What I will here seek to address are the central political implications of the existent tension between the messianic and the canonical form as they were unfolded in Benjamin’s writings and have progressed to the current moment. As we have already seen, the nature of what we consider as “revolutionary” in Benjamin’s thought stems from a certain one-sided emphasis on the messianic forces working within canonical forms as if they were entirely independent of them. His emphasis is perhaps historically justifiable in some sense as what he faced toward the end of his life was the counterpart to this position—the fascist, totalitarian gesture of an absolute focus placed upon certain canonical cultural forms, as if they functioned “timelessly,” and independent of any possible messianic undoing. What I hope to develop further through an inspection of these themes in the work of Ricoeur is that the recognition of the necessary interaction between both forces results in the basic position of a radicalized hermeneutics that can yet be productive in theological terms. In Ricoeur’s thought, the search for origins (arche) that canonicity seeks comes to be balanced by the focus on ends (telos) that messianicity constantly seeks what we are now in a better position to articulate.
As his professional division between the philosophical and the theological became less rigid toward the end of his life, I argue, Paul Ricoeur’s increased emphasis upon the religious perspective embedded within all representational formations tended to open his work toward these messianic, revolutionary impulses that bring about a possible presentation beyond representation, or, as he would come to word it, envisioning a world without work as the new condition of our humanity, even if such an envisioning appears to us as an impossible (and impractical) task. In this manner, I hope to demonstrate how there is yet more of a convergence between Agamben’s antinomianism and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics than might be first suspected, something only perceivable once we have acknowledged the “insoluble solution” (aporia) to the debate between Derrida and Agamben, or that which Ricoeur’s work will be utilized to isolate in a manner previously unarticulated.
Beginning with several recent popularized notions of the “exception” identified with a “messianic” core of politico–philosophical import (E. Santner, G. Agamben, S. Žižek, J. Butler), the first section of this chapter seeks to develop a “hermeneutics of canonicity” through Ricoeur’s work on myth, narrative, and the tensions said to reside at the center of the specifically biblical canon, though the dynamics of this canon become applicable to all canonical forms in general. This is done in order that contemporary accounts of political representation seemingly removed from any accompanying hermeneutics might open themselves toward the manner in which canonical representations, as a central defining element of cultural intelligibility, could be said to generate their own exceptions, what is here termed canonicity. By turning to Ricoeur’s contrast between Phariseeism and the Prophetic spirit in his early The Symbolism of Evil, as well as his later remarks on the biblical canon, I intend to show how the perceivable “failure” to account for the “exception” at the heart of representation actually reveals a misreading of the hermeneutical project and is, thus, of great interest for contemporary political and social theory. For Ricoeur, a fundamental canonical tension, exemplified here as a biblical (scriptural) tension between the prophet and the Pharisee, generates the “rules” which could be said to govern any given (hermeneutical) field of representations and their operation as a sociopolitical force, “rules” which yet maintain a certain “exceptionalism” at their core.
What follows from this foundation in the next section is an attempt to examine the development of the canonical form in Ricoeur’s work as it proceeds from this tension between Phariseeism and the Prophetic spirit within the biblical corpus. Accordingly, I will pursue a number of threads in his writing that all consolidate upon one of the various conceptions of the canonical form, presenting its characteristics from a number of angles within his diverse body of writings. By inspecting these varied definitions, I hope to demonstrate how the canonical form is a central concept within Ricoeur’s oeuvre on the whole.
Subsequently, I turn to look at the manner in which ontotheology has been conceived since the last century as that which provides the foundations for our sovereign political forms of power. It has been perceived as the support for any transition from a creative, religious imagination, a world of symbol and metaphor, to those concrete forms of history, politics, and even language upon which we so often depend. It is for this very reason that ontotheology is also often linked to those violent acts that frequently accompany these very same movements. Yet, and despite the apparent necessity of ontotheology, I am inclined to ask: do we, in the end, perceive the construction of an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics as a necessity that admits equally of the necessity for sovereign power in our world, or as merely one possible, contingent route to be taken among others? The answers we give to this question, as I maintain throughout this study, say as much about our philosophical views as they do about our political ones, a connection not always immediately clear in our basic political formulations.
By focusing on the distinction between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and the more recent contentions of Agamben concerning the origins of political thought, I intend to inspect the manner in which both of their political and philosophical formulations turn upon a reading of Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality, a crucial portion of his Metaphysics upon which so much depends. As such, Ricoeur’s work points to the same problematic unearthed in Benjamin’s writing, the delicate tension between the canonical form and its messianic undoing that, if severed one from the other, often results in extreme political or religious viewpoints.
In the final few sections of this chapter, I aim to deal explicitly with the issue of representation in Ricoeur’s work, hoping in the end to establish a form of radicalized hermeneutics by bringing his work into conjunction with that of Judith Butler. By looking first at Judith Butler’s descriptions of “giving an account of oneself” in relation to her strategic use of Levinas, I intend to reflect upon the complex nature of identity formations in relation to the social, cultural, and political dynamics that inform them. In this sense, we see how to be human is often portrayed as a constant risking of the self and yet also as an effort to be responsible in the face of a violent other who threatens to visibly undo us, even (and perhaps, especially) if this other comes at us from within. By situating the discussion of identity construction and its others in relation to an index of violences (i.e., violent vs. nonviolent responses traced as a measure of how responsible a person can be for themselves as well as for the other before or within them), I hope to broaden the scope of my analysis by showing how Butler’s work opens onto a hermeneutical plane that accepts some of the (necessary) violences of representation itself. As should be clear by now, such a hermeneutics is clearly aligned with the previous analysis of divergent canonical forms.
Such insights are doubly intriguing insofar as they can be conjoined with the Levinasian core unveiled within Ricoeur’s later ethical reflections, one that bears a striking affinity with Butler’s writings, as I intend to show. Indeed, the dialogue he occasions with Levinas is further revealed as the central factor in determining Ricoeur’s comprehension of the selves that we all are. By focusing on this Levinasian resonance, I intend to demonstrate how comprehending the precarious contours of our self-formed and yet socially-given identity constructions is nonetheless essential to understanding the starting point and foundation for any contemporary formulation of a radical hermeneutics as well as any sustainable ethical position. By meditating on the nature of representation in Ricoeur’s work, I look to demonstrate how a bridge might at long last be possible between dialectical and antinomian (“utopian”) thought, one that can be viewed from within a radical hermeneutical position, thereby also providing a resolution to the philosophical and theological problematic opened up in the first part of this study.
The “exceptionalism” of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and the bid for an ethical canon
It was the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who first put the “exception” under the spotlight of modern thought. For him, a focus on those elements exceptional to any and every system of thought (of logic, of history, of those representations attempting to encompass any whole) was an anti-Hegelian insistence on a form of subjectivity that sought to bring the lurching forward of dialectics to a kind of standstill.1 When, subsequently, in the next century, the German political jurist Carl Schmitt insisted on the political significance of the “state of exception” in determining the authority of sovereign rule nearly a century later, reference was made by him directly to Kierkegaard’s theological assertions.2 By recognizing the connection between these two thinkers of the exception, and despite the multiple differences between them, a deeper context is opened up by which to (re)view the significance of Schmitt’s dictum that all political concepts are secularized theological ones.
Schmitt is able to present this connection precisely by continuing to bring a Kierkegaardian conception of the (religious) subject (as the exceptional element within any society) to bear upon the politics of an immanently secularized world, something with which Kierkegaard himself was undoubtedly familiar.3 This is to say that what provoked Kierkegaard to reflect on the role of the Christian in an increasingly secular society was perhaps a similar impetus to what led Schmitt to reflect upon the rubrics of sovereignty at work in political systems. It is this “subjectivity of exception” that could be said to lie at the heart of what we might call the “logic of the religious” within an immanent political world, something which finds a deep resonance in that later twentieth century thought often conglomerated under the heading of “political theology,” the very roots of which, in many ways, I am pursuing throughout the entirety of this study.4
For example, when Benjamin utilized Schmitt’s basic insights on the state of exception in order to conceive of a “weak messianic force” working through history that could redeem history’s victims to (dialectical) progress, he relied upon the exceptions to any given canonical history in order to paint such a portrait.5 This was to be a reading of history, for Benjamin, which he pointedly refused to label as “atheological.”6 He called upon the structures of subjectivity formed as exceptions to the rule of (again, a Hegelian) “progress” in order to depict the forces of identity construction otherwise at work in history.7 In this way, he was to formulate the notion of an exception to any given representation as the “exigency of the forgotten,” the call issued from the repressed victims of a given canonical form of history to remember what in his eyes can never truly be forgotten.8 The incorporation of such a religiously inflected term as the “messianic” into Benjamin’s formulations of history is not coincidental to the link between exceptionalism and religious identity, as I have already indicated. Rather, this link is essential to recovering a realistic conception of historical justice. It would also not be surprising that Benjamin saw his work as saturated with the theological, like an ink blotter in relation to its ink, as he would describe it, for the theological was precisely the hidden impetus behind his critical political and historical formulations in many regards.9
A late modern strand of focus upon the “exception” as the defining norm of representations, along with its latent theological core, seems, in many regards, to flow from Benjamin’s merger of the theological with the political. Indeed, its messianic vigor has been the subject of many recent philosophical musings, from Derrida to Butler, and from Agamben to Žižek.10 One recent commentator upon the relation of the messianic to the exception, Eric L. Santner, has in fact incorporated some of the fundamental intuitions of Benjamin, Agamben and Žižek to illustrate the “exceptionalism” that currently dominates any attempt to “think the canonical,” whether that be a canonical form of representation (i.e., history, gender) or a literary or scriptural canon.11 For Santner, as for Benjamin before him, it is these “messianic” forces of exceptionalism that disrupt the canons at work within various cultures throughout the world, providing a universal ethical plea for justice to be done in terms of political and cultural representation. Their potential to disrupt is what allows Santner to refer to this tension as an inherent structural “state of emergency” within any given canonical form. And this example would serve to illustrate why this language of the messianic has spread far afield from its Judaic–religious heritage.
I would only pause here at this stage and over material with which the reader is by now already familiar to demonstrate how it can be shown through Santner’s depiction of a “structural state of emergency,” that a general hermeneutics could be said to develop from this structure of the canonical form. Moreover, this perpetual state of tension could be further disclosed as its defining movement of “canonicity,” the perpetual generation of normative social, cultural, religious, and political representations, over and beyond a singular historical instance of the canonization of a particular text. Like those tiny boxes on forms which ask the respondent to identify themselves with a particular social grouping (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religious heritage, etc.), all representations, more or less, adhere to a certain sense of canonical normativity, utilized in order to provide a coherent (social and cultural) intelligibility within a person’s affiliated community. Though canons and their accompanying representations do change over time (just as the list of possible categories on a form keeps expanding), they nonetheless present themselves as a quasipermanent entity within a given historical context, that is, as the arbiter, judge, and rule of normativity within any given field of representation. Canonicity can, thus, be defined as the always ongoing processes of canonization, which do not cease with the production of a particular canon—they evolve, often with serious social and political consequences.
These basic insights on the nature of the hermeneutical field of representations will subsequently be picked up and examined in greater fullness in this section through the work of Ricoeur, someone whom contemporary thinkers on the exception have kept at a certain distance. Yet, as his work has demonstrated, from the earliest studies in Fallible Man to his later work both on (biblical) narrative, and on history, memory, and forgetting, the place of canonical representations is pivotal for establishing any sense of self in relation to history. Such a turn toward a “hermeneutics of the exception” (as a “hermeneutics of canonicity”) will accordingly enable us, not only to make an essential connection between these diverse worlds of contemporary critical and hermeneutical theory, but will also serve to deepen the scope of what constitutes an exception in the first place. In essence, and as we will see in a moment, the hope for many contemporary philosophers is that a more fully developed hermeneutics of the exception will be able to properly juxtapose the messianic in relation to the canonical form. To realize these messianic forces at work in history, as Benjamin was wont to do, we must see them as always in relation to a particular, given canonical tradition from within which they arose and to which they are forever bound. This, and nothing less, is the nature of representation itself. Indeed, this is what Ricoeur’s work in its earliest formulations consistently points to and can help us to further envision.
Exploring Santner’s “structural state of emergency” as that which perhaps best defines this fracture of canonical authority can also be a fitting gesture toward forming a general hermeneutics that takes into account the contemporary (and yet also, ancient) tension between the canonical and the messianic. Indeed, a subsequently developed notion of canonicity could be moreover utilized as a cipher for translating contemporary thinkers of the exception (such as Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben) into a hermeneutical framework, something which I intend to substantiate through a juxtaposition of this element of exceptionalism with the hermeneutics of Ricoeur. The use of Ricoeur’s work in further defining the scope of what a “hermeneutics of canonicity” could be is not coincidental. It is a combination of his writings on biblical scripture, authority, and heteronomy, taken together within the general hermeneutical framework he has constituted, which provides us with a more fruitful option for continuing to develop these insights upon the processes of canonicity and their relation to the exceptional, messianic forces already at work in each canonical form.
The “hermeneutics of canonicity”: Phariseeism and its relation to the Prophetic
Ricoeur’s entire oeuvre provides just such an appropriate and unified ground for advancing a generalized theory of exceptionalism (or messianic force) and its relation to particular canonical readings of history. For example, and as an illustration of just how central these thoughts are to his work, in an early study translated as The Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur’s conception of myth as a narrative of symbols lies at the heart of discerning a narrative identity that is formed through canonical representations.12 Why this depiction of narrative should inform our understanding of exceptionalism becomes clearer when we perceive how the text functions in relation to its reader. Narratives are representations, of course, into which one can “re-write” one’s own identity in a heteronymous relationship with the text, according to Ricoeur, illustrating the absolute significance that canons hold in relation to identity formation, but also the manner in which we are interrupted (or displaced) by an external source become internalized.13 Indeed, this same general framework is what will ultimately provoke his ethical formulations much later in his work, as this heteronymous relationship with an other (representation) beyond us becomes the basis of seeing “Oneself as Another.”14
Incorporated into this schema is the same problematic which makes it difficult to dismiss any particular, contingent canonical tradition and/or text, in favor of a detached universal structure of (religious) thought. The exception will always in some sense enter into the self, transforming its identification with itself, indeed becoming that self that is now another. For Ricoeur, the linkage of the contingent and the universal takes place within the terrain of myth, defined as the narrative form outside the boundaries of time and space that is yet given over to symbolization, and which, by definition, reflects both a presence and an absence. Myth proclaims a truth concerning the relationship between the ontological and the historical that neither philosophy nor science can attest to, namely the suspension of conceptual opposition in the face of a narrative, a perpetuation of the play of presence and absence within the fields of representation and identity formation.
As regards our study here, and as Ricoeur outlines it, the narration of a myth provides a connection between what otherwise cannot be connected—the movement from an original goodness (our ontological situation) to our sinful “fallen-ness,” the guilt and alienation we feel and experience (our existential, historical situation). A myth consequently fulfills a very important role in constructing worldviews and cannot be reduced to an allegorization which, once fulfilled, is discarded. It serves a significant role in our lives by opening up a fundamental and irreducible tension that unites what ultimately cannot be fully united. In this sense, we might perceive myth as the precarious unity that exists between the canonical and the messianic, as several contemporary discourses have likewise framed it. Perhaps, like his work On Translation, narrative identity can be seen as a practical response to a theoretically impossible relationship, a theme which has its echoes in the work of Benjamin and Derrida to be sure.15 This “impossibility,” in a very direct sense, will give rise to the aporia that constitutes the fundamental essence of authority, as Ricoeur develops in his later work, which will thereby also thwart any attempt to sever the universal structure of the canonical form from its particular historical embodiments, as we will see in a moment.
Limiting myself at this point to his work in The Symbolism of Evil, I would like to argue that it is this irresolvable tension that asserts itself most directly through the relationship of the Prophet and the Pharisee. Though the discussion of Phariseeism in relation to Prophetism is undoubtedly bound to a particular religious (Judaic) tradition, Ricoeur nonetheless sees the tension between them as being the indivisible whole upon which the consciousness of sin (as the condition under which we embody these internalized tensions) in general depends.16 Given over to a particular typology of sin, Phariseeism is located by Ricoeur as the “birthplace” and “summit of perfection” of this modality of the consciousness of guilt known as “scrupulousness,” a moral type in which all humans are able to recognize their own experience.17 There is no doubt that Phariseeism is most typically associated with legalism, moral slavery, hardheartedness of heart, and literalism, he tells us; but, beginning with Ezra and the formation of the Torah, Phariseeism is here rather posited as the (particular) origin of the monotheistic experience, at least insofar as it was determined as a “light to the nations.”18 It is indissociable from the “canonical experience” it (in part, as one side of the tension) gives rise to. It cannot simply be dismissed or surpassed (though “fulfilled” is still perhaps an option).
With its roots in the prophetic vocation, this form of Judaic thought depicts an ethical framework that is yet connected to a historical representation of the founding “event,” the exodus of a chosen people. It is the conjunction of ethics and contingency within the particularity of this narrative, and its Law, that, for Ricoeur, resists becoming a universalized ethical structure.19 Indeed, the juridical nature of the “Jewish mind,” as Ricoeur puts it, proceeded case by case and therefore resisted the conceptualization and systematization that surrounded the functioning of Roman law.20 This resistance, which Judaism demonstrated toward becoming a universalized ethical structure, comes to characterize it as a religious tradition, embodied as a seemingly permanent “state of exception” with regard to other religions. It is from this fractured location that the canonical form takes its point of origination, a point which is always recreated in the subsequent wake of all those processes of canonicity that evolve over time and yet continue to produce subjects bound to a particular canonical text.
What soon becomes clear from this is that, for Ricoeur, there is an indissociable bond between this form of legalism and the subsequent addition of the prophetic voice necessarily added before the canon was closed, one that instigates the dynamism of the biblical scriptures as a whole, and which could be said in a certain sense to govern all of its canonical procedures, as I intend to demonstrate. There is a “rhythm,” Ricoeur calls it, of prophetism and legalism which runs throughout the Hebraic narrative. Indeed, Ricoeur is almost at pains to stress how biblical scholarship has often portrayed Phariseeism in a negative light, instead of pronouncing the dynamic unity between Phariseeism and Prophetism, a unity which must be allowed to exist if the canon is itself to remain normative as such. There is, in fact, an unbroken “ethical tension,” he states, which comes to be born in this dynamic interlacing, or even “incomplete assimilation” of elements.21 The “consciousness of sin,” as fundamental to our understanding of self in relation to myth, narrative, and symbolic interaction, is dependent upon such a tension as that between the Prophet and the Pharisee (or, the messianic and the canonical). Identity itself, as part of a larger representational framework that is constantly engaged in making normative statements and subsequent revisions of those same claims, is founded upon the inability of the one to ever fully assimilate the other. Or, as Ricoeur would have it, “So far, then, is the law from being a concession of prophetic circles to the archaic religion of the priests that prophetism presupposes the law and refers to the law.”22 This would certainly seem to be a far cry from seeing the prophetic voice as one completely at odds with the legalistic forms of religious tradition (as Agamben had been hinting toward earlier).
Thus he intends to present, or “re-present,” Phariseeism from another angle altogether, one which illustrates its integral unifying power for the biblical canon. Indeed, it becomes necessary for him to state that it was contrary to the literalism of the Sadducees that the Pharisees were engaged in an effort to “fulfill” the Law, to see it brought to its culminating point as “spirit.” It is meant to become a living law through the institution of the oral Torah, itself now elevated to the level of the written Torah.23 The Torah, seen through the processes of halacha, becomes “inexhaustible,” “unlimited,” and “flexible,” contrary to other popular representations of it as an attempted totalizing legalism.24 The “practical program for living” that Ricoeur outlines is obtainable, it is what can be done in this lifetime, and not an abstract ideal situated far out of reach. It is obtainable through one’s meriting of a reward. This unique contribution of “meriting” a reward leads directly to its obverse correlate, that of the “repentance” offered for one’s sins, the “return” to God that Judaism offers throughout its narrative.25 In this context of Phariseeism, grace will always yet be found for the good will.
The scrupulousness of Phariseeism can certainly lead, indeed sometimes almost led inevitably, to the “ritualization of ethics” as a “corollary of its heteronomy.”26 It can become a seeking after an “exactness” that ritual observance strives to fulfill. This can also lead to the full realization of its particular dangers: (1) of juridicization, (2) of ritualization, (3) of obligation, and (4) of separation, each of which can be seen as a forgetting of intentions (its spirit) through an increased focus upon legal detail (its letter). For Ricoeur, however, it is not just these risks that Phariseeism invokes; in fact, it is the realization of these dangers that forestalls the universalization of the ethical paradigm offered here through Judaism, resting rather in a particularity that “becomes for others a stumbling block and for [itself] a solitary [un solitaire].”27 Thus, we can see how the specific failing of scrupulousness is hypocrisy, the inevitable conclusion of a stagnant Phariseeism.
Does this type of moral scrupulousness, as Ricoeur asks, lead us to contrast a true Pharisee, constantly progressing to new domains, new applications of the law, with a false one of stagnation, alienation, and hypocrisy? For Ricoeur, this question offers no simple solution. Indeed, it was just such a line of inquiry which once plagued St. Paul who, for his part, saw the law transformed into the origin of sin, subsequently seen in his development of the contrast between the law as flesh and the spirit of Christ (cf. Romans 8): as Ricoeur formulates it, “. . . the attempt to reduce sin by observance becomes sin. That is the real meaning of the curse of the law [la malédiction de la loi].”28 The all-encompassing nature of Phariseeism, its temptation to provide the sole medium through which to comprehend Judaic thought, is essential for understanding its relationship with prophetism—the “absorption of all the outbursts of prophecy into the Mosaic figure seems to me to be the key to the formation of any scrupulous conscience.”29
Though a rudimentary distinction between “Christianity” and “Judaism” may be rooted in the tension between the Pharisee and the Prophet, Ricoeur is careful to maintain the integrity of both, while seemingly at the cost of neither. It is only the absolute favoring of one of these polar oppositions that seems to bring about a distortion of a more fundamental (and ineradicable) ethical tension, which must be maintained in order for ethics itself to ever function. And this point seems worth repeating, especially as it will recur throughout this study. We are Jews or we are Christians, inseparably connected throughout history because representative of the tensions that produce “history” in its canonical form, as has been clear in many ways since the first chapter.
The overall import of his thoughts on the canonical form remains central to understanding the significance of this tension at the core of all representational thinking. This new epoch in thought, the original context of the ascendency of the religion of the Torah came to signal a fundamental transition from creation to interpretation (i.e., the apparent “absorption” of prophecy into Phariseeism). Ricoeur’s sensitivity to the historical reception of a text pushes him to consider the lasting historical import of Phariseeism, and its governance of Judaic life, as of great significance in relation to the historical prophetic task. Despite the fact that Phariseeism survived long past the end of prophecy, the “ethical tension” between these two forms of religious thought remains as a central hermeneutical principle established with regard to the dynamics of not only biblical–canonical scriptures, but also of canonical–representational forms altogether, even if one side seems to dominate over another within a particular canonically-bound tradition. This tension, in fact, is what comes to define the concept of covenant itself, as well as the structures of canonicity, as Ricoeur’s subsequent work will later affirm, and as we will see shortly.
Here, again, as I have been suggesting, a messianic (prophetic) justice is interlocked with a canonical (Pharisaic) bid to totalize all representative forms, and though the latter will have always appeared to have “won” the battle, so to speak, it is the former which will actually serve over time to change the coordinates of said representations. In this sense, all canons can be said to maintain an aporia at their core, one which threatens to expose a concealed lack of authority, but which nonetheless also serves in some sense to ground it. This was, and is, a principle that Ricoeur subsequently took up from time to time throughout his career, demonstrating a remarkable consistency with which he addressed, either directly or indirectly, questions of the canonical and, by extension, of canonicity. It is also a perspective that adds a great deal of insight to the studies we have been pursuing throughout this work. Accordingly, in the section that follows, I will attempt to further such insights by outlining how this fundamental canonical tension casts a long shadow over Ricoeur’s further developments of the canonical form, thereby more fully sketching out what a hermeneutics of representation owes to the tensions between the canonical and the messianic. As I hope will also become clear, such a long shadow also says volumes about the interwoven nature of both philosophical and theological methods, a pursuit I have been investigating since the beginning of this study and which is only further confirmed by Ricoeur’s oeuvre.
The “exceptions” and aporias of authority
The major contributions of Ricoeur to our understanding of how canonicity functions take several shapes, and provide us with a closer inspection of the examples of “exceptionalism” present in his work and which seem themselves to flow directly from the already discussed tension between the Prophetic and the Pharisaic. Certainly, in a broader sense, the many elements of the biblical canonical scriptures are characterized by Ricoeur in a diversity of ways, including, as we have just seen, as a form of myth. The tensions which are held in check, but never resolved within the realm of myth, seem to be comparable to his remarks elsewhere on the combination of plurivocal elements that can be said to unite a diverse body of texts under one governing rubric.30 What I would like now to consider, however, are three interrelated notions of the canonical that appear in Ricoeur’s work and that seem to illuminate, not only the tension between the canonical and its messianic core, but also the social, ethical and political consequences that can be said to spring from the recognition of such a permanent tension. I do so with the intention of illustrating a definition of canonical forms that takes into account a hermeneutical perspective.
Accordingly, I will take a closer inspection of the canonical form as it appears in Ricoeur’s writings as being: (1) a particular, though not always explicit, combination of aporia and authority,31 (2) as with his theories of narrativity in general, a sequence of totalization, de-totalization, and re-totalization, coming to mirror in many ways, according to Ricoeur himself, the cycle of life, death and resurrection which the New Testament records,32 and (3) an act of both the “bringing together” and “perpetuation” of a particular tradition always bound up with a given canonical community that reads it.33 Each of these characterizations is not exclusive or rigid, however; in some sense, their overlap is essential for understanding the complexities of the canonical form itself. Thus, it will be necessary to look at all of these characteristics in general, and insofar as they interact with one another, in order to provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the processes which define canonicity as a whole. In this fashion, Ricoeur’s work on myth (hence, on the tension between Prophet and Pharisee) can be brought into comparison with his work on narrative as viewed through the dynamic tension of aporia and authority which comes to govern the realms of historical memory and representation. For it is this tension between aporia and authority that constitutes a more fundamental tension that, in turn, propels the desires for/of canonicity. By first assessing Ricoeur’s position on the canonical form and thereby establishing some sense of what canonicity might be, we can attempt to determine how Ricoeur’s work, beyond his earlier excursion into the Pharisaic/Prophetic dualism, could be said to point toward the messianic elements of the exception which have come to dominate certain contemporary sociopolitical discussions.
Firstly, the tension present between aporia and authority, and in relation to what I am calling “the processes of canonicity,” I believe motivates the heart of Ricoeur’s writings on biblical hermeneutics, as well as its linkage to his work on the whole. For example, in the context of a discussion concerning Yosef Yerushalmi’s historiographical operations toward the end of one of his last works, Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur makes the comment that it was the very act of closing the canon that gave the biblical corpus “the authority of Holy Scripture.”34 He makes clear in a footnote that the addition of the word “holy,” like the Jewish identity established through its relation with the Torah, sets it apart “from the rest of discourse and hence from critical appraisal.”35 What Ricoeur signals is that there is a clash which has arisen between memory, the meaning of history, and historiography, one which he will admittedly say that he is not able to resolve as such; it remains, he says, an aporia at the heart of the canonical.36 Indeed, it seems for Ricoeur to be the “burden of history” which we all bear, like the Jewish people themselves, that brings about a “discontentment” with our readings of history, since history itself cannot be completely totalized in its representational forms. Exclusions and remainders, it would seem, inherently accompany any attempt to generate a canonical form. The fundamental aporia of a canonical text, one that seems inextricably intertwined with its authoritative claims, is that it is a text divided from within, by its messianic (prophetic) and canonical (Pharisaic) tensions. There are some memories which must be forgotten, and, inevitably, a sort of ideological script of history takes form around those remaining particular memories. Yet, these are memories which are capable of being contested by the tensions present within the canonical text itself. Any (canonical) authority is consequently beset by the aporias which linger interminably at its core. In this fashion, we are all of us, Ricoeur remarks, the “bastard children [les enfants bâtards] of Jewish memory” caught between this past and “the secularized history of the nineteenth century.”37
This problem of sacred versus ideological text is not a new contrast here explored by Ricoeur. In his earlier essay on the concept of revelation, or the very nature of a potentially “sacred text,” he seemed quick to point out the difficulty of presenting a text bereft of its historical conditions, and this gave him leave to remark, for example, on the “destructive activity” of freezing the text as a reaction against heresy, to view revelation as an historical process, though “. . . the notion of sacred text is something antihistorical. I am frightened [Je suis effrayé] by this word ‘sacred.’ ”38 Though one could draw a carefully placed distinction between revelation and the sacred canonical in an attempt to overcome this “fear” of an ideological presence within the canonical, it would do little to affect the processes of canonicity per se, which are always, even if just slightly, invested in discourses which are generally considered as being “ideological.”39 As James Fodor, for example, has indicated, the validity of such a fear springing up to crush any sense of “truth” coming from a sacred canon stems from the perception that conceiving of the text as strictly autonomous in its “otherness” could be construed as a form of fundamentalism which embraces revelation as a “talisman” against critique, and which neglects the historical conditions behind any text.40 It is this “vulgar form of heteronomy,” as Fodor terms the consequent relationship between the sacred text and believer, that Ricoeur in fact sought to remove from general perceptions toward a “sacred” text, though it is a perception which is not easily erased in practical terms.
It is in this sense that I would like, secondly, to juxtapose the aporia at the heart of the canonical with the aporia of totality found in Ricoeur’s analysis of a threefold structure of time. For example, and in yet another context, Ricoeur states that the narrative structure is that which appears in its final (canonical) form as prefiguring, configuring and refiguring.41 It is through the aporias at work in narrative structures that the notion of canonicity in the work of Ricoeur opens up to the exceptionalism also within focus of this study. In this schema of historical representation, Ricoeur depicts the fracturing of the totalizations of history into a cycle of totalization, de-totalization, and re-totalization, an always imperfect, but necessary process of forming comprehensive and meaningful narratives, the deep-structures of political and social representation. Canons, then, would be subject to the same processes of totalization, appearing as complete, but constantly being subject to the de- and re-totalization which must accompany them (much as we saw in the case of Derrida earlier). Being such, we can glimpse how the canonical form is constantly negotiating between its being a quasitotality and its exceptional elements, a never-ending process of the generation of meaning and identity through the representations that are totalized, de-totalized, and re-totalized. These processes which come to define the very nature of what canonicity could be said to be also provides a hermeneutical framework by which all representations are, in fact, governed.
Yet, how does this affect the hermeneutics of reading a closed, canonical form, such as religious scripture? And what might an answer to this question tell us about the nature of canons (whether open or closed) in general? In the first instance, it is the prophetic (“messianic”) elements, those elements which strive for an unceasing justice, which constantly prevent the legalism of Phariseeism from ever totalizing, as we saw above. Closed canons, if they are to maintain any call to justice as a possible reality, must demonstrate a certain openness to, and recognition of, this tension. In the second instance, it is through the aporias inherent to authority that we sense an opening toward the potential for a “hospitality” of the canonical text, something which I will here seek to develop in relation to the processes of canonicity, and which I will develop toward the end of this section as an ethical–canonical injunction concerning violence—linking Ricoeur’s findings to the conclusion of the previous chapter.
In general, these tensions within representation are divided between their totalizing and exceptional elements pitted against each other in a manner which prevents any complete totalization from ever taking place, while simultaneously securing meaning within the symbolic order. Hence, whenever this dynamic is recognized as a normative structure, it can immediately be seen as indebted to the Judaic canonical tradition as Ricoeur has already indicated. Representation as a form of quasitotalization comes to function as a form of recognition which acts “as a continuing canonization, in the same way as people have referred to continuing creation.”42 It is in fact this “continuing canonization” that marks the processes of canonicity, acts of “continuous creation” which render its processes more than just theologically speculative; there are very concrete social and political consequences at stake in such acts.
Thirdly, reading this analysis through another of Ricoeur’s models for perceiving scripture, we can also see how it is through the authority of the canon that tradition is perpetuated through time, albeit in a sort of state of constant disruption at the hands of its messianic elements.43 It is this third viewpoint that signals the truly human aspect of this tension—the need which communities share in their desire to see their traditions and languages gathered together, codified and extended through time. Thus, their perpetuation also becomes an extension of the original “bringing together” (as the very definition of canonization) of texts and peoples which proceed and accompany it. It is this dynamic interaction that takes place between the acts of “bringing together” and “perpetuation” which cannot be subsumed solely under the auspices of one process or the other. It must be both acts occurring simultaneously and throughout time—these are the processes of canonicity. It is a genuine realization of the processes of canonicity that might help provide some solutions to current political–cultural problematics that seem governed by a desire only to perpetuate a given canonical norm, perceivable, either metaphorically or not, as the drawing and fortifying of boundaries and borders. If Ricoeur is right, it is the fundamental act of “bringing together” that lies at the roots of any canonical manifestation which must constantly struggle with the discontinuities found within any attempt to perpetuate its rule. And it is precisely this struggle which could potentially best reveal the recognition of the “other” as an exception (its messianic force) within one’s own (canonical) identity. The sociopolitical relevance of such an outlook is, to say the least, extremely profound.
Any search for a “common ground” between divergent viewpoints, as a “bringing together” must ultimately begin with, becomes the basis for the always “impossible” but nevertheless vital act of translation, something which Ricoeur elsewhere terms an act of “equivalence without identity [equivalence sans identité].”44 It is through the conceptualization and reality of translation, of bringing the other into my language, that a fundamental act of hospitality can be performed despite the apparent rigidity of canonical boundaries, especially linguistic ones. If viewed from this angle, we can see how translation becomes a fundamental act of perpetuation, serving as a reminder, not only of the difficulties of perpetuation in cultural–historical terms, but also as a reminder of the biblical canon’s original context within a threatened and eventually colonized culture, its perpetual exilic position as it were. It is in this translational sense that hermeneutics firmly roots itself within our understanding of the canonical form and which Ricoeur’s writings on translation, and its subsequent demand for hospitality, might further serve to develop.
The “ethical tension,” or the tension which in fact produces “the ethical,” present in the canonical form comes in the end to distinguish the differing canonical forms in our world as it points toward a “just” form of canons that should in fact be hospitable to the other, the foreigner, all excluded or even just marginalized figures within a given canon. Seeing things this way would be a step toward developing a hermeneutical consciousness of an “otherness” that remains within any canonical language, history, religion, or cultural tradition, but which is forcefully repressed in certain historical canons to be sure. As was highly relevant for Ricoeur, it was the advent of the Jewish scriptures, and their oppressive situation, we should recall, which first brought this dynamic to light. Read in conjunction with his remarks on Levinas at the conclusion of Oneself as Another, this form of canonical hospitality produces a marked focus upon the exception to any attempt at totalization.45
A happy canon?
If we are to attempt to comprehend Ricoeur’s formulation of the canonical, in its ideological as well as its sacred forms, we are left at this point with some very perplexing questions, such as: if all canonical works are then some form of ideology, is there a way to gauge their ideological commitments over against their sacred content? Does the recognition of the ideological undercurrents within a canonical religious text serve to dismiss their sacrality in some way, or does it in fact open up a justifiable political dimension toward being religious? In what way would scripture then not be subject to critical assessment? And, perhaps most appropriately in light of where his work had taken him in the search to relate history and memory/forgetting, is the sacred canonical text, by this logic, the exactly appropriate coincidence of forgetting what should be forgotten and remembering what should be remembered?
Ricoeur does not offer any direct answers to these important questions which arise when one juxtaposes his views on the sacred text with his work on memory, history, and forgetting. Bearing this in mind, what becomes clear, at least in this later work, is that a necessary forgetting comes to represent the necessity of moving forward in history, of establishing identities, of making life livable, in contrast, he reminds us, to “Funes the Memorious,” Borges’ clever fictional creation who lies nearly paralyzed on his bed, unable to forget anything he has experienced in his life.46 Perhaps this description of memory’s necessity is also a signal toward the essentiality of “forgetting” the noncanonical, a sign cast in stark relief to the obsessive assemblage by some of the archive, a contrasting bulwark forever attempting to stopper the processes of forgetting. In this way, we can see how the archive is endless, always re-opened, always awaiting the next find of material that will be added on; the archive is boundless.47 The sacred canon, on the other hand, is fixed in its boundaries, closed, and awaits nothing to be added to its depth.
It might here be suggested, and as it offers a completion to Ricoeur’s analysis of memory in relation to the canonical, that if it is the archive that tries never to forget, it is the canon that accepts a “forgetfulness” of what does not accord with its self-referential identity, a forgetfulness that does not attempt to “silence evil,” but rather is done in a peaceful mode, and “without anger [sans colère].”48 This would bring us, of course, as it brought Ricoeur in his study, to the doorstep of forgiveness. A canon must be (or constantly strive to become), and here following Ricoeur very closely on this, that which practices forgiveness, or “the horizon common to memory, history, and forgetting.”49 Here in consideration of the canonical form independent of (though still based upon) its religious function, this idea of a canon being that which forgives would certainly, if practiced, provide a fitting challenge to any who attack a canon’s existence solely based upon what it appears to exclude (as was the main contention of Agamben). By definition, a canon’s degree of “forgiveness” might rather be revealed in its recognition of the “other” lying at its own core.50 This is to say that viewing forgiveness from a hermeneutical perspective allows us to see the broader implications for forgiving in general, that is, to demonstrate forgiveness as an act immersed in a field of pre-existing social representations.
What becomes evident from this is that the canonical form, as with memory, must engage in acts of forgetfulness, not to purposely exclude or do violence to others outside the canonical community, but in order to establish the boundaries of identification (representation) in the first place. This is what we might here call, following so many thinkers of the past century, the “violent” mark of cultural and symbolic signification. As the case has often been made, a canon can only function as canon if it is perceived as such by the community which reads it, or which invests it with such a power over the members of the community.51 This focus upon the community’s relationship with the “sacred” text serves to illustrate how it is the boundaries between the sacred text and the nonsacred text, as “other” sacred texts, that define the religious community itself; “Becoming Canon and becoming Church go hand in hand.”52 The presence of those who are not quite in the community, but not quite out of the community, in fact, poses a modern-day dilemma according to Ricoeur. What becomes of the sacred text in this day and age? Does it open itself to other, formerly noncanonical texts, texts embraced by those partially in the community, but partially outside it as well? Yet, as Ricoeur points out, if these boundaries disappear, then the community itself disappears.53 Whatever change occurs in the text, another corresponding change occurs in the social identity of the community, thereby confirming the reciprocity between text and community. This is not to say, he reminds us, that these boundaries should not change; this is merely to signal the significance of what is at stake in such a redefining of the canonical.
Yet, and despite this general truth of their relations, the canonical community must demonstrate permeable boundaries in relation to the others of society, not denying representational claims (recognition) on the level of the political, which would be solely an extension of a totalitarian canonical form; rather, a recognition must be offered to any “other” of a community which yet respects the distance between the different groups, an issue that Ricoeur himself takes up in his Course of Recognition.54 The canonical work offers itself as the privileged site of the generation of “symbolic mediators” that form the basis for representation and the various forms of social bonding without doing violence toward other, separate representational claims.55 This is perhaps similar to what Natalie Melas has referred to as ending the Eurocentric grounds for comparison; that is, finding a common ground between conflicting canons without presupposing their unity.56
In so many words, Ricoeur could be said to develop a conception of the canonical form which includes a distinction between a “more truthful” and a “more falsified” canon, expanding this to include, among their other fruits, either a “happy memory” or an abused and repressed one, though the tools for measuring such an ideological engagement remain at times somewhat vague in his work. The linkage between such a view, however, and what we saw in the previous chapter regarding canonical forms is a parallel hermeneutical development that we cannot overlook. Essentially, this contrast between canons is solidified in his earlier work on revelation in terms of subject engagement with the narrative of the sacred text, producing either an imaginative relationship of text and reader or a “vulgar form of heteronomy,” as noted above. The relationship that Ricoeur speaks of between text and reader (generally), or canon and subject (specifically and with a slightly different relationship), can be sensed in the movement toward a recognition of oneself within the narrative, a movement which always remains as an openness to the “radically other” within the text, or to the “otherness” of the text itself. This is at once to perceive the canonical text as separate from oneself and yet as invested in a relationship with its subjects. As Ricoeur remarks among some of his comments on revelation, it is a relationship of dependence which is often mistaken for a submissive, or servile will so contrary to the enlightenment project of autonomy, and as such not as likely to be perceived as the opening of the imagination toward the world which it is, and which the text creates.57 It is, rather, “a non-heteronomous dependence of conscious reflection on external testimonies.”58 This understanding might perhaps serve as Ricoeur’s modification made upon modernity’s near total rejection of one’s perceived subordination of reason to religious belief. Indeed, and though Ricoeur may appear later on to revise his position on the conflict of autonomy and heteronomy, placing them in a relationship where one’s autonomy is already bound up in a heteronomous relationship, he does not depart from endorsing the nonviolent appeal which a consciousness that renounces political sovereignty is capable of encountering in poetic discourse.59
Ricoeur, here perhaps following Levinas rather closely, though often from a critical distance, pronounces how canons are capable of producing a form of sovereignty that remains “neighborly” in the sense that it is always bound up in a particular, communal identity, illustrating the presence of an-other that we ourselves are. It is this recognition which is able to remain nonviolent in its appeal even as it marks one as a member of its social offspring, presenting what we might follow Benjamin (and thus Assmann who cites Benjamin on just this point) in terming an act of “bloodless violence.” It is (ideally) this “bloodless violence” that the canon enacts when it forms a community, or even a culture within a community, inscribing its marks upon its subjects who gain an identity within the boundaries which the canon delineates. This is the case, moreover, even if the canon’s origins arise from within a violent history. Such a hermeneutic indeed follows from the analysis of the last chapter regarding the more or less violent distinctions to be made between different, already established canons.
Though this definition does not address the violences which certain “more violent” canons could be said to produce (in terms of memories repressed, abused, etc) in terms of the processes of canonicity themselves, this understanding also provides a certain validation to those attempts to form a canon within a canon in an effort to attain justice (not only like Luther’s preference for Romans over James, but also in those readings which downplay certain biblical–canonical elements like its frequent justifications for slavery, etc).60 This ethical principle of focusing on a canon’s exceptional elements could also be said to generate a hermeneutics of canonicity as a privileged site of ethical activity, a project possibly aligned with the ever-present search for justice, one that could lay stress upon the importance of forgetting certain historical events, even if recorded in canonical form, in order to cultivate what Ricoeur referred to on occasion as a “happy memory.”61
In this light, the canon would seem to be (or, to constantly become) that which could cultivate a “happy memory” and in contrast to a purely ideological script appearing as (politically) totalitarian in its formation and applicability, or as that which seeks to abuse and distort memory. The failure to promote such a canonical form of “happy memory” would inevitably yield to the dissolution of the canon’s force, or its substantial hold, within and upon the culture it has helped shape. If this is indeed an apt description of a canon’s relationship to the culture which it governs, the relative absence of the canonical from Ricoeur’s epic tome on memory, history, and forgetting seems to be somewhat inexplicable and perhaps constitutes a missed opportunity to unite two often separate strands of his thought—the philosophical and the theological.62 Though, from another angle, perhaps this absence actually serves to explain the separation between these disciplines.
At a time in history when the impact of sacred canonical texts wanes upon society, while other canonical media proliferate, when traditional religious communities disintegrate while the redefinition of other communal, transnational boundaries takes place daily, a closer inspection of the political consequences of this particular hermeneutic of communal and personal identity in relation to the canonical form seems essential.63 It would be of great importance to examine more carefully the relations of memory and forgetting, according to Ricoeur’s typology, as regards modern nation states, religious communities and social networks created and sustained by our global culture. To what degree do they cultivate or deny a “happy memory” and how might we, as global citizens, begin, sensitively and yet openly, to judge their successes and failures? Despite the daunting nature of giving answer to such questions, it remains our “modern dilemma” to work out these answers.
There is no doubt that canons, whether secular or sacred, open or closed, are particular products of a contingent history, dependent upon the varied circumstances which gave rise to their creation.64 Despite this fact, however, they are also expressions of a general structure of human existence, a need to bring together elements of a people, a language, a culture—and to perpetuate those elements forward through time. They are a sign of survival as much as of refinement and culture. The choice of one particular cultural heritage, given to survive at the loss of another, can actually appear as an act of violence, no matter how subtle or overt. In an age of globalization and the various confrontations between different canonical cultures, a particular canonical reading will always dominate over another as long as we are dealing with a world of signifying social and political representations. New hybrid identities will arise, though even they will eventually become part of another dominant canonical norm.
It is therefore a most fitting gesture to inspect, as Ricoeur demonstrates through the entirety of his work, the tensions inherent in any canonical text, tensions which can actually point toward a form of the canonical that itself provides a voice for the (messianic) elements necessary to counter any potential claims of totalization, or those of a greater violence seeking only to silence other traditions so that its own might survive. This would be a canon forever opening itself up to its messianic core of exceptionalism, a profound demonstration of its plurivocal elements coming into harmony with the unity (canonicity) of its texts in an attempt to lessen the hermeneutical violence of representations. This would be, in effect, an effort to seek justice no matter the loss, and perhaps most importantly, even if it is a loss to the self or to the canonical community in which the self takes root.
Following on the heels of Derrida’s work and the conclusions drawn in the last chapter, I would suggest that Ricoeur’s work again demonstrates a general perceivable necessity for establishing a “ruling” canon, or canon within a canon, as a “necessary violence” created for the sake of cultural intelligibility, even and especially if it is a hybrid result of multiple cultures overlapping. Indeed, this is the nature of canonicity and any religion which holds a canonical form. But, perhaps in some sense too, there is a possibility opened up to us by Ricoeur’s work to read the rise and loss of canons as acts of justice carried out in historical terms, as bids for less violence instead of more. Though, as history indicates, this is not always the reason for a particular canonical culture’s demise or success. The historical task that unfolds before us is one in which we must strive, even through the recognition or elision of disparate texts, for the coming of an ever greater justice. This is to let certain (less violent) canons “reign” over other (more violent) ones, or, more practically even, to sift through the myriad of cultural–canonical material (within any particular given social field) in order to discern which elements are best preserved and which ones are needing to be discarded.65 This would, following Ricoeur’s appropriation of Levinas, be an effort to seek a form of hospitality that would posit a host who is willing to do violence even to him or herself, to let parts of one’s own cultural heritage drop off into oblivion, in order to champion the furtherance of justice itself. This dominion of the less violent over the more is what prompted Benjamin to label its force as “weak.” Yet, this force, this “weak” force alone, would perhaps be the only genuine manner in which to recognize the messianic (or perhaps even the Messiah) moving among us.
The first part of this chapter has attempted to formulate a canonical hermeneutics in relation to Ricoeur’s work, providing obvious points of connection with, though also a further development of, the arguments elaborated previously (specifically as regards Assmann, Benjamin and Derrida). Such a reading is necessary, I believe, in order to provide a sound hermeneutics for interpreting these core dynamics lying at the heart of much philosophical and theological discussion of the past century. In what follows, I seek to continue the discussion already begun by bringing Ricoeur’s work further into dialogue with the ongoing debates addressed in the first part of this study, specifically as regards the contestations of Agamben. It is as such that I hope to deal with the potential for revolutionary (ultimately antinomian) activity within a hermeneutical framework. After taking a look at their convergence and yet distance, I will aim in the last part of this chapter to discuss the possibility of a radical hermeneutics that takes seriously the challenges brought against representational claims while simultaneously providing a renewed possibility for their role within our world.
The guises of violence, or on the difficulties of constructing an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics
Listen: the day the Palestinians become an institution, I will no longer be on their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I won’t be there anymore.
Jean Genet
A complicating factor in developing a hermeneutical understanding however comes about when one considers the nature of revolutionary political (or theological) action, something which could be said to spring up—at least in the last century—as an (over)reliance upon the abandonment of traditional representational forms. Indeed, from the basic platforms of communism to the near-permanent “states of exception” that have dominated a number of ill-fated political projects, we have been witness to a number of nationalistic constructions that sought to portray themselves as a form of “permanent revolution,” though they could remain concretely as anything but.66 Indeed, the question that remains as relevant now as it was in the past is whether a true revolutionary spirit could ever transition into a politically solidified form? It would seem that it could only stay revolutionary at the cost of all canonical, shared forms of understanding—meaning that once a revolution becomes a “legitimate” and recognized political state, its revolutionary potential disappears and something essential is lost, as the writer and political activist Jean Genet, for one, had previously noted.67
Despite this apparent paradox, our fascination with revolutions and their potential seems to continue activating something within us that is yet essential to our experience of “being human.” Perhaps it awakens a sense of the otherness within us that we cannot ever really codify or define. Or perhaps it calls us to renegotiate those canonical selves that we are in the present, producing ever new variations of what we potentially could be. No matter what the exact nature of this fascination is, we are constantly tempted to embrace the potential within us over the rather staid political forms around us and with which we interact daily. This is to say that political slogans promising “change” will always appeal to us on some level, no matter how infrequently actual change is truly possible. In what follows, I will try to develop a determined look at this contrast as it becomes pronounced in the philosophical contrast between potentiality and actuality, or at least between the manner in which we could be said to dwell in either state. The distinction between them is no small matter—indeed at the heart of this tension, I would conjecture, lie the roots of our most basic political, philosophical, and theological differences.
As many an astute thinker has noticed over the centuries, the difference between philosophy and politics is often a tightly maintained border. And perhaps this is rightly so. How one’s abstract theoretical musings become a concrete social reality for most is a terribly complicated issue. What more could be said about those thinkers who strayed too far into the wrong sort of political views based on their incomplete philosophical speculations (i.e., Heidegger, among others)? To throw religion into the mix in our attempts to locate a “true” or just political form would only seem to complicate matters even further and maybe run the risk of providing a legitimation for violences that would otherwise appear as simply absurd in the extreme.
Despite this caution, one that we would ordinarily do well to heed with all due warning, I intend to look at the interwoven nature of these three disciplinary boundaries (philosophy, politics, and religion) inasmuch as they are often inextricably presented as an ontotheological matrix. By contrasting the work of Ricoeur with that of Agamben, I aim to bring to light some of the undisclosed connections and developments in Ricoeur’s thought that are in need of elucidation, so that a more full-bodied approach to his oeuvre might be possible. In this way, I am also aiming to provide some conclusion to the seemingly interminable struggle between representation and presentation that has thus far, in some sense, dominated the present study.
Accordingly, I will seek to analyze the basic position of hermeneutics as expressed in the Aristotelian contrast between potentiality and actuality by first addressing Ricoeur’s comments on history and memory, as well as metaphor and ontotheology, in order to outline how his long-standing philosophical distance to theological claims comes to be almost completely reworked in his later writings. It is in these later writings, in fact, where a position that seeks to indicate a rereading of hermeneutics as we have come to know it thus far appears. As such, I aim to look at both the contrast and the apparent similarity between Ricoeur and the more “radical” Agamben, for whom any vestige of the political seems to be a capitulation to an unnecessary violence.
History or time
There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
—Walter Benjamin, Thesis IX, “On the Concept of History”68
The stark contrasts of such a depiction of history are what have undoubtedly given this image—culled from one of Walter Benjamin’s last philosophical and cultural testaments—its lasting significance. For Benjamin, history has often been caught up in its objectified (historicist) narrations such as modernity had sought to isolate, the history of the victors to be sure, even if solely undertaken as an academic enterprise or as part of any given historiographical act. Such historians were to be critiqued for their feigned objectivity, according to Benjamin, one that he placed severely at odds with a dialectical image of “weak messianic” proportions intended to upstage these monolithic visions of history, as we have already seen in the last chapter. As such, what Benjamin shows us through his image of the angel of history is the challenge inherent to all acts of historical representation—to locate the discrepancy between our recorded versions of history and time itself, the great disrupter of any attempt to codify the events that unfold within it.69
It comes as little surprise then that, when Ricoeur takes up those very questions which lie at the base of all historical representations and their relation to justice, he muses for a spell on this image, for, as he puts it “How could we fail to mention here Klee’s figure titled Angelus Novus, as it was described by Walter Benjamin in the ninth of his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’?”70 He subsequently recounts the thesis at length before speculating as to its meaning, also in-line with Benjamin’s own reflections on the subject: “What, then, is for us this storm that so paralyzes the angel of history? Is it not, under the figure of progress which is contested today, the history that human beings make and that comes crashing into the history that historians write?” Time provides an alternate vision of history through the histories that human beings ceaselessly create over and against it. If this is indeed the case, he quickly retorts, “. . . then the presumed meaning of history is no longer dependent on the latter but on the citizen who responds [donne une suite] to the events of the past. For the professional historian there remains, short of that receding horizon, the uncanniness of history [l’inquiétante étrangeté], the unending competition between memory’s vow of faithfulness, and the search for truth in history.”71 With reference to the potential of each citizen, the everyday human being over and against the historian’s often ideological gaze, Ricoeur constructs another entry point for his “little ethics.”72 It is within this constant struggle between one’s loyalty to a particular narrative of history, for whatever ideological, religious or cultural reasons, and these alternate accounts of history that are perpetually spun alongside the former, undermining their totalizing accounts from within, that the human being constructs itself, through its memories and through its recognition of the essential nature of narrative in one’s identity.73
As with his work on the relationship between the canonical community and those individual selves constituted within these bounds, for example, the structural narratives of both cultural and individual forms run parallel to each other, dictating their overlap and mutual interaction.74 It is in parallel fashion that we would do well to remember how any such narration of our identity is also subject to the incompletions that prevent any single identity from totalizing, with the result that we are all always-already caught up in the ongoing processes of re- and de-totalization that define the construction of the self, as Ricoeur made abundantly clear in his exercise on Time and Narrative.75 From this angle, it is easy to see how Ricoeur’s analysis of the construction of the self that we all undergo time and again translates into our particular forms of memory, history, and forgetting so central to those acts of representation that are as applicable to the self as to our representations of history in general, a point which his last major work sought further to elucidate. As he demonstrated in this context, certain memories are retained as essential to any given narration of events; certain others are forgotten, repressed, blocked, abused, controlled, obligated, or otherwise manipulated. Discerning the significant differences among these types was the challenge that Ricoeur dutifully took up, for, as he put it, “It is along the path of critical history that memory encounters the sense of justice [mémoire rencontre le sens de la justice].”76 For him, this focus on history and its ever-present alternate histories was the very means by which to comprehend the possibility for justice to be brought into our world, as well as for a just memory or self to be established.
The role of justice is likewise invoked in this context because the analysis of memory, which he presents us with accordingly opens unto the plain of politics, is in fact given over to considerations of peace. No “happy memory,” which he will seek to disclose more fully toward the end of his study, is possible without an adequate notion of peace to accompany it. The peaceful self, as with any hope for a peaceful community, must be one that practices justice in relation to its own memories, to its own history. It must enact a just memory in order to condemn the violence of an unjust exclusion or suppression of those particular memories (or historical events) that would otherwise run counter to its particular, framed narrative. Civil peace (and I would only add that any sense of personal or inner peace would have to be established here as well), he notes, is brought about through a denial of the violence necessary to found it.77 Ricoeur here concedes that politics, historically, has been defined as external to conflict, when in reality, it is completely interwoven with justifications for and legitimations of violence. Politics, if it is ever to strive for a truer practice of peace and an accompanying truer demonstration of justice, must exercise a “forgetful memory” in the “arena of power” as the very condition of all amnesty rather than amnesia. His formulation of the difference between them, as one might suspect, is that the practice of amnesty does indeed listen to the voice of the excluded other, the “unforgetting memory” that would otherwise threaten to constantly de-stabilize its, in Benjamin’s terms, violence-preserving political aims.78 In such a way, amnesty can become a conscious choice to move away from the amnesias of power and toward a more just politics. Ricoeur reminds us of how, as with all systems of distribution and signs, politics too “expresses revocable, chance choices, bound up with the struggles that mark the violent history of societies.”79 But politics is also, if it is willing, able to move beyond these inscribed, and often deemed insurmountable, (“political”) norms. By this reading, Ricoeur certainly seems to indicate a task for political thought to be rethought anew.
What Ricoeur is attempting to isolate as operative in the sphere of cultural memory is something akin to the establishment of the foundations of all societal formations in relation to their violent origins, much as Hobbes had once done.80 On this “fundamental relation of history to violence,” Ricoeur is especially quick to acknowledge this lineage of political and social thought and to develop it in much the same terms. As he puts it,
Hobbes was not wrong in making political philosophy arise out of an original situation in which the fear of violent death pushes man out of the “state of nature” into the bonds of a contractual pact that, first of all, guarantees him security; moreover, there exists no historical community that has not been born out of a relation that can, without hesitation, best be likened to war. What we celebrate under the title of founding events [événements fondateurs] are, essentially, acts of violence legitimated after the fact by a precarious state of right.81
A “state of right,” much like the construction of the self as subject, is a construct that can be undermined from within, by those forces of “otherness” that reside within any attempt at totalizing a particular historical structure (i.e., Benjamin’s “messianic” forces). And here is where Ricoeur’s understanding of the self takes on a deep political resonance. As with history, the self can be contested and undone by its humanity (or some form of “animality” or “creaturely being” outside of our humanity; Agamben’s “creation” would certainly apply) beyond the social narratives we have built for ourselves in order to identify ourselves.82 Hence, the formulation of oneself as another expresses its profundity and becomes a continuously self-renewing proposition within a political framework, as it is a reminder that we are constantly undermined from within by forces that would seek a more just representation of us similarly as all political forms must be rethought in order to become more just. In short, we are undone over and again by alternative versions of our selves disrupting us from the inside of our fabricated identifications. And this would serve to explain, in no small measure, why violence becomes utilized precisely at those junctures where we wish not to have to be undone, where we in fact try to hold firm to defending those boundaries (both personal and collective) that must necessarily become porous once again.
In this sense, there is no “unfortunate history” for Ricoeur, for history is a privileged form of an expanded collective memory; it is the foundation of any particular sense of self, even if it is eventually undermined only to be rebuilt later on. As other to itself, there is also, he reminds us, another notion of history that develops throughout time in a critical fashion, refuting the memories of a community (or individual) that “folds back upon itself [se replie] and encloses itself [se referme] within its own sufferings to the point of rendering itself blind and deaf to the suffering of other communities.”83 Though this blindness to suffering is precisely what causes suffering and allows its accompanying violence to continue to take place in our world, there is always another (though not necessarily alternate) history to be presented before the constructed versions of history with which we deal, both individually and collectively. These “little histories,” we might call them, are what make justice possible and what demonstrate the impossibility of ever totalizing any claim to power.
Perhaps things really are such that, as Benjamin (and Agamben) had already discerned, time itself interrupts history, providing us with those weak messianic forces that are always on the side of oppressed citizens or those mere human (“creaturely”) beings that live at the local, particular levels of history, counter to the established ideological scripts of national, cultural, or religious institutions.84 For his part, Benjamin had been concerned with establishing the proper relationship between history and a more natural, fluid sense of time. He had sought to determine the proportions that each could maintain in relation to the other, and thereby to determine how they could ever be said to coexist—if such a thing were truly possible. It would seem that just as history is interrupted by a time that moves on without any need for historical formulations, so too does the creaturely being that we are live without any need for those forms of (political) subjectivity that have so often accompanied it. Yet, we could certainly still ask: what are we to retain of a natural time outside of historical time, and what are we to remember of our “animality” (as the other within, the material creation within us) beyond our human, constructed selves? In like manner, Ricoeur inquires, what is the proper balance to be struck between forgetting and remembering, these two facets of history explicitly wedded to any historiographical operation, that is, to the very coordinates of what makes us “human?” Can a proper balance between them be conceived as the true locus of peace? In reformulated terms, such questions do more than simply summarize the stakes of Ricoeur’s line of thought; they also chart an inquiry into the balance necessary between representation and presentation, or between canonical forms and messianic forces, such as has been in desperate need throughout the entire length of this study.
How metaphor reigns politically
In his collection of aphorisms, fables and maxims, Agamben develops a succinct series of remarks on “The Idea of Peace.” Starting with the awkward addition of the “sign of peace” to the Christian liturgy, something which eventually fell back upon the familiar gesture of shaking hands in the absence of any genuine sign, he speculates as to what the true nature of a sign of peace might possibly resemble. What he finds is that “. . . there is not, nor can there be, a sign of peace, since true peace would only be there where all the signs were fulfilled and exhausted.”85 Perhaps it is, as Ricoeur has suggested: our historical narratives, our very cultural and religious memories, are founded on a violence concealed from sight, one that continues to be as necessary for forming communal boundaries as our political, cultural and religious constructions. Our attempts to represent peace are therefore always, in a sense, futile. They are still completely caught up within these ongoing battles of representation that must first be “fulfilled” or “exhausted” before any true sense of peace could possibly be grasped—again, if such a thing is even possible.
It would certainly seem that, as our contemporary forms of critical analysis would have it, we have reached an impasse concerning the contentious transitions between violence and peace. This much at least is attested through what Agamben declares when he states that:
Every struggle among men is in fact a struggle for recognition and the peace that follows such a struggle is only a convention instituting the signs and conditions of mutual, precarious recognition. Such a peace is only and always a peace amongst states and of the law, a fiction of the recognition of an identity in language, which comes from war and will end in war.86
It is a fiction, yes, though what remains unclear is whether or not this is a fiction we can do without, the same as asking whether or not we are capable of being truly “nonviolent,” or whether a “less violent” violence is all we are ever able to produce. This interminable state of struggle for recognition that takes place on the terrain of memory, as Ricoeur puts it, is what, pace Hobbes, Agamben detects at work within any given notion of history. This is, of course, also an essentially Marxist reading implicitly embedded within all such political sentiments (to be beyond all struggle, all history). What Agamben appears to be pointing toward, as was Marx in his own way, is a place beyond political representation as we have come to know it—an idealism as utopian as communism or the Kingdom of God in many ways, I would add.87
It is an ultimately nonviolent hope for a space beyond boundaries and borders, as much as it could possibly be beyond classifications and languages, beyond any sense of signification then. Agamben often signals such a place beyond all signs as the only place in which to approximate a real and lasting peace beyond our violent inscription in a political realm founded on warfare.88 It is by seeing it as such that he can conjecture:
Not the appeal to guaranteed signs, or images, but the fact that we cannot recognize ourselves in any sign or image: that is peace—or, if you like, that is the bliss more ancient than peace which a marvelous parable of St. Francis’s defines as sojourn—nocturnal, patient, homeless—in non-recognition. Peace is the perfect empty sky of humanity; it is the display of non-appearance as the only homeland of man.89
Whether such a land of nonrecognition as peace is possible, perhaps as a realm of pure gestures profaned of their ontotheological content, is an open question, but certainly one in need of being posed over and again. In many ways, the core of many a religious and political sentiment lies in this. What I intend to demonstrate throughout the rest of this chapter, however, is that these same tensions motivate the heart of philosophical thought as well, and that, if viewed from this angle, might offer us some real solutions to the aporias of thought we have been facing this whole time.
It is of course intriguing to consider these remarks juxtaposed with Ricoeur’s own speculations on the potential of the human being apart from its normal articulation as a being caught up in its work, or equally to frame these thoughts beside his remarks on recognition in general.90 What he considers, at the conclusion to his monumental study on the various ways of understanding history is the nature of a forgetting that would not be a form of “work,” but would rather provide a “liberation from care [liberation du souci],” with care being understood as the fundamental condition of the human being, similarly as it was for Heidegger.91 But, just as we might ask of Agamben, how are we to inhabit this world without our common shared preoccupation with work? Does Ricoeur not come across here as idealistic as Agamben in this regard, attempting to comprehend a space for the human being to exist outside the normal routine of our relation to our world that is made by our work? In short, and more closely aligning Agamben’s comments with Ricoeur’s formulations of the self (as another) than would most likely seem appropriate to many, Ricoeur’s words in this context would appear to remove the human being from the everyday realities we know altogether, forcing us to consider what lies beyond a world we consider as the only genuine possibility.92 We might conjecture, moreover, that this effort is one with his attempt to engage in a form of forgetfulness that would explain why “there is no politics of forgiveness” because it is likewise removed from our everyday forms of politics. Yet, if forgiveness is possible, for Ricoeur, it is possible only insofar as it is removed from a political realm.
Perhaps then a nonpolitical (and so nonviolent) existence is possible for the creaturely-beings that we are, the threshold of what always expressed for Ricoeur the limits of the theological.93 Though Agamben’s work has indeed often been criticized for espousing a form of “political nihilism,” just such a reaching beyond the political as we know it might indeed lie latent within Ricoeur’s conjectures on this point as well.94 And perhaps such an apolitical sphere that expresses a realm beyond the purely political would serve to explain why the theological (as beyond the philosophical) was of great interest to Ricoeur, for it pointed toward a structural problem of thought inherent to the hermeneutical method, one that he needed to more fully uncover and which could be expressed as lying at the heart of the distinction between potentiality and actuality. Getting to the heart of this problematic, therefore, might actually serve to address the questions we have been lingering over for quite some time.
Potentiality versus actuality
The essential tension between Ricoeur and Agamben can be sensed acutely in their varied renderings of Aristotle’s division between potentiality and actuality, a topic which both authors take up at central points within their writings.95 Their respective positions say as much about their divergent political (and perhaps religious) views as they do about their philosophical ones. As may be obvious already at this point, Ricoeur will find in Aristotle’s contrast a foundation for all hermeneutical understanding, from the philosophical to the political and very much in that order. For Agamben, however, Aristotle’s position, one that he claims is often misunderstood on this very point, leads many to take an ultimately indeterminate position (that of hermeneutics) rather than to the radical disjuncture with politics that he reads Aristotle as subtly advocating. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that their varied readings of Aristotle, in fact, formulate the basis of their worldviews, as I intend to explain in what follows.
To begin with, Ricoeur’s explication of Aristotle’s distinction between actuality (energeia) and potentiality (dunamis) provides the basic coordinates from which all of hermeneutics can be said to proceed. In this context, it is simply formulated in these terms:
. . . if energeia-dunamis were simply another way of saying praxis . . . the lesson of ontology would have no bearing; it is instead to the extent [mesure] that energeia-dunamis irrigates fields of application other than human action that its fecundity becomes manifest. In Aristotle’s text it matters little that sometimes dunamis is invoked on behalf of the physics of motion, and sometimes pure actuality on behalf of cosmotheology. What is essential is the decentering [décentrement] itself—both upward and downward in Aristotle—thanks to which energeia-dunamis points toward a ground of being [un fond d’être], at once potentiality and actuality [à la fois puissant et effectif] against which human action stands out [se détache].96
In such fashion, the tension between potentiality and actuality, mirrored in so many ways by those potential messianic forces working throughout any embodied, actual (canonical), and historical form, is played out as a permanent tension on the field of hermeneutics, the minimum measure of any given culturally-intelligible representation. Likewise, for Ricoeur, the self is founded on this circular tension between potentiality and actuality, a tension which can never be effaced in the realm of representations as such. What Ricoeur is after is a “ground at once actual and in potentiality [fond à la fois effectif et puissant],” that which never ceases to be both at the same time, and precisely because, as Aristotle had noted, these two conceptual limitations are themselves preceded by nothing—and thus, so often escape our attempts to define them.97 They are the inherent points of contrast embedded within any given definition, indeed as the tensional conditions that provide any sense of definition in the first place.98
Ricoeur admits that Aristotle had sought to grant potentiality an ontological status of its own, despite the apparent absurdity of such a claim, but that he had also been careful to define the potency of a thing always with respect to actuality.99 There is therefore a “circular definition” presented through the juxtaposition of terms, though it is one that is perhaps called into question by a fragment from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ricoeur notes, one that ostensibly links potentiality to a form of contemplation itself superior to actuality, though he does not address this possibility in Aristotle’s thought directly.100 Hence, the tension between energeia and dunamis remains for him a dynamic one, a tension involving both what is at the center of our representations (our actuality) and what could be said to de-center those very same representations (the potentiality latent within actuality). What we are approaching in the end, is a “ground of being, at once potentiality and actuality.”101 By viewing things as such, Ricoeur’s reading of Aristotle certainly coheres with his general hermeneutical framework through which he perceives the necessity for all acts of representation to conform to this scheme of a concrete actualized form and its potential for otherness lurking within that constantly threatens to undo it, no matter whether this concerns political, philosophical, cultural, or religious forms.
It is consequently of great interest that Agamben’s attempt to locate a presentation beyond representation will drive straight back to the heart of Aristotle’s schema as well, marking a preference for potentiality as a pure presentation (of the “thing itself”) beyond any conceived actuality as a general representation of something. This preference, I would add, is rehearsed in his thought on numerous occasions in his writing and is the cornerstone of his critique of established political, philosophical, cultural, and religious forms. Accordingly, as he reads the same section of Aristotle’s Metaphysics to which Ricoeur makes allusion though refrains from embracing,
What Aristotle undertakes to consider in Book Theta of the Metaphysics is, in other words, not potentiality as a merely logical possibility but rather the effective modes of potentiality’s existence. This is why, if potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, that potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia).102
That potentiality retains the possibility of being ontologically constituted as separate from actuality, and that this could in fact define a certain “state of existence” (a “form of life” beyond representation)103 is what Agamben detects at work in Aristotle’s formulations over and beyond what most commentators have considered. This possibility is latent, it would seem, within potentiality’s possibility to not pass over into actuality, to remain, as it were, forever ensconced within itself—potentiality as both its own potential and its own impotential, though without this impotentiality being or becoming an actualized form. As he clarifies, “What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be (its adynamia). To set im-potentiality aside is not to destroy it but, on the contrary, to fulfill it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself.”104 This ability, he stresses, is what led Avicenna to label it as “the perfect potentiality,” typified by the scribe who does not write.105
Were this simply a minor (or even major!) philosophical point, perhaps its significance could be downplayed or brushed aside as inconsequential to our lived realities—a matter concerning theory alone. What Agamben conjectures next, however, is that it is precisely this distinction between a misunderstood potentiality and our lived actualities that founds and centers our understanding of western politics (and ultimately religion) as a whole. He even goes so far as to suggest that Aristotle was the one who bequeathed our western political forms to us through his comprehension of this distinction. Such a giving can be seen, he suggests, when one considers that “The potentiality that exists is precisely the potentiality that cannot pass over into actuality . . .. This potentiality maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality.”106 And with this entrance of the concept of “sovereignty,” Agamben forges the profound link that animates his political critique in its near entirety: potentiality reigns sovereign in a sense entirely severed from concrete forms of political (sovereign) power.
Dwelling in a state of actuality, for Agamben, is the traditional sovereign gesture par excellence in both its ancient and modern conceptualizations. It is a realm given over entirely to proclaiming the necessity of things as they are (i.e., violence, statehood, etc) and as opposed to potentiality’s disclosure of our radical contingency (hence, the possibility of less violence, relations without statehood, etc). The forms of sovereignty that have reigned in actual political scenarios throughout history are so many attempts of humanity to establish itself as a “human” over the “animal,” to cloak our fragility with the guise of an always-already rational and political power, something that was subsequently codified by our western religious traditions as the ontotheological gesture par excellence.107 What Aristotle effectively does, in Agamben’s eyes, is to establish the coordinates of western political thought as they affect our entire structure of being in the world, dictating a horizon of political activity based on a model of sovereignty as actuality, therefore portraying our actual world, mired in its various contested representations, as a near-complete concession to sovereign power. As he will frame the discussion,
Potentiality (in its double appearance as potentiality to and as potentiality not to) is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding or determining it (superiorem non recognoscens) other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself.108
Like the human being that has trouble defining itself in relation to the animal world, often giving only circular definitions such as “the human is the animal that is capable of perceiving itself as human,”109 sovereign power is that which is sovereign simply because it declares itself to be sovereign, like the planting of a flag on foreign soil in order to claim that land as belonging to some distant nation-state. What we are dealing with, in fact, is the bare minimum gesture of signification as bound up with the basic coordinates of sovereign power, a relationship only further solidified by the flags, maps, boundaries, and walls which our world continues to construct over the surface of the entire planet.
Consequently, if seen from this point of view, sovereignty is indissociable from the governing fields of representation active within any given cultural or political matrix, from nation-states to religious traditions. This is the case for Agamben because our understanding of the state of actuality, insofar as it is generally conceived of as necessary, allows representations to be signified as essential, and as therefore inextricable from the fields of power woven to them. Though his claims have drawn the recurring critique that he is politically-speaking a “nihilist,” Agamben’s challenge to politics given through the possibility of an existence apart from sovereign power does provide a tempting counter-critique to those acceptances of political representation accounted for on a given hermeneutical plane. In this sense, Agamben’s divergence from Ricoeur and Ricoeur’s reading of Aristotle could not be more pronounced.
This contrast between an acceptance of the necessity of representations, as found in Ricoeur’s position, and a rejection of sovereign forms of power in favor of the hope for a presentation beyond all representations, as championed by Agamben, is one that no doubt motivates their widely divergent readings of Spinoza as well. For Ricoeur, Spinoza’s Ethics points toward a notion of God as act (energeia), a truth emergent for him perhaps because he places Spinoza’s problematic conceptualization of God (as pantheistic, or possibly atheistic) to the side.110 For Agamben, however, it is precisely this facet of Spinoza’s thought that motivates his subversions of any representation of God, for if God could be conceived as already being everything that is, there is only the pure regression of the infinite into the finite, a constant disruption of all that is (actuality) in favor of that infinite force which could be said to always surpass it (its never-ceasing potential).111
For all of this, however, I yet want to ask: to what degree is their potential disagreement a complete divergence? For Agamben, our selves are little more than a “fiction of an identity in language,” yet capable of outlasting any signification placed upon them. For Ricoeur, his remarks on the nature of metaphor within language as being a simultaneous expression of the thing itself (its “being”) as well as its negation (its “being not”), such as we find in The Rule of Metaphor, might yet find a general structural affinity with Agamben, though not a complete alignment to be sure. For Ricoeur, there is a paradox of all representational acts that “. . . consists in the fact that there is no other way to do justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the critical incision of the (literal) ‘is not [n’est pas]’ within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) ‘is [est]’ ”.112 The subsequent question to ask, for Ricoeur, and the one that really matters (for multiple levels of society), is how this metaphorical truth unfolds in reality, that is, in our concrete political and cultural lives. In other words, if “being as” expresses both being and not being, how is the “implicit ontology of the metaphorical utterance” to be comprehended as a social and political reality?113 This would be, in many ways, the same question that Agamben so relentlessly pursues. And, traditionally speaking, as we have seen already, the only way to justify their connection has been the domain of ontotheology, that which Agamben contests and Ricoeur could be enlisted to defend.
There has typically been great merit placed upon those efforts intended to construct an ontotheological bridge between metaphor and politics, to complete the journey from one to the other through the theological justifications given for sovereign and transcendent ontological forces, from God to the King, and from the King to Man (of course, as traditionally opposed to “woman”). In each transition, in each linkage of power between particular forms, there is a “movement beyond” the thing itself that carries the loaded charge of transcendence. As Ricoeur for one discerns, “And so, whether we speak of the metaphorical character of metaphysics or of the metaphysical character of metaphor, what must be grasped is the single movement that carries [emporte] words and things beyond [au-delà], meta.”114 By portraying the movement of transcendence as such, he is able to consider the act of signification as inextricably bound up with the creation of history itself.115 And it is from this basic platform that he is returned to something like Benjamin’s weak messianic force moving within history, disrupting its monolithic (totalitarian) tendencies, for whereas concepts attempt to pin a thing down, our creative imagination puts a demand to conceptual thought and attempts to present an idea beyond its inscription in our traditional networks of representation.116
What Ricoeur is driving toward is essentially the fact that our creative potential at times takes precedence over the actuality of our existing political and social forms—though the qualification “at times” must be further developed as possibly the distinctive difference between Ricoeur and Agamben. For example, and drawing on the same rich Aristotelian legacy in this regard as Agamben, Ricoeur determines how our potentiality, in reality, at times holds precedence over the actuality of those existing social and political forms before us in order to rejuvenate them and to re-determine their actual form. Moreover, he conjectures that seeing matters as such is the only possible way to access the thing in-itself beyond our collective, cultural representations of it. We may see the thing in itself but we are nevertheless returned to our representations in the end. For Agamben, this same realization, though with a certain one-sided emphasis upon the possibility of remaining entirely within one’s potentiality, has led him to seek to eradicate any guises of the ontotheological still lingering within our culture, and to attempt to behold the “thing itself” beyond any representations of it—this, for him, is the task of profaning what was once held to be sacred and of a search for those “forms of life” lived beyond these prescribed boundaries of ontotheological sovereignty. By doing so, he hopes to dismantle the ontotheological bridge between metaphor (potentiality) and politics (actuality), perpetually favoring the former over the false premises of the latter.
As I have tried to indicate in the above, albeit briefly, though Ricoeur’s work has appeared over the years as a justification for the necessity of representation, it is hard not to read his remarks on forgiveness and our possible existence apart from work as precariously balanced on the cusp of formulations similar to those of Agamben, albeit perhaps “balanced” with the necessity for representations remaining yet before him. His interest in, though reluctance to embrace, the theological may however, as he envisioned toward the end of his life, point to the difficulty he felt in stretching his philosophical claims to their limits—the very starting point of the theological, yet immersed in the tensions of the philosophical and the political.
Tentative conclusions to a perpetual debate
What philosopher worthy of the name prior to Heidegger has not meditated on the metaphor of the way [métaphore du chemin] and considered himself to be the first to embark on a path that is language itself addressing him? Who among them has not sought the “ground” and the “foundation” [le “sol” et le “fond”], the “dwelling” and the “clearing” [la “demeure” et la “clairière”]? Who has not believed that truth was “near” and yet difficult to perceive and even more difficult to say, that it was hidden and yet manifest, open and yet veiled? Who has not, in one way or another, linked the forward movement of thought to its ability to “regress,” to take step “backward”? Who has not attempted to distinguish the “beginning of thinking [commencement de la pensée]” from any chronological starting point? Who has not conceptualized his own task essentially as a labour of thought [un travail de la pensée] directed toward itself and against itself?117
As I pointed out in the last chapter, it was at a certain point in composing his Arcades Project that Benjamin seems to have suddenly realized that his obsession with origins, with finding any origin at all, in fact, was the same guiding principle that had driven his early work on the German genre of Trauerspiel (or “tragic play”), as well as his regard for biblical narrative.118 As he was to indicate, the search for an origin was central to understanding our search for a presentation beyond our historical representations. The only thing that remained to be seen for Benjamin, and what Agamben pushes us ever closer toward, is the manner in which the very dichotomous structure of representation/presentation is one opened up to us by religious thought (specifically in the contrast between certain forms of Judaism and Christianity) which was itself an inherent part of our western philosophical tensions, tensions then of thought itself, as we saw in the first chapter. And so, we would do well to remember that, even if Agamben’s reading of Aristotle is correct on this score, we have yet to ascertain the truth (or potential) of what these claims suggest. Is a realm without representation, political sovereignty, or even language (as the ultimate signifying act) possible for human beings? What would such a realm resemble other than that ever-elusive “Kingdom of God” that seems to mirror so many of Agamben’s claims on this count? And in even more directly philosophical terms: Can ontotheology, the basis for so many claims made in order to justify our sovereign representations, truly ever be overcome?119
Ricoeur was certainly aware of the temptation of philosophers to believe themselves to have conceptualized thoughts that no one had previously thought, to theorize realms of political and religious existence beyond what we see before us. His emphasis on this desire within each philosopher to find the origins of all thought, all language, all politics, and truth does indeed give us pause for thought, especially as his awareness merges with Derrida’s critique of Agamben as the thinker who seeks to be the first to disclose such insights, the thinker who in fact attempts to be sovereign over all other philosophers.
In the end, I find it helpful to juxtapose these reflections on the contrast between revolutions and political praxis, between Agamben and Ricoeur, with Derrida’s view on Benjamin’s relationship to violence, which serves as one possible interpretive key for the impasse explored here. For Derrida, there are only those representations before us that ultimately matter, and that solely provide meaning to our world. The distinction to note, it would seem, is only how in league our representations are with the violences done in this world. Which are more complicit with violence? Which less so? If a true state of nonviolence is possible—and as Agamben seems to suggest it is—perhaps it is only discernable after first progressing through a series of less violent (representational) forms. Whether this is something immediately achievable (as in Agamben), or should be sought out in increments (as in Ricoeur and Derrida) seems at times to matter very little. In this light, the fact that our religious, political, and philosophical speculations rest so firmly on the same foundation appears as almost negligible. Instead of gauging our global clashes in terms of these overly simplistic categorizations, what if, following this critique, we were to measure one’s relation to violence itself as an index of identifications? Instead of “Christians” and “Jews,” what if there were only those more or less willing to do violence to others and to themselves? And what if, instead of hiding behind particular religious labels as justifications for our actions, what if our actions spoke for themselves, and our representations formed according to such patterns of behavior? Perhaps becoming more aware of these structural resonances between identifications and violence might be a genuine first step toward lessening the violence perpetuated and sustained by those who would pretend they could identify themselves otherwise.
A Levinasian core: On an ethical affinity between Judith Butler and Paul Ricoeur
Though it might sound a bit dismissive of Agamben’s most central claims to suggest that it matters little in practical terms what is or is not possible, it is my wager at this point that the formation of a radical hermeneutical position within a theological context, one that takes seriously the various positions we establish in relation to violent actions, can actually lessen our concern for what is possible and lead, more dramatically, toward a transformation of the world we live in. Would such a wager be that far off the mark from the truth our religious and philosophical reasonings seek to uncover?
For all of his antagonism toward the realm of representations, Agamben yet says a curious thing in a genre-crossing work that, in many ways, comes closest to presenting the core of his own work. In Idea of Prose, Agamben states that “the only true representation is that which represents the gap between itself and truth.”120 Whether this statement represents a momentary lapse in his overall argumentation or is fully compatible with his stance on the division between presentation/representation could certainly be cause for further investigation. At any rate, it does seem to point toward the possibility for a genuine “presentation” to appear in the failures of representation, and not external to them. That is, perhaps our representations, by presenting their failures, are capable of actually achieving the desired success of a presentation. In other words, the existence of language itself may not be simply an obstacle to be overcome, but the very fabric through which any possible presentation becomes visible, whether or not such a “final” presentation issues in through one’s words or not.
Taking up the failures of representation as a sort of presentation within representation is the task of a radical hermeneutics to be sure.121 It was also the task of the concept of “appresentation” or that which attempts to respect the failures of representation without yet acknowledging the possibility of an authentic presence, as Husserl had once conceived it.122 Formulating such a conception was Husserl’s explicit (phenomenological) intention and such was also what Derrida seized upon—albeit in a subtle manner throughout his career—in order to found his most critical deconstructive gestures.123
Through an examination of the work of Ricoeur alongside that of Judith Butler on the issue of representation, and even more precisely on their readings of Levinas’ contentions with the phenomenological project, I am here locating appresentation as that which takes place precisely at the site of our “failure” to represent both the self and the other. This is a failure that must be maintained if anything is to be faithfully re-presented to us, almost paradoxically then as the only way to guarantee that any trace of a presence be felt. With this insight, we are returned to our fundamental starting point for this study, the contrasts between representation and presentation, to be sure, but also between dialectics and antinomian impulses. As Theodor Adorno once eloquently put it, “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”124 As such, he found, the contradiction inherent to dialectics “indicates the untruth of identity [Unwahrheit von Identität], the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived [des Aufgehens des Begriffenen im Begriff].”125 And though such remainders have generated a number of antinomian responses in order to adequately address their situatedness (Paul’s focus on the “remnant” would be one such example perhaps),126 there is yet another way possible to view the representations of history, one that invites our attention once again.
The dialectics of oneself as another
For Ricoeur, mimesis is a process that is dialectical in structure, and this is the case even despite Ricoeur’s seeming dismissal of traditional (historical) dialectics.127 Yet, dialectics do matter for Ricoeur, and in contrast to those antinomian forces we have been speculating on since the first chapter. What is significant in his use of certain particular mimetic dialectics (i.e., his use of the processes of totalization, de-totalization, and re-totalization in Time and Narrative), I would assert, is the manner in which he is able to bring such methods to bear on our (narrative) constructions of the self in relation to an other, or that which comes to paramount importance in his analysis of the Levinasian attempt to mediate between these two polarities. It is here moreover that I would locate the specific uniqueness of Ricoeur’s thought within twentieth-century philosophy, not to mention why I find him to be a helpful partner at this late stage in an ongoing dialogue.
For Levinas, of course, any notion of a “self” could only be achieved as a form of presentation beyond representation, what he sought ultimately to disclose in its full phenomenological richness.128 For Ricoeur, however, this presentation is able to exist only insofar as we can speak of it, insofar, that is, as our narratives about it reshape the very presencing of our narratively constructed selves. For example, on the movement of (re)presentation between Husserl and Levinas, Ricoeur tries, in fact, to find a rapprochement between them, as well as a space for himself. As he introduces the dilemma:
Husserl gave the name “appresentation” to this givenness [donation] in order to express, on the one hand, that unlike representations in signs or images [la difference de la représentation par signe ou par image], the givenness of the other is an authentic givenness and, on the other hand, that unlike the originary, immediate givenness of the flesh to itself, the givenness of the other never allows me to live the experiences of others and, in this sense, can never be converted into originary presentation. This has also been said elsewhere about memory: the series of memories of others can never find a place in the series of my own memories. In this sense, the gap can never be bridged between the presentation of my experience and the appresentation of your experience.129
The shift in understanding our ontological moorings occurs precisely at this juncture. It is furthermore upon this hinge that one could situate the entire deconstructive (spectral) procedure, as it was in Derrida’s reckoning with Husserlian phenomenology that he too found a way to maintain the contours of a logic of representation while yet maintaining the absolutely irreducible sense of difference (through avoiding a “metaphysics of presence”) that resonated throughout his work.130 Derrida’s reading of Husserl in this regard also makes sense when one stops to consider his profound indebtedness to and yet critique of Levinas.131 For Derrida, there will only always be these representations (or texts); for Levinas, however, such a maneuver appears akin to Husserl’s attempt to save representation, an effort Levinas labeled as being both “idealist and solipsistic,” according to Ricoeur.132
For Levinas, a respect for the other’s difference meant that the assimilation of the other into our own self-identity must be prevented. As Ricoeur reads this effect, “To represent something to oneself is to assimilate it to oneself [l’assimiler à soi], to include it in oneself, and hence to deny its otherness [nier l’altérite].”133 There is, in Levinas, a certain distaste for representation, as, in his philosophy, those myriad attempts to understand the other before us in reality involve a reduction of the other into a schematic, categorical representation. This is a move that must be avoided, even at the cost of losing our (representative) sense of self. The matter is brought to a decisive head by Levinas in terms of self-understanding, recognition and any sense of relationality with the other before us as the other will consistently and perpetually sever our attempts to incorporate them. Again following Ricoeur’s reading of this:
Because the Same signifies totalization and separation, the exteriority of the Other can no longer be expressed in the language of relation. The Other absolves itself from relation [s’absout de la relation], in the same movement by which the Infinite draws free [soustrait] from Totality. But how are we to think the irrelation implied by this otherness in its movement of absolution?134
The major questions however remain: how are we to perceive the presentation of the other beyond our inscriptions of the other into our self-understanding (that is, our representations)? How are we to recognize them? How are we to relate?
For Levinas, this break is facilitated by the use of hyperbole, the figure of “excess in philosophical argumentation.”135 Levinas’ use of hyperbole is invoked in order to destroy the “ruins of representation” by reaching back to that which is prior to any beginning (an an-archy beyond the origin).136 As one might suspect, and certainly insofar as all of this resonates quite deeply with Agamben’s formulations thus far, this refusal to concede ground to any presupposition of a sovereign self means that Levinas does not try to attest to the presence of a “self” as such; he refuses any attempt to locate the origins (arche) of a sovereign subjectivity (an attempt Derrida diagnosed as “archive fever”). Instead, he aims for the ultimate hyperbolic statement: that of substitution, the Other for the I, the I only insofar as it is hostage to the other.137 What is of supreme interest is that this reading, for Ricoeur, does not place Levinas outside of the phenomenological project altogether. Rather,
From this confrontation between Husserl and Levinas results the suggestion that there is no contradiction in holding the movement from the Same toward the Other and that from the Other toward the Same to be dialectically complementary. The two movements do not annihilate one another to the extent that one unfolds in the gnoseological dimension of sense, the other in the ethical dimension of injunction. The assignment of responsibility, in the second dimension, refers to the power of self-designation [autodésignation], transferred, in accordance with the first dimension, to every third person assumed to be capable of saying “I.” Was not this intersecting [croisée] dialectic of oneself and the other than self anticipated in the analysis of the promise? If another were not counting on me, would I be capable of keeping my word [parole], of maintaining myself?138
Here is where Ricoeur begins—albeit subtly—to instantiate his own claims. My word, it would seem, is to be situated, can only be situated, in relation to another, the other with whom I exist in a heteronymous relationship. In the end, there is the hyperbole of separation, on the one hand, and the hyperbole of the face that is before me, on the other hand, its epiphany with which I am confronted. The only way to bridge the gap between two forever separated faces, according to Ricoeur, is through language, through the narrative(s) we build in-between these fundamentally divided and yet intertwined entities we call self and other. As he puts it, “In short, is it not necessary that a dialogue superpose a relation on the supposedly absolute distance between the separate I and the teaching Other?”139 The true ontological role of metaphor arises as just such an effort to cross before the self and the other.140
This ongoing, historical dialogue becomes the very connection between the self and the other, what establishes our relation and what sustains it throughout time (and, in a religious sense, this is perhaps the function and significance of scripture, to hold us to the other whom we could not otherwise relate to, I might add). The centrality of narrative comes about as a linkage of the self and the other, an always fictive though essential relation between them. This fiction that is always encased in a realm of representations, yet affects (albeit in some distorted form) the presentation of each self that we all always-already are. This is Ricoeur’s answer to the phenomenological problem of what we are to do with the reality of appresentation and the failure to express a genuine presentation of the “thing itself”.
It thus appears that the affection of the self by the other than self finds in fiction a privileged milieu for thought experiments that cannot be eclipsed by the “real” relations of interlocution and interaction. Quite the opposite, the reception of works of fiction contributes to the imaginary and symbolic constitution of the actual exchanges [échanges effectifs] of words and actions. Being-affected in the fictive mode [le mode fictif] is therefore incorporated into the self’s being-affected [l’être-affecté du soi] in the “real” mode [le mode «réel»].141
For Ricoeur, such thoughts were the cornerstone for understanding our elusive sense of self constructed through the narratives that sustain us.
In what follows, I wish to link such a formulation of the narrative self to the political tensions and realities that we continuously face through the shared Levinasian critique of Judith Butler, one of the leading social theorists of our age. My intention in doing so is to expand upon Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach, bringing it into conversation with a critical theorist capable of utilizing a similar response to Levinas’ work. As such, I am hoping to show how Butler’s reflections on this score serve, not only to provide a linkage between Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and critical thought, but also to give a direct response to those challenges to representation that we have been following thus far.
Judith Butler on the dialectics of representation
For those familiar with the work of Judith Butler, it was something of a surprise, subtle as it may have been presented by her, to witness a profound, and as yet unresolved shift in her thinking. Such a shift could be characterized as such: if her early work had sought to present an individual beyond any inscription in a given representational matrix of intelligibility, her later thoughts have gravitated more toward admitting the necessity for historical representational frameworks as markers of individual and collective identity. As she once put it in an interview, to liberate a representation “. . . from its prior moorings in an established ontology is not to say that it will not acquire a new one.”142 And she adds, “So, I guess I would be a little less optimistic about the possibility of a radical unmooring than I was in 1993.”143
Part of what pushed her somewhat beyond her radical critique against (gendered) representations in her earlier work Gender Trouble (1990) was the acknowledgment that certain forms of recognized subjectivity (such as when gay marriage is legalized, for example) are precisely what allow some people in specific societies to experience forms of social recognition as a type of liberation.144 This is to say, though there might be sufficient reasons to question the institution of marriage itself as a form of oppression, for many, there is yet also a psychically liberating experience that takes place on the level of subjectivity that cannot be ignored. As such, Butler’s study of the “psychic life of power” proved instrumental in this regard, as our social structures of power do affect how we perceive and construct our very selves.145 Offering this recognition as a form of “universality,” she was able to effectuate a shift in her thinking, one that would come in the end to resemble the Derridean project of contesting and deconstructing particular canonical forms precisely so that they might be re-constructed in a more just form. “Universality, in that sense, would not be violent or totalizing; it would be an open-ended process, and the task of politics would be to keep it open, to keep it as a contested site of persistent crisis and not to let it be settled.”146 Hence, in very real and politically concrete terms, she is able to state elsewhere that:
When we consider the ordinary ways that we think about humanization and dehumanization, we find the assumption that those who gain representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being humanized, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed, not regarded at all.147
In many ways, the real question becomes one that takes into consideration the form of dialectics Butler is proposing, situated as she often is in-between the hyperbolic statements of Levinas and Benjamin (perhaps more than simply akin to Agamben’s own hyperbolic language), on the one hand, and Derrida, on the other. For Benjamin and for Levinas, it could be argued, there is a certain pointing beyond representation, an excess that brings all representational dialectics “to a standstill” (to quote Benjamin). Yet, for Butler, there is a defense of representation on certain political levels that can moreover be a form of liberatory praxis. Realizing a sense of responsibility beyond the exclusionary norms of society,148 however, leads her to formulate a conception of “interdependency” that certainly is not wholly unfamiliar to Levinas’ thought.149 And this might serve to explain to some degree why Levinas is and remains a central dialogue partner in her work as of late.
Her language and usage of admittedly Levinasian themes in her writing has drawn some attention, and not all of it positive.150 What is clear though is that she seeks in some fashion to define a sense of self that is dependent upon the other and therefore also upon the boundaries constructed between the other and myself: “If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness.”151 In the boundaries that exceed the self, we find ourselves. We find ourselves in relation to the other who lies on the other side of the boundary before me. “If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who ‘I’ am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others.”152 Therefore what is true for her is “. . . that the subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not, that we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and this precariousness. In this sense, we are all precarious lives.”153
In her efforts to move beyond a singular “human form” and toward an “unbound” bodily being (and therefore, I would claim, maintaining some sense of its “radicality”), Butler yet determines how dealing with the tensions of constructed subjects is a task well worth undertaking.154 She is not seeking to rehabilitate a notion of “the subject,” but rather to inspect how subjects are constructed within any particular grid of historical tensions, such as those between violence and nonviolence, and thus to push the boundaries of subjectivity to their very breaking point.155 As she puts it, “Violence and non-violence are not only strategies or tactics, but form the subject and become its constitutive possibilities and, so, an ongoing struggle.”156 Hence, for her, “The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way?”157 In other words, the representations that structure our world are very real indeed, and we neglect them at our own peril.
Accordingly, in an essay on “The Claim of Non-Violence,” she pursues a consideration of nonviolence as an appeal or as an address to us that works against violence (as a counter-force, and therefore somewhat akin to Assmann’s use of the term), though it cannot ultimately ever hope to do away with its existence.158 What she considers is the chance that perhaps not all forms of normativity are violent in and of themselves; and to admit as much is indeed to reinforce a transcendental universal perspective.159 It is also to endorse something of the hermeneutical framework I have here been exploring, and even this from a somewhat “radicalized” perspective. Expressing a position akin to Derrida’s notion of a “bloodless violence” at the heart of all cultural inscriptions, Butler seeks to recognize the violence of all cultural identifications while yet respecting the claims of nonviolence as often favored (more “just”) tactical maneuvers. Indeed, as she puts it,
. . . non-violence as an ethical “call” could not be understood if it were not for the violence involved in the making and sustaining of the subject. There would be no struggle, no obligation, and no difficulty. The point is not to eradicate the conditions of one’s own production, but only to assume responsibility for living a life that contests the determining power of that production; in other words, that makes good use of the iterability of the productive norms and, hence, of their fragility and transformability.160
The task, for Butler, is not to remove violence altogether, but to put forward a force of nonviolence within this cultural matrix of tensions in order to counteract the violences that unjustly act upon us. Nonviolence is, therefore, also not a universal principle to be applied everywhere the same. It is rather a force utilized in particular circumstances, as a particular instance of “pushing back” against particular (more or less) unjust violences. Again, as in the last chapter, we have a recognition that there are certain more or less violent (canonical) norms that must be dealt with, and as such on an individual basis.
The dialectic that emerges from this tension continuously seeks to determine the fluxuating coordinates of our very subjectivity as they are immersed in these processes of binding and unbinding from relations of violence and nonviolence.161 There is only a functional practice of relationality, not some utopian dream, as she will put it.162 “In this sense, non-violence is not a peaceful state, but a social and political struggle to make rage articulate and effective . . .”163 Accordingly, her reference in this context is to Levinas, who sees the face as presenting us with an ethical ambivalence: “a desire to kill, an ethical necessity not to kill.”164 An ethical practice consequently emerges from this Levinasian thematic, one that cannot be made into a universalized “principle of non-violence” but rather exists as a force, “fully fallible, of trying to attend to the precariousness of life, checking the transmutation of life into non-life.”165 This is a one-sided reading of Levinas, to be sure, but one that seeks to recover from his hyperbolic language the very foundation of our ethical claims.
What I find intriguing here is her portrayal of our personal narration of such tensions insofar as it presents itself as a sort of critique and supplementation to Ricoeur’s own insights. Seeing things as such, I would like to focus on the way in which Butler is able to envision how the account we give of ourselves is never complete, never fully realized, always interlaced with the multiple accounts of ourselves that we give, and all of which point toward the fictitious “origin” of an ever elusive “us.”166 And yet, this is an “us” that must be stated, in language, through the representations before us, through our numerous attempts to “present” ourselves beyond representation but which always fall back upon the more or less just or even unjust representations we have to work with.
So, if representation is the social reality we must continuously face, why has there been such a longing for a presentation beyond representation? Why strive so hard for a glimpse of something so elusive and undistorted by our cultural significations? What Butler wagers, I believe, is that the “presentation” we are looking for is little more than a recognition (as a form of humility perhaps) that representation is and will always be short of our intentions, that there is always something beyond its hold, even if that something can never actually be obtained. This is the gap that even Agamben has spoken of on occasion, as we saw a moment ago. She reminds us, in this context, that, for Levinas, “. . . the human is not represented by the face.” As she renders the implications of this fact,
Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. For representation to convey the human, then, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give.167
Our ability to disclose the failures of representation is what finally gives representation its force, and it likewise gives rise to some of our greatest artistic achievements, those expositions of our failings that we nevertheless pine for and transmit ceaselessly throughout history. As such, “. . . the human is not identified with what is represented but neither is it identified with the unrepresentable; it is, rather, that which limits the success of any representational practice. The face is not ‘effaced’ in this failure of representation, but is constituted in that very possibility”.168 Hence, this “failure” becomes in fact the only way to “successfully” present the other before us.
We take up the other (artistic, cultural) expressions of the selves that litter our histories because they assist us in identifying ourselves just as strongly as the persons who live and breathe next to us. “The critical image . . . works this difference in the same way as the Levinasian image; it must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing..169 And when it is on display, as it were, we recognize ourselves in what is not ourselves, a reiteration then of seeing “oneself as another”—“The one with whom I identify is not me, and that ‘not being me’ is the condition of identification.”170
This is where, I would argue, the Levinasian themes that intrude upon both Ricoeur and Butler become most beneficial—though certainly shorn of their hyperbolic demands for presentation. It is the ethical nonviolent call to respect the face of the other, the other that lies even and always within us, which propels us forward beyond embracing dialectics as an instrument that simply perpetuates violent struggle. Indeed, what we are rather reminded of is the singular refusal to embrace dialectics as a forum for (and justification of) exclusion and violence. We are, in fact, to play witness to another form of dialectics that yet respects the other, and that moves forward in openness. The true dialectic of representations, I would suggest, is one of violence meeting nonviolence, or, since we inhabit a realm of representations that are more or less always prone to some act of reduction into order to ensure intelligibility, we are constantly pitting bids for more violence against bids for less of it. When these two opposing forces meet, and assuming that violence does not by definition respect nonviolence and that, as Lacan once suggested, love will always give its ground to hate,171 how are we to respect an other who is violent? By loving it, but also, I would suggest, by working tirelessly to leave it behind, even if it means leaving a part of oneself behind. We are again reminded, it would seem, of Ricoeur’s notion of a “happy memory” that needs to forget certain things precisely in order to thrive, to forget things then that could be recalled if need be, but typically need not be remembered. It is loving the blood enemy who just happens to be a part of your own family.172
This reformulation of dialectics posits no third term as a solution to its dynamics, and yet it also yields no “presentation” completely beyond its representational poles. Perhaps it is not even an appresentation, as Husserl had hoped to justify. It rather invites us to perceive dialectics as a constant refashioning of both polarized ends, a constant re-alignment of what we consider both justice and injustice alike to be. This is to say that perhaps hermeneutics has more to say about dialectics than people have long suspected. Such a hermeneutics does not strive for a utopian future, but perhaps it can share in Frederic Jameson’s belief that a utopian world does yet exist, parallel to the one we live in now, unseen most days, unaccessed as a whole, but momentarily, from time to time, brought into our world like a flash of lightening and hope, readjusting the coordinates of our cherished representations though not doing away with them altogether.173
Radical hermeneutics
Viewing our current state of theology as a movement toward the atheological is a disconcerting transition for many to be sure. As a salient example, it was Walter Benjamin, Agamben’s inspiration in many contexts, for whom the act of remembrance, in contrast to the search for scientific-historical fact, was what guaranteed history could never be entirely “atheological.”174 There would always be some viewpoint external to history that would impart meaning to it. In this sense, the representations (“semblances”) which seem to solidify any sense of “cultural intelligibility” are given their meaning by viewpoints which appear as external to them, as then transcendent or “theological,” whether they are identified with a particular religious tradition or not.175 They are also, as Benjamin made clear toward the very end of his life, undone by those “weak messianic forces” moving through history that run counter to all theological–ideological readings of history, all myths of progress.176
His co-opting of a religious (“messianic”) terminology that seems to split or divide the theological from within can be established as a reading of history that attempts to grant power to those oppressed groups or persons who are otherwise muted within history, by any official historical record, that is, occluded by the strong narratives of progress and victory which dominate most historical accounts. Remembrance, by this count, will always appear to have two faces, that of the victor and that of the loser. This is more than a subtle reminder of the inherent contentiousness of any historiographical act.177 Indeed, acts of remembrance are often nationalistic, racist, colonialist, or patriarchal. They are possibly also, however, stories of liberation, survival, testimony, and truth, functioning often as, to borrow the theologian Johann Baptist Metz’s phrase, “dangerous memories” to those persons remaining in power.178 Insofar as all acts of remembrance are stories begging to be believed, they are certainly ideological, some more just in their fidelity to truth, others less so. Moreover, some are more violent to the precarious construction of identities today, some less so; for identities, no less than stories, are built upon these acts of remembrance passed along through time.179
It is in such a light that I would consider taking up Butler’s recent engagement with Benjamin’s work, and, more specifically, with the much discussed term “messianic.” Like Benjamin before her, Butler has striven to defend the excluded and marginalized figures of history whose very presence serves as a sort of messianic force undoing our normative cultural (and often legal) representations.180 Though her use of the term “messianic” has been somewhat limited, there lingers in it a profound connection to what has been stated above concerning Benjamin’s use of it, as well as a slight divergence from Agamben’s own use of the term.181 Illustrated by the context of her work on gender and its “undoing,” there is a specific way in which she attempts to undermine the “practices of repetition that constitute identity” which has, I would suggest, a strong resonance with Benjamin’s approach to history.182
As she has cleverly depicted it, in terms of human identity, there is no copy of an original ontological form that simply waits to be (re)produced in the present, but only copies of copies, carefully crafted representations of the (gendered) human being which change over time inasmuch as they are disseminated among particular social groupings. Early in her work, and as she explained in the context of creating “gender trouble”: “The subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both conceals itself and enforces its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects.”183 Her conclusion, that our identities are performed rather than “natural,” thus draws its strength from these acts of repetition which are easily deconstructed. This led her to conclude at the time that: “Ontology is, thus, not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing itself into political discourse as its necessary ground.”184 As we have seen, she has slightly culled some of this radicality from her later work, a culling which, I would argue, is directly related to her understanding of the messianic—her own particular evolution of the concept within this long series of reformulations.
Ontology, in Butler’s eyes, as I see it, would seemingly be little more than a word utilized historically to mask the ruses of any attempt to “ground” a given social normativity through a particular (“theological,” in Benjamin’s words) reading of history. The messianic, then, is what “ungrounds” such constructions, much as it was for Derrida. The critique she utilizes can be seen in this light as one aligned against the western ontotheological (and decidedly canonical) project and opening, as Annika Thiem highlights, toward the ethical.185 And this is ultimately what unites her work, in a certain sense, with Benjamin’s (and Derrida’s) conceptualizations of history and theology, a proximity which she herself has recently acknowledged by making reference to Benjamin’s use of “messianic time” in order to formulate a “revolutionary” critique of state (representational) violence.186
In essence, the division of gender unveiled by Butler as creating an arbitrary binary representation is an ephemeral ontotheological line which says nothing about an alleged ontological essence of being-male or being-female (if there even were such states of being, which she of course claims there are not), but rather is constituted as a theological (hegemonic) bid for power on behalf of those who most strictly establish and guard the boundaries.187 Her deconstructive act, because it deals with an ontotheological platform, and much like Derrida’s work before her, has something of a messianic structure to it; that is, it exposes the fault lines of any normative ontotheological claims from within, and is, in like manner, a challenge to the sovereign powers that be.188 It is in this sense, I believe, that it maintains its radical nature, despite her nuanced later views.
Butler has subsequently brought this unmasking of binary representations to the threshold of formulating an ethics, though pulling up short of a fuller critique of the ontotheology which pervades so much of western representational logic.189 It remains the case, as such, that there may be a space for making ontotheological claims in her work, though, again, the unmooring of a fixed (“natural”) ontological form from the created, creaturely beings that we are would still constitute her position as one that attempts to radicalize hermeneutics in general. Such a view, at least, is what I am trying to bring within a theological context as a (more) profitable way through which to read the complex, dynamic, and essential relations between canonical forms and messianic forces.
Conclusions formulated on the basis of Part Two
A moment ago, I made reference to the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson, whose own work recently has been focused upon, among other things, reconciling Ricoeur’s hermeneutical principles with political dialectical thinking.190 His calls for a certain form of utopian thinking to enter into our imaginative discourses is not a call wholly unfamiliar to Ricoeur, for whom utopian thought represents a genuine moment within the collective imagination to provide an entrance into a reality that was not yet present or even conceivable.191 Such is also how the theologian and cultural philosopher (as well as good friend of Jameson’s) Cornel West reads the possibility of “utopian interruptions” as they are delivered to us from the horizons of certain “prophetic imaginations.”192 And though such an outlook might certainly account for a large portion of what Agamben has been actively advocating, I believe that more can be said on the matter.
It is true that we cannot escape from the representations that lie before us. Linguistically, for example, we can only express the failures of representation in the hope that we can construct more just representations in the future (and despite the fact that there is no guarantee that things will get better). As I have been stating throughout, this would minimally represent the “Judaic” core of our experience, and would involve us in a hermeneutics (dialectics) of sorts to be sure. As I indicated at the conclusion of the last chapter, my reading of Benjamin’s project is one that, in the end, shares with Derrida’s interpretation of messianic forces acting in relation to canonical norms, and this despite the hyperbolic or excessive language that Agamben (as well as both Benjamin and Levinas before him) utilizes in order to stress the significance of the weak messianic forces that clamor for a presentation beyond representation. By holding to this reading, I am thereby holding to the truth that such an interpretation is the only way for one’s historical context (or even biography) to matter.
Christianity, it could certainly be said, does repeat particular antinomian gestures that arise from within its own Judaic roots. Its reliance upon a logic and history of messianicity seems to indicate that it is perpetually attuned to those who suffer a great injustice at the hands of unjust representational structures. It was, after all, particular strands of Judaism that Jesus reacted against most pointedly. Agamben’s understanding of the messianic as that which affects not only our religious logic, but also the created matter before us likewise contains something of a radicalized (even incarnational) nature that Christians would do well to take seriously. There is a specific deepening of the implications for our understanding of theology’s most basic operations that still lies in store for us along these lines of thought. My intention at this point, however, is, and despite the many ways I have tried here to demonstrate the relevance of his claims for theology, yet to challenge Agamben’s final conclusions by pointing us toward a form of hermeneutics that could simultaneously incorporate Agamben’s most basic claims while also maintaining its reliance upon canonical forms. There is a form of dialectics yet at work here, though one that continuously seeks to do a greater justice to those forms of antinomian (messianic) thought released from time to time in order to “correct” our canonical sense of normativity.
In short, I am claiming that this can be done by focusing on the manner in which a form of radical hermeneutics is concerned with the divisions that take place within and between canons themselves. This can be done, I will argue, by taking up Agamben’s fundamental Pauline intuition and returning it to the canonical form. That is, if Agamben is more loyal to the deconstructionist logic than Derrida (as Agamben himself asserts), then I am here suggesting a move that is more loyal to Agamben’s “division of division itself” than Agamben himself is. And I believe that this can be done, not by abandoning canonical forms and procedures, which are an inevitable part of our world today—not a contamination, but its basic building blocks—but by making distinctions between differing canonical forms. This, I wager, can be done by distinguishing between those canons that conceal violence and those that reveal it, a distinction that cannot be made when all canonical procedures are simply discarded from the outset. Such is what I have tried to demonstrate in the second part of this work.
From a theological position, the trick is not just to provide an apologia for a sacred canon as scripture, but to consider the necessity for constructing a cultural–canonical form in the first place. This must be an investigation that takes seriously both the processes of canonicity—the often elusive desires behind the formation of a canonical “text” or perspective—as well as a canon’s relationship to violence, the very grounds of society as well as of cultural transmission on the whole, certainly issues which impact theological discourse in no small measure.
Theology has often been dominated by the profound (and quite problematic) juxtaposition of believers and culture, though it has not always given the same regard to the manner in which its canonical writings are in fact generative of a (western) culture (and tentatively, we might add in Agambenian fashion, politics as well) in particular and the implications this holds for a theological construal of such a relationship.193 This conclusion not only illustrates how a renewed vision of the canonical form and its relationship to canonicity paves the way for relations between canonical forms and any associated ethical paradigms to be further developed, but also demonstrates, through a statement of this study’s fundamental theses, how certain forms of the canonical, those which expose the deception of violence in founding our most basic cultural–canonical forms, can actually preserve the voices of the oppressed or “repressed” elements (often portrayed as being “non-canonical”) at their core. Such an understanding, of course, profoundly alters our normal conception of the canonical form as well as our perception of how different cultures might begin to evaluate each other’s canonical foundations in a manner which does not assume the dominance of one over the other (“supersessionism”). By examining the structures of canonicity, and their relation to the concrete work of the canonical form throughout time, I have tried to show how a more precise account of subject formation, a rich process of “re-writing oneself” into the canonical narrative, becomes manifest as, in a certain sense, an act of re-creation, perhaps even in league with that sense of “rebirth” so central to a western theological setting.
Any manner of constructing historical representation must take account of the various already present canonical representations given through time, as well as their impact upon forming cultures which spring from said canonical origins, for, as Jan Assmann has noted, it was not “the introduction of writing, but the process of canonization [Kanonisierung]” that “triggered a fundamental change [grundsätzliche Veränderung] in cultural continuity”.194 To focus upon historical representation and its relation to culture is, thus, explicitly to state the relation of a particular canonical tradition to the impulses for canonicity that generate subsequent (and multiple) canons—processes which can be said to produce culture itself. Making this relationship as transparent as possible allows us to reduce (though perhaps not eliminate) the violence caused by subject formation and to expose the violent origins of society as they intend to turn the necessary processes of creating cultural distinctions into a totalitarian practice (akin to forms of fundamentalism).
If, then, the failures of representation are the only genuine way to present any-thing, it is by turning to those canonical forms that admit of their own failures, that side with the victims and oppressed of history, and that denounce other more violent canonical forms, that we might begin to reconceive the tasks that lie at the heart of our most basic philosophical and theological gestures in the present moment.