The Mourning Cloak

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The Rev. Joshua Gerhard Paetkau, M.Div, Rector of the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay in the Anglican Diocese of Quebec.

  • War is war.

    Earlier today I suffered the weird experience of being drawn into the narrative drama of a newspaper article. The article was about Canadian military action against the Islamic State, and the pathos of Canada’s leaders struck me as viscerally believable. Citing the horrors of the Islamic State, one leader was quoted saying something like – “it’s not even about politics, it’s about humanitarian aid.” Humanitarian war was offered, and like a sap I fell for it. Only for an instant, and as I set the newspaper down I wondered how a visceral horror could so instantly be transformed into a full-fledged political agenda – one I could accept so easily and unquestioningly. The usual response to growing stupidity is to say that one is getting older and becoming a realist. That won’t cut the mustard with me, but I will say that my mind is weaker than I’d like it to be.

    The lesson, that we should all be learning, is that war is war. Humanitarian war is not a thing. If our nation goes to war this means we are sending our young men and women to kill people and to be killed. This is a serious matter, and if the leadership of this country is preparing to send young people into the line of fire they need to be very clear about what they are doing. To say that war is not political is to grossly misrepresent what is going on. War, as the saying goes, is politics by other means. To represent it as heroism is dishonest and manipulative. If Canada is going to war, then we should go to war with clear objectives and an exit strategy. Steps need to be taken with the goal of long-term stability in the region. Finally, beyond the military objectives, we need to be damned sure that we understand that war is about killing people. That killing is hard, and should be hard. Even when we think it may be necessary, we should never think that it is right.

  • Lacan against the 21st Century.

    Works Reviewed: Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue. Translated by Jason E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 82 pages.

    One does not necessarily expect a book about Jacques Lacan to be compulsively readable. Lacan was an enigmatic thinker; his use of language is alluring, though extremely difficult to follow. The appeal Lacan holds for, at least some, contemporary thinkers is also a cause for reflection, and occasional concern. Accusations of charlatanism hang heavy around Lacan, and, at the very least, an understanding of the relation the French psychoanalyst bears to that body of discourse marked Lacanian would be helpful in understanding its impact and importance. Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue presents a multifaceted portrait of Lacan’s life and thought. It traces two distinct encounters with Lacan and his thought and point to the importance of his thought for the problems of our age. And it is compulsively readable.

    Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Roudinesco detail their own very different introductions to Lacan, and in these encounters a picture of the master emerges. Lacan is, indeed, a masterful figure for both Badiou and Roudinesco, but the mastery lies in the very tenacity of his thought and his refusal of ideology. That he is a master, moreover, means that his thought inspires enmity as well as discipleship and, perhaps, a certain creativity. This creativity is materialist, in its orientation to science, yet without foreclosing on the real of impossible discovery. The tension between philosophy and psychoanalysis is very much at play in Lacan’s thought; he struggles against philosophy precisely as he seeks to incorporate it into the field of psychoanalysis. There is an openness in his thought which Badiou and Roudinesco find important and compelling. Roudinesco writes that he “opposed every form of identitarian closure that denies the alterity that constitutes us and he opposed the behaviourism and cognitivism that have reduced man to his naturality..”(29) Lacan, and here Badiou echoes her sentiments, would have stood against the stupidity that overwhelms us; the apolitical fetishization of security, the extreme medicalization of the symptoms of human subjects, and the mediatization of communication to the detriment of knowledge.

    It is in their commitment to the open character of Lacan’s thought, much more than any position of mastery he might occupy, that brings the intensity that makes this little book so readable. Badiou and Roudinesco are convinced that the fate of Lacan is bound up with the fate of psychoanalysis, which is itself bound up with the fate of civilization itself. “Wanting to eradicate Freud or Lacan”, writes Badiou, “is to go after the very concept of the modern subject. And if that is abolished, the door is open to reactionary ideologies of the worst sort.” (67) Lacan, as the thinker who synthesizes the formula “never compromise your desire” with “do your duty” seems poised as one the few thinkers who might help us think the meaning of authority in the spirit of a free and open inquiry.

    Jacques Lacan Past and Present: A Dialogue is part history and part manifesto. It is both biography and apologetics, and makes a powerful case for the continued importance of the Lacanian legacy as a powerful antidote to the foreclosure of thought and the end of science.

  • These Neurobiological Times and Our Freudian Future

    Works Reviewed: Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 276 pages.

    The age of neurobiology has, apparently, arrived. Bookshelves groan, figuratively for the most part, under titles such as The Brain that Changes Itself, Brain Rules, and Clinical Neuroanatomy Made Ridiculously Simple. The authority of neuroscience has been harnessed into such a diverse range of causes as the fervent opposition to religion (a la Sam Harris), the proof of life after death in Eben Alexander’s The Proof of Heaven, and the critique of internet technology in Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Neuroscience also provides a conceptual framework for more colourful titles, including Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Literature, too, is well within the province of neurobiology since, after all, Proust was a Neuroscientist. In the television series Alphas the language of neuroscience, rather than genetics, is used to account for the superhuman abilities of its protagonists. The denizens of the self-help genre now frequently include references to neurology or fMRI images in a trend which one reviewer of popular neuroscience books scathingly labelled “brain porn.”(Steven Poole, New Statesman)

    There have surely been many legitimate advances in our understanding of the human brain over the past years. To sort out the pseudo-scientific from the legitimate claims, and thereby to assess what neuroscience can actually say about human existence, requires thoughtful reflection. It is this task that Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou set for themselves in Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. As they draw from the critical wellsprings of the Continental tradition of European philosophy and psychoanalysis they argue that the scope and method of these disciplines are themselves radically challenged, though not necessarily undone, by the findings of contemporary neuroscience. Critical engagement is imperative, particularly given the lack of attention typically paid to the sciences of the mind within the discourses of psychoanalyis and Continental philosophy. Johnston writes:

    Nowadays, it simply isn’t true that one has to sell one’s philosophical or pscyhoanalytic soul in its entirety in order to dance with the neurobiological devil…In fact, over the past half century, scientific matters concerning neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, epigenetics, and newly proposed revisions to Darwinian depictions of evolution, among other topics, have destroyed the caricature of biological approaches to subjectivity upon which the ever more-hollow excuses of a tired old antinaturalism rely, caricatures depicting such approaches as essentially deterministic and reductive.

    Johnston and Malabou contend that developments in the neurosciences do change the way we conceptualize the human subject, that is, the self. This changed understanding relates to a redefinition of affective or emotional life. The brain is increasingly understood, not as a logical processing machine, but as the centre of a dynamic, plastic, and inherently emotional life. Malabou identifies it as the center of “a new libidinal economy‘ and argues that a new conception of affects is emerging. The issue, for Malabou, is whether this new conception will lead to a genuinely different approach to emotions, passions, and feelings. She stages this as a problematic between of knowing whether emotions and affects are to be considered, in the traditional way, as rooted in the “process of auto-affection of the subject” or whether the idea of the emotional brain actually challenges this notion in favour of “an originary deserted subject?” Noting that Continental philosophy, particularly deconstruction, and psychoanalysis have already posed significant challenges to the notion of a subject that is fully present to itself Malabou goes on to ponder whether the findings of neuroscience confirm this conviction or shift it to entirely new ground. Her conviction is quite clearly that a radical change has occurred, although she does not for that reason jettison the work and intuition of her own philosophical tradition and training.

    Both Malabou and Johnston seek to triangulate philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience, and to encourage their readers to reconsider their sense of each of these fields and the possible connections and alliances between them. It is an interdisciplinary work, and one that is clearly regarded by the authors as a preliminary gesture towards reconciliation of fields of study that have typically been characterized by isolation and polemic. Seizing on current interest in a dynamic emotional conception of the brain Malabou and Johnston reconsider the limitations and potential of psychoanalytic work and philosophical wisdom to speak about the emotional life of human subjects.

    For Malabou this journey centres around the affect of wonder, and the possibility of its loss. Wonder is first among the passions of the soul, for, “without wonder the subject wouldn’t be able to have a feeling of itself.” What then, questions Malabou, are we to make of the claim of neurobiologists that brain damage can cause the subject to become completely detached from their own affective life; to lose their sense of wonder while continuing to be biologically alive? The destructive potential of trauma leads Malabou to form her conception of hetero-heteroaffection, that is, a notion of the subject as radically absent to itself.

    She does this through a philosophical genealogy that traces through Rene Descartes and Jacques Derrida to the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, then loops back around through Baruch Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze and Damasio again. Descartes and Spinoza are thinkers whom Damasio has himself written on extensively, with Descartes playing the role of the “metaphysician of presence” and Spinoza the “protoneurobiologist.” Derrida and Deleuze are brought in to add some depth to the philosophical history, as well as to avoid a too neat and easy packaging of Descartes and Spinoza. Malabou also contends that although both Derrida and Deleuze, in very different ways, challenged the notion of a subject that is present to itself, they did not envisage the possibility of a complete emotional deprivation that leaves the first-person perspective intact. It is this destructive plasticity, the potential loss of an absolute destruction and loss of a certain part of our psychic and emotional life that drives Malabou’s work and her challenge to traditional philosophic concepts and the limitations of psychoanalytic practice. At the same time, she is hopeful that the time has come in which a new materialist philosophy can be constructed, and bridges built between the humanities and biological sciences.

    Johnston, for his part, focuses on the affect of guilt and its relation to the unconscious. Through a close reading of Freud and Jacques Lacan, he contends that, although muted and ambiguous, there are indications in both of these thinkers towards a construction of unconscious feelings or misfelt feelings. Johnston contends that guilt is a good candidate for being to practical philosophy what wonder is to theoretical philosophy, that is, “a foundational effect that is a catalyst for the deliberations, decisions, and deeds of concern to philosophy’s prescriptions in addition to its wonder-driven descriptions.”(77)

    It is not, however, for reasons of practical philosophy that Johnston pays attention to the phenomenon of guilt, but rather because it is the one affect which Freud refers to when speculating about the possibility of unconscious affects. Still, the distance between theoretical and practical philosophy is suggestive of the distance between Malabou’s challenges to the theoretical underpinnings of psychoanalysis and Johnston’s endeavours to show the therapeutic viability of Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly as interpreted by Lacan. While both Freud and Lacan appear to categorically rule out the notion of unconscious affects there remains a certain ambiguity around the feeling of guilt, particularly in Freud’s work. Through this ambiguity Johnston works to develop a conception of “misfelt feelings”, that is, that the emotions lie, and not only by attaching themselves to inappropriate signifiers. It seems that the subtle inextricability of the emotions, language, and biological being is at stake here, and Johnston makes a powerful case that an encounter between current findings in neuroscience and the theoretical discoveries of psychoanalysis can provide a basis for a rich and dialectically nuanced account of emotional life.

    Self and Emotional Life stakes, in fairly bold tones, a provisional encounter between disciplines which often meet under fairly antagonistic terms. They manage to avoid sectarian posturing, for the most part, although the book is clearly written for a readership with at least some background in Continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and developments in neuroscience.  Finally beyond the general difficulty of learning the concepts the work is plagued by an irregular syntax, particularly in the section by Johnston, which makes reading rather more difficult than necessary. Overall, however, it remains an important work in providing resources and a framework wherein the findings of neuroscience can be reasonably assessed and interpreted.

  • End the occupation: Henry Siegman speaks out against attack on Gaza | rabble.ca

    End the occupation: Henry Siegman speaks out against attack on Gaza | rabble.ca.

  • Jerusalem; Fictional and Comparative Geography

    I shall not cease from Mental Fight  

    Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, 

    Till we have built Jerusalem 

    In England’s green & pleasant land. – William Blake 

    The first time I heard the anthem Jerusalem, in an Anglican church in Canada, I was struck and somewhat embarrassed by the incongruity of these words. What resonance could such imagery have in a country where the violent constructions of the colonial past were all too well known. This was Canada, not England. At the same time the resolute defiance of progress seemed to offer something else, clearly this was not a simple narrative of nationalism. What intrigued me most of all was the sense of a thrice-displaced geography. The industrial vision of England had been exported wholesale to North America, the theme of a land ravaged by the onslaught of progress, those Satanic Mills, fit us well. We could echo, too, the ancient dreams, outside the annals of history, in which the blessed feet caressed our shores. Unbound from time and place a memory beyond memory visits us in the midst of our squalour. We become aware that our geography, the places we inhabit, has an existence that vastly extends the narrow partisan and nationalist metaphors to which we subject it and ourselves. 

    The triple displacement is important because it means that the attachment to a particular patch of ground, say England, is imbued with dignity and yet prevented from the seat of full honour and authority. It is Jerusalem, the city of Peace, which is upheld. Jerusalem is not exactly the city in imagination; it cannot simply be constructed on the basis of our wills or the power of our dreams. Yet, in a way it is a city whose contours are open; a city made real in mind and action. 

    Ben Okri evokes Blake’s poem in his own poem Mental Fight to the end of a release from the powerful enchantments of destruction to which we have been subject so long. Our beginnings, our rituals, our stories are there to illuminate and guide us through the brevity of our being. Yet within these stories, these placings of ourselves, the temptation is always to territorialize. The beauty of special piece of earth,  the one in which we dwell, is torn from its reality and set up against us as a metaphor for destruction. To protect these ideas we lash out in real violence. Can this violence be unlearned through the practices wherein we learn our displaced and multiform geographies? Learn to love our place in the world without fear or condescension? 

  • Practicing Emotion: Breakfast with William James.

    Works Reviewed: William James The Heart of William James. Edited by Robert Richardson. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2012. 334 pages.

    Pragmatism. Conceived as a political option it could suggest a callous cynicism. In the spiritual register an agnosticism. An agnosticism, in fact, of many kinds that weds the uncertainties of experience to a thoughtless optimism. The latter is certainly one of the legacies of pragmatism, whose capitalization, in the form of the self-help industry, is well-known. The former consists in the deployment of a vague and nebulous hope whose paradoxical achievement is the perpetuity of an unchanging horizon. Hope, as Francis Bacon said, is a good breakfast but a poor supper. If we live now in the twilight of the world what can be said for hope as a bedtime snack? To pragmatically strive towards an indifferent or disappearing future seems a right fool’s errand.

    Why publish a collection of William James’ essays now? And why read it? The Heart of William James whose very title smells of emotionalism, commemorates the hundredth anniversary of James’ death. A hundred years of being dead is no lively cause for celebration unless, of course, the dead can speak to us. Not necromancy, but an enlivening communion of ideas and voices. James can still speak, quite powerfully, and reveal to us that spirited acquiescence, lacking in practice and thoughtfulness if not effort, is not pragmatism at all. At the very least it is not the best face of pragmatism. Despair is an ugly mug, but false hope is a thin mask. We can see right through it if we are looking. What James can teach us, today, is how to look.

    We live in an age of dangerous sentimentality. The fact that a word like hope can be used to feed spurious nationalist dreams or the vacuous fantasy of an achieved globality is a testament to that. A good question for us is “What is an Emotion?” The book begins with James’ essay of that name. Our preparedness to act in the world demands a certain level of understanding. If are actions are fuelled by our emotions, or arise out of them, we should be clear about what that means. James’ novel suggestion is that the body is itself emotional. Our bodies respond to perceived changes in our environment, and our feelings respond to those changes. James here draws heavily on the language of Darwinism and neurology to make an ancient point about emotion as mental state integrally connected to the discipline of the body. Standard emotional responses can be challenged, not from an abstract set of categories, but through a mindful practice of disciplining our responses to external stimuli.

    This, of course, raises the possibility of determinism, of a genetic, neurological, or some other order. James’ counter to this in “The Dilemma of Determinism” is to champion chance, as liberty, and, as Richardson suggests in his introduction to the chapter, as a gift more like grace than anything else. A pragmatists’s answer this affirmation of freedom even if it might not be so. Unsatisfying, perhaps, and altogether too cheerful. James makes much of the willed perception of reality. Belief is what holds our attention. We attend to those things we believe in, and because we attend to them we believe in them. “Belief and attention are the same fact”, writes James. Thus belief is tied to feeling, though it is important to note that James does some serious work on emotional life that does prevent sentimentalism. Though James does make reference to belief as the emotion of conviction we could still argue that rather more is going on than simple enthusiasm. How much more, of course, is questionable. At the end of the day the focus on the individual will seems rather overplayed. Perhaps this effortfullness is the true legacy of pragmatism.

    Yet, just at the point where we might be inclined to think of James as a self-help guru we are served up with a delicious side of proto-Freudian thought. In “The Hidden Self” James explores dissociative personality disorder and makes it abundantly clear that the self is a rather larger reality than the “ordinary” experience of consciousness suggests. In “Habit” we are brought back to a line of psychosomatic argumentation present in the first essay, this time with a more practical aim. Habit is, for James, the basic structural unit of mental life. However madly our consciousness may extend there are physical linkages to our daily practices. Habit is the “great fly-wheel of society” and the aim, for education, is to make the nervous system an ally instead of an enemy.

    To do this requires the assistance of “The Will.” In this essay James provides a pedagogical framework for the disciplining of the will without the breaking of the spirit. The will is a delicate instrument and force cannot harness it productively. Focussing on the positive is the reductionist version of the insight here, but James was dealing with a society wherein many where the connoisseurs of guilt. Not so different, perhaps, from our own day. In “The Gospel of Relaxation” James calls to attention the work of the monk Brother Lawrence who, though he had a strong aversion to kitchen work, came to love it through a steady practice of mindfulness.

    “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant” turn our attention towards more existential questions. The former urges a practice of reserve in pronouncing judgement, forbidding us to pronounce on “the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own” while the latter provides a general rubric for the meaning of life. “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing – the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however o live with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”(164) Here, in the phrase unhabitual ideal, we find a saving grace. The possibility to live for an idea makes of James a philosopher and not a peddler of stale ethics. This philosophical bent is further expounded in “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” where James outlines pragmatism as a philosophy of action. The political lessons of this philosophy are driven home in “The Phillipine Tangle”, an  anti-imperialist letter that appeared in the Boston Evening News on March 1,1899, and in the final essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” This last takes James lessons on habit to their extreme, arguing that the warlike spirit is best undone not through repression but through a redirection of its aim. In between these essays James in “The Sick Soul” speaks of religion as a cry for help. Here James acknowledges the darker, more tortured side of human psychology and the need for confession and deliverance. In “The Ph.D. Octopus” he bemoans the academic isolation in America in which honorifics are valued above learning. We are then brought to several ruminations on the nature of Consciousness.

    Throughout the work we are led through discussions occurring at once in the speculative and practical registers. There is a playfulness and openness in James’ thought that holds great promise. Philosophy is to be useful, not so as to be harnessed to certain material ends, but in order to live a fuller life. To live, however, is not merely to exist, but to reflect in a way that changes us and contributes to our well-being. We can see, in James’ writings, a trajectory that leads towards a narrow individualism, for example, in the focus he places on individual will and practice. It is important, however, that James was still engaged in a practice of at least a somewhat egalitarian education, and that the fact that emotion degenerated into sentiment can hardly be attributed to his practice of philosophy. Written at a time when hope still seemed real James offers real lessons in perspicuity and the practice of emotional thinking.

  • Refiguring Thought: Aesthetic Reflections.

    Works reviewed: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,2012.pp 593.

    This is the inaugural essay for this site of, hopefully, Useful Illusions. The rest of what is gathered here is the detritus of a previous project. That project was poetically characterized by a phrase, “closing time in the gardens of the West.” A hint of nostalgia too timorous to sustain an encounter, whether public or personal, aesthetic or political, beyond the most fleeting of glances. Oscillating between excuse and accusation, I could not claim, for myself, any but the simplest of failures. Nostalgia and regret simply do not offer a political vision. What they do offer, a paltry solace for the timid heart, is in the end rather poisonous. This sort of knowledge tree won’t feed anybody.

    I refuse,however, to regard what I have written as a simple useless wreckage. After all, I cannot pretend now to possess a clarity of thought or fixity of purpose which I had previously not known. Past missteps may be retrod, even after careful consideration, and newer journeys prove equally fruitless. The task of learning to regard the past, especially the past of the European Enlightenment, whose shadow is felt not only in the West, is a constant discipline. Mistakes are a part of learning, particularly if learning is to extend beyond canned repetition. Repetition, to be sure, but with palpable difference. Not necessarily an endless deferral of meaning, for why should the carrot that leads us into madness be privileged as meaning? The difficulty of this discipline lies precisely in the need for a maturity that knows both its boundaries and their fluidity. Maturity is not reached in a single bound and precious isolation is seldom conducive to robust growth. Withholding judgement can occasionally be strategic, but one’s hand is always forced one way or another. The question that remains is with what kind of clarity and conviction we proceed, and what ways we can discern wherein to cultivate an aptitude for the clarity and conviction that will carry us forward into freedom. Old idols don’t have to be resurrected; the perpetual hold they have on us is familiar enough. Familiar because unexamined, perpetual because unchallenged. The abstract mathematical spirit coolly considering the world is one attempt to circumvent the problem of being beings in thought. The pragmatism of desires is an equally unsatisfactory answer to the thinking person. What claim do desires lay to the foundation or direction of existence? The question of desire has to be raised, in all its various guises, not only to have done with the spectre of essentialism, but more pointedly to keep the pathways of knowing legitimately active. Desire is a question not an answer. If we are driven to do all that we do we certainly cannot know it, but pragmatic acquiescence is emphatically not produced here. Limitation is not intimate with itself at a metaphysical level, if it were we would know what we do not know. In any case there is a way forward; we can question our desires and learn to read them more skilfully.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization is a preliminary lesson in such reading; a handbook of sorts.This impressive text gathers some useful formulations for navigating the debris of globality. “Globalization,” says Spivak, “takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.Information command has ruined knowing and reading.Therefore we don’t really know what to do with information.”(1) The inability to seriously read and know, not only texts but also ourselves and others, is bound up in a bi-fold legacy of the Enlightenment; doubt and the aesthetic. The top-down approach of knowledge management, implicit in the idea of a total globalization, offers little in the way of navigating the uneven, volatile, and “only apparently accessible contemporaneity” of the actual world.(2) The catchphrase of the day, as Spivak points out, is sustainability.Desire is left unquestioned, even though global contemporaneity requires an “epistemological change that will rearrange desires.”(2)

    Spivak traces the intellectual heritage of the propensity to manage and balance as a displaced version of Schiller’s transformation of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. There is still something in Kant’s thought that, if not exactly hopeful, can be of use. The goal, however, is not to repeat the temptation to resolve the contradictions left open in his thought, but to cultivate an openness towards making other, perhaps more fruitful, mistakes. A double bind, rather than a polarity or resolution, is the guiding heuristic of this text.

    Learning to live with contradictory instructions is the double bind that grounds the introduction of the book, which proceeds by way of tracing the trajectory of proper names Kant-Schiller-Marx-de Man. These names are metonyms of epochal changes, for Spivak, and the lesson she wishes to draw from each of these names and the changes they signal is how to productively undo the aesthetic legacy of the Enlightenment “without accusation, without excuse, with a view to use.”(1) The language of double bind is drawn from Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind wherein Bateson attempted to use the concept to understand childhood schizophrenia qualitatively. Spivak brings this concept into a briefly outlined model with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an instrumentalized intellectual. The aesthetic education that can still be of some use is precisely an instrumentalized one, that is, an education that offers not the eloquence of abstract comprehension, but is worked out as a learned skill. A skill that requires careful listening and constantly questions deeply ingrained habits and the desires that produce them.

    The introduction of An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization is intentionally dispirited. The body of the book is comprised of essays gathered over the past 23 years. Those essays narrate a variety of subjects, from tertiary education in India and issues of translation to Marxism and the works of Rabindrath Tagore. The theory of a double bind is read back into these essays as an ongoing conversation and reflection. The essays themselves often portray a certain sense of hopefulness which, Spivak suggests, is out of step with where we are at today. A false hope, perhaps overconfident, but also in some sense necessary. Spivak enjoins her reader not to despair but once again to learning to live with contradictory instructions. Not bi-polar, but at least uneven. An aesthetic education that has a geography, that abounds in mother-tongues.

    Spivak is rightly hesitant about what effect a book from an academic press could really make on such an educational endeavour. I echo those concerns, greatly compounded, about the directions of a blog, written in English. In what sense does this effort participate in the deep language learning necessary for reflexive awareness of the way we collectively organize our desires? How do I rather not fall into the purview of an unmediated cyber literacy as the greatest good. If the point is not guilt, however, but the cultivation of the aesthetic and ethical reflexes needed to teach subjects not only to play but to discover their own habits on the way to undoing them. Steps can be taken, not towards sustainability, but to a fuller understanding of being human that does not shy away from the wealth of language and misunderstanding. The Tower of Babel, says Spivak, is our refuge, though of course it is not the tower but the rich fallout of being that refuses to be marshalled to a narrow purposefulness. There is, at any rate, a kind of prayer that cuts far beyond the mantra of hope offered by those already in comfortable positions. The hope is not for a salvation from on high, not even a technological angel. Instead it is near at hand, a kingdom that is dreamt and built by the action and love of lost people in a wasted world. Yet, there is a learning that has to happen, an aesthetic education that trains people to live differently and for a different world. “What Marx left uncalculated,” writes Spivak,”was the epistemological burden of training the socialist subject.”(185) If the world is indeed to change for the better, then it must be seen differently.

    So we are led to a form of prayer that is also a work, and often, an apparent waste of time. “That any reader will waste their time to learn to parse the desires (not the needs) of collective examples of subalternity is my false hope,” Spivak writes at the end of her introduction. The book is littered with phrases like these -to waste time, productively undo, to make intended mistakes. Against the privileged flow of information as data, of capital unbound from labour, the faltering steps we must take to really learn to know is powerful medicine indeed.

  • The Bible and Philosophy

    Works Reviewed: Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 379 pages.

    “Philosophy is useless, theology is worse.” There are times when this warning from the Dire Straits resounds,  not prophetically, but with the banal levity of a jingle. Stuck in within the mess of neurons we once called our minds tirelessly forbidding thought or belief. It isn’t a heavy nihilism though, more of a cliche than anything else. And, no doubt because there is no one else to do it, the theologians and philosophers continue to pursue their subtle movements, never quite sure whether it is a dance or a boxing match. This is done, often enough, with an eye to utility that translates philosophy into political philosophy and theology into political theology.

    Politics names only one of the possible connecting points for theology and philosophy. To another we might well give the name religion, and by this we are to understand the questions that arise when approaching questions of ethics, epistemology, and being from a particular confessional tradition. Religion generally conveys the conception of deeply ingrained set of beliefs and mental practices that traverses the psyche of the individual to a much deeper level than that typically associated with politics. From a certain perspective these beliefs and practices are viewed as errant and illegitimate methods of knowing. Religion, then, becomes something opposed to the exercise of human reason and the texts associated with religion are rendered suspect. Particularly when the texts in question are portrayed as originating in a supernatural or revelatory manner.

    Or so the story goes. In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture Yoram Hazony makes the case that the reason/revelation dichotomy has been used to marginalize the Hebrew Bible and render it obscure to the modern reader. He identifies a typology that divides literature into the camps of reason and revelation, where reason is generally associated with philosophical texts written by people like Plato or Thomas Hobbes, while the Bible is firmly counted in the revelation camp as an example of a miraculous knowledge that is to be believed on faith alone. Hazony argues against this reading, arguing that it is a view of the Hebrew Bible forged by the early Christian readings of the texts as well as by anti-Semitic tendencies in the German Enlightenment that celebrated the advent of Greek thought and sought to exclude all things Jewish from the halls of learning. Noting that even Parmenides and Plato make appeals to gods and goddesses in their philosophies, he argues that the texts of the Hebrew Bible should not be banned as examples of the pursuit of human reason simply because they use phrases like “the Lord said.” Hazony then goes on to outline how one might approach the Hebrew Bible as a work of reason, and draws out an ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology from its texts.

    The result is an intriguing and at times insightful book. Hazony provides a good overview of the three major divisions of the Hebrew Bible into the History of Israel, the Orations of the Prophets, and Writings. This is a fairly standard way of dividing the works of the Hebrew Scriptures according to major genre or literary traditions. Hazony`s main novelty is to place the central focus on the History, rather  than the Torah, as a continuous narrative which opens up “a space in which a certain discourse arises, and a search for truth that is, in effect, unending.“(65) This certain discourse, which is then understood to be written across the face of the Hebrew Bible, is essentially philosophy; Hazony argues that the biblical authors are “concerned to advance arguments of a universal or general significance.t(23)

    Hazony adeptly traverses the biblical narrative, drawing on its typologies and parallels to produce a cohesive and close-knit reading of the text. The ethics of the bible is the ethics of the shepherd, a freedom-loving and at time rebellious figure, who stands in opposition to the pious farmer. This typology is cast first with the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain is supposed to represent the piety of the grain-keeping nations like Babylonia and Abel is the figure of dissent whose echo can be read across the History in the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and all the stories of “dissent and disobedience that give use the courage to wrestle with man and with God where we must.”(139)

    There is certainly something intriguing about this reading, which recaptures a sense of the heroic, of tempering obedience to the law with reason and courage. Hazony’s attention to the literary cohesion of the biblical corpus is exquisite, his attention to the historical context in which it arose less so. The simple dichotomy between shepherd and farmer does not provide an accurate picture of the socio-economic realities of the Ancient Near East, and reading too much into this typology may be to cast the concerns of the modern imagination back into the text. Hazony, who is quite skeptical of most of the efforts of historical criticism, intends to read the Bible as a completed literary work. In this case, one could well imagine, that the mythic past of simpler economic times already informed the contemporary imagination, thus providing the biblical philosopher with a framework within which to advance his arguments. 

    Taken in isolation the distaste for historical criticism would be excusable. It is, indeed, a growing trend within the field of biblical interpretation to pay more attention to the literary qualities of the works themselves. Hazony’s insistence on reading the Hebrew Bible strictly as a work of philosophy, however, leads him to dismiss many of the developments in biblical studies as irrelevant or misled. This comes out most strongly in his analysis of the New Testament. Hazony begins the book by castigating the reason/revelation dichotomy for the way in which it obscures the meaning and purpose of the Hebrew Bible. This dichotomy, he maintains, is largely the result of early Christian distortions. The New Testament, it appears, was composed principally to bear witness to certain events and establish their reliability. The New Testament, essentially juridic in its character, perpetuates a secretive esoteric knowledge that is anathema to the philosophic pursuits of the Hebrew texts. This is Hazony’s take on the New Testament and, while it certainly points to one of the ways those texts have been read, it is not a reading well-informed by scholarship in the field of biblical studies. The New Testament is a work of diasporic thought whose authors are struggling to make sense of their ancestral culture and the promises of God in light of a new cultural, political, and religious context. True the format of the narrative is different, the individual witness and the juridical metaphor do take a more central role. A form of collective identity other than the national or ethnic also emerges. Does this mean that the New Testament is a work devoid of reason? 
    Hazony, in a reading shaped almost exclusively by Tertullian, suggests that the answer is yes. In doing so he is forced to repeat the reason/revelation dichotomy which he had earlier decried. He is also bound to a philosophy that is bound to a national character, a philosophy that has no room for the concerns of  individual, no resilience or resistance for times when the prevailing wisdom is bound up with the violent unjust excesses of state. It is unfortunate that Hazony cannot find in the diasporic some resonance with the post-exilic. Unfortunate too that, despite protestations to the contrary, Hazony ultimately reads both scripture and philosophy as closed books, everything has been written there is no room for the new in political configurations, ethical views of the self, or understandings of truth.
    Yet, at its strongest moments, Hazony does point to these possibilities. The task of the reader is perhaps to take him seriously in his suggestion to read the biblical texts as works that are not entirely foreign to human reason and to expand this reading in ways that are historically consistent and engage more fully with the breadth of human experience and imagination, allowing for the divine spark of creativity and the revelatory character which accompanies not only religion but all forms of true knowledge. Perhaps, then, we could shake off the persistent commercial jingles that stifle thought and erode conviction. 

  • Bolivia:entre amor y fantasía

    Esta noche me agarro una nostalgia fuerte para Bolivia. Para la Bolivia de mi juventud, y para su música. No la música tradicional sino el rock, el híbrido. La escena musical en cual participé. Como espectador, es verdad, pero sin embargo fue parte de mi realidad, una parte que se queda, de una forma que poco entiendo, hasta ahora. Esa música, y estoy hablando específicamente de la época en cuando el rock boliviano salio de la valle de la sombra de heavy metal y nació un rock mas indígena y localizado. Indígena, pero todavía bajo el señal del imperialismo y el capitalismo. Nacido bajo el auspicio del reino de los muerte-vivientes.

    Y que es la nostalgia sino una síntoma de la mala consciencia? Y yo, huyendo de Bolivia tras años y kilómetros de que tiemblo. Es simplemente que Bolivia amenaza a sus hijas? Pues, en Canadá la realidad es lo mismo. Bajo el signo del imperio todas las naciones practican el sacrificio de Moloch. Los faraones tiemblan las niñas, tiemblan lo nuevo, siempre. Lo que nació con Moisés no fue solamente otro israelita. Fue una generación híbrida; de un nuevo orden completamente. Pero híbrida; eso lo sabemos porque el infante fue criado por su madre bajo el autoridad de la princesa. La hibridad, aveces, genera lo nuevo. Por supuesto, tendrá que haber un sitio donde puede pasar un evento para tener un cambio verdadero. No es simplemente que una mezcla de productos o situaciones culturales resulta en la producción de un presente radicalizado. Cuando uno habla de nacimiento el alumbramiento de un mortinato es siempre una posibilidad. Especialmente en una cultura del aborto. Entienden, por favor, que hablo del aborto cultural, el aborto de la política, el aborto de la justicia. Pero, ni modo, no puedo administrar lo de que yo estoy culpable en las fuerzas del faraón. Siempre hay parteras, y los que huyen la responsabilidad del renacer son tan culpables como los soldados.

     Que son tus bendiciones, Bolivia? Bendiciones maldichos, que siempre son, te los agradezco. Pero siempre has sido mi penitencia, no mi refugio. Me identificaste como gringo, como agente estraño, y yo no me radicalice. No me permite identificar con tu pena y tu pasión. Yo se lo que llevo en mi alma. Ese amor primaria que me queda como presencia fantasmatica, o hasta como fantasmagoría. Y los que teman espantos son los que no han realizado la presencia de seres humanos, de seres vivientes. Eso también me regalaste Bolivia. Temor de los demonios. Es por eso, y solamente eso, que te he maldicho. Es por eso que llevo en mi corazón el deseo de venganza alado del amor. Tu no me dejaste vivir; me quede en tu presencia como fantasma, ahora te llevo igual. Yo se que no fue tu culpa. Si la culpa fuera tuya te pudiera perdonar. El culpable soy yo, culpable de no amarte fuerte. Culpable de tratarte como colonizador. Hasta hoy en día no he tratado tu memoria con el respecto que mereces. He menospreciado no solamente tu cultura, pero tus luchas. Y los he menospreciado precisamente por serte extranjero y extraño. Extranjero te fui por la naturaleza, ajeno por decisión. Tu decisión y mi decisión. Tu no me entendiste, y yo te menosprecie. Me hablaste con voz de superstición, me hablaste de satanás, de demonios, de los duendes. Condene la debilidad de tu mente, sin saber que llevaría tus demonios conmigo. Sin saber que tu espíritu, a la vez beneficente y maligno se quedaría atrapado en mi Psique. Mas que atrapado, porque es enteramente parte de la fabrica de mi ser. Que es este tumor, y yo soy el tumor. Este fantasma, y yo soy el espanto. No te puedo echar, no te puedo dejar. Tampoco no te puedo besar, no te puedo abrazar. Nos quedaremos, quizás siempre, en este lugar de los ajenos intimas. Te perdonare, quizás, y tu perdóname? Te suplico, lo que quiero es que me entiendas, deseo amarte. Deseo pasar de este lugar espiritual, y partir el pan con los seres vivientes. Los humanos no pueden vivir entre angeles y demonios. Somos carnales, seres materiales. Nuestro deseo, nuestro espíritu es el espíritu humano. Nunca fui tu dios, nunca fuiste mi demonio, ni tampoco mi ángel.

    Vivientes. Hay veces que pienso que los que somos, realmente vivientes, es lo único que no fuimos. No te pido salvación. No te pido venganza. A la misma vez, si te los pido. Dame salvación. Dame venganza. Dame absolución. Te suplico, como a un cura. Pero no es la divinidad que busco, lo que busco, lo que no encuentro es la humanidad. Mas que eso, es la vida material. Basta con los espíritus, con almas desincorporados. Maldito tu espiritualidad. Tal como el mio. Yo se que es debido al protestantismo, no es solamente Boliviana. Es mi experiencia, de eso y nada mas hablo. No quiero decir que hay una esencia boliviana. Precisamente no quiero decir eso. Y he dicho que el español es mi penitencia y no mi refugio. Y porque? Los espíritus son los que inhabitan purgatorio, son los corporales que buscan refugio. Y la confianza de que saldré de purgatorio? Pues allí queda la clave de mi suplicación. El cura trabaja en signo de la cura. Solamente renacer. Amantes, enemigos, comadres, algo. Solamente quiero pasar, junto con todo lo que para mi es Bolivia, de la nostalgia y la fantasía  al amor y la comunión.

  • Education, truth and the labour of love.

    Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths, A.J. Bartlett, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011 (ISBN: 9780748643752) vii+248 pp.


    Every so often a book comes along that, in its utter relentlessness, forces its reader out of the complacency of his or her habits of thought. A.J. Bartlett’s latest offering, Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths, stages just such an encounter. Written in a dense, elliptical style, Bartlett draws on categories from Alain Badiou’s Being and Event to present a vigorous and systematic reading of Plato’s body of work. With philosophical flair Bartlett shows that the question of education is at the heart of philosophy.

    Readers of Badiou will immediately recognize the six categories Bartlett utilizes in his reading of Plato: state, site, event/intervention, fidelity, subject, and the generic or indiscernible. Those unfamiliar with Badiou’s mathematically charged lexicon will find it harder going. Badiou is committed to a philosophical language that spans the registers of mathematical formality and poetic diction, and this decision is taken up by Bartlett and reflected in his style. That being said the fact that Bartlett’s is an interventionist reading – directed at a particular textual corpus, namely, the writings of Plato – provides narrative depth and helps contextualize Badiou’s philosophical project. 

    Bartlett’s thesis revolves around Badiou’s claim that “the only education is an education by truths.” (Badiou and Plato, 2) Bartlett argues that precisely such an education is staged across the breadth of the Platonic corpus and he discerns its form and trajectory using the aforementioned categories as a framework.  Each of the categories marks a link in what Badiou calls a “truth process.”(4) Unapologetically interventionist, in that they deploy categories created outside the Platonic texts, this reading does allow a dialectical trajectory to unfold from the texts themselves.  Badiou describes his own philosophy as a “contemporary Platonism” particularly in regard to a commitment to truth. For Bartlett this identification allows for a productive dialogic encounter with the two philosophers:

    To reinsert Badiou’s concepts and categories back into Plato is, in a certain sense, to return them anew to whence they came: a return, moreover, whose form is dialogical rather than repetitious, productive rather than comparative, whereby, in speaking to the Platonic corpus, it once again speaks back. In this way the Platonic corpus avoids the fate Plato describes for what is written down – the inability to answer back – and instead resumes again as dialogue, as subject. (3, italics in the original)

    The hope, Bartlett says, in deploying Badiou’s platonic categories back into the Platonic corpus is to draw a logical and implicative link between the axiomatic statement that “the only education is an education by truths” and a subsequent axiomatic that “thought is nothing other than the desire to finish with the exorbitant excess of the state.” (3)

    Education names a site of contestation.  Badiou tells us that truths are what “force holes in knowledge.” (1)  Knowledge here refers to the circulating rule of opinion that is the order, rule and currency of the ‘state.’ For Badiou the “state of the situation” is defined as “that by means of which the structure of a situation is in turn counted as one… The state secures and completes the plenitude of the situation” (Being and Event, 522).  The role of the state towards knowledge is a managerial one; it is tasked with keeping out the dangerous and disruptive elements. In the final analysis this amounts to a security against the threat of the void. Truth is subtracted; it cannot be merely added to rule of opinion and so to The excessive character of the state.  For the sophists of Athens knowledge is predicated on interest and education revolves around exchange and investment. Education, in the sense described here, becomes an instrument of privilege and a tool of exclusion. It is this kind of education that Plato’s Socrates denounces as unworthy of the name.

    Plato is nonetheless committed to education and the “lifelong task” of setting aright an education devoid of wisdom or truth. Bartlett describes the lack of truth Plato identifies in “state education” as constitutive of its form, and not an incidental effect of particular teachings. Yet, although the state dominates and misuses the name of education, education is still the site wherein its truth can come to be known. The struggle between Socrates and sophistic Athens arises precisely around Socrates’ refusal to submit to the dominion of state knowledge and his delineation of an education by truths.  In Plato’s texts Socrates is to be understood as the name of the event which ruptures the encyclopedia of Athenian knowledge.

     Bartlett suggests that Socrates’ oft-repeated claim to “know nothing” should not be dismissed as ironic posturing. Read alongside the charges against Socrates – that he corrupts the youth – it should be read both as openness to truth and a bitter indictment of Athens.  Bartlett reads the entire Platonic corpus as a re-staging of Socrates trial. This retrial finds that Socrates is indeed a corrupter, though what he corrupts is a corrupt state of affairs.  If this were to end simply with Socrates death it would be a despondent case indeed, however, “(f)or Plato, this retrial does not end in the execution of Socrates but in the Republic – a place where this corrupt state cannot be” (31).  Socratic education cannot be recognized by Athens because it does not lead directly to the polis, market, school, or stage. This is so because Socrates begins from a position of admitted ignorance, but with the avowed hope of coming to know what he did not know before. The Republic, says Bartlett, is the generic extension of what Socrates names in Athens:

    That the Republic exists is the very idea of the subjective procedure; that it insists is the result of forcing the truth of this idea into the situation as the condition of its thought. The knowledge of this truth must be forced into existence by the subject. All that the subject has to hang on, so to speak, is the belief that it can be forced, such is why this Socratic procedure is fragile, limited, and under attack…The only education is that which addresses the generic ‘capacity for reason’ whose disavowal is the constitutive condition of the sophistic state. Surely the formalisation of this address is Plato’s singular and decisive in(ter)vention. What this Socratic taking place makes manifest is simply that the sophist cannot educate, that what one receives in exchange for one’s ‘callous cash payment’ is not an education but a calculated return one’s investment and a stake in the regime predicated on the conceited yet powerful knowledge of what – at all costs – must not be. In the Republic – the decided place of philosophy, constituted by a thoughtful, subjective transformation – a place where sophistry cannot be for all, it cannot be simply because it never was an ‘education by truths.’ (226)

    The quotation above encapsulates precisely the book’s trajectory. What I have left out here is a detailed discussion of the fidelity to the event/intervention by which a subject is produced. Bartlett deals with this in considerable depth, reflecting on the Plato/Socrates relationship and Plato’s own interventionism. Following Badiou intervention “forms the kernel of any theory of time.” Intervention is time itself as the gap between two events. To intervene is therefore to take on the task of fidelity to an event and undertake the labour that, in the Republic at least, “is the collective production of justice of that which is for all and, as such, is the work of love.

    In Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths Bartlett has created a powerful text. There is here a reinvigoration of Plato studies, casting them not in a narrow academic sense but in a way that touches questions important to all; the questions of education and truth. At the very least they should give us pause at the varied ways in which our current forms of education serve the interests of power and pleasure. Read carefully they may spur a revolution in which education is wrested from the service of privilege and begins the work of love.