Our Debt to the Dead #6: The Soul’s Swoon, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Prayer of Death

What follows is the conclusion to my draft of a chapter tentatively entitled “Our Debt to the Dead,” which I hope eventually to make part of a book on trauma and philosophy

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All efforts to hold death at bay by retaining the memory of the dead, even just their names, ultimately fail.  Sooner or later, but inexorably, even the mere names of the dead vanish into the anonymous grave.  To be forgotten is the final destiny common to all, the living and the dead alike.  When at last all ways of avoidance are blocked, and one is finally forced, by the accidents of one’s life, to face the abyss of death and the grave’s oblivion and silence, all that the still living soul can do is swoon, as Gabriel’s soul does at the end of Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Interestingly, toward the end of the same century near the beginning of which Joyce wrote his great story, John Updike painted a similar portrait of the soul’s swoon.  In Memories of the Ford Administration, which is at one level a novel about the distortions, limitations, and ultimate losses of memory itself, first published in 1992 (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf), the overall story Updike tells involves the interplay of two included lesser stories, one of which is that James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States (about whose dying Updike had earlier also written a play).  Toward the end of the novel, in the final section devoted to Buchanan, Updike depicts him near the very end of his Presidency, when all his efforts to avoid the Union rupturing in two have finally collapsed in failure, and Buchanan himself knows that the nation is falling into the abyss of civil war.  Buchanan, the United States’ only bachelor President, is alone in his rooms.  Updike writes (pages 316-318):

He sleepily prayed, and the silence into which his brain poured its half-formed words, the sense melting like wax at the edge of the flaming wick, tonight seemed itself a message, tuned to his great weariness.  He saw for a moment through not his own mismatched eyes but through God’s clear colorless ones; he saw that sub specie aeternitatis nothing greatly matters:  not his own life, his ambitions, his patient intricate craven search for power, nor, cruel as the thought might appear from a wakeful perspective, the lives of the nation, the millions as they strain toward him for rescue.  The hordes of the Sennacherib invaded Israel, and the Temple was destroyed stone by stone, and yet within the beautiful dispassion of God these cataclysms had been cradled, and now slept unremembered but by a few.  While Buchanan had been Ambassador to the Court of St. James, British educated opinion had been considerably agitated by the apparent discoveries, within geology, of tracts of time vaster than any the Bible disclosed:  Buchanan now perceived a cause for serenity here, a vastness that dwindled all our agitations to a scarcely perceptible stir, and our mountains and chasms to a prairie smoothness, a luminous smoothness like that of Greenland, or of the unexpected southernmost continent first sighted by Captain Cook.  Having been long troubled by the silence into which his prayers seemed to sink without an echo, Buchanan in his majestic figure appreciated that the silence was an answer, the only answer whose mercy was lasting, impartial, and omnipresent. . . . As if though the gimlet eye of an eagle soaring in God’s silent winds Buchanan saw the nation beneath him, a colorful small mountain meadow scurrying with frantic life; its life would perish but infallibly renew itself in the turning of seasons, in the great and impervious planetary motions.  Thus reassured, the old man sank on a sustained note of praise into the void and woke with surprise into a still-stormy world where it seemed all but himself had tossed sleepless through the night.

To swoon in the face of death and the dead, in the sense that Joyce’s Gabriel and Updike’s Buchanan do, is to give relinquish all claim to ownership over death and, therewith, over oneself.  It is literally to “let oneself go”—both in the sense of “losing control of oneself” and in the sense of “allowing oneself to leave.”   Where one goes, once so let go, is into the same abyss before which one can only swoon:  the very abyss of death, in all its silence and oblivion.

In swooning, we, still living, die ourselves in turn, thereby responding to the invitation–to follow them–that all the dead who have gone before have extended to us.  To swoon as Joyce’s Gabriel or Updike’s Buchanan does is t0 accept that invitation, and enter into death ourselves.

Entering death in such a swoon has nothing necessarily to do with killing oneself, with taking one’s own life, in the sense that we use those expressions to talk of suicide.  Although under certain circumstances, such as those Jean Améry articulates, it may be that suicide is how a given soul’s swoon takes shape, under other, probably far more common circumstances, suicide is a way of pressing one’s claims to ownership, rather than abandoning them.

At any rate, there is nothing of self-assertion in the soul’s swoon before death, letting itself go into the Joycean community in death of “all the living and the dead.”  Rather, as is implicit in Joyce and explicit in Updike, the swoon is prayerful.  It is itself prayer in the most fundamental sense, in which to pray is to praise, just as Updike’s Buchanan sinks “into the void” in “a sustained note of praise.”

Independently of both Joyce and Updike, or at least independently of reference to either, French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has recently, in his book Dis-Enclosure:  The Deconstruction of Christianity (translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith [New York:  Fordham University Press, 2008), articulated prayer in a way excellently suited to capture what is at stake here.  At the end of an essay entitled "Prayer Demythified" he writes the following reflections, which illuminate “fanaticism” as the most destructive form of the endeavor, in effect (though Nancy does not put it this way, at least at this point in his text), to avoid or deny the abyss of death, rather than prayerfully to swoon into it, as Buchanan does.

What Nancy says applies not only to contemporary religious fanaticism of whatever sort, whether Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian--the latter as exemplified recently by the murder in Kansas in the spring of 2009 of Dr. George Tiller, murdered in the name of the protection of the "rights of the as yet unborn," as it is sometimes put.  It also applies to Nazi and fascist fanaticism, as Nancy's own remarks make clear, and to all other forms of political fanaticism, whether "religious" in professed motivation or not.  Above all, Nancy's analysis casts light on the connections between distortions of language and the fanatical avoidance of death and its trauma.

Thus, at the end of his essay on prayer Nancy writes:  "Fanaticism is nothing but the abolition of the intractable distance of the real [the traumatic structure of "reality" as such, in effect], and consequently also the extinction of prayer and all speech, in favor of effusive outpouring, eructation, and vociferation.”   In contrast to all such denial and distortion, prayer as such, as he has been arguing in the preceding pages of his essay, is nothing but the lifting up, the elevation, of the very speaking and saying that is prayer itself.  Hence, he goes on, after his remark on fanaticism, to write:

In the elevation of prayer, a supplication also, albeit ”accessory,” cannot fail to intervene, for in it [that is, in prayer] is revealed the “poverty” [of all human speech itself].  The fact is “poor humanity” may have nothing else to pray.  Prayer thus conceived does not enrich, does not remunerate the “poor humanity” that we today have just as many reasons to bemoan [as ever].  It carries poverty over to saying–and it isn’t poverty but saying that is obliterated in this prayer.  Does not the same apply (isn’t it the same thing) to the saying of love, the saying of mourning, and the saying of speech itself?

However that may be–and clearly the questions function rhetorically here–Nancy concludes that to

concern ourselves with this empty remnant [Note that term!] of prayer, [to] remain faithful to this obligation [to pray the poor prayer of poor humanity]. . . , [f]or us . . . has the force of a categorical imperative, for nothing today is more important than this:  to empty and let be emptied out all prayers that negotiate a sense, an issue, or a repatriation of the real within the narrow confines of our faded humanisms and clenched religiosities, in order that we may merely open speech once again to its most proper possibility of address, which also makes up all its sense and all its truth.

The gift that the dead give us in their very dying calls for just and only such prayer as response–a prayer that utterly exhausts itself in lifting up death and the dead themselves, and, in so raising them up, obliterates not death and the dead but the praying voice itself, which vanishes behind what it exhausts itself in lifting up.  Such a empty remnant of prayer, which expropriates those who pray–dis-appropriating them of all their own property, in order that they may at last pray properly–is the only proper prayer–indeed, the only proper speech–of those remnant communities, as I would called them, and as I will discuss in more detail in time, that are the only real communities, in any world of shared death such as our own.

The prayer Updike’s Buchanan offers up as he sinks into the void is praise of that same void, the void of silence and oblivion that is death itself.  In his soul’s swoon Buchanan’s prays the prayer of death, praising it and “raising up” the dead themselves, as I made a point of putting it above.   In the prayer that exhausts itself in lifting up the dead themselves, there thus occurs what, following Nancy, who himself here follows a long Christian (at least) tradition, we can call a resurrection of the dead.

However, that could only be in the sense of “resurrection” that Nancy himself discerns in the writings of Maurice Blanchot.  In “Blanchot’s Ressurection,” another essays in Dis-Enclosure, Nancy insists (page 89) that the “resurrection” in question is one which “does not escape death, nor recover from it,” but which rather “constitutes the extremity and truth of the phenomenon of dying.”  The movement of such resurrection “goes into death not to pass through it but, sinking irreversibly into it,” just as Buchanan sinks into the (same) void, “to resuscitate death itself.”

Resuscitating death itself, Nancy goes on, “is entirely different from resuscitating the dead,” at least insofar as that is taken to mean “to bring them back to life, to bring life back where death had destroyed it.”  That is, it is not a matter of what the Catholic theologian Hans Küng, persona non-grata to the Vatican since early in the papacy of John-Paul II, long before Nancy, who does not mention him, called, disparagingly, “the reanimation of a corpse.”   Not only Blanchot’s resurrection but also Küng’s involve no such reanimation of the dead themselves.  “Resuscitating death is an entirely different operation,” writes Nancy, the point of which is precisely “to let the dead be dead:  thus, to resurrect or resuscitate death, and the dead as [still] dead.”

To let the dead be dead is at the same time, Nancy also recognizes, to join them in dying, even while one still lives.  As he writes earlier in Dis-Enclosure, in an essay on the book of James in Christian scripture, an essay he calls “The Judeo-Christian (on Faith),”  “man” as he is emerging in ongoing changes “in the instituting configuration of the West” is (page 59)

no longer the mortal who stands before the immortal [a reference to Heidegger, though one I find questionable here].  He is becoming the dying one in a dying that doubles or lives the whole time of his life.  The divine withdraws from its dwelling sites–whether these be the peaks of Mount Olympus or of Sinai–and from every type of temple. It becomes, in so withdrawing, the perpetual imminence of dying.  Death, as the natural end of a mode of existence, is itself finite:  dying becomes the theme of existence according to the always suspended imminence of parousia [literally, presence or arrival—used in Christianity to refer to the Second Coming of Christ].

In accordance with such an understanding of the inseparable interweaving–the “identity” in the Heideggerian sense of “belonging-together”–of death and life, Nancy goes on in his very next paragraph to discuss the Christian sacrament of anointing the sick, especially the dying.  Sometimes called the sacrament of “extreme unction,” so marking the sick, writes Nancy,  “ signs not what will later be called life eternal beyond death.”  Rather, unction marks “the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred.  This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation.  In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah is a dying one.  The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortal.  The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable.”

Nancy then considers the Christian doctrine according to which “[d]eath is tied to sin.”  Considerably later in Dis-Enclosure, in an essay called “The Deconstruction of Christianiny,” Nancy argues that sin is not a “misdeed,” but a “condition.”   By his understanding, sin is the shared human condition of being in need of redemption (or salvation), insofar as in all human being there is a radical “indebtedness of existence itself” (just such indebtedness as I have tried to explicate earlier in this chapter in my discussion of Lifton and Heidegger on “guilt”), which the human being is “tempted” to deny or disavow, affirming instead the “self” and the self’s claim to independence, to ownership over itself, owing nothing to others before and apart from the self’s own voluntary commitments.  To “sin” is to give in to the temptation toward such self-affirmation, in the literal sense of affirming a “self” in the first place.  Nancy writes (pages 155-156):

Temptation is essentially the temptation of self, it is the self as temptation, as tempter, as self-tempter.  It is not in the least a question of the expiation of a misdeed, but of redemption or salvation, and salvation cannot come from the self itself, but from its opening . . . and as such it comes to it as the grace of its Creator. . . . Through salvation, God remits to man the debt he incurred in sinning, a debt that is none other than the debt of the self itself.  What man appropriated, for which he is in debt to God, is the self that he has turned in upon itself.  It must be returned to God and not to itself.  Sin is an indebtedness of existence as such.

In other words, while Heidegger tends to detach existential Schuldigkeit [guilt] from the category of “transgression” or of “debt” (in the ontic sense of the term), I wonder, rather, whether that Schuldigkeit does not realize the essence of sin as the indebtedness of existence–”indebtedness of existence” meaning, at one and the same time, that existence itself is in debt, and that which it is in debt for is precisely for itself, for itself, for the ipseity of existence.

My own reading of Heidegger on guilt, as I presented it earlier in this chapter, is one that takes Heidegger to be in full agreement with Nancy’s own interpretation of guilt, rather than at variance with it.  At any rate, my own agreement with the sort of interpretation of guilt Nancy offers is almost without qualification, my only qualification being that I suspect his account may still leave the difference-in-interconnection of guilt as the existential “indebtedness” he emphasizes, and guilt in a negative sense of being to blame for some misdeed, less than sufficiently clarified.  Ye his remarks themselves can be read in such a way as to point to the nexus of that interconnection-in-disconnection, insofar as they suggest that the basic “indebtedness of existence” grounds and manifests itself in the closure toward “self,” which then and as such is the refusal of the debt the living owe for the very fact of being alive at all.

The refusal at issue is a hardening of the self into its own claims of ownership over itself, as opposed to the recognition of fundamental indebtedness to the generosity of others.  It is stiffening of the self into selfishness, of the ego into egoism.  As the influential phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion, one of Nancy’s French colleagues in philosophy, puts it in Being Given:  Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (translated by Jeffrey L, Kosky [Stanford University Press, 2002]), by refusing not just some specific debt but all indebtedness whatsoever, the self or ego hardens into an attitude of total ingratitude, insisting that it does not owe anyone for anything.  As Marion writes (pages 90-91):

The ingrate is defined first not by a negative will or his impotence to repay good with good, but by incapacity, impatience, and exasperation simply in receiving it [that is, a gift].  He refuses the charge not only of acquitting himself of this debt (which would remain within exchange), but of ever having incurred–of ever having been offered a gift.  He suffers from the very principle that a gift affects him by befalling him.  He does not refuse this or that gift with or without this or that objective support:  he refuses indebtedness pure and simple–or rather the admission of it.  In a stubborn struggle against the evidence of the gift already given and without his consent, the ingrate has the presence to maintain that his consent alone decides the gifts given to him.  He sticks strictly to the base principle that “I don’t owe anything to anyone” . . .

In contrast, to face one’s ineradicable indebtedness for even being at all is, as Marion writes a few pages later (page 101), to face “what phenomenologically and morally is the hardest ordeal” or all, the ordeal of “succeed[ing] in making an exception to the principle ‘I don’t owe anything to anybody.’ “

At any rate, to return to the connection of death to sin, according to Nancy’s interpretation in his essay in Dis-Enclosure on the Biblical letter of James–which stands in a relation of reciprocal reinforcement with what he writes in the essay, later in the book, on the deconstruction of Christianity–to say that death is tied to sin is to say that it is “tied to the deficiency of a life that does not practice faith.”  However, as he then adds, in a remark especially significant for my present purposes, the faith at issue is not one that life just happens on occasion to fail to practice.  Rather, life “cannot practice it” (my emphasis), at least “without failing or fainting–at the incommensurable height of dying”—just as Joyce’s Gabriel and Updike’s Buchanan fail and faint.

“Yet despite this,” Nancy concludes—and we might well change that to because of it—“faith gives.”  What it gives is “dying precisely in its incommensurability (to give death, ‘the gift of death,’ he [that other "James," namely, Jacques--French for James—Derrida, in a book of that title] says):  a gift that is not a matter of receiving in order to keep, any more than is love or poverty, or even veridicity (which are, ultimately, the same thing as dying).”

So, too, is prayer “the same thing as dying,” especially that prayer in which the living raise up the dead, dying after them in turn.  In that dying, we indemnify the dead, keeping them safe from harm and loss, allowing them their rest in the silent, silencing keep of death.

That is our debt to the dead.

Our Debt to the Dead #5: Dishonoring the Dead

Below is the continuation of my draft for what I hope will eventually become a book chapter–a chapter on “our debt to the dead.”

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What do we owe the dead?  As I have noted before, in one way of taking that question—taking it, namely, to be a question concerning that for which we are indebted to the dead—the answer would be “everything.”  Furthermore, it is, as I have also noted before, in their very having died—that is, to put the same point a bit differently, precisely as dead—that the dead give us “everything.”

However, another way of taking the question of what we owe the dead–a way of taking it that is different, yet nevertheless inseparable, from the first–would be to take it as an inquiry about what would constitute proper response on the part of us, the living, to the dead, for what they have given us, the “everything” we owe them in the first sense.   Precisely given that what we owe the dead, in the first way of taking that notion, is “everything,” then just what would constitute a proper “response” to the dead, for what they have given us?  What response do the dead themselves, as dead, call upon us to make, given that we owe them everything?

What we owe the dead in that second sense of the question–that is, the response that would appropriately answer to the dead for what they have given us by and in their very dying–is to grant them in turn what I would like to call indemnity.  We owe the dead “indemnity” in the original etymological sense of that term whereby it means to keep from harm, to protect against loss.

How can the dead be harmed, however?  What more can they lose, given that they are already dead?  The most common answer would seem to be that they might lose their place in the memory of the living, and thereby suffer the harm of being forgotten.  Hence the common refrain of “Never forget!”  For example, Israelis admonish one another and the entire world to “never forget” what was done to the Jews of Europe in the Nazi extermination camps.  Or, to give a more recent example, bumper stickers and window decals carrying the same admonition never to forget those who lost their lives in the attacks of September 11, 2001, continue to show up on cars in the United States each fall.

Yet what we try in such ways never to forget will still eventually be forgotten, despite all our efforts at remembering.  Sooner or later, but inevitably, memory will fail.  The names of the dead, which we vowed never to forget, will be forgotten; and those who bore those names will sink into the great, anonymous mass of all the nameless dead of all the earlier ages.

Whatever can be remembered in the same sense that a name can be remembered, will inevitably be forgotten in time.  And even while the name is still remembered, there will come a time when the one who bore the name will no longer be, and only the name will remain. As Chrétien sees clearly, whatever can be remembered will be forgotten, and only what can never be remembered is truly unforgettable.

Before Chrétien, Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote along the same lines, specifically with regard to the Jewish dead of the Holocaust.  In Heidegger and “the jews”, in a passage to which I will return in a later chapter on trauma and “representation,” Lyotard writes (page 27) that the Holocaust

cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words.  Representing ‘Auschwitz’ in images and words is a way of making us forget this.  I am not thinking here only of bad movies and widely distributed TV series, of bad novels or “eyewitness accounts.”  I am thinking of those very cases that, by their exactitude, their severity, are, or should be, best qualified not to let us forget.  But even they represent what, in order not to be forgotten as that which is forgotten itself, must remain unrepresentable.  Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah is an exception, maybe the only one. . . .

Whenever one represents, one inscribes in memory, and this might seem a good defense against forgetting it.  It is, I believe, just the opposite.  Only that which has been inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten, because it could be effaced.  But what is not inscribed, through lack of inscribable surface, of duration and place for the inscription to be situated, . . . cannot be forgotten, does not offer a hold to forgetting, and remains present “only” as an affection that one cannot even qualify, like a state of death in the life of the spirit.  One must, certainly, inscribe in words, in images.  One cannot escape the necessity of representing.  It would be sin itself to believe oneself safe and sound.  But it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten, in writing.

It is to be feared that word representations (books, interviews) and thing representations (films, photographs) of the extermination of the Jews . . . by the Nazis bring back the very thing, . . . in the orbit of secondary repression. . . . It is to be feared that, through representation, it turns into an “ordinary” repression.  One will say, It was a great massacre, how horrible!  Of course, there have been others, “even” in contemporary Europe (the crimes of Stalin).  Finally, one will appeal to human rights, one cries out “never again” and that’s it!  It is taken care of.

A few lines later Lyotard contrasts all such endeavors “never to forget” the Holocaust–endeavors which, despite what may well be their authors’ own intentions, end up obfuscating and thereby perpetuating the very crime at issue—with what belongs “on the side of ‘the jews’” themselves.  He writes (pages 27-28):

One can represent the Nazi madness–make of it what it also is–an effect of “secondary” repression, a symptom; a way of transcribing anxiety, the terror in regard to the undetermined (which Germany knew well, especially then), into will, into political hatred, organized, administered, turned against the unconscious affect. . . . But on the side of “the jews,” absence of representability, absence of experience, absence of accumulation of experience (however multimillenial), interior innocence, smiling and hard, even arrogant, which neglects the world except with regard to its pain–these are the traits of a tradition where the forgotten remembers that it is forgotten; knows itself to be unforgettable, has no need of inscription, of looking after itself, a tradition where the soul’s only concern is with the terror without origin, where it tries desperately, humorously to originate itself by narrating itself.

The SS does not wage war against the Jews. . . . The war merely creates the din that is necessary to cover the silent crime. . . . –a second terror, a horror rather, practiced on the involuntary witness of the “first” terror, which is not even felt, not even lodged, but which is diffuse and remains in it like an interminably deferred debt.  In representing the second terror one ineluctably perpetuates it.  It is itself only representation. . . . One betrays misery, infamy by representing them.

Lyotard then sums up with a remark that can be generalized beyond efforts to remember the dead of the Holocaust, to apply to any efforts to remember any of the dead.  “All memory, in the traditional sense of representation,” he writes (my emphasis), “because it involves decision, includes and spreads the forgetting of the terror without origin that motivates it.”

We owe it to the dead, then, not to remember them, at least if remembering is taken “in the traditional sense,” wherein to remember the dead entails holding on to some “representation” of the dead, even if only their names.  Paradoxically, all such endeavors to honor the dead by always remembering them end up dis-honoring them.    It dishonors the dead by stripping them of the only thing left to them insofar as they are dead.  Instead of keeping the dead from harm, it harms them in the only way left to do so, once they are dead.  It harms the dead in that, far from protecting them against loss, it robs the dead of the one thing they still have:  their very death itself.   In an unusual but literal sense, it is a form of grave robbery.

Robbing the dead of their graves under the guise of remembering them is itself a way of attempting to gain control over death itself.  It is a matter of laying claim to what Robert Jay Lifton in Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003)—in which he drops, by the way and unfortunately to my mind, what I take to be his earlier fruitful suggestions, in Broken Connections, of a non-pathological concept of  ”survivor guilt” (which in this later work he calls “death guilt”)—calls “ownership of death.”   The dreams and assertions of a power so fantastic that it can lay claim to ownership even over death itself are built upon “profound feelings of powerlessness and emptiness,” as Lifton writes (page 178), to cover those feelings over and avoid facing them.  What is behind such “a sense of megalomania and omnipotence” that extends even over death itself is, as Lifton observes a few lines later, “[f]ear of being out of control.”

Our fear of not being in control is always, at bottom, the fear of death, the point where we lose all control.  To avoid facing that fear, we are willing even to dishonor the dead, robbing them of their very death under the pretense of remembering them.

Before the alternative, that of facing the loss of all control, we can only swoon—as I will turn to next.

Our Debt to the Dead #4: Dying in Vain

Today’s post is a brief one, containing the next section of my draft of a chapter on “our debt to the dead” for what may become book on trauma and philosophy.  It is an entry that can also stand alone, in my judgment, without any further contextualizing introductory comments.

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“If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!   Oh let my tongue cleave to my mouth, if I remember you not, if I prize not Jerusalem above all my joys!” sings the Psalmist (Psalm 136/137: 5-6).  The question, however, is how to be sure it is Jerusalem one is remembering, and not some poor substitute–some mere image of the holy.  So it is, too, with remembering the dead:  To be sure it is the dead themselves we are remembering, and not some mere shade of our own imagining.

If we would remember the dead, and not substitute for them some idol of our own making, then we also need to remember, in effect, just why we should remember the dead in the first place.  For just what do we owe the dead our constant remembrance?  Just what have the dead given to us, the living, such that we have incurred such a debt toward them?

We owe the dead for their death.  (So, at least, I have been arguing.)  Their death, however, is a pure gift that the dead bestow upon the living.  As a pure gift, the death of the dead is like the grits in an anecdote from psychiatrist and popular spiritual teacher M. Scott Peck, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller The Road Less Traveled.  In What Return Can I Make?  The Dimensions of the Christian Experience, written with Patricia Kay and Marilyn Von Waldner (Simon and Schuster, 1985), Peck tells the story of how once when he was served grits on the side in a restaurant in the American South, he remarked to the woman waiting on him that he had not ordered grits.  “You don’t order grits,” she replied by Peck’s account.  “ They just comes.”

Peck uses that anecdote to say that God’s grace is like grits:  One doesn’t ask for grace.  It just comes.

St. Paul is the ultimate source for such a Christian understanding of grace.  For Paul, grace is a pure gift freely bestowed by God upon those who receive it.  The Greek word Paul uses for “gift” is dōrean.   In St. Paul:  The Foundations of Universalism (translated by Ray Brassier, University of Chicago Press, 2003), Alain Badiou—a very different writer than M. Scott Peck, whom Badiou nonetheless unintentionally echoes on this point–writes concerning that Greek term:  “Dōrean is a powerful word; it means ‘as a pure gift,’ ‘without cause,’ and even ‘in vain.’”

Any pure gift is always given “in vain” in that sense.  That applies not only to God’s grace as Paul conceived it, but also to the pure gift that the dead give to us, the living, in their very dying.  Furthermore, as such a pure gift, the gift of their death is a gift that the dead give us altogether without any forethought or intention on their part, just by dying.  In that sense, their bestowing of their gift upon us who are still living is involuntary.

Correlatively, the reception of such a gift is no less involuntary.  One receives it just by being born at all.  It is for the very reason that both the giving and the receiving are involuntary, however, that the debt incurred by the living toward the dead for the pure gift of their death is in-finite (literally un-ending) and un-payable.  The debt is infinite and un-payable because the gift by the involuntary receiving of which we are placed in debt to the dead, is always without cause, always “in vain” in the sense Badiou explicates.

All death is in vain, and no one dies except in vain.   There is no point or purpose served by death.  It is non-purposive, a-telic—just like life itself, which, as Nietzsche observes, neither has nor lacks a meaning.

Accordingly, if it is the dead whom we are remembering and not some idol we are substituting for the dead themselves, we must keep in mind that their deaths were indeed in vain.   Any attempt to give “meaning” to their deaths, to assure that they will “not have died in vain,” in fact robs the dead of their very death.  To pretend to give death a purpose, a point or justification, is one sure way precisely to fail to honor the dead, to dishonor and even to blaspheme against them.

In so doing, in fact, one accrues, with or without intention, the second-order (“moral”) guilt of acting contrary to one’s duty (which includes simply not doing it at all)—here, one’s duty to the dead.  One reduces the dying of the dead (e.g., the millions killed by the Nazis) to no more than a means to achieve some end (e.g., the founding of the state of Israel) external to, and imposed upon, them.

Our Debt to the Dead #3: What We Owe

The post below continues my series with the draft of a chapter for a planned book on philosophy and trauma, a chapter on the idea of a debt the living owe the dead.  In my immediately preceding post, I discussed Heidegger’s analysis of debt and guilt, which is where I pick up below.

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If we are, as Heidegger argues, guilty or indebted with what we might, following his own terminology, call an ontological guilt or indebtedness, insofar as we are from birth accountable for a debt incurred without any choice on our part, then no payment at all, not even an infinite one, could ever possibly discharge our debt.  No payment is equal to what we owe.  Our debt is in principle un-dischargeable.  It can never be cancelled, no matter what we do.  The debt we owe for our very being is one that could not be discharged or cancelled even by our voluntarily ceasing to be—by taking our own life in suicide, for instance.  There may be some circumstances in which, as Jean Améry argued, the choice to commit suicide has good and sufficient grounds and is, therefore, a thoroughly rational choice under those circumstances, to be respected as such.  However, the idea that one could pay one’s debt for one’s very being by committing such suicide is not tenable.  If anything, a suicide committed on the basis of the inescapability of one’s ontological indebtedness would just incur further debt, adding more charges against one, in effect, in much the same way as leaving town and changing one’s identity to avoid making payments on a bank loan only increases one’s liability.

Whatever one’s belief or lack of belief about such matters as God and sin, at least one debt that all of us do indeed incur by being born at all is our debt to the dead.  For one thing, we are all first, last, and always in debt to the dead—as paradoxical as it may sound–for their very dying:  To put the point bluntly, if the dead had not died, then there’d be no place for us among the living.  By dying, the dead make room for us, as we in turn will make room for others in our own deaths.

Thus, we owe our very lives and any chance to live them to the dead, who, by their dying, make room for us to be born into life.  Life itself is indebtedness to the dead for the gift of life opened to us by their dying.  We are all born of the dying of the dead, and even giving birth is itself a matter of just such dying, that the newborn may be.  It is the giving up of one’s claim over one’s own life, so that life may come forth in the other, the one being born.  By dying, the dead give the gift of life to the living, bearing them to their births.

Such a link between bearing a child and dying oneself has often enough been noted.  What has perhaps been noticed less often is that giving life to a child is also giving the same child over to death, to dying.  As an old proverb says, as soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.  That is true not just or even mainly in the trivial sense that at any moment after birth one may suddenly die, killed by such accidents as earthquakes, malevolent acts of others, or congenital defects of one’s own.  The truth in the proverb that as soon as we are born we are old enough to die is that we are all born dying:  Living itself is “unto death” in a strong sense.  Giving birth to a child is setting that child free to die, letting the child go, releasing it into dying.  The dead, in dying, give us the gift of life, which is to say the gift that enables us to die ourselves:  In dying, the dead give us not just “the gift of life,” but also and inseparably “the gift of death,” to use the title of one of Jacques Derrida’s works.    For that gift of death, a gift without which we could receive no other gifts at all (nor offer any, for that matter) we owe a debt to the dead.

Above all what we owe the dead for that gift—of life, of death, of life unto death–is no more and no less than to accept the gift they have given us.  To accept the gift of death from the dead, however, is just to live unto death and into it ourselves, as the dead have done before us.  In turn, to do that—to accept the gift of death from the dead by dying oneself—is to pass on the gift of death, by clearing space for others, “the next generation,” to come forth, that they too may receive the same gift.  By not clinging to life, but letting it go, we make room for others to be born and life to go on–go on, namely, in the living, which is always unto death.

The dead as such, however, are anonymous.  Dying is entering into such anonymity.  It is folly, therefore, to think that we pay our debt to the dead by remembering them by name.  It is much more nearly the reverse:  We pay our debt to the dead by letting them go forth into death, as into just such anonymity.  It is in, and only in, anonymity that the dead are finally and truly let be dead.  Anything short of that, however, and we are refusing the very gift we owe to the dead, the very gift of life itself; we are throwing that gift back in the face of the giver, which is the very definition of ingratitude.

“How can one escape what never sets?” asks Heraclitus rhetorically in one of his fragments.   Yet in The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For (Fordham, 2002) Jean-Louis Chrétien teaches the paradox that only what can never be remembered is truly unforgettable.  All its possible positive benefits for those who are still alive set aside, the endeavor to remember the dead by reading their names–as is done on the anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, at the site where the World Trade Center once stood, for example–is not what the living must do, to give the dead their due.  Insofar as such endeavors to cling to the memory of the individual dead actually drag the dead out of the anonymity within which death itself encloses them, those endeavors just make a fetish of the dead.  To that degree, they refuse to honor the dead in their very being dead, and even begin to cross over into blasphemy against them.

Hope to be remembered individually and by name by future generations is hope in a sham-immortality.  As the author of Ecclesiates knew, all that is vanity.  Not only will all the survivors with all their memories of all their dead loved ones eventually vanish themselves in turn, but even while those survivors still live and still keep their memories of all their dead loved ones brightly burnished, the images so kept do not reveal but mask what they represent.  A form of idolatry is involved, whereby the images of the dead come to replace the dead themselves in the recollections of the still living.  The dead are thus denied their death, disrespected in their anonymous community in death.

In his classic literary biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellman at one point addresses the lines I used as the epigraph for this chapter, the last lines from “The Dead,” Joyce’s great closing story in Dubliners.  Ellman argues that the Joycean snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” must not be taken, as not a few have taken it, to be a symbol for death itself.  Ellman maintains that such an understanding would involve Joyce in a very un-Joycean tautology, the tautology of death descending on the dead.  Yet I would maintain, pace Ellman, that the snow of those lines is precisely death, and that it is just the fall of death upon both the living and the dead that brings both together into a single, universal community, the only community in which there is no “respecting of persons,” because in that community all are equal–equal, namely and only, in their complete anonymity:  All the living and all the dead are all alike alone together before death.

Only when the names of the dead are at last forgotten, are the dead themselves—all the anonymous dead alike–allowed at last fully to be themselves remembered, and no longer covered over by their very names and by our own needy memories of them.  As only the monk who no longer knows he is praying is truly praying, according to the desert anchorites of the early centuries of Christianity, so are the dead truly worshipped only when the worshiper no longer knows just whom she is worshiping.

Some of the most pointed examples of experiencing the impossibility of repaying the debt that the living owe to the dead can be found among survivors of such horrible traumatic events as the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, or the Nazi extermination of the Jews.  Robert Jay Lifton, who worked with survivors of both cataclysms, makes a point of how both Hiroshima survivors and Auschwitz survivors commonly regard their survival as mandating them to bear witness to those who did not so survive.  They experience themselves as guilty before those who died in the bombing or in the camps.  Furthermore, no matter how often and for how long the survivors bear such witness, telling others about what happened to those who did not survive, the survivors never experience it as enough.   They never experience themselves as acquitted of the duty to go on bearing witness.  As they experience it themselves, the debt of survivors to those who did not survive can never be repaid.

Not just for survivors of Hiroshima or Auschwitz, however but also for us all as “survivors”–those who are still alive in the face of all the dead–our debt to the dead is un-payable.  For that very reason, any attempt to pay it accrues a sort of second order guilt, the guilt that comes from doing harm to another.  We harm the dead in stripping them of their rest in the anonymity of death, insisting on calling them back from the grave by name, summoning them by our invocations, to serve as instruments for our own purposes.   To honor them and acknowledge our debt is to refuse any longer so to abuse them.  It is, instead, to let them be dead.

It is not by reciting the names of the dead at memorial occasions, or printing their pictures as “portraits of glory” in our newspapers, that we assume our debt to them and acknowledge our guilt before them.  Rather, we can assume that debt and acknowledge that guilt only by what amounts to an opposite sort of movement, one in which we no longer try to detain the dead and keep them with us, but instead allow them to depart from us, and go forth into the holy anonymity of the grave.

Our Debt to the Dead #2: Heidegger’s Guilt

Having discussed influential psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s idea of a positive, healthy, morally mature sense of having a “debt to the dead” in my preceding post, in today’s post I discuss Martin Heidegger’s famous analysis of guilt in Being and Time.

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In Being and Time Heidegger argues that “being guilty” (Schuldigsein) is a primordial existential determination of what he calls Dasein, his name for the human being, which is commonly left in the German even in English translations of his work.  That is, far from guilt being a condition one acquires only on occasion, by acting contrary to how one “should” act, being guilty belongs, by his analysis, to the very being of a human being, the being of “being-there” or Dasein (da: there; and sein: to be). According to him, it is only because Dasein always already is guilty, that it is even possible for it to become “guilty” in the derivative sense of having committed some violation of some moral or social law or rule—become guilty, in short, through failure to do one’s “duty,” to do what one “should” or “ought to” do.

It is interesting to note that, like Lifton, Heidegger supports his analysis in part by referring to the etymology of the word guilt (Schuld, in German).  The root of that term means “to owe,” “to be owing to. ”  In that sense, then, it means precisely to be in debt—namely, in debt to whatever or whomever one owes whatever it is that one owes.

In the everyday—but, for Heidegger, derivative–usage of the term ‘guilt,’ one acquires guilt by being the cause or agent of a violation of duty, broadly conceived.   So understood, being guilty is not at all definitive for being human at all.  Rather, it is an occasional state or condition acquired through specific acts (including failures to act) of a certain sort.  The “debt” connected to guilt is a debt accrued by such actions, and is, therefore, at least in principle something that could be “paid off” by some sort of payment, whether in pounds sterling or in pounds of flesh.

Such everyday usage clearly still accords well enough with the original, etymological meaning of the term ‘debt.’  In effect, contemporary usage just limits the notion of being in debt, of owing something, to cases in which the debt at issue is incurred by one’s own specific choices and actions, or at least to debts capable of being paid off in one fashion or another.  So, to give an example relevant to my concerns in this chapter, just such an understanding of debt would be in play in any account of so called “ancestor worship” that treated such worship as an attempt to keep the spirits of ancestors well disposed toward oneself or one’s society by making them payments in the way of sacrifices of various sorts, from firstborn children to fumes of incense or ejaculatory prayers.

In contrast, both Heidegger’s and Lifton’s analyses of guilt suggest a very different account of the nature of debt as such–and, accordingly, a very different account of what is at issue in supposed ancestor worship.  Certainly by Heidegger’s analysis–and, if I am right, also by Lifton’s–guilt, precisely as indebtedness, is not a condition acquired after the fact as a consequence of making certain choices or acting in certain ways.  Rather, it is part and parcel of being human, as such:  To be a human being is to be guilty, indebted, before and apart from any specific choices one might make or fail to make, or actions one might perform or fail to perform.

It follows, as well, that such guilt or indebtedness can never, in principle, be “paid off.”  Insofar as it defines the very being of the human being as such, even the payment of one’s own life could never write “paid” over the debt at issue.  No conceivable payment, no matter how large or difficult to make, could ever close one’s account and put one in good standing, as it were.

It is perhaps worthwhile to take a few moments to contrast the notion of guilt and debt that emerges in Lifton and Heidegger with another analysis of guilt with which it might seem to be similar:  the famous/infamous analysis of human guilt and indebtedness to God first fully articulated by St. Anselm in the 11^th century, and still very much alive today within large parts both of Catholicism and of evangelical Protestantism—an idea that finds popular expression billboards and bumper stickers that proclaim “Christ died for your sins.”   In line with such an idea, the supposed “fall” of humanity through Adam, the fall from grace by and into sin, is something by which human beings acquire an “infinite” debt to God.  By the principle that full payment must be equivalent to what is owed, however, an infinite debt could only be paid off with an infinite payment, which is, in turn, a payment that only a being that was itself infinite could ever possibly pay.  Accordingly, in order to pay the infinite debt incurred by sin, and thus liberate humanity from the burden of an otherwise un-relievable burden, it was necessary for the infinite God to become incarnate in Jesus and then to take on, as a sort of infinite scapegoat, all the infinite burden of sin, in order that, in His death on the cross, he could then pay Himself the infinite “ransom” demanded to liberate humanity from captivity in its own sin, and to reconcile it to Himself.

However, in contrast, Lifton’s and Heidegger’s analyses suggest, as I read them, that the debt the living owe the dead is one that even an infinite God could never pay.  To capture what is at issue, we might say that the debt in question is infinite in the sense of unending, taken strictly.  That is, it is in-finite in the sense of being literally without end–alternatively worded, it is ever ongoing.   To put the point paradoxically, even if God were to pay himself an infinite payment (as “ransom”) for the infinite debt of human sinfulness, humanity would still not be free of debt.  It would still not receive any “get out of jail” card in the game of divine monopoly.  Humanity’s debt to God would still be infinite, even after such an infinite payment.  It would just keep going on.  The debt would just keep “carrying over,” and the “balance due” would remain infinite.

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It may be helpful at this point to note that, more than twenty years after the publication of Being and Time, in what was eventually published under the title of  “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger explicitly connected the notion of “indebtedness” (Schulden) to the ancient philosophical doctrine of four-fold causation.  Indeed, he uses the very term Schuld (debt/guilt) to capture what, according to him, is at stake in the ancient Greek notion of “aitia,” normally translated as “cause.”   He says, in short, that what the Greeks meant by aitia was precisely that to which whatever was at issue was, in effect, owing.

In colloquial English, we often use ‘owing to’ in the way Heidegger has in mind.  For example, in the fall of 2008, after a summer of record gas prices, many families across the United States might well have said that “owing to the price of gas” they had not taken any long summer vacation trips.  Furthermore, though present usage of the term ‘cause’ is much more restricted than was the case for ancient Greek usage of the term aitia, it still does not sound especially strange to say that the cost of gas “caused” the families at issue to stay home.  If asked why they took no trips, such families might well say that it was “because” of the cost of gas:  be-cause of the price of gasoline–that is, by cause of it—they remained at home.

In that broad sense of the term, whereby a cause of an occurrence is anything that contributes to answering the question of “why” it happened, the causes of a given occurrence are the factors owing to which it occurred.  The event owes its very occurrence to those factors, and is in that sense indebted to them.

An occurrence solely as such, however, is not itself “accountable” in its indebtedness—accountable “for” itself “to” the factors to which it is indebted.  In contrast, it is not merely as being indebted—in the sense of “being owing to,” as just addressed, in which “being indebted” is characteristic of anything whatever—but also as being accountable for their debts to their “debtors” that human beings are guilty.

Heidegger expresses this by saying that Dasein not only “is” a “null basis” of itself, but also itself “has to be” that null basis—that is, it “has” that null basis “to be,” in accordance with Heidegger’s general formulation to the effect that Dasein never simply “is” whatever it is, but always has being whatever it is “as an issue,” or “at issue,” for itself, and in that sense always “has its being [whatever it “is”] to be.”  That is what Heidegger in Being and Time labels the “existence” (“ek-sistence”:  literally, standing out from itself) of Dasein.

Consequently, when he eventually gets around to discussing guilt, Heidegger offers a definition whereby guilt is:  “having to be the null basis of a nullity.”  For my purposes here–and based on Heidegger’s own discussion of guilt or debt (Schuld), indebtedness (being-in-debt, or being-guilty:  Schuldig-sein), and debts (Schulden )–being guilty can be taken to mean not merely being indebted or owing to something or someone,  but in addition to be accountable for the debt at issue.  In that sense, the debt at issue is a debt that lies at the very heart of the being of the person, prior to—and first making possible at all—the incurring of any debt or indebtedness in the more limited sense, where it is only through actions or failures to act that one can accrue guilt.  Thus, even before and apart from any actions we might take or fail to take, we are not only always in debt but also always accountable for it.  As such, we always must and always do–one way or another, like it or not–take up that debt, assuming it, as it were.

In our accountability for our always inescapable indebtedness, to give an accounting is always part of our standing debt:  We always  “owe an accounting” of our debt to—we are “accountable” to–whatever or whomever we are “owing” in the first place.  Thus, first and above all one is accountable for any given debt to whomever or whatever one owes whatever it is that one owes—to whomever or whatever gave it to one in the first place:  one’s “debtor” or “creditor” for the debt in question.  Thus, for example, in one line of one old version of the Christian prayer to “Our Father,” one prays to God the Father explicitly as to just such a creditor, asking that God “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”  More mundanely, the bank that carries the mortgage on my home is my creditor for the sum of money involved (plus interest, of course); and I am a debtor in relation to them for that sum.

It is at least conceivable, however unlikely, that the bank holding the mortgage on my home might at some time forgive me that particular debt.  If we are to believe many of the “believers” among us, then God does indeed forgive us the debts to Him we incur by “sin”—though there is disagreement among such believers about whether God must first be asked to forgive us the debt of our sins, as there is about the details required for the transaction.  For example, there is disagreement among Christians about whether the Incarnation and Passion of Christ was the price that God had to pay Himself to “ransom” us from His own clutches, as Saint Anselm says.

To stay for a moment with that same Christian example, it remains a matter of debate among Christians whether the indebtedness at issue, namely, the indebtedness incurred by “sin,” is so incurred by our specific, chosen actions and failures to act, or whether it is part and parcel of our being born in the first place.  Whatever may be the resolution of that dispute among Christians, if there is any final resolution possible, the mere fact that there is such dispute points to an issue concerning guilt and debt that has more than Christian significance.  That is the issue of how to address the indebtedness revealed by the preceding analysis, informed by Lifton’s and Heidegger’s works.  How are we to address that indebtedness incurred by the very fact that we are born at all, an inescapable indebtedness which is implicated in our very being, before and apart from any indebtedness of a more limited sort that one might incur by one’s decisions and actions, such as the decision to purchase a home on credit, or the act of stealing fruit from a neighbor’s tree (as Augustine famously did)?

I will discuss that question in the next section of this chapter.

Our Debt to the Dead #1: Robert J. Lifton, Survivors, and Guilt (Beginning a New Chapter and Closing, Belatedly and with Apologies, an Old One)

Today I begin posting the draft of a new chapter–the third so far–for what I plan to be eventually a book on trauma and philosophy.  This chapter has the tentative title of “Our Debt to the Dead.”

I also want to apologize to readers, for an unintentional omission in a recent series of posts.  Only while preparing the post for today did I realize that I had somehow never finished posting what should have been the penultimate post of the series I devoted to the first of the three chapters just mentioned.  I have now at last posted that entry, which can be found at this blog-site under the title “Responding to Trauma #7:  Rebecca Solnit and Building Paradise in Hell, Continued,”  published just yesterday (October 22).  Interested readers might want to go back and begin with the post “Responding to Trauma #6,” for the start of my discussion of Solnit’s recently published book A Paradise Built in Hell.

What follows below is the opening of my draft for the new chapter, on what we owe the dead.

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Our Debt to the Dead

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” – James Joyce, Dubliners

Robert Jay Lifton, Survivors, and Guilt

“One kind of anxiety is a sense of guilt,” writes influential psychologist Robert Jay Lifton to begin an analysis of guilt in Broken Connections:  Death and Life Continuity e (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1979, page 132).   What Lifton says about guilt is in the context of his decades-long research on survivors of such public, historically significant traumas as the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima at the end of World War II or of the American debacle in Viet Nam a few decades later.  With regard to the latter, Lifton played a crucial role in the development of the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and in eventually gaining official recognition of PTSD as a distinct diagnostic category, signaled by its inclusion in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980.

“Guilt feelings,” he goes on to observe, “like other forms of anxiety, are associated with psychological pain and many kinds of psychopathology.”  Lifton’s own concern with guilt, however, is not so much with pathological manifestations of it as it is with guilt’s healthy forms.  Thus, immediately after noting the connection between guilt and psychopathology, he writes that “guilt can also serve as a signal that the integrity of the organism, or moral integrity, is threatened.”  Thus, he concludes:  “It follows that the capacity for guilt is necessary and useful on the one hand, and a potential source of severe psychological harm on the other.”

Significantly, when Lifton turns to the topic of what has commonly come to be known as “survivor guilt,” that is, the guilt that survivors of a trauma that strikes others as well as themselves often experience toward those who did not survive, he does not relegate such guilt, as one might expect, to the second camp, that of unhealthy manifestations of guilt.  That is, he does not treat survivor guilt as a subset of pathological guilt, as tends to occur in contemporary popular psychological accounts of the phenomenon, where feeling guilt for surviving a traumatic event is typically treated as no more than a malady to be overcome, or at best a stage of the healing process–at any rate not as something that characterizes mature psychological health itself.

However, the contrary idea, that survivor guilt as such does indeed belong to mature psychological health, is just what Lifton’s analysis ultimately suggests.  Instead of relegating survivor guilt to the pathological side of phenomena of guilt, Lifton draws the distinction between the healthy and the pathological within survivor guilt itself.  Thus, while not at all denying that survivor guilt can and often does indicate an underlying psychopathology, Lifton also insists that it can sometimes indicate psychological—and moral—vitality and health.

As he presents it inThe Broken Connection, it is precisely his own earlier work with cases of guilt in survivors of the atom bomb explosion over Hiroshima at the end of World War II, as well as his work two to three decades later with American veterans of the war in Vietnam, which gives Lifton his guiding clues for characterizing not just survivor guilt, but even guilt in general.  In effect, he de-pathologizes survivor guilt by placing it in the perspective of the larger view of guilt he derives from his earlier work with survivors.

The crucial step in Lifton’s analysis is to focus upon survivor guilt in terms of the inexpugnable sense of a debt to the dead that survivors commonly experience.    In turn, against the not uncommon tendency to treat the sense of debt toward the dead as itself mere evidence of immature or superstitious belief, he articulates the position that, as he puts it at the end of the chapter on guilt in The Broken Connection (page 146), “[i]ndividuation itself demands that the young organism…indeed develop the capacity for a debt to the dead…”

Two pages earlier (144), Lifton is careful to note:  “The image of a debt to the dead conveys the idea of something one owes, a duty, an obligation, a matter in which there is some form of accountability.”  That last word, ‘accountability,’ provides the key for understanding Lifton’s entire analysis, in my judgment.  For him, the notion of debt is not to be read as a reduction of the idea of moral accountability or responsibility to some sort of economic exchange, as it is widely taken to be, especially in “deconstructive” accounts.  Rather than arguing that the idea of a debt to the dead involves a sort of economicization of the idea of guilt, as occurs in such accounts, Lifton, as I read him, suggests that what is really in play is a de-economicization of the idea of debt, in which the very notion of economic debt gets read back into the broader moral context of accountability or responsibility.

What is more, I do not think it does injustice to Lifton’s thought to remark that the tendency of his analysis is precisely to divorce the notion of debt, specifically of debt to the dead, from any attempt to treat such debt as something that could ever even potentially be “discharged.”  That is, debt to the dead in the sense at issue for him as I read him is nothing that could ever possibly be “paid off,” leaving the living no longer indebted, and thereby freeing them to go on about their business, content in the good conscience of having repaid their debts to, and squared their accounts with, the dead.

Rather, the sense of debt to the dead to which Lifton’s analysis points is a debt that is un-payable in principle.  It is a debt that can never be discharged and which, more importantly, is misunderstood as soon as it is treated in terms of any possibility of paying it off.  Indeed, I would argue that it is not pushing things too far to say that such “misunderstanding” is an all too motivated, self-serving one for those who entertain it:  The attempt to reduce one’s debt to the dead to something that might somehow someday be paid off, is actually the crucial attempt to shirk that very debt, to renege on it–in short, to cheat the dead of what one owes them.

However, the dead are remorseless, as it were.  They never forgive the debt the living owe them.  Nor do they ever “write off their losses.”  Instead, they stubbornly insist on asserting their claim on the living.   The dead are inexorable creditors.

By Lifton’s analysis the morally mature, healthy individual is, then, not someone who has somehow managed to pay her debt to the dead.  Rather, even to think in terms that would allow one to make sense of the notion of ever writing “paid” to the living’s debt to the dead would be a reliable sign of moral immaturity.  In contrast, the morally mature and healthy individual would be someone who holds tightly to the knowledge that her debt to the dead can never be discharged, never be paid or made good.  It is a debt, instead, that must be constantly borne.

Today, such a view seems completely counter-intuitive.  It runs head on against some currently basic notions concerning debts, indebtedness, and the payment of debts.  So deeply has the common contemporary understanding economicized the notion of debt that the very idea of the sort of debt Lifton’s analysis suggests we owe the dead–a debt the sum of which cannot be calculated and for which no balancing of accounts would ever be possible—such a notion seems to be sheer non-sense, a violation of the very meaning of the term ‘debt.’  A debt that could never even conceivably be paid, with however large a sum of payments, seems void of all sense, given current dominant understandings.

It also runs counter to the still widespread idea of the foolishness, the childishness–the “primitive” nature–of all “ancestor worship” and “ancestor religion.”  Contrary to such derogation of ancestor worship, if Lifton is right in the general direction of his thinking about debts to the dead, then ancestor worship could well bear witness to the good and mature moral sense of those who practiced it, rather than to their moral immaturity.

But what sort of a bizarre debt would it be, that could never in principle be paid off, and that is owed to those no longer even living?  Could it be anything more than a poor wordplay to talk of such a wholly non-indemnifiable debt?

In my judgment, Heidegger’s famous analysis of guilt and debt in Being and Time can help to answer that question, as I will discuss in the next section of this chapter.

Responding to Trauma #1: Learning from Cormac McCarthy

Today I am resuming this blog after going on vacation during August. Welcome to any new readers, and welcome back to my previous ones.  My intention is now to resume posting on this blog three times weekly, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as became my practice before I went on vacation.

Up until my vacation, I was using this blog to post entries I had written earlier, in longhand, in my philosophical journal, concerning the reading I have been doing for the last couple of years in the area of trauma studies, broadly conceived. Beginning with today’s post, I am modifying that pattern. With my final entry before taking vacation, I managed more or less to catch up with myself.  That is, with that post I more or less closed the gap between when I originally wrote reflections in my journal and when I shared them with readers of this blog.  Accordingly, now that I am resuming blogging, what I will be posting from now on will be from my current work on the topics of trauma, philosophy, and the connections between the two.

In typing up my earlier, handwritten notes for previous posts, I have not only made that material available for others to read.  I have also made it available to myself, to rework into longer, more thematically organized essays, which I hope will eventually form the chapters for a book on the topic.  In effect, I will be using this blog to write drafts of those chapters in public.

In doing so, I will be presenting some new material (new, at least, in the sense that I have not posted it before), along with reorganized, newly edited material that I have indeed already posted before.  With regard to the latter, I hope that, for my regular readers, rereading material they have already read before will prove to be rewarding, given the new setting in which they will be encountering it this time around.

What follows below is my draft of the opening pages of a projected chapter I have given the working title of “The Truth of Trauma.”  For blogging purposes, however, I will bunch the posts for the chapter under the title above, “Responding to Trauma,” numbering the posts consecutively and giving each day’s post its own identifying subtitle (“Learning from Cormac McCarthy,” for example, for today’s post).  In each of the posts to follow in coming days, I will just pick up where the preceding post leaves off, until the draft for the entire chapter has been presented.  Then I’ll repeat that process for the next chapter, and so on.

Here, then, is the opening of my draft of the chapter presently at issue.

* * * * *

The Truth of Trauma

By the truth of trauma I mean the response that trauma itself elicits from those to whom it happens–the response that lets trauma be the trauma that it is.  The truth of trauma is the response to trauma that grants it a place to strike, to traumatize, rather than denying it any place to take place.

But just what response, then, does trauma elicit?  What does trauma call upon us to do, if we are not to deny or avoid traumatization, but are, rather, to yield it space?

Let us begin with reflecting upon a powerful piece of fiction that in its own way addresses just that question.

* * *

In his fiction, contemporary American writer Cormac McCarthy depicts horrendous, traumatic events as they affect his diverse characters.  That is certainly true of his novel No Country for Old Men (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), subsequently made into an award winning film.  McCarthy ends the novel by depicting the retirement of Ed Tom Bell, a longtime border-town Texas sheriff and the moral anchor of the novel, in whose narrative voice McCarthy begins each of his chapters, before shifting to a neutral authorial voice.  At the close of the novel, Bell is leaving his office on his last day as sheriff, to return home to his beloved and loving wife.  Bell is retiring as sheriff because of his experiences, recounted in the preceding chapters, with Anton Chigurh, the new breed of soulless killer who is the engine driving all the considerable death and violence depicted in the novel.

Outside his office Bell gets in his truck, then sits there reflecting for a time, rather than leaving to go home right away.   He tries to sort out his own emotions.  McCarthy writes  (p. 306):  “He couldn’t name the feeling.  It was sadness but it was something else besides.  And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck.”   Then McCarthy alludes to an earlier episode in Bell’s life, when Bell was a soldier in World War II, holed up with his unit in a French farmhouse, which is eventually shelled and destroyed around them:  “ He’d felt like this before but not in a long time and when he’d said that, then he knew what it was.  It was defeat.  It was being beaten.  More bitter to him than death.  You need to get over that, he said.  Then he started the truck.”

Grammatically, at least, McCarthy’s text leaves the reference of the “that” which Bell needs to get over ambiguous.  What Bell feels he needs to “get over” could be the “defeat,” the “being beaten” he has experienced through Chigurh.  But it could also be that what he needs to get over is whatever it is in him–in his own character–that makes such defeat so “bitter,” “more bitter to him than death.”  That is, what Bell may feel he needs to get over may be, not defeat as such, but his making the avoidance of defeat so definitive for his sense of his own dignity.  My own reading of the novel, especially its closing pages, leads me to that latter conclusion, as I will now try to explain.

McCarthy uses the passage just cited to end the next to last chapter of the novel.  Then he casts the following, final chapter of only two pages entirely in Bell’s own voice.  In those closing thoughts, Bell recounts two things.  The first is how earlier in his life, as a soldier in World War II, he had discovered, outside the French farmhouse soon to be destroyed around him and his unit at the end of the war, a water trough that had been patiently chiseled out of the rock there by some erstwhile inhabitant in an earlier age.

“I don’t know how long it had been there,” Bell reflects:

A hundred years.  Two hundred.  You could see the chisel marks in the stone.  It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six feet long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep.  Just chiseled out of the rock.  And I got to thinking about the man that done that.  That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of.  I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one.  But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years.  Why was that?  What was it that he had faith in?  It wasn’t that nothing would change.  Which is what you might think, I suppose.  He had to know bettern that.  I’ve thought about it a good deal.  I thought about it after I left that house blown to pieces.  I’m going to say that water trough is there yet.  It would have took something to move it, I can tell you that.  So I think about him setting there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just an hour or two after supper, I don’t know.  And I have to say the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart.  And I don’t have no intention of carvin a stone water trough.  But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise.  I think that’s what I would like most of all.

Doesn’t the Psalmist singing of the transience of the rich and powerful and the triumph of the poor and lowly make just such a promise, too?  And doesn’t Bell’s own father, of whom Bell speaks in the second and last thing he recounts to the reader in the closing paragraph of the book, to which I will now turn?

Earlier, the reader has learned that Bell’s grandfather was a lawman, like Bell himself.  Bell’s father, however, was not.  He seemed to lack whatever it was his own father, Bell’s grandfather, and his son, Bell himself, had–whatever it was that let both of them become such figures of authority and prestige.  Just after mentioning the water trough in the rock outside the long-ago bombed-out French farmhouse, Bell recalls his father (pp. 308-309):

The other thing is that I have not said much about my father and I know I have not done him justice.  I’ve been older now than he ever was for almost twenty years so in a sense I’m looking back at a younger man.  He went on the road tradin horses when he was not much more than a boy. . . . He knew about horses and he was good with em.  I’ve seen him break a few and he knew what he was doin.  Very easy on the horse.  Talked to em a lot.  He never broke nothin in me and I owe him more than I would of thought.  As the world might look at it I suppose I was the better man.  Bad as that sounds to say.  Bad as it is to say.  That has got to have been hard to live with.  Let alone his daddy.  He would never have made a lawman.  He went to college I think two years but he never did finish.  I’ve thought about him a lot less than I should of and I know that aint right either.  I had two dreams about him after he died.  I don’t remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin in town somewhere and he give me some money and I think I lost it.  But the second one was like we were both back in older times and I was on horseback going through the mountains of a night.  Goin through this pass in the mountains.  It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin.  Never said nothing.  He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it.  About the color of the moon.  And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.  And then I woke up.

What we owe the dead is everything, if we owe them anything at all.  I will eventually return to the issue of our debt to the dead, but for now there is still much more to be said on the truth of trauma—the response trauma elicits from us.  My argument will be that the truth of trauma lies in such responses to as are embodied in Bell’s long dead French farmer, or his more recently dead father, rather than in the sort of response Bell himself, outside his office after his last day a sheriff, experiences as having suffered defeat.

* * *

Lifton and “Superpower Syndrome” Continued

6/22/09

This is the second post on Robert J. Lifton’s Super Power Syndrome–and the last of a series of eight consecutive posts overall about his thought.

 

Friday, November 21, 2008

Lifton, p. 152, on Bush’s response right after 9/11: 

The debt to the dead, and to the immediate survivors representing them, was instantly transformed into a strong impulse toward retaliative action.  Such a sequence is hardly unusual, and could be the experience of any national leader.  The danger a leader faces is that of equating a sense of debt to the dead with fierce, amorphous retribution.”

P. 175:  The Bush vision of spreading “freedom” and “democracy” across the globe is, in Lifton’s analysis, one of “fluid world control, . . . nothing less than an inclusive claim to the ownership of history.”  “Yet,” as he observes a few pages later (p. 178),

a sense of megalomania and omnipotence,  whether in an individual or a superpower, must sooner or later lead not to glory but collapse.  The ownership of history is a fantasy in the extreme.  Infinite power and control is a temptation that is as self-destructive as  it is dazzling–still another  version of the ownership  of death.

And, as he importantly notes later on that same page, such dreams/assertions of (fantastic) power tend to be underlain by “profound feelings of powerlessness and emptiness.”  He even more powerfully concludes that paragraph as follows:  “Fear of being out of control can lead to  the most aggressive efforts at total control of everyone else.”

Robert J. Lifton on “Superpower Syndrome”

6/19/09

Following up on the series of my six preceding posts on Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, this is the first of two posts on a later work of the same author, written after 9/11–Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003).  I first wrote the entry below in my philosophical journal on the date indicated.

 

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Lifton, Super Power Syndrome, p. 19:  “The image of apocalypse has been so much with us because we are meaning-hungry creatures who know that we die, and we fervently seek a place for our deaths in the cosmic order.  Individual deaths, when associated with the death and rebirth of the world, can take on special significance and high nobility.”

Against that, the acknowledgement that all death is in vaincould help.  [That is my observation, not Lifton's.]

P. 22–When apocalyptic ideas take on an interventionist activism:

The evil being confronted is viewed as something like an enemy army, which must not only be defeated but, since ever ready to regroup, annihilated.  For that task one requires what the writer James Carroll calls “god-sponsored violence”–violence that is both unlimited and holy.  As individuals and as a group, then, apocalyptics merge with God in the claim to ownership of death.  That is, they claim the right not only to murderous purification but to make all judgments concerning who is to die and who is to be permitted to survive.  This ownership of death comes to include ownership of meaning and of all aspects of life.

Perhaps all claims to ownership finally involve, as their inner sense, the claim to such ownership of death.

 

Pp. 140-141, on “what I call death guilt (frequently termed ‘survivor guilt’)”: 

Death guilt has to do with others dying and not oneself, or with remaining alive when one  has been close to death (and was “supposed” to die).  It has to do with what I would call failed enactment:  one’s inability at the moment of the disaster to act in the way one would have expected of oneself (saving people, resisting the  perpetrators), or even to have experienced the expectable and appropriate emotions (strong compassion for victims, rage toward perpetrators).  Death guilt begins with, and is sustained by, this “failure”; the memory can be endlessly repeated psychologically, and although somewhat ameliorated over time, is never completely erased.

As this passage indicates (and as Lifton suggests even more strongly in a note at the bottom of the same page, where he writes:  “There has been much confusion over ‘survivor guilt’ and related terms because they can be erroneously understood to suggest actual  wrongdoing, as opposed to guilt feelings, which are psychological manifestations of self-condemnation, however undeserved”), in this recent work, Lifton drops what I take to be fruitful indications in his earlier book Broken Connections that “survivor guilt” is a non-pathological form–or at least can be–of guilt, rather than involving a split between experienced and “real” guilt.

Here, then, he falls back on an equation of guilt with “wrongdoing.”  Thus, in the very next line on p. 141 he writes, “Guilt feelings [of "death guilt"] are closely bound up with a sense of debt to the dead, a debt that can never quite be repaid.”  So, here, he splits “guilt” and “debt,” which he connected, on the basis of their common etymological German root [the common root of Schuld (guilt) and Schulden (debts)], in Broken Connections.

Final Remarks on Jean-Luc Nancy

6/3/09

This is the third consecutive post I have devoted to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s ongoing project of rereading Christianity–rereading it in a way I find very suggestive for the study of trauma.  Today’s post contains my philosophical journal entries, first written on the dates indicated below, on Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure:  The Deconstruction of Christianity, translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York:  Fordham University Press, 2008).

 One of the reasons for the strong appeal Nancy’s effort at recovering Christianity (largely from itself) has for me, lies in his consistent, insistent rejection of any sort of cheap and easy “redemption” or “salvation.”  So, for example, on page 20 of Dis-Enclosure he writes:  “If I am undertaking, at present, a meditation on monotheism, it is not to seek in it some way out, some remedy or salvation.  ‘Salvation’ represents, on the contrary [to what he is attempting], the confirmation of the world of nihilism by the necessity of the redemption that it asserts.”  In Dis-Enclosure and elsewhere, Nancy is careful repeatedly to reject any redemption or salvation so conceived.  Accordingly, his thought makes room for, and thereby respects, the lesson that the Holocaust, the definitive “historical trauma,” and, indeed, that trauma in general, teaches–the lesson that there is no such “redemption” possible, as I have explored in some of my earlier posts at this site.

A little later in the book, in a critical reading of Heidegger in and as a chapter called “On a Divine Wink [German for "hint"],” Nancy also provides grounds for thought on the connection between the Wink or hint, translation (which winkt or hints when it makes an exception for an “untranslatable” word, such as “Wink” itself, just as it functions in the title of Nancy’s essay–and as he perfectly well knows), and sovereignty, which especially today attempts to establish itself on the declaration of “exceptions” to the presumed rule of law, exceptions necessitated by such public or historical traumas as the attacks of September 11, 2001.  (To cite Carl Schmitt’s famous definition, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.”) 

Thus, Nancy writes on page 106:  “The exception of the untranslatable constitutes the law of translation. . . . Where there is exception, there is sovereignty.  What is sovereign is the idiom that declares itself to be untranslatable.”  Then, in the very next paragraph (on page 107), he goes on to write:  “Sovereign is the translator who decides to suspend the translation, leaving instead the word in the original.”  Then he proceeds to express a double connection between the Wink and sovereignty: 

Thus we can establish, on the one hand, that the Wink is sovereign, and on the other, correlatively, that the sovereign winkt. . . . Nothing is more specifically characteristic of sovereign majesty than the frown, the wink, the expression said to be ’imperceptible,’ the reply to which is called a ‘sign of complicity,’ in the sense that, in that complicity, connivance precedes and exceeds understanding, in the sense that complicity has already understood whatever it is that has not been openly offered up to the understanding, but is expected.  The Wink opens an expectation at the same time as an impatience to which the decision to understand without waiting, in the twinkling of an eye, responds.

In his essay on the Wink Nancy connects Heidegger’s notion of “the last God” as the God who winkt, with  Derrida’s différance (the ordinary spelling of which, in French as in English, uses an e where Derrida writes, instead, an a)–noting in the process that the a in différance is itself a Wink (the very difference to which it calls attention can only be indicated in writing, since as pronounced in French there is no difference between the word written with an a and written with an e)–and with the idea of what passes by, as Heidegger says “the last god” passes by and is the last god only in so passing.  In that connection (of connections) itself, Nancy sees a Wink that opens upon “another sense”–a sense other than that of sovereignty, including, especially and essentially (since, as Derrida taught in Speech and Phenomena, there can be no “meaning” without “indication,” which is to say without any winken that opens the space for “signification”) the sovereignty of “meaning” itself (of that very sense of sense).

On page 113, Nancy writes, on this “other sense”: 

It is not the sense of the other or of an other [as in, say, Levinas], but the other of sense and an other sense, an always other sense that begins freely–if freedom consists in the beginning, and not in the completion, of a new series of events, a new sending back and forth of sense.  This inaugural and never terminal freedom accedes to that excess of sense–which is its sense, which is to say also the sense of being–as if to a climax, a supreme or a sublime that we cannot (and this is precisely the point) call “supreme being,” and that corresponds rather to the suspension of the supreme or of the foundation by which sovereignty declares itself.

This other sense is–to use the title of the next chapter from Nancy’s book, which reflects on a notion of Roland Barthes’, as the preceding essay does on a notion of Heidegger’s–”an exempting from sense.”  Nancy observes (pages 125-126) that to “exempt” is “to relieve of an obligation, to free, to exonerate from a duty or debt.”  Thus, “an exempting from sense” requires (to make sense) that “first sense must have been posited at the level of an obligation, an injunction of some sort . . . an imperative. . . . We have to make sense and produce sense, or else produce ourselves as sense.”  Later (still on page 126) he adds that “the formally sublime dignity of the ‘person’ and anonymous monetary circulation [which defines global market capitalism, of course]” are but the two sides of the single coin of what sets (itself) up (as) the sovereign–and together, as globalization of market economics, constitute the process to which “the other sense” of the preceding chapter on the Wink would be “other.”  Nancy then goes on, still on the same page: 

The wanting-to-say [that is, the "meaning":  vouloir dire, in French, which literally means "to want to say"] commanded by sense always consists, in sum, in a wanting-to-have-said (“I have said” is the word of the master).  An exempting from  sense, by contrast, designates a wanting-to-say [a "meaning"] in which the wanting melts into the saying and gives up wanting, so that sense is absent and makes sense beyond sense.

“There is no sense that is not shared,” Nancy has said already, at the start of his essay on an exemption from sense.  Returning to that observation on the last page of the same essay he writes:

Sense is shared or it does not exist.  The contrasting couple of the exclusive ineffable and the general equivalent, or, if you prefer, of negative theology and monetary ontology, is the result of the disintegration of sharing itself, in which each of the two senses falls to a single side.  Unique sense, in sum, is always unilateral, and no longer has any sense for that very reason.  Nor is it a question of juxtaposing multiple senses.  Here’s the point:  What makes sense is one person speaking to another, just as what makes love is someone making love to someone else.  And one being the other by turns or simultaneously, without there being an end to these comings and goings.  The goal–if we must speak of a goal–is not to be one with sense.  It is not even mutual understanding:  it is to speak anew.

 Then, at the bottom of the same page, he ends the chapter with this:  “And there we have, if I still dare use this word, an ethics for our time–and more than an ethics.”

Nancy then follows with a third excellent chapter, on “Prayer Demythified,” at the end of which (pages 137-138) he writes the following reflections, which illuminate fanaticism as the most destructive form of the endeavor to avoid or deny trauma–though he does not himself use that term.  What he says applies not only to contemporary religious fanaticism of whatever sort, whether Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian–as in the murder in Kansas just a few days ago of Dr. George Tiller, in the name of the protection of the “rights of the as yet unborn,” as it has sometimes been put.  It also applies to Nazi and fascist fanaticism, as Nancy’s own remarks make clear, and to all other forms of political fanaticism, “religious” in professed motivation or not.  Above all, Nancy’s analysis casts light on the connections between distortions of language and the fanatical avoidance of trauma, just as his earlier discussion of the Wink casts light on the connections between translation and sovereignty.  Nancy writes:  “Fanaticism is nothing but the abolition of the intractable distance of the real [the traumatic structure of "reality" as such, in effect], and consequently also the extinction of prayer and all speech, in favor of effusive outpouring, eructation, and vociferation.” 

In contrast to all such denial and distortion, prayer as such, as he has been arguing in the essay on prayer that precedes that comment on fanaticism, is nothing but the lifting up, the elevation, of the saying that is prayer itself.  Hence, he goes on: 

In the elevation of prayer, a supplication also, albeit ”accessory,” cannot fail to intervene, for in it [that is, in prayer] is revealed the “poverty” [of all human speech itself].  The fact is “poor humanity” may have nothing else to pray.  Prayer thus conceived does not enrich, does not remunerate the “poor humanity” that we today have just as many reasons to bemoan [as ever].  It carries poverty over to saying–and it isn’t poverty but saying that is obliterated in this prayer.  Does not the same apply (isn’t it the same thing) to the  saying of love, the saying of mourning, and the saying of speech itself?

However that may be–and clearly his questions function rhetorically here–Nancy concludes that to

concern ourselves with this empty remnant [Note that term!] of prayer, remain faithful to this obligation . . . , [f]or us . . . has the force of a categorical imperative, for nothing today is more important than this:  to empty and let be emptied out all prayers that negotiate a sense, an issue, or a repatriation of the real within the narrow confines of our faded humanisms and clenched religiosities, in order that we may merely open speech once again to its most proper possibility of address, which also makes up all its sense and all its truth.

Trauma calls for just and only such prayer as response–a prayer that lifts up trauma and the traumatized themselves, and, in raising them up, obliterates not trauma and the traumatized but the praying voice itself, vanishing behind what it exhausts itself in lifting up.  Such a remnant prayer, which expropriates those who pray–dis-appropriating them of all their own property, in order that they may at last pray properly–is the only proper prayer, indeed, the only proper speech, of those remnant communities, as I have called them, that are the only real communities, in any world of trauma such as ours.

 

What follows are my entries on Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure in my philosophical journal from last fall.

 

 

Monday, November 24, 2008

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure.  The second essay, “Atheism and Monotheism,” from page 25 to the end of the essay on page 28, is excellent.  In general, he is good indeed on the belonging together of atheism and theism, and on the identity (in Heidgger’s sense [of just such belonging-together, as contrasted to identity taken as mere belonging-together]) of the two as defining the West, but in these last few pages of the piece he is even better than usual.  Just to hit some of the highlights:

P. 25: 

Faith is not weak, hypothetical, or subjective knowledge.  [It's not knowledge at all.] . . . On the contrary, it is the act of the reason that relates, itself, to that which, in it, passes it infinitely:  faith stands precisely at the point where atheism [as the casting loose, one way or another,  of God, if "God" names the principle of totality, as he's arguing it does]. . . . This is the point Kant already recognized formally [see his critique of reason to make room for faith] when he spoke, for example, of “the incapacity in which reason finds itself, to satisfy by itself its own needs.”  Reason does not suffice unto itself:  for itself it is not a sufficient reason.

P. 26:  However,

the name “God” . . . in [an] atheological [sense, rather than the principle/God of theism/atheism] . . . refers to “something,” to ”someone,” or to “a nothing” . . . of which faith is itself the birthplace or the creative event.  That “God” himself may be the fruit of faith, which at the same time depends only on his grace (that is, exempts itself from necessity and obligation), is a thought profoundly foreign–perhaps it is the most foreign–to the theism/atheism pair. . . . Yet this thinking is not foreign to Christian reflection–no more so than to reflection in Judaism or Islam.  Let us cite only Makarios of Magnesia [4th century].  “This one who does the will of my Father gives birth to me [Christ] by participating in this act, and he is born with me.  He who believes that I am the Son of God engenders me in some sense through his faith.”

Bottom of p. 26 he cites “the word that was in a sense Heidegger’s last:  ’Only a god can save us now.’ “  Then, top of p. 27:

It is not politically correct to treat his sentence without contempt.  Yet it is philosophically necessary. . . . Now, to “save” is not “to heal.”  It is not a process, and it is not measured against some ultimate “health” (salus and sanus are not the same terms).  It is a unique and instantaneous act [note:  a Heideggerian Event!], through which one who is already in the abyss is held back or recovered.  “To save” does not annul the abyss; it takes place in it.  (Perhaps buddhist “awakening” takes place in a comparable fashion, if it takes place,  right in the middle of the world and not outside it).

A little later on p. 27:

And the “god” of which he [Heidegger in the article in Der Spiegel he gave 10 years before he died, with the proviso that it only be published posthumously] is speaking designates . . . the “nothing other” for which philosophy is neither the site nor the regime.  That god, that “last god” as he puts it elsewhere–that “god,” insofar as every god is the “last one,” which is to say that every god dissipates and dissolves the every essence of the divine–is a god that beckons [winkt].  That means, it makes a sign without sense, a sign of approach, of invitation, and of departure.  That god has its essence in winken.  And that sign-making, that blink of an eye comes to pass, starting from and in the direction of the Ereignis–the appropriating event through which man, appropriated to or by being, may be disappropriated (ent-eignet) of an identity closed in on its humanity.  Man may thus “propriate” himself, address himself and dedicate himself (zu-eignet) to what is infinitely more than him-”self” [lui-"même"].

 

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, “Opening” (first piece), p. 10:  “Christianity designates nothing other, essentially (that is to say simply, infinitely simply:  through an inaccessible simplicity), than the demand to open in this world an alterity or an unconditional alienation.”  Then, a bit later:  “Christianity can be summed up, as Nietzsche, for one, knew well, in the precept of living in this world as outside of it–in the sense that this ‘outside’ is not, not an entity.  It does not exist, but it (or again, since it) defines and mobilizes ex-istence:  the opening of the world to inaccessible alterity.”

Thus does Christianity itself become de-constructive.

Following up further (pp. 11-12):  “. . . the true scope of the ‘dis-enclosure’ can only be measured by this question:  Are we capable, yes or no, of grasping anew–beyond all mastery–the demand that carries thought out of itself without confusing this demand, in its absolute irreducibility with some construction of ideas or with some sloppy assembly of phantasms?”

Later on p. 12:  “. . . it is a question . . . of wondering whether faith has ever, in truth, been confused with belief.”  Indeed!  Then, as he correctly and importantly adds:  “In effect, it is enough to observe that belief is in no way proper [that is, here, "exclusive"] to religion.  There are many profane beliefs”; there are even beliefs among scholars and philosophers.

 

P. 36 (in third essay, “A Deconstruction of Monotheism”):

With the figure of Christ comes the renunciation of divine power and presence, such that this renunciation becomes the proper act of God, which makes this act into God’s becoming-man. . . . In its principle, monotheism undoes theism, that is to say, the presence of the power that assembles the world and assures this sense.  It thus renders absolutely problematic the name god–it renders it nonsignifying–and above all, it withdraws all power of assurance from it.

 

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, “The Judeo-Christian (on Faith),” p. 53, parenthetically notes that in the sense of “faith” at issue in the letter of James “there is at the heart of faith a decision of faith that precedes itself and exceeds itself,” then writes:  “If belief must be understood as a weak form of an analogy of knowledge, then faith is not of the  order of belief.”  But first (right after the parentheses) he writes that, as such a “decision,” “faith cannot be an adherence to some contents of belief.”  At the end of the same paragraph he writes: 

Taking a step further, even a short step, we could extrapolate from James a declaration like the  following:  “It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief,’ for example, in the belief in redemption by the Christ, that which characterizes the Christian:  only Christian practice is Christian, a life like that lived by him who died on the cross”–a declaration that we cold read in Nietzsche.

Perhaps there is, in that last remark, an indication of a genuine difference between Nancy’s articulations and those of [Gianni] Vattimo on the relevant point of faith:  Vattimo does indeed continue to think  in terms of what in the broad sense may be called the “contents” of belief–taking the latter still as a “holding for true” in some sense.  In contrast, Faulkner, say, in Requiem for a Nun is clearly no longer thinking that way at all, and his use of “belief” is such as to make it the same, I’d say, as Nancy‘s “faith.”  More importantly, I think the reading of Vattimo on the basis, in effect, of Nancy’s understanding of “faith” would help articulate a less rigid distinction between “contents” of belief and “practice” of faith.

For example, to “believe” in the power of prayer could surely be taken to be “holding for true” that prayer is effective.  Thus, the latter could be called the “content” of such a belief.  However, to hold that “content” for true is to act in a certain way.  So one might say something such as this to an “uncertain” believer of a certain sort (a certain sort of “uncertainty”):  “If you believe in the power of prayer, why don’t you act like it?”  That is, genuine belief itself must manifest as and in “works.”

Similarly, to use Nancy’s own example, to believe “in redemption by the Christ” is to be empowered and sent underway into redeemed life, a life lived as redemption and [therefore] lived redemptively.  And that “belief” is as much a gift and a grace as Nancy recognizes [what he calls] “faith” to be.

The happening of truth!

On p. 53 Nancy writes:

In a certain sense, James’ Abraham believes nothing, does not even hope. . . . James’ Abraham is not in the economy of assurances or substitutes for assurance . . . . The reasons that this faith has “to believe” are not reasons.  Thus it has nothing, in sum, with which to convince itself.  This faith is but the “conviction” that gives itself over in act–not even to something “incomprehensible” . . . , but to that which is another act:  a commandment. . . . Faith resides in inadequation to itself as a content of meaning.  And it is in this precisely that it is truth qua truth of faith or faith as truth and verification.  This is not sacri-fication [making-sacred] but veri-fication [making-true].

Then, on the next page (54):  “The work of Abraham is the acting or doing of this inadequation:  a praxis [acting] whose poiesis [making] is the incommensurability of an action (to offer Isaac up) and of its representation or its meaning (to immolate his son).”

Yet “to offer up” is no less a “representation,” finally, that “to immolate.”  So I don’t see that he has succeeded in isolating two opposed ideas here.  Despite his parenthetical remark to the contrary [at least as I read its suggestion above], Kierkegaard and Vattimo are pointing toward the same thing he, Nancy, is himself pointing to.  Those are three different ways, terminologically, of pointing to the same thing, I’d say–though none of the three quite succeeds as an articulation, in my judgment.

 

Something in all this has just occasioned this reflection, linking the interpretation of Abraham and Isaac with the idea I recently wrote of, that giving birth to a child is giving the child over to death:  Perhaps we could read the story of Abraham and Isaac as a parable of birth.  Perhaps all parents are Abraham, and all their children Isaacs who are “offered up” by those parents themselves to “God” = to no-thing = death.  Giving birth is offering up the born to God = death.

 

Later on p.  54:  “. . . what James . . . calls . . . ‘justification’:  that which makes just, that which creates a just one. . . . would be tied first to faith in the other. . . . The just one or justified one would be he who lets himself be attested, borne witness to, in the other.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins [in the untitled poem that begins, "When kingfishers catch fire"]:  “The just man justices.”

 

Thursday, November 27, 2008–Thanksgiving Day

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, the end of the reflection on James (“The Judeo-Christian (on Faith)”), p. 59:

What is changing, in the instituting configuration of the West, is that man is no longer the mortal who stands before the immortal.  He is becoming the dying one in a dying that doubles or lives the whole time of his life.  The divine withdraws from its dwelling sites–whether these be the peaks of Mount Olympus or of Sinai–and from every type of temple. It becomes, in so withdrawing, the perpetual imminence of dying.  Death, as the natural end of a mode of existence, is itself finite:  dying becomes the theme of existence according to the always suspended imminence of parousia.

Next paragraph, on [the sacrament of] anointing the sick, especially the dying: 

. . . unction signs not what will later be called life eternal beyond death but the entry into death as into a finite parousia that is infinitely differed or deferred.  This is the entry into incommensurable inadequation.  In this sense, every dying one is a messiah, and every messiah is a dying one.  The dying one is no longer a mortal as distinct from the immortal.  The dying one is the living one in the act of a presence that is incommensurable. . . . Death is tied to sin:  that is, tied to the deficiency of a life that does not practice faith–that cannot practice it without failing or fainting–at the incommensurable height of dying.  Yet despite this, faith gives; it gives dying precisely in its incommensurability (to give death, “the gift of death,” he [that other "James," namely, Jacques--French for James--Derrida] says):  a gift that is not a matter of receiving in order to keep, any more than is love or poverty, or even veridicity (which are, ultimately, the same thing as dying).

 

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, in “The Name God in Blanchot,” p. 76: 

Blanchot. . . neither asks nor authorizes any “question of God,” but he additionally posits and says that that question is not to be asked.  This means that it is not a question. . . . God is not within the jurisdiction of a question.  This does not mean that he falls within an affirmation that would answer the question in advance.  Nor does he fall within a negation.  It is not that there is or is not a God.  It is, quite differently, that there is the name God, or rather that the name God is spoken. . . . If all questions intend a “what,” a something, the name God corresponds to the order, the register, or the modality of what is not, or has not, any thing.

He goes on to write that Blanchot also uses words

such as being (as taken from Heidegger) . . . . For them as well,  the question is not to be asked, for it is already deposited within them.  But they are words (concepts), whereas God is a name (without content [any more than any name, properly speaking, has "content"]).  The name God must, then, represent something other than a concept here, more precisely, it must bear and bring to a head a trait common to names as such:  to be at the extremity and the extenuation of sense.

 

Next essay, “Blanchot’s Resurrection,” p. 89 (first paragraph of the essay):

The resurrection in question [in Blanchot] does not escape death, nor recover from it, nor dialectize it.  On the contrary, it constitutes the extremity and the truth of the phenomenon of dying.  It goes into death not to pass through it but, sinking irreversably into it, to resuscitate death itself.  To resuscitate death is entirely different from resuscitating the dead.  To resuscitate the dead is to bring them back to life, to bring life back where death had destroyed it. . . . Resuscitating death is a completely different operation. . .

The point is, indeed, to let the dead be dead:  thus to resurrect or resuscitate death, and the dead as [still] dead.

 

Next essay, “Consolation, Desolation,” is a reply to Derrida on Nancy’s deconstruction (in Noli me tangere) of the notion of resurrection.  P. 101:  “Faith never consists–and this, no doubt, in any religious form–in making oneself believe something in the way that one might convince oneself that tomorrow one will be happy.  Faith can only consist, by definition, in addressing what comes to pass, and it annihilates every belief, every reckoning, every economy, and any salvation.”

 

Monday, December 1, 2008

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, “On a Divine Wink” [Wink is German for "hint," and the English "wink," as in "wink of an eye," is derived from it], p. 119:  “Such is the divine truth of the Wink:  it stems from the fact that there is no wink of god, but that god is the wink.  He does not do it, he winks himself there, just as he states his name in it, properly common and commonly proper–the name, in sum, of every person.”

 

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, “The Deconstruction of Christianity”–relevant to my own thoughts on “survivor guilt”–pp. 155-156, arguing that sin is not a “misdeed,” but a “condition,” the very condition of the human in need of redemption (or salvation), and that there is a radical “indebtedness of existence itself”: 

Temptation is essentially the temptation of self, it is the self as temptation, as tempter, as self-tempter.  It is not in the least a question of the expiation of a misdeed, but of redemption or salvation, and salvation cannot come from the self itself, but from its opening . . . and as such it comes to it as the grace of its Creator. . . . Through salvation, God remits to man the debt he incurred in sinning, a debt that is none other than the debt of the self itself.  What man appropriated, for which he is in debt to God, is the self that he has turned in upon itself.  It must be returned to God and not to itself.  Sin is an indebtedness of existence as such.

     In other words, while Heidegger tends to detach existential Schuldigkeit [guilt] from the category of “transgression” or of “debt” (in the ontic sense of the term), I wonder, rather, whether that Schuldigkeit does not realize the essence of sin as the indebtedness of existence–”indebtedness of existence” meaning, at one and the same time, that existence itself is in debt, and that which it is in debt for is precisely for itself, for itself, for the ipseity of existence.

I don’t read Heidegger quite the same way he does.  More importantly, I’m not sure he is not still leaving less than sufficiently clarified the difference-in-interconnection of guilt as simple “indebtedness” and guilt in a negative sense.  Yet his remarks point, perhaps, to the nexus of that interconnection-in-disconnection.  Maybe it is something like this:  the basic “indebtedness of existence” grounds in, and manifests in, the closure toward “self,” which then and as such is the refusal of the debt.