful narrative resolution but a philosophically disappointing one. By taking an extreme case, it suggests that we can indeed (and must) draw the line between good and evil. But extreme cases make bad law. The theological disputes documented in these books are collectively more engaging and challenging, including the Carpocratian heresy itself, than the resolution Kearney produces to the problems they raise. An important task for another essay would be to show that the philosophical (and psychoanalytical) significance of the question of the

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double—I have in mind of course Freud’s discussion in “The Uncanny” and Otto Rank’s book The Double—is such that it cannot be resolved in narrative form. Kearney’s philosophical thrust is (eventually) to subordinate phantasy to reality; undecidability to the witnessing of truth; doubt to trust; and the time of the event, of interruption, to that of continuity and synthesis. But my sense of what he succeeds in doing, malgré soi, in his novels is to show that narrative, if anything, is a frame that can effectively dramatize the illusion of resolution. The struggle persists between a narrative imagination (in which narrative is supplemented by imagination and imagination is controlled by narrative), and what I call a certain negative capability, which can allow that there may be (equally) an ethical issue in allowing the voices of ghosts to continue to speak, in acknowledging the power of forces that would interrupt the progressive story of a life, and finally may put in question some of the power of synthesis. It may be, though this suggestion would have the drawback of introducing a disturbing note of reconciliation, that the true conclusion of Kearney’s second book, in which Jack and Raphaelle find a way of going on, is that the force of a certain narrativity has been purged, and that “living on” is precisely to have learned to live “with” and not just against a negative capability, one for which narrative would no longer operate as the ground of intelligibility, but as the frame within which synthetic unity is constantly challenged by transversal forms, powers, and relations that put in question the very idea of narrative identity. Such constant challenges would be the marks of the time of the uncanny, itself a mark of a disruptive imagination.

Notes 1. Kearney, “Narrative and the Experience of Remembrance,” in Questioning Ethics, ed. M. Dooley and R. Kearney (New York: Routledge, 1998), 26. 2. Kearney, Sam’s Fall (London: Sceptre, 1995). 3. Kearney, Walking at Sea Level (London: Sceptre, 1997).

Heretic Adventures Terry Eagleton

The eighteenth-century Irish philosopher John Toland led a life far stranger than fiction. Spy, occultist, freethinker (in fact, he invented the term), and radical republican, his closest literary analogues are the chancers, picaros, and peripatetic rogues that throng the pages of his contemporary Dissenting colleague Daniel Defoe. In fact, Toland and Defoe reveal some intriguing affinities. But even Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack are outshone in sheer heterodoxy and bravado by this extraordinary Irishspeaking shepherd, said to be the bastard offspring of a whore and a spoiled priest, and probably of an ancient bardic family. From this dismally inauspicious origin, Toland ended up a renowned European intellectual respected by Leibniz and admired by Voltaire, a seminal influence on the philosophies of the French Enlightenment. Known fondly to his Donegal neighbors as “Owen of the Books,” and rather less fondly as a sixteen-year-old renegade to Protestantism, he became a militant Presbyterian in Glasgow; a consort of freethinkers in Leiden; an intellectual bruiser in the coffeehouses of Oxford; a literary hack and habitué of radical circles in London; and a protégé in Dublin of the great Robert Molesworth, patron of the Irish intellectual left. It is also possible that he had an affair with the sister of George I. Bumptious, intemperate, and pathologically indiscreet, Toland is said by some to have invented the terms pantheist, North Britain, and West Britain, along with freethinker. He dabbled in hermeticism, mastered some nine or ten languages, and roamed at large in a louche underworld of religious heretics, subfusc political operators, and militant republicans. He was probably a Freemason, shared with W. B. Yeats a fondness for Rosicrucianism, and might also have belonged to a shady Dutch crew known as the Knights of Jubilation. An inveterate wanderer, he lived it up for a while in Berlin at the court of the Electress Sophia, was probably a secret agent for the British government, and along with Swift and Defoe spent some time on the payroll of a Whig politician as a propagandist. He was entrusted in 1701 to bear the Act of Succession to Hanover, thus playing a

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modest but historic role in securing the British throne for Protestantism. It is unlikely that his Inishowen neighbors would have greeted this contribution to history with much enthusiasm. The notion of a stable identity appealed to Toland no more than it does to postmodernism. A cosmopolitan vagrant, he reinvented himself perpetually and occasionally passed himself off as an Englishman, though he was in fact a considerable Celtic scholar, impressively learned in Irish letters, archaeology, and ancient history. At Oxford, he developed plans for an Irish dictionary and comparative study of Irish and Breton, and worked on an old Armagh manuscript stolen from a Parisian library by a spoiled priest crony. He also seems to have exploited the Irish monastic network in Europe as a handy set of hostelries and touted a brand of early Irish Christianity along with a more scandalous vein of rationalism and materialism. One of his feet was firmly planted in the world of Whiggish realpolitik, while the other remained lodged in far more heterodox, esoteric circles. A champion of Judaism and an apologist for Islam, he was an eccentric mixture of plain-speaking rationalism and sibylline occultism. Toland’s best-known work, Christianity Not Mysterious, had the honor of being burned no less than twice by the public hangman and sent its author scrambling hastily into exile. In a recently published edition of the text, Richard Kearney remarks on what he sees as Toland’s typically Irish doubleness: “at once Irish and non-Irish, Gaelic-speaking and Englishspeaking, Catholic by birth and deist by choice, native and cosmopolitan, devotee of ancient Celtic sects and champion of Enlightenment reason, inventor of countless pseudonyms yet never forgetful of his original Irish name.”1 Some years earlier, Kearney wrote in The Irish Mind (a book title that some of the less-enlightened English find mildly oxymoronic) of the typical Irish act of intellect as holding fast to a both/and rather than an either/or as paradoxical and inclusive rather than rigorously binary. It is a claim that brings together Kearney’s Irish provenance with his enthusiasm for such continental avant-gardisms as Derridean deconstruction. Not all both/ands, however, are to be celebrated. They must be submitted to a binary logic, with the more positive distinguished from the more noxious. There is, for example, the both/and of the Gnostic heresy, which sees God himself as deconstructively doubled between good and evil and holds in its more flamboyant form that the path of depravity and debauchery is thus just as valid an approach to him as the way of sainthood. You can win God by losing him, snuggle down in his all-inclusive bosom by scampering off on the road to perdition. This is a strain of thought that runs in diluted form from Charles-Pierre Baudelaire and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, T. S. Eliot, and Graham

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Greene: better perhaps to be evil, which is at least a kind of inverted intimacy with the supreme good, than to fall below such imposing metaphysical pinnacles in the trough of mere petty-bourgeois moralism. A particularly sinister subcurrent of Gnosticism runs throughout Kearney’s superbly accomplished novel Walking at Sea Level (1997), though it would be spoiling the fun to reveal quite how John Toland, himself a mysteriously dual figure, finds his own double in the character Jack Toland, the raddled, semialcoholic, and emotionally disheveled Irish physicist in Kearney’s book. Based in Montreal, where he is researching his namesake while consoling himself for a messy divorce with a stereotypically long-legged lover, Jack chases across Europe in search of his missing ex-wife, Raphaelle, and becomes caught up in an exotic world of twins, Gnostic sects, antinomianism, Irish monasteries, pedophilia, and a painful personal rebirth. Walking at Sea Level is an absorbing intellectual thriller, crammed with offbeat ideas and eerily disturbing subcurrents, triumphantly demonstrating that the phrase “philosophical novel” is far less of an oxymoron than “military intelligence.” If Kearney knows a thing or two about Anselm and Augustine, he is also a dab hand at capturing the sudden scorch of whiskey on the back of a raw throat. For such a searching, complex narrative, the treatment is engagingly light, deft, and unobtrusively witty. Instead of feeding us unprocessed slabs of philosophy, Kearney cunningly conveys, say, Toland’s views on matters such as his hair after lovemaking, which would still smell of stale marijuana. In a rare act of a coupling of its own, the book combines some remarkably subtle reflections with a fastpaced, vividly realized plot. This is a meticulously plotted text, as full of intricate interconnections as the mind of a paranoiac, or, in fact, the Spinozist theories of Toland himself. It was Sigmund Freud who remarked that paranoia was the nearest thing to philosophy. This web of capillary connections doesn’t always make for realism, but the flouting of realism has an ironic resonance to it. There is a good deal of nothing in the book, in a venerable Irish tradition from John Scottus Eriugena to Flann O’Brien. The Tipperary novelist Laurence Sterne once gravely observed that he had a great respect for nothingness, “considering what worse things there are in the world,”2 and this novel is brim with different kinds of vacancy: angst, vortices, an absent wife, booze-induced blackouts, black holes of the psyche or the cosmos, the death of a brother, the “nulling” or deadening of a body part, and nonevents like a sexual relationship that never happened. It is a work full of secrets and intimations, a kind of intellectual equivalent of the body-in-the-library mystery, which springs a devastating final surprise. If Kearney’s novel is stuffed with nothingness, it is also populated by

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twins. Doublings, doppelgängers, compulsive repetitions, and uncanny mirror images lie at the heart of the plot and the book’s more cerebral musings. There is, for example, the love-hate relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. This is a work all about heresy, a topic of concern mostly to the orthodox. There is a great deal of religious obsession in Ireland; it is just that some of it takes the form of atheism. The most tedious mirror imaging in the country today is that between nonbelievers who noisily reject a brand of Christianity to which no self-respecting person would give the time of day in the first place and the church responsible for converting a gospel of emancipation into this grisly parody. Irish atheists can thus buy their rebellion on the cheap, which might be rather less easy had they been allowed by their ecclesial opposites to encounter an intellectually attractive, politically challenging version of the Christian gospel. Walking at Sea Level makes no concession to such boring binaries. It is a biblical work, laced with quotations from the Psalms and the Canticles, but in the finest of Irish theological traditions, it is also quirky, un-Roman, philosophically curious, and heretically adventurous. It registers the human perils of heresy as well as its spiritual allures. In an honorable lineage of Irish letters, it is sophisticatedly cosmopolitan yet rooted in moral reality. Kearney is himself a Toland look-alike: both are philosophers, both hail from the Irish provinces, and both combine an inwardness with their native traditions with an enthusiasm for avant-garde Europe. Kearney is not the offspring of a prostitute and a spoiled priest, but no analogy is perfect.

Notes 1. Kearney, “John Toland: An Irish Philosopher?” in Christianity Not Mysterious: Text, Associated Works, and Critical Essays, ed. Philip McGuinness, Alan Harrison, and Richard Kearney (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1997), 207–22. 2. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 520.

Beyond Postmodernism: Reflections on Richard Kearney’s Trilogy Jeffrey A. Barash

The works that constitute Richard Kearney’s trilogy, Philosophy at the Limit (On Stories, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, and The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion), deal, from different perspectives, with experiences of extremity that “reside at the edge of our conventional understanding, seeking to address phenomena beyond the strict frontiers of reason alone in efforts to imagine new possibilities of saying and being” (OS, 157n2). His trilogy, in short, is inspired by the conviction that, in the face of such apparently inexplicable and unthinkable experiences, narrative is of supreme importance. Kearney argues for the central role of telling in the ongoing quest to confer meaning on our disjointed world, whether the telling involves the story of Freud’s Dora, the case of Steven Dedalus, or the historical narrative of Schindler in On Stories; the interpretation of sacred narrative in The God Who May Be; or the confrontation with radical otherness in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. If, as Kearney is the first to point out, the disjointedness of our contemporary world is due in large measure to a human condition bounded by extreme and apparently inexplicable situations, namely God, death, and radical otherness, we belong at the same time to a postmodern context in which the disarray is partly of our own making, the disarray of relentless and ever more rapid change; of an ever-greater threat of biological, chemical, or nuclear means of mass destruction; of a global sense of uprootedness amid an unprecedented population explosion and urban drift, accompanied by impassioned persuasiveness of religious fundamentalism, if not fanaticism. The unprecedented disarray of our postmodern condition has, for better or for worse, been accompanied by what Kearney aptly terms “hyper-advanced telecommunications and digital data flows in an . . . emerging megapolis of expanding velocity and immediacy,” which have dislodged traditional narratives as they have begun 142

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replacing the “old mnemonic, epistolary, and print modes of expression” (OS, 126). This seems to confirm what had been foreseen by philosophers such as Nietzsche or Heidegger and presents itself as the postmodern fulfillment of the collapse of the traditional foundations of the philosophical subject (the cogito, the ego, or the spirit) as a counterpart to the eclipse of the protagonist in the traditional epic and novel. But does all of this condemn the narrative as such to a loss of potency? According to Kearney’s bold argument, the contrary holds sway: our sense of disarray calls upon us to reinterpret ourselves and the meaning of the lives we live by relearning to tell our experience in light of the sacred texts and grand narratives whose symbolic significance has lost nothing of its latent force. The central problem is the interpretation through which symbolic contents can be liberated and made to speak to a postmodern world that risks turning a deaf ear. I will explore the trilogy’s unifying theme—stories that interpret the extremities of experience—focusing on the work that lies closest to my own concerns, The God Who May Be. In the opening pages of The God Who May Be, Kearney raises the question concerning the interpretation of the sacred in a world where traditional presuppositions concerning the subject, the cogito, or spirit, self-assured in the conviction concerning divine presence as the guarantor of ultimate, metaphysical truth, have forfeited their persuasiveness. Kearney asks, “What kind of Divinity comes after metaphysics?” (GMB, 2). This “after” is related to the postmetaphysical and postreligious, constituting the frame of contemporary postmodernism. As Kearney acknowledges in the introduction to Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, “postmodernism is a contentious and somewhat confused term” (SGM, 11). Let me proceed by clarifying what I take to be the main strains of postmodernism. Traditional metaphysical approaches to God, namely the onto-theology characteristic of Scholastic discourse, insisted that God’s being is the ultimately real Being in a hierarchy of beings. However far onto-theology might have ventured later from Scholasticism, it is predominantly characterized by the way in which, right up through the modern period, it reckons with God as the supreme ontological reality. At the dawn of the modern epoch, Descartes inaugurated modern onto-theology by conceiving the reality of God as an infinite subject guaranteeing ultimate truths through which experience can attain an indubitable sense. It was Heidegger who most clearly identified the movement of modern thought in the West—from Descartes to Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche— with a gradual eclipse of this role of the divine subject; here, according to Heidegger’s insight, which ushered in what may be qualified as our postmodern frame, Kant’s relegation of the Godhead to the ethereal realm of the thing-in-itself and Hegel’s identification of absolute spirit with the

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immanent realm of world history are among many preparations for the eclipse of the God of onto-theology. On a deeper level, this eclipse signified, above all, the end of the onto-theological assumption of divine omnipresence as the guarantor of metaphysical stability at the foundation of human experience. Kearney is attentive to the lessons that we can learn from Heidegger’s critical approach to the traditional marriage between metaphysical speculation and theology, which, Kearney notes, opens the field for his own conception of the “God who may be” (GMB, 91–92). Without refusing the modern legacy of secularization and the flight of traditional gods of onto-theology, Kearney nonetheless seeks inspiration in the legacy of the monotheistic religions of revelation, which we must learn to recount, and thus to interpret, in a new way. The originality of his approach in The God Who May Be lies in the perspicacity with which he seeks to renew another kind of interpretation reaching back to Nicholas Cusanus and that he describes as the “onto-eschatological” approach to God in terms of possibility. Here we are offered not an examination of God as highest actuality residing in an ongoing ontological presence, but an approach to the Divinity as persona requiring ongoing reelucidation and reinterpretation—the God, indeed, who may be. It is this original conception of eschatology, the enigma of last things pointing toward God as possibility, that inspires the examination of the extremities of experience in the work as a whole. Moreover, the call for the ongoing reinterpretation required by the approach to God as persona reveals the deep affinity between theology and narrativity and between the meaning that can be experienced and the story that is told, the unifying concern of Kearney’s trilogy. What is the significance of this call for the reinterpretation of God, approached less as a supreme actuality than as a possibility needing ongoing reelucidation? Are we not offered just another form of Christian theology dressed up to fit the modes of postmodern discourse? The importance of the trilogy lies in its strong reading of the ethical implications of the monotheistic religions of revelation. We must examine Kearney’s hermeneutic reflection closely to comprehend the precise depth of these implications as a means of sounding out the limits of the postmodern frame itself. Kearney’s task in the trilogy is less that of a mediator than that of a tightrope walker obliged to traverse deftly the narrow space bordered by two extremities. These are the two extremities that delimit the principle boundaries setting up the postmodern frame. I would characterize the extremities as the well-worn paths trodden by a multitude of theologians and philosophers who have reflected on the relation between ethics and

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religion during the century following the demise of the traditional God of onto-theology. On one side stands the collapse of religion into ethics. Here we dispense with traditional faith in revealed religion, with its appeal to the miraculous and the supernatural, while rationalizing all religion and justifying it in strictly ethical terms. We recognize here the powerful legacy of Spinoza, who originated the modern renunciation of all recourse to supernatural transcendence. Moreover, a secularized postmodernism no longer calls for a foundation in the intricate metaphysical speculation that the master had originally provided in his Ethics to promote the revolutionary idea that the truth of prophecy and “revelation” can find no principle of legitimation beyond a capacity to foster ethical goodness and political peace. In a post-Nietzschean and postHeideggerian world, the demise of onto-theology, the eclipse of the sacred (Entgötterung), or the intimation that “God is dead” may thus open the door to a deviation of religious credo into the mainstream of ethical principle. Here ethics no longer needs to concern itself with ultimate enigmas or searches beyond the pale of experience for a foundation of its principles. Dressed up in the postmetaphysical terminology of postmodern discourse, we are not far from that fully humanized world of which Heidegger spoke, in which ethics is finally divested of any religious pretension as it assumes the functional role of promoting social cohesion in conformity with the psychologist’s or the sociologist’s operational model. On the other side of the spectrum stands the modern rehabilitation of the preeminence of revealed religion in relation to ethics, beginning with the retrieval of the “knight of faith” by the eloquent modern champion of transcendence, Søren Kierkegaard. With singular force, Kierkegaard inaugurated the modern theology of crisis with his insistence on the requisites of an absolute faith that might reach beyond the pale of ethical goodness. We recall Fear and Trembling, which recounts Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son before the angel’s anguished cry stays the murderous intention of his hand, thus proving a faith ready to contradict the most fundamental of ethical imperatives: thou shalt not kill. Here the supremacy of absolute transcendence in the face of the ethical goodness prefigures the conception of God beyond traditional ontology and beyond a world of human works, which would capture the imagination of Protestant neo-orthodox theology, as well as the young Heidegger, in the years following World War I. Faith in things unseen came to the fore to unmask a theology of justification by works as just another form of ontological speculation by which one can “have” God and presume to render scrutable what remains fundamentally recalcitrant to understanding, even in terms of traditional ethical codes. “Not through created beings in the visible

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world does God turn to us,” Heidegger taught in his early course lectures, paraphrasing Luther, but through faith in the “Cross and the Passion” (im Kreuz und Leiden).1 In his later thought, Heidegger’s call for deconstruction gave way to ruminations on a divinity so radically uprooted from traditional metaphysics that any possibility of abiding the sacred in Christianity, as in any given religious tradition, was withdrawn.2 We are left with a radical historicity in the successive manifestations of the sacred, where the God of revelation is replaced by the more esoteric force of the God to come—the “last God,” as Kearney points out, who would seem to have little to do with the ethical and personal God of the great monotheistic religions, a God “who declares love and promises justice” (SGM, 219). On the tightrope between these interpretations of the sacred as sheer ethical goodness and as an incomprehensible transcendence, it is no accident that Kearney secures his interpretation through the guidance afforded by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s insight is his refusal, on the one hand, to forsake transcendence in the name of an ethical principle or, on the other hand, to subordinate ethics to the exigencies of an utterly enigmatic and inscrutable transcendence. From its very title, Otherwise than Being, Levinas’s great later work interprets transcendence as prefigured in ethical injunction, incarnated in the visage of the other. “Otherwise than being” refers not merely to the transcendence of a God beyond being but to the intrinsic oneness of transcendence with the ethically good per se. Before Levinas, a long tradition of interpreters of the famous Platonic phrase (“The good beyond being”3), culminating with Hermann Cohen (Ethics of Pure Will ) and Ernst Cassirer (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), invoked the good in the plenitude of a divine transcendence conferring upon being its dignity and its brilliance. Beyond traditional onto-theology, Levinas’s philosophy proposes to sound the limits of this conception of ethical goodness through a philosophy of radical alterity in which transcendence, enjoining us from depths beyond memory and history, poses us an obligation in face of the other. In The God Who May Be and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, Kearney points out the difficulty in such a radical approach to ethics. The insistence on otherness as the focus of the transcendent ethical injunction, he notes, in the company of philosophers such as Simon Critchley, is radicalized to the point of invoking an alterity that cannot be “comprehended or refused” (GMB, 77). In the tension between immanence and transcendence, between memory or history and the “immemorial,” the concrete identification of the good bequeathed by historical tradition and incarnated in empirical manifestation becomes problematic. And it is here that the insistence upon radical alterity, by exaggerating the tension between

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the immemorial ethical imperative and the concrete world of memory and history in which it must be implemented risks rendering unintelligible those ethical foundations that it proposed to ensure. Kearney situates these reflections in the proximity of the moral philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur offers a doubleedged critique.4 On the one hand, he brings into question a long tradition of philosophies of the subject that culminates in the fifth of Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, which posits the fundamental possibility of “apperception” of the other through a pure apprehension of the other as “analogous” to oneself. On the other hand, Ricoeur levels his attack against what seemed to him to be Levinas’s too-exclusive concern with alterity in the articulation of selfhood. Kearney’s innovation lies in his understanding of a hyperbolic and often too-undifferentiated emphasis on alterity as a central trait of postmodern philosophy and theology as a whole. It is in this light that we comprehend his reservations concerning Levinas’s conception of alterity, which come to full expression in Kearney’s examination of certain deconstructive formulations by Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s ruminations on divinity, as Kearney points out, share with the Levinasian notion of transcendence an abstraction from the concrete realm of empirical existence, since “God would be stripped of every specific horizon of memory and anticipation” (GMB, 76). But Derrida takes a fateful step beyond Levinas in his hyperbolic insistence on the radical incomprehensibility of otherness. Where Levinas attempted to reconcile transcendence with ethics in a philosophy of alterity, Derrida’s insistence on the blindness of faith and on the strangeness of the divine, bordering on the monstrous, risks skidding off toward a postmodern version of an ethically incomprehensible absolute that would bear little resemblance to Kierkegaard’s original formulation. There is something far more troubling in Derrida’s evocation of incomprehensibility, given his frank admission, as Kearney points out, that in face of the radical alterity of transcendence we have no way of telling the difference between the “divine and the demonic other” (GMB, 75). In his reading of Derrida, Kearney engages in critical reflection on the work of contemporary philosophers such as John Caputo, who in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion has brought the aporias of such postmodern reflections on divinity to the fore. For Kearney, the postmodern emphasis on incomprehensibility and implausibility risks leaving the door open to ethical perplexity where there is a need for hard empirical choice. In raising a telling question, Kearney brings to bear an important reservation that can be directed against so many contemporary preconceptions concerning radical alterity and absolute transcendence: “Don’t most of the rest of us need just a little moral insight, just a few ethical handrails as we

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grope through the dark night of postmodern spectrality and simulacritude towards the ‘absolute other,’ before we say ‘yes,’ ‘come,’ ‘thy will be done’?” (GMB, 76). The reservation expressed by this question evokes one of the central themes in Kearney’s reflections throughout the trilogy on the ethical implications of the monotheistic religions of revelation. Derrida’s sundering of the divinity in its radical otherness from the ethical God of monotheism indicates in all of its clarity a broader pitfall of theological reflection once it has freed itself from traditional onto-theology. We confront once again the problem of an esoteric and incomprehensible divinity sundered from the ethical moorings of the monotheistic religions of revelation, which, as we have seen, and as Kearney points out in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, had already come to the fore in the work of the later Heidegger. We are brought back once again to the dilemma of ethics when confronted with the radical otherness of the postmodern divinity. In what manner, however, are we to attain the ethical insight that, even where it is not precluded, often remains a sheer abstraction couched in the language of postmodernity? It is here that Kearney’s central premise comes to the fore. The attempt to relate and interpret the symbolic content of narrative has ethical implications in itself. But we are not referring here to any narrative. Just as Kearney refuses to accept a postmodern apotheosis of alterity in the abstract, placing all forms of otherness on an equal footing, in similar fashion some narratives or ways of narrating are preferable to others. “There is narrative and narrative,” he writes in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, “while some stories congeal and incarcerate, others loosen and emancipate” (SGM, 179). This approach to narrative reveals a key presupposition brought to bear in Kearney’s work, which accounts for the importance that he attributes to psychoanalytic theory and to the therapeutic models of narration, inspired by the work of contemporary authors such as Julia Kristeva. The symbolic force of sacred texts and great narratives lies in their capacity to speak to us not as isolated individuals, but as beings who, in communicating with one another, deploy deep structures of symbolic interaction that make possible conscious interpretation. This reference to a symbolic meaning underlying individual consciousness signifies that the meanings we interpret emerge from unconscious depths and come to the fore with particular acuity and with singular force where “ideas, images, and narratives try to say the unsayable” (SGM, 229). In such attempts, we confront situations on the horizon of our conscious experience as a contemporary collectivity or group. In light of this presupposition, the intensity of contemporary preoccupation with alterity hardly appears to be accidental; the broad concern with alienness is not an arbitrary intellectual fabrication foisted upon us by university professors who gravitate between

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Europe and Southern California. The incessant recurrence of the topic of alienness reflects deeper dispositions of a group, fueled by collectively experienced, terror-inspiring acts, and contemporary anxieties that, at another level of articulation, come to expression in the favorite obsessions of the popular media. Kearney has pointed out the role of writers such as Joseph Campbell in mediating between the theoretical treatment of God as a monstrous alterity, in works such as The Power of Myth, and, on the more popular level, fantastic depictions of alien forces on television and in cinema, directly inspired by Campbell’s imaginings in this vein (GMB, 149; SGM, 99). Kearney’s singular accomplishment is the exploration of the relation between these theoretical and popular levels of articulation and, in so doing, the probing of the limits of a postmodern fascination with otherness. As he shows in the trilogy, this fascination, in its one-sided quest for otherness beyond the self, risks ignoring that unacknowledged seat of otherness within us. Where we cannot come to grips with an unfathomable otherness within ourselves, there is a danger of projecting otherness onto the outer world as an incomprehensible force, fueling an obsession with the alien and monstrous. To approach this alterity and to interpret it, we are in need of what Kearney suggestively terms a “hermeneutics of the contemporary unconscious” (SGM, 229). Here, too, Kearney’s analysis delves into the ways in which the will to interpret and to narrate, by bringing the unconscious to consciousness and permitting a loosening of the constraints of obsession, can elicit a curative force confirming narrative in its ethical vocation. I conclude by highlighting what seems to me to be the cardinal role of this original conception of hermeneutics in our dislocated contemporary situation. The strength of the narrative interpretation of sacred texts that is advocated in The God Who May Be lies in its willingness to approach them as stories that, as symbolic sources of the great monotheistic religions, retain a particularly strong formative force in our contemporary world. Beyond all philosophical proclamations heralding the death of God, these stories are continually reborn to relate the sacred sources from which they tell us they originate. In his own narrative of these stories, Kearney lets them speak without imposing upon them any preconceived idea concerning the truth or falsehood of one way of accounting in relation to another, and Jewish approaches to the Old Testament are brought to bear with the same enthusiasm as Christian approaches to the biblical narrative as a whole. What is particularly pertinent in a trilogy that seeks a balanced approach to alterity, to otherness in the self and to selfhood in the other, is the way in which the hermeneutics of different traditions are brought to speak to each other and to behold both the sameness and the otherness

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that emanates from their deep symbolic structures. This method could also be brought to bear, as Kearney intimates, in accounting for the third of the great monotheistic religions, Islam, which, in its otherness, simultaneously points toward a deep affinity underlying the symbolic sources upon which the narrative of the Koran, incorporating the biblical texts at the wellspring of the Judaic and Christian tradition, is constructed. There is a pressing need to insist upon such affinities as a first step in countering obscurantists of all religious persuasions who claim to provide the sole legitimate possibility of exegesis of these sources. If there is an ethical significance to narration that may draw us beyond the fantasies of alienness in our postmodern world, it lies in the kind of hermeneutics elaborated in Kearney’s trilogy. And, if there is a curative power in narration, is it not in teaching us to interpret one another’s symbols in light of our own? Does this not allow us to accept a plurality of interpretations through which the great monotheistic religions comprising our tradition (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) can each be taken as a means of opening possibilities and bringing us to comprehension of ourselves? Narrative hermeneutics in this sense is very different from an eclectic blend or unitarian mixture of theological doctrines. It promises to lead us to insight concerning a symptomatic quality of hyperbolic insistence on the otherness of God, which, sundered from an ethical implication profoundly embodied in the texts themselves, deviates into a vision of alienness and even monstrosity. We end our reflections with a question: is it not a small step from the conception of an utterly transcendent God beyond the ethical implication of the sacred texts to a suspension of ethics in the treatment of those who do not believe in this God? If postmodern approaches to alterity have not generally intended to take this step, and have rather disseminated a message of hospitality and tolerance, their hyperbolic language all too easily lends itself to a very different reading. It is the great merit of Kearney’s work to have indicated the ethical limits of postmodernism. His injunction to read and to recount stories that have nourished cultural identities over the centuries needs, to my mind, to be taken seriously, lest a suspension of the ethical in the face of divine otherness feeds the “clash of cultures,” leading a postmodern world to forget the lessons of modernity and to succumb to the fashionable temptations of political theology.

Notes 1. Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, vol. 60, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995).

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2. I have dealt in greater detail with these topics in Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988); in the same work’s revised, forthcoming edition from Fordham University Press; and in Heidegger et son siècle; Temps de l’être, temps de l’histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995). 3. Plato, Republic, trans. P. Shorey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922), 509b. 4. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

On the Role of the Oneiric in Testimonial Narrative Eileen Rizo-Patron

When we are confronted with the apparently inexplicable and unthinkable, narrative matters. —Richard Kearney, On Stories

In the spirit of Richard Kearney’s recent trilogy, Philosophy at the Limit, this essay ventures to explore how the experiential dimension of the oneiric (from the Greek oneiros, for dream) affects our ways of perceiving the world and telling our stories—playing a critical role in our lives and cultural politics, which must remain open to examination and critique. The question of the role of the oneiric in testimonial literature is problematic from the outset, insofar as testimonies are understood as eyewitness declarations of events that have allegedly taken place in the real world. Testimonial literature has traditionally distanced itself from imaginative fiction in its need to provide a venue for veridical accounts of lived experiences. After a critical interlude on the apparent clash between the truth claims of testimony versus the philosophical enigmas of oneiric experience, these issues are essayed through a reading of the salient oneiric elements in The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor—a testimony of trauma, survival, and transformation recorded by Gabriel García Márquez, as narrated by Luis Alejandro Velasco, sole survivor of the shipwreck—with special attention granted to Márquez’s subsequent “story of this story” about the writing and publication of the account, its political context, and its consequences.1

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The Story of the Story In February 1955, during the military regime of Colombian dictator General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, news broke that eight sailors had been lost at sea when a storm hit the Caldas destroyer on its way from Mobile, Alabama, to the port of Cartagena, Colombia. Rescue efforts were abandoned after four days of futile search. One sailor miraculously made it to shore after drifting ten days on an empty raft, without food or drink. Luis Alejandro Velasco was hailed as a hero, and his amazing story was told ad nauseum by government-controlled media. However, a month later, he showed up at the headquarters of the Bogotá daily El Espectador wanting to tell his story again, that is, the “real” story this time. García Márquez, then a young journalist, was the staff writer assigned to take down the testimony (SS, v–vi). As a meticulous reconstruction of the sailor’s experience, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was published in fourteen installments by El Espectador, bringing unexpected and disturbing consequences.2 The details of the story (which will later become apparent) revealed the Colombian navy’s responsibility for the death of seven sailors who fell overboard during the Caldas destroyer’s voyage. Besides subverting official history, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor now stands as a historical document showing the effects of an oppressive regime on ordinary citizens. García Márquez reports that both the narrator and the journalist suffered severe reprisals from the Rojas Pinilla government after the publication of this material (SS, vi, ix). The newspaper was shut down, and shortly thereafter García Márquez was sent off to Europe, where he initiated, as he puts it, “a nomadic and somewhat nostalgic exile that in certain ways also resembles a drifting raft” (SS, ix).

Critical Interlude Revisionist historians and postmodern thinkers have challenged the truth claims of testimonies, dismissing such narratives as inescapably subjective or relativistic accounts of historical events, sometimes even questioning their capacity to refer to any kind of reality outside of the texts themselves.3 Kearney deals head-on with these issues, arguing that the question of narrative truth, while open ended, remains crucial when it comes to facing and responding ethically to cases involving individual or historical trauma (OS, 47). This essay furthers this inquiry by exploring a supplementary question, the apparent conflict between the claims of testimonial discourse and the enigmas of oneiric experience. In testimonies of

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trauma, survival, and transformation, dreams and visions appear to play a pivotal role. With this in mind, it might help first to foreground a tacit distinction between two very different types of testimonies addressed by Kearney in his recent work: (1) narratives that bear witness to some crisis that has taken place in our personal or collective histories, such as the historical and psychotherapeutic accounts discussed in On Stories, and (2) the testimonies explored in The God Who May Be, which attest to a revelation of some transcendent reality (a promise, a possibility not fully present, or the voice of the god of little things in everyday life) that calls for a creative response on our part to take on communicable form in the world of action and thus become an effective part of our histories. In a curious way, García Márquez’s The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor rolls both types of testimonial narrative into one. It is at once a denunciatory testimony about a tragedy with political roots and repercussions and a dream-laden testimony of miraculous survival and transformation. Before proceeding, let us attempt a brief sketch of what is meant here by the oneiric.4 As Ludwig Binswanger puts it, To dream means: I don’t know what is happening to me. From the I and the me there again emerges, to be sure, the individual. . . . In no way, however, does the individual emerge as he who makes the dream, but rather as the one for whom—he knows not how—the dream occurs. And this individual is, here . . . the plaything of rising and falling life, the roar of the sea and the stillness of death. (DE, 102)5

Broadly speaking, the oneiric refers not only to private night dreams and personal reveries but also to collective dreams in the sense of inherited myths, values, and beliefs that tacitly govern our lives (or against which we may rebel). It is important to the purposes of this essay that I concur with Binswanger that dreaming, at least initially, is not something we “make” as individuals but something that “happens” to us, we know not how. Oneiric experiences allude to phenomena that come to us unsolicited, breaking strictly empirical and rational boundaries, ranging from night dreams and hallucinations to premonitions and visions that may visit us during trancelike states or when consciousness is altered as a result of fasting, excessive pain, or trauma. But the oneiric may also serve to suggest the subconscious affective atmosphere (personal and collective) that permeates our ordinary sense experiences, connoting a liminal mode of perception that recognizes the dream element in life and thus subverts the traditional dichotomy between fact and fiction. For heuristic purposes, let us keep in mind three distinct yet intertwining senses of the oneiric: the psychological, which refers to specific oneiric experiences;

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the cultural, which alludes to oneiric matrices and myths that prereflectively inform our attitudes and orient our perspectives; and the ontological, the haunting presence of an inherently ambivalent oneiric element that traverses between the supersensible and sensible domains of existence, giving rise to our very experience of a living world that is always capable of surprising us with the unexpected. If testimonial narratives are authentic accounts of personal experience told by witnesses who are moved to narrate by the urgency of an extraordinary event or crisis, the question here is what kinds of disclosure should one expect to find in testimonies interwoven with oneiric experiences, which transcend the bounds of sensibility and the strict frontiers of reason. Kant had argued that such testimonies are essentially suspect given that “supersensible” matters lie by definition beyond the bounds of possible experience and hence beyond cognition.6 By dismissing oneiric phenomena, along with the possibility of perception’s epiphanic role, this modern notion of experience sets up a dichotomy not only between immanence and transcendence but also between the theoretical and moral spheres of knowledge. Experience and cognition are to be regarded as incapable of supporting the faith that human beings need in order to live moral lives—the faith in something supersensible upon which notions of the unity of all beings and of life’s ultimate purpose would depend. However, while testimonies of oneiric experiences may fail to assure us of their supersensible provenance, one might argue that even testimonies about the most ordinary empirical experiences can only communicate meaning to us on the basis of a supersensible principle that can be intimated through faith or, at best, through a subjective feeling of attunement, namely, the idea that the world and our minds are purposively linked, making the apprehension of “truths” possible. Kant himself tacitly recognized this in his Critique of Judgment when he wrote that the indeterminate notion of the supersensible underlies our sense of nature’s purposive harmony with our cognitive powers, suggesting, despite himself, that the entire structure of knowledge and experience already floats upon an oneiric element (CJ, Ak. 340). Nevertheless, if we heed Kant’s cautionary skepticism regarding the capacity of dream-filled testimonies to disclose truths of allegedly supersensible provenance, what are we to make of accounts, tacit in testimonial narratives, regarding the gravity of the oneiric or the summons of the supersensible in human experience? In “Testimonio y concientización,” the critic George Yúdice suggests a way of thinking through the dilemma posed by Kant regarding the validity of dream-filled testimonies by tracing the emergence in Latin American literature of two testimonial modalities that exemplify two distinct discursive orientations and modes of knowing: representational testimonies that aim at the production of cognitive truth

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by fidelity to past events or to a prevalent state of affairs and consciousnessraising testimonies that aim at the construction of emancipatory practices by subjects who struggle to constitute themselves and their values as they confront, with their own voices and stories, the dominant modes of discourse that have “othered” them.7 Yúdice’s claim is that this latter type of testimonial narrative operates on a model of thinking and discourse that is neither exclusively theoretical nor moral-practical but both simultaneously (TC, 209, 215). No longer regarded as an imitation of life, but as a creative criticism of life, these consciousness-raising testimonies illustrate what Kearney has characterized as the “critical-utopian” potential of narrative imagination, even though their challenge to official stories unfolds within ostensibly nonfictional contexts (PI, 255). What Yúdice calls concientización involves a mode of knowing that is responsive to the oneiric element within the contingencies of everyday human existence, rather than to either strict empiricalhistorical or imaginary-utopian domains of experience. Most important, as Yúdice has noted, what distinguishes these testimonial narratives from other literary genres is that they tend to arise in urgent responses to crisis situations and states of emergency (e.g., natural catastrophes, war, oppression). Moreover, given the recurring failure of Latin American modernity to open spaces of genuine democratic action when faced with such situations, people have resorted to other cultural strategies that make political action possible, such as collaborative efforts between oral informants and empathetic or politically committed transcribers/ editors (TC, 26). Testimonial writing has thus emerged in Latin America as an increasingly viable means to let otherwise silent or suppressed voices be heard, opening up a public space that would otherwise be inaccessible and becoming one of the distinctive weapons of cultural politics (TC, 221–22). In light of the above discussion, my interest lies ultimately in exploring the part that testimonies involving oneiric experiences might play in such cultural politics and, specifically, their potential role in the transformation of consciousness.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor More than thirst, hunger, and despair, what tormented me most was the need to tell someone what had happened to me. —Luis Alejandro Velasco

The piecing together of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was a collaborative effort between Luis Alejandro Velasco and the young journalist assigned

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to take down his testimony. Nevertheless, García Márquez attributes the narrative force of the story to the sailor who endured the trauma and survived to tell the tale (SS, vii). The transformation of a trauma into a story began almost simultaneously with the event itself: during his harrowing experience at sea the sailor had nothing more critical to keep him going—besides a raft, oars, and the few personal belongings with which he had fallen into the water—than his wits and his struggle to steer them favorably toward a projected end. As a member of the Colombian navy he had expected, all along, to become the object of the mass media’s attention (as well as of an intensive search by the Colombian air force). He was thus motivated to perceive every detail of his experience as though it were being recorded on film. As he replayed events, scenes, thoughts, dreams, and emotions obsessively on the ninth night, lying prone in the raft ready to die, the experience was more deeply etched in his memory in the form of a tale (SS, 79–80). Beyond helping the sailor keep his focus and sanity, the event’s transformation into narrative form is, of course, what subsequently makes it possible for the story to yield a deeper meaning of symbolic dimensions. When an ordinary experience is pondered long and patiently enough, a supersensible meaning is bound to emerge from the sensible. The fact that such meaning can arise from testimonial literature suggests that ordinary life is itself suffused with oneiric voices and poetic latencies waiting to be ushered into awareness through questioning and reflection. The event of being shipwrecked already suggests much about the potential import of the experiences that unfold. A ship is an ancient symbol of a societal structure that keeps a group of people within safe boundaries, afloat upon the dark waters of the unknown, and oriented together toward a common, projected destiny.8 By extension, it connotes a culture’s inherited or established modes of perceiving and interpreting experience, namely, the structure of consciousness. Being shipwrecked amounts to exile beyond the limits of such a structure. Further, it suggests being thrown outside the bounds of possible experience and perhaps beyond the limits of our usual conceptions of space and time. In what follows, I will trace a few instances of the irruption of the oneiric (that which surpasses natural understanding) in Velasco’s account of his experiences at sea. The passages I visit offer testimony of visionary experiences that seem to leave a profound imprint in the young sailor’s psyche, ordinary phenomena that he interprets as hints of miraculous modes of assistance from a supersensible realm. In situations of extreme need or crisis, as these passages show, empirical phenomena (natural events, living beings, or even inert objects) can in effect be perceived as symbols of warning or grace, and not merely as objects of experience in the Kantian sense. Our feelings, perceptions, and actions are inevitably

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immersed within an oneiric field of values and purposes that may escape determination as to their objective validity. The details of our experience are constantly taking on symbolic meaning. Visions at Sea—Dreaming or Waking? The morning after the shipwreck—after witnessing his fellow sailors being swallowed by the sea despite his desperate attempts to save them, spending a night of terror abandoned on a raft with no sign of rescue in sight, being reduced to a point of “no thinking” in his state of shock and helplessness—the young sailor was suddenly overcome by a deep sense of sublimity suffusing the atmosphere, filling his entire being with uncanny energy and a will to resist. The trauma had torn him open, exposing him to the brutal elements, but also to the miracle of being: When dawn broke, nothing mattered to me any more. I thought neither of water nor of food. I didn’t think of anything at all, until the wind turned warmer and the sea’s surface grew smooth and golden. I hadn’t slept a second all night, but at that moment I felt as though I’d just awakened. When I stretched out in the raft, my bones ached and my skin burned. But the day was radiant and warm, and amid the clarity and the murmur of the wind beginning to pick up, I felt renewed strength to continue waiting. Somehow I felt accompanied on the raft by a profound presence. For the first time in my twenty years of life, I felt perfect happiness. (SS, 31, translation modified)

The next oneiric break-in comes with the apparition of Jaime Manjarrés, a fellow sailor, aboard the raft. Although Velasco had been obsessing about the friends he had just lost to the turbulent waters, he had not thought about Jaime until suddenly one night he had a vision of him “seated on the deck of the destroyer, pointing with his index finger toward port” (SS, 39). This first vision, he admits, was evidently a dream. However, early one dawn, unable to sleep, he turned around and saw Jaime sitting at the other edge of the raft, just as he later began to see him every night, during which they had the most vivid conversations (SS, 44–45). If this had been a dream, he insists, he would not bother reporting the incident. He was positive each time that he was lucid and awake, hearing the whistling of the wind and the noise of the ocean, keenly aware of the hunger and thirst relentlessly consuming him (SS, 40). Even a month later, as he tells the story, Velasco is convinced that he had been awake when he saw Jaime and was certain that he could distinguish this experience from regular

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dreaming. Nonetheless Jaime’s solid presence dissolved before his eyes under the first rays of the sun: “I didn’t know if it was reality or fantasy,” he insists, “and even now I can’t decide if it was reality or fantasy” (SS, 76). Ethical Struggle at Sea Empirical incidents in Velasco’s voyage come charged, meanwhile, with supersensible overtones. Aside from the sharks that arrived for dinner every evening at five o’clock sharp, the only living beings that kept the forsaken sailor company were a flock of seagulls that appeared on the fifth day, not only as heralds of hope (a sign that land is near) but also as sources of temptation. When a young, bright-feathered gull landed on his raft, all the sailor could think about was how to capture, mangle, and gobble it down. But as soon as he grabbed it, feeling its warm body palpitate in his hands, the bird’s pleading hazel eyes brought to mind his captain’s reproach when he had found Velasco one day pointing a rifle at seagulls following the ship: “Don’t be a scoundrel. To a sailor, seagulls are like sighting land. It isn’t noble for a sailor to kill a seagull” (SS, 51). Though hungry, these words of wisdom echoed in his ears as he clutched the helpless gull. Nevertheless, voracity won, and he yanked its head off. As he tries to pluck its feathers, though, the fragile bird disintegrated into a repugnant, inedible blob, and the futility of the kill plunged him into nauseous despair. Tellingly, Jaime Manjarrés never returned after this night, intensifying his sense of pain and desolation (SS, 53). The next arrival was on the eighth day, after a violent storm capsized the sailor’s raft, nearly drowning him. Although the blow left him virtually crippled, the advent of a joyous flock of seabirds later that morning managed to inject him with elation and instant stamina. Curiously, on this day Velasco noted that his friend had been attending a Catholic mass in Mobile, Alabama, for the repose of his soul, and surely also (he later fancies) for the repose of his body. For that morning, as he contemplated the seabirds, the raft suddenly “assumed a speed that two men with oars couldn’t have equaled, moving in a straight line as if propelled by a motor along the calm blue surface” (SS, 70). As emissaries of grace, the seagulls had become far more than birds of prey or even signs of land. When an old seabird perched on his raft the following night, pecking at him gently as if caressing him, the sailor regrets the senseless slaughter a few days earlier. Nevertheless, as the gull became more playful and trusting near daybreak, the sailor again succumbed to the urge of grabbing it by the neck. He didn’t want to kill the bird, though his hunger was fierce. Tempted in a moment of weakness, he desisted at the sight of the bird’s enormous sad eyes.

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Oneiric Nourishment The final hint of the supersensible provenance of these birds for Velasco comes, however, from a biblical allusion dropped in passing. After releasing the gull, the sailor drifted unsteadily from a delirious dream to the vision of a succulent root caught in the meshes of his raft. He could not but recall the Bible story of the olive branch brought back to Noah by the dove he had earlier released from his ark (SS, 77–78). Could it be that the seagull had returned while he slept, bringing back this strange medicinal root as a miraculous boon? The decisive boost of energy to reach shore came, inexplicably, from a metal relic. Just as Velasco decided to succumb to death as he faced yet another night of false hope, the neck chain with a medal of the Virgin of Carmen, with which he had been plunged into the sea nine days earlier, popped into view. Evoking thoughts of family and school as he raised it to his lips to pray, the object produced a strange soothing effect amid his agony (SS, 78). Nonetheless, the tenth day rolled in with a red-hot sun and yet another infuriating hallucination—land! Noticing his raft veering toward some rocky cliffs—and suspecting, in utter bewilderment, that this may not be a dream—the sailor decided to abandon the raft and swim ashore. After a few feverish strokes, he felt the chain snap and slip off his neck. He managed to grab the medal before it sank and, clenching it tightly between his teeth, set out to swim on faith, for half an hour, toward an “imaginary shore” he could no longer see (SS, 84–88). Island of Cannibals? Days before sighting land, as it turns out, Velasco had been haunted by recollections of a story he had once read about a lost mariner reaching an island of cannibals (SS, 45–46). These recollections soon began to insinuate themselves as a premonition of dangers to come on land. The crucial question was whether the young sailor, after surviving miraculously at sea, would allow himself to be swallowed by the culture of self-interest and greed epitomized by the Colombian government and the society that would provide him a lavish welcome. The struggle against being “othered” or, even worse, assimilated by the discourse and practices of the prevailing regime—a struggle that marks Latin American testimonies by protagonists from marginalized groups—had become the central issue for the shipwrecked sailor as he belatedly approached the staff at El Espectador in the hopes that they would hear him out, given that he had allowed the government-censored version of his story to be dissemi-

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nated throughout Colombia and had collected copious royalties on his newly found fame (TC, 216–17). Velasco seems to have sensed, after four weeks of public fanfare, that being hailed as a “national hero” had been a form of silencing by the Colombian dictatorship: the truth of what had happened to the Caldas destroyer and its lost sailors was masked and investigated no further. When it dawned on him that his fame rested upon a governmental cover-up, the sailor must have felt it worth jeopardizing his vain popularity for the sake of his former shipmates, now lying, forever silent, at the bottom of the sea. As the “story of the story” suggests, his speaking up when it was no longer necessary (indeed, would even be foolish) was perhaps where Velasco’s real heroism lay. The action this time was undertaken not to save his own skin, but for the sake of a transpersonal end, however implicit this may lie in the telling of the tale itself. García Márquez initially attributed very different motives to the sailor’s decision to share his story with El Espectador. Surely, he thought, Velasco was capable of inventing anything—within authorized limits— for more money (SS, vii). But García Márquez was surprised to find otherwise when he asked the sailor to describe the storm that brought about the disaster: Aware that his statement was worth its weight in gold, he answered with a smile, “There was no storm.” It was true: the weather bureau confirmed that it had been another clear and mild February in the Caribbean. The truth, never published until then, was that the ship, tossed violently by the wind in heavy seas, had spilled its ill-secured cargo and the eight sailors overboard. This revelation meant that three serious offenses had been committed: first, it was illegal to transport cargo on a destroyer; second, the overweight prevented the ship from maneuvering to rescue the sailors; and third, the cargo was contraband—refrigerators, television sets, and washing machines. Clearly, the account, like the destroyer, was loaded with an ill-secured moral and political cargo that we hadn’t foreseen. (SS, vii–viii)9

It is unclear how conscious Velasco had been regarding the ethical charges he would be bringing against the government by revealing that “there had been no storm.” However, the knowing smile on his face and García Márquez’s astute remark—“aware that his statement was worth its weight in gold”—suggest that the sailor had approached El Espectador due precisely to the weighty implications he sensed in this seemingly innocuous fact. It is even likely that since he was aware of the dangers of

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speaking up against a dictatorship known to have assassinated dissenters, he was being rather coy about the way he went about his political denunciation, in a futile attempt to shield himself against predictable reprisals.

Epilogue The dreamer awakens in that unfathomable moment when he decides not only to seek to know “what hit him,” but also to strike into and take hold of the dynamics in these events himself— the moment . . . when he resolves to bring continuity and consequence into a life that rises and falls, falls and rises. Only then does he make something. That which he makes, however, is not life . . . but history. Dreaming, man is life-function; waking, he creates life-history. —Ludwig Binswanger, “Dream and Existence”

What kinds of truth can be gleaned from The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor? Besides the historical details it unveils, we have peered into a dimension of poetic significance latent in the sailor’s testimony. In light of the above, doesn’t Velasco’s story, including García Márquez’s “story of the story,” also testify to another truth about human spirit—about its capacity, or vocation, to transcend investment in the “culture of self-interest” that so predominates in the modern world and in which we all seem to be caught? What makes this testimony eloquent, in my view, is that the young sailor laid open this dimension of moral meaning in a very candid and unassuming way through the simple decision to bring his story into public view as he had actually endured it, and then to stick to his testimony despite threats, pressures, and the most seductive attempts at bribery— even though this decision would finally lead to losing his job with the navy (SS, ix).10 As García Márquez noted fifteen years later, contemplating a photograph of the former sailor grown older and heavier seated behind a desk at a bus company: “Life [has] passed through him, leaving behind the serene aura of a hero who had the courage to dynamite his own statue” (SS, ix). When it comes to dream-filled testimonies like The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, which stray beyond the bounds of “possible experience,” perhaps the only way to judge their legitimacy—as Kearney succinctly puts it—is by their fruits:

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Testimony is the bottom line. Faithful and discerning testimony— known by its fruits. Fruits of love and justice, care and gift. We have to try to tell the difference, in sum, between narrative testimonies that transform or deform lives. The rest is indeed silence. (GMB, 48–49)

Notes The epigraph to this chapter is taken from On Stories, 157n2. 1. Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, trans. Randolph Hogan (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). Henceforth cited as SS. Originally published as Relato de un náufrago (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1970). 2. After its journalistic circulation in 1955, bearing the sailor’s name as its author, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor was republished as a literary piece—unedited, except for the added “story of this story”—under García Márquez’s name in 1970, the year when Cuba’s major cultural institution, Casa de las Américas, first recognized testimonial literature as a distinct genre for its literary awards (SS, ix). See George Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” in Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (1991): 25–26. 3. Richard Kearney addresses the arguments of revisionist historians like Maurice Faurisson and David Irving, and postmodern thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, in On Stories, 47–69, and in Poetics of Imagining, 225, 241. 4. The viewpoint on the oneiric in this essay, drawn primarily from phenomenological psychology, calls for treatment that exceeds the limits of this piece. For an intriguing discussion on the existential nature of dream, and on dreams as an “index of transcendence,” see Ludwig Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” (1930; trans. Jacob Needleman) and Michel Foucault’s response, “Dream, Imagination, and Existence” (1954; trans. William Forrest), in “Dream and Existence,” ed. Keith Hoeller, special issue, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 19, no. 1 (1984–85): 29–105. Henceforth cited as DE. 5. Binswanger derives this notion from his admittedly “creative” reading of Heidegger’s existential analytic: “To use Heidegger’s words . . . Dasein is brought before its own being insofar as something happens to it, and Dasein knows neither the ‘how’ nor the ‘what’ of the happening. This is the basic ontological element of all dreaming, and its relatedness to anxiety” (DE, 102). 6. Refusing to grant feelings a cognitive status, Kant had insisted that it is impossible to determine the “supersensible influence” of a call interiorized within one’s own being, let alone the validity of another person’s testimony concerning something supersensible (“On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy, trans. P. Fenves [Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1993], 51– 82, especially 61n4). In Kant’s Critiques, meanwhile, the supersensible is understood not only as the occult essence of things in themselves but also as the hidden source of moral reasoning and aesthetic inspiration—an indeterminate idea that escapes cognition yet somehow remains necessary for us to make sense of nature

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and of human existence. See the Critique of Judgment, trans. W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), sec. 57, Ak. 339–46. Henceforth cited as CJ. 7. George Yúdice, “Testimonio y concientización,” in Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 18, no. 36 (1992): 207–27. Henceforth cited as TC. See also Yúdice’s “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” in Latin American Perspectives 18, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 15–31. Yúdice’s testimonial modalities reveal some significant similarities to the two types of testimony addressed in Kearney’s work. One might indeed argue that while the accounts of human trauma that Kearney explores in On Stories share the aim of Yúdice’s representational testimonies to retrieve and face a truth concerning past events (for cathartic or juridical purposes), the more visionary testimonies he discusses in The God Who May Be, though not as patently political as Yúdice’s consciousness-raising testimonies, might include secular accounts that give voice to people’s spiritual values and dreams that challenge established modes of thinking and are capable of inspiring transformative ethico-political action. The point here is that rather than focusing solely on an accurate representation of past events, these latter types of testimonies are especially responsive to what Gaston Bachelard once called “the still-fluid substance of our futures” (The Right to Dream [Dallas: Dallas Institute of Arts and Culture, 1989], 48–49). 8. See, for example, Sophocles’ metaphor of “the ship of state” in his Three Theban Plays, trans. R. Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), the city of Thebes as “a ship pitching wildly” in the early scenes of Oedipus the King (27–30), and Oedipus’s being hurled off the ship into the dark waters when he blinds himself in the last scenes after discovering his crime (1450–53). For a very different and provocative interpretation of navigation symbolism, see Foucault’s discussion of the “ship of fools” in Madness and Civilization (New York: Random House, 1988), 3–37. 9. Aside from the objective proof provided by the weather bureau that there had been no storm, the sailor and the journalist were later able to gather photographic evidence of illegal cargo aboard the ship on February 28, 1955, during its journey from Mobile to Cartagena in their case against the government (SS, viii). 10. By his decision to reveal that the smuggled goods aboard the Colombian destroyer had belonged to crew and officers alike, the sailor indirectly implicated himself, even while denouncing the navy for condoning the illegal use of a warship and for the criminal decision of its officers to hold on to the remaining cargo on the ship rather than to save the sailors’ lives.

Truth, Ethics, and Narrative Imagination: Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge Mark Dooley

For more than two decades, Richard Kearney has championed the role of the imagination in our postmodern world. Recently, he has expanded these reflections to encompass the question of how narrative and storytelling inform and instruct ethical awareness and judgment. As someone located firmly within the hermeneutic tradition, Kearney follows Paul Ricoeur in contending that it is “narrative identity which constitutes us,” and that an unnarrated life is not worth living.1 Without narrative imagination, Kearney insists, we are devoid of the wherewithal to keep our inherited identities open to the ethical challenges from the “anonymous forces of history,”2 or from those whose untold stories serve to disturb and unsettle the dominant political narratives of the day. The postmodern critique of narrative is all too often blind to these liberating impulses, and in opting for the cult of “the sublime” and “the unrepresentable” over the hermeneutics of suspicion and affirmation, many postmodernists are, according to Kearney, insufficiently responsible. While I respect the range and brilliance of Kearney’s readings, I have always been perplexed by his views on postmodernism. His claim, first announced in The Wake of Imagination and reinforced in Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, that postmodernism can be dangerous to the degree that it suspends all hermeneutic means of discerning gods from monsters, good from evil, and justice from injustice is in my estimation highly contestable. This is not to say, however, that Kearney is unjustified in having these anxieties: his critique of Baudrillard as a thinker who relegates all phenomena to the status of simulacra is perspicuous and spot on. On the other hand, when he has applied a similar criticism to Derrida, he is mistaken. I consider Derrida an exemplar of what Kearney calls a “good postmodernist,” one whose utopian imagination assists us in reinterpreting the past on the basis of an affirmation of future justice (PI, 184–85). Though in 165

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recent writings he has refrained from classifying Derrida as a “bad postmodernist,” the claim that the ethics of responsibility that deconstruction advocates is so committed to the notion of “undecidability” that its practitioners risk ending up in a state of paralysis, alas, still stands. In order to defend the strains of postmodern thought I endorse— those held by Richard Rorty and Derrida—against Kearney’s hermeneutic critique, it is necessary to question some of the terms in which Kearney states his argument. I want to argue, pace Kearney, that one can retain one’s allegiance to postmodernism and still believe that narrative has an ethical function. For Kearney, however, once one opts for the postmodern suspension of the “appearance-reality distinction,” one leaves oneself without the scope to judge between good and bad. Once, in other words, one abolishes all notions of reference and representation, one succumbs to “narrative irresponsibility” since one cannot differentiate good from bad narratives (PI, 255). But this is not the case. To dismantle referential criteria does not mean that one denies the power of imagination or narrative to effect ethical and political change. Neither does it mean that one cannot judge between rival narratives or between conflicting interpretations of the same event. What it does entail is, first, that one must make a distinction between historical truth (defined as an accurate account of what occurred in the past) and philosophical truth (defined as an accurate representation of reality as it is in itself ), and, second, that one reexamine to what extent imagination and narrative can provide access to the latter form of truth. It seems to me that Kearney conflates these two senses of truth: the philosophical and the historical. Giving too much ontological weight to narrative and imagination, he remains captive, in spite of himself, to a view of the self and the world that is residually “foundational.” This is ultimately at odds with his own hermeneutic belief in the linguistically mediated nature of experience. In what follows I shall try to support these claims by showing how Kearney’s notion of narrative imagination would not be rendered any less effective if he dropped the “realist” baggage to which he appears committed. Such baggage comes in the form of a residual ontology that hermeneutics, if it is to be consistent with its central claims, ought to eschew. Let me begin by teasing out the contention that Kearney confuses historical with philosophical truth. In his critical account of the postmodern imagination in the epilogue to Poetics of Imagining, Kearney maintains that “post-modernism often denies the distinction between what is real and unreal in our representations of things” (PI, 254). Such a denial, he says, results in “the abandonment of any narrative claim to recount past experience (a) ‘as it actually was’ (wie es eigentlich gewessen) and (b) ‘as if’ (als ob) we were actually there to experience it” (PI, 254–55). It is true that

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postmodernism can be broadly defined as a denial of reference and representation, and that it distrusts any suggestion that we can view things from a purely objective standpoint. One cannot infer from this, however, that abandoning representationalism means abandoning narrative objectivity. For example, by attending to physical and testimonial evidence at hand, we can give a fairly objective account of a historical event. As Derrida and Foucault point out, the problem has always been that we have paid far too little attention to such evidence, thus ensuring that mere historical constructions assume the form of historical necessity. As such, one can be as zealous an antirepresentationalist as Derrida and Foucault and maintain that, in Kearney’s words, “narrative matters” (see, especially, the last chapter of On Stories). While one may have given up hope of getting in touch with reality due to a lack of an independent test for the accuracy of representation (between, for example, my words or ideas and the world), there are tests for the accuracy of historical representation (between, for example, what I believe to have happened and what the documented evidence reports). I can, in other words, give truthful evidence at a trial and still be a committed antirealist. There would be little fuss if Kearney simply said that certain postmodernists do not take seriously the power that narrative imagination has to affect ethical change. His claim, however, is more controversial in that he seems to argue that because certain postmodernists have deconstructed representational claims to truth, they cannot thereby tell the truth. He thus assumes that there is a direct correlation between historical and epistemological truth. There is no such correlation. The reason why Kearney makes this assumption is that he is at heart what Heidegger calls a “metaphysician”: he believes that ethics has an ontological foundation that is revealed in and through narrative imagination. My aim, therefore, is to say why I think narrative imagination can survive the loss of such foundations and still retain its ethical power. In so doing, I hope to show that denying that we can get in touch with reality does not result, as Kearney argues, in a “denial of the moral distinction between just and unjust” (PI, 226).

Kearney agrees with Ricoeur’s contention that there is such a thing as “an extra-linguistic reality.” Both thinkers follow J. L. Austin and John Searle in holding that through discourse or speech acts “language has both a reference to reality and a self-reference.”3 This appears, however, to contradict directly Ricoeur’s and Kearney’s belief that “human action is always figured in signs, interpreted in terms of cultural traditions and norms.”4 It seems as though both Ricoeur and Kearney want to embrace

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the linguistic turn and, at the same time, remain faithful to the ontological tradition. But is it possible to adhere to the view that “all experience is a linguistic affair”5 while maintaining that we can accurately represent language-independent reality in language? The dilemma that Kearney and Ricoeur face is one that has been stated repeatedly and to good effect by Richard Rorty, who follows Wittgenstein, Sellars, Putnam, and Davidson in claiming that “identity is always identity under a description” (TAP, 103). These linguistic nominalists share with Hegel, Saussure, and Derrida the view that the identity of anything—person, object, animal, and so on—is determined by its relationship to other things. There is simply no way that we can isolate any object or person, for example, and say what it is apart from its relations to other objects and persons. To do so, one would make the absurd claim that in speaking of the object, it is somehow unrelated to the speaker. For those who have embraced the linguistic turn, “relations go all the way down,” and this is because “there is nothing to be known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing it . . . , [and] every sentence about an object is an explicit or implicit description of its relation to one or more objects.”6 For Rorty, Derrida, and others, we are unable to come between the descriptions we have of the world and the world itself; we are, that is, unable to test whether or not the sentences and the descriptions we employ are accurate descriptions or representations—those that map the world as it is in itself or those that are simply the best descriptions we have. When pressed by one’s realist opponent as to what is being described, all the linguistic nominalist can do is offer more descriptions. This is not to deny that there was a world before language users described it. Linguistic nominalism does not equal linguistic idealism. Rather, it suggests that language users have no prelinguistic knowledge of anything, and thus have no knowledge of the substantial nature or essence of any object in question. All objects are caught in a web of relations that reaches all the way down. Consequently, the idea of prelinguistic experience, which is said to capture the world in some unmediated and primordial way, should have no resonance for philosophers who, like Kearney and Ricoeur, purport to take language seriously. But both men continue to insist that through a certain privileged set of descriptions (narrative) we can indicate or signify an extralinguistic reality. The hermeneutic detour through language and text is but a way of breaking the spell of appearance to get in touch with a more fundamental reality, namely the self or the world. But after the linguistic turn, as good postmodernists like Rorty and Derrida have argued, it is no longer feasible to make such distinctions; there is no way in which we can be said to be in touch with a world or reality that escapes this network of relations. If

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Kearney believes that language captures something extralinguistic, he has to be able to say what that something is. In doing so, he will end up having to describe that portion of reality that breaks free of appearances in sentences that relate it to other things, thereby lending credence to the thesis that all experience is a linguistic affair. Let me push this a little further by attending briefly to metaphor and its relation to narrative in hermeneutics and postmodernism. One of the touchstones of Kearney’s theory of narrative imagination and identity is his belief, derived from Ricoeur’s treatment of metaphor, that “narrative discourse involves someone narrating something to someone about something” (PM, 92). The basic supposition here is that extralinguistic meanings somehow make it into language through narrative and metaphor. In other words, it is important for the type of hermeneutics practiced by both Kearney and Ricoeur that the distinction between the literal and the metaphoric remain in place, or that Frege’s distinction between sense and reference be taken seriously. This is why Ricoeur argues in favor of what he terms “living metaphors,” that is, metaphors that bring meaning to life. This suggests, once again, that although both men insist that we can have no unmediated access to reality, they presume that we can point toward the real through language. This is done in an effort to resist the claims of structuralism, deconstruction, and linguistic nominalism to the effect that words are not mirrors that accurately represent the way the world is, but marks and noises that help us make our way around the world. Moreover, as noted previously, the value of any such word or sentence is not determined by its capacity to pick out natural kinds, but by its relationship to other words in the textual chain. The structuralists were wrong to have suggested that language comes ready packaged with structural laws intact. But Saussure’s primary contention that the identity of signs is not a matter of correspondence seems incontrovertible. For all of these reasons, Kearney and Ricoeur still hold to the view that language is a medium that stands between speakers and the world. Because they want to keep the literal-metaphoric distinction in play, they need to hold onto the pre-postmodern suggestion that we have essential natures. This presupposes that language can indeed capture and represent a meaning outside of language. This runs contrary to the view expressed earlier that we have some way of checking if one language is closer to reality than another, or indeed if we can check our words or descriptions against nonwords to determine whether they accurately mirror one another. Once one agrees with the contention that all experience is a linguistic affair, as both Kearney and Ricoeur seem to, it follows that one must give up on both the appearance-reality and the literal-metaphoric distinctions, in addition to the belief in an “extralinguistic reality” that

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will satisfy one’s intuitions regarding the word-world relationship. Once again, this does not mean that one has to deny that there is a world outside language. All it obliges one to concede is the view that there is no way of taking up a “view from nowhere” to clarify that one’s particular language or vocabulary maps the world to a greater degree than someone else’s. There is no way, in other words, that one can claim that one’s descriptions of oneself and the world are more accurate representations of both, unless, of course, one can leave one’s humanity behind and get behind all descriptions. Once we jettison the view that language is a medium between ourselves and the world, we must also get rid of the idea that we can access the essential nature or essence of the self and the world. To let go of the ambition to get reality right obliges one to drop the belief in any transcultural/ extralinguistic universals or essences. This is simply to say that because no description of us or the world can be tested against the true nature of either, and because all descriptions are framed in a natural language with a long and multilayered history, sets of descriptions will always be competing against other sets of descriptions. No one set of descriptions will ever be more essential to the way things are than any others. The only use we can have for the literal-metaphoric distinction is that which Rorty and Davidson give it: metaphors are novel uses of old words or descriptions that, after much use, become literalized; they no longer serve our purposes in a way they once did. The history of the self, according to this view, is a history of competing descriptions, which were imagined for different purposes. Selves are, in the words of Dennett, “centers of narrative gravity,” or, alternatively expressed, there is no part of the self that lies behind or below the various ways in which it is described (TAP, 105). Just as relations go all the way down, so do narratives. Narratives, as a form of description, neither capture anything essential about the self nor reveal fundamental truths about us. To claim that they do is equivalent to claiming that narrative is a medium that stands between us and the intrinsic nature of reality. For Kearney and Ricoeur, however, narratives do not go all the way down but are mirrors to more timeless and essential truths about the self. This is evidenced in Kearney’s treatment of “narrative imagination” in both Poetics of Imagining and Poetics of Modernity. The proponents of linguistic nominalism, postmodernism (as I have defined it), and deconstruction would all agree with Kearney when he argues that “the narrative self involves an ongoing process of self-constancy and self-rectification that requires imagination to synthesize the different horizons of past, present, and future” (PM, 99). They would, moreover, consider his account of the intertwining of narrative and history eminently sensible.

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What they would dispute is that narrative imagination “is answerable to something beyond itself” (PM, 101). If Kearney is saying that when we put down a book or a text we encounter real live people to whom we are responsible, I am sure no one will disagree with him. But I do not think that his claim is so uncontroversial. What he is suggesting is that there is a dimension of the self that exceeds the constellation of narratives in which, as he claims, we are enmeshed from birth to death. This in turn indicates that he does not think that narrative is merely “a particular form of description—the one employed by novelists and autobiographers,” but that there is a fundamental locus that transcends all narratives and descriptions (TAP, 105). This view is aptly captured in the following passage: Either way, there is a recognition that narrative imagination may indeed have full poetic license within the imaginary, but that it encounters limits to its own free play when confronted with the irreducible otherness of the other. Narrative imagination is ethical because it is answerable to something beyond itself, so that even where it knows no censure (within the text), it knows responsibility (to the other beyond the text). (PM, 101)

To what could “the irreducible otherness of the other” refer in this context other than something intrinsic within the self that is fully language independent? What would it mean for someone who has repudiated the view that there is no linguistically unmediated experience of the self or the world to say that we possess something beyond the play of relations? Maybe Kearney wants to conflate description and narration, thereby suggesting that we cease narrating when we cease describing. But, once again, this would go against the stated aims of hermeneutics and suggest that there is a way of gaining privileged access to reality over and above the various ways we have to describe it. Postmodernists do not deny that there is an “other beyond the text,” but that access to this other exceeds the linguistic context in which we encounter him or her. What Kearney needs to tell us, thus, is why he thinks “the irreducible otherness of the other” is something more than a useful description for our current ethical purposes; why he thinks, in other words, it has more of a claim on us than any similar description, such as “child of God.” In his discussions of the ethical function of narrative, Kearney claims that he repudiates “the intrusion of moralizing dogmatism into the free space of creativity” (PM, 101). His ethics is not, accordingly, a “moralism of abstract rules but an ethics of experience (concerned with cultural paradigms of suffering and action, happiness and dignity)” (PM, 101). He goes on to say, however, that

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as Aristotle first acknowledged, poetics teaches us essential truths about human experience (unlike history, which is confined to facts), and these essential truths are intimately related to the pursuit of possibilities of happiness or unhappiness—that is, the desire for the good life guided by practical wisdom (phronésis). (PM, 102)

There is a tension between Kearney’s eschewal of “moralizing dogmatism” and a “moralism of abstract rules” and his view that “poetics teaches us essential truths about human experience.” Kearney wants to avoid accusations that he is a moral essentialist while concomitantly lending credence to a neo-Aristotelianism that speaks of “essential truths,” “universals,” and “the good life.” Many antiessentialists are quite happy to appropriate the idea of “practical wisdom” for deliberating ethically. But they do not think, as Aristotle did, that such wisdom can bring to light universal truths about the human situation. On an antiessentialist interpretation, practical wisdom means simply applying the lessons of past experimentation. On the basis of trial and error, we have come to consider it good for us to act in a certain way. This does not mean that what we presently consider a good way for us to act will be considered good by our descendants. There is no way of telling what moral dilemmas will exercise future generations, just as medieval Christians had no way of telling what moral dilemmas would eventually exercise us. For an antiessentialist, moral progress is not about penetrating through the veil of appearances to a set of unchanging moral universals, but it is a matter of acting on the basis of past experimentation while acknowledging that one’s action or decision may be deemed imprudent by future generations. Put otherwise, the fact that we now describe ourselves in Christian and democratic terms does not show that we are in touch with what is intrinsically or essentially good, but only that we have been lucky. We have been lucky to the extent that such descriptions— those thrown up by the Christian scriptures and by the protagonists of the French Revolution—have taken hold in a part of the world that has more in the way of power and wealth than any other. If neither Christianity nor democracy had taken hold in this part of the world, things might have been very different. Kearney, however, seems to think, following Aristotle, that poetics can provide indications as to how we (meaning all human beings) ought to act morally. It follows that there is something deep at the self’s core that binds each human being together, something to which one can appeal when ascertaining who is worthy of respect or dignity. But, to reiterate, if interpretation goes all the way down, as Charles Taylor, Ricoeur, Kearney, and others argue, then it has to be explained, if one is to be consistent, how interpreters can magically access uninterpreted facts of the matter. It

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would only occur to an essentialist who believed in timeless universals, universals unaffected by history, to claim that there is a transcultural uninterpreted dimension of the self to which we are obligated. But this is exactly what Kearney wants to argue, despite his contention that he is not interested in a morality of abstract rules. Just as there is no way to test if any language accurately corresponds to mind-independent reality, so too there is no independent way of determining if any of our vocabularies for ethical deliberation accurately represent the essential nature of the good. We have innumerable ways of describing ourselves for moral purposes, none of which can be said with certainty to be closer to the good than any other. For example, can we say that Aristotle’s description of the moral self is objectively better than that of Kant or Christ? Is there, in other words, some neutral standpoint from which we can judge between competing descriptions? There is no such standpoint. We should not infer from this that there is no way to decide between competing descriptions. While there is nothing “objective” (qua transcultural) with which we can compare our descriptions, we can nevertheless contrast them with one another. Consequently, we will prefer one description over another, not because it reflects moral purity or is intrinsically good, but because it is more useful for our current purposes than competing descriptions. Aristotle’s moral vocabulary might have been useful for the Greeks, but it is no longer useful for the inhabitants of earlytwenty-first-century democracies. The basic presupposition here is that because language (qua acculturation) goes all the way down, we have no means of transcending our particular sociocultural contexts in the direction of something more indicative of what we really are. This is not to say that contexts cannot be crossed and foreign languages learned. It is to point out that our norms are the product of a cultural inheritance contingent through and through. Languages of moral deliberation are, thus, also contingent and up for grabs. To say that your particular vocabulary of moral deliberation is more “universal” or “morally objective” is, as Rorty points out, an empty compliment. You would be better off saying that just because your moral vocabulary is fully contingent does not mean that it is not the best on offer. In support of this contention, you will not invoke the appearance-reality distinction by saying that your vocabulary of moral deliberation is better because it “teaches essential truths about humanity,” or because it “reveals universal aspects of the human condition,” but because it has a better chance of bringing to fruition the ideas of freedom, justice, and happiness encapsulated in the writings of those whom we most admire (PM, 103). The definitions of freedom, justice, and happiness that count will be the one’s that we currently value. The conclusions just drawn will seem repugnant only to those who

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continue to subscribe to the view that the self has an essential nature. Such proponents of the ontological tradition strongly defend various forms of moral realism. But those who, like Kearney, purport to take language and interpretation seriously, cannot afford to invoke such realism. Even the latter’s use of “narrative understanding” is not apposite, for it connotes a realm of meaning to which only narrative can purvey access (PM, 103). If Kearney is to be consistent, he ought to say that narrative has the capacity to expose us to many alternative self-descriptions, none of which is any closer to the intrinsic nature of the self. Hence, all philosophical, religious, scientific, political, and moral accounts of the self (including Aristotle’s, Kant’s, and Kearney’s) are competing narratives and self-descriptions and not universal truths about the self. Those that we favor at any given time will be those that maximize happiness as defined by context. In this way, narrative functions positively for us in present-day democracies in that it helps reinforce the self-image we now take pride in. Kearney, however, follows Aristotle and neo-Aristotelians like Martha Nussbaum in suggesting “that poetic narratives not only excite emotions of pity and fear, they also teach us something about happiness and unhappiness—that is, the good life” (PM, 102). This means that, for Kearney, narratives contain ahistorical moral truths apparent upon sufficient reflection. The “good life” does not mean the good life as defined by us, descendants of Mill and Hegel, but rather the good life per se. As such, narrative “is answerable to something beyond itself” (PM, 101). Again, this would elicit no objection if it simply meant that narrative opens us to situations and lives beyond our own limited purview and provenance, lives that could immeasurably enhance our moral self-image. But Kearney’s citation of “essential truths” and “universals” leads to the conclusion that he means something more than this, something more metaphysical and essentialist. This point is brought out nicely by Rorty in a discussion of Martha Nussbaum’s contention—one that Kearney fully endorses— that “some truths cannot be expressed except in narrative form”: The urge to attribute . . . truth-candidacy to narratives seems to me to originate in the rationalist, Platonic conviction that the only thing that should be allowed to change our lives is learning how something really is. No meaning means no intentional content, which in turn means no possibility of correspondence to reality. As a result of such inferences, rationalists conclude that the power of metaphor [and narrative] must consist in making truth-candidates available that cannot be made available by other means. To say that novels do not offer truth would be, for rationalists, to say that novels should be viewed with the same suspicion as that with which Plato viewed the poets. So rationalists who think

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that they should not be so viewed have to find a way of construing them as purveying truth.7

Like Kearney, Nussbaum wants to avoid having to choose between moral philosophy and narrative. She thinks that narratives are more able to impart the truths of moral philosophy than are the texts of the moralists. Although Nussbaum wants to privilege narrative, she also wants to preserve the deontological intuitions of the moralists, especially those of Aristotle. Once again, the problem with this line of thought is that it is inconsistent to hold that the extralinguistic can be adequately captured, expressed, or represented in language. Kearney argues, for Nussbaum, “What is peculiar to the ethical quality of narrative imagining, especially in literary works, is that it gives priority to the perception of particular people and situations over abstract rules” (PM, 243). But again, perception of this sort is only one pole of the process. The good life, for Nussbaum, needs to be founded on something more fundamental than the mere perception of particulars. Such perception is aimed ultimately at the universal and essential truths of moral life. Time and again throughout Love’s Knowledge Nussbaum insists that narratives provide us with access to what is real and true, what is universally good and just.8 Kearney and Nussbaum seem to argue that literature is the most appropriate vehicle for the transmission of moral knowledge. As Rorty argues, however, this is the same as saying that certain litterateurs are endowed with a faculty that the rest of us do not possess, one that allows them to rise above their own time and assume a God’s-eye viewpoint. But if one subscribes to that view, one is then under an obligation to explain why it is that only Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Henry James, and their kind, can furnish us with moral knowledge, while the Marquis de Sade, Stephen King, and Thomas Harris cannot. They also need to explain how certain litterateurs that write of the world or humankind in a way that is pleasing to us have an insight into reality that the litterateurs who describe us in an unsavory way do not.

Can narrative imagination still function ethically if it no longer furnishes us with essential moral truths? I think we can answer this in the affirmative. I agree with Kearney when he says “poetic imagining has the capacity to make us better human beings” in that it “entails a basic act of sympathy whereby the self flows from itself toward the other” (PM, 105). The capacity that literature has to arouse such sympathy, however, does not need to be supplemented with claims that it also provides insights into

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the nature of the good. As such—pace Kearney, Nussbaum, Ricoeur, and MacIntyre—I follow the postmodern intuitions of Rorty when he argues that making the turn from a religious and philosophical culture to a literary one requires that we read all writers (e.g., literary, philosophical, and religious) not as those whose descriptions of ourselves and our world are accurate representations, but as those who believe that “redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination.”9 This does not mean that through Husserlian “imaginative variation” we can get in touch with things as they are in themselves but that our imaginations will be devoted to dreaming up more-novel descriptions of ourselves than are currently available. This is a process of self-enlargement that relies not on the existence of an ideal self toward which we are steadily gravitating but on the availability of innumerable suggestions as to how we might lead our lives. On this reading, there is no one way to be human. Such a literary culture of the type proposed by Rorty would not deploy literature in an effort to extrapolate the universal from the particular, or reality from appearance.10 It would be deployed for the purpose of getting in touch with as many particulars as possible. What gives literature its ethical force is not that it is morality’s own medium but that the reader can become acquainted with people and situations that have traditionally appeared alien or strange. This is not to say, with Kearney, that “it is answerable to something beyond itself,” such as the “irreducible otherness of the other.” It is simply a suggestion that if you have been lucky enough to come from a culture that, for a multitude of sociohistorical reasons, has become deeply uneasy about its xenophobic, homophobic, or misogynistic character, then you will benefit enormously from reading as many novels and narratives as possible. In so doing, you will acquire a better understanding of why those whom you once distrusted describe themselves in the way that they do.11 Narrative, in other words, has the capacity to expose us to innumerable characters and situations. Narrative thus enables us to see that selfdescription is one of many available descriptions, and, as such, is no less contingent than any other. Most important, though, it allows us to get inside the head of those whom we fear or loathe most, or of those with whom we least want to be associated. The aim is not to determine to what extent these foreigners are morally deluded or out of step with the nature of the good life. Rather, it is to become acquainted with their world to such a degree that we can understand why they act as they do from their point of view. Understanding their fear is sometimes all we need to evoke the desired sympathy. Once we realize that what we call “the good life” is simply

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an abbreviation and a divinization of our parochial practices, then we come to realize that the test for moral awareness is the extent to which we are open to the strange and unfamiliar, and also to what extent we try to see “what these recalcitrant sort of people look like to themselves” (RFE ). To argue that there are universal aspects of the human condition revealed through narrative, as Kearney and Nussbaum seem to do, is akin to saying that there is an intrinsic moral nature, the structure of which is best captured in narrative form. For the reasons cited previously, both thinkers should drop this claim and stick to the view that narrative is one of the most effective ways we have at our disposal to engender greater levels of harmony between diverse peoples. In so doing, they would jettison the belief that the imagination is a faculty in the service of moral epistemology. They would see it as the primary means of getting in touch with other people for the purposes of becoming less egotistical. If, on the other hand, one persists in seeing imagination and narrative as tools in a cognitive process, or as servants of truth, then one runs the risk of diminishing the ethical efficacy of both. One’s primary objective in reading narratives will be to secure an account of “the good” to the neglect of discovering what it is like for someone to live in a world that regards him or her as evil or depraved merely on the basis of skin color or sexual orientation. In other words, one may become so obsessed with the essential nature of good and evil that one misses the opportunity to make sense of all the factors that lead someone to be categorized as “evil” to begin with. Narrative imagination’s primary ethical task is to get in touch with as many different types of self-descriptions as possible. Such familiarity breeds tolerance and sympathy, empathy and acceptance. It also permits one to see that one’s own self-description, inherited from birth, is not the only true description. It is one capable of being redescribed in the light of new and strange narrative descriptions of the self and the world. The imagination is not something that brings one any closer to the real or the good. It makes available as many different possibilities for being human as there are different types of novel. In an antifoundational world, narrative imagination is still the best means for bringing to fruition the moral ideals of tolerant liberals of the early twenty-first century. The only difference is that we would no longer consider such ideals “essential truths” but the best self-descriptions for moral purposes we have come up with so far. In the final chapter of his recent On Stories, Kearney makes much the same claims for narrative as I have been making here. Although he remains faithful to Aristotle’s conviction that “mimesis may be seen accordingly as an imaginative redescription which captures . . . the ‘essence’ [eidos] of our lives,” he seems to distill from it the latent foundational

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assumptions that both Ricoeur and Nussbaum tend to deploy (OS, 133). This is evidenced clearly when he remarks that the “very notion of cathartic pity and fear, linked as it is to unmerited misfortune, for example, would collapse if our aesthetic responses were to be totally divorced from any empathy or antipathy towards the character’s ethical quality” (OS, 155). The other two volumes in Kearney’s trilogy, The God Who May Be and Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, are replete with similar antiessentialist gestures. Ultimately there is not much distance between someone like me and Kearney. His latest books bear witness to a mind that is inexorably intrigued by the question of how the world can become more just, egalitarian, and pluralistic, especially at a time when the common reaction to world affairs is to retreat to the trenches, seal up the borders, and revive tribal myths and mantras. As such, he is more a product of the social democratic left than the cultural left, more an apostle of Václav Havel than a spiritual soul mate of Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton. His vision is constructive, hopeful, and affirmative, avoiding the penchant for social pessimism that defines the work of much post-Heideggerian and neo-Marxist thought. I would like to see Kearney go the distance, first, with the more sensible postmodern thinkers of social hope in ignoring those who irresponsibly claim that historical truth has no foundation in reality (“bad” postmodernism), and, second, in affirming all the consequences of the claim that there is no escaping the hermeneutic circle. This would mean abandoning all claims to universality, essence, and the correspondence theory of truth.12

Notes 1. Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 32. 2. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 205. 3. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 168. 4. Paul Ricoeur, “The Creativity of Language,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester University Press, 1984), 23. 5. This expression is that of Wilfrid Sellars, and one that is employed consistently by Rorty throughout his writings. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 98–121. Henceforth cited as TAP. 6. Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/redemption.htm (accessed May 21, 2006). Henceforth cited as RFE.

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7. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 54. 8. See for example Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 4–5. 9. Richard Rorty, “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture,” http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/decline.htm (accessed May 21, 2006). 10. “Seen in this light,” Rorty instructs, “what novels do for us is to let us know how people quite unlike ourselves think of themselves, how they contrive to put actions that appall us in a good light, how they give their lives meaning. The problem of how to live our lives then becomes a problem of how to balance our needs against theirs, and their self-descriptions against ours.” He continues, “To have a more educated, developed, and sophisticated moral outlook is to be able to grasp more of these needs, and to understand more of these self-descriptions” (RFE ). 11. Rorty explains: “Egotists [those willing to assume ‘that one already has all the knowledge necessary for deliberation, all the understanding of the consequences of a contemplated action that could be needed’] who are inclined to philosophize hope to short-circuit the need to find out what is on the mind of other people. . . . Religion and philosophy have often served as shields for fanaticism and intolerance because they suggest that this sort of short-circuiting has actually been accomplished. Novel-readers, by contrast, are seeking redemption from insensitivity rather than from impiety or irrationality. They may not know or care whether there is a way things really are, but they worry about whether they are sufficiently aware of the needs of others. Viewed from this angle, the hegemony of the novel can be viewed as an attempt to carry on through Christ’s suggestion that love is the only law” (RFE ). This, of course, is not to say that Kearney and Nussbaum are egotists of this sort. Both are seeking redemption from insensitivity. My claim is simply that in elevating narrative and moral philosophy to a status beyond that of a set of useful descriptions, they are unwittingly bordering on such egotism. 12. For more on the type of postmodernism to which I subscribe, see what I have written in The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); “A Civic Religion of Social Hope: A Reply to Simon Critchley,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, no. 5 (2001): 35–58; and “The Catastrophe of Memory: Derrida, Milbank, and the (Im)possibility of Forgiveness,” in Questioning God: Religion and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 129–49.

Afterword

Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust Richard Kearney

It is surely no accident that two of the greatest modern novels—Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—both feature “library scenes” in which their heroes undergo decisive literary conversions. In both cases, the respective protagonists, Stephen and Marcel, experience an “epiphany” that profoundly transforms their approach to literature. In Ulysses this occurs in the “midway” episode, called “Scylla and Charybdis,” in which Stephen, an aspiring writer, realizes the error of his grand aesthetic expectations and rejoins the ordinary universe—with Leopold Bloom as guide. In In Search of Lost Time, the library sequence comes toward the end of the novel when Marcel, also an ambitious young artist, encounters a number of death experiences and finally renounces his delusions of authorial grandeur—at which point he undergoes a series of “epiphanies” that open the way to his becoming a real writer in the real world. I propose to examine each of these library scenes as “traversals of the imaginary” that tell us something crucial about the Joycean and Proustian aesthetics. But first a word about the term epiphany.

Epiphanies in Joyce Epiphany was one of the most formative terms of Joyce’s aesthetic. It originally derives from the Christian account of the Divine manifesting itself to the Gentiles in the persons of the three Magi. What seems to have appealed especially to the young Joyce was the idea that it is through a most singular and simple event—the birth of a child—that the sacred revealed itself to the world at large. Epiphany signals the traversal of the finite by the infinite, of the particular by the universal, of the mundane by the mystical, of time by eternity. For Joyce it was to become the operative term for an aesthetics of everyday incarnation. Indeed one of his most moving 183

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lyrics went by the epiphanic title of “Ecce Puer” and ended with the lines: “Young life is breathed / On the glass; / The world that was not / Comes to pass. / A child is sleeping: An old man gone. / O, Father forsaken, / Forgive your son.”1 In chapter 15 of the seminal novel Stephen Hero, we find the following definition of Joyce’s style of writing between 1900 and 1904: “Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.” 2 Elsewhere in Stephen Hero, we find epiphany described as a “sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” And we read here that it is for “the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (SH, 211). This telling description relates in turn to another formative account of aesthetic epiphany in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Here Stephen defines beauty as radiance or claritas, which combines with two other Thomistic aesthetic properties—integritas and consonantia—to constitute the power of epiphanic revelation, especially as it refers (once again) to ordinary or inconsequential events. And yet in Ulysses, in which we might expect this aesthetic to reach its crowning expression, we find but one single use of the term epiphany, in the context of an ironic allusion to the vainglorious ambitions of the Romantic artist. The reference occurs in the “Proteus” chapter, in which Stephen is unable to seize the moment of mystical insight—the “secret signature of things”—unlike the hero Menelaus in the original Homeric myth who grasped the slippery figure of Proteus in water. As Stephen negotiates his way over the damp mud of Sandymount Strand in Dublin Bay he recalls how, when younger and more narcissistic still, he would bow to himself in the mirror and step forward “to applaud earnestly, striking face,” announcing all the wonderful masterpieces he would write to make himself famous for posterity. At this point, we read this telling sentence: “Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria.”3 And Stephen adds, extending mock-heroic memory into a future anterior: “someone was to read them there after a few thousand years.” The self-irony could not be more pronounced. Then, immediately, in one quick deflationary instant, we are brought back to the banal nature of Stephen’s immediate material environment. The ground is giving way. Our hero is beginning to slide and sink. And as he does so, Stephen thinks of the terrible shipwreck of the grandiose armada sent to rescue the Irish from British tyranny hundreds of years back. “The grainy sand had gone

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from under his feet . . . lost Armada. Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden of man’s ashes” (U, 41). The hubristic artist rejoins the disenchanted everyday universe of living and dying. Grand illusions are followed by failure and defeat, epiphany by anti-epiphany. But this, as it transpires, is not the final conversion for Stephen. It is more like a prelude to the ultimate deflation of Stephen’s Promethean ambitions in the national library sequence that takes place at the very center of the novel, signaled by the motto “The truth is midway” (U, 212). Here the process of aesthetic demystification will open up a path leading toward a new kind of authorship, and I shall argue a new kind of epiphany—what I will call epiphany 2. Epiphany in the Library The national library chapter opens with Stephen proclaiming his grand theory about Shakespeare before a band of fellow literary aesthetes. From the word go, the tone is set. This is about a “ghoststory,” ostensibly Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But more than that, too. When Stephen asks, at the outset, “What is a ghost?” the answer is telling. “One who has faded into palpability through death, through absence, through change of manners” (U, 188). From the beginning of the novel, Stephen has been haunted by the ghost of his own mother, at whose deathbed he notoriously refused to kneel and pray. She returns to him in the form of a recurring guilt— “agenbite of inwit”—which he tries to dispose of by banishing from his mind the “mothers of memory” (U, 188). But these mothers are also of a more collective and cultural nature, constituting that “nightmare of history” from which Stephen is trying to awake: Motherland (Ireland as Caitlin ni Houlihan), Mother Church (mariolatrous Catholicism), and mother tongue (Gaelic). Stephen wants to trade in these unholy ghosts of history for a holy ghost of pure aesthetic mediation. He will seek to reconcile a lost son (himself) with a spiritual father through the medium of art. And he will look for metaphysical confirmation of this in a certain reading of the Christian Trinity in which Father and Son are united, “middler the Holy Ghost” (U, 197). No women need apply. But Stephen is not talking in this episode about himself or about Ireland—at least not explicitly. He is talking about Shakespeare, who lived through his own crisis of filiality and fiction. According to Stephen, Shakespeare wrote his famous “ghoststory,” Hamlet, at the very time he was grieving the loss of his son, Hamnet, and his deceased father, John Shakespeare. The play was composed as some sort of aesthetic compensation for

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Shakespeare’s unbearable confusion as he hovered in the between space of fatherless sonhood and sonless fatherhood. The suggestion is that the playwright sought reconciliation through the agency of the ghost (a role Shakespeare actually played in the first London production in the Globe Theatre). What is more, Stephen proffers the hypothesis that the incestuous Gertrude is a stand-in for Shakespeare’s own wife, Anne Hathaway, who betrayed her husband by having an affair with his brothers in Stratford. This is how Stephen explains his theory: The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the specter. He speaks the words . . . “Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit” bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever. (U, 188–89)

Stephen suggests that William Shakespeare, in his theatrical performance as King Hamlet’s phantom, must have been aware that he was playing out his own grief at the loss of his son, Hamnet. “Is it possible,” Stephen asks rhetorically, “that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet’s twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the disposed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?” (U, 189). The ghost thus serves to link father (King Hamlet) with son (Prince Hamlet) by displacing the guilty queen Gertrude and replacing her with the “word of memory”—the story that Hamlet the Prince will eventually release to the world in the final act of the play as he bids Horatio, “absent thee from felicity awhile to tell my story.” By means of such narrative remembrance, the son shall ultimately fulfill the command of the father (“Remember me!”) through the spiritual-aesthetic agency of the play itself. Shakespeare will be reunited—poetically if not empirically, phantasmatically if not historically—with his lost son (and indeed with his lost father, John Shakespeare). Thus, also, we might infer, the ghost may rid Shakespeare of his own “guilt” by having his story told in this cathartic way. Melancholy gives way to mourning as it is “worked-through” in the telling of the “ghoststory.” So the theory seems to go.

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But if Stephen is right, are we not witnessing a curious reversal of Stephen’s own history here? Is not the very guilt—“agenbite of inwit”— that Stephen is seeking to absolve by “awaking from the nightmare of history” not occasioned by his own lack of proper mourning? In the transposition of his own history to the story of Hamlet, we find a strange transfer of Stephen’s guilt about his unmourned mother (Mrs. Dedalus in Ulysses) to the opposite guilt of the unmourning mother. Gertrude serves in a perverse sense as the guilty queen (like Anne Hathaway, on whom she is based, or Mrs. Dedalus and Mrs. Bloom, whom she represents) whose sexual and spiritual betrayal of her spouse qualifies her as a suitable “sacrificial scapegoat.” Her exclusion from the new trinity of Father-SonGhost will, the theory suggests, lead to a perfect artistic purgation and atonement. As Pater et Filius are mutually absolved through the medium of the spirit, woman (mother, spouse) is dissolved.

But let’s have Stephen speak for himself again. After a few rounds of literary jousting with the librarians Eglinton and Best, Stephen returns to his basic thesis that an artist can recompose the different aspects of his being—including that of father and son—through a work of art. Just as the “artist weave(s) and unweave(s) his image” in such a way that “through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth,” so too “in an intense instant of imagination” our past and future can somehow, miraculously, be united into a present moment. This is how Stephen, sitting in the national library surrounded by his literary peers, looks forward to a time when he will be able to look back at himself as he was in the past and in this very instant: “that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be” (U, 194). In other words, the genius of the artist is to be able to transcend the divisions of existence by means of a spiritual imagination that can subsume the ruptures of our temporality into an aesthetic of eternal redemption. Stephen quotes the poet Shelley in this passage, confirming a Romantic sentiment that harks back to Mallarmé’s description of Hamlet with which the chapter opens—“il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même, don’t you know, reading the book of himself ” (U, 187). The fact that this phrase is repeated—in French, then in English—as well as its crucial role of leading off the whole discussion of Hamlet that dominates the chapter, suggests that it is central to the author’s meaning. Here is the exemplary paradigm of the great book in which the contingencies and contradictions of ordinary life may be ultimately transformed. After several more bouts of repartee about how Shakespeare’s dra-

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matic corpus relates to his biography, Stephen returns once more to the theme of father and son in Hamlet. We are back with the “ghost” of King Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore addressing “the son consubstantial with the father.” Now the theological idioms of the Trinitarian mystery are explicitly invoked. “He who himself begot, middler the Holy Ghost, and Himself sent himself, Agenbuyer, between Himself and others” (U, 187). This passage, beginning with four uses of the term himself and ending with the return of God, now in the person of the crucified and resurrected Son, sitting at the “right hand of His Own Self” in heaven, is mock-heroic in the extreme. And, if the reader was in any doubt about the intended irony, the graphic invocation of “Glo-o-ri-a in ex-cel-sis De-o” to round off the theological parody adds a defining touch of mischievous melodrama. But this is not all. Stephen comes back to his Trinitarian theory— like a kitten playing with a ball of wool—later in the chapter when he raises the question of physical versus spiritual paternity. “A father,” Stephen now opines, is at best a “legal fiction,” at worst a “necessary evil” (U, 207). He means, of course, a biological father that has no real relation to a son apart from the physiological “instant of blind rut” that engendered him. Paternal and filial affection are therefore, so the theory goes, unnatural, and no son can ever be certain who his father really is (unlike the mother). Whence Stephen’s rather cynical quip: “Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” (U, 207). Thus Stephen’s overall hypothesis seems to be that in Hamlet Shakespeare is replacing the experience of actual fatherhood (his dead father, John Shakespeare) with a spiritual fatherhood that compensates for all the doubts, uncertainties, and rivalries that exist between real fathers and sons (for the male child’s “growth is his father’s decline, his youth his father’s envy, his friend his father’s enemy” [U, 208]). According to Stephen, this “mystery” of spiritual paternity—represented by the ghost in Hamlet and the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity—lies at the very root of the Western church and culture. Here “fatherhood . . . is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten” (U, 207). This ingenious fantasy of mystical fatherhood means that when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, “he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson” (U, 208). In this manner, Shakespeare contrived to resolve the tragic ruptures of his own life history (death of his father and son, betrayal by his wife and brothers) by transmuting this history into a mystical story. John Eglinton sums up Stephen’s metaphysical theory thus: “the truth is midway . . . He is ghost and the prince. He is all in all”; Stephen readily agrees, “The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.”4

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The implications of this are extensive. Just as Pater and Filius are miraculously reconciled, so too are a host of other human antinomies— “bawd and cuckold” (being now “a wife unto himself”), male and female (united as “androgynous angel”), possible and actual (“He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible”), and so on (U, 213). All of which suggests that the solution to life’s tragic contradictions and divisions is to be found in the great Trinitarian fantasy— forged by Christian heresiarchs like Sabellius and writers like Shakespeare—in which father and son are reunited through the mediating agency of Geist. Is this not what is meant by the summary statement that “truth is midway”—echoing the earlier allusion “middler the Holy Ghost”? This surmise would certainly seem to be borne out by Stephen’s citation of Maeterlinck’s mot about Socrates and Judas going forth only to find themselves again. Or as Stephen puts it in his own words: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves,” meaning that if God was the “playwright who wrote the folio of this world,” Shakespeare would rewrite the folio of his own world in a play called Hamlet (U, 213). And we might presume that Stephen Dedalus will do likewise when he finally comes to realize his vocation as Romantic artist par excellence. In other words, if Stephen’s theory is correct, art would be the greatest feat of mystical solipsism—self-thinking thought, self-loving love, selfcausing cause, self-creating creation.

But is that the end of the story? Is it simply a matter of converting the mimetic conflicts and sunderings of French “triangles” into the spiritual sublimity of mystical “trinities”? When, at the end of all the brilliant and grandiloquent discoursing, John Eglinton puts the hard question to Stephen: “You have brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your own theory?” Stephen replies “no,” and replies, we are told, “promptly” (U, 213). What are we to make of this sudden recantation? Why such a labyrinthine detour in this august national library, conducted by some of the smartest minds of the young Dublin literati, if we are to end up in a cul-de-sac? And why does Stephen go on to claim that the one who helps him to “believe” in the very theory that he now disowns is “Egomen”? (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines egomism as “the belief of one who believes he is the only one in existence.”) Let us reflect on what might be meant here by the notion of French triangle. A motif running throughout the library episode, as noted previously, is Anne Hathaway’s betrayal of her husband, William. This is very much a subtext compared to the central paternity theme, but it serves a

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significant role nonetheless. The terms used to describe Shakespeare’s unfaithful spouse are invariably disparaging. She is portrayed as a seductress who tumbles young William in the hay before she does likewise with Shakespeare’s brothers (Richard, Edmund, and Gilbert) once her husband had left Stratford for London—“sweet Ann I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer twice a wooer”—which is why, according to Stephen, Shakespeare brands Queen Gertrude with “infamy” in the fifth scene of Hamlet (U, 202). And when Stephen and Eglinton rejoin the discussion of Anne Hathaway later in the chapter, it is in the disparaging context of “an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god” (U, 206). The theological discussion of mystical paternity that immediately follows (discussed previously) adds a further nail to the coffin of the banished woman. It was on the mystery of the Christian Trinity—and not on the “madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe”—that the true church is founded (U, 207). And this theme resurfaces one last and very telling time as a terminal salvo to Stephen’s grand theory, accounting for that singular note of banishment—“banishment of the heart, banishment from home”—which we are told “sounds uninterruptedly” from one end of Shakespeare’s corpus to the other. The theme of betrayal is not some isolated matter. “It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created,” concludes Stephen (U, 212). And it is further borne out by the fact that Anne Hathaway’s betrayal repeats itself again in the next generation (the “married daughter, Susan . . . is accused of adultery”), while Anne herself is refused burial in the same grave as Shakespeare. “It is between the lines of this last written words,” claims Stephen, “ it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid” (U, 212). Thus, the theme of the infidel woman (wife-mother-daughter) ghosts the entire thesis of spiritual paternity and, Stephen argues, is the hidden motivation for Shakespeare’s invention of a literary “ghoststory”—a drama in which the “guilty queen” can be sacrificially purged and “Hamlet père” and “Hamlet fils” find themselves ultimately atoned “middler the holy ghost.” In other words, if the artist-author-creator can become a mystical father who is “Himself his own Son” and thereby can dispense with the profane mediation of woman (“being a wife unto himself”), then we would seem to have hit finally upon a solution to the cruel sundering of existence (U, 213). In this grand finale, Stephen’s theory would end where it began—returning to itself in triumphal self-congratulation—that is, with the Romantic vision of the great poet writing and reading the book of himself. The “playwright who wrote the folio of this world,” echoing the Mallarmean poet “lisant au livre de lui-même” (U, 213). But, once again, the matter is not so simple. Not only does Stephen revoke his own theory of triangles supplanted by trinities, but he goes on

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to confront the radical consequences of this disavowal. First, he undermines the metaphysical model of self-thinking thought as the ultimate guarantor of truth. The mystical paradigm of a self-sufficient paternity (Trinitarian or other) is now parodied as solipsistic and masturbatory. Buck Mulligan’s Dublin ditty about onanistic litterateurs—“afraid to marry on earth / They masturbated for all they were worth”—leads to a send-up of Socratic self-knowledge: “Jest on. Know thyself” (U, 216). And this point is reinforced by Mulligan’s proposal for a mock-heroic drama (recalling the earlier theological conceits of self-engendering trinities and androgenous angels) entitled “Everyman His Own Wife / or / A Honeymoon in the Hand / (a national immortality in three orgasms).” This is Mulligan’s way of trying to outdo the Irish revivalist movement of Synge, Lady Gregory, and Yeats, as well as A. E. Russell, who actually participates in the national library discussion. But Stephen, it now seems, will have none of it. He parts company here with Mulligan and his literary peers. He alone of the library company is not party to the subsequent reunion in the literary soirée. And this decision to pass beyond the pretentious antics of Dublin’s aesthetic coterie—which has preoccupied him up to now—on the foot of the renunciation of his grand literary theory, prepares Stephen to meet Bloom. The “jesuit jew,” as Mulligan labels Stephen, is now ready to behold the “wandering jew,” Bloom. “Jewgreek” crosses paths for the first time with “Greekjew.” Stephen now definitively renounces his presumption to become the great Irish writer to succeed Synge, Shaw, and Yeats (all mentioned in the episode). “Cease to strive,” he resolves (U, 218). And in so doing, Stephen begins the second half of his odyssey. He follows Bloom out of the national library onto the street of Dublin, a journey that will lead through night town and the cabman’s shelter to Bloom’s own home in Eccles Street, and, eventually, to Molly. The motto that “the truth is midway” now takes on another meaning, retrospectively, insofar as Stephen finds a way through the extremes of Scylla and Charybdis to embrace a new aesthetic insight—what I will call the “epiphany of the everyday.” This is how Joyce describes this crucial traversal of paths: About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he [Stephen] stood aside. Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today, if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably . . . . The wandering jew . . . . A dark back went before them. Step of a pard, down, out by the gateway. (U, 217)

The fact that Stephen will take his departure here from Mulligan and choose to follow Bloom instead is decisive. He trades in a popular, anti-

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Semitic litterateur for a vagrant, cuckolded adman. This is the real turning point in the novel and marks the threshold separating the narcissistic, Romantic Stephen from the later author of the everyday. And the epiphany that marks this turn? I would suggest that it is that instant of recognition in which Stephen suddenly “sees” what he had previously been blind to—the other. The will of another—Bloom, the despised and humiliated Semite—that fronts and confronts him humbly and unpretentiously (“bowing, greeting” [U, 217]). The “other chap,” who Stephen confesses presciently helps him “unbelieve” his grand theory. In short, that other who will lead him out of the self-enclosed, self-regarding circle of literary solipsism, away, back, down, out onto the streets of the ordinary universe, into a world where the self leads not back to itself—as with Socrates, Judas, Sabellius—but beyond itself toward otherness. A world in which time does not subsume space into itself but comes to heed and serve it: “That lies in space which I must come to” (U, 217). And as soon as Stephen accepts this, he sees not only his wayward past illuminated in the instant— “cease to strive”—but also his imminent adventures with Bloom: traversing the roads of Dublin city (“men wandered”), night town (“streets of harlots after”), and, finally, Molly (“a creamfruit mellon he held to me”). “You will see,” Stephen realizes (U, 217). This moment of traversal is the epiphany that will change his life. Moreover, are the last lines—in which the plumes ascending from the chimneys of Kildare Street are compared to the smoke rising from altars in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, perhaps alluding to the return and resurrection of the sacrificed woman (Imogen–Anne Hathaway–GertrudePenelope?)—another pointer to the return of Molly in the last chapter of the book? If this reading is sound, then the throwaway line in the very middle of Stephen’s peroration on mystical paternity takes on—retrospectively—another complexion: “Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life” (U, 207). If so, then Stephen’s “agenbite of inwit” regarding his dead and unmourned mother may itself, at last, be subsiding, with the repudiated “mothers of memory” assuming a more benign visage. Is the nightmare of history returning as that epiphany of the mundane so faithfully and jubilantly recorded in Molly’s polymorphous poem (itself one sustained coming back of time to space)? There is still a way to go, of course, from here to there, from the middle of the book to the end. But the tide has turned, and there is no going back. Stephen, it seems, has undergone a profound conversion from belief to unbelief in his own theory. He has died a death and shed his most fundamental delusions. No longer striving to fulfill the great expectations of immortal art—fostered by his literati confrères—Stephen is ready to take his lead from a simple adman, Bloom, who will guide him toward

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another way of “seeing” and “hearing,” another kind of art (in the lower case) in which father and son do not sacrifice procreation for creation, otherness for selfhood, space for time, female for male, history for mystique, the world of flesh and blood for a world of ghosts and Geist. Leaving his grand theory behind him on the shelves of the national library, Stephen follows Bloom into a profane universe in which divinity is witnessed in a “cry in the street,” in the “yes” of a woman’s desire. “God: noise in the street: very peripatetic” (U, 186). This is the truth of epiphany to which Stephen finally comes. Epiphanies—Intratextual, Extratextual, Transtextual The previous account identifies the role of epiphany within the Joycean text. But if Joyce is correct when he claims “it would be a brave man would invent something that never happened,” is it not legitimate to wonder if Joyce’s intratextual epiphanies might not repeat certain extratextual experiences in Joyce’s own life? Any attempt nowadays—after formalism and structuralism—to relate an author’s work to his or her biography is contentious at least. But it is not always unprofitable. Indeed, if we are to give any credence to Stephen’s own procedure in correlating Shakespeare’s oeuvre with his life—while accepting his disavowal of his own “theory” about this correlation—we may assume that there is more than madness in the method. Before moving on to Proust, I would like to suggest that there are three possible episodes in Joyce’s own life that might be said to prefigure crucial epiphanies in the novel. First, and most obviously, we know from Joyce himself that his first “going out” with Nora Barnacle on June 16, 1904, lies at the core of the book. This is the very day and date for the setting of the whole story, subsequently commemorated as Bloomsday. If this is so, by the author’s own admission, then it is probably fair to conjecture that Molly’s climactic phantasia is, in some respects, an epiphanic “repetition” of this moment— the existential past being given an open future through the kairos of the literary moment. Here the human eros of space and time is celebrated in an epiphany of sacredness. “What else were we given all those desires for I want to know,” Molly reminds us (U, 777). And as Joyce suggests in a letter to his Parisian friend Valery Larbaud, we can take Molly at her word: “Pénélope, le dernier cri.” Second, it is possible that a particular experience that Joyce had of being rescued after a mugging in Dublin was at the root of his motivation to invent Leopold Bloom. As he relates in a letter from Rome to his brother, Stanislas, dated November 13, 1906, a brutal mugging in Rome in 1906 that left him destitute recalled the earlier mugging in Dublin when he

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found himself rescued by a Dublin Jew called Hunter, who took him back to his home and gave him cocoa. The Hunter in question, as Joyce’s biographer Richard Ellmann explains, refers to a “dark complexioned Dublin Jew . . . rumored to be a cuckold whom Joyce had met twice in Dublin.”5 In his letter to Stanislas, Joyce reveals that this same Hunter is to be the central character of a planned new story called “Ulysses.” Ellmann comments: “On the night of 22 June 1904 Joyce (not yet committed either to Nora or to monogamy) made overtures to a girl on the street without realizing, perhaps, that she had another companion. The official escort came forward and left him, after a skirmish, with ‘black eye, sprained wrist, sprained ankle, cut chin, cut hand.’ He was dusted off and taken home by a man called Alfred Hunter in what he was to call ‘orthodox Samaritan fashion.’ This was the Hunter about whom the short story “Ulysses” was to be projected.” 6 Curiously, however, it was not until the second mugging triggered the forgotten memory of the first that Joyce resolved to create Bloom. Epiphanies seem to have something to do with a certain anagnoresis that coincides with a creative repetition or retrieval of some “inexperienced experience”—a sort of ana-mnesis that in turn calls for a particular ana-aesthesis of literary epiphany. We might even propose the neologism ana-phany to capture this curious phenomenon of doubling.7 And Stephen? I would hazard a guess that the existential epiphany that lies at the root of the invention of Stephen—if there is one—relates to some pivotal event of awareness-through-sundering that the young Joyce experienced in a Dublin library. Such a moment, though we have no specific record of it in Joyce’s biography or letters, would most likely have entailed a break with his Dublin literary rivals (for example, Oliver St. John Gogarty and Vincent Cosgrove, who falsely claimed to have slept with Nora)—a break that finally prompted Joyce to take the role of exodus and exile. At least, that is what might be inferred from the national library exchange analyzed earlier. As Declan Kiberd suggestively remarks about this decisive midway chapter: “Written in 1918, but dealing with a day fourteen years earlier, this section includes lines which predict its future composition, implicitly uniting the young graduate of 1904 with the mature father and artist of 1918. . . . Already Stephen sets himself at an aesthetic distance from events.”8 The recurring phrases that young Stephen addresses here to his future authorial self—“see this. Remember,” “You will see,” and so on—indicate the crisscrossing of past and future that epitomizes the singular temporality of epiphany (identified by Paul as kairos and by Kierkegaard and Heidegger as Augenblick). Moreover, the fact that a key epiphanic moment in Portrait also takes place in a library—Stephen’s revelation of the power of words in the famous “tundish” exchange with the Jesuit dean of studies—might further point in this

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direction. But all such attempts to link literature to life remain, of course, a matter of conjecture and surmise. Let me conclude with a few supplementary remarks on the intratextual epiphanies of Ulysses. Concerning Stephen, the actual proponent of the notion of epiphany in the first place, we might say that the epiphany of the library scene is one that mutates and migrates through the book, until it reaches its culmination in the “Part . . . You will see” intuition. Previous prefigurations of this epiphany are to be found, arguably, not only in the Sandymount Strand scene analyzed earlier (“Wait . . . Remember”) but already in the opening exchange with Mr. Deasy in which Stephen expresses his insight that God is “a cry in the street.” Such a developmental reading of epiphany—that it emerges within a temporal-historical-worldly process—would seem to find some support in Stephen Hero’s initial description of an object or event “achieving its epiphany.” The “radiance” of the “commonest object”—be it apprehending divinity in a “street cry” or in the unprepossessing figure of a wandering and rejected adman— attests to the traversal of eternity through time. But the eternity incarnate in the instant equally refers back to a past and forward to a future that overspills the moment. In this sense, we might say that epiphany manifests a paradoxical structure of time that Paul called “eschatological.” It is exemplified, for example, in the Palestinian formula for “remembering the one who is still to come”—a phenomenon that numerous contemporary thinkers have called “messianic” time (Levinas, Benjamin, Derrida). We are referring here to a singular form of “anticipatory memory” that recalls the past into the future through the present: a temporal anomaly that Levinas calls the “paradox of posterior anteriority,” and that the poet Hopkins—who studied theology and literature in the same Dublin libraries as the young Joyce—called “aftering” or “over-and-overing,” an ana-esthetic process that enables us to bear witness to the manner in which each simple mortal thing “deals out that being that in each one dwells; selves . . . crying what I do is me: for that I came . . . for Christ plays in ten thousand places.”9 And yet how do we explain that in Ulysses Stephen does not invoke the term epiphany except in the ostensibly derogatory sense in the Proteus/ Sandymount episode? I think that what we have in Ulysses is the mature Joyce translating his—and Stephen’s—youthful notion of epiphany into a post-Romantic literary praxis. What we witness is not some doctrinal exegesis of epiphany, which would too readily slip into some grand metaphysical theory à la the national library discourse; rather what we have is the performance of epiphany in the text itself. It does not have to be named. It is the very process of naming and writing itself: a process that retrieves life through the text and prefigures a return to the life-of-action

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after the text. Epi-phany as epi-phora and ana-phora: a transferring back and forth between literature and life, transversality, moving in both directions. If this is so, then the return of epiphany by performance, rather than by name, in the library chapter might be termed epiphany 2. Such a second epiphany, which dares not speak its name—out of modesty as much as discretion—would be post-Romantic and postmetaphysical, democratic rather than elitist, and deeply demotic in its fidelity to the ordinary universe. And such epiphany is what we might call posthumous to the extent that it resurfaces after the experience of radical parting, powerlessness, and loss. “For without sundering,” as Stephen learns, “there is no reconciliation” (U, 195). And what, finally, of the intratextual epiphanies of Leopold and Molly? For Leopold, as for Stephen, one could say that they are multiple, recurring at various key moments in the text (e.g., in Davy Byrne’s pub, in the Hollis Street Hospital, in the cabman’s shelter, in night town, when he chooses compassion over violence and hate)—recurrences that seem to “achieve” their ultimate epiphany in the culminating passage of “Ithaca” in which Bloom, curled up in the bed at Molly’s feet, embraces a condition of quiet equipoise: “less envy than equanimity . . . childman weary, manchild in the womb” (U, 733). Resisting the path of mimetic rivalry (with Blazes Boylan), jealousy (of Molly), competition (with Stephen), and hatred (toward the citizen and other anti-Jewish persecutors), Bloom chooses rebirth. And Molly’s epiphany? The final sequence speaks for itself. Joyce’s own verdict, cited earlier, is not impertinent: “Pénélope, le dernier cri.” The only remaining question might be, is this the ultimate epiphany of epiphanies for Joyce, and for us his readers? Or is the entire novel itself an epiphany from beginning to end, with Stephen, Bloom, and Molly serving as our three mundane magi—offering us different aspects of one particular epiphanic moment: June 16, 1904? One epiphanic time in one epiphanic space? A day in the life of three Dubliners, retrieved, rewritten, and resurrected as literature? Not a triumphal literature of closure to be sure, but a textuality of endless openness to the event of life as serendipity, surprise, accident, and grace.

Epiphanies in Proust Proust’s In Search of Lost Time performs a similar aesthetic of epiphany. Though Proust does not explicitly invoke the term, the associated idioms of incarnation, manifestation, revelation, and resurrection recur at key

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moments in the text, especially around the final library episode. This is where Marcel—like Stephen—comes to an ultimate reckoning with his vocation as an author. Returning to Paris after a spell in a sanatorium where he has been recovering from a pulmonary illness, Marcel darkly acknowledges that he will never be a writer: “If ever I thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one.”10 He experiences deep disenchantment. All his great literary ambitions are shattered as he encounters death at every turn: news of daily carnage from the war front; the demise of his dashing young peers, especially Robert de Saint Loup; the shocking decrepitude and abjection of the once-proud Charlus; and the fall of the old Guermantes dynasty and its replacement by the arriviste Verdurin. And amid all this, Marcel realizes that those who were dearest to him in his youth have passed away—Grandmaman, Maman, Swann, Odette, Françoise. Even his erstwhile artistic models—Elstir, Goncourt, Venteuil—have lost their former allure. It is the end, it seems, of Marcel’s Grandes Illusions. Arriving at the Guermantes soirée in Paris, where he had, for so many years past, nurtured his elevated artistic aspirations, Marcel experiences a profound sundering. Alone and late for the musical prelude to the evening, he is ushered into the library by a servant and asked to wait. Thus begins one of the most elaborate explorations in modern literature— along with the library episode in Ulysses—of the whole relationship between art and life. Lasting almost one hundred pages, this extraordinary detour through Marcel’s death and resurrection as an author takes the form of five successive “epiphanies.” Modeled on the earlier madeleine experience, these four examples of “involuntary memory” present Marcel with the possibility of dying to his old Romantic self and starting over again as a writer. Let us take a closer look. Traversing the courtyard leading to the Guermantes salon, Marcel stumbles on uneven cobbles and suddenly recalls an earlier experience of stumbling in the Baptistry of San Marco. In one instant, all his misgivings about the reality of art and life vanish, and he is transported back to that forgotten moment in Venice many years before—a moment that was not fully experienced at the time but is now involuntarily retrieved, reexperienced in all its glorious radiance. A chance reduplication of a similar experience across two different times and spaces results in the epiphany of almost-timeless proportions. This initial “miracle of the courtyard” is followed shortly by another event of involuntary recall. Biding his time in the Guermantes library, Marcel hears a servant accidentally strike a spoon on a plate and suddenly remembers the sound of a hammer struck against the iron wheel of a train by a forest—a sound that was rejected by his consciousness as irrelevant at that time but now returns in all its splendid intensity, saturated with deep resonance and reverberation, as if there was

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a microcosm imprisoned all these years in the vaults of Marcel’s somatic unconscious, just waiting to be released. Marcel wipes his lips with a starched napkin and is revisited, in another involuntary recall, by a luminous instant in the dining room of the Grand Hotel at Balbec, where he holidayed as a child—a further instant that had been discarded by his voluntary memory as contingent and impertinent. Then, the sound of water crying like a siren in the heating pipes of the library recalls yet another buried unconscious association waiting to be triggered. And finally, when Marcel takes down a volume of George Sands’s novel François le Champi from the shelves of the Guermantes library, he is vividly reminded of an evening when his beloved mother read this very same book to him at bedtime. All five visitations constitute what Samuel Beckett calls a “single annunciation.”11 The significance of this annunciation—we would say epiphany—at this crucial point in the novel is to prepare Marcel for the rediscovery through anagnoresis of his true literary vocation. In other words, Marcel must renounce the vocation of art as some voluntary project, some elitist will-to-power, in order to recognize the epiphanic magic of the everyday—a recognition that only comes after he has accepted failure, disillusionment, and death. The Proustian narrator lays great emphasis on this, citing the famous passage about the grain dying so as to be reborn. Henceforth Marcel will write posthumously, retrospectively, anamnestically, ana-aesthetically: Marcel the actual author is returning from the future to meet with Marcel the aspiring author of the past. The epiphany of the present haunts the “starcrossed road” where past and future traverse each other. It is not, of course, that this is the first or only time that Marcel experiences such phenomena of “involuntary recall.” The famous and recurring incident of the madeleine dipped in linden tea precedes the library scene, as do a number of other similar phenomena— such as the steeples of Martinville perceived from Dr. Percepied’s carriage, the three trees near Balbec seen from Mme de Villeparisis’ trap, the hawthorn hedge near Balbec, the leitmotif of the Vinteuil Septuor, the incident in which Marcel stoops to unbutton his boots during his visit to the Grand Hotel at Balbec and is flooded by the memory of his departed grandmother stopping over his distress as a young boy, and so on. The point is not that epiphanies never happened before the library scene; it is that Marcel was not yet ready to see and hear them for what they really were. He had not yet, to cite Deleuze, been fully trained in his “apprenticeship to signs.”12 And it is not until such apprenticeship is accomplished, through his recapitulative awareness of “being-towards-death” in the library, that Marcel can finally acknowledge the preciousness of even the most banal and discarded events through the lens of time recap-

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tured (le temps retrouvé ). Art is less a matter of Romantic creation than of epiphanic re-creation. For, as Marcel asks, “was not the re-creation by the memory of impressions which had then to be deepened, illumined, transformed into equivalents of understanding, was not this process one of the conditions, almost the very essence of the work of art as I had just now in the library conceived it?” (TR, 525). Such epiphanic understanding marks the moment of anagnoresis. Otherwise put, time has to be lost before it can be recovered. Unless the seed dies, accidents cannot be retrieved as essences, contingencies as correspondences, obsessions as epiphanies. Only through the veil of mortality can the sacred radiate across the profane world that the arrogant repudiate as ineligible for art. It is only after he renounces his Promethean will-to-write that Marcel’s previously inexperienced experience is reexperienced in all its neglected richness. And the greater the neglect, the greater the richness, for it is precisely the rejected and remaindered events of Marcel’s existence that return now, in and through literature, as “resurrections.” The three personas of Marcel—as character, as narrator, and as author—seem to crisscross here for the first time, like three Proustian magi recognizing that the deepest acts of communion are to be found in the most fortuitous acts of ordinary perception. This whole process of resurrection takes the form of what Marcel calls “metaphor”— an art of “translating” one thing in terms of another. True art, Marcel now realizes, is not a matter of progressively depicting a series of objects or events (“describing one after another the innumerable objects which at a given moment were present at a particular place”); it occurs only when the writer “takes two different objects” and “states the connection between them” (TR, 290). This identification of “unique connections” and hidden liaisons between one thing and another is what enables the writer to translate the book of life (that “exists already in each one of us”) into the book of art (TR, 291). This is how Marcel puts it: “truth—and life too—can be attained by us only when, by comparing a quality common to two sensations, we succeed in extracting their common essence and in reuniting them to each other, liberated from the contingencies of time, with a metaphor” (TR, 290).

Proust’s novel does not end there. Marcel does not stay in the library any more than Stephen does. And though he takes this occasion to announce an extremely elaborate theory of literature and life, the text does not culminate with theory. Marcel leaves the library and reenters the everyday universe. And it is here, in the midst of the chaos and commotion of a fragmenting Parisian community, that Marcel has what we might consider to

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be his ultimate epiphany: his meeting with Mlle de Saint Loup (Gilberte’s daughter). Mlle de Saint Loup is to Marcel what Molly (via Leopold) is to Stephen. Both appear at the end of the story and lead the author-artist beyond the vain play of mimetic triangles and abstract trinities back to the ordinary universe of generation and gratuity. Was she not, Marcel says of Mlle de Saint Loup—“and are not the majority of human beings?—like one of those star-shaped crossroads in a forest where roads converge that have come, in the forest as in our lives, from the most diverse quarters”? And he adds: “Numerous for me were the roads which led to Mlle de SaintLoup and which radiated around her” (TR, 502). Marcel then recalls the two great “ways”—the Guermantes way represented by her father, Robert de Saint Loup, and the Méséglise way represented by her mother, Gilberte, the narrator’s first youthful love. One of them took me, by way of this girl’s mother and the ChampsElysées, to Swann, to my evenings at Combray, to Méséglise itself; the other, by way of her father, to those afternoons at Balbec where even now I saw him again near the sun-bright sea. And then between these two high roads a network of transversals was set up. (TR, 502)

From this emerges Marcel’s new vision of life as a large web in which the various incidents of time past and time recovered crisscross in a “network of memories” that gives us an “almost infinite variety of communicating paths.” So that life resurrected in and through literature becomes a palimpsest of chiasmic overlaps and transversals that cannot be brought to a final close. Mlle de Saint Loup sets up a series of reverberations and recollections that resonate out into the future. She is the only character in the novel not “recalled” from the past as such. She comes to Marcel out of the future as it were, taking him by surprise. And it is precisely by virtue of her “messianic” advent into Marcel’s world that she opens up a new optique on the past, the present, and the time-still-to-come. This new optique is what Marcel now calls a three-dimensional psychology, one that leads from life to literature and back again. Marcel’s recapture of the different planes and elements of his life, following his encounter with Mlle de Saint Loup in the party, makes him realize that “in a book which tries to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a quite different sort of three-dimensional psychology”—a perspective that affords, he says, “a new beauty to those resurrections of the past which [his] memory effected while [he] was following his thoughts alone in the library” (TR, 505–6). Marcel, like Stephen after his library epiphany, is now ready

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to “part” with his past so as to regain it. He is prepared to pass from the “see this, remember” (epiphany 1) to the “will see” (epiphany 2). And again like Stephen, Marcel will be lead to his book and to a life-beyondthe-book by someone with whom he does not actually speak (Molly for Stephen; Mlle de Saint Loup for Marcel). In Gilberte’s daughter, coming to him across the room in the Guermantes salon, Marcel sees the possibility of rebirth and renewal, another’s life beginning again and going beyond his own. This young woman, he realizes, is the incarnation of time lost and regained. “Time, colorless and inapprehensible time, so that I was almost able to see it and touch it, had materialized itself in this girl . . . still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth” (TR, 507). Then comes the moment of decisive anagnoresis.13 While tempted to rejoin his old ambition to compose a great masterpiece that would “realize a life within the confines of a book!”—mimetically drawing “comparisons from the loftiest and the most varied arts”—Marcel says no (TR, 507). He resists the temptation. “What a task awaited him!” he proclaims, taking his final distance from the persona of the great writer, now suddenly displaced into the third person—“How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book!” (emphasis added). But Marcel now knows he is not this man. He is not one of those Promethean Romantic artists whose will-to-power would construct his work “like a general conducting an offensive,” or an architect building a huge vaulted cathedral, ensuring one’s immortality even in the tomb, “against oblivion” (TR, 508). This ideal author of the ideal book is not for Marcel. He has learned, like Stephen in the wake of the library episode, to “cease to strive.” And again, like Stephen, he has come to disavow “his own theory.” He no longer believes in the gospel of the absolute text. Instead, he resolves on a far-more-modest proposal: to begin a work that will serve not as a text in itself and for itself—the grand illusion of the self-sufficient book—but rather as a pretext for the renewed and resurrected life of his readers. Marcel’s critical conversion is marked by the seemingly innocuous phrase, “But to return to my own case. . . .” The word but is all-important here. The full passage reads as follows: But to return to my own case, I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would read it as “my” readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be “my” readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my book, but with its help I would

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furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether “it really is like that,” I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written. (TR, 508)

The author dies unto himself so as to be reborn in and through his readers. Marcel’s literary metanoia is complete. The die is cast. This ultimate epiphany expresses itself in a series of descriptions of writing as discovery and disclosure: midwifery, pregnancy, childbirth, mining, incubation, detection, listening, diving, excavation, repetition, revelation. Indeed it confirms Samuel Beckett’s own conclusion that for Proust, “the only fertile research is excavatory” (P, 508). The old Romantic delusion of art as some fiat of omnipotence gives way to a more humble profession: to an aesthetics of passion rather than imposition, of receptivity rather than volition, of humility rather than hubris. Epiphany as anaphany. In a word, ana-aesthetics. Indeed just as the humiliated Bloom becomes Stephen’s guide to Molly, the previously mocked figure of Françoise is now retrospectively rehabilitated as Marcel’s most reliable guide. The housemaid Françoise was the one who had always been pointing Marcel, from the beginning, away from literature for literature and in the direction of literature for life. She was the mundane servant who, “like all unpretentious people,” had a no-nonsense approach to literary vainglory and rightly saw through all Marcel’s literary rivals as mere “copiators” (TR, 509). It was Françoise, Marcel now realizes, who had “a sort of instinctive comprehension of literary work” capable of “divining [Marcel’s] happiness and respecting [his] toil” (TR, 509). And so Marcel resolves to labor as she did, weaving, stitching, and sewing from bits and pieces of cloth: “constructing my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress” (TR, 509). The muse is displaced by the maid. The fantasy persona of Albertine, the main source of Marcel’s tormented jealousies and deceptions, is finally replaced by the scullery seamstress of the real. In this respect, Françoise—no less than Molly—is the reincarnation of Penelope. What we are witnessing is the return of the Odyssean figure from great heroic wanderings to the workings of the everyday. The marvels of literature are now to be sought less in monumental basilicas of grandiose design than in the intricate weft and warp of ordinary existence. In this embrace of writing as weaving we find the literary trope of metaphor being allied to that of metonymy. The transformative and synthetic power of metaphor, which turned contingency into essence, is here supplemented by a second moment that returns the essence to contin-

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gency—that is, to metonymy as a process of endless displacement and replacement, of accidental weaving and unweaving, of one thing ceding itself to another in the quotidian play of time. This new understanding of writing as a stitching of webs, tapestries, textures, and texts, leads Marcel to the insight that he is the “bearer” of a work that has been “entrusted” to him and that he will, in time, “deliver” into other hands (that of the reader). This intuition of the basic intertextuality of writing comes to Marcel as a sort of deliverance from his long fear of death. Affirming that genuine literature is a form of messianic “repetition” or remembrance of life forward—from natality to mortality and back to natality again—Marcel finds himself “indifferent to the idea of death” (TR, 509). Learning to die is learning to be reborn. “By dint of repetition,” he says, “this fear had gradually been transformed into a calm confidence. So that if in those early days, as we have seen, the idea of death had cast a shadow over my loves . . . the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death. For I realized that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had already died many times” (TR, 509). Marcel’s authorial self now faces the possibility of being posthumously reborn again as another, as one of those many harbingers of new life, epitomized by Mlle de Saint Loup or, more generally, by his future readers. Natality reemerges from mortality, so that the final passage of the novel—recalling the dead Albertine and the dying eighty-threeyear-old Charlus—invokes an enveloping movement of time that swings back and forth, up and down, carrying us toward vertiginous and terrifying summits, higher than the steeples of cathedrals, before returning us again to earth, “descending to a great depth within.” In short, time is all too wont to raise mortals “to an eminence from which suddenly they fall” (TR, 530–31). And from such recognition of the fall back into the ordinary universe, fear becomes love and literary delusion becomes real writing.

So what, in sum, do these Proustian conclusions tell us about epiphany? They indicate, I suggest, that epiphany is a process that is “achieved” in a series of double moves: first, that of mortality and natality; second, that of metaphor (the translation of one thing into another) and metonymy (the disclosure of new meaning through the accidental contiguity of contingent things); and third, that of constructing and deconstructing. Moreover, it is in this last double gesture that the text surpasses itself and finally reaches out toward its future readers. For if we begin with the notion that literature “constructs” an epiphany based on the recreation of impressions recalled in involuntary memory, the literary text in turn “deconstructs”

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itself in order to allow for the recreation of the reader. That is how Penelope’s tapestry and Françoise’s sewing works—stitching and unstitching, weaving and unweaving, endlessly. In a form of hermeneutic arc, the text configures an epiphany already prefigured by a life that is ultimately refigured by the reader.14 And this reader is one who not only co-creates the text with the author but re-creates it again as he or she returns from “text to action.” If epiphany invites a first move from life to literature, it reinvites us back again from literature to life. In both Proust and Joyce, it is indeed Penelope who has the last word.15 So what do we readers learn from Penelope? What do we stand to gain, if anything, from our traversals of the Joycean and Proustian imaginaries? Less closure and consolation, I would wager, than keen vigilance and excitement before the open interplay between literature and life. Traversing the epiphanies of Marcel and Proust, something about our own sensibilities as readers is more finely attuned, just as something about our imaginations is more enhanced and amplified, graciously opened to new possibilities of being. After such odysseys the world to which we return is, surely, never quite the same.

Notes 1. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol. 2, ed. Seamus Deane, Andrew Carpenter, and Jonathan Williams (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), 769. 2. I wish to thank Amanda Gibeault for bringing this and other such texts to my attention. The full passage from Stephen Hero reads, “First we see that the object is one thing, then we see that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance” (New York: New Directions, 1963), 213. Henceforth cited as SH. Stephen speaks these words to his friend Cranly to explain how even the most demotic of objects—in this case the clock of the Ballast Office—can achieve an epiphany. So from this earliest consideration of epiphany in Joyce’s work we realize that it involves (1) a sensible response to an external stimulus in the world (rather than a merely intramental insight) and (2) a certain interpretative response on the part of the viewer (or by extension, the reader). In Stephen Hero, as later in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this discussion is followed by a Thomistic account of the properties of aesthetic beauty. In Portrait Joyce already appears to be taking a certain ironic distance from his early “theory” of epiphany, though not, I would contend, from the phenomenon of epiphany itself, which remains central to Joyce’s developing aesthetic—in practice if not in name—in both Portrait and Ulysses. I shall introduce the terms epiphany 1 and epiphany 2 to mark this important distinction between the early and the later Joyce. While the former seeks to force essences out of their everyday vestments,

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the latter seems to acknowledge that essences are to be found within the everyday events themselves, no matter how trivial or insignificant. In what follows, I am grateful to my colleagues in the Joyce-Proust Reading Seminar and the Phenomenology of Fiction Seminar at Boston College in spring 2005, and especially to Andy Van Hendy and Kevin Newmark, who introduced me to so many intriguing aspects of Joyce that I would otherwise have ignored. 3. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 40. Henceforth cited as U. 4. See also René Girard’s intriguing reading of this passage in “French Triangles in the Shakespeare of James Joyce: Do You Believe in Your Own Theory?” in A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New York: Oxford Press, 1991), 271–89. 5. R. Ellmann, “Ulysses: A Short Story,” appendix to Ulysses, by James Joyce (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 706. 6. Ibid., 705. 7. For more on the theory of ana-aesthetics, see my “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3–20. 8. See Kiberd’s very informative note to the Penguin Annotated Students Edition of Ulysses (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 1013. 9. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 129. 10. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 6, Time Regained, trans. A. Mayor and T. Kilmartin (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 238. Henceforth cited as TR. 11. Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 25. Henceforth cited as P. 12. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (London: The Athlone Press, 2000). 13. See Aristotle on the key role played by re-cognition (anagnoresis) in poetic awareness, when we recall something previously forgotten and realize how different things are connected, how “this” relates to “that,” and so on. See the Poetics 4, 4, 1448–49, and Rhetoric, 1, 2, 23, 1371–72. 14. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), especially chap. 4, section “The Traversed Remembrance of Things Past.” 15. Derrida offers a useful gloss on the language of Molly/Penelope in an intriguing footnote to his commentary on the relationship between Greek and Jew in Emmanuel Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” (in Writing and Difference [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 79–153, footnote on 320–21). Commenting on a phrase in Ulysses— “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet”—Derrida not only attributes this to “woman’s reason,” as in Joyce’s text, but also identifies Joyce here as “perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists” (153). The implication here seems to be that the discourse of “feminine logic,” associated with Molly/Penelope, is one that, for Levinas at least, suggests an “ontological category” of return and closure: namely, Ulysses returning to Penelope in Ithaca, and Stephen and Bloom returning to Molly in Eccles Street, where they may find themselves “atoned” as father-son, JewGreek, Greek-Jew, and so on. It is not quite clear where Derrida himself stands

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toward Joyce in this early 1964 text, though it is evident that he thinks Levinas would repudiate the Joycean formula as overly Hegelian and Greek (that is, as not sufficiently respectful of the strictly Jewish/Messianic/eschatological need for a radically dissymetrical relation of self and other). In his later essay, “Ulysses Gramaphone,” first delivered as a lecture to the International Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt, in 1984, he makes it clear that the “yes” of Molly/Penelope marks an opening of the text beyond totality and closure to an infinite and infinitely recurring “other.” Even if it is a response to oneself, in interior dialogue, “yes” always involves a relay through an other. Or as Derrida cleverly puts it, oui-dire, or “saying yes,” always involves some form of oui-dire, or “hearsay”: “A yes never comes alone, and we never say this word alone” (“Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge [New York: Routledge, 1992], 300).With this relay of self through the other, this willing of yes to say yes again, “this differing and deferring, this necessary failure of total self-identity, comes spacing (space and time), gramophoning (writing and speech), memory” (254). And this “other” clearly implies a reaching beyond the text of Ulysses itself to the listener, the reader, an open call for our response. In this sense we would say that Ulysses is a deeply anti-Hegelian book. Molly’s finale does not represent some great teleological reconciliation of contradictions in some absolute synthesis of spirit, but an ongoing affirmation of paradoxes, struggles, contraries, contingencies, in a spirit of humor and desire. “What else were we given all those desires for?” asks the polymorphously perverse Molly, a far cry from the Hegelian triumph of identity. We may conclude, therefore, that the story of struggle and trouble does not end when Stephen follows Bloom out of the library; it only begins. And by the same token, Molly, when she finally arrives, does not put paid to Trinities as such, she simply reintroduces us—along with Stephen and Bloom—to another kind of trinity, one without a capital T and more inclusive of time, movement, natality, and desire (all those things banned from the Sabellian trinity of self-enclosed identity), and, one might add, a trinity that is more inclusive of the reader. For like any epiphany, Molly’s too calls out to an open future of readers. On Proust’s work as an opening to otherness, see also Levinas’s cryptic but revealing essay on Proust in Proper Names, trans. M. B. Smith (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 99–105. Walter Benjamin identifies the Penelope motif of textuality in Proust. In his essay, “The Image of Proust,” Benjamin writes: “For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection” (in Illuminations [New York: Schocken Books, 1968], 202). Benjamin identifies the Penelope trope with the textual process of weaving and unweaving, forgetting and remembering, composing and disrupting, which manages to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. Once again, Penelope’s fidelity to the epiphanies of the everyday is affirmed: “Can we say that all lives, works and deeds that matter were never anything but the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain” (203). Or again: “Proust’s most accurate, most convincing insights fasten on their objects as insects fasten on leaves, blossoms,

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branches, betraying nothing of their existence until a leap, a beating of wings, a vault, show the startled observer that some incalculable individual life has imperceptibly crept into an alien world. The true reader of Proust is constantly jarred by small shocks” (208). This emphasis on the microscopic and miniscule is repeated at the level of language itself, through which Proust, like Joyce, offers us a subatomic investigation of society in terms of exploring the reverberations and associations of the most everyday words and phrases, what Benjamin calls “a physiology of chatter” (206). This reminds me, in turn, of Camus’ observation that “all great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great thoughts are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door” (“The Myth of Sisyphus,” in Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. G. Marino [New York: The Modern Library, 2004], 448). I am reminded also of the telling passage in Aristotle’s On the Parts of Animals in which he writes, “Every realm of nature is marvelous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, is reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of living thing without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful” (645a15–a23).

Notes on Contributors

Jeffrey A. Barash is a professor of philosophy at Université de Picardie, in Amiens, France. Barash’s publications include Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Sinn der geschichte und Geschichtlichkeit des Sinns: Heidegger und der Historismus) and Temps de l’Être, temps de l’histoire: Heidegger et son siècle. Jerry Burke is a visiting assistant professor in philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He holds degrees in literature and philosophy from University College, Cork, and he has taught at the University of California, Riverside. His writings include an article on Northern Ireland’s Belfast agreement in Irish Political Studies. Noam Chomsky is Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues, international affairs, and U.S. foreign policy. His publications include Language and Politics; The Masters of Mankind: Essays on the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy; Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance; Toward a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There; Problems of Knowledge and Freedom: The Russell Lectures; and Middle East Illusions. Jacques Derrida, until his death in 2004, was Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Translations of Derrida’s work in English include Without Alibi, edited by Peggy Kamuf; Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I, translated by Jan Plug; and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, translated by Michael Collins and Mark Dooley. Mark Dooley is the author of The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, editor of A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus, and coeditor (with Richard Kearney) of Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy. Dennis Dworkin is an associate professor and chair of the history department at the University of Nevada at Reno. A specialist in modern Europe, Britain, and Ireland, Dworkin is the author of Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies and is the coeditor (with Leslie G. Roman) of Views Beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics.

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Terry Eagleton has written a novel, several plays, and the screenplay for Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein. He has been Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford and a fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. He is a professor of cultural theory at Manchester University. Eagleton’s books include Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Zˇ izˇek, and Others; The Gatekeeper: A Memoir; and The Truth About the Irish. Richard Kearney is the Charles B. Seelig Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. A leading figure in the field of continental philosophy, he is the author of more than twenty works of philosophy and literature. Kearney is widely recognized for his work in the areas of philosophical and religious hermeneutics, theory and practice of the imagination, and political thought. As a public intellectual in Ireland, he was involved in drafting a number of proposals for a peace agreement and in speechwriting for President Mary Robinson. Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, where she is appointed in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. From 1986 to 1993, Nussbaum was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She is also the founder and coordinator of the University of Chicago’s Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. Nussbaum’s publications include Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law; Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Sex and Social Justice; Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life; For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Joshua Cohen; and Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Anne O’Byrne is assistant professor of philosophy at Hofstra University, New York. O’Byrne’s publications include “Utopia Is Here: The Revolutionary Philosophy of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Luc Nancy,” in Thinking Politics: Baudrillard and Nancy, edited by Thomas Brockelman, and “The Excess of Justice: Timaeus and Aristophanes on Sex and the City,” in International Studies in Philosophy. O’Byrne is also the translator, with Robert Richardson, of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural. Paul Ricoeur, until his death in 2005, held professorships at a number of leading universities, including the universities at Strasbourg, Nanterre (now Paris X), Louvain, and the University of Chicago. He received numerous awards, including the Dante Prize (Florence, 1988), the Karl Jaspers Prize (Heidelberg, 1989), the Leopold Lucas Prize (Tübingen, 1990), and the French Academy Grand Prize for Philosophy (1991). Publications of Ricoeur’s work include The Just (trans. David Pellauer); The Course of Recognition (trans. David Pellauer); and Memory, History, Forgetting (trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer). His works The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics; From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II; Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary; History and Truth; and Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology are published by Northwestern University Press.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Rizo-Patron holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Binghamton University. She specializes in Latin American literature, hermeneutics, and the phenomenology of imagination. She has completed a dissertation on the material imagination in Gaston Bachelard and is embarked on a project on the Latin American testimonial novel. John Rundell teaches in the Ashworth Program at Monash University in Australia. He is an editor of the journals Thesis Eleven and Critical Horizons and the author of Origins of Modernity: The Origins of Modern Social Theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx. He has jointly edited such works as Culture and Civilization: Classical and Critical Readings (with Stephen Mennell) and Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship (with Rainer Bauboeck). James M. Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Irish Studies at Boston College. His interests include the contemporary Irish novel and narrative as well as American realism and naturalism. He is working on a new book, Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: Reading Contemporary Narrative of the NationState. Charles Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. Taylor’s numerous publications include Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited; A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, edited by James L. Heft; Philosophical Arguments; Rapprocher les solitudes: crits sur le fédéralisme et le nationalisme au Canada, edited by Guy Laforest; Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition,” edited by Amy Gutmann; The Malaise of Modernity (republished as The Ethics of Authenticity); and Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. David Wood is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He is the editor of Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit and Derrida: A Critical Reader, and the author of numerous books and articles, including Thinking After Heidegger; The Deconstruction of Time; “What Is Ecophenomenology?” in Research in Phenomenology; “Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Embodying Transformation,” in Interrogating Ethics (edited Jim Hatley and Chris Diem); and “Comment ne pas manger: Deconstruction and Humanism,” in Animal Others (edited by Peter Steeves).

Peter Gratton holds a doctorate in philosophy from DePaul University, Chicago, and teaches at Northeastern Illinois University. He has published articles on continental philosophy and African philosophy in such journals as Political Theory, Philosophy Today, Essays in Philosophy, and the Journal of Philosophical Studies. He is assistant editor of Philosophia Africana. He is also an assistant editor for Routledge’s Continental Philosophy series.

John Panteleimon Manoussakis holds a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College. He has published articles in the areas of the phenomenology of God and ancient philosophy for a number of journals. He is the editor of After God, Heidegger and the Greeks (with Drew Hyland), and the author of Theos Philosophoumenos (in Greek) and God After Metaphysics. He teaches philosophy at Boston College and at the American College of Greece.