If I understand Santer and, in turn, his understanding of the other thinkers he uses to construct his argument (and that is a big if), the barrier to neighborly univeralism – one not dependent on reducing all people to a lowest common denominator of humanity, but also avoiding the particularist trap of division through the promotion of difference – is the “super-ego attachment” he first describes in detail on pp. 104-5. This attachment is born from the “matter or materiality at the heart of the neighbor, the excess that makes the neighbor irreducible to the ‘political animal’” (104). (One question: what is the relationship between this materiality and the ‘unknowable alien kernel’ we encounter in Reinhard and Zizek? Are they the same?)
A reorientation toward a neighborly understanding of society would involve a “miracle” involving the “intervention into and suspension of this dimension of super-ego attachment” (105) because it is this super-ego attachment that leads to “fantasies of exception”/transgressive desires resulting from boundaries upon them that the law attempts to set (130). In other words, if we can stop defining ourselves in terms of exception, we can be “without restraint, exposed to the proximity of the neighbor” (131). This would constitute a “miracle” in Santner-ian terms, and for Santner, a source of that miracle is divine love – the love of God - as demonstrated by Rosenzweig (133). In other words, the fact of divine love can authorize the miracle - the turn away from transgressive exceptionalism. (Another question: how does this work? The Pauline/Agamben sections were the most challenging for me.)
Yet Santer stops short of calling for a return to belief as a path toward a modern miracle of neighborly thinking. He calls for “postsecular thinking,” rather than “religious thinking” (133). So, assuming my general outline is correct, 1. What can authorize, or permit, a Santner-ian miracle in a postsecular world, if not God? And 2., what are the implications for any investigation of premodern societies? If, as Zizek proposed, premoderns lived fully exposed to the gaze of the Other (i.e., God), was premodern society necessarily more neighborly? Put differently, is the neighbor category ultimately more useful when looking at the medieval world, than it is for analyzing post-Enlightenment societ(ies)?
Nb. I am still struggling to fit these readings to my own investigations of the medieval and early modern world, but I’m optimistic about the project.
I do think Santner's discussion of materiality points up the same (bond of) unknowability that Z and R identify with the traumatic kernel of the real.
ReplyDeleteIn thinking through your great question about what authorizes or causes miracles, I realize how important it is to Santner that God be understood as that which enables a perspectival change. The God he finds in Rosenzweig has all the traditional terms: providential creator and source of revelation. But Rosenzweig wants to pry these open, to associate this with "new thinking", which is above all a new relationship to semiotics and tradition. So miracle should be understood as an "event of meaning" rather than, I take it, an attempt to just subvert or reject meaning. The goal is to reorient ourselves to the past and the future by changing the way we relate to the anxiety produced by the inconsistency and incompleteness we encounter in relation to both (p86).
For Rosenzweig, his decision to leave academia and commit to a Jewish community and adult education, enabled this reorientation. At the end of this piece, and in more detail in his book, On the Psychotheology of Everyday LIfe* Santner suggests that psychoanalysis can facilitate something like this by "unplugging" the analysand "from the multiple forms of servitude dwelling in his or her 'members'" (132). And for Benjamin, revolutionary politics could inspire a new calling.
Still, this doesn't fully answer Scott's question about the role of God or divine love, which I would restate as follows: Santner is clear about the need for reorientation, an uncanny interpellation, and asserts repeatedly that love is essential, but to me it reads more like an existentialist manifesto than an investigation of neighbor love. Clearly the one who has unhooked from the deadening solace of social norms and identity should love, but Santner has almost nothing to say about who is loved, and why. This links up with the question Patty posed, about the relationship between Reinhard's neighbor love and Christian agape, so I'll post that question separately.
These questions about the difference between the gaze imputed to God and one that is not, or between premodern and modern societies, is absolutely crucial to the project of this class, and I'm grateful to have such lucid versions of them laid out here at the beginning (especially when accompanied by some optimism that they're worth pursuing). Thanks for this and your previous posting.
This is really great stuff, and very helpfully elucidates Santner for me. I will confess to a couple of thoughts on the topic of the portability of these theorizations to the "premodern" culture to which we are attending this semester:
ReplyDelete1) Lacan, famously, identified the emergence of the "modern subject" with the subject of the Courtly Love relation. Given this, why does Zizek adopt the pre-Kantian, post-Kantian distinction? [He follows other thinkers like Joan Copjec in doing so, btw.]
2) Regarding the miracle: What are we to think of the fact that medieval Orthodox Christianity explicitly DENIED Islam the possibility of miracles? [There's more detail on this in the Biddick essay to be read next week.]
I guess in sum, the big questions I have query the possibility/necessity of considering how and if the medieval context can offer a rejoinder/revision/tweaking of the notion of neighbor-love.
I'm not sure I'm qualified to respond to this, but I found Scott's questions very helpful as a way into Santner's essay, particularly in an immediately applicable way regarding this course.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering if Santner's theories about Paul are complicated as they apply to the medieval world because of the presence of other thinkers in medieval society. In other words, I'm not sure if Santner's Pauline arguments are as applicable to medieval Christianity as they might at first appear.
In any case, perhaps the pull between the situation (which I cannot control but into which I am thrown) and my responsibility (to others) could still be helpful as a way of thinking of neighborliness. How might these traits be manifested in medieval society? Can we use the (perhaps too simplistic) idea of medieval culture as being highly stratified as a model for watching neighbor-love unfold? What sorts of neighbor-love could exist between (again, perhaps too simplistic) medieval classes? I'm thinking ahead to the "Canterbury Tales" and the violence or conflict between the characters from different estates.