"The problem of community"

Indeed, we have omitted something from our evocation of the kinship between Marxism and religion which must be rectified at this point: it is the way in which all the issues that turn around church organization and the community of the faithful constitute a point-by-point anticipation of all the most vital problems of political organization in our own time: problems of the party, of class solidarity, of the soviets, of communes, of democratic centralism, of council communism, of small group politics, of the relations of intellectuals to the people, of discipline, of bureaucracy – all these crucial issues which are still so very much with us are those most centrally at stake in the great debates of Reformation and of the English cultural revolution. The problem of community – bound for us, for better or worse, to its concrete expression in the institution of the political party – was for them linked to its concrete or allegorical expression in the notion of a church or congregation or community of the faithful; and the excitement and actuality of the English cultural revolution as it unfolds from 1642 to 1660 is surely at one with this burning preoccupation with the nature of collective life.

Fredric Jameson, from "Religion and Ideology: A Political Reading of Paradise Lost." Delivered at the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature July, 1980.

Milton, Derrida, and the site of hospitality

  

In his seminars on hospitality, Jacques Derrida sets out to distinguish conditional hospitality (which follows the ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian customs of hospitality toward to the stranger or foreigner as a legal obligation) from unconditional hospitality (which says “yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before any anticipation, before identification, whether or not it has to do with . . . a human, animal, or divine creature,” (77)). Unconditional hospitality is transgressive, lawless, and absolutely heterogeneous to conditional hospitality; but it also depends on the limit of the law in order to break it. The scene of hospitality is therefore necessarily bound up with the religious and the emancipatory:

It is as if the stranger or foreigner held the keys. This is always the situation of the foreigner, in politics too, that of coming as a legislator to lay down the  law and liberate the people or the nation by coming from outside, by entering into the nation or the house, into the home that lets him enter after having appealed to him. . . . as if, then, the stranger could save the master and liberate the power of his host. (Derrida 123)

This post is an exercise for an upcoming paper: a preliminary attempt to explore Derrida's aporia of hospitality through the meeting of spirit and matter, divine guest and human host, in Milton's epic poem. Book V of Paradise Lost illustrates Milton’s attempt at an original, prelapsarian rule of hospitality, which inevitably involves the creation of domestic space. Adam and Eve are allowed to play host to Raphael. However, it is not humanity that first prepares for the arrival of a divine creature, but a gendered earth, who is depicted “Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will / Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, / Wild above rule or art; enormous bliss” (V.295-297). To call the earth “wanton” is to identify its essential excess, which is at once unnecessary (or gratuitous) and sexually suggestive: earth warms her “inmost womb” and it proves to be “more warmth than Adam needs” (V.302). Although female in type, the earth is constantly overstepping its domestic bounds. Perhaps this requires a rethinking of prelapsarian domesticity. In other words, the earth’s generous (potentially transgressive) hospitality prefigures, conditions Adam and Eve’s opening to the stranger from heaven. Indeed, says Adam, nature’s “fertile growth . . . instructs us not to spare” (V.319-320).

Roles are quickly established: this is one condition of hospitality. Adam is first host, while Eve is relegated to the food preparation. Adam’s directions to Eve are made in haste, for the occasion demands nothing less than their finest show of hospitality: “. . . go with speed, / And what thy stores contain, bring forth and pour / Abundance, fit to honor and receive / Our Heav’nly stranger” (V.313-316). As Derrida points out, in the act of hospitality, “Desire is waiting for what does not wait” (123). But the host’s desire also involves a certain expectation in which the host’s boundaries are breached: that “[c]rossing the threshold is entering and not only approaching or coming” and so the invited guest becomes the one who invites, “the guest becomes the host of the host” (123). Eve at once suggests that she and Adam are partly motivated by their own earthly pride. In their presentation of their home, Adam and Eve are suggesting to their superior guest that “. . . on Earth / God hath dispensed his bounties as in Heav’n” (V.329-330). In this way, their subjective importance to God lies hostage to the  potential validation of their heavenly visitor.

Milton’s description of Eve’s preparation emphasizes the place of labour in the domestic sphere. This scene of food preparation and composition is “a trope for poetry,” which orders and maintains the sensuous into rhyme and verse (333-336n). Meanwhile, Adam greets their guest, “bowing low” and praising Raphael, while attempting to articulate humanity’s giftedness, its favor in God’s eyes. That Adam and Eve “by sov’reign gift possess / This spacious ground” already puts them in receptive and submissive roles, thereby making their hospitality entirely conditional upon their status.

Raphael is a kind and hospitable guest; so hospitable in fact, that he condescends to eat earthly produce. But would Raphael have eaten earth’s harvest had Adam not invoked their mutual submission to God the father? By eating with them, Raphael fulfills the pretentious wishes of Adam and Eve. He admits, “God hath here / Varied his bounty so with new delights, / As may compare with Heaven” (V.430-433). But unlike humans, Raphael’s digestive process involves transubstantiation and secretes the food that is not absorbed by his spiritual body through his pores. Thus spiritual food differs from material food “in degree”; “. . .what God for you saw good,” says Raphael, “I refuse not, but convert, as you, to proper substance” (V.490-493). It is thus Raphael’s display of hospitality to the human pair which more closely resembles the unconditional hospitality of which Derrida speaks. Indeed, it allows for the story of Satan’s fall from heaven, it makes good on the human curiosity which later becomes transgressive, and temporarily disrupts the order of creation. Perhaps something similar takes place when Eve encounters and speaks (!) to the serpent.

Defourmantelle, Anne and Jacques Derrida. Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Love's Excess: Reflections on Dante's Purgatorio

Purgatory is a curious place in Dante's Divine Comedy, perhaps because its description as a place (rather than a process of preparation and purification for heaven) is a relatively recent idea.  I imagine Dante's poetic rendering of the afterlife (and this also works for the other locations of the Divine Comedy) has a fair bit to do with the fact that most of us think about heaven, hell, and purgatory in spatial terms.  This isn't a bad place for the imagination to start, but it seems to me that most of us choose to settle there (and choosing to settle, or rest, is the great temptation for those making Purgatorio's uphill climb). Dante's writing demands more than most contemporary readers are wont to give a text. In fact, Dante claims to have written Pugatorio with an express concern for the spiritual lives of its readers: it's purpose is "to make the living pray better."

As a reader who comes from a Protestant background (with little or no exposure to the doctrine of purgatory), I came to this text with significantly less anticipation than I had for the Inferno. But Purgatorio may turn out to be my favourite book in the Divine Comedy. Here, the majority (I say "majority" because it is quite rare for souls to go straight to heaven) of heaven-bound souls ascend a multi-levelled mountain (which, like Hell, is broken up into levels based on each of the seven fatal sins) in order to purify and refine themselves from those sins that they could not surmount during their lives. Its important to bear in mind that, as with the Inferno, Dante's God is not some abstract judge who arbitrarily imposes the distinction between sin and salvation on humanity; rather, such categories are the product of human actions. These souls are in purgatory because they still feel the effects of their sins. In other words, sin is a real, material problem, and purgatory is a necessary passage for one on her way to paradise. Often portrayed popular culture as an uneventful nowhere-land, purgatory is actually the only location of the Divine Comedy in which all events happen in real time; or to put it a bit differently, time must pass for change to happen. All souls found in purgatory have been saved and have no cause for fear; it is hope that keeps them in ascent, it is hope that gives them momentum.

In good Aristotelian fashion, Dante construes human freedom as the right ordering of one's inner state (comprised of the intellect, the emotional appetites and the vegetative powers), which corresponds to the proper use/direction of desire. As Virgil explains to Dante,

"Neither Creator nor His creature, my dear son,
was ever without love, whether natural
or of the mind," he began, "and this you know.

"The natural is always without error
but the other may err in its chosen goal
or through excessive or deficient vigor.

"While it is directed to the primal good,
knowing moderation in its lesser goals,
it cannot be the cause of wrongful pleasure.

"But when it bends to evil or pursues the good
with more or less concern than needed,
then the creature works against his Maker.

"From this you surely understand that love
must be the seed in you of every virtue
and of every deed that merits punishment." (XVII.91-105)

Purgatorio can thus be characterized as the place in which human souls work out (and struggle through) their desires. Inferno, in contrast, is a tour of all the various ways humans are enslaved to their desires. The fires of refinement are not found in hell (where it is cold, windy and stagnant) but in purgatory.

Again, Dante's theological and philosophical project resists the abstract character of modern thought. There is no gap between the reality of salvation and the experience Dante recounts; nor is there what now seems like an inevitable separation between reason, ethics, and faith from the competing desires that constitute human nature. Here, the human subject always functions as a desiring creature. Following Augustine, for Dante, it is not question of whether to desire or not (a point most pietists get wrong), but of how and what we desire.

In classical theology, desire is not a choice but an ontological condition: it is the very substance of our Being; and as such, Being is dynamic and diverse. Virgil tells Dante that "since no being can conceive of itself / as severed, self-existing, from its Author, / each creature is cut off from hating Him" (XVII.109-111). For me, these few lines from Dante do good job of summing up the "secular" mentality of Milton's Satan (i.e., "A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time").

"The Dreadful Work of Justice": Some Thoughts on the Inferno

I'm lucky enough to be part of a reading group that's planned to read each volume of Dante's Divine Comedy over the summer months. Having just finished the Inferno, I can say that, daunting as it may be, I'm really enjoying the reading process.

Some key questions that have arisen for me while reading are these: How are the characters with whom Dante converses narrating themselves (i.e. are they trustworthy, are they contemptuous, etc.)? Furthermore, what is the relationship between Reason (Virgil not only represents the poetic tradition, but also stands in as an allegorical representation of Reason, which in itself is not sufficient for salvation) and Emotion (namely, pity or sympathy, which we as readers continuously encounter in Dante's reactions to the inhabitants of hell)?

What's important to remember as we explore this tension is that, although humanist interpretations have prized Dante's sympathetic response to the stories of those he meets, Virgil continuously reminds Dante that his pity is essentially a symptom of pride (at least, while in hell): "Who is more impious than one who thinks that God shows passion in His judgement?" (XX.29-30). Piety and pity both come from the same Italian root: "pieta." This makes things a bit tricky at times, but in this case it's quite clear that Virgil recognizes that such pity challenges God's authority. Another important point of clarification: if God were to show "passion in His judgment" it would mean that his judgment could be second-guessed - that it was subject to a whim. We also need to remember that "Virgil is not the Roman poet so much as he is human reason unenlightened by faith; when he acts or speaks in the poem he does so without the historical context supplied by his life and works" (Robert Hollander's "Introduction," xxix). In other words, as a pagan poet, Virgil can only take Dante so far. Reason names the limit of Virgil's sensitivity. He is interested in justice and has little to say about compassion or forgiveness (though, he does admit to feeling pity himself when he observes the friends of his that are stuck in Limbo).

Unsurprisingly, I've found John Milton's Paradise Lost an interesting point of comparison. Unlike his heroic representation in Paradise Lost (and unlike most of the characters we meet in Hell), Dante's Satan isn't given any dialogue, for it appears he's too preoccupied chewing on traitors. Also surprising is that Dante's Satan isn't associated with fire but with ice: "The emperor of the woeful kingdom / rose from the ice below his breast" (XXXIV.28-9); the three winds produced by the flapping of his wings are "the sources of ice upon Cocytus" (XXXIV.52). To finally escape Hell, Virgil and Dante must climb "down the thick pelt and crusted ice" of Satan's "hairy flanks" (XXXIV.73-75).

I've also found Menomena's new album, upon which I've been expounding in my last couple posts, the perfect music for navigating hell (in particular, the track "Killemall," which inspired my choice of image for post below).

with fruit surcharg'd

First things first: the date's been set for my essay in the Globe and Mail. On February 20th I have to buy my own copy. That's right. It's completely pro-bono. Not even a free issue. I don't know why they call it "Facts & Arguments," anyway. None of the featured essays I've read argue anything other than the worth of reading a few linked anecdotes. No, I'm not bitter. I'm over-joyed.

I'm currently in the middle of writing a paper on the relationship between Satanic pride and the surveillance in Milton's Paradise Lost. Shame and paranoia overtake the happy couple after their notorious ingestion, which at first ignites their eyes and loins. Visual stimulation alone is out of step with the Garden of Eden's utility and perverts the pro-creative impulse that ties each object to the image of its Maker. The flipside of pornography, it turns out, is the feared surveillence of God, whose previously celebrated omniscience is reduced to a pair of eyes that gaze like Satan: the post-lapsarian God, for Adam and Eve, is detached from the world (how else can he maintain perfection) and ego-centric (no wonder no one likes him).

Writing a review of Animal Collective's latest is my reward for getting the paper finished and sliding it under the door of my prof. I've totally cut myself off from Merriweather Post-Pavillion until then. It's far too infectious. "My Girls" keeps pummeling you and my attention span is fragile enough already. Until then, here's a nice piece by Simon Reynolds (over at blissblog) on the recently inhabited space of mid-mainstream popularity that AC have achieved with MPP. Deserved accolation, I'd say.

And now, back to work.

paradise regained

My first real encounter with reader response theory comes by way of John Milton. The 1970s seem forever ago, don't they? They right well should. My parents hadn't even met each other yet. Still, every text on Milton in our library seems to predate 1976. Luckily, Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was first published years before the cut-off date and I have a copy sitting beside me as I type this. The choice quotation from Lamentations gracing the title page ("Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord") leads me to believe that I will enjoy rummaging through this batch of dated essays.

What have I been doing lately? Why, reading Paradise Lost, of course! All 12 books of it in a mere 12 hours last weekend. Grueling? Yes. Boring? Certainly. Worthwhile? Uhhh...probably. There's even a press release. Yes, I've been growing fond of Satan, the cheeky little bugger. After I reflected on Satan's seeming childishness in class today, my professor carried my comment through a nice analogy. He's like an adolescent who, after being sent to their room, spitefully resolves to rebel against his parents as the ruler of his bedroom (a solitary space all his own, to do with as he pleases). So deluded is the boy that he fails to realize that the entire house belongs to his parents. The room is not and will never be his alone. Thus Satan is bound, though his speeches weave together threads from great mythical spools; from the epic poets and all their labours, for everything is written as though "the mind is its own place."

The song he'd be singing, sporting short-shorts like Stuart Copeland (or something even more revealing):



I think Sting would make a good Satan. He's certainly got the hair for it.