Liberal Democracy Made Strange

If you are like me you were brought up eating, sleeping and breathing liberal democracy. I didn't know this at the time. Lib dem is the ideology that we practice on a daily basis. But I want to make it strange for a moment, so that we might see what it is.

Open Google Earth. You are far away from the planet. You zoom in, coming closer to a land formation, the middle east, Turkey to Saudi Arabia. On this land are multiple people groups, some of whom follow Islam, some Christianity, some Judaism, others secular. If you hold that your allegiance is to a version of the good shared by a collectivity you see yourself as part of a people group. As a group you occupy land. This land may also be shared by people of other groups. Lib dem tells us that the only way to live in peace with these people of other groups is to privatize our particularities, and live a public life that is difference blind. Thus we sell what we make to people regardless of their group allegiances. The groups we are a part of tell us that the only way we can live at peace with other members is to privatize those things that are publicly contentious. In the broader shared space, I should privatize my religion so that I can live at peace with others of other groups. [Religions invert this: I should privatize my political opinion, so that I may share more with my friends.]

Lib dem is a group that holds a good. The good is that those other groups are a problem because they conflict with the making of a broader group - humanity. In this respect lib dem must make us over as equals (the privatization impulse) so as to extend the group affiliation as far as it can go. The problem here is that lib dem must extend globally, because the members of the species - humanity - extends globally. What falls victim to this broad extension of governance? Particularity. Do people like to have their particularities taken away? No. Consider NY in the 1800s as Scorsese portrays it: the town was a dutch settlement taken over by Brits. Irish, Italian, German and Jewish settlers decided to move in, not to mention African slaves. Did any of these people want to give up their ethnicities, their cultures, their religions? Not entirely. They may have given up one thing or another, but not their entire particularity. NY must be an identity that reflects the particularities of each subgroup. And the groups must not be put into play by the city ID, but rather, held coextensively.

But lib dem likes to limit difference, so it says, especially after the race riots of the 1960s, you can hold on to your ethnicity, but don't make a big deal about your religion. Religion is a particularity that we can do without, because, afterall, it is a "belief", an ideology, which is subscribed. Ethnicity is not, it is natural. Of course this notion of ethnicity has died away, and now ethnicity is little more than an ideology along with religion. All we have left is "difference" - not ethnic difference, not religious difference, not linguistic difference - just homogeneous difference.

The problem with lib dem is that empty difference may be good for keeping peace, but it isn't good for the soul. It isn't good for the mind. It isn't good for liesure. Empty difference is what you encounter when you can't tell the difference between a pepsi and a coke. It is fast food. Lib dem's chief product is fast food. Walmart is the symbol of lib dem governance, because it is a broad shelter under which all people can come and buy anything they want. It collects everything and assimilates it to nothing. Everything is relativized as a commodity, an ideology (ethnicity, religion, sexuality).

So I'm a bit fed up with lib dem, and it is not because I don't like negative freedom, or public agency, or peace, or broadly extended law, or "multiculturalism". It is that I don't like being made in the image of fast food.

Ultimately, lib dem must erase region, localities of all kinds, nations, land demarcations. This is because the ultimate vision of lib dem is to have a borderless globe over which all can travel as nomads. Lib dem is about being unfettered. The problem is that I like to be a bit fettered. I like my linguistic distinctions, my religious views and practices, my local water with its specific minerals. I like things that are rooted, and I like having roots.

Can lib dem be delimited such that it ceases to promote "difference" and begins to allow roots?

The mulitiple Individual

"It is necessary to theorize the individual, not as a monad, an ‘unencumbered’ self that exists prior to and independently of society, but rather as a site constituted by an ensemble of ‘subject positions’, inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities and participant in a plurality of collective forms of identification." (Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 97)

So, I have realized that how the subject is conceived determines the political form it will support. The subject is the metonymic polis. This means that if the subject is multiple, it will support a pluralist framework; however, if the subject is singular, it will support a state that is unified on the questions of the Good, and the Will.

From a Christian perspective, our trouble with liberal-democracy (that it creates homogeneous subjects and supports empire), and the trouble with dictatorship (while it has the power to police the market, the sovereign itself is unpolicable), stems from our inability (the impossibility) to "think" trinitarian forms of government and subjectivity that can articulate singularity and plurality without mystery. Because the acceptance of mystery is conversion. Thus to have a state that is both multiple and plural is to have a Christian state, otherwise, you are stuck with mediocrity, or genocide.

This is to say that I don't think that Radical Orthodoxy can sincerely support pluralism (religious), as their teleology of politics results in trinitarian ends under which "genuine subjectivity" is only available through conversion.

Ding an Sich as Eucharist, infinitizing mater

I just finally put two and two together and realized that in Catholicism, the thing in itself is the Eucharist*, which is itself, infinitely deep, such that going into the eucharist takes us into the Logos spoken before time. Like Alice, travelling through a worm hole (or whatever she does), that is always already with us, the Eucharist comes in us from "outside" so that we are more fully part of Logos, Shalom, Love.

It is true though that a Christian goes into the body, while the body comes into her. There are some interesting border issues, or a-border issues, that have to do with spirit as infinitizing our mater.

Somehow though, this idea of the eternal pre-lapsarian body, which I in no way think ever existed other then as Christ, is in tension with this idea of a seed falling into the ground so that it might birth a plant. I know that by retaining the word body, we resist splitting the Christic body into spirit and body (we retain a unity), but sometimes, the idea of spirit as divorced from body (somewhat Cartesian, somewhat Gnostic), is canonical in Christianity. I was just reading about an interval between esse and essentia in Aquinas (around 250 in Pickstock's After Writing). Paul continually talks about putting to death flesh and living in spirit (but he also talks about putting on the body of Christ, or exhaling his self, that he might inhale Christ 1 Col...) God, the father 'exists' not as a body but as a spirit, as nothingness, yet what do we do with the body of Christ, which is itself spiritual. Do we just conflate spirit and body? It's like Hellenism and Hebraism have had a front on collision, and bodies and spirits are flying every which way. I don't know what to think.

* it is a misnomer to say that the Eucharist is a "thing" because it is a relation to the Trinity through the Son. Thus, the Eucharist as ideal ding an sich, redefines ding as Sein (being). Being as itself.
What bothers me about the discourse of being is that we have psychologized it so that being is only there for us if we attend to it. But being is not like that; it is aready there, whether we think it or not. We may have a heightened experience of being, but being is not just a state of consciousness. Ontology is regardless of psychological flux, not that we could do without psyche, but that psyche cannot erase being's persistence without dieing.
If, when we are in "the cloud of unknowing," "the dark night of the soul", the via negativa, we are close to the Father, it would seem that a psychological reading of this experience would side for non-being (perhaps this is true if the Father is nothingness). But God is the pure act of love, and action does not happen outside of a context. Understandably, God is the context for His act.
When we fold "context" and "act" together like that we open language to God. I guess this is how God is impossible.

Milbank on Islam, the West and Secularity from Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror

Milbank, John
Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror
The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 101, Number 2, Spring 2002, pp. 305-323

Revived Islamic civilization is in some ways a challenge to the Western secular state, but it is also much more like a rival twin than we care to imagine. Recent scholarship is showing just how Islamic the West itself has been. When the University of Oxford was founded in the late twelfth century, some scholars there took over an essentially Islamic project for the experimental control of nature that was at first to do with optics and alchemy. The Cartesian turn to the subject, the idea of knowledge as detached representation of spatialized objects, the exposition of being as univocal, all have their long-term origin in ironically the Oriental thought of Avicenna (ibn Sina).To say, as many do, that Islam was only accidentally, and for a time, the bearer of a Mediterranean civilization to which it was essentially alien is quite untrue. Even though philosophy was less easily assimilated within Islam than
in Christendom, Avicenna and other philosophers were still concerned with ‘‘prophetology,’’ or the nature of inspiration, and this profoundly inflected their rendering of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic understandings of the soul. In this crucible, protomodern ideas concerning subjectivity were forged and then handed over to the West.

In the year 1277, the Christian West reached its crisis: certain drastic edicts issued by the archbishops of Paris and Canterbury meant that it decided more or less to outlaw the common Hellenistic legacy of Aristotle fused with Neoplatonism, and blended with allegorical readings of the Hebrew Bible, which it shared with Islam, Judaism, and Byzantium. A common culture of mystical philosophy and theology, focused around analogy and ontological participation—which has also tended to favor social participation— was rendered impossible. TheWest went in one direction and Islam in another, since Islam, too, inclined in this period to outlaw this perspective. Islam became a doctrinally orthodox, scriptural, and legalistic civilization to the exclusion of dialectics and mystical theology (apart from newly enhanced Sufistic tendencies).

The conventional view is that from that point forward, the West became secular and Islam became theocratic. But that seems to me to be a half-truth. In fact, by bandoning the shared mystical outlook, Western Christian theology started to look more and more itself like Islamic orthodoxy; it started to read the Bible more like the Qur’an, allowing only the literal meaning and construing that meaning more narrowly than it had. The new stress in the fourteenth century, that only God’s will makes things true and right, echoed earlier Islamic Kalam theology and some of the ideas of Al-Ghazali.

The West’s attitude toward evil, with ironically the Cathars safely defeated, started to become more Manichean, again taking over the unfortunate Iranian contamination of Islam by the primordial Zoroastrian tradition. But, above all, in the political domain, the Islamic alliance of the absolute will of the Caliph linked to the will of Allah, and with the right to fight holy wars, was taken over by Christian thought. As earlier in Islam, so now also in the West, a merely de facto grounding of state sovereignty in absolute right to do what it likes is linked to its mediation of the will of God. Thus the early Western nation-state started to fight holy wars within Christendom itself. Modern Islam and Christianity are not after all so dissimilar in certain ways. What I am wanting to suggest here is that theocratic notions of sovereignty are not simply something archaic within Islam that stands over against our Western modernity. In many ways theocratic notions are specifically modern in their positivity and formality (as Carl Schmitt indicated). Bush in a crisis has appealed to the supposed divine destiny of America, and it is modern Judaism that has lapsed into a statist, Zionist form.

There is now a terrible symbiosis arising between Zionism and the American Protestant and un-Christian literalistic reading of the Old Testament in the Puritan tradition, which equates Anglo-Saxondom with Israel. Both ascribe to an idolatrously non typological and non eschatological reading of God’s ‘‘free election of Israel,’’ as if really and truly God’s ‘‘oneness’’ meant that he arbitrarily prefers one lot of people to another (as opposed to working providentially for a time through one people’s advanced insight— as Maimonides rightly understood Jewish election); and as if he really and truly appoints to them, not just for a period, but for all time, one piece of land to the exclusion of others. (Regina Schwartz’s The Curse of Cain, which tries to distinguish true from idolatrous monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, is highly relevant here.) There is also an unfortunate tendency within contemporary theology to play down the Christian ‘‘going beyond the law,’’ which incoherently and anachronistically seeks a kind of alignment with post-Biblical Rabbinic law, as if this somehow had obviouslymore status for Christianity than Islamic law (even if we may well often find the former to be nearer to Christian charity).

Meanwhile, the Islamic Wahhabi, to whom bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda belong, are themselves in some ways very modern. They are opposed to all iconic images, all auratic manifestations of religion; they are urban, middleclass, fanatically puritanical. They are prepared to compromise the Islamic tradition insofar as it stands firmly against usury. And they are thoroughly in love with technology. Bin Laden in the desert with his gun is surely an American antihero: perhaps a sectarian first cousin to Joseph Smith. For it is not an accident that the Mormons—that archetypical American sect, according to Harold Bloom—express such explicit kinship with Islam.

But of course the West and Islam have construed the legacy of theocratic sovereignty in very different ways. The West has invented a secular sphere that is neutral and unmystical: the sphere of a pure balance of power whose control is still nevertheless, in the last analysis, divinely sanctioned. Strict Islam knows only an expression of sovereignty through sacred laws. One may not much care for either variant. But on what basis can one decide that an Islamic sacral state, especially if it took a more sophisticated form than that envisaged by the Taliban, is not permissible? In reality our apparent concern for women and others persecuted by these unpleasant people is fantastically hypocritical: as recently as 1998 the Californian oil giant UNOCAL, with the backing of the United States, was trying to enlist Taliban support in building an oil pipeline through Afghanistan from the former Soviet territories to the north. Meanwhile, the manifestations of asharia law in Saudi
Arabia have not appeared troublesome to Western economic interests. The only possible basis for refusing the legitimacy of an Islamic state would be if Islamic men, and especially Islamic women, themselves decided that they no longer wanted such a thing. This decision would amount though to a new construal of Islam, and a redefinition of Islamic community apart from the sanction of coercive law. Islam would then have to proceed in a more Sufistic direction. It is certainly not in principle up to the West
to decide, but I do not think that the West as it is presently constituted can tolerate this forbearance and all its implications.

Yet properly speaking, this is a debate that Islam should be able to conduct with itself without external impediment. Such a debate could even help us in the West to realize that genuine religious pluralism and tolerance means far more than merely respecting the private beliefs of the individual. Communities also are collective realities that we should respect, within certain bounds of discrimination.

A perpetual war against terrorism can be seen as an effort to resolve the crisis of state sovereignty in the face of globalization. Since in a real sense both the Western and the different Islamic state forms face the same crisis, one can go further and say that both terrorism and counterterrorism, which will quickly become commingled and indistinguishable, are attempts to resolve this crisis. To see globalization on one side and anti-globalization on the other (as Baudrillard perhaps tends to do) is too simple.
(312 - 315)

U.S. and indeed European domestic democracy is a kind of harmless theatrical indulgence for the globally privileged. And this circumstance reveals to us that the trouble is not ‘‘totalitarianism’’ pure and simple, but the emptiness of the secular as such, and its consequent disguised sacralization of violence. There is a desperate need for the United States to reach behind its current Machiavellian,Hobbesian, and Lockean norms for its deeper and more truly radical legacy of Christian (and at times Jewish) associative agrarian and civic Republicanism, which has truly to do with just distribution and the inculcation of social virtue .Among much of the American populace, the spirit of this legacy is still extraordinarily and creatively alive, as anyone who has lived in the United States can testify. Yet it is today rarely able to achieve any conscious political articulation.
(321)

Both empty secular power and arbitrary theocratic power, in their secret complicity, show us no way forward. Neither enlightenment nor ‘‘fundamentalism’’ can assist us in our new plight. Instead we need to consider again the Biblical and Platonico-
Aristotelian metaphysical legacy common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We should ponder ways in which this legacy may provide us with a certain area of common vision and practice, while at the same time respecting social and cultural spaces for exercised difference.

Such a common vision would eschew all idolizations of formal power, whether in the case of individual ‘‘rights’’ or of absolute state sovereignty. Instead it would trust that human wisdom can intimate, imperfectly but truly, something of an eternal order of justice: the divine rapports of Malebranche and Cudworth. A shared overarching global polity would embody this intimation in continuously revisable structures dedicated to promoting the common good insofar as this can be agreed upon. It would also embody this imperfection through the maximum possible dispersal and deflection of human power.

Perhaps then the noble and at times heroic perpetuation of the local and embedded also could be a proffered gift to the whole globe, which would reciprocate with a measured influence and support, instead of an obliterating equivalence. Perhaps then we would cease to sacrifice the substantively particular to the generally vacuous, ensuring that there was no need for the particular to incite in response the suicidal sacrifice of everything, forever.
(322-3)

Quote of the Evening - John Donne

This is the xxiii stanza of John Donne's "A Litany". I'm interested in the doubled action of prayer in the last line.

Hear us, O hear us, Lord; to Thee
A sinner is more music, when he prays,
Than spheres' or angels' praises be,
In panegyric alleluias ;
Hear us, for till Thou hear us, Lord,
We know not what to say ;
Thine ear to our sighs, tears, thoughts, gives voice and word;
O Thou, who Satan heard'st in Job's sick day,
Hear Thyself now, for Thou in us dost pray.

Quote of the Morning

"In the Roman Rite, as we have just seen, the worshipping "I" is both designated and realized by self-dispossessing acts of doxological impersonation which displace any sense of enclosed autonomy in the subject in favour of that which is impersonated. However, this does not result in a radically discontinuous subject, but rather intensifies his continuity to reside in God. This liturgical impersonation is not a matter of arbitrary mimicry across a lateral plain of untimely interchangeable identities, but an altogether more radical and redemptive mimesis which transgresses the hierarchical boundaries between the worldly and the other worldly. Unlike the random mimetic arts with Socrates expels form the city the transcendence of that which is imitated in the Roman Rite ensures that mimesis does not remain a purely extrinsic act. By impersonating angelic voices or the Trinitarian persons, the worshipping impersonator cannot but participate in that which he emulates, and so, to travel in another's name becomes the nomination of the traveller himself. In consequence, he does not ashamedly conceal his inadequate and stammering voice by assuming divine voices, in the cover manner of ventriloquist substitution, but boldly asserts that he acts "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti." He borrows this name not in order to deny its own speaking, or to silence its declaration, but in order to disseminate it still further. For, the borrower of the name is also that name's ambassador." (Catherine Pickstock, After Writing, p 208-9)

Stranger than Fiction

I just finished watching Stranger than Fiction, which I really enjoyed. Talk about realism! Anyway, I noticed one of my comp books on the shelf of Dustin Hoffman's office - After Virtue, with a "used" sticker on it. I'm not sure if you can see it in this picture, but I do have to say, the TV in corner office is a nice touch.

Quotes of the Morning

"The more devastation and instability an unbridled marked creates, the more illiberal a state you need to contain it." (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 220)

"Capitalism has always pitched diverse forms of life promiscuously together - a fact which should give pause to those unwary postmodernists for whom diversity, astonishingly, is somehow a virtue in itself. Those for whom 'dynamic' is always a positive term might also care to reconsider their opinion, in the light of the most dynamically destructive system of production which humanity has ever seen. But we are now witnessing a brutally quickened version of this melt-down, with the tearing up of traditional communities, the breaking down of national barriers, the generating of great tidal waves of migration. Culture in the form of fundamentalism has reared its head in reaction to these shattering upheavals. Everywhere you look, people are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to be themselves. This is partially because other people have abandoned the notion of being themselves as an undue restriction on their activities" (Eagleton 49 - 50)

"[There is a] fundamental paradox located at the center of the rule of law in a democratic society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, Franz Kafka, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Jacques Derrida, Alan Keenan, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, while disagreeing on numerous issues, concur in asserting that a democratic state seeking to honor the rule of law is also one in which a sovereign power operating both inside and outside the law is brought into play. Since the paradox expresses the lawlessness upon which the rule of law depends it is often hidden from public view. ...[G]aps and fissures open up periodically between positional sovereignty as the highest authority to interpret the law and sovereignty as the effective power to decide what it will be. ...[F]or a government of self-rule to come into being out of a nondemocratic condition, the public ethos needed for democratic governance would have to be preceded by the kind of laws that nourish it; but those good laws, in turn, would need to be preceded by that very ethos if they were to emerge. The laws and the ethos must precede each other." (William E. Connolly, Pluralism, 134-5)

"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 5)

"The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries" (Schmitt, 36)

I found myself laughing

I found myself laughing
And the self did say
Something, though I would,
I could not repeat.

In this laugh was a
Secret
Holding me to they, the one they, the total they,
The they of play and fixity

It was in them,
I found him,
And in him I found them

His name is Augustine
And in him I find Augustus,
But it is the prior gust
I seek, both Caesar
And slave, exalted
And crucified
Finalized and continued

There is a sense
That the laugh picks up
Where it left off

I picked up the first book
And I laughed
Such as Sarai had done
Doubting the tribes in
Her husband’s wrinkled
Test.

What sort of test?
Testicular, male, globes of potential
Nested in amongst marrow-less
Femurs
Empty bones, dry bones
Ezekiel laughed, he must have
Burning dung, lying on one side as
He did
Laughing at the past, laughing at the future
Modernity: who would lie, lay even
Who would lay such an old feller like he
Laying about
Wrinkled
With the smell of shite not so far off.

Laugh I tell you, laugh.
I picked up Augustine in his 44th year,
And I chortled at his childishness,
Playing with figuration as we was,
At the feet of God:
Do heaven and earth, then contain the whole of you, since you fill them?
Or,
When once you have filled them, is some part of you left over because they are too small to hold you?

If this is so, when you have filled heaven and earth, does that part of you which remains

Flow over into some other place?

God, do you laugh, filled up with you as you are?
Is there room for a belly shaking good howl?

If you were to laugh, would you laugh with
Sarai, laugh against Sarai? Would you laugh with
Abram, as he came against his humanity,
Would you laugh with him?

Would you laugh through him?
And laughing impregnate Mary,
By yourself, for yourself,
Against humanity, with humanity,
Laughing through the couplet,
Down through the cervix,
Out near the labia, and into the outro.

You Father were in the outro and the intro,
Above the Cross, on the Cross, below the Cross,
There was a moment, where I thought you cried,
Laughing, facing death,
Breathing in, committing spirit, unto
Yourself.

Where did you go for those three days?

I’m not laughing. You rent the veil;
Did you need to return it?
You wore the robe, did you need to mend it?

Dark comedy here? Feels a little sacrilege
To laugh at such a disappearance.

There is a pit, a wonderful pit,
In which the Father hides,
Is that where you went?
Into the tent? Beyond the curtain,
Home from the pig farm,
Donning the ring and the robe
Eating the slain lamb?

Is this a joke?
(three days passed without a laugh)

I guess not.

Up from the belly he a laughed,
Which a mighty snicker he did come,
He arose, a Victor, to be broken and eaten,
To be eaten and broken, till the end of days

He a laughed, he a laughed,
Hallelujah, he a laughed.

Quote of the Afternoon

So I just finished my first article for Books in Canada, titled Newfoundland in Letters, and I have been asked to take up another on short fiction in Atlantic Canada. I'm glad to do this. It keeps me abreast of the new writing in the region, while helping me to fill out my CV and become a better writer.

But now that the article is off, I can focus on my comp reading again. Here is the quote that hit me this afternoon, Pickstock, After Writing again:

In contrast to the "urge" of Derridian differance, liturgical language is neither autonomously in command of itself, nor an instrument controlled invisibly by a lurking and manipulative power. Rather, its language is in several ways "impossible". For liturgy is at once a gift from God and a sacrifice to God, a reciprocal exchange which shatters all ordinary positions of agency and reception, especially as these have been conceived in the west since Scotus. Moreover, liturgical expression is made "impossible" by the breach which occurred at the Fall. This breach is the site of an apparent aporia, for it renders the human subject incapable of doxology, and yet, as I have suggested above in my analysis of the Phaedrus, the human subject is constituted (or fully central to itself) only in the dispossessing act of praise. However, the aproria is resolved in the person of Christ, whose resurrection ensures that our difficult liturgy is not hopeless, and enables us to rejoin the angelic liturgy taking place in an ambiguous and shifting space beyond our own. (176-7)

I heard "impossible" used as it is above, in a presentation by Alison Milbank, who was a reader of After Writing before it was published. She was speaking about Huysmans' decadent and satanic images of Christ which, she implied, were "impossible", yet which led him into the Church. I was trying to get at what impossible meant in that context and if she was playing on Pickstock's usage of it, then I think I know what she is about. Pickstock's very theory of the subject is constructed on an impossibility, that of opening to God, which is already transcended by God for us. Not too shaby: she takes Paul and makes him relevant to contemporary theoretical gobily-gook. I like it.

ECMAs and "the arse lickers of Satan"

I was too touched by this not to post it (Perhaps McKay is the one that is a little "touched"):

The Trailer Park Boys — Bubbles, Ricky and Julian — busted out of jail and into the Halifax Metro Centre to host the awards, two of them still wearing their orange jumpsuits.

It is the second year the foul-mouthed TV and film stars, played by Robb Wells, John Paul Tremblay and Mike Smith, have played host.

The boys kept their language clean and performed a heart-warming rendition of Kitties are So Nice, with Bubbles on guitar.

However, Newfoundland and Labrador comedian Mary Walsh referred to the federal Conservatives as 'the arse-lickers of Satan' before introducing a performer.

The cameras then focused on Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay, who had committed a faux pas earlier in the evening, when he mistakenly referred to Halifax as Toronto.

He drew a chorus of boos and was ribbed about it throughout the night.

Pickstock critiques my post on represention and the thing in itself

So now that I have a pretty good handle on the Kantian conception of representation and synthetic imagination, Catherine Pickstock goes and messes everything up for me by telling me that this is attached to a nominalist conception of ideas, which thinks being univocally, rather then analogically, and which devoids the space between subject and object of divine participation (mathesis):

“In so far as the “real” is now determined by the intellect, and the first object of the intellect is now Being, it seems that Scotus anticipates the modern invention of the object and its distinction from the subject. …In consequence, the object is now defined on the basis of the concept, as representation. This departs from Aquinas’ Aristotelian theory of knowledge, whereby the form of a thing disengages itself from its matter and becomes a thought or “species” in our mind…[Scotus] opens up the possibility of an empiricism which thinks of material reality in terms of isolated atoms of information streaming in from the outside world, which the mind must then synthesize, since they act upon the mind in the mode of merely efficient causality. This involves a departure form the traditional hylomorphic view that the form of a thing is already synthesized before it “informs” the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence), and that the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode. Knowledge, for Aquinas, is therefore akin to an ontological event. In contrast to this, post-Scotist representation is equivalent to a de-ontological process, for the perceived object is reduced to an empirical exigency which simply happens to facilitate or occasion an act of cognition”. (After Writing, 130-1)

So instead of composing the cat from a bunch of sense data, Aquinas would encourage me to see the cat as a form already composed before it “informs” my mind. Now that it is in my mind, the active intellect must bring it to full coherence. When the “species” is formed in my mind (the ‘cat’ of Chloe, I’m suspecting), it is an event, not unlike being itself. This is how Aquinas demonstrates that knowledge is divine participation. In a way, God forms the cat as a whole, and sends it into my mind, at which point I must use my intellect to fully reveal the cat to myself (I suspect this is the inward light of Christ that fully reveals the cat as Chloe). And this revelation is an event, like a party. Have a beer. No, I insist.

So where Kant’s process emphasizes the assembly of the whole only by observance of the parts, Aquinas tells us that God creates the whole, which we must reveal to ourselves. I suspect this has more to do with waiting for the Polaroid picture to reveal itself, then it would connecting the dots of the image. Aquinas is a proponent of Gestalt psychology…and Kant believes in constructivism. I hadn’t realized that these 20th century debates fell along realist-nominalist divides.

Okay, here is something to think about: How does this relate to pointillism (and the TV colour matrix) and the previous preference for whole forms, say in a painting by Delacroix, or David? How does this relate to Alex Colville’s method? Is pointillism Kantian painting?

Now think about the camera. The camera doesn’t expose an image to parts. It captures the whole image. Even when the composition is of a part, say half of a face, the whole is presupposed, and it asks us to fill in the rest of the image, such that we are active viewers. Why would the mind assemble parts, if the film doesn’t? Is reality (what ever that is), really as partial as Kant suggests? Or is there a deeper order running through it all?

And a final thought: I can see that structuralism was a type of heuristic that sought out the logos, but which did so on univocal terms. I think we can revive the search for coherence, the logos, on analogical terms, without ever thinking that we have the logos cornered with any type of positivism.

Charles Taylor on CBC Radio One

Charles Taylor on the Current, CBC Radio One. He's talking about that crazy town in Quebec that has said stupid things about Islam.

the real, the thing in itself (ding an sich)

I just don't know what to think about "the real". It seems that no one thinks that we have any access to the "thing in itself". Reality for those of us born after the "social construction of reality" idea rose to ascendancy is only a construction. Some say it is a linguistic construction. Others say it is the construction of our senses. I don't know what to think, but my intuition tells me that I interact with things that are real and have real experiences with them.

Lets say I look across the room at my cat, sleeping on the blanket on top of the couch. I might linguistically relate this to you, but I do not linguistically relate this to myself. Some people do, but I don't look at the cat and have the words scroll through my head like some sort of wall street electric banner. I don't look at the couch and say couch. I just perceive the whole of the couch. This is where I'm tempted to deny the real. If I look at the cat, and I see say 45 percent of her body, my mind fills in the rest. I don't see a partial cat, I see the whole cat. But this is not a linguistic construction on my part. It is the privileging of the whole over the part, the ideal over the particulars of my visual perception. My imagination assembles the partial view I have, by looking to my tradition of seeing cats (my memory) and assimilating the sense data into a cat schema. Better yet, my imagination working with my memory knows the particulars of Chloe, my cat, and can recognize her at an instance. None of this is linguistically mediated. It isn't like my mind is constantly decoding a textual word into images that I am conscious of. No, I am in touch with the light that is reflected off my cat, which allows me to assimilate the colours, forms, patterns, volume and texture of my cat, such that I perceive the existence of the whole cat, even though part of the cat is hidden to me at all moments.

What isn't real in this equation? I'll tell you: the cat I construct in my mind isn't real, it is an image of the cat. But the light is real. The colours are real - they are not figurative approximations - there is no analogy at work here. The forms are real. How am I not experiencing the "thing in itself"? Certainly I do not experience the thing as Chloe experiences Chloe-catness, but I experience the visual expression of her catness.

Jean Luc Nancy likes to play with the idea that my representation of the cat is nothing but an interior extension of myself, somewhat like an interior phallus, which I "touch". Representation, to Nancy, is masturbatory. Sex is masturbatory. All life is masturbatory. This seems to be solipsism to me, the idea that I am the only mind, all else is simulacra.

Just rereading this post: I do find myself thinking about the "typo". Why if I compose a text, am I likely to read the whole word and not see the scrambled word, or dropped word. For instance, i will often write a sentence with they in it and drop the y. This may have something to do with the key board, but, nonetheless, I rarely catch my "y-less theys" on a proof-read. I'll catch them a day later. I just reread my last post and found a few typos. One that sticks out to me is redure which I read as rendure. I've just found out its spelled render. Anyway. The point is that I have a subjective bias because I can only encounter the world subjectively. Perhaps this is what the denial of "the real" is all about, but still, I don't like how this leads our popular culture to see all constructs as fictions, as arbitrary. That is just careless social theory, despite the fact that you hear such hogwash coming from intelligent people. It might have been arbitrarily assigned, but that don't mean it's arbitrary people. Tradition might be built on top of it. Which would make it real now, since it is a fixture in someone's reality. Oh, I may be pushing it here; it's off to dream land for me.

Frank Gehry and his Critics: Sketches of Frank Gehry

Magnanimity is a quality that is lost on critics. I've just finished watching Sydney Pollack's Sketches of Frank Gehry (the architect that does the wavy titanium pieces - the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao Spain, the Music hall in LA and I think he's redoing the AGO in Toronto) , and I've been surfing around with the reviews. Figures like Eva Hagberg, weren't fans of this film, and I suspect they aren't fans of Gehry either (though I think Hagberg is ambivalent). Hagberg's probably right about Pollack's film, it is a bit too much of a celebration - not enough of an evaluation... what can you expect from a friend? But Hagberg, let's face it, you don't need to be an expert to tell if a piece of architecture is aesthetically interesting (technically interesting yes...). Now the average Schmoe won't be all that specific, though she may surprise you (you wanted me to use the male pronoun there didn't you). Gehry's Bilbao and his LA piece radically alter the aesthetics of their place for the better for the moment. Does architecture need to be eternal? Well the best pieces will have longevity, but it must also speak to the phenomenology of the contemporary city dweller, and on that level, Gehry's work all but forces a viewer to dwell poetically. It stands out in the midst of tall city shit, like an iceberg. Not necessarily there for eternity, but something to gawk at, in awe, for the time being. And the awe that a Gehry invites us to partake in is not the awe of totalitarianism...it is the awe of the passionate inwardness - the romantic expressivism of that aging hippy generation (you know the type - they drive Mercedes and hang on to the revolutionary urges of their youth).
Hal Foster, very much the aesthete, doesn't think that Gehry's work is worth all the hoopla. Foster gives the impression that he is rooting for the architect who ruptures the metanarratives, renders open the closures, the messianic type who celebrates provisionality and makes the ordinary (chain link) extraordinary. To Foster the early Gehry is an artist, the later Gehry...a sellout. But let's examine the nature of this sellout. I can agree that some of his stuff is pretty shitty, but I can also ascent to the praise that is extended to his work at Bilbao. Bilbao and the LA piece do rupture the skyline. They explode the city forms. They look like futurist sculptures that are lived in. Now Foster is right to say that Gehry shouldn't be heralded as the greatest living artist because of this, but this shouldn't take away from the sublimity of his work. I, for one, can appreciate his pieces without the need to deify him. After all, there are lots of 'conformity buildings' to compare his work to, and I can tell the difference without any training.

To Foster's credit, he claims that he needs to hold to a critical line, as a critic, so that the public will know that dissenting voices are permitted, available. I think this is a valuable role for an artist to play, but lets identify the object we are playing with - consensus - and not the object of art. Magnanimity is worth exploring. Greatness, something both Foster and Gehry know a bit about, is a privilege that is not a privilege for the sake of debasing others. Greatness need not exist on a Darwinian plain of violence and competition. Greatness can stand on its own, in its own presence, among other great presences, without fear of limited space.

By the way, Hagberg is on point about Julian Schnabel; Pollack completely mis-reads him:

"and Julian Schnabel, who (in a brilliantly critical farce that Pollack seems to have missed) shows up in a terrycloth robe with a brandy snifter in one hand and a cigarette in the other, dropping loaded one-liners like "It makes me want to put my stuff in there." They get it: Frank's just fucking with us".

What Hagberg isn't clear about who her "us" is that Frank fucks with...I think Frank is fucking with them, for our benefit...

Download the Gehry film at Greylodge (lord knows neither he nor Pollack needs the money)

Note: Zizek! and Sketches of Frank Gehry have both shocked me with the quirkiness of their subjects. It is interesting to see such heterogeneous personalities, with their odd gestures, tones of voice, neuroses. You swear it was a Woody Allen conspiracy.

Quote of the evening

'Religion is the Real as the impossible Thing beyond phenomena, the Thing that “shines through” phenomena in sublime experiences; atheism is the Real as grimace of reality, as the gap, the inconsistency, of reality. This is why the standard religious reproach to atheists (“But you cannot really understand what it is to believe!”) has to be turned around: our “natural” state is to believe; the truly difficult thing to grasp is the atheist position. Here one should move against the Derridean/Levinasian assertion of the kernel of religion as the belief in the impossible Real of a spectral Otherness that can leave its traces in our reality—the belief that this reality of ours is not the Ultimate Reality. Atheism is not the position of believing only in the positive (ontologically fully constituted, sutured, closed)reality; the most succinct rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu definition of atheism is precisely “religion without religion”—the assertion of the void of the Real deprived of any positive content, prior to any content, the assertion that any content is a semblance which fills in the void. “Religion without religion” is the place of religion deprived of its content, like Mallarme’s—this is atheism’s true formula—“nothing takes place but the place itself.” Although this may sound similar to the Derridean/Levinasian “Messianic Otherness,” it is its exact opposite: it is not “the inner messianic Truth of religion minus religion’s external institutional apparatuses” but, rather, the form of religion deprived of its content, in contrast to the Derridean/Levinasian reference to a spectral Otherness, which does not offer the form, but the empty content of religion. Not only do both religion and atheism insist on the Void, on the fact that our reality is not ultimate and closed—the experience of this Void is the original materalist experience, and religion,
unable to endure it, fills it in with religious content.'
diacritics / spring 2001 100-101 Zizek The Rhetoric of Power

Even if you don't agree with this guy, you have to marvel at his rhetoric like you would the unfathomable card tricks of a illusionist. Zizek the illusionsist...
There is a point in The Sublime Object of Ideology where he freaked me out with revelation: you do not know it but you do it. You practice Capitalism everyday. How do you rupture it? Stop practicing Capitalism...

Zizek on Job p102 The Rhetoric of Power

Against this temptation, one should precisely locate the true greatness of Job: contrary to the usual notion of Job, he is not a patient sufferer, enduring his ordeal with firm faith in God. On the contrary, he complains all the time, rejecting his fate (like Oedipus at Colonus, who is also usually misperceived as a patient victim resigned to his fate). When the three theologian friends visit him, their line of argumentation is the standard ideological sophistry (if you suffer, by definition you must have done something wrong, since God is just). However, their argumentation is not limited to the claim that Job must somehow be guilty: what is at stake at a more radical level is the meaning(lessness) of Job’s suffering. Like Oedipus at Colonus, Job insists on the utter meaninglessness of his suffering. As the title of Job 27 says: “Job Maintains His Integrity.” As such, the Book of Job provides what is perhaps the first exemplary case of the critique of ideology in human history, laying bare the basic discursive strategies of legitimizing suffering: Job’s properly ethical dignity resides in his persistent rejection of the notion that his suffering can have any meaning, either as punishment for his past sins or as a trial of his
faith, against the three theologians who bombard him with possible meanings. Surprisingly, God takes his side at the end, claiming that every word Job has spoken was true, while every word of the three theologians was false.

Job as ideology buster. And here I though ideology was a post-Cartesian/Kantian construct.

Quote of the afternoon

Is Socrates talking about the modern love song here?

Who, for example, could speak on this thesis of yours without praising the discretion of the non-lover and blaming the indiscretion of the lover? These are the commonplaces of the subject which must come in (for what else is there to be said?) and must be allowed and excused; the only merit is in the arrangement of them, for there can be none in the invention; but when you leave the commonplaces, then there may be some originality. (Phaedrus Jowett translation)

But when you leave the commonplaces, then there may be some orginality. This little quote will stay with me. Makes a lot of sense.

Quote of the morning

Book XI, 4, The Confession of St. Augustine

Earth and the heavens are before our eyes. The very fact that they are there proclaims that they were created, for they are subject to change and variation; whereas if anything exists that was not created, there is nothing in it that was not there before; and the meaning of change and variation is that something is there which was not there before. Earth and the heavens also proclaim that they did not create themselves. 'We exist', they tell us, 'because we were made. And this is proof that we did not make ourselves. For to make ourselves, we should have had to exist before our existence began.' And the fact that they plainly do exist is the voice which proclaims this truth.

It was you, then, O Lord, who made them, you who are beautiful for they too are beautiful; you who are good, for they too are good; you who ARE, for they too are, But they are not beautiful and good as you are beautiful and good, nor do they have their being as you, their Creator, have your being. In comparison with you they have neither beauty nor goodness nor being at all. This we know, and thanks be to you for this knowledge. But our knowledge, compared with yours, is ignorance.

...

Me: Compare this to the bad translation online. It's amazing how creativity must meet creativity to keep translated works alive. This passage is spectacular for the way it describes the relations between our qualities and those of God. Augustine effortlessly explains the analogy of being, that God and humans exist in analogical relation: our beauty is an analogy of God's beauty. Many protestants give analogical thinking up because it exalts human nature higher than Luther et al would permit. After all, we are made only a little lower then the angels. I was quite moved by reading Marilyn Robinson's little essay on Psalm 8 a few years back. You can find it in her collection The Death of Adam. As a protestant thinker - congregational I believe, she has a wonderful understanding of the analogia entis (analogy of being). Her Pulitzer prize winning novel, Gilead glimmers with analogical insights, not the least of which is the central character's quest to bless his God-son. Very moving, and this comes from a man with a stone heart (ah, but there is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in).

I'm minutes away from finishing Theology and Social Theory - another one bites the dust!

Quote of the afternoon

"Wherefore the man who lives according to God, and not according to man, ought to be a lover of good, and therefore a hater of evil. And since no one is evil by nature, but whoever is evil is evil by vice, he who lives according to God ought to cherish towards evil men a perfect hatred, so that he shall neither hate the man because of his vice, nor love the vice because of the man, but hate the vice and love the man. For the vice being cursed, all that ought to be loved, and nothing that ought to be hated, will remain." (Augustine Civitas Dei, XIV 6)

I had no idea that this was Augustine's logic. I find myself encountering elements of classical Christianity in the Christianity of today, and I am amazed because never suspected these ideas/phrases were so old. For all I knew, "hate the sin and love the sinner" could have been Billy Graham or John Wesley, but lo and behold, it's granddaddy Augustine. Perhaps we are more orthodox then we think??

Quote of the morning

"Whereas the civitas terrena inherits its power form the conqueror of a fraternal rival [Romulus kills Remus to control Rome] , the 'city of God on pilgrimage through this world' founds itself not in a succession of power, but upon the memory of the murdered brother, Abel slain by Cain" (394 Milbank, Theology and Social Theory)

Flicks: Zizek!; Double Indemnity; the Tommy Douglas Story; Dreamgirls

"The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's 'Capital': 'They do not know it; but they are doing it'" Zizek! (12:27)

Last night I watched the documentary Zizek! (2005); today, to escape the bitter cold (-25 Celsius), I stayed inside and watched Double Indemnity (1944), a film that Zizek is looking for in his documentary (and one that I have been meaning to watch for some time). Now I'm watching Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story (2006, CBC mini-series). Last night before Zizek, I saw Dreamgirls (2006). I was very disappointed in Dreamgirls, which is nominated for almost everything this award season (though I was glad to see that it wasn't nominated for best picture). Dreamgirls is poorly written. It is a musical that is badly translated into film. I'm tired of this musical to film business anyway. Also, the Motown story would be much better as just that, the Motown story, and not the almost Motown story. I will say this: Jennifer Hudson can sing like a banshee, and she's not a bad actor. Also, Eddie Murphy does a good job of playing a James Brown-like soul man who is forced to sing like Lionel Richie by the Berry Gordy Jr analogue (Jamie Foxx).

The common thread in all these films (and the good thing about Dream Girls): the corruptions of capitalism. Zizek is a lacanian-socialist, Tommy Douglas was a Baptist Socialist (the best kind - much better then the National Socialist), Double Indemnity's lesson is on the corruption of money, and has a corrupt insurance sales man who kills an oilman (sounds socialist to me...though the best detective ends up being the claims guy, Keats, at the insurance company). Bill Condon tackles the market's effect on the forms of black music (though he seems to bask in the production of Motown parody). At one point the Gordy Jr. character (Foxx) tells the Diana Ross character (Beyonce) that he made her lead singer over the Florence Ballard character because Ross's voice was so thin that he could put anything he wanted into it, whereas Ballard's voice was too rooted in black tradition to for him to control.

The Tommy Douglas story is excellent. There is a great representation of the 1931 Bienfait Miner Strike, where the RCMP killed three peaceful, protesting and singing Miners, calling them Communist (mostly because of racist attitudes towards Ukrainians who populated the town). Here is a little exchange between Douglas and the man he beat as Premier, Jimmy Gardiner:

Jimmy Gardiner: Bit of a difference between your table and my mine isn't there? People notice these things you know.

Douglas: If people notice that I don't need a private room to eat my dinner that is, ah, fine by me.

Jimmy: That's not what they notice. They notice that you may be premier but this is still my table in my restaurant in my town in my Provence, you've only got it on loan.

Douglas: We all get it on loan Jimmy that is the concept of democracy.

Gardiner: No sir the concept of democracy is that business goes on as usual regardless of who gets elected. You could call yourself a socialist reverend, but this is a capitalist country and the people won't stand for it.

Douglas: Well the capitalists lost this time. Enjoy your table. (5:1 4:00)

Now I'm not sure about Douglas's position on democracy, but I certainly like how he practiced justice. One of my biggest fears as of late is that democracy is the opiate of the masses, the idea that you can have effect, that you can control the market. I think the real problem in 21st global politics is that democracy has little hold on the market and political forms won't until we have some sort of global political power that can restrict and discipline the market. Our environment hangs in the balance, as do our particular identities, our localities, our religions, our accents, our languages (other then English).

A word on the Zizek! documentary: I was amazed at how quirky he is. I've been reading his works for three years now and I had no idea what he was like in person. I'm also very impressed by the film, especially the ending. But this is what I'm most impressed by: the film was made by Astra Taylor, who was born in 1979 in Saskatchewan, who studied at the New School for Social Research, has published a book, and is working on her third film or so. She's also taught two courses. It makes me feel like I'm letting the world pass me by.

On Givenness

Marcel Mauss started a debate about gifting and gift exchange in 1924, by producing an ethnographic work, The Gift, which denied the existence of a free gift. Since then the debate about gifting, which was grounded in material exchange, has drifted into discourses on ontology, phenomenology and theology. This Fall (2006), I heard Margaret Visser give a work shop based on the word "thanks", and its relationship to gifting. She was examining the difference between "Thanks" (and its etymology in the German Dank, and Dink) to its analogue in the Romance languages "Gracias" (grace, gratuity). German forces you to think about what it costs someone, where as Latin acknowledges the prior givenness of the gift. Thanks leads us to accounting, where as Grace leads us to the Feast. I think Visser has more tact then I, prone as I am to drawing harsh lines and caricatures.

Derrida got his hands on this topic and argued for an inaccessible purity in gifting. According to Derrida, the free gift must meet this requirements:
1. There is no reciprocity
2. The recipient must not recognize the gift as a gift or himself as the recipient of a gift
3. The donor must not recognize the gift, either
4. The thing itself cannot appear as a "gift" (I lifted this from the Wiki article on Mauss's The Gift, though it is Derrida's position as recounted in Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite.)

For Derrida, the purity of the gift is exalted to unreachable ends. It makes me think of his analysis of Law in Kafka's famous "Before the Law". With Kafka the Law is unattainable and so far beyond human understanding that one can only stand before the law and grow old (and less as less of a specimen of lawful life). It reminds me of Roman 3:23, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God". I can assent to this; however, I think that it is quite clear that Christ thinks right action is knowable (and doable), even though perfection is unattainable by anyone other than the Christ. Still, we must long to be perfect (I used to read Christ's "Be ye perfect like your Father in heaven" as ultimate irony, but I have changed my tune: I think we cannot but attempt such perfection, otherwise we do nothing). Gifting is part of perfection because it is part of God's being. The Father, who is complete in and of himself, cannot help but extend himself in creation through the Word, and the world cannot help but respond fully to such extension as there is nothing (evil) to restrict the perfect perception (a non-response is, in the end, nothing). This is to say that there is no re-presentation in God; the Spirit is one of complete fidelity between subject and object, speaker and spoken, spoken and heard, given and returned. This seems to be a bit of a closed (feedback) loop, if we don't open it to the limited beings, humanity. Because every aspect of humanity is completely given (life, soul-mind, knowledge, love, tradition, language, politics, ontology - except evil), all humanity can do is participate in a gift economy that is beyond human ability to reciprocate. As I write "beyond", I do not mean to say that humans can't aspire to God's ability to freely give from an infinite source, only to say they humans cannot do this without tapping the God-source in the first place. Humans cannot freely give without participating in God.

How is this enacted in the Catholic Church? The Eucharistic ceremony, whereby God gives his body (the Word, language...don't forget it, infused in materiality as it is) to his body, to join them to him in giving, that they might then give to the broader community as he gave to them, and extend the circulation of gift (truth, goodness, beauty).

I was inspired to write on this when I was reading Milbank's small essay "The Gift and the Given". Here are some highlights from his essay (his gift?):

"Supposing that I am myself, really, ontologically a gift? Then one does not immediately need to invoke the other in order to grant oneself this status. If mind or spirit is more than an illusory epiphenomenon, then it does not derive from matter, and must be in consequence a mysterious and fundamental gift from the unknown (Bruaire, 1983). If I am myself a gift, then what lurks in me from before myself is more than the human, horizontal other. It is rather the trace of a vertical donor. And it seems appropriate that this donor, ‘God’, who gives gifts to nothing, and so gives gifts to themselves in order to establish gifts, should create first of all a creature able reflexively to exist by giving this gift to herself in turn. Is this not what it means to think (Bruaire, 1983)? Then gratitude for the gift of self spills later over into generosity towards the neighbour in imitation of that generosity that has first constituted us in being at all." (445)

Milbank's key insight, from my perspective, is that Mauss and other reduce gifting to contracting, which is totally immanent, with no aspect of transcendence, and no relationship to Gift as givenness - tradition/culture/language - the prior gifts none of us can escape, to which we can add little as individuals.

Here is a long quote from Milbank that is worth suffering through (Milbank has incarnated the via dolorosa into his prose, just as Derrida has incarnated play into his):

But to speak of spoken sign as gift – what does this mean? If a gift is a signifying convention then is it at bottom a fiction? Is the impossibility of the pure gift according to Derrida (because we award ourselves economically even in telling ourselves that we have been generous) coterminous with the endless deferral of meaning by the sign, such that to speak is to endlessly project the arrival of meaning, while to act ethically is endlessly to strive towards a generosity that cannot be enacted? This implies, however, as Derrida was aware, that postponement of meaning nonetheless remains ‘truer’ than a foreclosed presence of truth, while equally the impossible gift remains ‘the good’ in a way that economic and contractual self-assurance cannot be. So 11: What is the co-implication between gift and fiction?

Is meaning just postponed? Or can it be in some measure anticipated? And if not, then is the gift basically a sign, a promise of special attention that can never be realized? But perhaps, to the contrary, a sign has always a material vehicle, like the person speaking, the medium in which it is inscribed, the actions, place and time that accompany it. This vehicle itself supplements the import of the sign, and not just the next sign to which it gives rise. This ensures that some meaning is already realized. Is this meaning a suppression of indeterminacy, or does it of itself open up a specific but open horizon of meaning? If it does not, then the significance of the material for meaning seems to be suppressed, by arbitrary fiat. But a sign proffered by a material someone deploying a material vehicle is not just a sign, it is also a gift. Inversely, a material thing handed over must be also a sign in order to be a gift. So gift is the exact point of intersection between the real and the signifying. It thereby exceeds the contrast between history and fiction, just as, at the instance where we receive joyfully a gift, our lives have become saturated with meaning, like novels, as if we were truly living out a dream. Thus, the instance of the gift is the instance of the closing of the gulf between the fictional and the desired on the one hand and the real and the tedious on the other.

And yet this instance only reminds us that such closure is more fundamental than the rift since, originally, no material thing appears to us before it has been interpreted as in some way significant; nor, on the other hand, can any signified meaning ever entirely float free of material actuality. Where this cultural presupposition is seen as itself a response to a prior gift (sign/reality) then one has ‘religion’. Where the latter is absent, then the unavoidable presupposition of original gift – the givenness of gift, both historically and ontologically, for human existence – is placed, with a constant effort, in ironic brackets. Then the gift is seen as only a fantasy in order to escape the givennness of an endless drift, rising up without generosity from a fundamental void. All then unravels: there can be really no gift, unilateral or reciprocal, but only the assertive gestures of power and their self-interested mutual contracting.

So, finally, 12: Is the gift the echo of divine creation and of divine grace? And otherwise, is it an illusion? (445-6)

There we have it: Power or Peace?

The Legitimacy of Modernity: Blumenberg, Lowith, Schmitt, Milbank and the Pomos

How did the Modern world emerge? Is it, as some claim, a disobedient child of modernity, or does it have a legitimate identity of its own, independent of Christendom? This is what Robert Wallace, translator of Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of Modernity has to say:

“Blumenberg makes it clear here that while the modern age is not the result of a transformation (whether through ‘secularization’ or any other process) of something that was originally Christian, this does not mean that it sprang into existence spontaneously, as though into a historical void. The continuity underlying the change of epoch is, he says, a continuity of problems rather than of solutions, of questions rather then of answers. Instead of remaining forever fixated on ‘doctrines’ or ‘ideas’ as the stuff of our tradition, we need to learn to relate these to the human activity of inquiring, of questioning, which gives them their relevance and concrete meaning. When we do so, Blumenberg suggests, we may find other kinds of continuity besides those of rightful inheritance or illegitimate misappropriation, and other kinds of novelty besides that of unprovoked ‘creation from nothing’” (Robert Wallace xviii).

Blumenberg wants to see modernity as springing from a Christian context, but what springs has to have a different composition then what fell. His critique of Lowith is on grounds of continuity. In emphasizing the illegitimacy of progress (bad providence), Lowith highlights how progress fails where providence didn’t. Blumenberg wants to claim the opposite. That progress is not deprived providence, but that providence was such an insufficient prototype of progress that we cannot highlight their identity; we must emphasize their difference, the rupture of Christendom. How did this rupture occur? 1. Science moved beyond Scientia; Bacon et al overcame Aristotle. 2. The literary arts overcame classicism (Wallace xvii-xviii). Both of these innovations occurred in the 17th century.
Do I agree with Blumenberg? Partially. I think that Blumenberg is right to complicate the genealogy of progress. If we stress continuity too much then we oversimplify the context and the issues that lead to progress. However, I think that Blumenberg is trying to smuggle Lowith’s thesis back into this text, by demonstrating how continuity is a mistake, but by linking providence and progress through a more complicated narrative.

However, I think that we need to turn to Carl Schmitt and consider how the idea of the nation state has emerged from Christendom. Blumenberg might have more on his hands then he thinks?:

“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God become the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries” (Political Theology 36).

What becomes clear in Schmitt’s analysis is that he is using analogical reasoning, which recognizes that when we highlight a similarity, that similarity is couched in a great number of differences (I want to say infinite here but I fear I may be misusing the term). I sense that Blumenberg has adopted a flat view of being, univocity, which interprets all things with being, as being of the same genera. Analogy would claim that there is always a difference between different orders of being. That we must preserve this distance between Being (of God) and being (of man). This complicates Lowith’s thesis on continuity – progress is analogously related to providence. The state is analogously related to the Church.

It struck me that Milbank’s interpretation of the liberal subject and the secular realm is relevant to this discussion. Milbank claims that the secular realm is not only related to the Church, but that it is a theological construction which emerges from Medieval thinking (religious and secular realms and priests). He also claims that the creation of secular space in protestant settings was firstly a theological creation. Milbank claims that Locke and Hobbes argued for private property by considering Adam's mythological position in the Garden of Eden. Milbank extends his argument to the providence in Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market place, and to socialism in de Bonald's (and Saint-Simon's) positive (and Catholic) state.

There is another level, or context, for this general argument – the relationship between Christendom and Modernity - that I we need to consider: Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy have launched a full fledged deconstruction of Christianity (and Foucault had an implicit argument about the relationship between Christian confession and modern subjectivity). Why do we need to deconstruct Christianity if Modernity is legitimate on its own? I think Derrida, Nancy and Foucault have sided with Lowith in claiming that Modernity is still intimately related to Christendom, so intimately that it must still kill the Christendom Father in order to evade its shadow.