The Movement of Mimesis

 

 

 

                                        

    The mimetic element in language can, like a flame, manifest itself only through

a kind of bearer: the semiotic element.

                                                            - Walter Benjamin –

                                               

 

 

Referring to an incident at a conference in Britain for sociologists and anthropologists of religion, where a scholar received a violent reaction to a paper on her work with a gay evangelical church in the US, Simon Coleman observes: “As a form of witness, the paper lacked any analytic framing through which the speaker could reclaim a professional form of personal identity” (2008, 49). Given the intense drive of academia and academics to retain personal identity and authorship in their work, one could read this incident, this aggressive outpouring, as a natural reaction to an attempt to dissolve authorship and hence personal voice and selfhood. As Coleman writes, “What was being presented had entirely merged ethnographic and evangelising voices” (49). Such an intense and violent manifestation of ‘unease’ that a merging of self and other, of ethnographer and evangelist, of the two poles of being and of knowing, serves to reveal the extent to which we lay claim to some form of impenetrability, of autonomy, of selfhood and authority. The participants of the conference were intent on destroying such an example, such a paradigm, so as to ensure that the two poles of self and other retained a ground or foundation of purity, of separable, individual integrity.

 

Before Coleman moves on to give another ethnographic example, in referring to the incident just outlined, he says: “In the example I have just given, the dangerous affinities between the pulpit and the academic podium might seem to be evident” (49). This merging is somehow a ‘danger’, it seems to presents a threat in some way. Perhaps the question we should ask is whether these two poles, in this case the ‘pulpit’ and the ‘academic podium’, are separable. In replacing priests as the saviors of civilization, have academics not established a secular priesthood? Have they not simply taken the same role, the same function, by embodying a different discourse as their veil?

 

In What is Enlightenment Kant explicitly dethrones the priests, the clergy, and passes the torch to scholars, to the priesthood of modernity, to the defenders and preachers of reason, of science and technology. Kant was of course formalizing or theorizing what had been taking shape in Europe for some time, which is why he was able to freely say such things. The scholars, like the Platonic philosopher-kings, now on top, having, with the lordship of reason, supplanted God from his place at the summit of the scala naturae or great chain of being, will bring enlightenment and reason to the people. Kant tries to avoid this top down or hierarchical political ontology, but he fails miserably epistemologically, as his brief text and the subsequent history of the academy has made clear. There are those who know and those who do not and the preponderance of ‘information’ in the modern age cleverly masks the lack of knowledge and hence power available to the secular priesthood’s congregation, to hoi polloi, a lack that is comparable to the ‘ignorance of the Dark Ages’.

 

When Coleman speaks of such dichotomous categories as self/other and here/there or home/field, there always remains some core of permanence, wherein the two poles remain and dictate the play that takes place in between them. He speaks of “blending the Self with the Other” (2002, 76), where some identity for each is retained. Both poles are capitalized, absolutized, so that they might retain some core of identity, of un-alterity; for if there were simply pure otherness, then there would be no self and hence no otherness; identities, authorial prerogative and any and all semblance of purity and power would dissipate. The woman whose paper was received so aggressively, who wholly merged the poles, who stepped beyond polarity itself, had to be violently dragged back into the in-between dictated by the poles so as to avoid a disruption of the structure. What if we do not drag her back? What will her movements outside the structure reveal? 

 

Coleman speaks of mimesis. Mimesis is a copying, a falsifying of an original, of a being that has an internal integrity, which is in itself unrepresentable. Yet what happens in the process of mimesis and what does the work of this movement reveal about the structure of polarity, most significantly about self and other? Is the mimetic task a simple representation of a presentation, a reformulation of that which has an integral formulation, a core of identity, of sameness? In being prompted “to wonder about the nature and direction of mimesis” in his fieldwork, Coleman asks “Who…has been mimicking whom?” (78), but is it not the case that what takes-place, what occupies space, is mimicry itself?

 

Is mimesis “an appropriation of the other” (2008, 42), as Coleman believes? To appropriate is to make ones own, to make the other into oneself: appropriation is a movement of self-creation. The self, the scholar engaged in fieldworker, appropriates the other, that which occupies the field, whatever or whomever it may be, so as to be able to represent the other. There appears to be representation (by the self) of a presentation here, yet the originary movement is itself a presentation that has been represented (by the other). Charles Darwin, “standing on a beach in Tierra del Fuego,” finds the natives mimicking him (2002, 75). In re-presentating their presentation, is he not representing a representation? For Darwin, appropriation of the other becomes re-appropriation of the self. There is always presentation, upon which there is a building of layers of representations. The other, the object of the self’s gaze, is presenting himself to the other; he is aware of the other’s gaze and so becomes other than himself, than his self, assuming something remains behind, that some ‘thing’ is not presented. But Darwin’s story tells us more, it tells us that as Darwin reappropriates his self through the other, the natives of Tierra del Fuego self-other themselves and represent what has been presented to them through a presentation which is itself a representation, which they have appropriated. 

 

The movement of mimesis is complex and the question of ‘who mimics whom’ is lost amidst this problematic flow of self and other, of presentation and representation. What appears is the possibility of a pure movement of representation and hence only of reappropriation, which precludes any reference to an originary presentation or appropriation. We are led to ask where there is some essential residue that remains in this complex movement of representation and reappropriation, whether we can locate a presentation and hence appropriation, which assumes a core of identity. If to appropriate, to make ones own, is a process of self-creation, then does this not reveal to us that the self is itself  a creation, an assemblage of appropriated ‘material’? This would mean that presentation and appropriation are always already representation and reappropriation and that the self is entirely mimetic.

 

Yet, this movement appears counterintuitive, since there seems to always be some form of conflict or tension created in the encounter between self and other. This is where the importance of spatiality emerges. There is an encounter between self and other, but it is not an encounter between identities, between grounded poles. The encounter takes-place between grounding beings, not between grounded poles. The encounter is not one of givenness, of essentiality, but one that actively takes-place. The self has its world, its dwelling place, what has taken-place over time, over its existence. This world is always limited because of its horizonal finitude. Consequently, each self necessarily encounters otherness, others with different worlds, different dwellings. The difference of degree of the otherness that the self encounters in various others depends on the content that the self has made its own. The otherness that Coleman encountered in Sweden, as he himself notes, was more familiar than, say, the otherness encountered by Chagnon among the Yanomamö. This is not a difference of essence, of identity, but of space. Any ‘integrity’, any ‘identity’ or ‘self-sameness’ emanating from the self arises from its location, its place of dwelling, where it has taken-up its created and creating ground. Through this logic self-creation and mimesis become movements of representation and reappropriation of otherness, which is only other, and this to varying degrees, because of its necessary distance from the self. The self thus becomes entirely mimetic.

 

Just as the finitude of the self limits the space that it can occupy through the mode of spatiality, it also limits the time that it can occupy through the mode of temporality. Each self lives through a history, which becomes its own, which it reappropriates for itself. Each self is limited to its history, what it has made into its own history, which arises out of its necessary historicity brought about by the mode of temporality dictated by finitude.

 

The self, through its finitude, spatially and temporally conceived, is its lived experience, its finite actuality. There is nothing essential about this. The ‘self’ bespeaks nothing more than its finitude. Yet finitude is more than its finite actuality, it also manifests an infinite potentiality, a potentiality that can take the self so far afield that it can transcend itself and become wholly other, to entirely merge with an otherness that is infinitely other to it. Chagnon, who had never witnesses such an intense otherness as when he first encountered the Yanomamö, “abandons the ethnographic task of collecting genealogies and begins to act like a human in Yanomamö terms” (n.3). The self becomes the other.

 

In the 1999 film Instinct, based on the novel Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, the infinite potential of finitude becomes immanently vivid. An anthropologist, having disappeared for sometime, reappears accused of murder and is deemed to be too violent and dangerous to even be considered for reassimilation into the human population. Through the keen work of a young psychologist, we come to know that the anthropologist had lived among gorillas to the extent that he had become one of them, not as a human being among gorillas, but as a gorilla among gorillas. The human being had become his other, he had shed his self and taken-up another of another species. In the end the anthropologist escapes the ‘human world’, what was no longer his dwelling place, what had become other to his self, and returns to his world, to his being among the gorillas.   

 

It would be fitting to recall the life of Jane Goodall here, even though she, unlike the anthropologist in Instinct, has never abandoned her human self and continues to dwell among human beings. However, it is significant that her task, after two decades of dwelling (to varying degrees) among chimpanzees, has become one of bringing the self and other, the human and the chimp, closer together – her task has become to chisel away the space and history dividing the two species. Perhaps this is the unending, unachievable adventure of finitude, of its infinite potentiality: to overcome its finite actuality, and not, contrarily, to veil itself in a mythical identity and false sense of security. Perhaps this is mimesis.

Deconstructive Creation

                                                                            

                                                                                  

The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity.

                                                                                                                – Gilles Deleuze -

                                                                                                                      

Delphi, Greece (December 2006)

As I sat on the ledge of Mount Parnassus, the sacred home of the Muses, staring across great planes of olive groves and violent rock formations, I wondered whether we, like nature, were capable of such creation, whether we could create naturally.

 

With lithospheric shifts, mountains and valleys can hardly avoid structural instability, they too constantly shift, mutate, flow into streams of otherness. Nature is constantly destroying, destructuring, deconstructing itself; yet in its deconstruction of itself it is always creating itself anew: its deconstruction is creation. I remember sitting on that ledge in Delphi wondering whether there was a path beyond deconstruction, a path on which we could once again create. I soon understood that any creative path would have to move through not beyond deconstruction, that it would have to deny any structured creation, any building of systems and artifices, damns and dikes, to resist the flow of difference and its liquid multiplicities. Yet can we create without constructing stable foundations? Can we set out on the path of thinking and not arrive at an end, a conclusion, a telos?

 

This course, its multiplicities of themes and diverse pathways of discussion, offered me an opportunity to return to this seminal question, perhaps the only valid questioning of our time. I witnessed among us the opening of diverse paths of movement, paths that did not abandon the myth of presence, of stability and of a structured or constructional creation; paths that in their very insecurity emanated a paradoxical sense of security, abandoning the stability of ground, of the permanence of presence; and paths that moved between these, that felt the great unease of the abyss dividing them and their movements. As one who has with great unease and difficulty moved away from a longing for ground, for stability and certainty, who has dwelled along destructured margins, I was offered an open field wherein I could think about our potential for deconstructively creating. Thus, for me, the course was an opportunity to think the potentiality for creating, a creating upon open seas, upon the unpredictable waters of finitude.

 

I still wonder at times how it is that although the Earth has been shown to be in constant motion, that although the very ground beneath our feet has been shown to be ever mutating and morphing, itself ungrounded in space, moving us along with it, we nevertheless refuse to abandon our belief in stability, in a secure, unchanging ground beneath the horizon of temporality. Yet when I begin to think about this, I remember that long ago we internalized the security of the Earth, that we internalized its permanence and stability, its ground, its earth; I remember the myth of the soul, the age-old narrative that within us remains an unchanging core of identity, of constancy. Against this hidden reality I place a manifest reality, a deconstructive creation. A creation that creates as it moves, that is always in motion, that does not yearn for ground or to become complete, to ‘resolve’ its tensions by denying them, by feigning them.

 

The method of reading multiple pieces by multiple scholars on the ‘same’ topic served to undermine the supposed sameness of each topic, of each term. ‘Gender’, ‘emotion’, ‘ritual’ were all problematized, complicated, seen to be heterogeneous. The stability of each term, its construction, its identity, faded with every attempt to plant it into the ground, with every approach towards presence. As the terms were allowed to freely move about, they began to create, to diversify, to open multifarious paths of thinking. ‘Gender’, for example, was itself shown to be created and creative; its genealogy and potentiality made manifest both the forces at work in structuring and limiting it in order to control and dominate it and through it and the deconstructive creative forces at work in undermining and calling into question the very forces that created it, that limited its fluidity, its potentiality for being other than it was structured to be.

 

A deconstructively creative reading creates with and through its reading, while always acknowledging the potentiality for creating otherwise, for creating other than it has; it recognizes the infinite potentiality of finitude in its finite actuality, the multiplicity of potential creations in the singularity of its actual creation. Amidst such a multiplicity, deconstructive creation resists the temptation to unify the diverse singularities, to crush the movement of difference, to make it stand still and become self-same, it is not architectonic. The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of religious studies is ideally suited for such a method. It is a field where a singular topic is viewed from infinitely different disciplinary perspectives, where soon the very singularity of the topic becomes multiple, where traditions flow into one another and interact as they interpenetrate. Its very subject matter, that of religion, deals with singularities that often claim to be totalities, to be absolutes, each vying for dominance and refusing otherness. Yet the field’s diversity and difference demands communication in community and otherness and so a method that works to constantly reaffirm fluid movement.

 

   Remarks On Fluidity and Communal Formations:

The Course Practically Considered

 

 Though below I’ll offer some remarks as to how the course could be other than it was, I do so  out of the necessity of the assignment, rather than a desire to change particular elements of the course. I found the course, both its organization and execution, to be rich and will thus only offer some minor suggestions.   

 

The use of terms, around which each week’s discussions and readings circulated, worked well to show the diversity of possible readings of what on the surface may have seemed to be homogeneous entities. What was interesting was that quite often, through the readings and classroom discussions, we saw how the terms, isolated from one another, overlapped and leaked into one another’s space. The readings on ‘emotion’, for example, could not avoid discussing ‘performance’ or ‘ritual’, and vice versa. Again, such terms as ‘method’ or ‘methodology’ and ‘text’ or ‘writing’ could not be restricted or isolated to a single week and a single set of readings, since they underlaid and were relevant to every other term or issue. This situation makes me wonder what could have been done to more explicitly point to this interplay, this ‘leaking out’. Perhaps the naturalness of this occurrence suffices to highlight its fluidity. After all, the choice of guiding the course by having various scholars converse with one another on various terms or words is what allowed for this leaking out, whereas the choice, for example, to structure the course through individual scholars (and not individual terms), thereby isolating them from one another, as though singular authorities, and so hindering them from speaking to one another on a given theme, would have certainly closed off the flow of any leaks.       

 

As for the readings themselves, they were well chosen for introducing young scholars to some prominent, contemporary figures and ideas in the field of religious studies. Yet the work of the original thinkers, whose ideas were the basis for much of the readings, were not read. With each week’s contemporary scholarly readings I would have included a short piece or two from the writings of thinkers who had originally formulated the theories being consciously or unconsciously employed or applied by the scholars whom we read. I would have also chosen readings from other, non-contemporary historical periods, whether ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, or early modern, and would have aimed to find some non-Western sources, thus simultaneously showing a different or lateral methodological approach to the study of religion. I would have attempted to allow space for not just the gaze of the self (of the other), but also of the other (of the self) – this would be different from a self-reflexive gaze (even to a large extent in the case of Masuzawa), which, though important, is nevertheless the self’s gaze of itself. This might be overreaching, but I would, to whatever degree possible, aim to temporally and culturally (or linguistically) diversify the readings and to include some work from the original thinkers whose theories were richly exploited by the scholars whom we read. Given this, I would still heavily emphasise contemporary scholarly approaches in the field for obvious practical reasons.

 

The role played by the instructor, lying somewhere between detached interlocutor and Socratic gadfly, not only coaxed the students to offer their thoughts and ideas, but at times also served to softly undermine their tacit assumptions. The ideal role of the instructor in such a course and perhaps in most courses would be to both work to draw out the students’ thoughts and arguments and to deconstruct or destructure them. Greater emphasis, however, might perhaps be placed on the latter function. While playing this role, the instructor would simultaneously offer students potential openings for finding paths for thinking otherwise. The instructor would only softly offer possible openings, not the paths themselves. This role is somewhat of a tightrope act and so quite often difficult to maintain, if, as I suggest, the instructor places greater emphasis on actively deconstructing the students’ ideas. There is a danger here of being too forceful, too violent, but that’s the nature of thought, of creation. Creation necessitates destruction and violence, however uncomfortable it makes us feel. A phoenix is born anew from amidst its own ashes.     

 

The role of the students in the course was active and productive. I’ve taken part in seminars at various institutions in various countries over the years and the discussions and atmosphere of ours was quite rich and communal. The students were required to and took active roles in the path taken during classroom discussions and this led to a more communal and interactive experience. The active role of the students in the course was also manifest in the nature of the assignments, which required responding not only to each week’s readings, but also to one another’s responses to the readings. Having to write on something forces one to actively engage the ideas one reads, which, when being read, are only felt passively. In this spirit of greater activism, given the immense diversity and richness of the students’ backgrounds and intellectual formations, perhaps each student could have been required to select a piece of reading for one of the themes of the course, reflecting his/her interests and reading of the given theme.

 

I quite like this ‘active’ mode of pedagogy or education – both words at their roots mean ‘to lead’ – where students help lead themselves through and with the instructor, rather than the instructor taking the reins and guiding passive, unthinking followers. What this reveals is a belief, a faith, in community, in a genuine walking and being together. Yet this does not always work; in fact, it rarely works well, since there are so many diverse factors that must come together to mould such an interactive community. We can be thankful that in our case, for our course, it happened as it did, that a community was formed.                                                                          

                          

Self-othering Tradition

 

Notre Dame de Paris (Fall 2006)

 

Tradition is the illusion of permanence.

 

                                      – Woody Allen -

 A common theme running through this week’s readings was that there is a core identity or internal sameness that sustains an essential traditionality within a given tradition as it externally changes.  Eric Hobsbawm speaks of tradition as an “invariance” which “imposes fixed (normally formalized) practices, such as repetition” (2) as opposed to an ‘invented tradition’ which is “characterized by reference to the past, if only by imposing repetition” (4); Nicholas Thomas of a self/other logic whereby there is ‘objectification’ and conscious and hence external creation and structuring of a tradition (214-215); and Paul Post of tradition as what is ‘two dimensional’, as both “a continual re-contextualization” and a continuance of what is named the ‘traditional tradition’ (56).  Though Post attempts to develop a more fluid, ‘vital’ notion of tradition against the “old, static” notion he deems problematic (58), he nevertheless retains an inside/outside logic akin to Hobsbawm’s old/new (6) or Thomas’ self/other logic, which demands that there remain some untouched residue or core of identity and hence of presence underlying the changes a given tradition undergoes. It should then come as no surprise when, in the last lines of his paper, Post poses such questions as ‘What is the identity of the tradition of Christian ritual/liturgical music?’ and ‘How can this identity be preserved through the constant, dynamic, contingent interaction of cult and culture?’ (59).  The enabling condition for posing such questions is the assumption that tradition has an identity, literally, a ‘sameness’, only on the surface or outside of which there is dynamism and contingency.   

I would like to question tradition here, to see whether it is identical, whether it is a self-same continuity between past and present whereby the past is transmitted in essentia to the present.  What is its genealogy, its movement? How does it carry itself?

As is often the case we can locate an opening for thought within language, through the word itself.  Perhaps we can begin to understand tradition by listening to what it has to tell us, what it wants to tell us.  The word, of Latin origin, from tradere, has a twofold sense, a fascinating playful paradox, which pours forth as a fluid movement.  In its singularity it signifies both a ‘transmitting’ and a ‘betraying’.   

 

Tradition reaches across (space and time), a sense reflected in its twofold origin, an origin which further unveils the logic of its movement. The verb tradere is a composite, deriving from the preposition trans, which literally means ‘on’ or ‘to the other side’ and the verb dare, which means ‘to give’. Thus, tradition is always already a giving on or to the other side, a handing down which is a surrendering. Its logic is a simultaneous transmittance and betrayal, it transmits by betraying.  In the very act of giving it is already on or moving towards the other side of itself, in its very giving it is self-othering. It does not give over a quidditas or whatness, an essence, but betrays such a potentiality through its fluid self-othering movement.  Thus, the ‘invention’ or ‘creation’ of tradition never takes place within a space created by an inside/outside logic; for tradition contains and internally situates its own outside, its own internal-externalization.               

 

Nietzsche’s remark in Der Antichrist that “in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross” arose from his belief that St. Paul had invented Christianity, since Jesus’ life had in fact been a radical critique and rebellion against organized religion. Paul, according to Nietzsche, had betrayed the life of Jesus by traditionalizing or creating a tradition out of his life and words.  Christianity is not a ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ tradition, because it began as a betrayal of a singular life that was not a tradition, not something static and unchanging.  The life of Jesus was not meant to give birth to a tradition and so it is in reality nothing more than a betrayal.         

 

Yet Paul’s betrayal of the ‘memory’ of Jesus and his ‘invention’ of the Christian religious tradition was not the originary betrayal of Christianity. Paul was emulating Judas. It was Judas’ betrayal of Jesus that lead to Jesus’ crucifixion and his becoming Christ.  It was through this originary betrayal that the Christian tradition began. What Nietzsche believed to be a betrayal as abandonment of the tradition embodied by Jesus was in fact a betrayal as tradition, a betrayal that was tradition in its very movement. Tradition dwells within continuity through its continual self-betrayal. The continuity of tradition lies in its self-othering movement, not in a self-same permanence. As Jesus says to Judas in The Gospel of Judas, “you will exceed all of them [i.e., the Apostles], for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me” (56). It is only through the betrayal of Jesus that Christ will arise, that a bridge between heaven and earth, humanity and the divine will be formed. Judas’ betrayal, to be later followed by that of Paul, is the origin of the being in perpetuity of the Christian tradition, of Christianity. There is no tradition without betrayal.  The gospel continues: “They approached Judas and said to him ‘What are you doing here? You are Jesus’ disciple’” (58).  They did not understand the sacrifice, the betrayal required to perpetuate the tradition, to spread the Word. Judas did, and so he simply “answered them as they wished. And he received some money and handed him over to them” (58).     

 

In reality the self-othering movement of tradition does not provide for a singular or original origin just as much as it does not provide for a singular or teleological end. Thus, we can only speak of Judas’ betrayal as marking the originary moment of the coming into being of the Christian religious tradition as it is understood in a limited sense. The tradition marked by the word ‘Christianity’ did not begin with this betrayal, but can be traced back into prehistory and perhaps atemporality. Practically speaking, there is the Old Testament, the cult of Dionysus and various other traditions which were betrayed in the coming into being of Christianity. This logic presents the potential for recovering an originary tradition or self-othering movement, which is at work amidst the diversity of our traditions. What would come to pass with such a logic would be the realization that a comparison of various traditions would not be a comparison of isolated and divided particular or individual traditions external to one another, but a comparison of the various self-othering movements of an originary human tradition or self-betrayal.    

 

This reading of tradition casts new light on the prevalent self-righteous slogan of remaining ‘true to tradition’, of being loyal and steadfast in the face of all those who desire to ‘corrupt’ and ‘betray’ it; for, as we have seen, it is exactly those who betray a tradition, who are its most ardent defenders. Rather than be suspicious of the thinker who ‘betrays tradition’ by appropriating it in fruitful and rich ways, we would be better served by being suspicious of those who claim that loyalty to tradition consists in the ‘honest’ and ‘pure’ transmission of what is essential to it. In this context the only difference between these two groups is that whereas the former is honest about its engagement, its being in community, with the originary movement of tradition through its betrayal and hence continuation, the latter conceals its complicity, its involvement in tradition’s own betrayal, in its self-othering movement. Faithfulness to tradition can only be sought in its betrayal. If tradition were to ever cease its movement of self-betrayal, it would die, it would become its own sepulchre, its own memory.           

 

 

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead.

                                                      – Allan Bloom -

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris

 

Serious Emotions: Philosophy, Rhetoric and Sophistic Play

 

 

 

An emotion refers to what it signifies:

the totality of the relations of the human-reality to the world. 

 

                                                            - Jean-Paul Sartre -

 

 

A few years ago, while living in Paris, I had a chance to go for Sunday Mass at the famed Notre Dame de Paris.  At one point during the ceremony, something occurred that has remained with me since.  The Cathedral was crowded with worshipers and even a few, curious onlookers standing and sitting side by side.  As I looked over to my right, where a woman was praying, I could see tears streaking down her cheeks.  Before looking down, as I tend to do at such times, I looked to my left and noticed that an older man was smiling almost at the verge of breaking into open laughter.  He noticed that I was observing him, so he turned to me and in a wispy French accent whispered: “Did you know that Christ loves to laugh as much as he loves the Father; I don’t imagine either of them to be too serious, love is never weighed down, it always floats.”  Though at first I smiled at him, superficially, out of a desire to be polite, accepting and reassuring, slowly I began to feel a profound tranquility within my heart as I recalled Nietzsche’s god, the echoes of his laughter, his rhythmic dance.

 

Most would consider a smile, let alone open laughter, as lacking a necessary and natural seriousness – Mass is after all a solemn occasion, an occasion for tears and serious reflection, for performances of the Missa solemnis.  Thus, it is not surprising that in ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric’ Debora Shuger argues for a taxonomy wherein emotions are “serious” as opposed to “playful” (116-117).  Her aim is to defend rhetoric from the charge of sophistry, which, she claims, is playful and so irresponsible.  She writes: “Rhetoric is not sophistry precisely because the former is passionate, and hence serious rather than playful” (118).  Here she is not just claiming that rhetoric is serious, but that so too are emotions or “passions”, and that they are not playful.  Emotions are not playful, but serious. 

 

In attempting to rescue rhetoric from what she sees as the agon between philosophy and rhetoric, which, according to her, has been established by a postmodern reading of the traditions, she attempts to assimilate rhetoric to philosophy, as the title of her piece indicates.  In so doing, it becomes paramount that she establish veracity as the telos and fundamental structuring criterion of rhetoric.  Despite her attempt to move away from Plato’s influential tripartite psychological doctrine, which she rightly observes as being at the core of the divide between philosophy and rhetoric, reason and emotion, a divide wherein rhetoric is assimilated to sophistry in order to be more readily dismissed, she actually ends up adopting the Platonic philosophical structure itself.  Her claim is that rhetoric has just simply found itself on the wrong side and that the sacred rhetorics of the Renaissance Humanists proves this.  Interestingly, in the ancient world, sophists were quite often rhetoricians or orators – the words were used interchangeably – something Shuger fails to mention. 

 

Shuger argues that rhetoric, like reason, is also serious, for it too is concerned with truth, in fact it is concerned with faith, which is the path to the Truth Himself.  As she concludes, “Rhetoric in this sense, then, is not below but beyond reason” (128).  Rhetoric can be more serious and more veridical than reason, than philosophy itself.  Thus, she is not in the least concerned with philosophy and its history being characterized by reason/truth/seriousness, but rather with the exclusion of rhetoric and emotion from this elite council.  It is never a question for her whether philosophy thus characterized is actually all or even a part of what philosophy is, what the history of philosophy has been.  She never questions whether the history of philosophy has in fact been characterized by reason, truth and seriousness.  I do not wish to get into the genealogy of this delusion and the immense irony of Shuger’s attempt to locate a space of belonging for rhetoric and emotion within the space supposedly demarcated by ‘philosophy’, within a rational, veridical, serious space, the very space which was the locus for rhetoric’s and emotion’s originary exclusion.  Suffice it to say that even today there is a lively debate among Anglo-American ‘philosophers’ about how the period between Greek philosophy and Descartes, the first ‘modern’ philosopher, was not really philosophy, but rather theology.  Such a reading of the history of philosophy excludes such canonical giants of philosophy as Augustine, Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, let alone the sacred rhetorics, about which Shruger speaks and which she goes to great lengths to include within the ‘analytic’ category of philosophy that she uncritically appropriates.        

 

In the history of Western philosophy and thought emotion has been for the most part negatively characterized and rejected as not objective, irresponsible and so immoral.  The emotions are irrational and lacking in objective truth value, which has lead to their mystification, or at least to the argument that they are “inexplicable”, as John Corrigan points out in the ‘Introduction’ to Religion and Emotion (6).  There is certainly merit to the argument that how we feel is at least to some extent, if not entirely, irreducible to explicit, rational formulations, especially given our finite and so limited epistemic abilities, but the genealogy of the mystification of emotion reveals that this ‘argument of mystification’ arose as a negative attempt to marginalize and exclude the emotions from the field of knowledge and hence of truth and morality.  Emotion was made to be irrelevant.    

 

As outlined above, the root of this characterization of emotion can be located in the Platonic taxonomy where superior reason (or ‘philosophy’) governs inferior emotions.  Shuger’s attempt to rescue emotion from this fate rather than challenge the taxonomy itself, attempts to relocate emotion to the space wherein philosophy dwells.  Thus, she must necessarily characterize emotion as what is concerned with truth, as what is ‘serious’ and grave – there is no room for levity here, no room wherein one can even begin to interrogate or challenge the weighty superiority of the category of the ‘serious’.  Her discourse simply serves to further entrench the dichotomous categories of the ‘serious’ and the ‘playful’, with the sole objective of a trivialization and rejection of the latter.  Why is there such immense value placed on what is ‘serious’?  Whence arises this gravitas?         

 

Reading Shuger’s paper is like reading a Christian Plato engaged in self-apologetics, attempting to rescue a now Christianized or ‘sacred’ rhetoric from suffering the horrible but well deserved fate of sophistic, which is nothing more than a playful game, a dancing around.  The sophist “does not come to fight, he comes to show off….he plans to dance,” as the 17^th century rhetorician, Nicholas Caussin, whom Shuger quotes, puts it (119).  Playfulness, as Shuger sees it, is simply a “delight in language for its own sake” and so it is “at odds with the commitment and unselfconscious absorption of strong emotion” (118).  Shuger might as well be quoting or summarizing Plato’s famous and highly influential condemnation of the sophists of his time, who, according to him, did not deserve the title ‘philosopher’.  She says nothing new here.  Plato long ago condemned and dismissed those whom he identified as ‘sophists’, whom he characterized as only concerned with the human emotions and linguistic play, with financial profit and moral degradation of ‘noble’ characters.  The sophists were interested in nothing more than an irresponsible and unserious horseplay.  It is obvious that there is truth, objectivity and morality, all of which are grave matters and non of which were concerns of the sophists who were ‘relativists’ and charlatans.  As we should have learned by now, this is the well-known charge hurled against those who have dared to challenge or play with such notions as ‘truth’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘morality’ and our ability to discern them with any real certitude. 

 

Shuger’s taxonomy of the emotions necessitates the existence of two types of emotions: ‘serious’ (or ‘strong’) and ‘playful’; the former, examples of which are love and faith, are characterized by a concern for truth, knowledge and ultimately for God, whereas the latter are concerned with trivial and inconsequential matters.  The intense emotions of the old man by my side, the very emotions that he believed he shared with his God, were inconsequential, trivial, because they were not serious, not concerned with truth and knowledge – they were all negative.  I wonder what he would have thought, how we would have felt, if I had said this to him, if I had trivialized his emotions, challenged their intense profundity, if I had trivialized his God and his world.                           

 

In an infamous passage in the Laws (908d ff.) Plato, no longer content with dismissing the playful sophist, the unserious linguist, who concerns himself with human emotion, condemns him to execution.  As Camus reveals in L’étranger, little has changed in our time; “in our society” too, as he tells us in the ‘Afterword’ to the novel, “any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.”  The hero of L’étranger, Meursault, does not cry at his mother’s funeral, he does not feel as others do, as he should, he does not feel seriously about ‘serious matters’, does not feel their gravity.  In L’étranger we see that to feel otherwise is to risk condemnation, to risk execution.  Jesus too was crucified.           

 

 

 

Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun that leaves no shadows.  Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound

passion, the passion for an absolute truth, a truth born of

living and feeling.

 

                                                            - Albert Camus, L’étranger –

 

A God Who Dances: Performance and Play

 

 

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances…

 

                                                            – Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.7.139-41 -

 

 

With his characteristic brilliance, in Jaque’s famous monologue from As You Like It, Shakespeare offers us a glimpse into how we are in this world, how we live between life and death, between those two singular events, which we are unable to ever experience, but which circumscribe our being in the world. 

 

Is not life itself the greatest of all rituals, a stage, a performance set between the play of gravity and grace, of love and hate?  I imagine God and the angels dancing, Satan and the demons too, side by side, between heaven and hell.  Nietzsche once said that he could only believe in a God who could dance.  I wish he were still alive to read the Gospel of Judas; there Jesus plays, laughs uncontrollably, devilishly, perhaps ritualistically; and where there is laughter, so too does one find lightness of heart and of step.  Yet Jesus’ own disciples are unable to understand his movements, to play with him, to enter into his laughter, his lightness.  Judas understands him, Judas is light, his star shines the brightest, as Jesus tells him.

 

Since early times, ritual, both religious and secular, assuming we can even draw such pure distinctions, has been a seminal part of human existence, of how we experience and relate to our world.  Thus, the emergence of ‘performance’ discourse in the latter half of the 20^th century as a method for understanding human ritual practices, like so much else in our epistemological repertoire, simply signalled a scholarly awareness of what had always been an integral aspect of human life.  What has always been has now become what is studied and what is studied always becomes problematic and a source of contention. 

 

Whereas in Ronald Grimes’ article, ‘Performance Theory and the Study of Ritual’, one finds an almost obsessive and troubled attempt to clarify terms, methods and theoretical stances, in Catherine Bell’s article, ‘Performance’, there is a playful, but no less troubled, attempt to dance in and around the margins of the space delimited by the performance discourse.  Bell believes that as long as she moves, as long as she dances, Grimes will be unable to identify the ritual she is enacting.  Yet, whatever their theoretical postures and allegiances, in the end both scholars are concerned with the same subject matter: human ritual practices.  Grimes chooses to take a stand, Bell to dance.

 

Both scholars play the game, take up roles and wear masks.  Grimes takes on the persona of a ‘serious scholar’ who voices his annoyance with the ‘irresponsible playfulness’ and ‘elusiveness’ of Bell, who herself prefers to reside on the plane of ambiguity, on the bridge above the abyss, rather than on its ends, where there is sure ground.  Bell uses her prop, a long, thick sword, to cut those who stand on either end, on the terra firma circumscribing the abyss; piercing their theories, their methodologies, she dances back across and over the abyss, where she believes she is beyond their reach.  She frustrates and infuriates.  She is irresponsible because she refuses to take a stand, to take up ground and fight.  Surely it is infuriating when you are weighed down by gravity, but your enemy can float beyond you, when she can harm you, but she herself lies beyond your reach.  Yet I am reminded of book V of the Iliad where Aphrodite comes to the rescue of Aeneus, her son, and is wounded by the mortal, Greek warrior, Diomedes.  Goddesses too can be wounded, they too can be pierced by mortals.  Despite her light feet, despite not being bound to the actualities of the earth, to any sure ground, when Aphrodite decides to get involved in mortal matters, she too must take a stand, take up ground and fight.  To fight is to risk being wounded.  As Grimes shows, Bell can be pierced too, she too suffers wounds, because she too takes up ground, even if for a moment. 

 

To some extent we have no choice, to exist is to take up ground.  We are not gods.  Finitude is to some extent always actualizing itself, even if banally.  What Bell does is perform a playful, ritualistic dance, which she refuses to bring to an end.  The spectator, Grimes, sits through hundreds of pages of this performance, as he makes a point of mentioning, but eventually tires and becomes angry.  He yearns for a telos, for a culmination of sorts, for permanence, for some meaning; he demands that the movement cease so that he can circumscribe it and define its boundaries.  There must be an end to all things.  Bell is cautious in her irresponsibility, a term which she appropriates from Grimes, by arguing, through the movement of her dance, that being responsible requires being open to pure difference, to the waste produced by systems by the irresponsible act of systematization.  Though she acknowledges her finitude, she embraces its infinite potentiality, rather than the finite and limited actualities she sees before her.  Grimes does not ignore or fail to see certain circumscribed and limited potentialities before him, but his project, his ritual is concerned with a critical actualization of the infinite potentiality.  Both lay claim to a responsibleness beneath the horizon of finitude.   

 

We can learn from these complimentary ritual practices, with which both scholars mark their body of work.  They embody both difference and universality.  They are both rituals, acts, practices, paths established and religiously pursued.  However, whereas one is fluid and playful, a dance, the other takes a stand, embraces permanence and is more meditative.  One is a Sufi, a whirling Dervish, dancing his way into union with the Divine, the other a Buddhist monk meditating in pure stillness.  Though it is not simply their methodologies which differ, Grimes’ being avowedly ‘critical’ and Bell’s ‘playful’, but their objectives too.  One’s method indicates one’s path.  Grimes systematizes with the aim of developing models and analogues, whereas Bell is suspicious of “attempts to formulate a system” (218) and seems to aim to mark the difference left within the margins of the universalizing systems formulated by others.  One gets the feeling that Grimes wants to attain nirvana, whereas Bell is at least troubled by the possibility of dancing into union with the Divine and thereby ending her dance, her play.  Both scholars are complimentary performers, but they must play agonistically, they must perform polemically.  Their relationship must be marked by hate, by distance, if love is to take shape in the space between them: without distance there is no yearning, no desire, no attraction and hence no love.  Yet, though, do systematization and free play belong together, do they in fact yearn for one another?                             

     

There is an entire world at stake here and it concerns our epistemological path; more specifically, it concerns the path of the humanities, which is itself ultimately based an avowed or inconspicuous ontology.  Systematization is always a yearning for structures and for structuring and so for an ontology of presence.  As Derrida understood in ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’ (L’écriture et la différence), such a yearning is a dreaming of origins and of truth, a nostalgia which takes a negative stance toward a playfulness or freeplay that refuses to take veracity as its fundamental determining and interpretative criterion.  This is evident in Grimes’ stance towards Bell’s playfulness, which is not even that playful.  From his comments, I imagine that someone like Grimes would be lost and infuriated by the playfulness of a Derrida or Deleuze.  There is another path, one that we all embodied and embraced as children, a path offered us by Nietzsche: playfulness or freeplay.  Nietzsche affirmed playfulness and did not look towards constructing truth or a system within which an end could be sought and had, through which the play could locate a finale.  For Nietzsche, the performance, the ritual play was ongoing and so could never be circumscribed and delimited.  In a note dated some time between 1883 and 1885, he wrote: “to impose upon becoming the character of being – that is the supreme will to power” (Will to Power, 617).  As Derrida writes in ‘La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines’:

 

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign,

of freeplay.  The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or

an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and

lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.  The other, which is no

longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond

man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who,

throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words,

through the history of all of his history – has dreamed of full presence, the

reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. The second

interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does

not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the “inspiration of a new

humanism” (again from the “Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss”) (427).

 

Systematization is more comfortable, more secure, it promises to fill a lack within us, to answer the call of a primordial yearning for presence, for permanence and certainty; but it violates our being, our being simultaneously infinite potentiality and finite actuality.  To embrace freeplay and affirm its joyous discomfort is a profoundly difficult task, but one that offers infinite riches and pleasures, unimaginable infinitudes of open pathways on which to think and feel.  We can either embrace this opening or close ourselves to the world and so too to ourselves, to our being.  As Derrida puts it:   

 

As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin,

this structuralist thematic of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative,

 nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the

Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world

and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation-would be

the other side. This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than

as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure

freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present,

pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic

indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace (l’aventure ‘séminale’ de

la trace)  (427).

 

We can either languish in a ‘negative nostalgia’ or set out on “the seminal adventure of the trace.” We can either choose to dance or to stand still.       

 

 

 

Assuming that rapture is nature’s play with man,

the Dionysian artist’s creative activity is the play with rapture.

 

 

                                                                                                            – Nietzsche -

Finitude: Between Mythos and Logos

 

 

 

 

  There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.

 

                                                                        - Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 11 –

 

 

 

At the outset of The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth Wendy Doniger locates the  primordial tension between the universal and the singular within the human being (21).  It is “this tension”, she says, that “gives rise to the myth”, to myths that “form a bridge between the terrifying abyss of cosmological ignorance and our comfortable familiarity with our recurrent, if tormenting, human problems” (22). 

 

I would like to inquire into the source of this tension, which Doniger locates in the human being and which seems to pontificate between or connect the cosmos and the singular human being, by tracing a genealogy of the mythical. 

 

In a seminal passage from the Politics Aristotle defines the human being (anthrōpos) as a “political animal (politikon zōion)” who alone among animals “has speech (logos)” (1253a).  Thus, logos becomes the mechanism for the exclusion of the human being from the category of a-logistic animality.  Human being was to be henceforth indentified with logos in the history of thought.  The human being became the logical being, the reasonable, rational being.

 

A mainstay of ancient Greek was the prevalence of oppositional and hence symmetrical word pairs, among which one could often find logos/mythos.  Given Aristotle’s definition of the human being as the ‘logical’ animal and the immense influence of his thought on subsequent thinkers, one should not be surprised that mythos became the black sheep of the family.  In almost every language the word ‘myth’, a word that originally meant ‘story’ or ‘spoken word’, has come to take on pejorative connotations.  To be fair, Aristotle alone is not responsible for this genealogy.  To find the roots of this mutation, we have to go back to Xenophanes and Plato.   

 

The agonistic relationship between Homer and Plato has by now become legendary; however, Xenophanes of Colophon was the first philosopher-poet to challenge the veracity and morality of Homer’s myths, to pit mythos against logos and to call to account the great poet and his legacy.  Yet, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed in an 1872 fragment entitled ‘Homer’s Contest’, “we do not understand the full strength of Xenophanes’ attack on the national hero of poetry, unless – as again later with Plato – we see that at its root lay an overwhelming craving to assume the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame.”  As Homer had become the greatest composer of verse, it was Plato’s destiny to become the greatest prose stylist of the Greek language.  Plato, not Xenophanes, was to become the great antagonist of Homer, the defender of logos contra mythos.    

 

The Homeric epics, comfortable in dwelling on the plane of mythos, never laid claim to the ‘objectivity’ of logos.  Interestingly, the word logos occurs plentifully in the entire extant body of Greek literature, both in prose and verse, save in the epics, where it occurs only once.  It was not until Xenophanes, a poet who was also a philosopher, that veracity became the criterion for judging mythos, for judging it as ‘false’, as ‘untruth’ and so as ‘immoral’.  This demonization of mythos was the basis for the powerful and sustained attack on the Homeric myths in Plato’s Republic.  In the Republic Plato accuses the Homeric myths of both untruth and immorality.  As Plato saw it, the problem with the various Homeric myths was their content.  Homer’s readings of traditional myths, which had become canonical through their brilliance, eloquence and consequent popularity, were ‘false’ because they were ‘immoral’ –  Plato was the first great moralist in the Western tradition.      

 

Plato’s motivation in attacking and destroying the hegemony of the Homeric myths was thus more complex than Doniger leads us to believe with her comment: “The myths that Plato didn’t like…were lies, and the myths that he liked…were truths” (3).  Plato was concerned with what he believed to be the ‘immorality’ of the content of the Homeric myths, which he deemed harmful and dangerous in the political realm.  His goal was to subsume the category of mythos beneath that of logos, to subsume ‘falsity’ and ‘immorality’ beneath ‘truth’ and ‘morality’, to make myth rational, moral and so logical.  As Doniger observes, Plato had no qualms about spinning myths, beautiful and highly poetic ones actually, but what is essential in his motivation to mythologize is that his myths always served to validate or prove his philosophical theories – his myths were arguments, they too were logoi.     

 

By the time Aristotle came around to defining the human being, the genealogy of mythos, its subsumption beneath logos, had been all but forgotten, especially to the philosophers, who had themselves systematically fought to conceal it.  It was only natural that Aristotle went on to define the human being, the creature at the top of the hierarchy of being, as what possessed truth and morality, or, what was the same, logos.  For Aristotle, the human being became an actual human being in possession of logos, when he reached adulthood, the telos or end of his linear progression.  A child, for example, was not a human being in actuality, but only in potentiality, because he was atelēs, that is, ‘without telos’ or ‘incomplete’.  I mention this, because the subsumption of mythos beneath logos and of potentiality beneath actuality are interrelated – this formulation is essential to the source of the tension Doniger identifies. 

 

Just as the myths Doniger draws on in her first chapter, so too do Job and Yashodha, the myths’ characters, oscillate between the cosmic or macro and the singular or micro.  Job and Yashodha “never entirely forget” (21) that they have seen the cosmic, that they have seen through the eyes of the Divine, but they must make themselves ignorant or cause a forgetting within themselves, whether consciously or not, so as to be able to continue living and not be crushed beneath the immense weight of existence, beneath the infinite potentiality of being.  Unlike Atlas, they cannot bear the immense infinitude of the heavens, they are merely human, merely finite.  Herein lies the source of the tension Doniger identifies: human finitude.  As she says, “myth is the most interdisciplinary narrative” (6), because it is the human narrative: the expression of our finitude.  Just as myths oscillate between infinitude and finitude, between the universal and the singular, the human being oscillates between infinite potentiality and finite actuality: human finitude is mythical.  We take refuge in our limited actualities, in a forgetful “serenity”, as Doniger puts it (21), while at times we transcend ourselves, our actual finitude and catch a glimpse of the potential infinitude of the cosmic of which we are a part. 

 

Yet, Doniger doesn’t pursue this mythical logic to its logical end: when we take this refuge, when we bring about this forgetting in ourselves, we necessarily abandon the mythical oscillation and our human finitude, which maintains within it potential infinitude, for sheer actualized finitude, for pure actuality.  Forgetting is comfortable, a solace amidst suffering.  Faced with the immense weight of cosmic existence and its sheer infinitude, the other edge of human finitude, we take refuge in a blissful forgetting.  He who knows of nothing beyond himself, has no vision beyond himself, beyond what is actualized before him.  Aristotle’s subsumption of mythos beneath logos and of potentiality beneath actuality is meant to heal the wound of human finitude, to stop the blood flowing from our potential infinitude, to conceal our oscillation, our mythicality.            

 

In a famous passage at the end of the Enneads, Plotinus asks “how is it that the soul does not remain in the vision of the Divine?”  His response and promise: “because it has yet to wholly depart; but there shall be a time of vision unbroken, the self weighed down no longer by the body” (VI.9.10).  As God says about the human being in the Qur’an: “I created [him] with My own two hands” (38:75), with His spirit blown into our clay.  Though we share in the divine light or breath, we are creatures of the earth, of the soil, we are heavy, more easily weighed down by the force of gravity.  In La Pesanteur et la Grâce Simone Weil writes “two forces rule over the universe: light and gravity (deux force règnent sur l’univers: lumière et pesanteur)” (41).  With language reminiscent of Plotinus, in The Confessions Augustine writes: “I was caught up to You by Your beauty and quickly torn away from You by my weight”(VII.xvii.23) and goes on to quote Wisdom 9:15, which reads: “The body, which is corruptible, weighs down the soul, and our earthly habitation drags down the mind to think many things.”  For Augustine and all other mystics, this being ‘torn away’ from the vision of the Divine is painful, it gives rise to what Augustine poetically calls the core inquietum or ‘distraught heart’.  It is easier to forget this pain, to conceal the wound, rather than let it fester. 

 

Yet, perhaps we don’t have to read this tension of human finitude beneath a horizon of an otherworldly atemporal infinitude, of which we are mere temporal fragments, like the shattered pieces of the originary Truth, which, as the Midrash on Psalm 85:11 tells us, occurred after God had hurled Truth to the ground (41).  Such an originary Truth cannot be recovered insofar as we are mythical, insofar as we oscillate between potential infinitude and actual finitude, insofar as we are human beings.  Any attempt at recovering an actual originary Being beyond being, at ascending to the heavens, has the contrary effect of re-covering or concealing and forgetting any potential infinitude and so of forcing us to remain in an uncreative and limited actuality, a banal finitude. 

 

Doniger speaks of a “bottom up” method, wherein “contradictory impressions” are sought in order to engage in cross-cultural comparative analysis (73).  Yet, why is there any need for vertical movement?  Can we not merely move horizontally along an infinite horizon of potentiality?  On the plane of infinite potentiality there is no lack of space and so no need to build vertically, which historically has only served to obscure the vision and humanity of those who come to believe that they dwell in the heavens among the gods and so beyond their fellow human beings.  In the land of potential infinitude we would have the potential to be mythical, to create without such terrifying and limiting notions as God, Truth, or Morality.  Yet, would it be possible for we who have all been offered a mythical glimpse of an actual other world, of an actual infinitude, of the Divine, to simply live in the land of potential infinitude?  Beneath such a horizon, wouldn’t potential infinitude itself be limiting?  Would we not want to one day walk through the gates of actual infinitude?  In light of all this, do we even have the potential to recover our mythical potentiality beneath a horizon of temporality?  If we in fact do have such a potential, what would then happen to our suffering, our oscillatory trauma and its wound; do we dare think that it would simply disappear, that it would simply heal?

 

 

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

                                                                                    - Pindar, Pythian III.61-2 -

The Feminine Aporia

 

 

She represents precisely the one who is outside of the system, excluded from the system;

and, being excluded from the system, the woman represents this excess,

this break, this absolute transcendence.

 

                                                          -Jacques Derrida -

 

 

 

In his article, Gender, Daniel Boyarin develops what can be called the feminine aporia:  the irresolvable, twofold formalization of the feminine as what is either masculine or effeminate.  The woman is either masculinized into spiritually pure and intellectual male or effeminized, which  encompasses such traditional androcentric notions as ‘dependent’, ‘passive’ and ‘receptacle’ (whether for the penis or embryo).  The masculine feminine is nothing more than the masculinized woman, an Athena who, fully formed, springs forth from the head of Zeus, the patriarch; she is born from the masculine mind, the presumed ‘essence’ of the masculine itself.  In this formalization the feminine has actually become masculine, the feminine body is abandoned for the masculine mind.  The masculinized woman does not bear children and remains a virgin – the feminine is associated with the body and the masculine with the mind.  Conversely, the effeminate feminine is woman in her ‘true’ or ‘essential’ nature, she is embodied and so despiritualized and deintellectualized.  As Katherine Young in From the Phenomenology of Religion to Feminism and Women’s Studies observes, “reason and mind have been associated in Western thought with maleness and superiority, whereas body and emotion have been associated with femaleness and inferiority”(29).  The feminine is not equal to the masculine insofar as it is feminine, woman must thus masculinize herself, she must become a man, if she desires ontological and hence social, economic and political equality.       

 

I would like to explore the nature of this aporia with which Boyarin concludes his article, I would like to take his conclusion as an opening and beginning for thought.  An aporia, a ‘being pathless’, signals an opening for thought and its horizonal infinitude, it reveals the vast and rich planes of potentiality.  What does this aporia tell us about the ontology of the feminine and its potential? 

 

In The Sex Which Is Not One Luce Irigaray writes: “Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as individualities.  She is neither one nor two.”  Woman is somehow mysterious, she somehow eludes the categorizing and forceful individualizing of an androcentric culture; she is not one and therefore cannot be formalized as such.  However, what makes her not one also makes her not two, since, as we’ve seen, the feminine is aporetic, it is an irresolvable twofold formalization of the masculine and the effeminate.  Yet, doesn’t a woman have to be ‘someone’, either one of the twofold either/or formalization?  Doesn’t she have to be either a masculinized or effeminate individual, doesn’t she too ultimately have to be one, even if only under the coercion of an androcentrism?  Perhaps we can reorient the question by asking ‘can woman really ever be essentially and so entirely one to the exclusion of the other of the either/or formalization?’   

 

 

  An aporia always locates itself in the realm of potentiality, which is oblivious to the forces that actualize and delimit its power.  Thus, a woman who has been masculinized in actuality is still effeminate in potentiality, the feminine intellectual is still embodied in potentia.  Herein lies the immense potentiality of the feminine aporia: the subversive mystery of woman.  Whereas man is always one, always formalized as autonomous individual under coercion of a self-created, self-imposed androcentrism, woman is two in potentia.  She can be simultaneously one and two, because the feminine functions on the level of potentiality.  Woman is multifarious, chimerical.  She cannot be formalized, categorized and controlled as easily as the man and so she becomes ‘excess’.   As Derrida says, “She represents precisely the one who is outside of the system, excluded from the system; and, being excluded from the system, the woman represents this excess, this break, this absolute transcendence.”  Woman can simultaneously be intellectual and child bearer, mind and body; more significantly, she can create both spiritually and physically, whereas man cannot.  This is why the body has been denigrated from time immemorial, why the female body and its sexuality have always been so subversive and so violently veiled.  The feminine aporia reveals that woman has the potential to be both female and male.  Herein lies the primordially subversive being of the feminine: woman is self-othering, whereas man is self-same.  Whence arises the omnipresent reality that women tend to be other oriented and men self oriented.      

 

Woman can be celibate, she can denigrate her body and become a disembodied intellectual, she too can devote herself to God and the ‘higher’ intellectual pursuits, but at any moment, at the very moment that she is the masculine feminine, she is other in potentia, she is embodied.  This ambiguous being of woman is unformalizable and therefore subversive – it can only be formalized as an aporia, as a pathless unknown, which is insufficient for and so dangerous to a reductionist and totalizing system.  Moreover, it is exactly her body and its sexuality that is the stimulus and weapon of her subversiveness and the androcentric attempt to disembody her by desexualizing and veiling her body bears witness to the potential danger she possesses.  Contrary to the dominant narrative, the androcentric attempt to pacify woman and the potential possessed by her body and its sexuality did not arise because she was conceived to be feeble, but rather because she was deemed potentially subversive and dangerous.  Woman transcends the system and therefore threatens to break it, to tear it asunder.

 

As David Kinsley relates in his article, Women’s Studies and the History of Religions, the goddess T’ien Hou is worshipped and conceived differently by women and men on the South China coast.  Whereas to men “she is primarily an establishment deity, a guardian of the status quo,” women “take no part whatsoever in the public cult” – subversive enough in itself – and see the goddess as a “maternal” character who is associated with “children”(8), which is the creation of the female body and its sexuality, the very element which is non-masculine, which transcends man.

 

Kinsley’s article offers a glimpse into how women’s studies has done in a few decades what millennia of ‘men’s studies’ could not and did not do.  Women’s studies has in only a few decades subverted millennia-old traditions, revealing the sheer potential of the woman, of the feminine aporia.  As grand as this ‘revolution’ in the academy may seem, it is quite insignificant when compared to the subversive and revolutionary potential at the core of the feminine being.  What is needed is a thorough ontology of the aporetic feminine being.  Only such an ontology can reveal the immense importance of the potential that the feminine being possesses for the movement of resistance and the creation of an ethically and politically inclusive community.      

 

As is the case with the genealogy of any ancient god or goddess, there is much variation among the surviving accounts.  Athena’s story is no exception, especially given her immense importance in Greek civilization.  One story, which I hinted at above, tells of how she was born fully formed from the head of Zeus.  However, this simplistic genesis has a subversive heritage.  Zeus was smitten with the goddess Metis, a word meaning ‘intelligence’ or ‘wisdom’, who resisted him and so was pursued and finally overtaken by the king of the gods.  While Metis was pregnant, a prophecy was related to Zeus that the child born from the union of the two gods would be greater than the great patriarch himself.  Afraid for his safety and his dominance, Zeus swallowed Metis and eventually Athena was born fully formed from his head.  She sprung forth with shield and sword in hand and came to be known as the Athena parthenos, the ‘virgin’ warrior.  By swallowing Metis, ‘intelligence’, Zeus fully masculinized the female goddess and her offspring.  Athena became the virgin goddess of craft, wisdom and war and so there remained in her little trace of the feminine.  This myth reveals that the masculine violently suppressed and conquered the feminine so as to maintain its own dominance, to secure the patriarchy; that the feminine was masculinized so as to be formalized and appropriated within the system.  Yet, Athena’s genealogy also reveals that the mind and the body, intelligence and sexuality were once unified in the feminine, embodied in Metis.  We are offered an opening here through which the mind and body, intelligence and the ethical, self and other may be thought in community in the being of the feminine, in woman.  The subversive potential of the feminine, of woman, is the path through this opening.                      

 

    

 

Once there was the Great Matriarchy, the history of peoples flowed

as simply as that of plants.  Then the conceit of the drones:

a rebellion, and we had civilization.

 

                                                 – Italo Calvino -

 

The Being of Language

 

 

 

Part I

 

Literary Theory and the Concealment of Being

 

 

The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the

saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.

For questioning is the piety of thought.

                                                                   - Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology -

 

 

In History, Theory, Text Elizabeth Clark traces the predominantly 20^th century movement of what she refers to as ‘literary theory’.[1]  The subtitle of her work, Historians and the Linguistic Turn, testified to her belief that what she is tracing is a linguistic turn or shift.

 

On November 20^th 2001, Jacques Derrida participated in an English language round-table discussion at Loughborough University, which was dubbed ‘Life After Theory’.  The first comment he made, when given the opportunity to speak, was:  “Now, I never use the word ‘theory’ in the way that you do here; I don’t use the word ‘theory’ after you, after the Americans and the English speakers.  So, I would translate this into French as ‘life after philosophy.’” 

 

Derrida, like Gadamer and Foucault, was a philosopher, not a ‘theorist’, as the English speaking world refers to those philosophers, particularly from the European Continent, who do not fit the Anglo-American category of ‘philosophy’.  Of course, for various reasons, which are often incomprehensible, Clark appears to be unaware of this, and her exposition of the ideas of such thinkers is important in that the scholarly and general community need to be exposed to such subversive, questioning critical ‘theories’ in whatever way possible.  It is a noble act to, as Clark says, “reach across disciplinary fences”(161).  More scholars stand to learn from her openness.  In fact, the roots of what she refers to as ‘the linguistic turn’ are deeply philosophical and, more importantly, highly political in nature, which further contributes to the comfortable forgetting, which has occurred – or perhaps its roots were never really revealed in the English speaking world.  The genealogy of the transmutation of the word philosopher and philosophy into theorist and theory respectively, is a complex one and this is not the place to trace its genealogy.  Suffice it to say, however, that there is a forgetting or concealment that underlies this usage and it is on this concealment that I want to briefly dwell here.

 

The concealment of the naming of the philosopher and philosophy as theory and theorist respectively is the reason underlying Clark’s reading of the ‘turn’ about which she writes as ‘linguistic’.  She believes that it is an issue of language, of texts and contexts.  In a sense, it is, but not in the traditional sense that she takes it, it is about the being of language, the being that underlies language.  When Foucault titled his short, but influential essay, Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur, ‘what is an author’, and set out to destroy any and all residue of the ideological force that such a notion might have still had, one must at least wonder about the word itself.   His choice of the word auteur was a significant one  It derives from the Latin auctor or ‘originator’, which signals the underlying ontology of presence – that being is a substance (substantia) that underlies all things as objective ground – that was and still continues to be the basis for all ideological assumptions or mythologies serving as the foundation of human ‘ideals’.  Foucault is trying to dispel the myth of essentialism and its traditional derivatives such as ‘human nature’, ‘God’, ‘inalienability’, the ‘self’, ‘autonomy’ and so on.  Derrida, Barthes and Gadamer are part of this 20^th century philosophical project.

 

Clark inadvertently allows this concealment to reveal itself twice in chapter 7 of her book, once on page 137 with her use of “phenomenology of presence” and a second time on page 142, when she refers to Derrida’s use of the phrase “metaphysical assumption”.  The ‘turn’ in language and the reading of texts and related matters are a consequence of the metaphysical or, more specifically, ontological ‘turn’ that was first fully concretized in Heidegger’s epochal Being and Time.  Derrida’s philosophy of language is a consequence of this fundamental ontological shift, which he explores in numerous texts.   

 

Derrida and Gadamer are not appropriating “different Heidegger’s”(137), since the notion that there even are two Heidegger, an ‘early’ and a ‘late’, arose mostly as an attempt to explain away the very real complexities of Heidegger’s thought.  As early as Being and Time (1927), Heidegger had argued:

 

The idea of being as constant objective presence not only motivates an

extreme definition of the being of innerworldly (innerweltlich) beings

and their identification with the world as such, it simultaneously blocks

the possibility of bringing to view attitudes of Da-sein in a way which

is ontologically appropriate (Sein und Zeit, 98 [German pagination]).

 

An ontology of presence gives rise to an extreme identification or equation of human beings with their world, their context.  Such an assumption fails to account for the appropriate “attitudes” human beings have, that is, the attitudes they possess and that define their being in the world – Heidegger’s notion of Welt or ‘world’ means far more than the mere physical and social globe.  The scholar can assume that he has access to the ‘inner’ experience or world of another or even of himself, he can assume that he can put on the ‘insider’s lens’ and decipher the meaning, the essence, the intention of a given text.  Heidegger makes this comment early on in Being and Time, before he actually mounts perhaps the most sustained destructive critique of the notion of an ontology of presence, using a method, which he called Destruktion, literally ‘destruction’, which is actually where Derrida derives the fundamentals of ‘deconstrution’.  It is this that underlies the ‘linguistic turn’ that Clark signals.  Before epistemology there is ontology, there must be being before there is knowledge of beings.

 

Heidegger problematized fundamental traditional notions like ‘being’ and ‘truth’ by arguing that they simultaneously reveal and conceal themselves, or, put otherwise, they inhabit a simultaneity of in-sistence and ex-istence, that is, a standing-in and standing-out.  Thus, existence, literally ‘standing-out’ (ex-stare), is itself a being outside itself, a transcendence and hence an objective concealment, a hiding way from sight.  Therefore, the notion of all modes of being as presence, that being is always something there, ready at hand and waiting to be discovered is fundamentally flawed and naïve to say the least.  Such a monumental revolution in the fundamentals of thought, in metaphysics and ontology, has and will continue to have immense consequences for us, not the least of which has already and will continue to be in epistemology, in how we access, view, classify and categorize our knowledge.  It is important to bear this in mind when grasping at such romantic and uncritical notions as ‘objectivity’, the ‘insider’s perspective’ and the like; for the objective is simultaneously the subjective and the insider’s perspective the outsider’s perspective.  When taking a naïve, unquestioning stance in thinking, it is at that very moment that we forget being and ourselves become questionable.   

  

 

 

Part II

 

Rivers Beneath the Horizon

 

 

potamoisi toisi autoisi embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei.

 

As they step into the same rivers, different and diverse waters flow upon them.

 

                                                                                    - Heraclitus, fragment 12 - 

 

Text:

 

Textus

 

A singular being-in the community of infinite weavings of multiplicities, never as isolatable singularity.

 

An ever flowing singular river of multiplicity beneath the ever receding horizon: context.

 

Da-sein – being-there, where the da, the ‘there’, is a flowing river reaching into infinite and unquenchable bodies of water, into the infinitude of context.

 

A river flowing in the spatio-temporal simultaneity of inside/outside, always on the margins, between words, between letters and the spaces between the spaces themselves.

 

A singular multiplicity of thought, action, laughter, love and so of the political, the religious, the ethical.

 

 

Context:

 

Cum-textus

 

The community of texts, the togetherness of web formations, the interweaving of multiplicities, which are themselves weavings.

 

The infinite totality of rivers beneath the ever receding horizon.

 

The horizonal sky beneath which is the infinitude of being, within which there is all self and otherness no longer dichotomous.

 

The exception (or ‘taking-out’) of the polarization of inside/outside and the formation of their spatio-temporal nexus.

 

A play, a dance, a poem, an experiment and their infinite totality:  philosophy.

 

 

Author:

 

Auctor

 

The originator: the divine, the alpha and the omega, but as agapē, as charity, as love, never as substance, as objective presence – always beyond being: Dieu sans l’être.

 

Descending and ascending as the horizon, as context, as infinitude.

 

The force of attraction and repulsion in the infinite spaces between texts: the textuality of texts.  Love must repel, it must be repulsive so as to create space for attraction, for an intimate drawing-near.    

 

The charity drawing together and separating the infinite rivers of multiplicity to create their infinite totality, to create context.

 

 

Reader:

 

Rædan

 

An interpreter of enigmatic dreams.

 

The messenger of the gods whom love offers to move through the infinite totality of rivers that constitute the horizon.

 

Sein-können – potential-for-being, potential infinitude, but whose simultaneous actual finitude limits him to finite actualities beneath the infinitude of context, beneath the infinite potentialities.  He thus resists love and infinite charity while simultaneously accepting it, he too is simultaneously repulsive and attractive.

 

A text infused with divine charity and so itself an enigmatic dream – self-interpreter: auto-hermeneutician.

 

The simultaneity of finite knowledge and infinite certainty arising from a lack of perspective available only in the infinitude of context.

 

Finitude in search of infinitude who forgets his search, his being, his infinite task.

 

 

 

---

[1] See, however, page 164, where she twice uses the phrase “literary-philosophical theory.”

The Negative Community: Categorization and Control

 

The basis of all domination is the absence of reciprocation

 

                                                       - Jean Baudrillard, La Violence du Mondial -

 

 

 

In The Invention of World Religions Tomoko Masuzawa sets out to trace the genealogy of the ‘world religions’ discourse which has become so prevalent in our time.  Reading her intriguing account of the movements of this discourse, I found myself wondering whether the genealogy of this discourse is part of a larger context.

 

The book addresses a central question: why was there a sudden surge of interest in religions that were other than Christianity in the 19^th century?  Was it sheer interest or fascination?  Was it to improve Christian self-understanding?  Was it the sudden rise of secularism that consciously or unconsciously brought about an attempt to locate answers elsewhere, in religions that were other than Christianity, which was perhaps deemed to have ‘failed’ to keep at bay the flood of secularism?  Was it the ‘spiritualist’ attempt to understand the world and to locate the universal core of the one, true ‘Religion’ underlying the diversity of world religions?  Most of the texts that Masuzawa explores hint at or explicitly refer to one or more of these reasons; however, these reasons are all to a large extent simply foreground, as Masuzawa herself recognizes.  Throughout the book, but especially in the final chapter, Masuzawa offers the possibility that the pluralist world religions discourse is perhaps indicative of the transplantation of the European project of hegemony from one context or discourse to another, particularly if we look at the work of Weber’s contemporary, Ernst Troeltsch.

 

So it would seem that the legacy of the world religions discourse, at least to some extent, is the European project of hegemony, of world domination.  This may likely be the motive force underlying the world religions discourse and the championing of pluralism, but one that would only be in the background of the genealogy of the discourse as the discourse developed among scholars, that is, in the field of research itself.  No scholar, especially as the treatments of the other religions became more and more sympathetic, that is, more politically correct, would want this motive of hegemony to become foreground, since ultimately the myth of scholarly objectivity is a highly valued and respected narrative.  However, well into the 20^th century, European governments, and by extension their citizenry, never shied away from being explicit about their imperialist, colonial or hegemonic motivations in deciding and implementing foreign policy in a ‘pluralist’ and ‘inclusive’ mode.  Even today a government as politically correct as the United States, with its diverse media-based technologies of manipulation and propaganda distribution, has no reservations in openly declaring that securing ‘democracy’ for all the nations of the world is in its own best interest, that such a project will strengthen its security and solidify its power so that it may continue fighting to expand the dominion of the free world and the ideals of ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and the like.                

 

This is all foreground and simple to spot, in fact it is meant to be so, since there is no nation that would openly declare that it is against such noble ends as stability and security, democracy and freedom.  As long as the free world, namely the West, is powerful and secure, so too, goes the logic, is the rest of the world.  Freedom and democracy are safe insofar as the West is in control of world destiny.  The interests of the West thus become synonymous with those of the rest of the world.      

 

As Masuzawa herself shows, in his 1891 Elias P. Ely Lectures Frank Field Ellinwood could and was willing to openly speak about the “great conquest” of Christianity “against the heathen systems of the East”(101).  Even George Matheson, who spoke about “reconciliation” with other religions, only allows for such a plurality insofar as it exists beneath the natural hegemony of Christianity: “for each and all there is a seat in the Christian Pantheon”(86).  He leaves no doubt that the pantheon itself is Christian.   

 

So if the legacy of the world religions discourse, European or Western hegemony, is itself foreground, even to some extent explicitly in the objective, non self-interested scholarship, at least early on, when political correctness was not the great virtue that it later became, does this signal that there is another, perhaps more complex, background underlying the genealogy of the discourse?  To find an answer to this question we have look at the broader context of modernity in the 18^th and 19^th century, during which time the world religions discourse was in its embryonic stages. 

 

The work of Michel Foucault offers us a starting point.  In the late 1970s Foucault began to study what he termed la gouvernementalité, a term meant to denote the techniques and procedures used to categorize and direct human behaviour in order to better control human resources.  The goal of such technologies is to solidify the politico-economic rule of a government over its sphere of influence.  The German Polizeiwissenschaft, as Foucault points out, was an exemplary manifestation of this method of categorization and control.  It developed in the 18^th century and its primary objective was the maximization of the economy of life administration in order to maximize governmental power.  The goal of governmental power was ‘biopolitical’, that is, the administration of life. 

 

The nexus of power and knowledge is the core of biopolitics, which is why contemporaneously there developed in the 18^th century a hierarchy of knowledge, wherein access to information and knowledge became the basis for modern class divisions.  Physicians and scholars began to form the new secular priesthood and institutions of higher learning, the new churches, multiplied across Europe and North America.  The biopolitical movement and the need for a secular priesthood arose as an attempt to confront the sudden increase in population and the massive influx of information and knowledge, which occurred to a large degree due to the expanding geopolitical context brought about by European imperialism and colonialism.        

 

It is perhaps only against this background that we can begin to situate and better understand the genealogy of the modern discourse of world religions.  Within this context, the genealogy of this discourse becomes a minor species or branch of the core genealogy underlying modernity, of the genealogy of biopolitics.  However, it seems that the motive force underlying the movement of biopolitics is itself hegemonic.  Yet there is a fundamental difference here and one which, as we shall see, reveals that there in fact does exist a form of community and egalitarian pluralism binding the ‘Christian West’ and ‘non-Christian other’.  Whereas the hegemonic nature of the world religions discourse was and, as indicated above with the example of the US, still is openly, though somewhat differently, hegemonic, the hegemonic nature of the biopolitical discourse was predominantly and is now entirely inconspicuously hegemonic.  The reason for this is that the hegemony of the world religions discourse has always been other oriented, that is, the object of domination has always been a foreigner, the East, for example, whereas biopolitical hegemony is both other and self oriented.  Biopolitical hegemony or governmentality originally began as an attempt to categorize and control local or native populations and only later, through imperial and colonial expansionism, foreign populations.  Political power never openly subverts itself.

 

The new information and knowledge that scholars in the 18^th and 19^th centuries studied and categorized not only served as the means by which European governments were able to establish vast and powerful technologies for dominating foreign populations, but also as the means by which these same governments were able to develop complex technologies for dominating their own native populations.  This secular priesthood was seminal in helping develop the technologies necessary to control the massive modern governmental systems that are in place in our time.  They are also, whether they are aware of it or not, still indispensible for its continued operation and sustainment.     

 

In this context the project of 19^th century comparative theology or of anthropology, of studying and categorizing the foreign other in order to conquer and bring it within its own dominion, was no different from the core biopolitical project of modernity: the study, categorization and control of all life, whether native or foreign.  The assumed superiority of the ‘Christian crusaders’ whose comparative work was meant to show the superiority of the Christian religion was exactly that, assumed, with little or no basis in reality, at least as concerns the mechanisms of political power or domination.  To be sure, the West has always had a privileged position in modernity, politically, economically and otherwise, but this does not alter the core reality that they inhabit the same community as the rest of the world, the negative community governed by biopolitical technologies of domination.  This is the true ‘egalitarian pluralism’ created and sustained by the biopolitical order of modernity.

In Pursuit of the Unattainable

 

 

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

 

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

                                   

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6 -

 

 

In their discussion of the notion of method, the authors of The Emptiness of Emptiness (EE) approvingly quote Richard Rorty, who writes “…the idea of method presupposes that of a privileged vocabulary, the vocabulary which gets to the essence of the object, the one which expresses the properties which it has in itself as opposed to those which we read into it.”    

 

It’s true that for the most part scholars assume that more or less what they do is to ‘let speak’, that is, they do the necessary groundwork so that the subject matter of their study is able to reveal itself.  Years ago, I remember reading a work titled What Plato Said, written by one of the foremost authorities on Plato at the time.  What the author did in the volume was reveal to us what Plato really said, meant, thought and so on.  It was the first time that I began to really wonder where the scholar himself had disappeared to – was he still there?  Perhaps he had managed to completely excise himself from the work and to call forth the ghost of Plato.

 

Yet is there actually something inherent to the idea or notion of ‘method’ itself that presupposes a ‘privileged vocabulary’ such as the one indicated by Rorty? 

 

A common claim in this week’s readings is that one’s method is, to some extent, one’s prejudice, that we necessarily approach our object of study with certain preconceived notions or modes of interpretation.  As the authors of EE claim, “what we learn in our encounter with these texts is in every way a function of the tools we bring to our study.”  So it appears that ‘method’ is what one possesses, a tool one carries in one’s tool-belt.   

 

The 20^th century was arguably ‘the century of method’, a century absorbed in methodological concerns.  Perhaps it was telling that Nietzsche, who died in 1900, at the doorstep of the century of method, had argued that the history of philosophy (and of scholarship to a lesser extent) was nothing more than the history of the justification of prejudice.  The great thinkers of history were nothing more than brilliant deceivers, con-artists, who were driven by a yearning to justify their own prejudices.  We should bare in mind though that Nietzsche wasn’t attempting to reduce the history of thought to such a simple formulation – all he was doing was identifying a pattern among intellectuals, one that, he believed, was indicative of aspects of the historical movements of thought and scholarship.  Although it’s almost difficult to argue with Nietzsche, when one thinks of how productively methods employed prior to the ‘postmodern age’ had managed to marginalize and silence voices of dissent and the diverse categories of ‘the feminine’ and ‘the abnormal’.                

 

Thus far, it would seem that Rorty and Nietzsche are right about what the notion of method denotes, that it is nothing more than how one studies an object, a ‘how’ or ‘path’ that assumes a final and achievable destination or goal, an objective essence, as Rorty puts it.  As the authors of EE point out, such thinkers as Nietzsche, James and Rorty have argued that this is simply a myth, a mythos or ‘narrative’.  So does this mean that, when we read a text, we’re only able to read into it?  Moreover, I’ll ask again, is this reading of method, that it presupposes an essentialist teleology, inherent to the idea or notion itself?

 

Why don’t we explore the word method more thoroughly.  It’s a compound of Greek origins, derived from the preposition meta, meaning ‘with’ (in this case), and the noun hodos, meaning ‘way’ or ‘path’.  So I guess the above reading of the word is also etymologically sound: method is ‘the path with which one is’ or ‘the path one is on’; either way it seems to be one’s own path, with its ‘possessional origin’ in oneself in a sense, not in the other that’s being studied.    

 

Interestingly, as can happen with compounds, especially in Greek, given the richness of the language and its vocabulary base, the whole contains more than its constituent parts.  Methodos also means ‘pursuit’, not what one is with, what one already possesses, but what one is not with, what eludes one and that at which one aims.  It would seem that method is simultaneously what one does and does not have, is and is not with or on.  What is method telling us here?  We’ve talked about what it means to ‘take a path’, to ‘be with a method’, but what might it mean to ‘be without’ one and to be so simultaneously? 

 

Appropriating the language of the Mādhyamika philosopher, we can pose the question differently: what does it mean to ‘be empty of fullness’, to be simultaneously lacking and hence in pursuit of what one already has?  Note how it’s not that one is ‘full of emptiness’, which would imply that the goal is to empty oneself of an illusory fullness, but rather that one is already empty, for it is the ‘I’ who is in pursuit, who is dispossessed of that which it seems to already possess.

The simultaneity of this double bind is a temporal distention befitting human finitude.  Heidegger defined Dasein or the ‘human-existent’ as Seinkönnen, as ‘potential-for-being’, which is simultaneously limited in its potential infinitude by the horizon of temporality.  Given infinite possibilities, we are only able to actualize a finite number, because the horizon of our being, which is temporality, is finite.  In Augustine’s Confessions we find an impassioned prayer to God to be saved from the distentio (stretching-out) of temporality.  For Augustine there is no worse pain than the distention brought about by human finitude, by the limitations of temporality.

Existing within the horizon of temporality, we are empty of the fullness of eternity.  Just as there’s no solution, no possibility for transcending human finitude insofar as we’re human, there is no possibility for transcending the double bind of method.  It is true, we are always on a path, but the notion of method tells us more, it reveals our finitude to us, that we never reach any ‘end’ or ‘essence’ on this path, that we are always in pursuit of some ‘culminated path’, some telos, which must necessarily elude us – this is the deception, the ruse that method itself reveals.  It tells us that ‘the search for meaning’, of which the authors of EE speak, is in reality a search for the limits of our language, for the limits of our world.  In our finitude the entirety or unity of the path we’re on eludes our grasp, our pursuit to understand and deconstruct it – we grasp at the whole, at meaning, but all we are offered are bits and pieces, parts of a projected whole.  Method itself reveals that all methods are necessarily finite, limited, lacking in the fullness of eternity; it embodies the human condition: finitude in search of infinitude. 

 

 

A Potential Path Beyond Method

 

Caroline Bynum, in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, speaks of the method or the path pursued to God and religious piety by religious women in the Medieval period.  The Medieval woman would turn inward and read her body and soul as text for symbols, thus creating an internal textuality, a living textuality.  Does this method light a path beyond human finitude?  Surely by journeying inward finitude becomes even more vivid?

 

The Arabic word fitra, which plays a prominent role in Islamic tradition, is usually read as the originary human nature placed within creatures by their creator.  Fitra literally means ‘opening’; it’s the originary opening placed in the creature by the creator so that he may remember and return to his origin – it is the path of return.  The Sufi turns inward, the mystic, the Medieval women, of which Bynum speaks, all turn inward in search of a path beyond finitude.  Perhaps what they find, even if just for a brief and fleeting moment, is their originary fitra and the culmination of their method, which is no longer a path pursued, but a path attained.