Mourning Humanism, or, the Idiom of Haunting

Music: My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: Kooler Than Jesus Why Derrida? Well, I've been reading Specters of Marx--a tough go, but easier than his early stuff for certain. Why am I reading Specters of Marx? Because I want to talk about a lot of stuff that's influenced by it. So I've been working on a review essay that uses Derrida to leap into a discussion of posthumanism vis-a-vis rhetorical studies. Here's a teaser of a little bit that I have; I'll post more when I get the parts critical of my mother (KK Campbell) and father (RL Scott) written.

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In the work of rhetorical theory in the last decade, the term "postmodernist" is sometimes used as a foil to recommend an alternative. In their popular textbook, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader, for example, John Lucaites and Celeste Condit address "postmodernism" as if it were a person:

Postmodernism's critique of modernism [as a misguided positivism] is well-taken; unfortunately, postmodernism does not offer a viable independent alternative to modernism. As a perspective founded primarily on critique and opposition, postmodernism is always parasitic on that which it critiques. In presenting a world where public discourse is nothing but deceit, postmodernism precludes the possibility of any community whatsoever.

Lucaites and Condit recommend, of course, what Edward Schiappa has dubbed "sophisticated modernism," an approach to critical inquiry that attempts to mediate the critiques of modernity and the tried and true methods of structural analysis and criticism. Outside of the academy, postmodernism has been similarly critiqued as lacking a program or productive goal, especially after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center on September 11, 2001: "After the attack," Julia Keller wrote for the Chicago Tribune, "postmodernism loses its glib grip." Reality "became real again," meaning became "meaning fathomable," and "truth extant." After taking a nasty swipe at Susan Sontag for suggesting that U.S. foreign policy is partially to blame for the attacks, Keller recommends, of course, the tried and true posture of self-censorship. Inside and outside of the academy, postmodernism is often characterized as a kind of religion that casts true believers into a perpetual state of doubt, in which every utterance becomes an ironic reversal, and every testament of belief, a rhetorical blind.

As anyone who has been called a "postmodernist" would likely admit, in NCA journals (and especially in the remarks of blind reviewers), the term is most often used as an epithet that means whatever the name-caller thinks it means, frequently without reference to an actually existing literature. To be sure, some rhetoricians would identify their work as "postmodernist," and there are a number of prominent thinkers whose work has become associated with the label, such as Baudrillard, Delezue, Foucault, and Lyotard. Yet outside a general commitment to understanding the dynamics of modernity (whatever we decide that is), as well as the more common and generally welcomed abandonment of rigid or positivistic notions of objectivity in the humanities, very little suggests that the accused sit at the same postmodern table. To wit: what postmodernism means differs according to the context of usage, and to address this or that scholar as a "pomo" says very little about her or his work.

If there is a common denominator among those identified or self-identified with postmodernism, however, it is the de-centering of the autonomous, self-transparent subject, alternately understood in terms of Descartes' rational knower (the "cogito"), Kant's transcendental subject, or closer to home, the vir bonus, dicendi peritus. This common commitment to displacing the masculinist, self-same rational agent as the center of the known universe, also known as "posthumanism," is the hidden premise of the postmodernist enthymeme, and in most instances the accusatory rhetoric of the postmodern (that is, the uses to which postmodern foil is put) is a reaction to the posthumanism that underwrites various, differing understandings of postmodernity. In a disciplinary context, attacking the "postmodern" is a symptom of a theoretical impasse regarding the humanist subject; that which has passed as postmodernism is actually posthumanism.

The humanist subject is dead, of course, but what this means is a complicated matter better examined on the page than refuted by jumping in front of an on-coming train. In this review essay I advance the idiom of haunting as a theoretically informed orientation to criticism that mourns this death in a useful manner. As an orientation toward critical work, the idiom of haunting attempts to preserve the central values informing rhetorical criticism while nevertheless embracing the notion of a subject that is constructed, decentered, fragmented, performed, or spit. Beyond mere metaphor, the idiom of haunting denotes a conceptual repertoire for listening to and speaking about the dead, literally and figuratively, as well as a considered attempt to orient the critic in a position of hospitality, open to the other. Below I review a series of books that provide the mental furniture of the idiom, beginning first by contextualizing the discussion in relation to the critique of humanism begun by Heidegger and furthered by Derrida in respect to "hauntology," an anti- or pseudo-theory of irreducibility that confounds our impulse to essentialize. Derrida's now famous discussion of hauntology (a pun on ontology in French) marks the beginning of what Jeffery Weinstock has termed the "spectral turn" in cultural theory and criticism. Since the English publication of Specters of Marx in 1994, there has been an explosion of academic works that speak in the curious language of ghosts: from John Durham Peter's discussion of spiritualism and the idea of communication, to Jeffrey Sconce's genealogy of the ghosts in our television sets, of from Jean Baudrillard's recent discussion of the "spirit of terrorism," to Slavoj Zizek's frequent discussion of ideology as a "specter," the language of phantoms and ghosts has become ubiquitous in cultural theory and criticism. Although hauntology should not be conflated with the idiom of haunting, it will become clear that all the books reviewed here entail a debt, at least indirectly, to Derrida's thinking about ghosts. Then, after a discussion of Richard Kearney's elaboration of the posthumanist problematic that haunting addresses, I examine a series of books that telescope more narrowly on three, interrelated concepts central to the idiom: trauma, mourning, and the uncanny.

Posthumanism and the Spectral Turn

In the Western intellectual tradition, the critique of humanism is often said to begin with reactions to Jean-Paul Sartre's celebration of freedom in his existential philosophy. In his well known public address titled "Existentialism Is a Humanism," Sartre remarked that the central principle of existentialism was that "existence precedes essence," which he argued demands individual "subjectivity as one's point of departure" in philosophical inquiry. The system he erected to meet this challenge, particularly as it is represented in Existentialism and Humanism (1947), is complex and somewhat contradictory in relation to his later writings,13 but at base it provides a necessary centrality for the Cartesian cogito. "Subjectivity of the individual is indeed our starting point," he says, because there "can be no other truth to start from than this: I think; therefore, I exist." The notion of the singular imagination as a site of purely interior self-creation, which was first extolled in German Romanticism, finds its humanist aspirations pushed to the logical extreme in Sartre, who also isolates the essence of humanity as self-creation or creativity.16 Further, it is on the basis of this creativity that freedom exists as an activity of choosing. Because existence precedes essence in Sartre's view, no meaning is predetermined. Rather, meaning is created by human beings in the act of being. Since there is no predetermined meaning to the world, Sartre argues that humanity is condemned to make meaningful choices. Subjectivity is announced as the effect of the making of choices in the process of making meaning, of acting: "There is no reality except in action. . . . Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life."