Mourning Humanism III

More on my review essay on haunting: Speaking of the many attempts to kill off Marx and Marxism (and at least tacitly, Freud and psychoanalysis), in Specters Derrida underscores our general impulse in the West to "chase away a specter, exorcise the possible return of a power held to be baleful in itself and whose demonic threat continues the haunt the century." Richard Kearney's Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, the third of a trilogy of books exploring relgious themes, opens with a thorough examination of this problematic assumption, that the specter is, de facto, a "demonic threat" that must be assimilated, exorcized, or killed-off and mourned. Broadening the pseudo- or non-concept of the specter to alterity as such, Kearney begins with the observation that most "strangers, gods and monsters-along with various ghosts, phantoms, and doubles who bear a family resemblance-are, deep down, tokens of a fracture within the human psyche." Each strange figure is always a double of one sort or another, mirroring a posthumanist subject that is "split between unconscious and conscious, familiar and unfamiliar, same and other." In other words, at the level of the social, monsters are us. They remind us, argues Kearney

of a choice: (a) to try to understand and accommodate our experience of strangeness, or (b) to repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders. All too often, humans have chosen the latter option, allowing paranoid illusions to serve the purpose of making sense of our confused emotions by externalizing them into black-and-white scenarios . . . .

The first five chapters that comprise Strangers, Gods and Monsters, examine a number of these scenarios, ultimately ending with those launched by the events of September 11, 2001. Insofar as each scenario presents us with a choice to be made in respect to the other, we are again reckoning with haunting as an orientation that avoids the endless spiral of ontology by foreswearing an absolute what (-am I? -are they?) in favor of the "how" of relating to the other.

Chapter one provides a genealogy of the scapegoat, beginning with an examination of the figure of the goat in Leviticus and tracing it to and through various "demons" in religious eschatology. Kearney then examines René Girard's critique of scapegoat myths, which is that since the dawn of humanity the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat has been used build community consensus through "collective projection," but at a horrific cost. For Girard, the death of Christ exposed "the sacrificial lie for once and for all by revealing the innocence of the victim," so the argument goes, the lesson being that the genuine other, "ethical alterity," is God in the end. Kearney takes Girard to task for too readily condemning myth as "somehow inherently monstrous," and he is careful to point out that sometimes the repudiation of strangeness is in fact deification, a claim vividly illustrated by the bloody monstrosity of Christ in Mel Gibson's 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ. Although Kearney does not examine the film, after reading this chapter one can clearly see how controversy surrounding Gibson's pornographic vision of divine sacrifice is in part caused by the film's exposure of the close relation between monstrosity and divinity Kearney describes.

Moving beyond the scapegoating function in mythic and religious discourse, Kearney turns to the figure of the "alien" in popular culture and philosophy in chapters two and three respectively. With an examination of the alien monster in the Alien film series and the Kurtz character in Francis Ford Copolla's Apocalypse Now Redux, Kearney shows how both filmic narratives forward a humane civil pedagogy: our task "is not to kill our monsters but to learn how to live with them," most especially because they represent the "stranger within." In echoes of Derrida's opening remarks in Specters, the task of learning how to live--"finally," Derrida echoes, to live with others, with death--begins by recognizing the demands of justice. In chapter three the problem of the other is most succinctly and clearly framed in reference to the work of Derrida, and his teacher, Emmanuel Levinas. Indeed, insofar as chapter three is the core of Strangers, Gods, and Monsters, a closer account of this chapter alone will help to explicate and organize the rest of the book as Kearney's response.

Kearney begins the third chapter by arguing that "most ideas of identity," specially national identity, "have been constructed in relation to some notion of alterity." He continues that

Contemporary thinkers like Levinas and Derrida have made much of the fact that the Western metaphysical heritage, grounded in Greco-Roman thought, has generally discriminated against the Other in favor of the Same, variously understood as Logos, Being, Substance, Reason or Ego. This prejudice is called the "ontology of Sameness" by Levinas and "logocentrism" by Derrida. But both share the view-one canvassed by a wide variety of continental thinkers-that justice demands a redressing of the balance so as to arrive at a more ethical appreciation of otherness.

Learning to live with ghosts entails the recognition that the other does not have to be the Same. "Openness to the Other beyond the Same is called justice," continues Kearney, and this posture of openness has a name: hospitality.

Kearney then proceeds to examine Derrida's post-Specters work focusing on hospitality.49 He posits the "other" as another "worthy of reverence and hospitality," and the "alien" as another about whom we are suspicious, or who is scapegoated or discriminated against. Kearney suggests that for Derrida (as well as John Caputo, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy), justice refers to something beyond the law (the law understood here as a necessary exclusion of non-conformists in an identitarian regime like the nation state), an "unconditional hospitality to the alien." For the deconstructionists, hospitality is only "truly just . . . when it resists the temptation to discriminate between good and evil others," the "hostile enemy (hostis) and the benign host (hostis). Derrida's extension of this argument concerns the inherent paradox of hospitality: the general conception of hospitality concerns a "host" who opens his or her home to others. Built-into this conception is the idea that the host has the right to discriminate among others who allowed to enter, because it is possible that certain evil others could get in and hold the host hostage. So each visitor is made to announce his or her identity at the door, which entails a certain degree of injustice and thus collapses the other into a binary: the other is either "invader-alien or welcome other." Faced with this pickle, Derrida argues for an "unconditional hospitality" that "marks a break with everyday conventions of hospitality governed by rights, contracts, duties and pacts." Kearney explains that Derrida does not dispense with the law of right altogether, however, for our relation to the other/alien/stranger is still, nevertheless, regulated.

After rehearsing what reads at times like a haunted cocktail party thought-experiment, the point around which the entire book is written emerges: "The problem with this analysis of hospitality is, I fear, that it undervalues our need to differentiate not just legally but ethically between good and evil aliens." Kearney is admiring of the posture of deconstruction, the critique of identity, the embrace of an openness to the stranger-other, and so on, but has trouble with any stance taken against making judgments. After a quick detour through Levinas on radical alterity to establish one end of an extreme (a radical passivity before the other as Absolute Alterity; e.g., God) and Kristeva on the uncanny to establish the other (that the other is the "mirror image: our othered self"), Kearney proposes the third way of a "diacritical hermeneutics of action." The basis for such a hermeneutic is the necessity of self-constancy for ethics, which is achieved only through narrative. "Narrative identity should not therefore be summarily dismissed as an illusion of mastery," as some posthumanist arguments seem to suggest, but rather is required in order to "de-alienate" the other. One is tempted to say that, for Kearney, salvation is rhetoric-more rhetoric recognizing "oneself as another" and "the other as (in part) another self." The reader must wait until many pages later in the next chapter, however, to learn what role the production of discourse has to play in Kearney's program.

So how does one maintain a commitment to the posthumanist subject and an openness to alterity on the one hand, and a need to distinguish between good an evil on the other? First, Kearney proposes to promote "practical understanding," or the capacity to deliberate about "the enigma of evil" with a commitment to act against it once discerned. His elaboration of phronesis-praxis depends entirely on the vehicle of "narrative" and resembles what Dana Cloud has described as a "pragma-rhetorical approach" to evil: "a perspective that emphasizes 'how' evil is produced, deployed, used, and misused in public discourse, bracketing the question of the ontological status of evil itself" with a stress on pragmatic action.53 Such wisdom is supplemented with "working-through," an acknowledgement of suffering and trauma and a commitment to laboring through the pain "as best we can." Such working-through entails a certain commitment to narrative catharsis-writing and speaking about the traumatic, mourning in the more common sense of the term. Finally, Kearney recommends "pardon," the gesture of forgiveness that is, at some level, admittedly irrational.

After the significant discussions of the third and fourth chapters, the rest of Strangers, Gods, and Monsters doubles as both a place to take care of some unfinished, tangentially related business (e.g., quibbles with Caputo, Lyotard, and Zizek) and as an example of the sort of action-based hermeneutics Kearney has in mind. He discusses the U.S. response to the attacks on September 1l, 2001 as a textbook example of wrongly reckoning with the alien outside and within (in personal communication, Kearney noted that he had long started writing the book before those events). He reviews with various alternate attempts to reckon with death and/or the other, such as the adoption of a melancholic imagination in chapter seven, willed silence in terms of the concept of the 'immemorial" in chapter eight, and the celebration of the uncanny concept of the khora in chapter nine. In the second half of the book Kearney is careful to confront various concepts of ineffability-in the language of Lacan, "the Real," or that which is beyond our capacities to represent-in order to stress the necessity of critical judgment and speaking-out. For example, in criticizing Lyotard's notion of the immemorial, Kearney argues that

Rather than reject all notions of "representation" and "reference" out of hand, would it not be wiser to problematize and redefine them? To repudiate absolutely every reality claim amounts surely to a ruinous dichotomy between a modern positivism of fact and a postmodern apophatism of silence.

Kearney responds similarly to Zizek on the sublime, Derrida on the khora, and so on. He is willing to admit of multiple kinds of ineffability in the critiques of ontology, but consistently argues against strategies of silence or inaction; to do so, he claims, subordinates ethics to aesthetics. Ultimately, however, we learn somewhat surprisingly by the concluding chapters that Kearney wants a middle way that is open to Heidegger's thinking about God (unlike Derrida, Kearney ain't no atheist), but supplemented with an ethics of action (this may not be so surprising if one is familiar with Kearney's previous work, however). Although Kearney is on board with the posthumanist critique of the "modern idolatry of the ego," deconstruction needs to be "supplemented by a critique of the postmodern obsession with absolutist ideas of exteriority and otherness" (even Kearney cannot resist the foil of the postmodern, it would seem). For Kearney, learning to live with ghosts does not mean ghost-busting isn't necessary from time to time