Being and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger

Overview

Part 1

Heidegger sets himself the task of what he calls a “destruction” of the philosophical tradition. Heidegger refuses to avail himself of the standard terminology of modern philosophy, with its talk of epistemology, subjectivity, representation, objective knowledge and the rest.

HEidegger has the audacity to go back to the drawing board and invent a new philosophical vocabulary. For example, he thinks that all conceptions of the human being as a subject, self, person, consciousness or indeed a mind-brain unity are hostages to a tradition of thinking whose presuppositions have not been thought through radically enough. Heidegger is nothing if not a radical thinker: a thinker who tries to dig down to the roots of our lived experience of the world rather than accepting the authority of tradition.

Heidegger’s name for the human being is Dasein, a term which is usually rendered as “being there.” The basic and very simple idea is that the human being is first and foremost not an isolated subject, cut off from a realm of objects that it wishes to know about. We are rather beings who are always already present in the world, outside and alongside a world from which, for the most part, we do not distinguish ourselves.

What goes for Dasein also goes for many of Heidegger’s other concepts. The basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives into the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”

For thinkers like St. Paul, St. Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, it is through the relation to God that the self finds itself. For Heidegger, the question of God’s existence of non-existence has no philosophical relevance. The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in “becoming who one is” in the words of Nietzsche. This insight into finitude is deepened in Heidegger’s concepts of conscience and what he calls “ecstatic temporality.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/05/heidegger-philosophy

Part 2: On ‘mineness’

What is at stake in the book is the question of being. This is the question that Aristotle raised in the Metaphysics. For Aristotle, there is a science that investigates what he calls “being as such,” without regard to any specific realms of being, e.g. the being of living things or the being of the living world. Metaphysics is the area of inquiry that Aristotle calls the “first philosophy” and it is the most abstract, universal, and indefinable area of philosophy, but it is also the most fundamental.

Heidegger begins with a series of rhetorical questions: Do we have an answer to the question of the meaning of being? Not at all. Do we even experience any perplexity about this question? Not at all. Therefore, the first most important task for Heidegger is to recover our perplexity for this question: “To be or not to be?”

For Heidegger, what defines the human being is this capacity to be perplexed by the deepest and most enigmatic of questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? So, the task of Being and Time is reawakening in us a taste for perplexity, a taste of questioning. Questioning–Heidegger will say later–is the piety of thinking.

The first line of text in Being and Time is “We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed.” This is the key to the crucial concept of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) with which the book begins: If I am the being for whom being is a question–“to be or not to be”–the the question of being is mine to be, one way or another.

In what, then, does the being of being human consist? Heidegger’s answer is existence (Existenz). Therefore, the question of being is to be accessed by way of what Heidegger calls “an existential analytic.” What what sort of thing is human existence? It is obviously defined by time: we are creatures with a past, who move through a present and who have available to them a series of possibilities, what Heidegger calls “ways to be.” Heidegger’s point here is wonderfully simple: the human being is not definable by a “what,” like a table or a chair, but by a “who” that is shaped by existence in time. What it means to be human is to exist with a certain past, a personal and cultural history, and by an open series of possibilities that I can seize hold of or not.

This brings us to a very important point: if the being of being human is defined by mineness, then my being is not a matter of indifference to me. A table or a chair cannot recite Hamlet’s soliloquy or undergo the experience of self-questioning and self-doubt that such words express. But we can.

This is the kernal of Heidegger’s idea of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), which more accurately expresses what is proper to the human being, what is its own. For Heidegger, there are two dominant modes of being human: authenticity and inauthenticity. Furthermore, we have a choice to make between these two modes: the choice is whether to be oneself or not to be oneself, to be author of oneself and self-authorising or not. Heidegger insists, as he will do throughout Being and Time, that inauthenticity does not signify a lower or lesser being, but many readers have had reason to doubt such assurances.

Regardless of the twin modes of authenticity and inauthenticity, Heidegger insists early in Being and Time that the human being must first be presented in its indifferent character, prior to any choice to be authentic or not. In words that soon become a mantra in the book, Heidegger seeks to describe the human being as it present “most closely and mostly” (Zunaechst and Zumeist).

Note the radical nature of this initial move: philosophy is not some otherwordly speculation as to whether the external world exists or whether the other human-looking creatures around me are really human and not robots or some such. Rather, philosophy begins with the description–what Heidegger calls “phenomenology”–of human beings in their average everyday existence. It seeks to derive certain common structures from that everydayness.

But we should note the difficulty of the task Heidegger set for himself. That which is closest and most obvious to us is fiendishly difficult to describe. Nothing is closer to me than myself in my average, indifferent everyday existence, but how to describe this? Heidegger was fond of quoting St. Augustine’s Confessions, when the latter writes, “Assuredly I labor here and I labor within myself; I have become to myself a land of trouble and inordinate sweat.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/15/heidegger-being-time-philosophy

Part 3: Being-in-the-world

What Heidegger seeks to destroy in philosophy in particular is a certain picture of the relation between human beings and the world that is widespread in modern philosophy and whose source is Descartes (indeed Descartes is the philosopher who stands most accused in Being and Time). Roughly, this is the idea that there are two sorts of substances in the world: thinking things like us and extended things, like tables, chairs, and indeed the entire fabric of space and time.

The relation between thinking things and extended things is one of knowledge and the philosophical and indeed scientific task consists in ensuring that what a later tradition called “subject” might have access to a world of objects. This is what we might call the epistemological construal of the relation between human beings and the world, where epistemology means “theory of knowledge.” Heidegger does not deny the importance of knowledge, he simply denies its primacy. Prior to this dualistic picture of the relation between human beings and the world lies a deeper unity that he tries to capture in the formula “Dasein is being-in-the-world.” What might that mean?

If the human being is really being-in-the-world, then this entails that the world itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it means to be human. That is to say, I am not a free-floating self or ego facing a world of objects that stands over against me. Rather, for Heidegger, I am my world. The world is part and parcel of my being, of the fabric of my existence. We might capture the sense of Heidegger’s thought here by thinking of Dasein not as a subject distinct from a world of objects, but as an experience of openedness where my being and that of the world are not distinguished for the most part. I am completely fascinated and absorbed by my world, not cut off from it in some sort of “mind” or what Heidegger calls “the cabinet of consciousness.”

Heidegger’s major claim in his discussion of world in Being and Time is that the world announces itself most closely and mostly as a handy or useful world, the world of common, average everyday experience. My proximal encounter with the table on which I am writing these words is not as an object made of a certain definable substance (wood and iron, say) existing in a geometrically ordered space-time continuum. Rather, this is just the table that I use to write and which is useful for arranging my papers, my laptop and my coffee cup. Heidegger insists that we have to “thrust aside our interpretive tendencies” which cover over our everyday experience of the world and attend much more closely to that which shows itself.

The world is full of handy things that hang together as a whole and which are meaningful to me. In even more basic terms, the world is a whole load of stuff that is related together: my laptop sits on my desk, my spectacles sit on my nose, the desk sits on the floor, and I can look over to the window at the garden and hear the quiet hum of traffic and police sirens that make up life in this city. This is what Heidegger calls “environment” (Umwelt), where he is trying to describe the world that surrounds the human being and in which it is completely immersed for the most part.

Heidegger insists that this lived experience of the world is missed or overlooked by scientific inquiry or indeed through a standard philosophy of mind, which presupposes a dualistic distinction between mind and reality. What is required is a phenomenology of our lived experience of the world that tries to be true to what shows itself first and foremost in our experience. To translate this into another idiom, we might say that Heidegger is inverting the usual distinction between theory and practice. My primary encounter with the world is not theoretical; it is not the experience of some spectator gazing out at a world stripped of value. Rather, I first apprehend the world practically as a world of things which are useful and handy and which are imbued with human significance and value. The theoretical or scientific vision of things that can be found in a thinker like Descartes is founded on a practical insight that is fascinated and concerned with things.

Heidegger introduces a distinction between two ways of approaching the world: the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) and the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Present-at-hand refers to our theoretical apprehension of a world made up of objects. It is the conception of the world from which science begins. The ready-to-hand describes our practical relation to things that are handy or useful. Heidegger’s basic claim is that practice precedes theory, and that the ready-to-hand is prior to the present-at-hand. The problem with most philosophy after Descartes is that it conceives of the world theoretically and thus imagines, like Descartes, that I can doubt the existence of the external world and even the reality of the persons that fill it–who knows, they might be robots! For Heidegger, by contrast, who we are as human beings is inextricably bound up and bound together with the complex web of social practices that make up my world. The world is part of who I am. For Heidegger, to cut oneself off from the world, like Descartes, is to miss the point entirely: the fabric of our openedness to the world is one piece. And that piece should not be cut up. Furthermore, the world is not simply full of handy, familiar meaningful things. It is also full of persons. If I am fundamentally with my world, then that world is a common world that experienced together with others. This is what Heidegger calls “being-with” (Mitsein).

Part 4: Thrown into this World

Heidegger seeks to reawaken perplexity about the question of being, the basic issue of metaphysics. In Being and Time, he pursues this question through an analysis of the human being or what he calls Dasein. The being of Dasein is existence, understood as average everyday existence of our life in the world. But how might we give some more content to this rather formal idea of existence?

Heidegger gives us a strong clue in Division 1, Chapter 5 of Being and Time. The central claim of this chapter is that Dasein is thrown in projection (Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf).

Heidegger advances his investigation in concept clusters. One cluster contains three concepts: state of mind, mood, and thrownness. State of mind is a rather questionable translation of Befindlichkeit, which William Richardson translates as ‘already-having-found-oneself-there-ness,’ the thought is the human being is always already found or disclosed somewhere, namely in the ‘there’ of its being-in-the-world. This ‘there’ is the Da of Dasein.

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood in the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something which befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger’s work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world.

This is another way of approaching his central insight: that we cannot exist independently of our relation to the world; and this relationship is a matter of mood and appetite, not rational contemplation.

Such moods disclose the human being as thrown into the ‘there’ of my being-in-the-world. Thrownness (Geworfenheit) is the simple awareness that we always find ourselves somewhere, namely delivered over to a world with which we are fascinated, a world we share with others.

We are always caught up in our everyday life in the world, in the throw of various moods, whether fear, boredom, excitement, or anxiety.

But, Heidegger insists, Dasein is not just thrown into the world. Because it–we–are capable of understanding, we can also throw off our thrown condition. Understanding is, for Heidegger, a conception of activity. It is always understanding how to do something or how to operate something. Understanding is the possession of an ability (etwas koennen) and the authentic human is characterized by the ability or potentiality to be (Seinkoennen).

So the human being is not just a being defined by being thrown into the world. It is also one who can throw off that thrown condition in a movement where it seizes hold of its possibilities, where it acts in a concrete situation. This movement is what Heidegger will call, later in Being and Time, freedom. Freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is the experience of the human being demonstrating its potential through acting in the world. To act in such a way is to be authentic.

Part 5: Anxiety

Moods are essential ways of disclosing human existence for Heidegger. Yet, there is one mood in particular that reveals the self in stark profiel for the first time. This is the function of anxiety (Angst), which Heidegger calls a basic or fundamental mood (Grundstimmung). Anxiety makes its appearance in Division 1, Chapter 6, where Heidegger is seeking to define the being of Dasein as what he calls “care” (Sorge).

Dasein is being-in-the-world. Our everyday existence is characterized by complete immersion in the ways of the world. The world fascinates us and my life is completely caught up in its rhythms and activities. The question Heidegger asks in Chapter 6 is: how is the being-in-the-world as a whole to be disclosed? Is there an experience where the world as such and as a whole is revealed to us? Is there a mood in which we pull back from the world and see it as something distinct from us? Heidegger’s claim is that being-in-the-world as a whole is disclosed in anxiety and is then defined as care. As such, anxiety has an important methodological function in the argument of Being and Time.

But the existential resonance of anxiety is much more than methodological. The first thing to grasp is that anxiety does not mean ceaselessly fretting or fitfully worrying about something or other. On the contrary, Heidegger says that anxiety is a rare and subtle mood and in one place he even compares it to a feeling of calm or peace. It is in anxiety that the free, authentic self first comes into existence.

In order to understand what Heidegger means by anxiety, we have to distinguish it from another mood he examines: fear. Heidegger gives a phenomenology of fear earlier in Being and Time. His claim is that fear is always fear of something threatening, some particular thing in the world. Let’s say that I am fearful of spiders. Fear has an object and when that object is removed, I am no longer fearful. I see a spider in the bath and I am suddenly frightened. My non-spider fearing friend removes the offending arachnid, I am no longer fearful.

Matters are very different with anxiety. If fear is fearful of something particular and determinate, then anxiety is anxious about nothing in particular and is indeterminate. If fear is directed towards some distinct thing in the world, spiders or whatever, then anxiety is anxious about being-in-the-world as such. Anxiety is experienced in the face of something completely indefinite. It is, Heidegger insists, “nothing and nowhere.”

Heidegger’s claim earlier in Division 1 of Being and Time is that the human being finds itself in a world that is richly meaningful and with which it is fascinated. In other words, the world is homely (heimlich), cozy even. In anxiety, all of this changes. Suddenly, I am overtaken by the mood of anxiety that renders the world meaningless. It appears to me as an inauthentic spectacle, a kind of tranquilized and pointless bustle of activity. In anxiety, the everyday world slips away and my home becomes uncanny (unheimlich) and strange to me. From being a player in the game of life that I loved, I become an observer of a game that I no longer see the point in playing.

What is first glimpsed in anxiety is the authentic self. As the world slips away, we obtrude. I like to think about this in maritime terms. Inauthentic life in the world is completely bound up with things and other people in a kind of “groundless floating”–the phrase is Heidegger’s. Everyday life in the world is like being immersed in the sea and drowned by the world’s suffocating banality. Anxiety is the experience of the tide going out, the seawater draining away, revealing a self stranded on the strand, as it were. Anxiety is that basic mood when the self first distinguishes itself from the world and becomes self-aware.

Anxiety does not need darkness, despair, and night sweats. It can arise in the most innocuous of situations: sitting in the subway distractedly reading a book and overhearing conversations, one is suddenly seized by the feeling of meaninglessness, by the radical distinction between yourself and the world in which you find yourself. With this experience of anxiety, Heidegger says, Dasein is individualized and becomes self-aware.

Anxiety is the first expression of our freedom, as a freedom from things and other people. It is a freedom to being to become myself. Anxiety is perhaps the philosophical mood par excellence, it is the experience of detachment from things and from others where I can begin to think freely for myself. Yet, as Heidegger was very well aware, anxiety is also a mood that is powerfully analyzed in the Christian tradition, from Augustine to Kierkegaard, where it describes the self’s effort to turn itself, to undergo a kind of conversion. Heidegger’s difference with Christianity is that the self’s conversion is not undergone with reference to God, but only in relation to death.

Part 6: Death

The basic idea in Being in Time is very simple: being is time and time is finite. For human beings, time comes to an end with out death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death. This is what Heidegger famously calls “being-towards-death.” If our being is finite, then an authentic human life can only be found by confront finitude and trying to make a meaning out of the fact of our death. Heidegger subscribes to the ancient maxim that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” Mortality is that in relation to which we shape and fashion our selfhood.

There are four rather formal criteria in Heidegger’s conception of being-towards-death: it is non-relational, certain, indefinite and not to be outstripped. Firstly, death is non-relational in the sense in standing before death one has cut off all relations to others. Death cannot be experienced through the deaths of others, but only through my relation to my death. Secondly, it is certain that we are going to die. Although one might evade or run away from the fact, no one doubts that life comes to an end in death. Thirdly, death is indefinite in the sense that although death is certain, we do not know when it is going to happen. Most people desire a long and full life, but we can never know when the grim reaper is going to knock at our door. Fourthly, to say that death is not to be outstripped simply means that death is pretty damned important. There’s no way of trumping it an it outstrips all the possibilities that my power of free projection possesses. This is the idea behind Heidegger’s famously paradoxical statement that death is the “possibility of impossibility.” Death is that limit against which my potentiality-for-being is to be measured. It is that essential impotence against which the potency of my freedom shatters itself.

At the end of the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger writes, “Higher than actuality stands possibility.” Being and Time is a long hymn of praise to possibility and it finds its highest expression in being-towards-death. Heidegger makes a distinction between anticipation and expectation or awaiting. His claim is that the awaiting of death still contains too much of the actual, where death would be the actualization of possibility. Such would be a gloomy philosophy of morbidity. On the contrary, for Heidegger, anticipation does not passively await death, but mobilizes mortality as the condition for free action in the world.

This results in a hugely important and seemingly paradoxical thought: freedom is not the absence of necessity, in the form of death. On the contrary, freedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one’s mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. Concealed in the idea of death as the possibility of the impossibility is the acceptance on one’s mortal limitations as the basis for an affirmation of one’s life.

So, there is nothing morbid about being-towards-death. Heidegger’s thought is that being-towards-death pulls Dasein out of its immersion in inauthentic everyday life and allows it to come into its own. It is only in relation to being-towards-death that I become passionately aware of my freedom.

Despite its baroque linguistic garb, Heidegger’s analysis of being-towards-death is exceptionally direct and powerful. However, it is open to the following objection. Heidegger argues that the only authentic death is one’s own. To die for another person, he writes, would simply be to “sacrifice oneself.” To that extent, for Heidegger, the deaths of others are secondary to my death, which is primary. In my view, such a conception of death is both false and morally pernicious. On the contrary, I think that death comes into our world through the deaths of others, whether as close as a parent, partner or child or as far as the unknown victim of a distant famine or war. The relation to death is not first and foremost my own fear for my own demise, but my sense of being undone by the experience of grief and mourning.

Also, there is a surprisingly traditional humanism at work in Heidegger’s approach to death. In his view, only human beings die, whereas plants and animals simply perish. We are not the only creatures in the universe who are touched by the sentiment of mortality.

Part 7: Conscience

Heidegger insists that although his description of being-towards-death is formally or ontologically correct, it needs more compelling content at what Heidegger calls the “ontic” level, that is, at the level of experience. Finitude gets a grip on the self through the experience of conscience.

Conscience is a call. It is something that calls one away from one’s inauthentic immersion in the homely familiarity of everyday life. It is, Heidegger writes, that uncanny experience of something like an external voice in one’s head that pulls one out of the hubbub and chatter of life in the world and arrests our ceaseless busyness.

This sounds very close to the Christian experience of conscience that one finds in Augustine or Luther. In Book 8 of the Confessions, Augustine describes the entire drama of conversion in terms of hearing an external voice, “as of a child,” that leads him to take up the Bible and eventually turn away from paganism and towards Christ. Luther describes conscience as the work of God in the mind of man.

For Heidegger, by contrast, conscience is not God talking to me, but me talking to myself. The uncanny call of conscience–the pang and pain of its sudden appearance–feels like an alien voice, but is, Heidegger insists, Dasein calling to itself. I am called back from inauthentic life int he world, complete with what Sartre would call its “counterfeit immortality,” towards myself. Furthermore, that self is defined in terms of being-towards-death. So, conscience is the experience of the human being calling itself back to its mortality, a little like Hamlet in the grave with Yorick’s skull.

What gets said in the call of conscience? Heidegger is crystal clear: like Cordelia in King Lear, nothing is said. The call of conscience is silent. It contains no instruction or advice. In order to understand this, it is important to grasp that for Heidegger, inauthentic life is characterized by chatter. Conscience calls Dasein back from this chatter silently. It has the character of what Heidegger calls “reticence,” which is the privileged mode of language in Heidegger. So, the call of conscience is a silent call that silences the chatter of the world and brings me back to myself.

But what does this uncanny call of conscience give one to understand? Conscience’s call can be reduced to one word: Guilty! But what does Dasein guilt really mean? It means that because the human being is defined in terms of thrown projection, it always has its being to be. That is, human existence is a lack, it is something due to Dasein, a debt that it strives to make up or repay. This is the ontological meaning of guilt as Schuld, which can also mean debt. As Heidegger perhaps surprisingly writes, although it should be recalled that he was also writing in troubled economic times, “Life is a business whether or not it covers its costs.” Debt is a way of being. I owe therefore I am.

Heidegger goes on to show that this ontological meaning of guilt as indebtedness is the basis for any traditional moral understanding of guilt. Heidegger’s phenomenology of guilt, and here is close to Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, claims to uncover the deep structure of ethical selfhood which cannot be defined by morality, since morality already presupposes it. Rejecting any Christian notion of evil as the privation of good, Heidegger’s claim is that guilt is the pre-moral source for any morality. As such, it is beyond good or evil. Is guilt bad? No, but neither is it good. It is simply what we are, for Heidegger.

Heidegger insists that Dasein does not load guilt onto itself. It it simply is guilty, always already, as Heidegger liked to say. What changes in being authentic is that the human being understands the call of conscience and takes it into itself. Authentic Dasein comes to understand itself as guilty. In doing this, Dasein has chosen itself, as Heidegger writes. This is very interesting: what is chosen is not having a conscience, which Dasein already has because of its ontological want or indebtedness, but what Heidegger calls, rather awkwardly “wanting to have a conscience.” This is a second-order wanting: I choose to want the want that I am. Only in this way, Heidegger adds, can the human being be answerable or responsible. Thus, responsibility consists in understanding the call, in wanting to have a conscience. To make this choice, Heidegger insists, is to become resolute.

Part 8: Temporality

Heidegger tries to avoid a few things in his discussion of time. Firstly, he is trying to criticize the idea of time as a uniform, linear and infinite series of “now-points.” On this model, which ultimately derives from Aristotle’s Physics, the future is the not-yet-now, the past is the no-longer-now, and the present is the now that flows from future to past at each passing moment. This is what Heidegger calls the “vulgar” or ordinary conception of time where priority is always given to the present. Heidegger thinks that this Aristotelian conception of time has dominated philosophical inquiries into time from the ancient Greeks to Hegel and even up to his near contemporary Bergson.

Secondly, he is trying to avoid any conception of time that begins with a distinction between time and eternity. On this understanding of time, classically expressed in Augustine’s Confessions, temporality is derived from a higher non-temporal state of eternity, which is co-extensive with the infinite and eternal now of God.

In order to understand what Heidegger means by temporality, we have to set it in the context of the existential analytic of Dasein that I have sought to describe. The discussion of being-towards-death led to the idea of anticipation, namely that the human being is always running ahead towards its end. For Heidegger, the primary phenomenon of time is the future that is revealed to me in my being-towards-death. Heidegger makes play of the link between the future and to come towards. Insofar as Dasein anticipates, it comes towards itself. The human is not confined in the present, but always projects towards the future.

But what Dasein takes over in the future is its basic ontological indebtedness, its guilt, as discussed in the previous blog. There is a tricky but compelling thought at work here: in anticipation, I project towards the future, but what comes out of the future is my past, my personal and cultural baggage, what Heidegger calls my “having-been-ness.” But this does not mean that I am somehow condemned to my past. On the contrary, I can make a decision to take over the fact of who I am in a free action. This is what Heidegger calls “resoluteness.”

This brings us to the present. For Heidegger, the present is not some endless series of now points that I watch flowing by. Rather, the present is something that I can seize hold of and resolutely make my own. What is opened in the anticipation of the future is the fact of our having-been which releases itself into the present moment of action.

This is what Heidegger calls “the moment of vision.” This term, borrowed from Kierkegaard and Luther, can be approached as a translation of the Greek kairos, the right or opportune moment. Within Christian theology, the kairos was the fulfillment or redemption of time that occurred with the appearance of Christ. Heidegger’s difference with Christian theology is that he wants to hang on to the idea of the moment of vision, but to do so without any reference to God. What appears in the moment of vision is authentic Dasein.

The key to Heidegger’s understanding of time is that it is neither simply reducible to the vulgar experience of time, nor does it originate in distinction from eternity. Time should be grasped in and of itself as the unity of the three dimensions–what Heidegger calls “ecstases”–of future, past and present. This is what he calls “primoridal” or “original” time and he insists that it is finite. It comes to an end in death.

For Heidegger, we are time. Temporality is a process with three dimensions which form a unity. The task that Heidegger sets himself in Being and Time is a description of the movement of human finitude. As many readers have pointed out and Heidegger himself acknowledged, Being and Time is unfinished. The question that he leaves hanging at the end of the book is the issue that began the whole enterprise, namely the question of being as such. We have been given an answer to what it means to be human, but no sense of how we might answer the question of being as such.

Epistemology of the Closet (1990) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

1. Overview
2. Breakdown of the Introduction: Axiomatic
3. Other Important Terms
4. Future Implications

Overview

Along with Michel Foucault’s 1976 History of Sexuality (Volume 1) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Sedgwick’s 1990 Epistemology of the Closet is considered one of the key texts of queer theory. Generally, the epistemology of the closet is the idea that thought itself is structured by homosexual/heterosexual definitions, which damages our ability to think. The homo/hetero binary is a trope for knowledge itself.

For Sedgwick, the study of sex is not coextensive with the study of gender, as sex is chromosomal and gender is constructed. She draws distinctions between constructionist feminists (who see sex as biological and essential, and gender and gender inequality as culturally constructed), radical feminists (who see chromosomal sex, reproductive relationships, and sexual inequality as culturally constructed), and Foucauldians (who see chromosomal sex as biologically essential, sexuality as culturally constructed, and reproduction as both). She discusses the realization in feminism that not all oppressions are congruent as a particularly important one, because it included the realization that a person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may in fact be enabled through others, for example, a woman who uses her married name shows her subordination as a woman and her privilege as a presumed heterosexual.

Sedgwick also addresses the ways in which the relationship between sex and gender can be compared to the relationship between race and class. According to Sedgwick, they are related but should be mapped on different axes; sex and gender, while related, are not coextensive. The variety of sexuality has some links to gender, in that some sexual preference is gender-related, but there are many more dimensions to sexuality which have nothing to do with gender–power, positions, sexual acts. However, gender is definitionally built sexuality in a way in which race and class do not have an analogue.

Gender is definitionally built into homosexuality (meaning attraction to the same gender), but sexuality represents an excess beyond gender and reproduction; therefore, there can be no concept of homosexuality without a prior notion of gender. Also, the very study of gender often reveals a heterosexist bias, because by setting up gender as a binary it assumes a heterosexual norm. It is unrealistic to expect a nuanced analysis of same-sex relations through an optic calibrated to the coarser stigmata of gender difference. Sedgwick posits instead constructing a study of homosexuality along the axis of sexuality instead of the axis of gender, so that there would be a much richer analysis and take into account many more dimensions of sexuality other than gender attraction. It might also reveal different forms of oppression and assumptions about identity/power structures feminism takes for granted. Finally, she observes that the heterosexual/homosexual binary has greater deconstructive potential as a dichotomy than male/female, in that sexual orientation has a “greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and representational doubleness.”

Sedgwick notes in the 2008 preface to Epistemology of the Closet that it was written in light of the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick Supreme Court decision, which upheld a Georgia sodomy law, it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2003 by Lawrence v. Texas. She also notes that it is hard to convey now the emergency of the late 1980s AIDS crisis, which Epistemology was also a response to:

“The history is important…for understanding some of the tonalities and cognitive structures of Epistemology of the Closet: how the punishing stress of loss, incomplete mourning, chronic dread, and social fracture, and the need for mobilizing powerful resources of resistance in the face of such horror, imprinted a characteristic stamp on much of the theory and activism of that time.”

Sedgwick sees the closet as the “defining structure for gay oppression in this century,” which is connected to 20th century surveillance (activist use of rhetoric of “police in the bedroom”). She acknowledges her Foucauldian influence, specifically in the recognition of the connection between sexuality and knowledge: “after the late eighteenth century…knowledge and sex became conceptually inseparable from one another–so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge, ignorance, sexual ignorance, and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion.”

Breakdown of the Introduction: Axiomatic

The work argues that an understanding of Western culture must be incomplete and damaged to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition

• Heterosexual/Homosexual: has great deconstructive potential as a dichotomy than male/female, in that sexual orientation has a “greater potential for rearrangement, ambiguity, and representational doubleness.”

Will examine contradictions that seem internal to twentieth century understandings of homo/heterosexual definition (like “sodomy”)

Important political implications–court defense of “gay panic” as a legitimate defense (when compared to someone claiming “race panic” or “gender panic”)

Axiom 1: People are different from each other.

Sedgwick gives a page long list of how even the same sexual preferences can have a very different meaning to people, even the very idea of sexual identity takes different priorities in the formation of different people’s identities. It’s more important to ask how certain categorizations work and what relations they are creating, rather than what they mean.

Axiom 2: The study of sexuality is not coextensive with the study of gender, correspondingly, antihomophobic inquiry is not coextensive with feminine inquiry. But we can’t know in advance how they will be different.

Recognition that chromosomal sex, gender, and sexuality, while related, should be seen as separate axes of identity, analogous to the relationship between race and class.

• Chromosomal sex: “group of irreducible, biological differentiations between members of the species. Homo sapiens who have XX and those who have XY chromosomes.”
• Gender: “the far more elaborated, more fully and rigidly dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors–of male and female persons–in a cultural system for which ‘male/female’ functions as a primary and perhaps model binarism affecting the structures and meaning of many, many other binarisms.”
• Sexuality: “the array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges, in both women and men, that tends to cluster most densely around certain genital sensations but is not adequately defined by them.

Gender is only one dimension of sexual choice; the binarized focus on object-choice gender as the defining characteristic of sexual identity has been a recent one. Sedgwick posits that the “distinctly sexual nature of sexuality has to do with its excess over, or difference from, procreational sex,” making sexuality more the polar opposite of chromosomal sex, rather than societally constructed gender as its polar opposite.

Any system with gender as its focus will have an inherent heterosexist bias, to the extent that female gender is constructed as a supplement or contrast to male identity; assumption of male/female roles in any kind of couple (or the assumption that sexuality implies couplehood/coupling) in this system.

Recognition that not all oppressions are congurent, but are differently sructured; lessons learned from feminism’s interactions with issues of race and class are applicable here.

Importance of taking sexuality out of the realm of gender studies/feminism, as there are many dimensions of sexuality which have nothing to do with gender.

Axiom 3: There can’t be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together. Or separately.

Importance of seeing gay studies as separate, albeit informed by, feminist theory.

Related to the matrix of minoritizing/universalizing and liminality/separation

For those who see lesbianism as the highest form of a “woman-identified woman” (from the 1970 Radicalesbian Declaration), this would fall under the separatist view, which would consider lesbian experience as completely different from that of homosexual men. Different from those who would be more open to the idea of liminal sexuality, who feel solidarity through mutual oppression in a heterosexist society, would see more similarities in experience.

Axiom 4: The immemorial seemingly ritualized debates on nature versus nurture take place against a very unstable background of tacit assumptions and fantasies about both nurture and nature.

At this point, questions about causes of homosexuality are often counter-productive, and often result in a pathologizing stance (i.e., if we know what causes it, we’ll know how to fix it)

Axiom 5: The historical search for a Grand Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.

Especially those who interpret this as a teleological theory of sexual identity. Reflected in the “sex wars” of the 1980s, which exposed contradictory understandings of the very constructed nature of lesbian and gay male identity, how to a certain degree they have been constructed in relation to each other (mannish lesbian and effeminate gay man)

Axiom 6: The relation of gay studies to debates on the literary canon is, and had best be, tortuous.

Early 1990s questions about canon-formation are evident here; acknowledgements of the limits of the current canon, the creation of minicanons, and their ultimate influence on the greater canon.

Lessons from feminism: both recovery of missing texts as well as re-examination/consideration of canonized texts through the lens of “gay studies.”

Axiom 7: The paths of allo-identification are likely to be strange and recalcitrant. So are the paths of auto-identification.

Her own role relative to studying homosexuality (in her 2008 preface, she acknowledges that when she has had sex with another person, it has been with a man; she also acknowledges what she calls a persistent perspectivism throughout the text, a constant awareness of who’s asking and who wants to know). Overall goal of opening channels of visibility.

Rest of Introduction: (similarly examines assumptions about what aspects of identity should be considered separately and together)

• lesbian v. gay identity
• meanings of different dimensions of sexuality
• how the question of the very origin of sexual preference should be considered
• dangers of the teleology of the Great Paradigm shift
• question of canon-building (separate or integrated canon?)
• questions of allo-identification v. auto-identification–ultimately comes down to a general question of opening channels of visibility

Other Important Terms

• Minoritizing/universalizing: Seeing the issue of homo/heterosexuality as the concern of a small, distinct, fixed homosexual minority v. seeing it as an issue of continuing importance for all people across a continuum of sexualities
• Liminal/Separate: Same-sex object choice as a matter of liminality or transitivity between genders v. same-sex object choice as reflecting an impulse of separation

**Sedgwick puts these two binaries into a matrix, which she uses to map a contemporary understanding of homosexuality

Future Implications

Importance of taking sexuality out of the realm of gender studies/feminism, as there are many dimensions of sexuality which have nothing to do with gender/queer theory

Separation of gender, chromosomal sex, and sexuality was key to further complications of sexual identity raised by transsexual/transgender identities

The recognition of the closet as an identity of performance–connection to Butler’s focus on the performativity of gender

Evolution of “closet”–Sedgwick herself later announced coming out of the “fat” closet; demonstrates connection between knowledges and sexuality

Becoming Human (2020) Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson looks to the historical entanglement of philosophy and science–racism is implicit in historical science and is thus also encoded into the history of philosophy. Where Toni Morrison sees metaphysical condensation as a collapse of persons into animals which prevents any sort of humanization, Jackson sees multiple forms of blackness…the animal is just one of those forms. Her big thing is the plasticity of blackness, it’s sub & super human all at once. So for Morrison, this type exchange is more rigid, but Jackson sees people like Hartman coming in with similarly plastic notions and I think she draws inspiration from there. But there are alternative conceptions of being and the nonhuman that Jackson hopes to account for. Her three main things she argues for are:

1. Delineation of species has relied on the question of reproduction, and black female flesh persistently functions as the limit case of the human because gender, sexuality, and maternity hold a central place in the animalization of blackness.
2. Eurocentric humanism needs blackness in order to erect whiteness; humanity can be an achievement more easily alongside “the animal”
3. There are different forms of ontological and materialist thinking in black expressive culture that don’t correspond to typical ones; simply reformulating blackness as “human” after centuries of bestialization doesn’t account for black expressive culture

We are both bios and mythos; cultural production, science, and philosophy are all required for Jackson’s argument. She turns to black writing & black cultural expression because this has been the site of black philosophy, theology, and political theory.

“Becoming Human was underwritten by the belief that if history is processural and contingent, then art holds the potential of keeping possibility open or serving as a form of redress. In other words, art can be a remedy and may be a means of setting right a wrong. The expressive works in this book…perform this intervention by defying the rules of given literary and visual artistic genres and traditions, performing innovative philosophizing and contrary aesthetics using what Saidiya Hartman has once called ‘the visceral materials of history.’ These novels and visual works ‘break forms, breaking them open so other kinds of stories are yielded’ and other philosophies of being can be felt and known.”

Book Review, A.E. Stevenson, Catalyst

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human…uses contemporary African diasporic literature and mixed-media collages to present unruly theorizations that disrupt philosophical conversations about the creation of the human, the black(ened) subject, and the animal. It does not play fair. This book deftly dismantles Enlightenment thought to propose a “black(ened) humanity,” unmooring previous concepts in Black studies and posthumanism that argue that Black humanity is a “denied humanity.” Jackson takes the reader through a critical genealogy of human-making, engaging with Hume, Hegel, Jefferson, and Kant to show that the category of black(ened) humanity depended not so much on an antiblack horizontalization of blackness and the animal, but rather a transmogrification of blackness that allows black(ened) humanity to be “not denied but appropriated, inverted, and ultimately plasticized in the methodology of abjecting animality.” Jackson intervenes in these ontological debates stating that the violence of black(ened) humanity comes from its “plasticization” through which “the animal is one but not the only form blackness is thought to encompass.” Furthermore, and perhaps most radically, Jackson argues throughout the text that the idea of “the animal” emerges through the afterlives of slavery and colonial encounters that affect human and nonhuman forms of life.

The new formulations push us past the dead end of “dehumanization” to consider the new modes of “being/knowing/feeling” that come from imagining what blackness can be outside of a reliance of Hegel’s theory of “universal humanity.” Jackson prioritizes the works of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, Ezrom Legae, and Wangechi Mutu as she believes that “black literary and visual culture theorizes and philosophizes.”

The first chapter detangles Man’s Self-making through the abjection of the animal by proposing that possibilities arise from trans-species correspondence. Jackson turns to the (neo)slave narrative, Frederick Douglass’s seminal Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison’s influential Beloved, arguing that they provide the language through which we have come to understand the bestialization of blackness…Jackson sees Morrison’s refusal of sentimentality in Beloved as a generative exploration of the entanglement of race, gender, animality, and sex that makes up black(ened) humanity. Emphasizing Mister’s gaze as the moment of Paul D’s undoing, Jackson demonstrates the “problem of ethics that accompanies asymmetrical relations” such that an interaction between slave and a rooster dislodges hierarchical and humanistic portrayals of gender, knowledge, and being. Jackson emphasizes that slavery’s conditions could turn Paul D., a man, into “an occasion for the theater of sovereign power and manipulated matter–a plastic.”

In the second chapter, Jackson makes the seismic claim that blackness is a being, not nothingness, and more specifically, “something rather than nothing, perhaps even everything.” To do this, she situates Black female flesh as the matrix figure of the human through an analysis of Ti-Jeanne’s physical vertigo in the novel Brown Girl in the Ring, thereby dismantling the Heideggerian ordering of the world into discrete categories (human, animal, stone). Following Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, Jackson places the figure of the absented Black mater(nal), the nonrepresentable, as the fundamental figure that unravels Heidegger’s empirical logic. Vertigo here is a “measure and means for the disordering and inoperability of a metaphysics” that forecloses other epistemologies of worlds, illuminating the violence of the idea that there is one “universal” world, as such.

The third chapter initiates a shift in the book towards a discussion of how antiblackness infiltrates species discourse, wherein many scholars have attempted to distinguish between human-animal and human-nonhuman. Using Butler’s work, Jackson argues that the interspecies relations in the book are not mimetic to human relations, disrupting common metaphors for “the discourse of species” within the genre of science “fiction.” “Bloodchild” has been read as an allegory for the power dynamics of slavery and colonization. Jackson, instead, argues that Butler imagines “an articulation of embodied subjectivity that is typified by receptivity rather than mastery.”…Radically, Jackson states that Butler doesn’t champion symbiosis, like feminist, posthumanists have argued, but instead mediates on its “promises and perils…under the conditions of an unequal power.” Jackson argues the discourse of species between Gan and the Tlic, an insectoid people, is a critical ontological discourse that has been underprivileged in discussing the impact of Black science fiction writers.

[Jackson talks about evolutionary association being divided into four classes: mutualism, comensalism, amensalism, paraistism, and synnecrosis. However, she puts for a theory by Lynn Margulis in order to read “Bloodchild,” symbiogenesis, which argues that the origin of life itself is symbiotic and that mutual interaction, cooperation, and dependence among organisms is as important if not more evolutionarily significant than Darwin’s natural selection.]

The final chapter turns again to the figure of the abjected Black female body to show how philosophical thought, specifically aesthetics, and scientific classification collaborate to violate this figure to make the Human coherent…Jackson engages Wynter’s theorization of sociology to consider Black female sex(uality) as an emerging framework within intra-active multiscalar systems. Intra-activity within these systems allows for a robust understanding of the body that considers the impact of the biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural in the “somaticization of politics,” and that of war on these bodies, more directly. Jackson emphasizes the constructed Black female body in the material collages of Mutu’s Histology work and Lorde’s musings on carcinogenesis in Cancer Journals to show the direct effects of racial domination has on these bodies.

The coda solidifies the theoretical stakes of the previous chapters into an assertion that extends biopolitics and necropolitics. Jackson argues that Achille Mbembe’s necropolitical weapon is not exterior technology but rather has been somaticized within the body through “the biological field such that the black(ened) body, the very materiality of the organism, yields and redirects its energies to the destruction of black vitality.” As such, epigenetics…can never be the path to ameliorate the violence against the black(ened) female body’s reproductive organs.

Book Review, Michael Calo, excerpts

Reinterpreting liberal humanism and its naturalized ‘Man’ as a teleological construct that both relies on and begets hierarchical modulations of race, gender, and species, the book elaborates on and intervenes in contemporary debates in the fields of African diaspora and Black studies, biopolitics, posthumanism and animal studies, new materialism, and gender and sexuality studies.

Drawing from Black feminist scholars, especially Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson reconceptualizes the relationship between Blackness and animality, raising important and urgent questions about the limits of our understanding of humanity and the construction of race. Reading “unruly” texts of the African diaspora alongside, through, and against Enlightenment science and philosophy and their epistemological descendants, Jackson reinterprets what previous scholars have argued is humanism’s exclusionary and dehumanizing racial logics. Rather, she claims, Blackness was integral to the development of humanist thought, as the contours of the (white, male) ‘human’ were drawn in relation to an “ontologized plasticization” of Blackness: “not any one particular form of violence–animalization or objectification, for instance–but rather coerced formlessness.” Jackson’s concept of plasticity implicitly theorizes Black fungibiliy beyond the idiom of the enslaved subject as commodity to engage more fully notions of animality.

Thus, in her reading she suggests that, rather than plead for inclusion in, and thus recapitulate to liberal humanism’s category of the human, African diasporic cultural art frequently generates a “critical praxis of being, paradigms of relationality, and epistemology” that stymie normative conceptions of the human being. In this vein, she argues that scholarship that overemphasizes Black inclusion and humanity ultimately reify the onto-epistemologies they seek to dismantle.

The monograph’s first two chapters examine the ways that African diasporic literary texts interpose in humanist philosophy and signal toward alternative modes of being. In Chapter 1, Jackson develops the notion of plasticity, tracing the ways in which Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and 1873 speech “Kindness to Animals” and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) problematize the human-animal distinction and (try to) circumvent its ontological and epistemological fundaments. Reading Douglass, Jackson examines the “rhetorical inheritance” that shapes Douglass’s texts, and notes the enslaved or ex-slave’s problem of self-representation, whereby the grammar of slavery precedes and thus prefigures that can be said and how. Turning to Beloved, Jackson focuses on Paul D’s encounter with the rooster, Mister, and reveals how Paul d’s recognition of his own de-sexed blankness, his existence as an empty signifier, potentiates the redefinition of “his gender and being in improvisational terms rather than in fidelity to those inherited from slavery.” Through her discussion of sex and gender as co-constituted with racialized humanity, Jackson highlights Beloved‘s unsettling of the animal-human binary, arguing that the novel “offers an approach to the question ‘What is man?’ that ultimately invites the dissolution of its terms.”

Jackson’s methodology and critical approach dovetails with her critique against “calcified” humanist traditions. She examines “literature and art for theory…placing the theories of/as literary and visual art in conversation with more recognizable means and forms of philosophy,” and thus imbues her objects of study with their own critical praxis. Indeed, the Coda concludes with a reaffirmation of the power of art: “art holds the potential of keeping possibility open or serving as a form of redress.”

“Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987) Leo Bersani

Written in 1987 during the peak of the AIDS crisis, Bersani investigates the homicidal threats underlying much of the anti-gay rhetoric in the coverage of HIV and AIDS at the time. Not only does Bersani note how the coverage of HIV, which addresses itself to an audience presumed straight and HIV-free, is much more interested in testing for and containing the disease, rather than caring for those suffering from AIDS and researching cures for it. Identifying “how a public health crisis has been treated like an unprecedented threat,” Bersani also quotes several ludicrous accounts from supposed authorities (like doctors) whose portrayal of the “gay lifestyle” which they link to HIV and AIDS is ridiculous–in one of the article’s epigraphs, for example, Johns Hopkins Medical School Professor Opendra Narayan claims that “these people have sex twenty to thirty times and hour.”

However, the turn that Bersani makes in his argument from this is startling. From here, he starts with the premise that the big secret about sex is that “most people don’t like it.” Informed by thinkers as diverse as Andrea Dworkin and Michel Foucault, Bersani zeroes in on the fundamental problem associated with the penetrative acts associated with HIV transmission: “to be penetrated is to abdicate power.” He ties the stigma of anal penetration to both misogyny as well as more specific stigmas against prostitution in the early twentieth century. First, he comments on the larger discussion of the effect of gay stereotype “styles” on the heterosexual world. Calling into question the very valence of camp, Bersani notes that “if you’re out to make someone you turn off the camp.” Disagreeing with those who claim that gay “leather queen” styles cause insecurity in the heterosexual males it is parodying, Bersani instead argues that “nothing forces them to see any relation between the gay-macho style and their image of their own masculinity.” Further, he identifies that the hyperfemininity of drag queen performances “is both a way of giving vent to the hostility toward women that probably afflicts every male…and could also paradoxically be thought of as helping to deconstruct the image for women themselves,” although he admits that the “mindless, asexual, and hysterically bitchy” character of such performances most likely would provoke “a violently antimimetic reaction in any female spectator.”

In his discussion of the connection to prostitution, he notes the similarities between the imagined instability of the sexual appetites of gay men and prostitutes. Like the rate of an orgasm every two minutes imagined in the epigraph, they are “reminiscent of male fantasies about women’s multiple orgasms.” The promiscuity assumed in both populations is targeted in both populations as “the criminal, fatal, and irresistibly repeated act”; this focus allows those in power to “‘legitimate’ a fantasy of female sexuality as intrinsically diseased; and promiscuity in this fantasy, far from increasing the risk of infection, is the sign of infection.”

After considering the work of both anti-sex feminists such as Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as well as the investigation of sexuality, especially in the realm of S&M, of Michel Foucault, Bersani comes to an important conclusion:

“…the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power. It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition. It replicates self-shattering as self-swelling, as psychic tumescence. If, as these words suggest, men are especially apt to “choose” this version of sexual pleasure, because their sexual equipment appears to invite by analogy, or at least to facilitate, the phallicizing of the ego, neither sex has exclusive rights to the practice of sex as self-hyperbole. For it is perhaps primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to becoming a struggle for power…It is the self that swells with excitement at the idea of being on top, the self that makes the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other.”

Bersani thinks that we should focus on this shattering as a key aspect of sexuality: what is we stopped thinking of the so-called “passive” role in sex as demeaning, but rather that “the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it.” Ultimately, “if the rectum is a grave in which the masculine ideal…of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be celebrated for its very potential death.”

Bersani’s identification of misogyny at the heart of the anti-gay hysteria as well as his call to arms to re-think the sex act itself seems to anticipate Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and quite a bit of subsequent queer theory. Reimagining and rethinking the meanings of the sites of sexuality is key theme in queer theory, which owes a lot to this essay.

Cruel Optimism (2011) Lauren Berlant

Overview

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant reveals that despite deteriorating social, economic, and environmental conditions, people still remain attached to fantasies of the “good life”; her research examines how such fantasies have survived even when conditions for survival are increasingly compromised under postwar neoliberal restructuring. She posits “cruel optimism” as a relational dynamic whereby individuals remain attached to “compromised conditions of possibility” or “clusters of promises” embedded in desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises. For Berlant, optimism is a formal or structural feeling, such that an “optimistic attachment is invested in one’s own or the world’s continuity, but might feel any number of ways,” including not optimistic at all. In other words, maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable. Berlant is essentially concerned with conditions of living or the state of the “present,” which she describes as structured through “crisis ordinariness,” and turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises; by tracking the various impasses we face today, she suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain “genres” are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold, alternative genres that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.

Main argument: Berlant theorizes “cruel optimism” as a way of understanding the injurious attachments we have formed to fantasies of the good life that are no longer sustainable in the present. She claims that perceiving the present as a “mediated affect” will allow us to better apprehend the conditions of “crisis ordinariness” in which we live today; in other words, only by recognizing and understanding the various impasses we face can we strive to create alternative conditions for living otherwise.

Exigency: Berlant’s work responds to crises in our conceptions of the “good life,” namely, to the way in which the lives and livelihoods we have taken for granted have become impossible to attain; she suggests that only by recognizing that these fantasies are fraying can we develop alternative ways of living the present.

Methodology: Berlant asserts, “My method is to read patterns of adjustment in specific aesthetic and social contexts to derive what’s collective about specific modes of sensual activity toward and beyond survival.” In other words, she focuses on the particular as a way of theorizing a collective sense of the historical present: “I am extremely interested in generalization…This is part of my method, to track the becoming general of singular things, and to give those things materiality by tracking their resonances across many scenes, including the ones made by nonverbal but still linguistic activities, like gestures.” Berlant critiques “everyday life theory” because she argues that it “no longer describes how people live.” She situates her work alongside Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory, Marc Auge’s Non-Places: Essays on Supermodernity, Michael Taussig’s The Nervous System, and Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects because it “turns toward thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on.”

Berlant produces an archive of the “impasse or transitional moment” that illustrates “exemplary cases of adjustment to the loss of this fantasy” of the good life.

Berlant writes, “[e]ach chapter tells a story about the dissolution of optimistic objects/scenarios that had once held the space open for the good-life fantasy, and tracks dramas of adjustment to the transformation of what had seemed foundational into those binding kinds of optimistic relations we call ‘cruel'” As such, in her first chapter “Cruel Optimism,” Berlant elaborates on her theorization of “cruel optimism,” claiming that it is an analytic that will help us “track the affective attachment to what we call the ‘good life,’ which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subject who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it.” She argues that this attachment is not “just a psychological state,” but rather results from ordinary conditions of living in the present, which “are conditions of the attrition or wearing out of the subject”; cruel optimism for her consequently allows us to perceive why “people are not Bartleby,” why they choose not to resist but instead “ride the wave of the system of attachment they are used to” even when this system fails them. Berlant analyzes an untitled poem by John Ashbery, Charles Johnson’s story “Exchange Value,” and Geoff Ryman’s novel Was, works that stage various impasses that suspend “the rules and norms of the word,” and force us to “pay attention to the built and affective infrastructure of the ordinary,” and question the strategies of survival and adjustment we have developed for living in the present.

Vocabulary

“Cruel optimism”: A “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility.” For Berlant, it is not the “experience of optimism,” but rather its “affective structure” that is especially important for explicating the nature of our attachments to fantasies of the “good life” because optimism becomes cruel when “the very pleasures of being inside a relation have come sustaining regardless of the content of the relation.”

“Precarious public sphere”: “[A]n intimate public of subjects who circulate scenarios of economic and intimate contingency and trade paradigms for how best to live on, consdering.”

“The (historical) present”: Berlant’s concern with deteriorating social, economic, and environmental conditions in the contemporary moment leads her to theorize the “present” as a “mediated affect,” “a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters…are also always there for debate.” In arguing for an investigation of the “shared historical present,” she is not advocating a “shallow presentism” but rather asking us to recognize how debates about the “contours and contents” of the present are “always profoundly political” because they determine what “forces should be considered responsible and what crises [demand] urgent” attention.

“Crisis ordinariness”: Berlant argues for a shift away from the language of trauma as a means of registering profound and even catastrophic social, economic, and political change. She describes the present as structured through “crisis ordinariness,” which reframes the exceptionalist logic of trauma because crisis operates in the ordinary through embedded conditions of precariousness.

“Impasse”: The “book’s main genre for tracking the sense of the present.” The impasse, for Berlant, refers to a “stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once inevitably present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things.” [Her conception of impasse is also connected to “impassivity,” the attempt to maintain “composure” amidst crisis; it relates to “gestural economies that register norms of self-management that differ according to what kinds of confidence people have enjoyed about the entitlements of their social location” as well as to the body more specifically, “[t]he way the body slows down…to clarify the relation of living on to ongoing crisis and loss.”

“Genre”: Instead of tracking the “waning of affect” Berlant “track[s] the waning of genre,” especially “older realist genres…whose conventions of relating fantasy to ordinary life and whose depictions of the good life now appear to mark archaic expectations about having and building a life.” In her perspective, “[g]enres provide an affective experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art” and, more importantly for Berlant, the “waning of genre frames different kinds of potential openings within and beyond the impasse of adjustment that constant crisis creates.”

“Object of desire”: “[A] cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us.”

“Object of cruel optimism”: It is the “thing within any object to which one passes one’s fantasy of sovereignty for safe-keeping.” Berlant asserts that “[i]n a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity,” which helps us “sustain a coasting sentience” in order to avoid recognizing the enormity of our own sovereignty.”

Questions

• Why is the notion or “genre” of the “impasse” so important to Berlant for re-conceiving the good life?
  • Berlant turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending “crisis ordinariness” and offers the “impasse” as a transitional moment in which we realize that existing “genres” are no longer enough to make sense of the present. Each chapter of Cruel Optimism examines a particular situation of impasse and demonstrates how individuals are not impassive, but rather developing strategies for survival and modes of adjustment for getting by when our good life fantasies are no longer sustainable. The impasse also reveals that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold and, thus, signal crucial sites for understanding how people are developing alternative genres for navigating situations of overwhelming incoherence and precariousness.
• Why is aesthetics central to Berlant’s method for understanding the historical present?
  • Berlant turns to aesthetics not to suggest that the lives of characters are “equivalent to what happens to people but [rather] to see that in the affective scenarios of these works and discourses we can discern claims about the situation of contemporary life.” Berlant also claims that the attrition of the good life fantasy “manifests itself in an emerging set of aesthetic conventions that make a claim to affective realism derived from embodied, affective rhythms of survival,” i.e., the dissolution of certain “genres” and the creation of new ones. Aesthetics for her is therefore deeply connected to our experience of the world; it allows us “to rehabituate our sensorium by taking in new material” and “provides metrics for understanding how we pace and space our encounters with things.”
• How is Berlant’s work in conversation with other theories of affect and the “good life”? (i.e. Sara Ahmed, Jose Munoz, and others). Where does she situate herself critically?
  • Berlant distinguishes her work from Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness through its formalist concerns; in other words, rather than the feeling or experience of optimism, her research focuses on optimistic attachment as a “structure of relationality.” She asserts, “I am seeking out the conditions under which certain attachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings.” Furthermore, Berlant attempts to “produce a materialist context for affect theory” by analyzing various fantasies that permeate the ordinary and demonstrating how such fantasies exert a material impact on people’s lives. She also argues, following a Lacanian tradition as Brian Massumi and Teresa Brennan do, “that affective atmospheres are shared, not solitary, and that bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves.” Berlant situates Cruel Optimism alongside Jose Munoz’s Cruising Utopia (even though he concentrates on the future whereas her interest is in the present) and Ghassan Hage’s Against Paranoid Nationalism (although his work focuses on people’s relationship to the State while her research tracks “zones of labor, neighborhood, and intimacy.”
• How does Berlant structure her archive?
  • Berlant puts Cruel Optimism in conversation with her “national sentimental trilogy–The Anatomy of National Fantasy, The Female Complaint, and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City,” which are works “focusing in particular on how intimate publics work in proximity to normative modes of love and the law.” She claims that this book extends the concerns of her earlier work into the present and that the “archive of this project, straddling the United States and contemporary Europe, looks at precarious bodies, subjectivity, and fantasy in terms of citizenship, race, labor, class, (dis)location, sexuality, and health.” Historically, the “cases” she explores in the text are “linked in relation to the retraction, during the last three decades, of the social democratic promise of the post-Second World War period in the United States and Europe.” Berlant does not go into detail on how she selects the specific works she discusses in each chapter of the book, which also makes for an incredibly eclectic if at times disorienting archive.

Vibrant Matter (2010) Jane Bennett

In the first two chapters of her book Vibrant Matter, Bennett brings out a philosophy that challenges the traditional definition of matter as passive, inactive, and inert. That is to say substances and materials are lifeless. However, Bennett believes that everything is alive, interconnected. She emphasizes the active powers of materials, arguing that it plays an essential role in the emergency of every event.

Most of the time, we think of objects as stable and passive, and humans as the active subjects. We are used to dividing the world into dull matter and vibrant life. This dichotomy between matter and life causes us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formations. Bennett points out that in childhood, people often believe that everything around them in animated. In her writing, she wants to recall such an early perception of the world. According to her, substances aren’t simply alive in a mechanistic way or infused with a transcendent spirit. They are alive in their complex interrelationships, trajectories, and propensities. Bennett shares Bruno Latour’s term ‘actant,’ which is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman.

She states that objects are alive because they have efficacy. They are capable of making a difference, producing effects, and altering the course of events. Bennett was inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s experiment with the idea of a ‘material vitalism,’ according to which vitality is immanent in matter-energy. We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do. In other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body. Bennett aims to theorize an intrinsic vitality of materiality and to dissipate the binaries of life and matter, human and animal, organic and inorganic, in order to call attention to the material vitality.

The Force of Things

In the first chapter, Bennett seeks to highlight a positive, productive power of things, an active role of nonhuman materials in public life. Bennett insists that objects have ‘thing-power,’ the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle. It is impossible for us to understand it systematically, because its unsettling experiences show us how our environment is active and we aren’t dominated subjects.

Bennett tells a story of her own experience, where once she entered a room and saw a glove, some pollen, a dead rat, a bottle cap, and a stick. She couldn’t stop imagining what the story was behind this scene that was caused by each individual object. More importantly, this scene struck her with the awareness of the singularity of each one. Bennett caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that she generally conceived of as inert. She was surprised by the intrinsic power of these things. This vital materiality can never be thrown away. That is to say you will be affected by thing-power rising from any object, even a pile of trash. Bennett also offers an example of a gunpowder residue sample to illustrate that things can be an important intervention in an assemblage. In this case, the gunpowder residue is key evidence that could lead a judge to make a final decision.

Besides organic matter, Bennett mentions that inorganic matter has magnificent vitality. For example, water loops are caused by soliton, self-solitary waves that maintain their shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Their self-organization is much more variable and creative than we’ve ever imagined. Organisms become a special, distributed form of a common material, a particular continuity of water, rock, mineral, etc. From this point of view, humans are composed of a complex web of active bodies and vital materials. Our power is a kind of thing-power. Therefore, humans aren’t autonomous or sovereign subjects. In the process absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mechanism, Bennett gives voice to the vitality of materiality. Realizing the vitality of the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us will generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies and will enable wiser interventions into that ecology.

The Agency of Assemblages

An actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. Bennett develops a theory of distributive agency by examining a real-life effect; a power blackout that affected 50 million people in North America in 2003. She offers an analysis of the electrical power grid as an agentic assemblage. There are two philosophical terms we need to understand, the affective bodies of Spinoza and the notion of assemblage form Deleuze and Guattari

Affective Bodies

Affective bodies means associative bodies in the sense that each is continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies. The power of a body to affect other bodies includes a ‘corresponding and inseparable’ capacity to be affected. There are two equally actual powers, that of acting, and that of suffering action. Because the nature of the affective body is as being both affected and able to affect means it is neither subject nor object, but rather enters into relations with other affective bodies that form a mode. All things are modes of a common substance. Every mode is itself an assemblage of many simple bodies. Both simple bodies and the complex modes have their own conatus. Bennett notes Spinoza’s idea of conative bodies that strive to enhance their power by forming alliances with other bodies. This means that affective bodies enter into relationships with other affective bodies in order to increase their power. The more complex bodies congregate, the better capacity they possess. In the case of a complex body, conatus refers to the effort required to maintain the specific relation of movement and rest that obtains between its parts, a relation that defines the mode as what it is. The maintenance is continual invention because every mode must seek new encounters to creatively compensate for the affections it suffers. Bodies enhance their power in or as mixed assemblages. Bennett suggests that the concept of agency cannot be localized in human bodies but must be distributed across a varied field of matter.

What Is an Assemblage?

In order to think these complex relations, we need to turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage. Bennett explains assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are not governed by any central head. No one materiality or type of material has sufficient capacity to determine consistently the impact of the group. The affects of an assemblage is not the sum of the forces of each materiality considered alone. Various affective bodies come and work together. They form together and break apart for open-ended change. They exist therefore for only particular times and places. The assemblage has a certain vital effectivity called an agency of the assemblage.

Bennett goes on to give an example of how assemblages function in the great blackout of August 2003. The electrical grid is understood as a massive mix of coal, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, profit motives, lifestyles, economic theory, etc. It is impossible to say exactly who or what ’causes’ the blackout. The agency of assemblage is something distributed along a continuum extruding from multiple actants, from an electon flow to a member of Congress.

Bennett introduces the concept of distributive agency which “does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect.” This is distinguished from traditions that define agency as a moral capacity linked to “an advance plan or an intention.” “There are instead always a swarm of vitalities at play. The task becomes to identify the contours of the swarm, and the kind of relations that obtain between its bits…this understanding of agency does not deny the existence of intentionality, but it does see it as less definitive of outcomes. It loosens the connections between efficacy and the moral subject, bringing efficacy closer to the idea of the power to make a difference that calls for a response.”

If we accepted the fact that we’re part of a massive, complex assemblage, then we can never isolate any actor or thing as the ultimate cause of an event. What caused the economic crisis of 2009, for example? Any attempt to locate a single cause immediately fails, and all of these elements are better conceived not only as causes but vibrant actants.

In the final section, Bennett confronts head on the notion of distributed agency, of the agency of assemblages, which exists in tension with a desire to hold people accountable. Were energy speculators guilty for the blackout? The notion of a confederate agency does attenuate the blame game, but it does not thereby abandon the project of identifying the sources of harmful effects. To the contrary, such a notion broadens the range of places to look for sources.

Book review forum in Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 1, no. 3 (2011) Reviewed by Bruce Braun, excerpts

Indeed, bodies of every kind are seen to be capable of affect–they move, combine and recompose as they encounter other bodies, revealing a vitality that is present at every imaginable spatial and temporal scale. Moreover, they move us and move in us; of all the things that Bennett seeks to displace, human sovereignty is perhaps foremost among them.

---

…attending to vibrant matter, she suggests, may lead us to engage with the world differently, and in particular to embrace more ‘ecological’ modes of existence. Presumably this will happen because we will be more aware of the ways that our existence is conditioned by and constituted through a lively materiality that both precedes and exceeds us.

---

They speak of an ‘eventful’ world, a world in which becoming is privileged over being, where the pre-individual takes priority over the individual, and where a complex non-linear causality interrupts our commonsense assumption of a mechanistic world.

---

No earthworms, no humans. But does this make earthworms political actors, or, for that matter, hurricanes, viruses and electrical grids? Bennett thinks it does, provided we see political activity as something like an ecosystem in which bodies of all sorts are encountering other bodies, resulting in the provisional formation of publics that are provoked into being by common problems. A public, then, is a cluster of bodies harmed by the actions of others, such that their powers are diminished.

Book review, Reviewed by Karen Weingarten in Configurations, excerpt

This is a book that seeks to complicate the terms “life” and “matter,” but even more importantly, it seeks to define a politics–one that Bennett calls “vital materiality”–which questions the distinction that is at the heart of the American system: namely, that human beings are the supreme and most important life form. Ultimately, underlying her political philosophy is that if–as humans–we accept on a political level that all things–living and not–are in Gilles Deleuze’s words “ontologically one, formally diverse,” then, according to Bennett, “human decency and a decent politics” would emerge.

Of Grammatology (1967) Jacques Derrida

Derrida’s monumental work Of Grammatology (1967) is his most representative work. Of Grammatology is an examination of the relation between speech and writing, and it is an investigation of how speech and writing develop as forms of language. Derrida argues that writing has often been considered to be derived from speech, and he says that this attitude has been reflected in many philosophic and scientific investigations on the origin of language. He says that the tendency to consider writing as an expression of speech has led to the assumption that speech is closer than writing to the truth or logos of meaning and representation. He explains that the development of language occurs through an interplay of speech and writing and that because of this interplay, neither speech nor writing may properly be described as being more important to the development of language.

Of Grammatology is divided into two parts. Part I is entitled “Writing before the Letter,” and Part II is entitled “Nature, Culture, Writing.” Part I describes the traditional views of the origin of writing, and explains how these views have subordinated the theory of writing to the theory of speech. Part II uses this explanatory method to deconstruct various texts in such fields as linguistics (Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics), anthropology (Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques), and philosophy (Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages).

Even though his Of Grammatology is a comparatively early work, it offers a classic statement of deconstructive processes and a detailed formulation of Derrida’s theories of written language. Parts of the text were composed in 1965 as reviews of books on writing by Madeleine V. David and Andre Leroi-Gourhan and a collection of papers from a colloquium entitle L’Ecriture et la psychologie des peuples. These reviews in substantially their original form appear in Part I, Chapter 3. Similarly, much of Derrida’s discussion of Levi-Strauss, first published in 1965 in the Levi-Strauss issue of Cahiers pour l’analyse, reappears in Part II, Chapter 1. The complete text of De la Grammatologie, which Derrida calls a two-part essay, was translated into English by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in 1976. While her own accomplishment in this translation is superb, it is apparent from her detailed translator’s preface that Derrida served, however modestly, as the translator’s collaborator.

Of Grammatology opens with a preface and an exergue. The preface outlines the structure of the text: Part I offers “a theoretical matrix,” which is then tested in Part II by a reading of the “age of Rousseau.” For Derrida, Rousseau’s example and influence extend undiminished from the eighteenth century to our own time. To read the age of Rousseau is to assess the structures of thought that reach from the years Rousseau wrote to the present. Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida himself are in this sense Rousseauists. Not only, however, is this philosopher who has been marginalized by historians of philosophy allowed to give his name to the chronological expanse that includes Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, but also Derrida has the courage to select the little-known text of the Essay on the Origin of Languages in order to read the age of Rousseau and to test the theoretical work of Part I of Of Grammatology.

As he proceeds with his fundamental project “to produce the problems of critical reading,” Derrida, while having “no ambition to illustrate a new method,” demonstrates the necessity that reading free itself “from the classical categories of history…and perhaps above all, from the categories of the history of philosophy.” Already Derrida anticipates ways in which Of Grammatology will be misread. Its methods are not new; rather, they have been overridden, not by history, but by a mode of historical writing that neglect (or refuses) to view the past “in every respect as a text.” Although it continues to be claimed that Of Grammatology’s (or deconstruction’s) project is anti-historical and apolitical, Derrida’s argument, forcefully announced on the first page of his text, refutes this claim in advance. Of Grammatology ‘reads’ the age of Rousseau by recovering the textual remains of its past, texts that intervening historians have systematically left unread, justifying their neglect by invoking such unexamined categories as philosophy and literature and by assigning Rousseau to the latter in the interests of purifying the history of philosophy.

Of Grammatology’s preface concludes by forecasting a fundamental contradiction in the age of Rousseau: on the one hand, it values documentation and the protocols of historiography–“legibility and the efficacy of a model.” But even as it sets about the recovery of the past, it necessarily disrupts it, as will be seen in Derrida’s later critique on Levi-Strauss, an as yet unnamed modern anthropologist of the preface final sentence. Despite the surprises of the preface, its tone is quiet and restrained, especially in contrast to the messianic call of the exergue. Derrida does not set himself above or apart from the age he is about to read, nor is he claiming himself immune to the contradictions and disruptions of previous Rousseauist historians. Indeed, all of the texts he reads–Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss–he reads with compassionate respect and with a recognition of his own susceptibility to the errors he identifies in others.

In this vein the exergue outlines Of Grammatology as a field of thought by focusing on unexamined metaphysical assumptions concerning phonetic writing in historical linguistics and on the first movements towards the dislocation of those assumptions. Like the preface, the exergue illuminates what has previously been kept hidden or obscure. An exergue, though part of the text, claims to remain outside the work (ex + ergon [work]), or more technically, it is the small space on the reverse side of a coin beneath the principal device where an inscription may be found. This particular piece of writing–the portion Of Grammatology entitled ‘Exergue‘–is both outside of and part of the text.

The exergue begins with three numbered quotations. The first, by way of metaphor, identifies a grammatologist with the sun and the Babylonian sun-god (Samas) with the light that illuminates the earth, making the land appear a piece of writing (Cuneiform signs), in striking similarity to the grammatological metaphors of the biblical Psalm 19. The secon quotation (from Rousseau’s Essay) identifies the practice of three forms of writing with three progressive stages in the history of civilization. The final quotation (from Hegel), by an exercise in metonymy, makes the ethnocentrism of Rousseau’s history explicit in its claim for the superior intelligence of alphabetic script (and by implication, those peoples who use it). The first sentence of Derrida’s own exergue, following these quotations, identifies the quotations themselves as a “triple exergue,” the writing outside the writing that is outside the text. The witty claim here is that writing as a concept has been controlled by the kind of ethnocentrism manifested in the three quotations: religion, social history, and philosophy disguise ethnocentrism as logocentrism. The word encumbered by the weight of unexamined metaphysical assumptions becomes the defining essence of god, civilization, and philosophy.

Derrida proceeds to enumerate three ways by which logocentrism as the agent of ethnocentrism imposes itself on the world. As “the concept of writing” (here distinguished from the physical process of producing signs with pen or keyboard), logocentrism generates a dissimulated history of phonetic writing even as it proceeds to inscribe its own history; as “the history of…metaphysics” from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, it both identifies the origin of truth with the logos and the history of truth with the repression of writing as the concept of science, it both assigns language and logic central importance for the project of science and announces its dissatisfaction with phonetic writing.

The future, which Of Grammatology works to bring about by exploiting the stresses and cracks in the structure of the present historical-metaphysical age, can only be proclaimed or presented by Of Grammatology itself, because that future puts “into question the values of sign, word, and writing.” For the representation of that future, there is no exergue, nothing legitimately outside the inscription or text of the moment. Thus, Of Grammatology is a fecund, liberating force that for the moment is bound in by traditional notions of metaphor, metaphysics, and theology. It nonetheless asserts itself in multiple and interdisciplinary ways, although it can never claim its own essentiality or toe unity of its project, given its basic distrust of all essentialisms and all easy claims of reconciling unities.

The Life of the Mind (1977) Hannah Arendt

In 1973, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures–an annual series established in 1888 aiming “to promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term,” bridging science, philosophy, spirituality, an ancient quest of enduring urgency to this day. Arendt’s lecture was later expanded and published as The Life of the Mind, an immeasurably stimulating exploration of thinking–a process we take for so obvious and granted as to be of no interest, yet one bridled with complexities and paradoxes that often keep us from seeing the true nature of reality. With extraordinary intellectual elegance, Arendt draws “a distinguishing line between truth and meaning, between knowing and thinking,” and makes a powerful case for the importance of that line in the human experience.

Arendt considers how thinking links the vita activa, or active life, and the vita contemplativa, or contemplative mind, touching on Montaigne’s dual meaning of meditation, and traces the evolution of this relationship as society moved from religious to scientific dogma:

Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest. According to traditions of Christian time, when philosophy had become the handmaiden of theology, thinking became meditation, and meditation again ended in contemplation, a kind of blessed state of the soul where the mind was no longer stretching out to know the truth but, in anticipation of a future state, received it temporarily in intuition…With the rise of the modern age, thinking became chiefly the handmaiden of science, of organized knowledge; and even though thinking then grew extremely active, following modernity’s crucial conviction that I can know only what I myself make, it was Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the Science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by apperances.

The disciplines called metaphysics or philosophy, Arendt notes, came to inhabit the world beyond sense-perceptions and appearances, while science claimed the world of common-sense reasoning and perceptions validated by empirical means. The latter is plagued by “the scandal of reason”–the idea that “our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.” (Four decades later, Sam Harris would capture this beautifully: “There is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”) But Arendt is most intensely concerned with the world we inhabit when we surrender to thought: What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow-men, are together with no one but ourselves?

To begin solving this riddle, Arendt turns to Kant’s famous distinction between Verstand, or intellect, which seeks to grasp what the sense perceive, and Vernunft, or reason, which is concerned with the higher-order desire for understanding the deeper meaning behind such sensory input; while intellect is driven by cognition, reason is concerned with the unknowable. He memorably wrote, “The aim of metaphysics…is to extend, albeit only negatively, our use of reason beyond the limitations of the sensorily given world, that is, to eliminate the obstacles by which reason hinders itself.”

Arendt unpacks Kant’s legacy and its enduring paradox, which plays out just as vibrantly in our ever-timely struggle to differentiate between wisdom and knowledge: The great obstacle that reasons (Vernunft) puts in its own way arises from the side of the intellect (Verstand) and the entirely justified criteria it has established for its own purposes, that is, for quenching our thirst, and meeting our need, for knowledge and cognition…The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

This vital distinction between truth and meaning is also found in the fault line between science and common sense. Arendt considers how science’s over-reliance on Verstand might give rise to the very reductionism that becomes science’s greatest obstacle to tussling with the unknowable:

…something very similar seems, at first glance, to be true of the modern scientist who constantly destroys authentic semblances without, however, destroying his own sensation of reality, telling him, as it tells us, that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. It was thinking that enabled men to penetrate the appearances and unmask them as semblances, albeit authentic ones; common-sense reasoning would never have dared to upset so radically all the plausibilities of our sensory apparatus…Thinking, no doubt, plays an enormous role in every scientific enterprise, but it is the role of a means to an end; the end is determined by a decision about what is worthwhile knowing, and this decision cannot be scientific.

This sounds remarkably like the notion of moral wisdom–the necessarily subjective values-based framework that, by its very nature, transcends the realm of science and absolute truth, rising to the level of relative meaning. Adding to history’s finest definitions of science, Arendt writes:

The end is cognition or knowledge, which, having been obtained, clearly belongs to the world of apperances; once established as truth, it comes part and parcel of the world. Cognition and the thirst for knowledge never leave the world of apperances altogether; if the scientists withdraw from it in order to “think,” it is only in order to find better, more promising approaches, called methods, toward it. Science in this respect is but an enormously refined prolongation of common-sense reasoning in whch sense illusions are constantly dissipated just as errors in science are corrected. The criterion in both cases is evidence, which as such is inherent in a world of apperances. Ands ince it is in the very nature of apperances to reveal and to conceal, every correction and every dis-illusion “is the loss of one evidence only because it is the acquisition of another evidence,” in the words of Merleau-Ponty. Nothing, even in science’s own understanding of the scientific enterprise, guarantees that the new evidence will prove to be more reliable than the discarded evidence.

And therein lies the paradox of science–the idea that is aim is to dispel ignorance with knowledge, but it is also, at its best, driven wholly by ignorance. In a sentiment that Carl Sagan would come to echo twelve years later in his own Gifford lecture–“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.” Arendt writes:

The very concept of an unlimited progress, which accompanied the rise of modern science, and has remained its dominant inspiring principle, is the best documentation of the fact that all science still moves within the realm of common sense experience, subject to corrigible error and deception. When the experience of constant correction in scientific research is generalized, it leads into the curious “better and better,” “truer and truer,” that is, into the boundlessness of progress with its inherent admission that the good and the true are unattainable. If they were ever attained, the thirst for knowledge would be quenched and the search for cognition would come to an end.

In considering this “illusion of a never-ending process–the process of progress,” she returns to Kant’s crucial distinction between reason and intellect:

The questions raised by our thirst for knowledge arise from our curiosity about the world, our desire to investigate whatever is given to our sensory apparatus…The questions raised by the desire to know are in principle all answerable by common-sense experience and common-sense reasoning; they are exposed to corrigible error and illusion in the same way as sense perceptions and experiences. Even the relentlessness of modern science’s Progress, which constantly corrects itself by discarding the answers and reformulating the questions, does not contradict science’s basic goal–to see and to know the world as it is given to the senses–and its concept of truth is derived from the common-sense experience of irrefutable evidence, which dispels error and illusion. But the question raised by thinking and which it is in reason’s very nature to raise–questions of meaning–are all unanswerable by common sense and the refinement of it we call science. The quest for meaning is “meaningless” to common sense and common-sense reasoning because it is the sixth sense’s function to fit us into the world of appearances and make us at home in the world given by first our five sense; there we are and no questions asked.

The disconnect between the common-sense criteria of science and the quest for meaning, Arendt argues, reverts to the original question of thinking and the limitations of “truth”:

To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know. Thinking can and must be employed in the attempt to know, but in the exercise of this function it is never itself; it is but the handmaiden of an altogether different enterprise.

Arendt’s most poignant point explores what that enterprise might be, speaking to the power of asking good questions and the idea that getting lost is how we find meaning:

By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that men, if they were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded…While our thirst for knowledge may be unquenchable because of the immensity of the unknown, the activity itself leaves behind a growing treasure of knowledge that is retained and kept in store by every civilization as part and parcel of its world. The loss of this accumulation and of the technical expertise required to conserve and increase it inevitably spells the end of this particular world.

A Secular Age (2007) Charles Taylor

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age considers in detail the character of the various intellectual and social transformations in the West over the last five hundred years which have led to our current secular age. In doing so, Taylor presents a new understanding of secularity, not so much in terms of the falling away of belief in God or the receding of religion from the public square–although he does not deny the importance of these–but in terms of the transition from a society in which it was virtually impossible to challenge belief in God to one in which belief in God is one of the multiple, contested options. In particular, he opposes what he calls subtraction accounts, which explain the rise of secularism in terms of the realisation and assertion of innate aspects of the human character which became possible with the Enlightenment removal of religious constraints, arguing the need to pay careful attention to changing conditions belief and the construction of new images of the self and society. The work is divided into five sections, four of which are historical and the fifth constructive.

The first section on the work of Reform examines the medieval and Reformation roots of secularism through to the beginning of the Enlightenment. It traces the transition from an enchanted world, in which God and spiritual forces pervaded society and directly influenced its structuring and self-definition, to the disenchanted world of individual minds and bounded or buffered selves. Taylor describes the enchanted world of medieval Catholicism as embodying an equilibrium based on a hierarchical complementarity which encoded a marked division between spiritual and temporal sections of society. Likewise life was lived within the ebb and flow of higher and ordinary times, punctuated by the riot of the carnival, with religious commitment preserved through continual focusing and dissipation. Disrupting this equilibrium and disturbing the enchanted view of self and society was the movement of Reform, which had its roots in the early centuries of the Church but accelerated markedly in the late medieval period. Reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, sought to remake the whole of society after the pattern of the higher, spiritual vocations. Characteristic of Reform was an inward turn of devotion and a profound critique of popular piety, and thus of the enchanted world, as idolatrous and immoral. In the Reformation itself this Reform fervour became iconoclastic, uprooting the old sacramental and hierarchical dispensation and replacing it with the great levelling doctrines of individual salvation and justification by faith alone.

Taylor argues that closely connected to the progress of Reform was the rise of the disciplinary society and the emergence of the modern moral order. Grounding both developments was a radically altered view of nature, the origins of which he traces especially to Nominalist philosophy. This replaced the old view of nature as endowed with intrinsic purpose and essence with a new view of it as indeterminate and possessing only extrinsic purpose. In this sense nature was no longer simply viewed as a given but became, at least in principle, infinitely malleable. When turned inward this stance of instrumental reason had far-reaching effects. For rather than passively accepting his own nature, man began the process of actively remaking himself. Crucial to this was a voluntarist understanding of the will as the engine of moral change–another important legacy of Nominalism.

Taylor traces this voluntarist understanding through diverse movements including the Renaissance culture of civility, late-medieval Reform and the Calvinist Reformation, arguing that all of these manifest in different ways a shared desire to transform the ‘raw nature’ of humanity. However, he sees its culmination in the movement of Neo-Stoicism, embodied by Lipsius and Descartes. For it was the Stoic norm of detachment which led both to a new ethic of rational control and discipline and a transformed view of ‘buffered identity.’ Applied to the political sphere this led to an unprecedented attempt to transform, or discipline, society through the application of instrumental reason. As Taylor suggests, it was this disengaged, disciplined stance which became ‘an essential part of the defining repertory’ of modernity. In the long term its effect lay in what he terms the ‘great disembedding.’ Where before man was unable to imagine himself outside of a particular social context, now for the first time the stance of detachment made this possible. Disembedded, society fragmented from a unified whole into a collection of buffered individuals. Indeed, society itself now became defined in terms of transactions and exchanges between individuals promoting a new worldview of the economy. Associated with this were further transformations, seen especially in the development of the public square and the direct-access society, in which the old patterns of mediated exchange was replaced with a new immediacy and simultaneity of relation.

In Part 2, Taylor turns back to his main purpose, explaining the rise of exclusive humanism. His argument is that this came about through the intermediate stage of providential deism. The first key feature of this is what Taylor calls the ‘anthropocentric shift’ traceable to thinkers like Tindal and Locke. He identifies two key features of this:

• First, the idea that God’s plan for human life encompassed only human flourings;
• and second, the increasing understanding that we can chieve this with our unaided forces.

The denial of transformation and eclipse of grace led to a marked receding of transcendence and a prioritizing of the immanent sphere. With this the ‘hitherto unthought’–exclusive humanism–began to seem thinkable. Coupled with the rise of polite society among the elites, which began to see essential elements of religion as ‘superstition’ or ‘fanaticism,’ for the first time moral and spiritual resources began to be experienced as purely immanent. In particular, the renewed confidence in human nature–a radical departure from the Augustinian/Calvinist position which had previously held sway–became encapsulated in the ideal of universal benevolence which characterised Enlightenment ethics. This receding of God from the moral order was paralleled by a similar receding from the natural order. Increasingly, God began to be conceived of in impersonal terms, as the supreme architect of the universe who related to his creation only through the natural laws he had instituted. There was thus a widespread rejection of the notion of an active, interventionist God, seen clearly in the contemporary critique of miracles. Thus while God had not yet disappeared from the picture, he had been decisively banished from all but the most distant involvement with his creation.

In Part 3, Taylor turns to consideration of what he calls the ‘nova effect,’ the explosion of ethical, religious, and atheistic options which took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he suggests, in the face of the opposition between orthodoxy and unbelief, many were cross-pressured, looking for a third way. This dynamic produced a kind of nova as more and more different ‘third ways’ are generated and proliferate in a chain reaction. In particular, as the eighteenth century proceeded, many began to feel a deep malaise at the disenchanted world of Deism, seeking to break out of their buffered identities. However, many also felt that they simply could not return to religion and so began to search for different ways to compensate for the feeling of lost transcendence. Taylor suggests that this took three quite different forms. The first, which he calls ‘axes of resonance,’ refers to those who saw the Deist understanding of universal charity and benevolence as far too tame, holding that the modern moral order eclipses all human potential for moral ascent. Instead they demanded higher standards, arguing for the power of humans to transcend themselves. The second is the romantic axis and refers to those who pursued a kind of fusion of ordinary human desire and a higher goal. It came to identify beauty as this goal and rebelled against the rationalism of the buffered identity. Both these axes were capable of both Christian and humanist development. The final, tragic axis, however, was opposed to both Christianity and the modern moral order as too facile and optimistic. It argued the need to heroically face up to the tragedy of human life. In celebrating death and godlessness it opened up a new, disturbing but yet for many compelling, facet of unbelief.

From this general description, Taylor turns to a more detailed account of how this space between belief and unbelief opened up, focusing on two connected transitions. The first is what he calls a shift in cosmic imaginary. Where before the world was perceived as a finite, ordered cosmos it now, particularly with the advances of science, began to be seen as infinite in space and time. At one and the same time this both reinforced man’s sense of smallness–and his concomitant sense of awe–and opened him up to a new sense of affinity with nature, through the dawning awareness that he himself has evolved from nature. Thus man came in contact with the sublime and with a new appreciation of his own unplumbed depths with all the terror and exhilaration that inspired. Yet, significantly, the sublime could be experienced either as purely immanent or as a new register of transcendence, making it a kind of neutral space between the camps of belief and unbelief. This is closely related to the second shift which Taylor detects, and which he argues was again associated with Romanticism. This shift was an artistic shift from art as mimesis–the imitation of reality–to art as expressing its own language and meaning. Taylor argues that this turn to the ‘subtler language’ was associated with the breakdown of the old, hierarchical view of reality and particularly the notion of correspondence between different orders of being. In place of this, art began to forge its own reality and in doing so became a powerful expression of the immanent potentiality of man, once again revealing new, undreamt depths to the human psyche. In this way art, like nature, began to present an important middle ground between belief and unbelief.

In the concluding chapter of Part 3, Taylor traces the ‘expanding universe of unbelief’ through into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking England and France as case studies. His claim is that in both cases, the nova effect related to the tension between ideals and counter-ideals of the moral order of society. In the English case, Taylor argues that a new vector emerged in the cross-pressure between the sense of flatness and belief in an impersonal order. This movement, embodied by Carlyle and Arnold, strove to maintain the values of Christianity while shedding much of its doctrinal content. In this way they sought to embody what they regarded as the essential spirit of Christianity for a new age. Coupled with this development was a new binding of Christianity both to an ethos of discipline–an effect of the evangelical movement–and to national identity. The result was a stripped-down Victorian Christianity of duty and altruism, embodied in the institutions of Empire such as the public schools. Yet as this new Christian order was established, it too began to feel flat and so we find an important counter-ideal of society developing, stemming from Wordsworth and the Romantics. This reached its height with the Bloomsbury movement which revolted against the repressive values of Victorian Christianity in the name of feeling and self-expression.

In nineteenth-century France, Taylor argues, we can find an analogous pattern of ideal and counter-ideal embodied in the tensions between the supporters of the monarchy and the Republic. Somewhat like the proponents of the new Victorian Christianity the French monarchists quickly realised that the values of the ancien regime could no longer rest on the same metaphysical basis. They therefore grounded them in terms of respect for order and authority, detaching them from their original mooring in the Christian faith. In time, however, both the monarchial and Republican order came to seem flat. This led to revolt against the established orders in the name of a new sense of transcendence, as can be seen in the burgeoning youth movements of the time. Taylor concludes by suggesting that in France and England, as well as across Europe, matters came to a head in the First World War. This shattered both the synthesis of Christianity and civilsational order and the belligerent confidence of the youth movements, opening the way for a new conception of the moral order of society to emerge.

In Part 4, Taylor takes up the story of secularisation, again arguing that the delinking of religion from society, which began in the nineteenth century and accelerated in the twentieth, has opened up an important new niche for religion. In suggesting this Taylor reacts against the tendency of secularisation theory to uphold the inevitability of religious decline, arguing instead that the whole debate must be reconfigured in terms of the cross-pressures of belief and unbelief and the way in which new spiritual options are created and multiply. In order to demonstrate this he contrasts the ideal type of the ancien regime–in which there is an order of hierarchical complementarity and a mediated structure of access to society–to that of what he calls the age of mobilisation–in which people are persuaded, pushed or corralled into new forms of Church and society. What is different here, Taylor argues, is that now, for the first time, the social, political, and ecclesiastical structures that people rely on had to be mobilised into existence, they cannot simply be assumed. In religious terms an important facet of this is the movement away from national Church structures to free churches and denominations or to affinity groups within a larger Church. Thus at the same time as many people left the churches, many others founded new ecclesial forms with their own distinctive ethos and discipline. These were not only decoupled from wider society, but also had to be opted into. In these new forms of spirituality the notion of the festive–seen in Catholic pilgrimages or evangelical revival meetings–had an important place, providing new sites for collective access to transcendence. In political terms it can be seen in the construction of reinvigorated national identities and the emergence of lobby groups and trade unions. What is the characteristic of the age of mobilisation is not only the breakdown of old connections between religion and society but the formation of a new, more individualistic, religious mentality, initmately connected to notions of spirituality, discipline, political identity, and civilisational order. In this way what were previously features of elite religion now attained a much wider valency.

As Taylor suggests, the tightly organised churches which emerged out of the age of mobilisation were set up for a precipitate fall. This fall, which had its epicentre in the Sixties, has led to the formation of profoundly altered conditions of belief in our society. This new age of authenticity is characterised by a culture of expressive individualism, which owes a considerable debt to Romanticism. The revolts of the Sixties were against the buffered self and culture of the Fifties which seemed to many conformist and crushing. Their aim was to break down all the barriers that society had erected to self-realisation and flourishing, particularly those between reason and sensuality. As Taylor suggests, their legacy has led to a marked change in social and moral imaginary. Thus not only did it break down the old connections between Christianity and society, particularly in the sexual revolution, but it also opened up new spheres of social interaction, like fashion, and new experiences of transcendence, such as the football match or rave. Taylor argues that the effect of these changes on religion have been highly complex. On the one hand, people are increasingly looking for a life of greater immediacy, spontaneity and spiritual depth than can be provided for them in the immanent order of unbelief, while on the other hand many do not find the authenticity and wholeness that they desire in the established (mobilised) forms of religion. This has created an important tension between the new forms of spiritual quest and the old patterns of authority which seek to foreclose them. Alongside this is the phenomenon of diffusive Christianity, in which people distance themselves from established forms of religion yet at the same time are unwilling to entirely break with them. Taylor concludes his account of religion today by suggesting that its future is likely to be determined by the tension between spiritual quest and foreclosing authority and the important cross-pressure that this produces.

In Part 5, Taylor turns to give a theoretical account of the current options available to us in the secular age–whether of belief or unbelief–and the tensions between them. Here he first rehearses his argument that through the progressive buffering of self and the decoupling of grace and nature–developments associated with the revolutions of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries–a new view of immanent self-sufficient order developed. It is important to note, however, the immanent frame was able to develop in three directions. It could remain open to transcendence, it could become utterly closed to transcendence or it could exist in the cross-pressure of transcendence and immanence. With this established, Taylor turns to consider the different ways in which the immanent frame closed in on itself. For against the prevailing tendency in secularisation theory he insists on the need to explain this closure, rather than simply assume it as natural, obvious, or inevitable. Taylor argues that all of these ways are variants of the ‘coming of age’ scenario. They all assume that religion is childish and lacks the courage to face up to reality and in the name of maturity proposes a stance of unbelief. It is this underlying assumption which reinforces their strident claims that they are denying religion in the name of reason and science, blinding them to the fact that there are many rational, scientific people who see things entirely differently. This coming of age scenario is even more pronounced in what Taylor calls the counter-Enlightenment. For here it is not just that freed from illusion humans come to establish the true facts about the world, but that they come to dictate the very values they live by. In this way closure comes from a stance of self-authorisation. The acceptance that we live in a meaningless universe leads to the exhilarating sense that we can create out own meanings. Under such a powerful perspective the closed take on immanence becomes entirely axiomatic.

From an outline of the immanent frame and its closure Taylor moves on to the cross-pressures that most of us experience. For as Taylor suggests the salient feature of today’s Western society is not so much the retreat of religious belief but the mutual fragilisation of competing religious and nonreligious, believing and nonbelieving options. In particular he argues that the debate between belief and unbelief centres not on issues of metaphysics, theology, or even science, but rather on the ethical presuppositions that underlie these different stances. Crucial, therefore, is the question of what fullness or flourishing consists in.

From this perspective, Taylor turns to the two major dilemmas which he sees as confronting both faith and unbelief. The first is the question of how to define moral and spiritual aspirations for human beings while showing a path to transformation which does not crush, mutilate, or deny what is essential to our humanity. For while religious desire to transcend humanity might threaten the affirmation of human values, the unbelieving assertion of human values risks equally cutting off all pathways to transcendence. The second dilemma concerns the problem of violence. While this is often seen as a religious problem, Taylor instead points to the deep metaphysical roots of violence in human nature. As he puts it, the dilemma facing both religious and nonreligious positions is that the struggle against evil can itself generate evil, so that the goodness of the final goal is itself undone in the process of trying to reach it. He argues that the only escape from this spiral of violence is the path of renunciation, seen supremely in Christ but also with its definite nonreligious analogues. For it is only in doing this that forgiveness and reconciliation can actually be achieved by transcending the natural impulse for violent retaliation. Realising this, he suggets, is the challenge that faces all of humanity, whether believing or unbelieving.

In light of these dilemmas, the question that confronts us, Taylor argues, is that of the ‘meaning of meaning’–that is, the question of what are the sources of the deepest meanings in our lives. It is because this question still confronts us that the frontiers of modernity remain unquiet. In this sense the buffered self, the homogenous time and the horizontal structure of the immanent frame are inherently fragile. For constantly aspects of the communal, the vertical and the higher are breaking into them–particularly in the mode which Taylor calls the ‘festive.’ However, what most troubles the modern identity, he argues, is death itself. For death threatens to separate us from everything that the immanent frame wants to proclaim as important, including supremely love. Of course this is a predicament shared by religion, yet in transcending death and providing an eternal ground for love religion provides a meaningful solution to the problem of death. Likewise, Taylor suggests that the immanent Englightenment provides another important resolution in the celebration of death. What is clear, however, is that it is the universal condition of death which keeps alive this question of the meaning of meaning, constantly prodding people from their immanent perspectives and preventing them from settling down to comfortable unbelief.

Taylor’s final chapter offers a discussion of those who have broken out of the immanent frame. All of these, he suggests, are examples of a new experience of fullness and the higher which have a transformative impact on their lives. They are thus important for us to study in order to gain an understanding of what lies outside the immanent frame of secularity. Focusing on Christian examples, he argues that these conversions often possess a twofold aspect, combining a sense that the immanent order of psychological or moral self-understanding is deeply flawed with an awareness of a larger, transcendent order which can alone make sense of their lives. However, while they involve an important reconnection with the Christian tradition, Taylor is clear that they cannot be seen simply as repristinations of this tradition. Instead they are responses to the immanent order they come out of, which remain in important ways shaped by this immanent order. His first example is that of Peguy, whose concept of faithfulness to the Christian tradition excluded a simple return to it. Against the mobilising tendencies of the Catholic Church, he argued for the need for each person to connect with his or her own ‘mystique.’ Yet in connecting this mystique to the higher aspirations of the Church he remained faithful to the essence of Christianity. His other example is that of Hopkins, whose search for a new poetic language, inspired by Romanticism, drew him to a reinvigorated Christianity. Yet, as Taylor suggests, in articulating a new kind of connection to the higher, Hopkins never lost sight of the fundamental individuality of things–their inscape. Instead, his genius was to reconnect the immanent world in all of its marvelous diversity to its transcendent source in God.

In light of these itineraries of conversion, Taylor concludes by mapping out two possible paths for the future. The first, which he rejects, is that of an inexorable decline of religions as foreseen by secularisation theorists. The second, his own prediction, is that life will continue to be lived out within the tension of the transcendent and immanent. For paradoxically, history has shown, it is when immanence becomes most entrenched that transcendence is most likely to break out again, albeit in new and often bewilderingly diverse forms. In this sense the story of how we got here remains inextricably bound with out account of where we are today.

Black Prometheus (2016) Jared Hickman

In Black Reconstruction in America (1935), W.E.B. Du Bois argued that the origins of the modern world are rooted in racial slavery. Du Bois’s straightforward and profound argument lies at the heart of Jared Hickman’s book. Black Prometheus provides a thorough reevaluation of “modernity” in which racial slavery is front and center. As Hickman shows, the Prometheus myth manifested in a myriad of ways over time and served specific purposes of either affirming or critiquing the cosmic status quo. For example, the Platonic version in Protagoras downplayed the hostility between Prometheus and Zeus where the latter absorbed the former’s convictions and thereby reinforced his political power. In essence, the rebelliousness of Prometheus was elided in favor of affirming Zeus’s position. This sanitized version, stripped of Promethean resistance, functioned as a “Platonic-cum-Christian political theology of the Absolute.” Hickman is most interested in this conceptualization of the Promethean myth and how black intellectuals challenged it.

For Hickman, the year 1492 is essential, as the world fundamentally changed and with it the application of the myth. Euro-Christians justified colonialism in the Americas with what Hickman calls “anthropological Absolutism,” which was the notion that they were ordained by God to serve His will and “save” non-Europeans. In other words, if indigenous people and enslaved Africans suffered in the process, that was simply part of God’s plan. From the historical context coupled with the advent of racial slavery, Hickman argues, emerged dual Prometheuses, one of which revitalized the rebellion narrative during the Age of Revolutions. Black resistance to racial slavery in the Americas fundamentally altered the Euro-Christian absolutist Prometheus myth and turned it on its head. Thus a new politicized theology of the myth emerged through the writings of Olaudah Equiano and subsequent slave narratives which valorized slave rebellion, centered Africa in global history, and categorically rejected Euro-Christian absolutism. The term “black Prometheus” refers to this reconceptualization of the ancient myth that emphasized black agency and rebellion. Hickman’s main argument is “that the full possibilities and implications of Prometheus’s act of political-theological rebellion only became legible though a high-stakes racial coding in global modernity. Competing articulations of the myth–the perpetuation of the Euro-Christan Absolute in dialectical opposition to the racialized “other” or “African” and enslaved Africans and their descendants’ rebellion against the status quo in favor of a “black revolutionary immanence”–form the crux of Hickman’s critical analysis which is rich in breadth and depth. The heart of the book is devoted to two sections–“Prometheus of Africa” and “Prometheus of Caucasus.” Each has two chapters in which Hickman delineates the myths, its historical functions, and the centrality of race. The final section examines the literary history of slave rebellions.

In Chapter 3, Hickman uses Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) as a historical example of black Prometheanism. He carefully dissects G.W.F. Hegel’s racist othering of Africa and Karl Marx’s universal emancipation argument via the white proletariat, both of which are encumbered with the dialectic of the Absolute. Using Douglass’s remarkable life story and escape from bondage, Hickman demonstrates that even when Douglass reached the free states, he was not really free as that very notion was defined in relation to black unfreedom, whether it was through enslavement in the South or the nominal freedom of African Americans in northern states. The dialectic of the Absolute, represented in Hegel and Marx, and exemplified in the definition of American freedom, is what Hickman argues Douglass was up against in his search for meaningful liberation. Only through a repudiation of the Absolute, Hickman maintains, could Douglass’s unbinding as a black Prometheus give meaning to universal freedom. And central for Hickman is Douglass’s critical engagement with, contra Marx, the Euro-American religious underpinnings of antebellum race relations. It is Douglass’s anti-theism, Hickman ultimately argues, that places him on the same philosophical plan as Marx when it comes to a universalist history of global modernity and radicalism. Indeed, the Douglass example underscores Hickman’s broader critique of secularization that is woven through the analysis.

A question left to future scholars is how Hickman’s arguments apply to slave societies in Latin America, where racial slavery in the Americas first took root. A more direct engagement with black Christianity throughout the Americas–such as enslaved Africans’ utilization of Christian practices to ameliorate their conditions and gain legal freedom in places across Spanish America, such as New Spain–would have enriched the analysis. If black people interpreted Byron’s words as a call for slave rebellion, the same logic need apply to their use of Christianity.