JCRT Live

Indicative culture

By Adam Katz

The indicative sentence could be said by anyone; imperative and interrogative sentences are defined by the speaker and listener.  To use Peircean terms, imperatives and interrogatives have a first and a second, while the indicative is uttered by a third.  The speaker of the indicative sentence is therefore outside of the direct interaction involved in the interrogative, imperative and, most fundamentally, the ostensive. 

If you say “he needs help,” you are clearly outside of the help-seeking; for that matter, if you say “I need help”—as opposed to “help me”—you setting yourself, as speaker, at least somewhat apart from yourself as needing help.  The response called for by your indicative sentence is something along the lines of “what’s wrong?” or “what can I do?” that is, an interrogative, rather than a direct proffer of aid.  You are engaged in a discussion over your situation.  Your indicative statement calls for a response—that is, it commands a response, or embeds an imperative:  inquire into my condition.  How meaningful the sentence is depends upon how meaningful that inquiry would be—that is, what new ostensive signs it would yield.  The same is true if we increase the distance between the need for help and the sentence—say, “K needs help.” 

Here, a different chain of interrogatives and imperatives constitutes the space of inquiry opened by the sentence, including questions like “how do you know” or “who says” that K needs help? (Questions that would hardly arise with a sentence like “I need help”).  The inquiry here might take new paths—perhaps the credibility of whoever claims K needs help becomes the central question, leading one of another speaker to put forward a sentence embedding the demand for some ostensive sign that would credit whoever claims to speak for K. 

The inquiry, or the space of questioning and answering articulated in the indicative sentence, is itself a deferral of some demand, an impossible demand, or a convergence of conflicting demands, at some distance from the speakers:  the question is the softened edge of the demand.  Some potential dispute regarding the subject or name organizing the sentence must lie at the origin of its utterance:  perhaps K is right in front of us needing help, in which case “K needs help” is only slightly removed from urgent questions like “what do you want from me?” and “why are you just standing there?” and these questions are themselves separated by the thinnest of boundaries from imperatives like “do something!” and “help him!” and these latter, in turn, from interjections or exclamations (look at that!; Oh my God!)—in this case, the indicative sentence could represent either a momentary lull in the mounting emergency or a panicky non-response (the subsequent sentences should weigh down on one or the other possibility). 

Or, K is far away, beyond our capacity to aid him, and any dispute about K and his condition may be equally distant, in which case the mention of that condition stands in for some other set of disputes regarding competing demands and our conversation only makes sense, is not monotonous droning, if (this is my hypothesis) the conversation could be put at stake in one of those proximate disputes and if its continuance is therefore framing and deferring them.  A good sentence, then—esthetically and ethically good—is one that holds the imperatives at bay but keeps them within sight, and, even more, keeps the space of questioning sufficiently expansive to shape the sentences along a range of actual and potential questions from requests for simple information to inquiries regarding the shape of the sentence itself. 

With an originary understanding of language, we need not venture beyond the grammar of signification itself for an esthetics, an ethics and a politics.  Signs make sense along two axes:  first, their iterability; second, as norm.  To the extent that a sign is composed in accord with rules that a competent sign-user could discern and iterate, it has reached the threshold of signification.  To the extent that a sign is convertible with other signs, can measure and be measured by them, so as to open up a field of semblances, it has likewise met that threshold. 

For sentences, as I suggested in my previous post, that threshold has been reached when a name becomes a source of imperatives (K’s needing help has transformed K into a source of imperatives—respond to K, inquire into K’s condition, spread the word about K, etc.); this happens when an impossible imperative finds a name to order.  We erect the name in between us to defer our dispute by ordering the name to remain in that place:  this is iteration.  In thus “situating” the name, we attribute, as I also suggested last time, the imperatives the name is obeying, to the following:  a particular agent; “reality” (the very reality created by the sentence, which generates a range of potential imperative-ostensive articulations, and which orders us around so often); and the name itself (as conferring a name confers at least a minimal freedom and capacity for self-constitution).  This is norming. 

A verb is some articulation of compliance with commands coming from these three sources—our obligations to others, our sense of a limiting reality, and the space of freedom we constitute by issuing commands to ourselves before knowing what obeying them would look like.  How one articulates those commands in an incoming sentence dictates what one takes to be an appropriate response to the sentence, one that will sustain the continuous present the sentence supports. 

A good sentence is both iterable and norming.  We can fold ethical, epistemological, esthetic and political claims into accounts of how iterable and norming sentences are, which is another way of inquiring into how sentence-y they are.  Goodness, knowledge, beauty, and freedom are all products of disciplinary spaces—that is, they result from commanding these names to show through semblances and to provide us with commands, in turn, that will enable us to confer these names and their descendants upon objects, events and actions yet to come.  It is sentences, enacting the disciplinary space constituting these arenas, which would be the mode of measuring and registering these event/signs. 

Imperatives issuing from another, from reality, and from the name itself, respectively, would be incommensurable, but out of what other material than incommensurables can commensurabilities be constituted?  When we make sense of a sentence, including the one we are speaking, we affirm some such commensurability ostensively, the way we recognize an imperative has been fulfilled, by integrating the sentence into the course of living, treating it as a model for appropriating reality, as a fount of new imperatives.

Indicative culture would be a culture interested in citing and creating such planes of commensurability:  attracting, ordering and transcending the strongest imperatives flowing from our diverse resentments.  To match an indicative culture I would propose a marginalist politics, which seeks out that composition apart from which everything stays the same.  We homogenize and commensurate the world through our habits, and through our habits we render ourselves idiosyncratic before the world. 

Let’s say I go out and get the newspaper every morning and then I come back for my morning coffee.  What would define this as “habit” will naturally vary:  in some cases, “morning” is good enough, in some cases only “at 6:45” will cover it; is it always exactly the same amount of coffee, or is the habit defined in terms of “however much coffee I feel like” that morning?  However the habit is composed, the world is commanded to come together in a particular way through it, and signs cross the threshold over into meaning in terms of what sustains, what can be gathered into, and what interrupts the habit. 

This mode of analysis can suit any level of individual and social complexity:  I read, teach and compose sentences in habitual ways, I respond to praise and criticism and confront compelling claims that disrupt my thinking likewise; habits are contagious and, like all contagious vehicles, mutate constantly, from neighbor to neighbor, teacher to student, across a place of work, among viewers of a popular TV show, etc.  What interrupts my habit is what constitutes that habit before another and before myself as other, and raises the question of how each habit will read the other in terms of itself, itself in terms of the other, and with what remainder. 

When something interrupts my habit, I must re-compose it:  in one sense, this is an adjustment at the margins; in another sense it is a creation ex nihilo.  The store at the corner from which I buy my paper goes out of business, and so I have to walk another block; the paper itself goes out of business and I need to get my news from a favored internet site—maybe I need to buy a computer.  Either way, the rupture in my habits can be healed, and the apparent “size” of the rupture won’t tell us much about what it will take to restore the habit:  maybe the store that went out of business was owned by my best friend who just died and speaking with him for a couple of minutes every morning was an integral part of my habit, and maybe I take swimmingly to the Internet. 

Either way, these are marginal adjustments:  new signs must fill the rupture and I can assign values to each of the candidates, based upon the system of value already in place.  But this revaluing also seeps through the entire system, and I am ultimately doing everything differently.  And we have lots of habits and habits for articulating the various habits that normalize the world for us and make us idiosyncratic to ourselves. 

Politics is where we get into the habit of having our habits interrupt each others in a regular manner:  “regular,” in the sense of common and sustained, but also in the sense of rule based.  When acting politically, we put forth our habits at their most interruptable at that point where the other’s also seems so.  Where we both seem to be following the rule and yet applying it in incommensurable ways, there is where either of us might try to have our rule encircle the other.  I find some way of following my application that disenables yours; and, in turn, I re-regulate your habit in terms of my application.  This, of course, involves a way of talking about what we are doing:  naming our practices so as to command us to follow my application; disobeying, in my discourse, the command your naming of your own and my practices would put forth. 

What we are looking for is where marginal shifts involve new compositions of the system—not necessarily revolutionary change, although sometimes that, but just as likely systemic relabelings of the “same” practices and institutions.  Not necessarily all at once, but implicitly, perhaps putting in place a new command that will take years, even generations, to fulfill.  The best spaces for such moves tend to be on the boundaries between imperative and indicative, executive and judicial, where a new set of imperatives and the habits supporting them are incommensurable with the existing indicative regime, or those who habitually work with indicatives in detachment from imperatives seek to influence the imperative regime. 

For example:  a politician who represented me would demand that President Obama and any other publicly responsible figure who believes that the interrogation techniques used upon captured combatants between 2002-2006 constituted “torture” and were therefore illegal do the following:  not only must you seek to prosecute everyone whom you believe broke the law, but you must apologize to and pay reparations to all victims of that “torture,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself.  Are we not a nation of laws?  Mr. Mohammed has not been tried, much less convicted—in the eyes of the law he is as innocent as anyone else. 

Apologizing and paying reparations to Mohammed seems to me only a mere and completely logical step forward from prosecuting the practitioners and lawyerly “enablers” of “torture”—and yet in crossing this boundary the habits of adherents to what I call the “human rights world picture” converge, suddenly, with the habits of those promoting massacres without limits.  “International human rights law” is, one might say, a set of imperatives seeking out the name who will ensure compliance with them—but they will never find it because the habits of international lawyers and human rights activists find no points of contact with the habits of those who enforce the law and might effectively oppose the will of tyrants. 

I would like to make it a political habit to expose this misfit, because believing in the efficacy of “international human rights” leads to the habit of composing sentences with lots of quasi-imperatives scattered aimlessly around (everyone should do, think and say all kinds of things which they would never actually think do or say, and even if they did, it wouldn’t have the consequences it “should” have anyway).  And exposing this misfit would, in turn, re-name the Nuremberg precedent as a “victor’s justice” nevertheless applied with enough impartiality to attain universality, so as to generate imperatives whose bearers might forge needed points of contact—the Nuremberg precedent might sufficiently justify and usefully circumscribe at least some wars, such that warriors might be happy to share the results with the lawyers and activists. 

To the extent that asymmetrical war waged by the stronger aims at protecting the victims of those who claim to be our victims, the ruthlessness of the warrior culture can be preserved and modified by innovative legal forms.  The law can cover the spaces opened and exploited by those who fight outside of the inherited norms of warmaking only by norming, at the margins, the diverse and improvisational methods of counter-insurgency. 

The lawyers and activists have to study the habits of the soldier, rather than the reverse.  This is not the direction in which we are currently headed.

Adam Katz teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.  He is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis:  A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry and an editor of Anthropoetics, the on-line journal of Generative Anthropology.

Obama's Cairo speech - "new beginning", new Enlightenment, or old aporia?

By Carl Raschke

I've been sifting through the text of President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo calling for a "new beginning" in relations between Muslims and the West.  I've been looking for those portions of the text that would truly seem inaugural, if I may be permitted a little piece of "pomo-speak".   I have to say that I am impressed, and that there is almost nothing in the address that comes across as hackneyed, platitudinous, or downright fulsome, as one would expect of any "political" speech, even though this one is political to the core.  Is it inaugural?  Yes, truly, and the reason has to do with far more than what the White House itself is saying.

There were concerns voiced by Obama's critics in the run-up to his "historic" talk before a sometimes approving, sometimes demuring (especially when he criticized violence against Israeli citizens in Palestine) audience of largely Egyptian students.  The critics predicted he would spend a lot of time "apologizing" for America and its historical sins.  He didn't.  They also warned that he might end up pandering to his Islamic audience.  He didn't do that either.  Obama defied in this instance the effort of many of his critics to brand him as one who kowtows to enemies simply by "making nice." 

Every nuance of his carefully crafted rhetoric was strategically designed to affirm many classic American foreign policy objectives while scotching any hint of we-stand-for-right-and-truth bravado or you-have-a-right-to-be-mad-at-us grovelling.  In essence, it was an effort to sound in his own way Kennedyesque by carefully articulating many familiar and venerable strains of democratic internationalism and idealism while repudiating the post-911 "clash of civilizations" idea.  If Muslims are so much like us, while implicitly sharing our peaceful goals, there's no reason we can't all get along, Obama seemed to be saying.

The Los Angeles Times summed it up: "Obama's style has been to cast himself as ready to lead the nation past the entrenched battles of the Clinton and Bush years and to ask Americans to look beyond old fault lines and accept a new politics of pragmatism and compromise." He was attempting to do the same with Muslims.  But if one takes a look at the wording of the actual speech, a more grandiose vision seems to emerge.  The key statements occur in the fifth paragraph.  "I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.  Instead, they overlap, and share common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings."

Obama's "new beginning", therefore, was to enunciate the lofty principles of the European Enlightenment, out of which America was birthed, and to invite present day Muslims of all stripes in all nations to re-define themselves within that shining episteme.  It was perhaps a rare meld of Kennedyism minus the "pay any price" polemics as well as Wilsonianism minus any kind of "make the world safe for democracy" rant.  It even smacked of Kantian cosmopolitanism, summoning the rational-minded from all cultures and all faiths to step forward as one toward the global city on the hill.

Obama of course didn't mention Immanuel Kant, nor the Kantian "categorical imperative" on which all cosmopolitanism through the principle of a universal "rational faith" must be forged.  But he came as close as any politician could come in describing the true "religion without religion" of the eighteenth century Aufklärung. "There's one rule that lies at the heart of every religion -- that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples."

Obama, in effect, challenged the West as much as the Muslim world to forsake the "postmodernism" of the last forty years with its emphasis on the philosophy as well as the politics of cultural, religious, and personal identity.  In a sweeping gesture that could only be made by someone with his wealth of symbolic capital for today's international leadership - African roots, racial "hybridity", American president, Harvard-educated apostle of global inclusivism - Obama called on the most "identitarian" of peoples to embrace a world vision that is far more European than Muslim. 

Although Obama, unlike previous American presidents, acknowledged the painful legacy of a "colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims", he challenged those resentful of that legacy to let go of it and embrace a set of values and ideals that "post-colonialists" frequently blame for the legacy in the first place.  The historical causal nexus linking the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and colonialism has been fairly well explored in the scholarship of the past century.  

But there is another factor that is almost routinely overlooked - the events of 1683 that not only sewed the seeds for the rise of post-Reformation and industrial Europe, but also for what has been called the "great Muslim humiliation" before modern Western military might that has shaped the last almost three and half hundred years.  We are talking about the Battle of Vienna between the allied armies of Central Europe and the Ottoman empire, seat of the last caliphate and champion of the dar al-Islam ("house of Islam"), that commenced on September 11, 1683 and concluded a day later. 

Like the legendary Battle of Tours in 732 A.D., which halted the first century of Islamic expansion and laid the groundwork for the rise of Charlemagne and the very idea of Europe, the Battle of Vienna set in motion the events that have configured the present conflicts.  A respected Muslim colleague of mine some years back confirmed the historical significance of the date September 11 for many in his community, which was not in any way "randomly" selected by Osama bin Laden for his strategic attack on America by hitting New York's Twin Towers.  It was a commemoration by certain Muslims with long memories of what Westerners have either forgotten, or are for the most part ignorant of.

A Muslim chronicler wrote of the defeat at Vienna:  "this was a calamitous defeat, so great that there has never been its like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state." That "calamitous" turning of tables, according to later historians, both weakened fatefully Ottoman power at its apogee and emboldened the nation states of Europe, including Russia, to put deliberate and relentless military pressure on the once mighty Ottomans until they became a ghost of themselves and collapsed in 1918 after their last gasp attempt to save themselves by first seeking to adopt Western ways and finally allying with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.  

In the introduction to his blow-by-blow account of the Battle of Vienna entitled Vienna Anno 1683, Austrian historian Johannes Sachslehner writes that the year 1683 "has become a profound mirror of the history of early modern Europe."  It also tipped the balance in the minds of Europeans between the ultimate importance of faith and religion versus "materialistic, technical, and military thinking" in the definition of a people's historical goals.  In other words, it sparked the Enlightenment.

The "clash of civilizations" (regardless of whether it is understood in the way Samuel Huntington originally presented the thesis), which Obama acknowledged in passing as an historical reality, turns out to be something much deeper than any renewed Enlightenment-driven, pomo-Kantian, globalist internationalism can overcome.  Kant himself was all about advancing the gospel of reason, including a nod even to the necessity of military conflict, in his own quasi-messianic anticipation of the coming of a commonwealth of the world's rational-minded. "Today Europe, tomorrow the world" is the implicit message of his famous essay Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. 

This "universal cosmopolitan condition," according to Kant, is the "last" to be achieved.  It can only be achieved, as the Enlightenment itself was achieved, after the exhaustion of endless religious particularist conflicts. "The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men", Kant wrote in 1784.

That was virtually Obama's message in Cairo. 

However, such an "inauguration" today poses many deep, theoretical dilemmas that take us well beyond such familiar (Enlightenment) concerns as intolerance, historical victimization, and the persistence of old, combative habits. The dilemmas - perhaps we should use the proper philosophical term and say "aporias" - were not only trenchantly recognized, but "deconstructed" in context by Jacques Derrida in his famously opaque, but decidably epochal 1995 essay entitled ""Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Reason Alone".  

Derrida takes up where Kant left off.  Derrida recognizes the "singularity" of the religious as that which both "responds to" ("religion is the response") and internalizes according to what he calls its "logic of autoimmunity" the Kantian exceptionality of radical evil. 

Kant argued late in life throughout his "historical" essays that this singularity, or exceptionality, seems to proscribe the dream of Enlightenment.  Yet, Kant insisted in an argument that anticipates Hegel's own "cunning of reason" (List der Vernuft) that the refractory exceptionality of radical evil, manifest in seemingly endless human conflict, propels the calculus of rational expediency and the quest for peace among sovereign states, and in the end (yes, the Enlightenment did have its own curious "eschatology") the universal commonwealth of all rational beings.  Again, something similar seems to be the gist of Obama's foreign policy.

Derrida, however, has his own prophetic insight into the impossibility of a dialectical resolution of history, of any List. The Enlightenment, like the 18th century concept of "religion" on which the notion of the universal "right" of religious freedom is based, is a Graeco-Roman (and by derivation European) artifact. It is the cornerstone of what he much earlier named our "white mythology".  More difficult to think than the Kantian "idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view" is the "return of religion," which is what 911 was all about. 

The extensions of the Enlightenment are the ideas of economic and scientific progress, the ideology by which colonialism was always justified, as well as what Derrida terms "globo-latinization", hence "globalization" in the neo-liberal sense.  Religion has an entirely different genealogy.  Its genealogy is not the globo-Latin, but the "world" in Jean-Luc Nancy's sense of that which is shared intimately as a Mitsein within the space of particularity, that is beyond any kind of conceptual or universal "representation."  

This Mitsein is constituted by what Levinas called the "otherwise than being" of revelation itself.  It is not subject to any Kantian axiomatic of "reason alone." As the Qur'an itself says in the sura known as "The Spirits": "knowing the unseen: God does not reveal the unseen mystery divine to anyone at all, except a Messengers with whom God is pleased; and God sends forth observers before and behind him."  The singularity of the religious, the "sacred testimony," resists fiercely all globo-Latinization, according to Derrida.  It is not radical evil - though it can become "evil" - so much as radical exceptionality.

Radical exceptionality is exactly what the world is up against, and any summons for a "return of Enlightenment" to counter the "return of religion" is prone to disaster.  As Derrida says in "Faith and Knowledge" the coming of this exceptionality, constituted not only as a "return" but as an "event", "ought to puncture every horizon of expectation." 

911 was such a "puncture."  There are more to come. The Enlightenment brooks no aporias, which was Kant's project. 

But history - and the God of history if one wants to theologize about it - is a stern teacher, even for a rudderless West that desperately desires a Renaissance of its once glorious secular imperium, that wants a new Enlightenment.       

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver.

Specter and event

By Carl Raschke

I have awoken just about every morning for the last six weeks with the sense that this year is going to turn out to be an historically decisive one in terms of world events - like 1968, 1989, or even 2001. 

All I can say to justify this "sense" is that I have it.  Decisive years are different from specific events that are normally identified, or correlated, with such a time frame.  Their "eventfulness" cannot usually be ascribed to one great thing, or event (in the singular), that happened and is remembered - the uprising in Paris, the fall of the Berlin Wall, what we now call "9/11", etc.  

Philosophically, I draw my understanding of the event from Alain Badiou, who develops it from Deleuze.  "The event is not actually internal to the analytic of the multiple," Badiou writes on p. 178 of Being and Event (trans. Oliver Feltham, Continuum Publishing, 2005), that is, in our case to the sequential generation of the moments of recent history.  "Even though it can always be localized within presentation, it is not, as such, presented, nor is it presentable."  Badiou distinguishes between a fact (i.e., "of history") and an event. 

Unlike the trace, which pertains to the text, or khora, which belongs to the empty spacings of logos in its coursings, spectrality is what stalks history.  It is akin to Badiou's "event site."  It is not a generatrix (as would khora), but a hidden and persistent parameter of what takes place.  Yet it remains clandestine.  The "specter" of Marx about which Derrida wrote in the early 1990sis neither "joined to" (gefügt an) to the present nor "available to" (verfügbar) present cognition.  Its time dimension is obscure.  That is why it remains a specter.

A fact has a simple, or singular, location within history, but no historicity.  But the "historicity" of the event, for Badiou is different from Heidegger's historicity.   The difference does not merely lie in Badiou's efforts to contextualize the theory of the event in mathematics, in set theory.  Events, according to Badiou, are "localizable," yet not "presentable."  What does that really mean? 

Events are singularities that belong to the "form-multiple of historicity."   Events in this way "occur" always within what Badiou terms an "evental site."  An evental site "is an entirely abnormal multiple, that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation."  Only the site is presented.  Badiou gives as an illustration a "case of a concrete family, all of whose members were clandestine or non-declared, and which presents itself (manifests itself publicly) uniquely in the group form of family outings." (p. 175)  Badiou may have in mind, of course, the conspiratorial, Maoist cadres to which he once belonged, but that is really beside the point. 

The tension is not, as in Heidegger, between the "revealing" and "concealing" of that which is, but between our tendency to demand "empirical" substantiation of what we consider to be the case and our recognition - ever since at least the advent of quantum physics - that what we observe may not be what is there, or was there, because it has now been transformed through observation.

By now one should properly deduce that I am not warming up for one more, tiresome pontification on how significant Obama's presidence supposedly is.  Obama's election is only a fact of history - and a significant one, in terms of the order of multiples, to say the least.  But there is no "eventfulness" to it.  In fact, very little other than the obvious has really happened. 

I am saying, boldly, that we are coursing through an "event site" of which the significations have to remain hidden (according to Badiou's theory itself).  I've never been able to prove that Badiou all along has been reading Bultmann's theology of several generations ago about the "Christ event" that is historical, though unintelligible to history itself.  But these associations are not merely aleatory.   It is not accidental that Badiou's well-received book on St. Paul really complements Bultmann, or that Badiou himself is a source of growing fascination among a newer generation of "postmodern" academic theologians (though they all struggle to follow him half the time, as they once did with Derrida).  Badiou is probably more instructive for latter day "Bultmannians", since he has unshackled himself from Heidegger, which Bultmann couldn't. 

But I digress.   What has compelled me to reflect of late along these lines is not a closer reading of Badiou, but a re-reading of the "later" Derrida, in particular his own "eventful" book Specters of Marx.   Composed ostensibly in its historical situatedness as a rejoinder to the soaring popularity of Francis Fukayama's dawn chant (in his bestseller The End of History and the Last Man) to the rising sun of neo-liberalism upon the occasion of Communism's worldwide collapse, Specters of Marx of course inaugurates an alternate "messianism" to Fukuyama's.  The messianism of the "democracy to come."  Now that Fukuyama's world vision has itself gone up in flames, Derrida's naturally seems more prescient, even though few have figured out what the latter was really going after.  Derrida's messianism without a messiah is not a readily usable "political" tool of analysis, even among the trendiest genus of current, postmodern "democrats", and the slowly fading glow of messianic Obamaism will not make much difference in the long run either.

After spending the past two weeks in conversations with my students in the advanced Derrida seminar I am currently teaching at the University of Denver, I can only say that Derrida's so-called "political" writings are not about "messianism" so much as it about "specters", as the title of the book makes clear.  I would assert boldly that the "three ages", or stages, of Derrida's philosophical development - early, middle, and late, as conventional nomenclature would have it - can be "marked" (deconstructively, to be sure) respectively by each of the following terms - "trace", "khora", and specter." 

Now, on a blog, I will not even attempt some arcane and elaborate justification, with proper proof-texting, of this contention.   But I will say that the "evolution" of these terms can be fleshed out with respect to the larger themes, or philosophical issues, that Derrida took up - again respectively - in the unfolding of his prolific writing career.  The trace calls our attention to the way in which the singular "presence-ness", the material "haeccity" (as Deleuze would phrase it), of the written inscription resets the entire question of Being, which Heideggerian "fundamental ontology" sought to "overcome."  The khora indicates the fertile and "pregnant" space of the mystical moment into which the trace vanishes - hence postmodern "negative theology"  and the whole trail of neo-Derridean, "religionless" prayers and tears. 

The specter, however, is what "haunts" us at particular time, and will not go away.  The specter does not vanish, like the trace, but returns.  It is a ghost, a revenant.  Yet it is not something, simply like a ghost, that once lived and now cannot be stuffed away in mere historical memory.  The Marxian specter, at least so far as Derrida meant it, never really lived to begin with.  In that sense it is more closely akin to Badiou's "event site."  It is not a generatrix (like khora), but a persistent parameter that remains hidden within the flux of multiples. It is a "secret" of what takes place. 

In 1993 Derrida perhaps had an "uncanny" intuition that Fukuyama's realized apocalypse of absolute spirit in the form of global capitalism was a fantasy rather than an affirmation.  On the other hand, his sense of the messianic-democratic may also be read in hindsight prove itself to be something of a fantasy as well - a French one, possibly, of which every recherche experience on Bastille day offers some vague inkling.  If subsequent history provides guidance, the title of the book could just as well have been Specters of Mohammed.

The "messianic" spectrality of Derrida's political writings is more haunting than politics itself.  In 1993 Derrida had not totally recognized, or begun to come to terms with, the "specter" of his own Judaism anyway.  Such spectrality draws us closer, I believe, to what Badiou was thinking about events.

The phenomenon of Derrida itself can be seen perhaps as an event-site which remains invisible against the tangible presentation of the intellectual and cultural history of the last thirty years.  We have been attentive to something clumsily marked as the "postmodern."  but we have been oblivious to what might be spectrally stalking us.  Particularly in America, we have reframed rather tired old debates in terms of the alleged influence of this "specter", but we have failed to appreciate its own power as that which is still "to come" (avenir).

In the last decade postmodern thought has largely degenerated, like a CNN or Fox News segment, into a parade before the camera of established "experts", or luminaries, coming from opposite sides on the same-old-same-old and taking strategic shots at each other.  The current scholarly celebration of the conversation between Žižek and Milbank in The Monstrosity of Christ is a case in point.  I quote from the book blurb by the publisher.

"In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion’s illusions; in the other corner, “Radical Orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand...Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed."

For something like this "conversation" to receive so much attention fifteen years ago would have been unthinkable.   I haven't read the book yet, and I'm sure it's illuminating in many ways, but come on!  I'm reminded of the BBC debates between Father Copleston and Bertrand Russell in the 1960s.  Erudite atheist versus erudite theologue.  Only the names and the styles of argument have changed.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  Since when was postmodernism about deciding on what "foundation" to rest classical arguments?   I thought foundationalism had been left in the dust.

When what was once avante-garde becomes merely a cool kind of retro, you know you're in a rut.  But, as Hegel said - actually rather cryptically - about the painting of grays in grays, something may be happening here, but you don't know what it is. 

As Derrida points out, specters "appear" through conveyance as much from the future as from the past.  This bidirectionality, or bi-vectoring of their appearance, which is key to what Deleuze characterizes as an event in keeping with the "logic of sense", renders any representation of what is actually happening impossible.  Specters of something that remains so hidden by what has gone on, even in the now foregone age of Derrida, that people - as Marx said of the regimes of "Old Europe" - try either to ignore it, hunt it down, or stamp it out before it manifests.  

Since blogs are supposed to be more chatty and down-to-earth than any philosophical disquisition, if not perhaps running commentary on what is current and "newsworthy", I hope you can please pardon me for refusing to name whatever I sense. I could say I "seem" to sense this or that, but specters are always ambiguous and ambivalent.   

This blog was inaugurated last fall, just about the time that the world economy seemed to be careening toward collapse and a new political order seemed to be sweeping in on a heady tide from the future.  If what was occuring during that brief time interval could have been "sensed" as a messianic moment (after all, the messianic irruption is always preceded by great tribulation), something else is wafting in on the breeze.  I call your attention to the latest editorial in London's Financial Times.  The time may be "out of joint", as Shakespeare says and as Derrida cites as the condition for the spectral manifestation of the messianic.  But the way things "appear", according to the edtiorial, have become increasingly opaque and unintelligible.  The Times writer quotes another famous line of Shakespeare - "a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing."

One is reminded instead of Nietzsche's "specter" at the opening of The Will to Power.  "Nihilism stands at the door.  Whence comes this strangest of guests",  the most unsettling of any revenant?

Not a "democracy to come", but something simultaneously even more glorious and severe. What is "to come" must first  overcome. Nietzsche was transfixed with a sense of overcoming of humanity, the "overman."  But after a false messianic dawn has passed a new eventfulness is brewing.

What is more glorious than the "specter" Derrida names the "impossible."

Specters of the eschata.

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver.

Habit and errors and composition

By Adam Katz

Everything stays the same but composition, says Gertrude Stein.  So, what is “everything,” and what is “composition”?  (For that matter, what is the “same”?) Everything is all that falls below the threshold of our attentiveness, what remains as background, noise, the field of semblances, subsumed within habit.  Composition is the raising and lowering of that threshold.  In her “Reflection on the Atomic Bomb” Stein asserted that

What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting…

The atomic bomb is the same as everything else that destroys—if unleashed, it will kill 10 million, maybe 100 million, maybe more, but that’s just some amount more than is killed by a murderer or garden variety terrorist.  If we go about living our lives when we hear about the latter, we will do the same when we hear about the former.  Our lives may become different, but what do you mean by that—at what point does more violence and destruction mark a qualitative transformation compared to the previous “level” of violence and destruction, and at what point does the bundle of activities comprising our daily habits, which is anyway always undergoing silent revolutions, become a different way of living?  There are still lots of interesting things and lots of ways of being interested in them and the rest we can’t do anything about.

What ties us to the world are ostensive and imperative signs:  our desires and rivalries produce rifts, within each of us and between all of us; in the midst of these desires and rivalries for centrality we stumble upon the materials displaced by the nihilistic tenor of our urgencies and find ways to piece them together—we attend from some material (say, some previously overlooked habit) which is thereby converted into a sign and to the object we were pursuing, interrupting our pursuit, creating shared distance.  Even more, we compose those materials, attending from and to each of its “parts” in turn, conferring upon it a formal and transcendent reality.  The object we were pursuing is now framed, and accessible only via established rules and rituals.

These signs are named, and we command the names to remain in place until the names command us to model our activities on the process of their own composition.  Our discourse, our sentences do little more than transcribe these commands, but what is interesting is that we get them wrong.  Error is co-constitutive with norm:  we imitate the small details when it is the broader intention we must be limning; we become “big-picture guys” when the devil is in the details.  And so habit becomes the idiosyncratic composition of the center, as we establish commerce between all of our names, establish conformity across the field of imperatives we obey, and are then driven into new desires and rivalries by strange names and commands that are nothing more than the malapropisms of our habits. 

So, what, exactly, do we think will happen with the global economy?  Unemployment will go up—how much—2 points? 4 points? 10 points?  Will our credit cards no longer work?  If we move our money out of the volatile stock market, will our insured bank deposits then vaporize?  Will agriculture cease; will there no longer be anyone to transport goods to market? I wouldn’t discount any of these possibilities—although I will note that I almost never hear any descent into such specifics in all the panic talk (which, I also note, at times suddenly morphs into speculation regarding whether we will start coming out of the recession this Fall or next Spring—in short, nobody knows anything). 

Habits won’t cease, though, and just as we can raise the threshold above which we notice difference, we can lower the threshold—more likely than government finding a way to restore corporate health or put people to work is people establishing new economic and social networks on the margins of their intersecting habits.  And we will thereby rediscover the laws of complementarity:  if the market crashes, maybe that is just a return to the true value of the commodities circulating through it; if official money ceases to measure anything reliably people will find other measures; if the rules seeking to prevent in advance insecurities, violence and error start to paralyze creative activity, people will seek out new trade-offs between these various goods; if regulators are, as they likely will be, as unable to predict values 2, 3, 10 years down the road as the participants in the market themselves, then transparency will be the only check on inordinate risk and will itself become among the highest of values.  Perhaps strategies—of the kind one would expect all good postmodernists to applaud—of fleeing established centers, which become chokeholds with increasing rapidity, and establishing novel ones, will proliferate and not so much “resist” domination as seek to render it incoherent.

I confess I am less sanguine about the Global Intifada.  The Global Intifada might best be seen as the embodiment of Aime Cesaire’s remark, prescient, insightful and vicious all at once, that the West only cared about the Holocaust because the victims were white.  It is true—the mass industrialized slaughter of Europe’s Jews became the foundational event of the postmodern, victimary era, because it—in the light of the new possibilities revealed by the atomic bomb—disclosed the possibility for universal destruction at the heart of the rivalries among the Western powers that culminated in the immolation. 

It is true that in the event itself, the colonized world, those behind the “color line,” were a side show at best.  Cesaire’s remark also revealed, though, that the future of the event lay in the rise to centrality of this side show—that the ethical effect of the virtually universally shared horror at the scene of Auschwitz would be to place under the severest scrutiny, even if not all at once, every invidious distinction, even the most implicit, between one category of humans and another; and every claim to expert neutrality, scientific objectivity and procedural probity, which had all after all just been put to work in discovering, justifying, and implementing the most invidious of imaginable distinctions.  And it is vicious in the way it sets the terms for this overturning of margin and center:  in the end, the Holocaust must be taken away from the Jews, and what better way to do so than to represent the Jews as the new Nazis?

Barack Obama, in his inaugural address, announced that the world is changing and we must change with it.  A sentence both leaden and brutal.  He must know how, exactly, the world is changing (he has commanded the world to come together as a model and has mapped out the imperatives we must follow in adhering to that model) and is either objectively describing the laws of reality (of which he is mere executor) which will force us to change accordingly or letting us know that he is determined, as voluntaristic subject, to force us to change.  The world is always changing, and each of us is always changing at some angle to those of the world and the world is no more than all these angles.  The Progressivist imperative, reiterated here in warmed over fashion by Obama, has always been a nihilistic metaphysics—now it has become the defense attorney of a burgeoning death cult. 

The dictum composed by the “imperialist” bogeyman Churchill is far more valuable than Obama’s hideous bromides:  democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.  We will always be dissatisfied with democracy, that dissatisfaction will periodically reach such a pitch that we are tempted to throw it all away for some other system—formerly, more authentic and unmediated; now, less wasteful, smarter, more inclusive and shock-resistant, until we acquire the static hysteria of the blackmail victim who is not quite sure that he’ll never run out of ransom money.  And we will always come to realize that precisely this set of dissatisfactions and the way it sets and sustains each of us amidst and among all the rest is democracy.  Or at least we can always be coming to believe that such is the case. 

Gertrude Stein also said that she liked having habits but didn’t like others talking about her habits—this by way of explaining why she wasn’t a utopian.  Having habits, loving one’s habits, riding one’s habits, slavishly following one’s habits, finding extensions of one’s habits in the world and getting into the habit of finding in the world providential interference with and cause for revising one’s habits—this is not a bad definition of freedom.  Having other people get into the habit of explaining one’s habits, cataloguing them, diagnosing and reordering them in accord with some template—that is not a bad definition of tyranny. 

Deeper than liberalism and democracy is the imperative order—the realm in which commands are spontaneously issued and obeyed, where the proximity of emergency is more real than the ever lowering threshold of victimage.  Habit is deeply rooted in the imperative order—it is an idiosyncratic method of preparing for emergency by keeping sharp the distinction between what must be kept close and hand and what can be let go.  Like habit, the imperative order is most effective when unnoticed:  that is, when security is ensured unobtrusively.  And therefore easily forgotten or demonized until it is essential.  At some point the dominant men in the community must have willingly devoted themselves to defending the weak against other men like themselves, and this initiated the process whereby they came to subordinate their own imperative order to the declarative order of principles (“all men are created equal”).  Only then is freedom possible—only when those willing to risk their own lives to ensure that participants in exchange can complete their exchange unmolested outnumber those for whom exchange is fraud or easy pickings do we have freedom. 

The perpetual composition of habits is sensitive to such conversions; indeed, it may be that the transformation of rituals into habits relies upon this kind of conversion—Stein insisted that verbs were interesting because there are so many ways they can be mistaken, in my last post I argued that sentences transform names into recipients and sources of imperatives, and now I can say that the connection between verbs and imperatives lies in the fact that it is first of all imperatives that can so easily and interestingly be mistaken—and so sentences are in essence the collaborative process of converting those errors which arrest our collisions into the material of norms. 

The continuance and constant adjustment on exposure to reality of our own habits depends upon the covenants among those who seek mutual insurance for the errors consequent upon their imperatives.  And so the vast field of centrifugal, eccentric habits depends upon and flows back into those social sites based upon explicit, publicly shared habits.  Having the courage of our habits will enable us to affirm reality in the errors of our self-issued imperatives, the ones we forget and call habits, and that provide us with a source of revelation in anything that suddenly lies outside of our habit as part of our composition. 

The convergence between novel compositions and ferocity harnessed and directed toward those who would hold civilization hostage by targeting its most vulnerable members and interstices—this is the answer to the Global Intifada.  It’s not the answer we seem ready to provide right now, but it is encoded in the habits and composition of freedom—freedom, nothing more than no one, including you, knowing what you are going to do next, what you are about to tell yourself to do and what will then count, for you, as having done whatever you have come to be told by yourself.

Politics is for protecting the dominion of habit and helping it become self-reflexive and open to novel compositions.  The inertia of the other’s habits needs to be converted into the materials of one’s own composition.  We might think about such a politics as a series of assignments we give to each other, assignments that would take the general form of, “by all means keep doing whatever you are doing but just take into account this one thing I’m doing—and I will begin by doing what I’m doing and taking into account one thing of yours.”  These should be the rules of political exchange—anyone who’s not ready to go first in some proposed reciprocity should be boycotted.  Convert the courage of your habits into the habit of encouraging others to compose with your habits. 

Adam Katz teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.  He is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis:  A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry and an editor of Anthropoetics, the on-line journal of Generative Anthropology.

Born Again

By Colbey Emmerson Reid

Neil Marshall’s 2006 horror film The Descent is about six female high-risk adventurers who get lost in an uncharted Appalachian cave system inhabited by cannibalistic monsters. These turn out to be an undiscovered species of southerners produced through inbreeding, perfectly adapted to live alone in solitary pockets of the mountains until it’s time to go hunting.  You know, just like the real ones.

Naturally, the entryway to the cave collapses, the spelunkers are separated, and the women’s only hope of survival is to find another exit while evading the creatures. The women who try to outwit the monsters with their more highly evolved brains, like the English teacher and zoology doctoral candidate, who determines her opponents hunt by sound and can be eluded by silence, are the first to go. The only way to survive against the so-called “crawlers” is by becoming as feral as they, which is to say, by hacking them to pieces with climbing tools before they rip your throat out.

The “descent” of the title thus alludes to Darwin’s The Descent of Man, in which the biologist explains that animals differ in gradations from human beings rather than qualitatively. The women in the cave discover that their distinction from the extant cave men and women diminishes the longer they survive, thus illustrating a downward drag within the principle of natural selection. For instance, one of the women, Sarah, cowers in a hole in the wall for a little while, watching the crawlers feed on one of her friends. When they’re distracted by the sounds of the other lost women who are shouting for each other in the dark, Sarah emerges to try to help a second friend, Beth, who’s wounded, immobile, and clearly the next course.

Sarah has a good cry and considers crawling back into her nook, but in the end instinct takes over. She bashes Beth’s brains out with a rock so she’ll be dead when the crawlers get to her, and then bludgeons her way through a crowd of monsters until she falls into a sinkhole. When Sarah emerges, gasping for air, she pulls herself out of the hole, kills another couple of crawlers, and lifts her weapon high in her best conquering hero pose. The blood and mud on her face make her look like a highland warrior, an archetypal figure for victory won through violence—ironically, though, the Scotch herdsmen who cultivated a reputation for hair-trigger tempers and merciless reprisal in order to protect their sheep from thieves are also the ancestors of Appalachian mountain people. Sarah’s competition for survival draws out her likeness to what she is trying to escape. In one scene, she butchers a family of crawlers offered by the film as effigies of Sarah, her husband, and her child.

The evolutionary nightmare is only half the story. The other half is a psychological thriller focused on the aftereffects of the death by the impaling of Sarah’s husband and daughter in a head-on collision with a pole-laden car on the way home from a white water rafting adventure. After navigating the rapids while her family watches, Sarah notices that her husband seems distracted and Beth notices that he’s very attentive to one of the other women, Juno. The car crash occurs shortly afterwards; Sarah’s husband looks away from the road when she asks him why he’s been distant, and the next thing Sarah knows she’s waking up in a hospital, looking for her child, and then sprinting down a corridor as the lights behind her blacken. At the end of the hall, she collides with Beth and the news that her family is dead.

The descent into the cave one year later parallels the corridor in the hospital, the former echoing the latter and framing the “adventure” as an effort to escape a psychological descent into darkness. Sarah struggles with hallucinations of her daughter that paralyze her; we watch her leave the present, her face going blank and her body limp as her mind becomes absorbed in time. Crawling through a tight pipe later on Sarah has a panic attack, and Beth’s words as she’s trying to calm her gasping friend say it all: “the worst thing that could happen has already happened. There’s nothing else to be afraid of.” Of course, she doesn’t know about the inbred southerners yet—but it’s clear that Marshall means to carve two stories out of one, to trump the trumped-up creature feature with a real-live horror, the kind of horror anyone might experience and be ruined by. In a genre that always offers survival as the ultimate prize—in this sense, all horror films are the invention of evolutionary biology—Marshall wants us to wonder whether staying alive is enough.

By introducing an ordinary trauma into the Darwinian parable, Marshall thus produces the kind of “monstrous misreading of Darwin” that Elizabeth Grosz (The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Duke University Press, 2004) has attributed to Nietzsche, who contended that Darwin’s construction of evolution produced an environmental fatalism designed to make nothing more than “the weak…the herd…the servile…the low…the mediocre”—in short, “the boring” (100-101).  Nietzsche represents himself as the “anti-Darwin” (101), a champion of the exceptional, the unrepeatable. Against the vicissitudes of natural selection he posits his own principle, the will to power, defined as a longing—indeed, a demand—not simply for adaptation but “exaptation” (101): the excess of survival.

In The Descent, while the other adventurers are stock characters whose fitness is tested by circumstances, Sarah conquers the crawlers because her past provisions her with a will to seek something beyond the merely human as it is defined by biology and produced by nature. The will to power, which is a form of playfulness with the vast waste, or inutility, that Nietzsche discovers everywhere within the system to which Darwin ascribed scarcity and efficiency, wants more than simple subsistence and reproduction. It seeks profusion, luxury, abundance, an elevation of the organism above itself. What Sarah must discover in the cave, an allegory for her mind, is whether she will be rendered mentally and emotionally dead by her past: will she just get by, or will she find her way to joy again.

It is not Sarah, though, but Juno who first exerts the will to power, and who invites Sarah to do so too. She reminds the group of their motto: “if there’s no risk, what’s the point?” and ensures that their adventure will be dangerous by filing the wrong cave with the forestry service and lying to the others about the difficulty of the cave they’ll be exploring. Juno’s extension of the invitation to risk is designed to help Sarah as well as herself. She apologizes to Sarah for leaving so quickly after her family’s death the year before, telling Beth, who berates her for it, that “we all lost something” in the accident. Though it sounds like Juno is rehearsing the cliché of her lost sense of immortality, in fact we know because we’re shown the tender glances she exchanges with Sarah’s husband right before he dies that Juno is speaking literally: she lost him. Juno wants the latest adventure to be an occasion for rejuvenation. She tells Sarah, once they’re trapped in the cave, that she wants them to discover something new and name the cave: “Maybe your name,” she offers—and Sarah challenges, “Or yours.” This is the classic scenario of the will to power, which either shapes or is shaped by matter.

Sarah misunderstands. She accuses Juno of endangering the group by taking them on an ego trip, but she’s got it wrong. Neither the adventure nor the will to power is about ego.  They’re about wagering the self against an expansion: they’re about transcendence. For Juno, the appearance of the crawlers is a fortunate disaster. They raise the stakes, as the will to power desires the greater tension that will drive it toward greater accomplishment. Juno’s goal is to make it out alive with Sarah so that both women can be reborn, in part because the rebirth of each is dependent on her alliance with the other. When Juno discovers markings on the cave walls suggesting an alternate exit, Sarah is lost and Juno tells the other women that she’s not leaving without Sarah. Her refusal to leave without her rival, whom she treats only as an ally, testifies to her desire to extract herself from the conventional rivalry narrative. Juno wears a charm around her neck engraved with the words “love each day,” a testimony to the renewed jubilation she seeks to uncover for herself and friend by refusing the conventional narrative of envy and competition between women.

Indeed, Marshall suggests the alternative paradigm through an implied lesbian relationship between Juno and a younger woman euphemistically referred to as her “prodigée.” In the context of Juno’s Roman name, a relationship that might otherwise seem maternal is eroticized. Juno is determined to offer Sarah this alternative as well. But Sarah recognizes “love each day” as something her husband used to say. When she and Juno meet again after wandering alone through the cave, everyone else is dead. They follow the markings Juno found on the wall, butchering crawlers together with easy grace. It appears as though they will triumph together, and emerge reinvigorated by their survival—which Marshall has begun to trope as trivial; it’s just not that difficult for them.

At the last moment, however, Sarah confronts Juno with the engraved charm necklace Beth snatched from Juno’s neck before falling into the pit with Sarah. Sarah knows that Juno left Beth for dead, and that she’d hoped the knowledge of Sarah’s husband’s unfaithfulness would die with her. Juno is trying to rewrite history in order to produce a more bearable future, a future that will not end in descent, the living death of those buried alive by an emotional catastrophe. She doesn’t want to be merely alive. But Sarah is caught in the throes of ressentiment, an inability to “digest the past and be rid of it” (116). For her the past keeps coming on strong, it “returns to haunt the present” literally in Sarah’s recurring fantasy of her daughter’s birthday party, and thereby overshadows all futures.

Marshall suggests that it is not environmental fatalism that ruins Sarah but her own inability to become “untimely” by removing herself from the constraints of a present too fully circumscribed within the past. Her alternative is to extract something from the past which will reshape the present, and it’s easy for the audience to see how Sarah’s history could explain to her the plausibility of difference, a “tension with the present which [could] move [her] to a future in which the present can no longer recognize itself” (117). We—like Beth—have noticed that Sarah’s marriage was falling apart anyway, that in losing it she wasn’t losing anything. Sarah’s anger with Juno is all about revenge for a loss that should now be beside the point. Juno seems to have understood this; she turns to her friend to help recover from the loss of something she too never had. Nevertheless, Sarah turns her weapon on Juno in a fury, the only new story she can put together is one in which her daughter dies because her husband is distracted by Juno. She hacks into Juno’s leg with a scythe and leaves her crippled and weaponless to a fresh onslaught of crawlers.

Sarah makes it out of the cave, and Marshall plays up what will become the film’s great irony by accompanying Sarah’s emergence from the ground with a high, spiraling camera and majestic orchestral music. She claws her way up a tunnel lined with bones, pushes her hand through a thin covering of dirt and moss, and hoists her body from the earth in a scene the audience recognizes from vampire and zombie movies. This should be our first clue that all is not as well as it seems, since in horror movies that which crawls from the ground is only ever “undead.” When Sarah’s head pops out of the ground she draws a deep breath, a baby’s first breath on emerging from the womb: she thinks she’s born again having slain her demons (avenged her child’s death), which she believes—mistakenly—to be Juno.

Back at the car, Sarah careens out of the woods, pulls over to the roadside, and is nearly hit by a truck. This is the first hint that the past isn’t vanquished, that she’s in the throes of the demonic repetition of that other post-adventure head-on collision. Sarah recognizes this, but she still thinks she’s won. She thrusts her head out the window and vomits water like a drowned woman resuscitated. Slowly, with relief, she draws her head back into the car. She’s ready to drive away from the cave now, it’s over. She looks to her right and finds—the bloodied ghost of Juno in the passenger seat. The screen goes black: “the darkness” (the film’s original title) that Sarah’s been running from since the hospital corridor is upon her.

The ending, revised from the British version in which Sarah dies in the cave for American audiences who wanted a happy ending, questions whether mere survival can constitute happiness (the competing resolutions illustrate the difference between American and continental philosophical constructions of happiness). Sarah gets out of the cave alive, but she’s trapped in the madness of a future that only repeats the past with a different face attached to it. Having traded hallucinations of her dead daughter for hallucinations of her dead friend, unable to think her way out of the misery of eternal repetition, she is caught in the hell of a Darwinian descent in which beings become only that which has been selected by their history.

Sarah has been reborn exactly the same, and the real horror of “The Descent” is not about crawlers or even being trapped alive and forgotten in a cave beneath the earth. It’s about the inability to create a new self through rebirth, the bitter disappointment of a self that becomes merely itself again. Sarah’s hope for something else has been left in the cave with her leg chopped off. But while Sarah’s survival is hardly a happy ending, her friend, who submits to the strike rather than fighting back—as she is clearly equipped to do—has realized the Nietzchean promise of the Overman by not merely accepting but willing the accident that happens to her, thereby achieving the nobility of “a kind of happy self-annihilation” (102). The Overman is a more-than-human-being which ascends not by evading, forgetting, or even remembering the past but by willing its eternal return.

For Nietzsche, the eternal return is the extraordinary acceptance of fated events as willed events, an invitation to them to happen again, no matter how mundane, humiliating, emotionally withering, or physically destructive. While Juno could have elected to defend herself against Sarah the way she did against the crawlers, this would have been to fall back into the clichéd narrative of erotic rivalry between women and deny herself the new being she’s been pursuing in the cave. Since “‘becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated…it is not too much to say that even…death…is among the conditions of an actual progressus’”; indeed, “‘the magnitude of an “advance” can even be measured by the mass of things that has to be sacrificed to it’” (Nietzsche, quoted in Grosz, 108-109).

Marshall seems to think that the original ending, in which Sarah kills her friend and then purposely succumbs to the crawlers, would have been “happier,” as it would have reflected the Overman’s will for the eternal return of her loss. As it is, all that can return is more of the same—The Descent 2 is due to be released in 2009, with Sarah haunted by hallucinations of an event she neither remembers nor understands, forced back into the cave that nearly killed her, doomed to the horrible repetition not only of her trauma, but also—should she survive again—the disappointing rebirth of an identical subject. Marshall offers a cautionary fairy tale against being born again into a demonic repetition, and proposes conventionally “sinful” behaviors (lying, murder, lesbianism, suicide) as lining a path towards that genuine paradigm shift which is constitutes a genuine resurrection story.

Colbey Emmerson Reid is Assistant Professor of Modern Literature Department of English and Humanities York College of Pennsylvania.  She can be reached at creid@ycp.edu.

Originary grammar - part 2

R.C. Collingwood exposed a basic principle of Western metaphysics when he noted that “[t]he logician’s proposition seemed to me a kind of ghostly double of the grammarian’s sentence… Grammar recognizes a form of discourse called the sentence, and among sentences…one kind which express[es] statements  In grammatical phraseology, these are indicative sentences; and logicians have almost always tried to conceive the ‘unit of thought’, or that which is either true or false, as a kind of logical ‘soul’ whose linguistic ‘body’ is the indicative sentence.”  Eric Gans’ originary hypothesis enables us to pursue further the implications of this observation regarding the reduction of claims about reality to true or false propositions modeled upon the indicative sentence.  Gans defines metaphysics as that form of thought that presupposes the primacy of the declarative sentence.   Metaphysics thereby obscures the primacy of the ostensive sign, and the secondariness of the imperative. 

The purpose of this obfuscation in ancient and modern Enlightenments is to neutralize the power of the ostensive:  as the originary sign, the ostensive defers violence and constitutes the community around a central, sacred object; however, once contending sacralities struggle to occupy the same space the power of the ostensive becomes a source of violence.  Metaphysics attempts to do the work done by ritual in the more compact community—it defers violence in a world where market interaction breaks the bonds of ritual by placing the representation of a reality that transcends all specific desires and demands at the ethical center of society.

It is in his first book on the originary hypothesis The Origin of Language (1980) that Gans traces the emergence of the declarative sentence from the originary scene.  As I pointed out in my previous post, the originary sign “saturates” the scene which it constitutes—it would best be “translated” as the Name-of-God but a more “literal” translation would be something more along the lines of God-whom-you-must-not-encroach-upon-on-pain-of-immediate-cataclysm-stop-right-there-don’t-dare-take-that-next-step-you-are-considering-right-now…  As long as the ostensive sign is the only sign, it would generate such scenes, resolving imminent conflicts, enhancing the cohesion and “inter-operability” of the nascent community.  Its iterability and usefulness, though, would keep lowering the threshold of mimetic rivalry at which it could be introduced—more simply, it would become increasingly mundane as the singularity of its designation of the center is modified by its more variegated deployments. 

I am, then, suggesting the emergence of something like a “vocabulary,” of a system of signs alongside the transcendence of the originary sign.  Somewhere along the way a human being issues what Gans calls the “inappropriate ostensive,” designating an object that isn’t there.  When the inappropriate ostensive is met by a retrieval of the named object, it becomes the imperative sign.  Since the threshold for putting forth a sign has been lowered, so that signs become meaningful in non-critical situations, imperatives can alternate with ostensives in minimally conflictual ways—indeed, imperatives can only be meaningful with an ostensive at the “end” of it.  If I demand something of you, not only is my demand not fulfilled, but I have no evidence that you have understood my demand, or even that I have made it correctly, until you produce whatever it is I am demanding. 

In this world of ostensives and what we can call ostensive-imperative articulations the uses of signs are still limited by the proximity of some object.  Objects demanded, acts commanded, must be produced and carried out within some very determinate temporal frame—otherwise, the linguistic acts will “expire.”  The creation of a “reality” that transcends the immediate proximity of some object that might be shared, contended over, requested, requires a different linguistic form.  For Gans (still in The Origin of Language) the origin of that new linguistic form, the declarative sentence, is to be found in what he calls the “negative ostensive”:  an imperative goes unfulfilled (it can’t be fulfilled; it is refused—could there be any means of making this distinction at this point?), but remains unappeased.  Conflict arises, and at least a mini-crisis looms.  Neither “interlocutor” wishes to push further, but neither can simply retreat.  The imperative is “softened” into an interrogative (the imperative repeated in a less peremptory way); a question creates space for “dialogue” that a command or demand excludes.  The word remains the same, only the “tone” and “posture” of the “interrogator” changes; and the word remains the same when the “answer” is put forth:  the same word, “inflected” differently, instead of the object.  Once this linguistic exchange is completed successfully, we have the first sentence:  topic+comment, (the object) (not here). 

A space for the declarative sentence has now been opened up—if the “claim” that the object is not here “makes sense” (appeases whoever makes the demand) then it would make sense that it could be elsewhere, anywhere else, and other “predications” become possible.  At some point (and here my own hypothesizing takes over from what I hope has been an accurate account of Gans’ argument in The Origin of Language) the ostensive is conjoined with a fresh imperative, issued by the recipient of the original one, as there will be questions that require a path, however mediated, back to the object if they are to be “answered” (and not revert back into more menacing or importunate imperatives). Here we would have a clear separation and articulation of parts of speech (Name-of-Object—Place-Name/Direction), and once imperatives can be placed alongside ostensive naming the name is subjected to imperatives in general and thereby embedded in a sustainable reality, beyond anyone’s grasp

Here, we would have a noun and a verb.  It helps, I believe, if we view this ostensive-imperative linguistic articulation as a sequence of “inappropriate” usages on a succession of scenes.  Since our very distinction between different speech-act forms is artificial at this point, the first imperative could easily have been put forth (“intended”) more as a kind of “adjective”—it would become a verb, and become “transitive,” once acted upon and hence extended beyond its site of articulation.  In turn, such an imperative issued by the recipient of a demand back to his interlocutor (following an insufficient negative ostensive) gets transferred to the object; once transferred to the object, the imperative could be coming from anywhere (imperatives have already been exchanged with God in the ritual scene). The sentence is itself, in a sense, an imperative directed toward the object—all these vectors of command enmesh the name-of-the-object in reality, out of anyone’s reach, turning it into a source of imperatives itself. Now we would have genuinely autonomous objects moving through what I would propose calling a “field of semblances”.  If a “semblance” is something that is simultaneously sign and object (object when we—to use Michael Polanyi’s terms—attend to it, possessively; sign when we attend from it to something else), reality itself is a field of semblances created by us through the use of sentences which give objects their own life and thereby require that we devise formal mediations (compromises and covenants with objects that add new layers of complexity to our reciprocal compromises and covenants with each other) in order to arrange for their reliable availability, as signs and objects. 

Sentences, moreover, exist, sustain themselves, in a swirling pool of imperatives and interrogatives and are best made sense of as deferring and incorporating imperatives (through the mediation of questions).  Even more, they themselves generate imperatives, upon whose acknowledgement their intelligibility is contingent, directed toward the field of semblances:  “understanding” a sentence would involve obeying or resisting, iterating and complementing in words and deeds the ways it orders (strongly suggests/politely requests—anyway, one’s understanding is mediated by the softening of the imperative into a question) you to disperse the field of semblances around the name.  So, to put it a little idiosyncratically, a sentence is a name turned by order from marker of dangerous convergence to event.  A noun and a verb.  Imperatives come from all over, but let’s reduce it to three possibilities:  from another name; from reality; from the name itself.

 I’ll put forward the following hypothesis:  in any sentence (the exceptions will almost always be verbs that are tied to questioning), we can translate the verb into an imperative coming from one of those three origins.    Or, more precisely, some range of probability for imputing it to some distribution of those origins.  The composer of the sentence thereby preserves the name and insists you compose another sentence anticipating and forefending some possible convergence upon it.  It is then in the subsequent sentence that the distribution of possibilities in the previous one is established, as that subsequent sentence begins with the embedded request to authenticate ostensively the imperative embedded in the verb of the previous one.

Originary grammar is the mode of thinking within sentences, tracing the paths from ostensives (what was settled being put out of order) through imperatives (put it back in order!), the stalling of imperatives and their softening into interrogatives (what’s the best way of ordering?), and into the declarative sentence (here’s a range of possible orderings) and back into imperatives (tradition/reality/conscience dictates that…) that, fulfilled and ostensively “authenticated,” settle things just enough to maintain a tolerable threshold for the emergence of new ostensives. 

Thinking is itself obedience to the imperative (self-issued?  on compulsion from reality, rightly perceived? divinely imposed?  Perhaps the quality of thought is at stake) to suspend obedience to all imperatives as the various possible circulations of those imperatives can be iterated in sentences, sentences that keep deferring the imperatives embedded in previous sentences.  The most perfect issue of thinking is the maxim, simultaneously general in its implications, pragmatic in its applications, and paradoxical in its operations: the maxim is an imperative issued by the name to itself to single out an imperative from reality to obey..  For example:  thinking is obedience to the imperative to suspend all imperatives.

Metaphysics—like Hebraic and then Christian monotheism—emerges as an attempt to transcend scapegoating.  The Hebrew community, Socrates and Jesus all deliberately attract the desires and resentments of all—the revelation all these intellectual/spiritual movements share is that scapegoating, rather than saving the community, destroys it—from a more historical perspective we could say that this is the case past a certain level of social development, when the imperatives of scapegoating conflict with the necessary openness between communities connected through markets or empires.  But metaphysics never effectively extracts itself from the procedures of scapegoating, and while the revelations of the monotheistic faiths are inexhaustible, that of metaphysics has been drying up for centuries. 

If metaphysics is the mode of thought based upon the primacy of the declarative sentence, I would further refine that definition to say that metaphysics is the mode of thought that sees the declarative sentence solely as a conduit for the imperatives issued by reality.  Metaphysics confirms human nature from the standpoint of human mind; it replaces scapegoating with realism, which lets reality select the victim and establishes intermediary institutions to ensure for natural selection.  This was once progress—it delayed and somewhat neutralized socially legitimated violence, and helped prevent the further degeneration of that violence into out-and-out human sacrifice. 

Even now, with human sacrifice on the rise in, in particular, the practice of suicide bombing, we should be cautious in assaulting metaphysical modes of thought everywhere we find them.  But we cannot obey the realist imperative to set aside all concern with other ways of writing sentences, with the generation of idiosyncratic idioms through which self-issued imperatives of names and things make audible orders and orderings operating below standard thresholds, in the meantime. 

Next time, I will examine the syntax of contemporary victimary metaphysics and propose an originary thinking of error as a way of working the margins of the current tsunami of the Global Intifada and the global financial crisis.

Adam Katz teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.  He is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis:  A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry and an editor of Anthropoetics, the on-line journal of Generative Anthropology.

"Post-America" - an exchange

By David Hale

“When all truth is lost, we at least have irony.” I have always loved Kierkegaard for that remark. In close competition for my affections is Nietzsche’s “hope is the last cry of the slave class.” Is his not the season of the ironical slave? - A time of smug satisfaction that those who are more equal are now in charge of all the rest of the equals? - A time of hope that all things will turn out for the better because of some invisible guiding hand of goodness?

I fear I am hopelessly caught between Kierkegaard’s cynicism and Nietzsche’s utter lack of determinism. Without truth and without hope can there be any life at all? It is in this lifeless indeterminism, somewhere between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, that I wish to respond to Carl Raschke’s rather dark blogs.

Raschke has suggested (darkly) that this greatest nation in all of world history, may be past its nadir. Disregarding this nation’s founding by the hand of God, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and our brave troops fighting oversees… Or, failing that, disregarding this wonderful community of equality, liberality and change… Raschke has described this event horizon. In a decade, he says, we may witness the decline of our beloved America. In his estimation this is an era perhaps comparable to the Roman Empire at the time of Augustine whereas Rome had already been sacked once was headed towards rule by the papacy rather than Caesar. While Washington DC has not been sacked, the World Trade Towers have been destroyed.

Are predictions of America’s demise too soon? But it will happen sooner or later, should we not agree? Should there not be revelry for those who wandered so long in the wilderness as outcastes under the last administration? Why bother to conceive of a post-America? Isn’t this a time for rejoicing? Why try to think the unthinkable or imagine the unimaginable? And won’t we be worse off? - Huddled around open fires, at the mercy of the mob, the elements, and each other, like a pack of animals. This America is the land of law and education - can we imagine life better without either? And don’t we deserve better than the deprivation of the nomad, the Indian, and the aborigine? After all, slaves have been emancipated as have women. Aren’t we better because we know better?  Aren’t we more than equal because we know about equality? Don’t we deserve the better and not the worse? Maybe God did not found this country, but at least He ought to have.

Melville as given us a tale almost as entertaining as Augustine’s fanciful justifications for Christian war and Christian rule. Melville’s tale is of a Great White (rhymes with Male). Ahab’s obsession was with that great blank wall punctuated only be two black holes into which we see into all of our own worst horrors. As the Great White heads towards the ship on its fateful charge, we write our own fears on its featureless forehead. The greatest fear might be the vast blue ocean that swallows all in its limitless immanence. There is kind of fate at work here, but it is not of any design, other than that of the hunter and the hunted, Oedipal father and son, master and the slave. A death we know nothing about, takes one and all.

David Hale is a lecturer in philosophy at Mesa State College in Colorado. He can be reached at chateauway@aol.com. 

Carl Raschke responds:

Although I do not necessarily read myself necessarily as some kind of coded prophet of darkness and doom, as David Hale (himself the dark prophet of the Rockies' Western Slope) seems to suggest, I will acknowledge the characterization, if only to foster a certain measure of cerebral shock and awe.  Hopefully the philosophically minded, such as ourselves, do not have simply to talk politics, as many of our colleagues when they get the occasional opportunity to behave like school children.  We can talk perhaps about the political in the way that philosophers like Derrida started doing about two decades ago - about what remains "undecidable," "spectral," "to come."

The Derridean avenir is hopeful, though it is not about "hope."  That is evident in Derrida's re-engagement with own Judaism from the late 1990s onwards and in his toying with the "messianic."  I suppose, however, Derrida is not ultimately up to snuff when it comes trafficking with real messianism. I call attention to an article in the Wall Street Journal that for what seems the first time in a major American news outlet seriously looks at the international politics of Iran, and the Iranian revolution, as a systematic and self-conscious effort to follow the script of messianic prophecy about the world savior known as the Mahdi in Shiite Islam.  If you want, call Derridean messianism - "messianism without a messiah", the messianism of participatory democracy - messianism lite.  Or, borrowing from the old saying from the 1980s went, we can say "real messianists don't deconstruct."  In other words, they have a real messiah.   

Is a real messiah "post-partisan?" If so, we probably no longer have the messiah some thought we would, because we're for now, as the news shows, we're decidedly post-post-partisan.  But are we on the threshhold of a "post-America?"  If you're a Republican, you probably think that we're getting close, although there is always the 2010 mid-term elections.  1994 anyone?  If you're a Democrat, you're probably rejoicing that we're now "post-George Bush's America."  But the real America is only starting to rise, like some phoenix-like Big Bird of Real Hope and Change, out of the ashes and rubble.  1992 anyone?  The fact is that America keeps rising up every two presidential election cycles or so from the ashes of its ravaged partisan otherness.  If I were a Republican I would remember 1996.  If I were a Democrat, I would remember 2004.

Melville's great cosmo-historical allegory etched within the timeless classic Moby Dick is often read as a not-so-veiled critique of American political messianism, of the "redeemer nation."   But it can also be read as a kind of tragic vision of a kind of messianism now that becomes its own "apocalypse now."  From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan perhaps to the Great Stimulation we are always testing the limits of our own messianism.  When do we cross the invisible line beyond which we see the roadsign "Welcome to Post-America."  Perhaps we've already crossed the line, if we consider the forces of globalization - in both their centrifugal and centripedal fury.  Supposedly the taxpayers will "own" all the companies and big banks we continue to bail out, but in reality it's the Chinese. It used to be said "I don't own my house, the bank does."  Well, since the invention of financial derivatives, they don't own it either.  Nor do the people who bought the derivatives, who really own worthless paper.  It's the guys who own the debt to pay for cleaning up the mess that happened in the first place.

Does anyone "own" America anymore?  John Locke said that "in the beginning all was America."  That's probably true of America as well. The "great American empire," as the rest of the world often says. Sort of like the Holy Roman Empire that Voltaire quipped was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire?

In our messianism do we have the "audacity" or the" arrogance" of hope.

Call me Ishmael.

Labels without scars - mystifying amnesia in today's Presidential politics

By Wendy Felese

As I was watching television last evening with one of my children, a commercial came on that piqued my interest. Combining an urban rap beat with creative animated graphics, the script was suggestive of new beginnings, with an air of excitement and possibility.  The voice of the rapper was male - energetic and signifying youth, hope, change, and a brighter future. “The earth is sustainable…equality is attainable.” As the message reached its end, three words played out on the screen. Are you in?"

Yes, I thought. Yes, I get it…I’m in! The commercial turned out to be for Starbucks.  Clearly, if you “get it” you drink their coffee. I don’t. If there is one caveat of postmodernism (and I recognize the irony), it might be something like - there is no neutral view from no-where. Citing this fact, feminist Lila Abu-Lughod, in conversation with colleague and fellow anthropologist Kirin Narayan, coined the term halfie to describe her unique social position as a scholar. As an anthropologist, her own identity pivots on her multi-ethnic background (Palestinian/American) and her gender. These are fecund vantage points upon which to offer her subjective analyses. She describes advantages and disadvantages associated with these multiple identities, but as an ethnographer, it is imperative that she socially locate herself. In other words, how she sees is as pertinent as what she describes. That allows Abu-Lughod a unique flexibility in her approach – a way of thwarting static categorizations and entrenched methodologies, and yet it renders her vulnerable to a bewildering array of critiques from multiple audiences.

President Obama communicates from a similar social location. As the first weeks of the new administration unfold, we may see far less of this embodiment of paradox. But in the months leading up to the election, this artful self-articulation was astounding to behold.  Take for example, the three small but hermeneutically saturated words, carefully enunciated as a way of linking ideas together to form a global trope. Yes, we can.  Obama’s unique ethnicity (Andrew Young calls him Afro-Asian-Latin European), as it became fused with this phrase, formed an ontological metonomy that captivated imaginations among discrete communities on many different levels. How this materialized is worth examining. Abu-Lughod continues to remain devoted to relentless reflexivity as part of her methodology. At the time she first emerged on the academic scene, she was among a cadre of social scientists rejecting the idea of absolute objectivity, allowing for the intrusion of self as a vital element of her observations.

Can the subaltern speak? Abu-Lughod might offer a conditional yes to this paradigmatic question, but of course, it always depends on to whom and how the speaking manifests itself.  Her use of the term "halfie" was offered as a way of describing individuals whose natural and cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parenthood.  Today, the metaphor is not only discordant, but in the global arena, it is practically obsolete. Its utility as a tactic, however, continues to magnify multivalent social interactions within disparate cultural settings. Examining how this tactic manifests in a worldly context is provocative. In her 1991 publication Writing Against Culture (a response to the canonical and iconic collection of cultural anthropology by James Clifford and George E. Marcus), she rejects the false dichotomy between self/other, reminding readers that we must constantly attend to the positionality of the anthropological self…and our own representations and constructions of our subjects. 

Again, her own social location(s) meant that her work was always aimed at multiple audiences – feminists, anthropologists, and non-Western scholars, among others. President Obama’s use of this strategy establishes fluidity in his own creations of meaning; he masterfully negotiates in semiotic fields of evolving interpretations. His messages, globally transmitted through sophisticated media sources, are often in collusion with the production of symbolic no-places where local, national, and transnational identities are formed, negotiated and renegotiated. For example, his ability to connect with multiple audiences is profoundly revealed in his ideological fondness for the country’s sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln. While muting the troubling historical fact that Lincoln was a devoted segregationalist, one not particularly disturbed by the economic system of slavery (clearly articulated many times - e.g. …if I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it), Obama selectively promotes the image of the Great Emancipator, thus linking his own journey to an iconic but imagined figure – a journey all-at-once both visionary and cosmogonic.

The obfuscating move is powerfully effective. A mythic link to a past characterized by the bitter swill of the Civil War and segregation successfully ignites a revivalist movement, and a revisiting of an imagined point in history when the communal we faced two divergent roads. In recapturing this isolated but utopian moment, Obama completes the eternal return, leading us down a nobler path, remapping our collective trajectory, and negotiating towards the common good.  Abu-Lughod elaborates on this method of relying on notions of authenticity and the return to positive values not represented by the dominant other. But who is the Other in this vision? Our impulse, of course, is to point to the previous administration – it’s a convenient but dubious move. Obama’s own words suggest solidarity with all Americans, regardless of party or platform, especially when he compels America in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship…to brave once more the icy currents.  Arjun Appadurai’s contemporary anthropological theory demonstrates how binary categories are often negotiated and reconstructed in the disjunctive global era.

We /they cognitive structures, historically entrenched through strategic mapping of territories both geographical and institutional, have been complicated. By using his term scapes, he examines the hyper-real and its mimetic tendencies as among the ironies of global politics. Borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s nostalgia for the present, Appadurai describes the synaesthesia associated with, but clearly transforming, master narratives of colonial nation-states, resulting in the political project of managing micro-identities. The central paradox we are faced with today is that primordia (whether of language or skin color or neighborhood or kinship) have become globalized. An efficient method of harnessing this disjunction is to construct a soteriological image of a mythic past, an “illo tempore,” all the while suggesting that this past may be not only collectively recaptured, but that it is indeed, "paradise lost".

Here is where we engage the Other, an avatar of our own “fallen” state. We are being encouraged, though this semiotic transmission, to form a new and holistic humanism. Leela Gandhi suggests that this process can result in a mystifying amnesia that promotes a seductive image of wholeness, but enshrouds discrete, but no less iniquitous genealogies of marginalization. Andrew Young, quoted in the January 26, 2009 edition of Time magazine, sums it up: "Barack Obama defies categorization. The fact that his father and grandfather on one side were black doesn’t make him any more of a black President than his grandfather on the other side being white would make him a white President. We claim him, and we are proud of him, but the fact is that he has not had the experiences of deprivation, humiliation and racism that I had to grow up with….he has the labels without the scars."

Navigating in these icy currents without a fixed point of destination, a stated mission, and the certainty of returning to our native shores, requires an ontological leap – whether or not we are ready and willing to make it together remains to be seen. I’m on board for now, but with an eye on the uncertain landscapes ahead, I’m not unwilling to jump.

Wendy Felese is a doctoral candidate in the joint program of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology. She can be contacted at Wendy.Felese@du.edu.

Dis-enclosure and the inaugural moment

By Carl Raschke

Why do I write one day after the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama about the significance, or possibly the ultimate inconsequence, of Jean-Luc Nancy's recently translated and immediately discussed book La Déclosion (Dis-enclosure)?  Both the book and the event (and, of course, both book and event often have reciprocal, overlapping if not co-extensive qualities) can be considered specific instances of an aporia in the Derridean sense. 

First, the event.  Inauguration day represented in many ways the deconstruction of the historic text of American presidential politics, as everyone across the political spectrum from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to Fox News' Bill O'Reilley seemed to acknowledge.  Contrary to much received opinion, Obama's presidency was indeed, as the former candidate himself said it was in effect, a deconstruction of the binary politics of right and left.  But the aporia itself, or what has at times been called the "moment of deconstruction", could be seen in the subtle disquietudes of the day.  Much of the inaugural crowd came to hear something approaching Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, and what they got instead was a mild version of Churchill's "Blood, sweat, and tears."  The day seemed not as "inaugural" as many had hoped, yet neither was it simply replay.  It represented not so much continuity and not so much discontinuity. 

Indeed, it can be considered aporetic.  Obama was sober but hopeful, challenging yet soothing, encouraging yet minatory.  It was not a good day for the politics of desire and simulation.   Obama spoke (intimately) to the American people, as presidents on inauguration hopefully do.  But he also spoke (homiletically) to the Other.  It was the Other (specifically, in this case, the Muslim world) that he was expected to make some kind of radical gesture toward.  But the gesture to the Other was, ironically, a gesture from within the syntax of the Same; it was a gesture of engagement (Einschaltung), not necessarily changeover (Umschaltung).   It was an interposition, a moment when something happens that can be called in today's American political argot a "game changer."  An aporia. But the game isn't really changed at all.  Noticeably, the discourse of "change" fades gradually from the political lexicion, because change - not really grand change- has happened. In the discontinuity is a strange sort of continuity with the past - Obama supposedly had a less exciting than expected inauguration speech because he studied and tried to connect up carefully with the gravity and loftiness of inauguration speeches in ages past.  

Second, the book.  Reading Nancy reminds me of my first take on Freud's Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents).  Both are about what we might call "the problem of Christianity," which Continental thinkers since Heidegger, including Derrida, seem to write about in much the same manner.  Christianity become in Nancy the philosophical version of Paul's famous "thorn in the flesh," as it was in an extended sense for Freud as well.  The overfamiliarity, yet "strangeness" (Unheimlichkeit) of ohe "Christian" for pagan Europe since the time of the Greeks is Nancy's theme.  This sort of aporia is implicit in Nancy's very rhetorical question: "How did faith, one day, with the West start composing a decomposition of religion?" 

The answer of course is inseparable from the other question of why Heidegger in his project of the Destruktion of metaphysics did not consider either "religion" or "God" as philosophical problems, though he was obsessed with intimations of "divinity", not to mention a peculiar sort of eschatology developed in his Contributions to Philosophy, or the Beiträge. "Only a god can save us," Heidegger famously wrote, but salvation is from the "wink" of the so-called letzer Gott, the "last god."  The last god is not the Christian God.  The god's wink is in its withdrawal, which is at the same time a vanishing point in the Seinsgeschichte, the "history of being."  

In Heidegger, the wink is a "beckoning" (one of the more solid translations of the German word der Wink, which Heidegger uses).  For Nancy, the wink seems only possible because of a "discontent" within the Western history of metaphysics that is seeded and fomented by the Christian revelatory event, the strange and aporetic collocation of Greek piety and Semitic monotheism.  The "Christian" element in the thought of the West - Derrida's incommensurable "Jew-Greek" intertextuality - depends on this collocation. It is what makes this intertextuality unbehagen, literally "uneasy," a malaise.   There is Christian parousia in the Biblical sense (what is often rendered a "second coming"), but there is also Heidegger's which consists in the eschatological opening of Being to itself, when "all the gods have fled".  Such an opening Nancy reads as déclosion, dis-enclosure.  It is not religion without religion so much as eschatology without eschatology, or what he dubs "a faith that is nothing at all."  It is Kant's "interest of pure reason" that becomes a radical, yet finite distension, a catachresis, of the metaphysico-rational itself. 

Therein lies Christianity, according to Nancy, as "deconstruction."  "In other words, the parousia of the homousia, far from representing a difference in nature between theology and philosophy, in fact representing the infinite opening of the sense of ousia thought of as presence, a parousia of itself." That is dis-enclosure.  Nancy tries to find this new "essence" of Christianity, an exercise European philosophers and theologians have been conducting since the 18th century, in the Book of James.  As one commentator on Nancy has suggested, it comes down to "hope" without any distinguishable reason for hope. Obama reminded us too that in the midst of all the bad news we must rely on hope.  That is where we are left finally after "change."

Vattimo's "weak Christianity" now comes down descends one more notch: it becomes the West's "wink Christianity."  Perhaps we can follow Nancy's thread here and "deconstruct" Derrida himself in the former's deconstruction of Christianity.  Christianity is perhaps a metatext of the West in which its deconstruction serves as the leaven for the deconstruction of all others texts, ancient and novel.  Just as Derrida emerges through this process as a strange witness to the the both the ubiquitous operability and insuperability of khora, so through a deeper "re-Christianization" of the reading of deconstruction itself we come to its parousia, which is the same as the parousia of the West.   But isn't that what Nietzsche meant, in effect, when he declared in The Will to Power that "nihilism stands at the door" as the "strangest" (unheimlichste) of "guests?"  Contrary to Heidegger, in Nancy the nihil of nihilism is not harbored in the "forgetting" of what is kept hidden in the dialectical play of concepts throughout the tradition of Western philosohy.  The nihil is present from the beginning.   Here we have "negative theology", or perhaps a theologia crucis, written into the ontology of the West itself.  Christianity constitutes the great thread which, when pulled, rips all the other threads apart.  The death of God is not announced; is "present" ab origino.  Here ousia is "dis-enclosed", that is "crucified" in a Pauline sense (though Nancy wants to forget Paul), in its fateful parousia. 

La déclosion is, therefore, an inaugural moment, a permanent inauguration of parousia as the constant oscillation of a deconstructed politics, philosophy, theology, and all the representational structures and sign-chains in and beyond (not "outside") itself.  The "opening" of dis-enclosure, the "Open as such" - there is no "beyond" - remains a valency, for Nancy, of Deleuze's "pure immanence."   Nancy's book, however, can also be read as a kind of "dis-enclosure" of what we have come to know as the postmodern epoch.  That dis-enclosure, as in Washington, is both an eventful and somewhat less than eventful "gray morning" (in Nietzsche's phrase), an inaugural moment that wraps up so much and promises far less, promises only hope.

The only problem with such a parousia is that it remains totally "dis-enclosed" (and "enclosed" also) to itself, to the language and hopes of the West.  Nancy has committed a fateful error, which remains common among members of not just French but all the Western intelligentsia, when he declares that "Christianity is inseparable from the West."  That has already been historically disproved, particularly by Phillip Jenkins in such books as The Next Christendom.  Postmodernism is not, contra the narcissism of the new academy, a parousia in its own right, and that is why it is crucial we do, in fact, move beyond it.  I make that comment as one who has participated along with many others in an earlier "inauguration" process.   The "end" of the West may be quite visible on the horizon, as was Rome in Augustine's day, in an historical sense.  The current "global crisis" is a prophetic marker.  Nancy is wrong again when he identifies globalization with this parousia.  

Any "death of the West," which we will probably experience more fully in the next decade, constitutes simply an intertextual moment in a yet only barely glimpsed "deconstruction" of a series of texts yet to be read.  With its hyphenation the "post-modern" amounts less to the Big Kahuna of philosophy than its Big Lacuna.  And in that Lacuna a was sonst etwas, as the Germans say, is rising.  A singularity that is greater than any Heideggerian, or Nancyean, parousia.  It is not an event but an "event horizon".  That is what parousia in the "apocalyptic," if not the eschatological, sense has always meant.  Derrida understands the relationship between the spectral and the "to come" (avenir).  The West in this case is the specter, but the avenir is more, much much more.  The "discontent" (Unbehaglichkeit) of Dis-enclosure refers both to the spectrality of the specter and the venir of the avenir, its immediacy, if not its presence.  Philosophy, or any philosophical theology, is incapable of drawing the connection.

What is coming does not speak.  It rides in on the storm, as the lightning flashes from the east and goes as far as the West. 

Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver and is the author of various books on postmodern philosophy and religion - most recently, GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).  He can be contacted at craschke@du.edu.    

Originary grammar

By Adam Katz

Originary grammar is the name I give to my work within Eric Gans’ originary hypothesis of the origin of language.  According to the originary hypothesis, the first sign emerges in the midst of a crisis in which the pre-human hominid group is threatened with self-destruction through everyone’s common convergence upon some desired object.  Following Rene Girard’s account of mimetic desire, and attributing to the higher hominids the distinguishing feature of greater mimetic capacity, the originary hypothesis posits a mimetic crisis that leads to the breakdown of the animal pecking order within the group, requiring some new mode of restraint upon mimetic desire and rivalry. 

The crisis is resolved through what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation”:  mostly likely a mere moment of hesitation, which is in turn imitated by the rest of the group, situated them all before a central object that now “repels” their desire.  The destructive consequences of mimesis are thereby arrested through the transcendence of and re-articulation of mimetic activity itself and the human emerges along with the sacred (the newly inaccessible, repellent object).  The human appears as the species which poses a greater danger to itself than is presented to it by any external threat, and simultaneously as the being capable of deferring that danger through the signifying relation to sacred Being.  Representation is the deferral of violence—not merely the kind of local violence of which we will probably never be rid, but the kind of contagious, immolating violence between which and ourselves we will never cease to interpose whatever signs we can cobble together when needed.

The originary hypothesis cannot be “proven,” of course:  there will never be any archeological or biological evidence supporting it.  Its confirmation lies in the power with which it enables us to make sense of human things, on the one hand, but also in the very plausibility of positing some origin to language.  In other words, if language must have emerged as a whole, “as such,” with everything transformed from a condition of non-meaning to meaning; in a word, if language must have emerged in an event, then we can hypothesize more or less meaningfully regarding the constitution of such an event.  And, indeed, the fact that we couldn’t consider the possibility of a “piece” of a sign—either there is a sign or there isn’t—speaks strongly in favor of some kind of leap from a world without signs to a signifying world. It further makes sense to assume that such an event could not have been a trivial one—the existence of the group and each of its members must have been strongly apprehended by all to have been at stake. 

Our posited event must presuppose a situation which the existing means of resolving conflicts could not address.  The resolution must then draw upon while transforming existing capacities of the species.  Our hypothesis cannot presuppose capacities that only language could have bestowed upon us, nor can we introduce any elements into the originary event that wouldn’t be fully explicable in terms of what we can reasonably presuppose.  The event in question must enable us to account for the sign’s transcendence:  to put it simply, we must be able to account for what Saussure designated with the signifier/signified distinction:  the fact that any sign remains in some sense the “same” sign, regardless of the different situations in which it is deployed, and that this sameness has nothing to do with its physical features. 

The ostensive gesture put forth on the originary scene, upon which the object is “named” God (he-who-commands-us-to-renounce-immediate-appropriation; or something along those lines), in its iterability and the non-availability of its referent enables us to account for the immateriality of the sign.  The ostensive gesture, that is, “means” only to the extent that all members of the group willingly participate in the event of its meaning by iterating the word of God.  

To use the word “willingly” as I just have brings to light some of the more provocative questions generated by the hypothesis.  On some level, everyone on the scene must “know” what they are doing:  each must see the others iterating the gesture of aborted appropriation and each must “authenticate” the gesture. 

But we could not posit some declarative, propositional intent to such a gesture, as in:  I am pledging to you my intention to renounce possession of the object and any assault upon your person in the hope that you will do the same, along with everyone else… (We can’t have language before we have language…)  To the extent that we try to convey the meaning of the gesture to the scene’s participants, we would have to do so in terms of a “feeling,” or what Charles Sanders Peirce called “firstness”:  the experience of the thing as it is, without any reference to anything outside of it or outside of that experience of it. 

On one side of the gesture is a sense of continuity, of sustenance, of life, of Being; on the other side is annihilation.  As sign users, we are tacitly aware of this distinction, and this distinction is iterated every time something “makes sense” to us.  We know much more than we can tell, as Michael Polanyi puts it, and we are beings of the event—indeed, for humans, there is nothing but events (overlapping events, events within events, events referencing other events, to be sure, but nothing but events).  And we both create and are created by, act in and suffer the event.  We cannot know in advance what might successfully defer the violence activated by the convergence upon some central object of desire in any specific case; indeed, what would be the “measuring stick” for determining the degree, much less quality, of desire and resentment implicated in some such convergence?—and yet we are able to “come up with” something that sometimes works.  And, of course, sometimes doesn’t—there was nothing inevitable about the originary scene, nor is there about our indefinite continuance as a species.

There is a politics of the originary hypothesis:  a politics of the center, one that can accommodate much of what we now designate “left” and “right” and hopefully much more as well.  Human history is a continual struggle for liberation from the singular, irreplaceable object at the center of the originary scene, toward ever more substitutable, dispersed and exchangeable objects.  At the same time the center must be attended to, even if that center is no more than the contingent moral and political guarantees of a set of loose, evolving and largely tacit rules regulating the status and accessibility of the evolving world of objects.  Maximal freedom to produce, exchange and consume objects (with ever looser definitions of what counts as an “object”) is articulated in increasingly complex ways with networks of associations, constitutions, contracts, covenants, habits and laws needed to condition those exchanges and manage all of the desires and resentments produced by new degrees of freedom.  And there is resentment generated by the “system” of exchange itself, a resentment which we might call “victimary,” which reads the inevitable inequalities and instability generated by the millions upon millions of daily exchanges as a disguise concealing the actual consolidation of power of some small, corrupt, insidious and ingenious elite. 

This type of “totalizing” resentment gave us the Communist and Fascist insurgencies of the 20th century, as well as the current Islamic supremacist-led Global Intifada. There are less virulent versions as well:  indeed, some level of victimary resentment seems to be the “enterprise cost” of the exchange system itself.  We might call the politics of the originary hypothesis “liberal,” in the 19th century sense combining civil liberties and free market economics; at the same time it is a future oriented politics always on the alert for what the political theorist Frank Ankersmit has called the “creative compromises” that resolve seemingly intractable conflicts by producing new rules and that are especially characteristic of the type of social order we have come to call “liberal democracies.”  (In subsequent posts I will distinguish my own politics and my own reading of contemporary events within the broad space I am constructing here within which dialogues over the meaning of the originary scene could gather around themselves various political meanings and consequences.)

As for the “grammar,” I will also return to this question in the more literal sense of the generation of sentences and other relations between words and signs and reality, but for now, consider that the originary sign on the scene as I have accounted for it has a doubled mode of operation:  it initiates and seals the scene from within the scene; and, it represents the sacred object to those congregated on the scene, thereby simultaneously constituting the scene through its relation to some externality.  We have, that is, an internal and emergent system of references that draws its power from and, indeed, roughly imitates, an unmolested and presumably invulnerable reified center. 

In that case, the latter, representational operation of the sign names a limiting reality which demands acknowledgement, while the former, circulatory operation of the sign relies upon the sign’s iterability (its “imperfect” dissemination through the scene) and therefore its variability and generative power.  We can expect to find these two operations in any act of making meaning, then, as the noun names the sub-stance and the verb completes the event by making the named object peripatetic:  as Gertrude Stein asserted, what is interesting about verbs is that it is so easy to make mistakes with them, which opens up the possibility of generality by way of “error” (inappropriate rule application) and thus difference and novelty.

Adam Katz teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.  He is the editor of The Originary Hypothesis:  A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry and an editor of Anthropoetics, the on-line journal of Generative Anthropology.