Mourning Humanism II

Music: Horizon: Through the Round Window In a previous post I rehearsed Sartre's view of the humanist subject for three reasons. First, I didn't want to discuss my personal life in my blog because I was tired, so I just pasted in a piece of a review essay I've been working on (like I'm doing in this post too).

Second, I think for many folks that Sartre's view represents the last gasp of humanism in continental philosophy. Humanism maintains that human being is the primary and most valuable object of inquiry, and often proceeds in its many variations by describing the many ways in which human beings are, as Protagoras is reported to have said, "the measure of all things, all that are that they are, and all that are not, that they are not." Sartre's existential philosophy of freedom-through-choice is the ultimate secular expression of an ontology built on Protagoras' conviction.

Third, the humanist notion of a radical responsibility through choice was common in the 1960s, and although Sartre's existential subject is rarely mentioned directly, variations were eventually folded into NCA-style rhetorical theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whether we wish to admit it, our last humanist gasp in rhetorical theory is reflected in the many discussions of the ethical responsibilities of rhetorical choice-making, which Kenneth Burke labeled "symbolic action," which Karlyn Kohrs Campbell termed a "symbolic approach" to rhetorical theory, and which Robert L. Scott christened as "epistemic rhetoric." For example, an often overlooked yet central consequence of Scott's epistemic view is the "ethical turn" it recommends: "The point of view that holds that man cannot be certain but must act in the face of uncertainty to create situational truth entails three ethical guidelines: toleration, will, and responsibility." Many of the notable "turns" in rhetorical studies from the late 60s onward, from symbolic action to symbolic convergence, from rhetoric as epistemic to "consensus theory" and the "aesthetic turn," are, however unwittingly, built on the notion of a self-transparent rhetor/artist making rhetorical choices that entail a tremendous responsibility: the rhetor "must recognize the conflicts of the circumstances that he is in," Scott writes, "maximizing the potential good and accepting responsibility for the inevitable harm." Because such an ethical orientation depends on a self-transparent subject of conscious, symbolic intent, a critique of humanism would, therefore, seem to challenge the ethical foundations of our received understanding of the rhetorical subject. The idiom of haunting addresses this challenge directly in a way that preserves--indeed, foregrounds--ethical responsibility, but before I describe how, it is important to provide a basic description of the "death" of the humanist subject.

So what is, then, the critique of humanism? Although there are a number of answers, this critique is often said to begin with a deliberate, conspicuous rejection of Sartre's notions of freedom and choice, and this is primarily because Sartre's expression of humanism provides a clear articulation of the general, underlying assumptions of most versions of humanism. Origin narratives of the critique of humanism typically cite the work of Heidegger as the first step, whose famous "Letter on Humanism" was written in response to Sartre's project. In the letter Heidegger urges an abandonment of "the name [of] humanism" in favor of a different conception that consists in the analysis of "being-in-the-world" over that of subjectivity. For Heidegger, existence per se ("Dasein") topples humanity in its expanse, and the narrow, selfish, narcissistic focus on individual subjectivity prevents us from investigating Being properly. In this respect, posthumanism gets caught in a semantic pickle insofar as the critique concerns human-ism; from the outside it is often read as a disavowal of commonly shared values (e.g., social justice, equality, democracy) or as misguided critique of specieism. Posthumanism is not an anti-humanitarianism, but represents the view that that subject is neither singular, nor self-transparent, nor the center of the universe, and that the self-important "haughtieness" of the subject of certainty, as Nietzsche put it, "deceives him [self] about the value of existence," in retrospect having done more harm to than good.

After Heidegger's letter, the critique of humanism finds its fullest expression in the work the mighty French ménage a trois of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, as well as in that of a number of feminist scholars (notably the so-called "French" feminists, and later, Dona Haraway). The phallogocentrism of the humanist subject, the poststructural critiques of Lacan and Foucault, and the Derridian deconstruction of humanism have been discussed among rhetorical scholars elsewhere, and I refer readers to that work for more thoroughgoing accounts. What has not been discussed in detail is the way in which Derrida's notion of the spectral and haunting assumes the death of the subject, but embraces what most scholars would identify as humanitarian values, most especially those of toleration, (good)will, and responsibility.

In general, Derrida's work comprises a wholesale attack on the concept of unity, which is implicated in notions of origin, truth, reason, presence, and universality. His most famous contribution to the intellectual tradition, deconstruction, seeks to expose the illusions and fantasies of unity often assumed of and by texts. Derrida's critique of humanism is thus initially effected at the level of the reading and writing subject, which is constructed within language, and which he exposes as an unstable play of differences in a manner that is entirely textual (or alternately, everything is unstable text). "[F]rom the inside where 'we are,'" argues Derrida, "one has nothing . . . but the choice between two strategies." Either a "Heideggerian" hermeneutic that continually undermines the suppositions of its own problematic-which "risks sinking into the autism of the closure" by presuming something akin to an end or telos (presumably, the "end of man")--or a Nietzschean deconstruction of the "active forgetting of Being" in the ecstatic production of multiple iterations in multiple languages in an orgasmic textual party. In either case, the centrality of human being is dissolved in favor of an oscillating, de-volving or deconstructing movement that does not ossify into a determinate thing.

When Derrida later moved from critical philosophy to social critique, deconstruction continued to appear as an orientation or posture of indeterminacy that an individual makes or takes in relation to texts, structures, institutions, and so on, which refuses to close-up, settle, conclude, or totalize them in relation to absolutes, unities, and presences. In his later work, beginning most notably with the arrival of the English translation of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (hereafter Specters) in 1994, the posture of indeterminacy is urged in respect to the "other," a term that refers to anyone worthy of consideration in the general pursuit of justice (sometimes the Other is capitalized to denote this status). In Specters the other arrives as a ghost, as a figure that cannot otherwise be fixed or reduced as a being or as a non-being, thereby reframing the self/other relation so central to our fantasy of communication as an ethical relation between a decentered or uncertain self and something that that confounds our sense of place in time, our sense of control: this thing is the ghost the specter, or as Derrida prefers, the revenant, a spirit that always comes back, like the return of the repressed. Derrida opens Specters with the observation that "learning to live" more justly, more open to the other and to death, "remains to be done." We have arrived at the "time of the 'learning to live,'" says Derrida, and the key to such wisdom is "to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts." In Specters the death of the subject is assumed; now the death of the other-the deaths of others, especially the deaths of others under the aegis of Marxism, as well as the ontological status of the other as a harbinger of death-is in question.

Derrida's understanding of hauntology in Specters is advanced as an ethical posture in response to global capitalism and what he terms the "ten plagues" of the new world order that emerged in the 1980s (e.g., homelessness, nuclear proliferation, etc.). Although Specters was intended as a conciliatory project that details the indebtedness of deconstruction to a certain "spirit of Marx," the failures of Derrida's thinking in this respect have been extensively catalogued elsewhere, and a number of article-length book reviews on the project are available. The scholarly consensus about this particular project is that reconciling deconstruction and Marxism is futile (at least from a Marxist vantage). Yet few if any seem to condemn Derrida's ethical undertaking, of learning to live among and with others more justly, more humanely. This is perhaps the reason why Derrida's elaboration of the figures of the specter and revenant have traveled much more widely in the academic imaginary than deconstruction in the spirit of Marx.

From a critical vantage, hauntology participates in a critique of presentism by advancing an empty messianism reminiscent of that which Benjamin described in his "On the Concept of History." Insofar as the specter neither "is" nor "is not," it is a figure that represents past and future temporalities that cannot be "given a date in the chain of presents." Derrida compares Hamlet's/the audience's/our waiting for the king's apparition in the first act of Hamlet to our/the reader's position in the opening of The Manifesto of the Communist Party: "A specter is haunting Europe-the specter of communism." The specter is either from the past (the king) or from the future (communism), or rather, it would seem the specter is always coming from the future even if it is from the past: "The anticipation [for the ghost] is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing ("this thing") will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won't be long. But how long it is taking." Hauntology is thus a politics of "temporal disjuncture," to borrow a phrase from Moishe Postone, that resists what Derrida terms "mourning."

Typically, mourning refers to the process by which an individual is able to detach him or herself from an object of love, usually a loved one. An inability to mourn is melancholia, which is a kind of repetition compulsion driven by an abject inability to detach one's self from the object of love. The process of detaching oneself from the love object-or rather, the idea or ghost of the love object, since the object itself is not present-is not instantaneous, but occurs over time. Mourning is thus a process of temporal "fixing," of "getting over it," and can be plotted along a cultural teleology that many of us learn, for example, in terms of "stages" of grief, "periods" of morning, and so on. Although it is usually characterized as "normal" and "healthy," Derrida characterizes mourning as pathological. Mourning

consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead (all ontologization, all semanticization--philosophical, hermeneutical, or psychoanalytical--finds itself caught up in the work of mourning but, as such, does not yet think it; we are posing here the question of the specter, to the specter, whether it be Hamlet's or Marx's, on this near side of such thinking).

Mourning is accomplished by knowledge, by claiming knowledge of the dead, by claiming to know the dead, thereby silencing ghosts in gestures of a certain place and time, a certain present. The consequence of this kind of mourning is an irresponsibility and deafness to the other and the promise of unknown future (that things can always be otherwise, that communism, in a certain spirit, is still coming). The accomplishment of mourning-of ghost-busting, if you will-is reflected in the dogmatisms, absolutisms, apocalypticisms, and other teleological orthodoxies that party-based Marxism shares with, for example, contemporary Evangelical Christian movements (e.g., a vengeful Jesus coming tomorrow to smite the unrepentant, as in the popular Left Behind book series). Later in the book, Derrida counters mournful and strident messianisms with a "desert-like messianism (without content and without identifiable messiah)," as if to redeem the posture of hospitality so central to New Testament Christianity from temporal absolutism--from the certitude of dates. The accomplishment of mourning--of ghost-busting, if you will--is a silencing of the specters of communism and democracy, which represent the possibility of a different and just future. Although Specters is an extraordinarily complex elaboration of hauntology vis-à-vis the Communist Manifesto, Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man, and the horrors that confronted the world in the 1980s (and today), hauntology is fundamentally a deconstructive approach released from philosophy onto the political and cultural imaginary. As a posture or orientation, hauntology attempts to resist ghost-busting by embracing the figure of the specter or revenant as a haunting reminder that we can never completely reckon with the past--that despite mourning, we remain haunted--nor secure the future. Specters urge us to remain open to both by abjuring the present.