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.