On Art as Therapy

During my recent visit to Toronto, I was able to spend an afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario. After absorbing parallel bodies of work by Francis Bacon and Henry Moore in a new high profile exhibit, I noticed a large display awkwardly thrown into the corner of the gallery’s entrance. Beside the title “Art as Therapy” sat a screen with Alain de Botton’s head prominently displayed, ready and waiting to explain how select works of art can help us better understand one of five select categories he's deemed relevant to the human experience. Of course, the flags go up immediately, not simply because the simple equivocation of art as therapy brings to mind the worst kinds of bourgeois myths — and indeed it’s hard to think of a better face for this than de Botton’s — but because the whole scheme is such an unabashedly self-aggrandizing gesture by de Botton himself. Here, alongside a group of select paintings from the canon of Western art (placed in groups throughout the gallery according to the categories of “sex,” “money,” “politics,” “love,” “nature”), was de Botton’s talking head. Not that it was necessarily out of place. The seamless relationship between ideology and arrogance is nothing new to the art gallery.

In this mini-exhibit, each work of art is accompanied by a reflection and a “problem” for the viewer to digest. Passing through the gift shop, I realized that the project was tied in with a new book (after which the exhibit is titled) and the author had been scheduled for a book signing at the gallery within the next couple of hours. Sure enough, de Botton had also been featured on Q earlier that morning in a debate over his controversial project. I listened to the radio clip today and none of what he said was terribly surprising. De Botton’s approach to art as an opportunity for therapy is not at all out of step with his recent book Religion for Atheists or his so-called School of Life project. In nearly all cases, the cultural products that make up the Western canon are uncritically received and repurposed for the lifestyle politics of the modern consumer. Stripped of their historical and cultural contexts, religion, philosophy and art have a similar function: to make us better people, to help us believe in the supposedly ennobling values of European culture. For de Botton our present enjoyment and use of the arts has been held hostage by art historians. What I find interesting about this strategy for engaging visitors is how it’s all based on an emotional or affective register. There is no illusion here, no attempt to sell this as anything other than straightforward ideology. Visitors are invited to “feel better” about one of the five categories and the selected piece of art will, upon its reflection, help with that process.

I’ve always been uneasy with this brand of easy-going pop philosophy, partly because of how it always seeks to write off intellectual or academic approaches as inaccessible and elitist. In his Q debate, De Botton started by giving a fairly trite summary of art criticism as a field that disregards all questions of functionality or purpose, a field that instead insists upon art’s ambiguity and silence as is best for private enjoyment. Art, he says, should by contrast provide us with an opportunity to experience the whole range of human emotion, but in order for it to do that it needs to be framed in a psychological method that allows us to align our “deeper selves” with works of art.

My main problem with this union between de Botton and the AGO has mostly to do with his patronizing, dull readings of artworks and the interpretive keys that he provides as opportunities for self-reflection and improvement. His approach has been called “reductive” and it is. But it's also worse than that. It assumes that gallery visitors can only find common ground in their individual sense of fulfillment and contentment. Sex, politics, love, money, nature: each category is simply a self-evident way to experience and digest our individual feelings about the world. Against his caricature of art criticism (which eschews all sense of function or purpose) de Botton sets up a program he believes to be controversial and provocative, that is in fact anything but. Rather, it’s the most sentimental form of appreciation possible and does little more than deflate its objects while reproducing the most vacuous of readings. Along with treating art as a good in itself, each category appears fully formed and uncontested. A telling moment in the Q debate occurs when the issue of accessibility arises from de Botton’s opponent (Canadian artist/critic RM Vaughan), who rightly suggests that most art is still synonymous with wealth, class and privilege. De Botton immediately agrees and says, “that’s why I’m a great believer in postcards, online images, and anything that you can do to bring art, freely, cheaply and easily into peoples’ lives.” He then decries our cultural obsession with the original as the problem standing in the way of this. But this is where it stops for de Botton because, as should be clear by now, he only cares about values in the abstract and consistently overlooks any resonance that such cultural obsessions might have something to do with class, history, gender and so on.

It’s perhaps unfair to levy such criticisms at de Botton, who has after all been doing essentially the same thing since publishing his book on Proust back in 1997. His message remains the same, even if his books have gotten bigger and his subjects have switched from high-minded French literature to high-minded European art. What his art criticism project does best is point out how much our cultural categories of aesthetic appreciation increasingly favour of an ahistorical, affective response that finds its footing in the self-help industry. But, then, why should any of us be surprised by this?

Ludwig Wittgenstein and religion

A short video documentary produced by the BBC.
  

A review of Jacques Rancière's Aisthesis

The following review has just been posted over at the CC website. I first encountered Rancière's writing several years ago and it remains a challenging yet indispensable way of think about art and its political meaning. I'm grateful to Verso for sending a review copy. I've been anticipating this book since its earliest reviews began appearing. Parts of this review overlap with some of the work I did last year on William Morris and the demise of modernist architecture.

Book Review: Jacques Rancière. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. New York: Verso, 2012. 304 pp.

In histories of Western art, modernism is a deceptively straightforward term: it is often used to refer to a turning point in aesthetic production, a radical shift in style that belongs to a new form of historical self-consciousness. But such accounts typically disregard the various ways in which modernism was produced and the moments of political and aesthetic possibility prior to its periodization as historical modernism proper. For decades, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has been upending our preconceptions about the relation between art and politics. His newly translated work Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art presents readers with a series of interventions into the field of aesthetics, tracing its role in the emergence of artistic modernism. At stake for Rancière is our reception of modernism's legacy and the political closure that has been entailed by it. As he writes at the end of the book's preface, "Social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution, and was only able to deny this relation by transforming a strategic will that had lost its world into a policy of exception" (xvi).

In Aisthesis, Rancière is not looking for an essence or truth inherent to art. Rather, he is concerned with the ways in which what he calls "the aesthetic regime of art" has been used to identify particular images, performances, texts, and objects. Art, for Rancière, does not enter into a domain called politics from a position of autonomy. Rather, art is always already a social practice, a distribution of bodies within a political field. In each chapter, he attempts to trace a logic of art that departs from the interpretive network that gives it meaning. Each of the scenes that Rancière explores in Aisthesis are treated as instances in which "a given artistic appearance requires changes in the paradigms of art" (xi). Each object of study, in other words, is treated as an instance of "art" but also as a singular moment (of novelty, revolution, or emotion) in which art is reconstituted. Each scene is a "fabric," a "moving constellation," in which these various modes of perception, affection, and thought are woven together. Each object of study is an instance in the formation of the aesthetic regime of art and "a displacement in the perception of what art signifies" (xiii).

The term "art" has often been thought to designate a place distinct from prosaic reality: in this mode of thinking, a work of art will break with the everyday to achieve an elevated status. Instead, says Rancière, the aesthetic regime that has formed our perception of art's constitution does just the opposite: it works to "erase the specificities of the arts and … blur the boundaries that separate them from each other and from ordinary experience" (xii). Most often, the identification of an artwork's transcendence is a product of retrospection that cuts it loose from such aesthetic conditions.

Although Rancière's analyses move through seemingly abstract categories, he makes it clear from the onset that this project begins not from an idealist concept of art or theory of the human, but from material conditions shaping what he calls the "sensible fabric of experience." Material conditions but also "modes of perception and regimes of emotion, categories that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them" (x). These organizing modes of relation and perception are what allow us to formalize a domain as nebulous as art. Indeed, one of art's distinctive characteristics is that it unites what other schemas might distance. One of the implicit arguments of Rancière 's book is that through particular determining forces (interpretation, sensation, and perception), art is continually re-defining its boundaries by incorporating what it once opposed, from the mangled form of the Belvedere Torso to the journalistic filmmaking of James Agee. The history of art is a history of exception and incorporation, and in Rancière's genealogy these transformations in the sensible fabric are the conditions of art's emergence.

Aisthesis moves chronologically through fourteen under-estimated events in the history of Western art in order to construct a historical framework for understanding modernism, which remains a difficult concept despite our familiar associations with a particular style or moment of artistic consciousness. A large part of Rancière's project, here and elsewhere, is to reclaim the domain of aesthetics and redefine its relationship to art. A philosophical outgrowth near the end of the eighteenth century, aesthetics emerged as a field that made possible a new way of identifying art. Prior to the aesthetic revolution, art was schematized according to what Rancière refers to as the "representative regime of art," which followed established hierarchies and classical conventions. With the aesthetic regime, the division between art and life undergoes a transformation: while their distance is maintained, art and life are simultaneously drawn together into the same terrain. As the chapters of Aisthesis demonstrate, this paradoxical configuration allows the domains of art and life to retain their differences by sharing certain commonalities. The crucial question is, then, not what is art? but, what counts as "aesthetic art"? Where, in other words, does the aesthetic regime assert itself?

Each chapter takes an opening piece of art criticism as its point of departure. The first passage comes from Johan Joachim Winckelmann's 1764 text, History of Ancient Art, which went on to influence many of the philosophers and poets whose writings would define the next century of aesthetics. Considered Winckelmann's masterwork, History of Ancient Art creates a chronological account of Western art's development in ancient Greece, drawing together artistic objects and their broader social and intellectual conditions. For Winckelmann, artwork helped to explain a bygone era, but as Rancière illustrates in his analysis, the eighteenth century art historian relies on the destruction of a particular statue, the Belvedere Torso, to construct an idealized image of the ancient Greek city-state and its people. Here, art emerges in the absence of action and the ambiguous sensation that the statue evokes. While the representative order appreciated the harmony of proportions and the relation between visible form and spiritual character, the Belvedere Torso lacks the composite parts to create material harmony or identity. For Rancière, Wincklemann's celebration of this sculpture thus "signifies the revocation of the principle that linked the appearance of beauty to the realization of a science of proportion and expression" (4). A gap has emerged between the two, and it is precisely this gap that will inform what the aesthetic regime defines as beautiful. Wincklemann's comparison of the torso's muscles to waves in the sea carries this dissociation even further. According to Rancière, the wave metaphor suggests both indeterminacy and perfection.

The tension of many surfaces on one surface, of many kinds of corporality within one body, will define beauty from now on. . . . Wincklemann inaugurates the age during which artists were busy unleashing the sensible potential hidden in inexpressiveness, indifference or mobility, composing the conflicting movements of the dancing body, but also of the sentence, the surface, or the coloured touch that arrest the story while telling it, that suspend meaning by making it pass by or avoid the very figure they designate. (9)

Such beauty, however, needed a principle to unite the singularity of the artist and the development of the arts as a technical tradition. Wincklemann's treatment of ancient art uses the concept of history to do just this: it "signifies a form of coexistence between those who inhabit a place together, those who draw the blueprints for collective buildings, those who cut the stones. . . . Art thus becomes an autonomous reality, with the idea of history as the relation between a milieu, a collective form of life, and possibilities of individual invention" (14). For Wincklemann, the statue represents the perfection of a collective life that is no longer present. It is a social body that cannot be actualized. With Wincklemann, art has a new subject, the people, and a new context, history. This paradox between art and history plays itself out in our museums.

History makes Art exist as a singular reality; but it makes it exist within a temporal disjunction: museum works are art, they are the basis of the unprecedented reality called Art because they were nothing like that for those who made them. And reciprocally, these works come to us as the product of a collective life, but on the condition of keeping us away from it. (19)

The following chapters continue this line of analysis through overlapping scenes of painting, poetry, dance, and theatre. Rancière revisits Hegel's posthumously collected Lectures on Fine Art (1835), where the philosopher develops a criterion for art, independent of technical excellence, social grandeur, or moral instruction. Focusing on Hegel's treatment of Murillo's Beggar Boys Eating Grapes and Melon, Rancière locates a symptom of the demise of the representative regime. No longer does the painting's significance hinge on the old hierarchies, which would have dismissed the piece as "genre painting." Instead, Hegel locates his aesthetic criterion in the freedom of the work, which "signifies its indifference to its represented content. This freedom can thus appear purely negative: it relies only on the status of work in museums where they are separated from their primary destination" (30). The indifference of the contemporary observer, Rancière argues, could mean that painting's contents have been increasingly formalized, now a simple matter of shape, line, colour, and so on. Here we witness another departure from the representative regime of art. Painting in particular for Hegel is the work of surfaces, the play of appearances; and, Rancière summarizes, "it is this play of appearance that is the very realization of freedom of mind" (32). Equally important within this chapter is Ranciere's suggestion that Hegel's treatment of art was facilitated by the Louvre's early curators, who reorganized the religious and political art of the ancien regime within a neutralized gallery space.

Several chapters later, Rancière locates the antithesis of Hegel's identification of Greek perfection with the freedom of a people in John Ruskin's theory of gothic architecture, from his influential work, The Stones of Venice (1851). The chapter begins with a passage from Roger Marx's L'Art social (1913), which employs the metaphor of the temple to describe the work of Emile Galle, a master of the so-called "decorative arts." Marx's lecture was originally addressed to an audience of workers and embodied the art critic's quest for aesthetic regeneration, which sought the unity of fine and decorative arts (the "equality of arts") and advocated the idea of social art. Social art, notes Rancière, "is not an art for the people; it is art at the service of ends determined by society" (135). Here, the artisan's life and thought present in an aesthetic object are "the singular manifestation of great anonymous life." Where Wincklemann saw the suspension of life in Belvedere Torso and Hegel saw the freedom of mind within the indifference of painting to its subject, Roger Marx follows John Ruskin in his pursuit of an equality between artist and artisan.

By drawing Ruskin up against Hegel, Rancière demonstrates just how radical the Victorian critic's theory of art truly was. In Ruskin's eyes, the geometric perfection once praised by Schiller and Hegel expresses a rigorous division of labour, an institutionalized gap between artist and artisan. By contrast, Ruskin's idea of true art functions more as "applied art, which applies both to the construction and decoration of buildings, art that serves life, serves to shelter and express it" (139). Opposing form to function undoes art's unity. All true art, according to Ruskin is both decorative and symbolic, integrated into a building that will be inhabited and will thus express modes of social existence that exceed their function. Rather than a simple nostalgia for medieval cathedrals, Ruskin's theory of art is "a social paradigm of art." The continuum of modernist architecture follows Ruskin in understanding true art as that which "adapts life and expresses it," but the important critical question, Rancière argues, has to do with "which life one must adapt to and which life one must express" (143). The ensuing developments of modernism depend on how this relationship is understood. Ruskin's paradigm evolved in its application by Roger Marx, and later, Peter Behrens--the artistic advisor of the German electric company AEG. While Behrens and his friends at the Werkbund have been interpreted as turning to function against form, Rancière argues that such emphasis on function was an artistic affirmation of a society in which utilitarian ends are subordinate to an ideal of social harmony. What truly counts as art for the Werkbund and the later Bauhaus is the reformation of structures linking modes of production and modes of consumption. While Ruskin saw the style of this reform embodied in nature, here it is the abstract lines of industrial standardization that affirm the unity between function and expression.

Rancière concludes Aisthesis with an analysis of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans and an essay by Clement Greenberg on "Avante-Garde and Kitsch." Rancière shows how the work of Agee and Evans is able to give aesthetic treatment to and dignify the lives of suffering sharecroppers during the Dust Bowl before turning to Greenberg's essay. Greenberg's piece remains an influential polemic against the industrial revolution and its culture of kitsch. Here is where we begin to see the institutionalized split between high and low culture that continues to define historical modernism in the popular imagination. For Greenberg it was an imperative to dispense with art that was not serious and politically committed: i.e., the vulgar tastes defined and developed through a capitalism of peasant culture. But what Greenberg was announcing, argues Rancière, was the death of

historical modernism in general, the idea of a new art attuned to all the vibrations of universal life: an art capable both of matching the accelerated rhythms of industry, society and urban life, and of giving infinite resonance to the most ordinary minutes of everyday life. (262)

Aisthesis is a difficult and impressive study that should (and likely will) significantly alter tired debates over modernism's legacy and the relation between aesthetics and politics, more generally. As Ranciere writes in his preface, the work begun in Aisthesis does not represent a finished project and might include other scenes. His present study ends at a significant crossroads within modernism's history: a contradictory moment shared by James Agee and Clement Greenberg in which modernism's concern with ordinary life was undercut by an announcement of its demise. By ending in this way, however, Rancière implies that modernism remains an unfinished project and, indeed, exploring its historical network is a crucial part of its recovery.

Archiving the messianic: Derrida, Benjamin and the politics of memory

There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of reptition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. (Derrida, Archive Fever, 11)

For most of us, the archive represents a practical space of investigation, with its contents sitting in darkness, waiting to be reassessed and rediscovered. What's perhaps less obvious about the archive is its construction, an analogue to the scholar's privileged cultural position and, along with it, the hermeneutical agenda she brings to her research. Since Derrida's Archive Fever, the archive has become a important concept in questions of cultural theory and historical methodology. Of course, Derrida wasn't the first to question the archive's authority or the ways that history is produced by it. Not simply a site for the preservation of cultural artifacts or a repository of a past authenticity, the archive also names a basic procedure of inclusion and exclusion, a simultaneous remembering and forgetting that proceeds from any attempt to archive. Derrida's work invites us to consider several crucial outcomes of this process: first and foremost, that a dialectic exists between what gains historical legitimacy through its preservation, and what is condemned to oblivion by being ignored or repressed. The archive always entails some kind of exteriority and for this reason opens up the discussion to theology (the messianic) and psychoanalysis (repression). Secondly, while most discussions of the archive have been driven by questions surrounding the organization of the past, Derrida's work considers how these ongoing modes of organization orient us toward the future.

The possibility of forgetfulness, without which a properly "archival" desire could not function, is not only limited to repression: it is one of several names given to the forgetting that is always precedes the work of memory. In Derrida's treatment archive paradoxically collects and orders that which we desire to preserve for the future by removing it from present circulation. Put another way, the archive safeguards its contents in the name of access by making them inaccessible. The process of archiving thus mirrors a process of forgetting and repression that can also be described as eco-nomic: “it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law” (7). Appropriate, then, that "archive" derives from arkheion: "a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded" (2). The ability to preserve and organize, in other words, also entails the authority to interpret.

It all sounds quite abstract, but Derrida makes clear that the question of the archive is not “the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive” (36). In other words, a concept of the archive already presumes some degree of distance from its operation. Thus Derrida finds it useful to speak of the archive as aporetic repetition: “The archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out to the future” (68). Rather than a straightforward concept, the archive names a cultural procedure that remains bound up with a fetish for a singularity not unlike Walter Benjamin's description of the "aura." As Derrida writes,

With the irreplaceable singularity of a document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, but each time in its original uniqueness, an archive ought to be idiomatic, and thus at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction. (90)

This is the seemingly impossible task of the archive: to remain open and accessible, to allow for reproduction and repetition without doing violence to its contents, all the while resisting the idols of presence and authenticity. Not an easy task but an unavoidable reality, particularly within an institution like the university.

Perhaps this is why the ability of the archive to “call into question the coming of the future” hinges upon the messianic, an arrival that is not predicated by any conditions or defined by any knowable content (33). Derrida argues that the injunction of memory to preservation and repetition, “even when it summons memory or the safeguard of the archive, turns incontestably toward the future to come” because such repetition is always, “in the same stroke,” the “anarchive” of the death drive, the violence of forgetting, and thus “the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition” (79). So, on the one hand, Derrida provides us with a way of understanding the archive as an aporetic structure that is always already active in every impression (which is always accompanied by a suppression or repression, a spectral presence haunting the archive, etc.); on the other hand, the very repetition of this process is an opening to the “future to come,” to which he gives the name the “messianic.”

As Derrida notes in Specters of Marx, the term “messianic” is a repurposed term from another Jewish critic. And, indeed, Derrida isn't alone in his retrieval of Benjamin (See Agamben, Critchley, etc.). Although the messianic serves a somewhat different function in Benjamin’s work (particularly within his "Theses on the Philosophy of History"), it is also related to his own mal d’archive. In “recollection,” Benjamin writes in his Arcades Project, “we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological, just as we are not allowed to write it in immediately theological concepts” (N8, 1). This statement points to a necessarily negative theology that governs Benjamin’s thought. “Were Benjamin to use theological concepts openly,” explains Susan Buck-Morrs, “he would be giving Judaic expression to the goals of universal history; by eschewing them, he gives universal-historical expression to the goals of Judaism” (244). According to Derrida, the difference of the messianic from Benjamin's messianism is a formal one. Preference is given to "messianic rather than messianism, so as to designate a structure of experience rather than a religion" (Specters, 211). At the same time, however, both figures understand the term not simply as a future event, but as a negation permeating every historical moment. Yet the political overtones of this are quite different for Benjamin. By his understanding, messianism entails the redemption of what history proper fails to represent: political opportunities lost, individual and collective voices silenced. As Benjamin writes, “Some things pass down to posterity by making them untouchable and thus conserving them, others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them” (Reflections 302). Benjamin is not so much after an alternative history, a secret narrative that runs beneath the history of the powerful; rather, suggests Terry Eagleton, he directs his attention to “a series of spasms or crises within class history itself, a particular set of articulations of that history” (48). Rather than charting out an alternate course, in other words, Benjamin draws such crises into a complex “constellation” produced by the historical necessities of the present (in his case, Fascism). Eagleton summarizes, “If fascism eradicates history by rewriting it in its own image, historical materialism rewrites the past in order to redeem it in its revolutionary validity. . . . Materialism must insist on the irreducibility of the real to discourse; it must also remind historical idealism that if the past itself—by definition—no longer exists, its effects certainly do” (51).

Even if we follow Derrida and refuse to accept the political theology inherent to Benjamin’s messianism, we can still appreciate its dialectical function within his philosophy. To put it enigmatically, theology's disappearance is the condition of possibility for its rescue: just as the evacuation of theology revolutionized Baroque allegory, so utopian desire marked by its disappearance can and must be trusted as the motivation of political action “because it teaches us that the present course of events does not exhaust reality’s potential . . . [and] because revolution is understood as a Messianic break from history’s course and not its culmination” (Buck-Morss 243).

But this relationship between theology and politics can also be conceived of the other way round. Following Fredric Jameson, Alberto Toscano suggests that the resurgence of the concept of the messianic in critical theory is "symptomatic of the complex predicament of a thinking that wants to preserve the assertion of a politics of radical transformation while navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of an untenable philosophy of history, on the one hand, and a resignation to the present, on the other" (240). Toscano's concern here has to do with the displacement of responsibility and struggle that a return to the messianic supposedly engenders. For all Derrida's cautioning and theoretical restlessness, the messianic remains a limit-concept: what he would characterize as "an experience of the impossible" that arrives independent of preparation or expectation. For Toscano, it reflects a larger sense of powerlessness on the left and with it, a genuine fear of any kind of prescriptive or ontological program. Toscano's is not a particularly profound critique, but it does guide us back to the domain of history and political strategy, repositioning Derrida's treatment of the messianic within a broader ideological context and, in this way, suggests the production of another kind of archive, perhaps with more concrete implications.


Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

---. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.

---. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

---. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso, 1981.

Toscano, Alberto. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso, 2010.

Zizek in coversation

Promoting his newest book, God in Pain.



Promoting his recent "life-work," Less than Nothing.

Michel de Certeau's Mystic Fable

Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life is a classic work of cultural theory. The best arguments in my thesis certainly wouldn't be what they are without it. Chapters like "Walking in the City" and "Spatial Stories," are regularly anthologized, but de Certeau's broader discussions of theology, psychology, semiotics and history are routinely ignored, in part because they're so difficult to pin down. The Mystic Fable is De Certeau's unfinished study of sixteenth and seventeenth century mysticism. In it, he works to distance his own project from conventional understandings of early modern spirituality that reduce mysticism to subjective (inner) experience. It's a dense volume, full of enigmatic passages and provocative statements. (Among its highlights, The Mystic Fable includes a brilliant reading of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and offers some curious glosses on Teresa of Avila and Jean-Joseph Surin.)

De Certeau conceives of sixteenth and seventeenth century mysticism not as an inner retreat (which he considers to be part of the ideological project of modernity) but as a socio-political practice: the lives of such mystics spoke of an "otherness" which removed them from the established narrative Western enlightenment; it also made their practices profoundly unstable by comparison."The gesture of 'going on retreat,' or 'withdrawing'" he writes, "is the universal indication of the tendency that countered the necessary 'docility or 'compliance' of State-connected religious institutions with the segregation of a place."

From the Introduction: 

Of course, there is an obvious continuity from religion (or mystics) to historiography, since both have taken in hand the relationship that a society maintains with its dead and the repairs that meaningful discourse, torn by the violence of conflicts and chance, constantly requires. But the historian "calms" the dead and struggles against violence by producing a reason for things (an "explanation") that overcomes their disorder and assures permanence; the mystic does it by founding existence on his very relationship with what escapes him. The former is interested in difference as an instrument to make distinctions in his material; the latter, as a split inaugurating the question of the subject. (11)

The Other that organizes the text is not an outside of the text. It is not the (imaginary) object that one might distinguish from the movement by which is sketched. To locate it apart, to isolate it from the text that exhaust themselves trying to express it, would be tantamount to exorcising it by providing it with its own place and name, to identifying it with a remnant not assimilated by constituted rationalities, or to transforming the question that appears in the guise of a limit into a particular religious representation (in turn excluded from the scientific fields and fetishized as a substitute for what is lacking). (15)

To look at processes in this way, to "interpret," in the musical sense of the term, this mystical writing as one would a different speech act, is to consider it a past from which we are cut off and not presume ourselves to be in the same place it was; it is the attempt to execute its movement for ourselves, to retrace the steps of a labor but from afar, without taking as an object of knowledge that thing which, in passing, changed the written word into a hieroglyphic. To do this is to remain within a scriptural experience and to retain that sense of modesty that respects differences. These trips taken in the textual suburbs of mystics already point out pathways to get lost (even if only to lose a kind of knowledge). Perhaps we will be led, by its confused murmurings, toward the city become sea. (17)

Milton and the (post)secular

Over the course of my thesis research, I've come across two rather sexy books that treat Milton alongside contemporary critical theory. Both are part of Stanford UP's excellent series Cultural Memory in the Present, and offer different responses to contemporary debates over the legitimacy of a so-called secular age by focusing on seventeenth century English poetry.

In Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism, Regina M. Schwartz understands Reformation iconoclasm as a necessary critique of Church officials who sought to control the domain of mystery and instrumentalize the sacred. But by upending the sacramental tradition, she argues, radical reformers enabled “a new instrumentality—not of the Eucharist by the Church, but of the sacred by the state” (29). Like the Reformers of early modern Europe, she writes, “we are [today] witnessing a shift in emphasis again, away from the figure of the modern Self and toward the figure of the Other, a shift that . . . is inflected both philosophically, as given-ness, and theologically, as gift” (139-140). Rather than falling into the temptations of identity politics and empty, but no less violent universalisms, Schwartz urges her readers to imagine another possibility for identity: “a particular that honors other particulars, one that opens out toward a potential universal without coercion” (Ibid.). Like other postmodern theologians, she models her vision of harmonious difference on the Eucharist, the performance of which preserves the irreducible mystery of the divine through the real presence of Christ’s body and blood. 

In the post-Reformation poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Milton, Schwartz locates a hunger for the divine, “a poetry that signifies more than it says . . . through image, sound, and time, in language that takes the hearer beyond each of those elements,” thus compensating for the loss of sacred liturgy (7). Milton’s contribution is found in the way Paradise Lost approaches debates surrounding the doctrine of Real Presence. In prelapsarian Eden, Schwartz locates a “transubstantiation” that infuses all matter (“All ingests All”), thus blurring the distinction between material and spiritual substance. The Garden’s continuous rehearsal of the Eucharist serves as a critique of theological and ecclesiastical representations of the sacraments. If Schwartz resurrects Milton out of a nostalgia for pre-modern transcendence and “its realm of justice,” Feisal G. Mohamed’s Milton and the Post-Secular Present considers Milton’s writing and biography as a corrective to contemporary debates over politics, ethics and terrorism.

Against those literary critics who would downplay or secularize Milton’s religious fervor, and those radical theorists who are attempting to think beyond the current order of liberal democratic capitalism, Mohamed’s Milton teaches us that “messianism is the language of particularization, not a hearkening after internationalism” (36). As he writes in his conclusion, Milton’s work can alert us to how “The lack of sociality in the believers adherence to truth will pay no heed to worldly institutions, or to fellow citizens, perceived to oppose truth, finding its most extreme political expression in the endorsement of religious violence” (131). Though it first appears more nuanced, Mohamed’s opposition to a secularized Milton has mostly to do with his desire to retain those moments of explicitly religious violence within the English poet’s career. Milton thus becomes an example of how the liberal subject’s attachment to individual truth claims can open a path of violence toward the Other. The first chapter, which suggests a parallel between Milton’s plain style in Paradise Lost and Alain Badiou’s theory of “evental” truth procedures, criticizes Badiou  for precisely this reason. “Who more than Milton,” gleefully asks Mohamed, “resembles [Badiou’s] view of Paul, with its iconoclastic sweeping away of laws and institutions conflicting with a truth secured by the declaration of an enlightened subject?” (39-41). Against this rendering of a universal via the particular, Mohamed suggests that Milton’s implicit critique of the human subject—the uncertainty of inner promptings, the reader’s inability to access the conscience of Milton’s protagonists—draws into question what Badiou sees as the founding of the universal subject.

Relying on Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Mohamed suggests a parallel between the US government’s public strategy for justifying the invasion of Iraq—overwhelming its audience with an excess of reasons—and the rhetorical excesses of Milton’s Areopagitica. The “kettle logic” of Areopagitica, he writes, is “a cover for its ideology of the hegemony of an emerging reforming class” (54). Milton’s tract reflects what Marxist historians identify as a possessive individualist quality, where, as C. B. Macpherson writes, “Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of . . . property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange.” In what follows, Badiou, along with Zizek and Derrida, is again faulted for his preoccupation with an “evental site” that exists apart from pre-existing knowledge. Such a focus, argues Mohamed, only reproduces "the ideological grounds of determining the good apparent in the ethics of Areopagitica” (61). Following Gayatri Spivak, who grounds the possibility of an ethics in the as yet unrecognized Other, Mohamed ends up endorsing a familiar form of humanist education where “Reading is not only an ethical activity, it is the ground of ethical activity in its initiation of the call by which positive political change can occur, because it is only through the kind of reading sometimes fostered in the humanities that we are invited to imagine alien subjectivities” (62). 

Although I find the first part of his book unconvincing (especially when it comes to his critiques of Badiou and Derrida), Mohamed's emphasis on hegemony (whether based in class or race) is a good reason for maintaining Milton's religiosity within critical discussions of his poetry, one that I find somewhat more useful than Schwartz's theologizing. I should say, however, that Milton and the Post-Secular Present is more focused in its final chapters, which deal explicitly with religious violence, contemporary terrorism, and the poem that, currently, seems to generate the most debate among Miltonists: Samson Agonistes. I'll be dealing with these chapters in my next post.

Fiona Apple and a pathology called "love"

Last week, a friend's passing reference to Fiona Apple as one of Lana Del Rey's predecessors got me up in arms. I've been listening to Apple's 2005 album, Extraordinary Machine, a lot lately, and rumors about her long-awaited follow-up, which could be released a few months from now, have also just begun to circulate.Valentine's Day seems like the right occasion to rehash some of the reasons why I find her music so interesting, and why I go on the defensive when I hear her get linked to other popular female singer-songwriters.

"Not About Love" - Jon Brion's unreleased version: 

The controversy surrounding Extraordinary Machine's release is a bit muddy, but it'll help to explain why I felt it necessary to post two very different versions of the same song above. Originally thought to be delayed because Apple's label, Sony, doubted its commercial viability, the long awaited album had fans writing letters and mailing apples to label execs as part of the "Free Fiona" campaign (my roommate at the time was peripherally involved through his Fiona Apple message board--we even had a "Free Fiona" poster on the door of our dorm room). As it turns out, there was an original version, produced by Jon Brion, that was shelved because Apple wasn't happy with it; she then reworked most of the songs with a different producer (Mike Elizondo) and released the album.

Elizondo's finished product was still a good collection of songs, but the unreleased version with arrangements by Jon Brion (the demos of which had leaked several months before the official version came out) was, at least in my eyes, clearly superior. Apple felt that Brion's instrumentation had nearly taken over her songs: as such, they represented his musical taste more than they did her artistic identity (The two versions of "Not About Love," posted above, are a great example of this). But, for me, Brion's production accented the strangeness of Apple's romantic vision. What ended up sounding like sugary pop on the Sony's official release had a much darker, perverse quality to it when accompanied with Brion's string arrangements. The songs on his version of Extraordinary Machine nearly collapse under their own weight. If it's really "not about love" for Apple, it's because it's impossible for her to align herself with the security of conventional romance: instead, the kind of consuming love she articulates is pathological ("Get Him Back"), at times violent ("Window"), and often turns out to be solipsistic ("Better Version of Me"). Here's what's probably the best example of what I'm trying to get at.

And, naturally, with all this talk of psychosis, and narcissism, I think of Zizek, whose Lacanian remarks on love are, I think, realized in some of Fiona Apple's more compelling songs:

More generally, when one is passionately in love and, after not seeing the beloved for a long time, asks her for a photo to keep in mind her features, the true aim of this request is not to check if the properties of the beloved still fits the criteria of my live, but, on the contrary, to learn (again) what these criteria are. I am in love absolutely, and the photo a priori CANNOT be a disappointment - I need it just so that it will tell me WHAT I love... What this means is that true love is performative in the sense that it CHANGES its object - not in the sense of idealization, but in the sense of opening up a gap in it, a gap between the object's positive properties and the agalma, the mysterious core of the beloved (which is why I do not love you because of your properties which are worthy of love: on the contrary, it is only because of my love for you that your features appear to me as worthy of love). It is for this reason that finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. Everyone knows Lacan's definition of love ("Love is giving something one doesn't have..."); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: "... to someone who doesn't want it." And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us - is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us?

In a kind of Hegelian twist, love does not simply open itself up for the unfathomable abyss in the beloved object; what is in the beloved "more than him/herself," the presupposed excess of/in the beloved, is reflexively posited by love itself. Which is why true love is far from the openness to the "transcendent mystery of the beloved Other": true love is well aware that, as Hegel would have put it, the excess of the beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very place of the inscription of my own desire into the beloved object - transcendence is the form of appearance of immanence. As the melodramatic wisdom puts it, it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

 From With or Without Passion: What's Wrong with Fundamentalism. Part 1.

"Application" (from Kant to Schmitt) in Measure for Measure

In his introduction to Valences of the Dialectic, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson uses the word "application" ironically (if not dialectically). This is because in the context of his system, such a term presumes an agency that is abstracted from the matter at hand, thereby distinguishing a unified inside from from a fragmentary outside (the common sense appearance of the separation of essence and appearance, which the classic dialectical operation upsets). But he goes on to show that this view itself belongs to an untroubled (undialectical) dialectic. For this reason, the properly dialectical (the dialectic as operation) can only name "application" insofar as it prefigures its negation.

The underlying logic of the dialect as a system that is "applicable to everything" (a mode of the dialectic which Jameson aims to dismantle) can perhaps be traced back to the Kant and his attempt to unite universal ideals and rational necessity. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant approaches moral law in much the same way that he did knowledge in the first critique: such laws "must be valid not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity." Here we see Kant as a precursor to (or, getting a bit ahead of ourselves, an instrument within) Carl Schmitt's conception of the sovereign, whose power rests his ability to decide the state of exception and, consequently, to be "in force without signification." In Homo Sacer, Agamben quotes Kant from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Now if we abstract every content, that is, every object of the will (as determining motive) from the law . . . there is nothing left but the simple form of universal legislation." Because the pure will is unaffected by questions of freedom and self-interest, the law can be totally binding (as with Kant's other faculties). Here, law becomes indistinguishable from life, for individual motivation is shown to be "nothing other than the law itself through the respect that it inspires. . . . For once the content of free will is eliminated, the law is the only thing left in relation to the formal element of the free will."

In Measure for Measure, Angelo is the clear expression of this sort of moral necessity. Indeed, our "common sense" impression is that the Duke's moral laxity is what occasions the law's application in the figure of Angelo: in the interest of government, the Duke has "Lent [Angelo] our terror, dress’d him with our love” (1.1.20). Angelo first appears to embody pure identity (the unity of appearance and essence, application and law) with his role, while the Duke (along with the audience) is aware of the discrepancy that exists appearance and reality. In other words, the true sovereign has laid out a space of exception by giving over the pretense of the law to Angelo: the Duke does not transfer his sovereignty but its appearance. Thus while the Duke is able to negotiate between both spaces, Angelo is consigned to the realm of appearances (which makes his Kantian bent all the more fitting) and deals with subjects through a rigid logic of exchange value. For this reason, Angelo cannot even consider mercy or forgiveness but, instead, easily slips into the law's perverse underside (by trading Claudio's crime against wedlock in for Isabel's chastity). Angelo's rule can thus be characterized by a series of ultimately incomplete (that is, suspended) applications, which lay the groundwork for the sovereignty of the Duke to be reestablished and the bodies of his subjects redistributed.

Like Angelo for the Duke, Kant is merely a stepping stone for the true exercise of Schmittian sovereignty. As Agamben writes in State of Exception,

The concept of application is certainly one of the most problematic categories of legal (and non-legal) theory. The question was put on a false track by being related to Kant's theory of judgment as a faculty of thinking the particular as contained in the general. The application of the norm would thus be a case of determinate judgment, which the general (the rule) is given, and the particular case is to be subsumed in it.

Kant's mistake, suggests Agamben, "is that the relation between the particular case and the norm appears as a merely logical operation." Rather the passage of generic to particular always contains the practical activity of mediation: "Just as between language and world, so between the norm and its application there exists no internal nexus that allows one to be derived immediately from the other." Thus we might think of Angelo (as the Duke's instrument for enacting the state of exception and emergency, of applying the law by suspending his own authority) when Agamben writes, "the state of exception is the opening of a space in which application and norm reveal their separation and a pure force-of-law realizes (that is, applies by ceasing to apply) a norm whose application has been suspended."

The state of exception separates norm and application to the utmost limit in order to make its application possible. This is the only way that the Duke can hold Vienna's reality together with the appearance of governance; he therefore effectively suspends his own application of the norm by installing Angelo, whose "pure violence without logos claims to realize an enuciation without any real reference."

Slavoj Zizek on the Book of Job, the first Critique of Ideology

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.

"Maintaining now the specters of Marx"

After a (long) month of reading Derrida, Specters of Marx emerges as an easy (but actually quite difficult) favourite. It may have something to do with the timeliness of my reading (Halloween is just around the corner), but much my admiration for this text comes form the way in which Derrida uses the opening scenes of Hamlet as entry point for his discussion of ghosts and specters. However, it is in the final chapter (after Derrida has discussed the heterogeneity of Marx's voice and has offered a ruthless critique of Francis Fukuyama), that Derrida stages his critique of Marx.

At a basic level Derrida reads Marx in the same way that Marx reads the German philosopher Max Stirner in The German Ideology: as haunted (and obsessed) by the ghosts of Hegelian-Christian idealism. In their preoccupation with specters, both Marx and Stirner follow what Derrida calls the “[s]pecular circle: one chases after in order to chase away, one pursues, sets off in pursuit of someone to make him flee, but one makes him flee, distances him, expulses him so as to go after him again and remain in pursuit” (175). Here, as Derrida notes, we can see that hospitality and exclusion belong to the same impulse: the specter of communism that Marx would welcome is bound up with the ghosts that Marx would like to exterminate.

In Capital, Marx sets out to conjure away the “representative consciousness of a subject." In his attempt to think otherwise than Plato, not to mention Hegel, Marx privileges that which “survives outside the head.” Stirner has set out to annihilate his “phantomatic projections” of Christian Europe but in so doing, Marx argues, Stirner merely replaces these phantasms with a second ghost of corporeality: the “egological body." Stirner has not touched upon the “actual relations” that constitute the “fatherland." For Marx the phantasm is a product of material conditions; Stirner fails because he believes such ghosts can be defeated on their own terms. But as Marx points out, the ghosts will only finally disappear when social and economic conditions are transformed. Derrida suggests that, in this ontological tradition, Marx is doing precisely what he diagnoses as a “quid pro quo” in Stirner (an exchanging of one thing—one self-presenced origin—for another).

Though disguised as a rhetorical maneuver, Derrida consistently deploys the familiar binary of “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” in this critique. He has done this elsewhere, but in the context of this critique, the figure of the hand at once suggests labour and use-value: an immediate relation between the human subject and its object. But the hand can also be an instrument of deception. In this way, Derrida endeavors to show that within Marx’s writing there is a “sleight of hand” at work, which occurs in the relationship between the “head” (Stirner) and the “hands” (Marx). Both, of course, are still connected to the body.  Derrida’s trope of the hands mirrors Marx’s trope of the head (in his critique of Stirner), thereby disrupting Marx’s privileging of praxis over thought as the means to a world without ghosts. But such a world is pure phantasm.

As Derrida demonstrates throughout Specters of Marx, haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony. Therefore, "if he loves justice at least, the 'scholar' of the future, the 'intellectual' of tomorrow should learn it from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning how to make conversation withthe ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech . . . they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet" (221).

Jacques Derrida’s “The University without Condition”

 

"Take your time but be quick about it, because you do not know what awaits you."

Let’s begin with a question of marginal importance: Why, in this address, does Derrida insist on mentioning that he's short on time and why is he afraid of “wasting” it? Late in his discussion, Derrida points out that the “clock sometimes represents the attribute of the humanist – the same clock that I am obliged to watch and that keeps a strict watch over the lay worker that I am here” (228). Time is a fictional construct ordered by hourly units, it is part of what maintains the structure of the university and the work that is done, both inside and outside the university. In other words, time operates as part of the architecture that defines and delimits the university. But what sort of work does such time permit?

The university that we have inherited (the university that engages us, the university in which we are engaged) operates within a framework based on Kantian ideals. For Derrida, the Humanities belong to Kant’s dream of a system of knowledge without work; as such, they appear to correspond to Kant’s pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason (though here Derrida confines himself to the discussion of art and nature from the Critique of Pure Judgment). Kantian categories, which form the basis of knowledge, are purely constative: they “must prepare without prescribing: they would propose forms of knowledge that remain merely preliminary” (219). Kant’s Humanities are proposed to be scientific, neutral and universal. Even for the professor, whose work of professing is an activity, the Kantian university imagines a space free from the production of oeuvres. Derrida works to show how Kant’s privileging of the Humanities (his dream of sovereign knowledge) rests on basic, but no less generative, distinctions within the university, which constitute “the powerful juridical performatives that have given shape to the modern history of this humanity of man” (231). By taking Kant to task, Derrida reveals how Kant’s traditional conception undermines its own claims to interiority and sovereignty: Kant “withdraw[s] the faculty of philosophy from any outside power . . . and guarantees this faculty an unconditional freedom to say what is true and to conclude concerning the subject of truth” (219). Here, Derrida’s work is to reveal the horizon (which is both a limit and opening) of the Humanities.

At the same time, the Western tradition divides the activity of work from its concept of the “world.” Derrida’s decision to use the French “mondialisation” (instead of globalization) keeps our focus on this “notion of world that is charged with a great deal of semantic history, notably a Christian history” (224). In other words, mondialisation is a product of the Humanities, an attempt to think its outside through a lateral, universalizing process. Can we understand the sovereignty of Kant’s Humanities as a way to think our way out of death, perhaps as a further expression of interiority? Does Derrida’s rhetorical anxiety, mentioned at the beginning of this response, reflect the impending arrival of death?

différance revisited

My first of fourteen graduate seminars on the ethical and political thought of Jacques Derrida begins with an effort to situate our upcoming readings in the context of post-structuralism. Today we made recourse to "Différance," that seminal lecture given before La Société française de philosophie in 1968, as a taste of Derrida's engagement with the philosophical tradition. Our next (introductory) class will focus another pair of major essays, each of which highlight a crucial move in Derrida's thought: performativity in "Signature Event Context," and textual analysis in "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy."

At the outset, I'm relieved that we have an agenda, and that we can be up front about it; that is, we are reading Derrida after the so-called "ethical turn" in cultural theory with the assumption that Derrida has always been in engaged in questions of an ethical and political nature; furthermore, that we are doing theory in the academy, a context in which Derrida's ideas (and guiding "concepts") are simultaneously muted and omnipresent, most often presented as ahistorical givens. In other words, Derrida is an emblem for many impulses and there's no getting around it.

Many such impulses can be located in Derrida's essay on différance. I first read this essay in an undergraduate course on postmodern philosophy and I'm glad to have this chance to reread it four years later. Indeed, one of the best things about reading Derrida is the fact that his texts are so multivalent, so thick, that one always sees something new and exciting upon a rereading. In the course of this exercise, a number of significant moves (many of which were highlighted in our class) emerged that had previously eluded me (perhaps this had something to do with the fact that I was in my second year, and was only beginning to "get it"). The rest of this post is an attempt to highlight several of these instances.

In this essay, each of Derrida's interlocutors acts as a precursor to differance; in their respective work philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Levinas have anticipated Derrida's argument. Derrida is effectively picking up on certain ruptures in the Western tradition in order to justify his own tendencies, to make good on their promises, to carry forward what has already begun. For example, Derrida draws on Nietzche's indifference to difference (exemplified in the eternal recurrence of the same) and Freud's language of the unconscious refers to deferral and delay (a temporality invoked by differance); differance also picks up on Heidegger's distinctions between Being (Dasein) and being and between presence and the present, as well as Levinas' interest in radical alterity and Saussure's construal of language as a differential system of negatively related terms.

But within this towering tradition of serious (and intimidating) intellectual work, Derrida is quick to point out the importance of "play." Misreadings of Derrida tend to emphasize the anarchy implicit in this concept, but it is far more multivalent than often gets suggested: it is a performance, it is imaginative, joyful, but it also suggests the movement, the shakiness, the potential for disturbance, that one finds in a loose bolt.

Those familiar with Derrida's critique of phonocentrism and logocentrism will recognise that the graphic importance of the "a" in differance demonstrates that signification (whether in speech or in writing) is never present to itself. Indeed, one sees this worked out through many of Derrida's writings. It is the nature of writing (and the nature of the academic institution) to make differance present; or, to put it slightly differently, it is always an outcome of our scholarly context that differance is turned into a concept, a method, or a potential application (however, one sees this most often with regard to deconstruction). Thus, part of Derrida's strategy throughout his career is to continuously displace differance with new terms (such as pharmakos, spectrality, etc.) to frustrate this constant sedimentation.

Another somewhat obvious (but no less crucial) element in "Differance" is Derrida's occasional gesture towards a negative politics. Differance

governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority. It is not announced by any capital letter. Not only is there no kingdom of differance, but differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom. (Margins of Philosophy, 22)

In much the same way Derrida describes the "a" of differance as an Egyptian Pyramid: "This stone -- provided that no one knows how to decipher its inscription -- is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant" (4). This abdication of mastery is offset by a closing affirmation ("in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance"), but the politics of differance are clearly premised on a certain kind of violence done from inside the text, and from the inside of Derrida's inherited tradition. As we move further into Derrida's more overtly political work, I'm expecting that questions of violence and responsibility will be at the forefront of our engagement.

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").

New Book - The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation

Winnipeg, MB – CMU PRESS is pleased to announce the publication of The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation edited by Chris K. Huebner and Tripp York. The Gift of Difference is a collection of essays in which theologians such as Craig Hovey, Harry J. Huebner, and D. Stephen Long consider the strengths and weaknesses of Radical Orthodoxy in dialogue with the Radical Reformation tradition. Writers in this volume engage topics such as ecclesiology, martyrdom, worship, oath-taking, peace and violence.

In recent years, Radical Orthodoxy has become an important and influential movement in contemporary theology and philosophy. Spearheaded by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy enlists the resources of classical theology to engage the current strongholds of secular and religious thought.

Proponents of Radical Orthodoxy argue that the Enlightenment project to remove reason, ethics, politics and economics from a theological framework culminates in the nihilism of postmodern discourse. They suggest that much contemporary theology is idolatrous in nature because it takes the isolation of such disciplines for granted.

In the Foreword, John Milbank writes that “[modern Mennonites] see the Church itself as the true polity and (unlike most of the magisterial Reformation) they see the possibility of ‘living beyond the law’ in terms of a new sort of social and political practice.” What might this concrete expression of Christian discipleship have to suggest to a movement like Radical Orthodoxy? What gifts does Radical Orthodoxy offer academics, ministers and laypeople from Radical Reformation tradition?

“This book explores both common and divergent themes between Anabaptist/Mennonite theologians and their counterparts in the Radical Orthodoxy movement,” says co-editor Chris K. Huebner. “For example, while they jointly reject as false the dualisms characteristic of modernity, the manner in which questions of peace and justice get framed remains an ongoing debate.”

Chris K. Huebner is Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Canadian Mennonite University. He is the author of A Precarious Peace: Yoderian Explorations on Theology, Knowledge, and Identity (Herald Press, 2006) and co-editor, with Peter Dula, of The New Yoder (Wipf & Stock, 2010).

Tripp York is an Instructor of Religious Studies at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He is the author of The Purple Crown: The Politics of Martyrdom (Herald Press, 2007) and Living on Hope While Living in Babylon: The Christian Anarchists of the 20th Century (Wipf & Stock, 2009).