I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand. —James Baldwin
I was just reading back over an old conversation I had on this blog with George Hunsinger, after his 2006 debate with David Bentley Hart on the analogia entis, and it appears to me now that Hunsinger completely undermines himself in his wild anxiety to avoid ‘metaphysics.’ Two points are at the heart of his quarrel with Hart: first, we need to reject any notion of ontological continuity between God and creation; second, “we would need to agree that the ontological divide is bridged by the Incarnation alone.” But these points imply at least as vigorous a metaphysics as Hart’s perspective—specifically, a metaphysics premised on God’s being intrinsically and necessarily discrete with respect to creaturely being, except in the case of the incarnation. In simpler terms, that means that God is “somewhere else” and only came “here” in Jesus.
3 July 2009 |
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Tags: David Bentley Hart,Metaphysics
Laura McKenna’s take on the current state of blogging (via Adam Kotsko), especially the bit on the decline of linking culture among weblogs, seems to me, too, quite apt. But I would add that part of the reason for the shift is probably also a change in the way people tend to read blogs. I get my miscellaneous interesting links almost exclusively from Facebook now (and, I suppose, from Kottke); blogs I read for the commentary. If a blog posts very many links with only a sentence or two of commentary, as happened much more commonly in the old days, it’s off my reader almost immediately. The same goes for the theoblogging equivalent: blockquote after blockquote from whatever random thinker one happens to be reading that day. I don’t think my habits are terribly uncommon on this point.
As readers have looked to blogs more and more for substance, and not just links, the burden to ‘be fresh’ has grown proportionately. A link and a parroted word of approval, even with a word or two of elaboration, generally falls on deaf ears. (Interestingly, though, McKenna’s original post has spawned quite of few posts in just this genre [1, 2, 3]—just like it would have in 2002!)
The social web has grown up, and blogging has changed along with it. To keep the old linking culture alive, what we need now is to maintain blogging as a conversational medium more than simply a broadcasting one.
2 July 2009 |
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Tags: Blogging
I’ve been picking through Leland de la Durantaye’s new book on Agamben, which looks really good. “Critical introductions” to continental figures have proliferated wildly of late, but it’s surprising how many of them fail precisely as introductions, because they try so hard to reproduce the author’s style that they also reproduce his or her obscurities and difficulties. (After dipping into secondary sources on Blanchot and Nancy lately, I found myself confused on exactly the same points as I had been after reading Blanchot and Nancy directly.) To see it done well, though—and de la Durantaye has done it well—is a marvelous thing. These “critical introductions” really are a new, very helpful kind of genre: systematic interpretations of a thinker’s corpus, sympathetic but not sycophantic, clarifying key concepts and major conversation partners.
I’d like to see the same idea extended to classical thinkers. Especially for the medievals, but so too with many of the fathers, the secondary literature that does exist tends to be smothered in a certain kind of late modern piety that obscures more than it reveals. Franciscans write on Franciscans, Dominicans write on Dominicans, Cistercians write on Cistercians (the seculars falling almost entirely by the wayside), and their work is invariably a blend of exposition and veneration. As a result, rigorous critical conversation with these figures only appears in those few contemporary thinkers bold, intelligent, and eccentric enough to dive into these old, obscure, often untranslated bodies of work and create their own critical purchase ex nihilo—like Agamben himself, or a few from the Radox crowd.
A few good critical introductions along these lines would go a long way, I think. They could situate the stray tidbits of information batted around in popular academic conversation within a much more careful account of a thinker’s whole body of work. John Duns Scotus: A Critical Introduction could lay to rest an enormous amount of more or less ignorant squabbling about ‘the univocity of being’; Peter Abelard: A Critical Introduction could, if Adam Kotsko is right, rein in the superficial readings he’s so often given in atonement conversation. I’ve thought for a while that I myself would enjoy taking up such a project on Bonaventure.
(Postscript. Besides being good introductions to the thinkers, these volumes would do an enormous service just by indicating where the hell to find their texts, in the original and, if they exist, in good modern language translation.)
2 July 2009 |
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Tags: Medievals,Method
Read enough classical texts to find some unusual concept or practice which is mentioned, but left undeveloped. It’s safest to draw from Plato or Aristotle, as then one can be confident of undermining the whole history of Western philosophy, but the scholastics are also a good choice if one wants to appear slightly eccentric, and going to Augustine might make you the next big thing. (Avoid St. Paul, especially if you’re a Christian, as you’ll probably end up coming across as a feckless imitator.) Proceed to demonstrate how this concept, properly understood, leads to the undoing of the whole discourse to which it originally belonged. Finally, identify three or four examples of a structurally similar idea appearing later in history, to prove that you have succeeded in superseding not only the original thinker himself, but his whole subsequent tradition.
Bonus points if you find such a concept in a relatively obscure person or text, then show it to be determinative for subsequent canonical thinkers.
1 July 2009 |
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Tags: Miscellaneous,Philosophy
For my own sake as much as anyone else’s, a brief elaboration of Agamben’s notion of good and evil in The Coming Community:
“Since the being most proper to humankind is being one’s own possibility or potentiality, then and only for this reason (that is, insofar as humankind’s most proper being—being potential—is in a certain sense lacking, insofar as it can not-be, it is therefore devoid of foundation and humankind is not always already in possession of it), humans have and feel a debt. Humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act.
“This is all that is meant by the old theological doctrine of original sin. Morality, on the other hand, refers this doctrine to a blameworthy act humans have committed and, in this way, shackles their potentiality, turning it back toward the past. The recognition of evil is older and more original than any blameworthy act, and it rests solely on the fact that, being and having to be only in its possibility or potentiality, humankind fails itself in a certain sense and has to appropriate this failing—it has to exist as potentiality.”
—Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 42–3
In Agamben’s use of the terms, then, ‘original sin’ doesn’t name anything evil at all, evil being “the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact like others” (p. 14), or in its specifically human aspect, the attempt to found our own existence in or as the power of (‘actualized’) being (pp. 30–1). In other words, for Agamben, the only human evil is the denial that our existence is only ever possible existence. Original sin, on the contrary, only names the “debt” in which human beings characteristically find themselves, as ‘lacking’ fully realized existence, which “failure” is in fact a good.
This corresponds to Agamben’s broader contention in this book that the good always consists in a self-grasping of evil, and that “truth is revealed only by giving space to non-truth” (p. 12). Those theses rest on the same equivocation in the concepts of evil that appear in the above quote: the “evil,” “failure,” or “non-truth” that the good and truth must include is the (im)potency and incompleteness of being-such-as-it-is (i.e., whatever being, or quodlibet ens). But that incompleteness—or better, because it brings out Nancy’s voice and Blanchot’s, the unworking—is of course a good according to Agamben.
This is also the context within which it is necessary to understand his claim that “ethics has no room for repentance” (p. 43). It doesn’t mean there is no evil that must be avoided or even (possibly) renounced, but that repentance is always a matter of establishing oneself beyond impotent existence. Repentance belongs, in Nancy’s terms, to the pursuit of immanence (viz., the attempt to produce one’s own essence).
30 June 2009 |
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Tags: Giorgio Agamben,Jean-Luc Nancy,Original Sin
The prefaces to Nicholas Lash’s book on Marx, A Matter of Hope, and to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, both mention that lectures given at my own dear institution were part of those books’ origins. I’m wondering, though, if this isn’t actually an editorial prank, as the idea of Notre Dame inviting public lectures on Marxism or gender theory just seems too far-fetched.
29 June 2009 |
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Tags: Notre Dame
Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, an amazing and hilarious 1865 letter from Jourdan Anderson, an ex-Tennessee slave, to his former master, who had written him asking him to return to work for him:
As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost- Marshal- General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly—and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio….
P.S. —Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
Read the whole letter—it’s incredible.
18 June 2009 |
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Tags: Miscellaneous
Further evidence, in the case of Rousseau, to confirm Nancy’s thesis that forms of community premised on a single, collective subject can’t help but tend toward totalitarianism:
As nature gives to each person an absolute power over all its members, the social pact gives to the body politic an absolute power over all of its members, and it is this very power which, directed by the general will, bears the name of sovereignty. (Du contrat social II.iv)
10 June 2009 |
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Tags: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Jean-Luc Nancy
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