Margery Kempe and prayer

(This is part of the preparation I've been doing for discussion on Tuesday....)

We’ve talked about Lacan and the feminine/masculine positions, and we’ve seen that the feminine position is ambiguous toward use of language, never in control of language. 

What, then, do we make of Kempe’s speech, particularly her prayers? Pg. 39-41, “The creature, being in her prayers, having mind of this matter, Christ said unto her spirit….” She repeatedly prays to Christ, who tells her what will happen in the future, who will die or not, etc. Kempe’s prayers seem to have a great deal of power to predict what will happen in the world and to change even the will of God. She prays for a man who is sick, and as a result “he lived many years after in good health and prosperity” (40). She prays for a “wicked woman” who “shall be dead” as Christ tells her, but as a result of her prayers “our Lord granted her mercy for the soul” (40). 

We’ve mentioned how Custance in “The Man of Law’s Tale” prays frequently, but we haven’t really talked about how prayer may differ from normal speech or about why it seems to be so important to these female characters. It might seem that prayer is simply Kempe’s way (and Custance’s way) of gaining masculine authorization for her actions—true, the masculine authority in her case is God himself, but she’s still just another woman under male domination.

However, it seems to me that prayer in Kempe’s case is more complex since her prayers often result in her going head-to-head with some male church authority, and also since her prayers appear to change Christ’s own course of action (in the case of the woman whose soul is damned until Kempe intercedes). In this second way Kempe actually takes up the Biblically masculine role of Christ, becoming a mediator for sinners as he is supposed to be (1 Timothy 2, “There is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus….”). So in what ways does prayer function to authorize Kempe? Or does it authorize her at all?

"Cruel" Acts and Monuments

Well, we seem to have arrived at the difficult, harried middle of the semester--it's own "traumatic kernel," if not of the Real, than at least of calendar! (That's a joke! she hastens to add .  .  .)

I was struck, in reading the Marshall essay alongside the excerpts from Foxe, that this week usefully returns us to some of our preoccupations from early in the semester: viz., the contrast between "love" and "justice," the contradiction of a "universal" religion (Christianity has this ambition) that is nonetheless regularly obsessed with different degrees of "insider"/"outsider" status. The Pagan, the Jew (from the Prioress' Tale), the Saracen (from the Charlemagne Romances), the Virtuous Pagan (from Erkenwald), the heretic (from Foxe, but also related to the Saracen), and the problem (raised in the Man of Law's Tale, and explicitly addressed by Shibanoff) of which kind of outsider might more troubling: near or far, heretic or religious other?  It's increasingly interesting to think about the degree to which medieval and early modern Christian texts worry over the limits to Christian universalism--in terms of our concerns this semester, this is also to say that such preoccupations register doubts about the very universalism to which Christian redemption lays claim. If not the virtuous judge from Erkenwald (left, sorrowfully, for hundreds of years in "hell"), then who? But if that virtuous judge then why not any virtuous person with or without belief?

But, back to Marshall: on p. 102, when she turns to the question of "neighbor-love," Marshall descibes Lacan's understanding of this as an "anti-morality," and quotes Lacan quoting the Marquis de Sade: "To love one's neighbor may be the cruelest of choices."  She continues with the quote (this is Lacan): "my neighbor possesses all the evil Freud speaks about,but it is no different from the evil I retreat from in myself. To love him, to love him as myself is necessarily to move toward some cruelty" (102; quoting Seminar VII).

I'm struck by Lacan's phrase: "to move toward some cruelty." This is a delicate way to put it--it's not, for instance, to "be cruel" or to "enact cruelty"--and, in fact, Marshall is quite clear that the cruelty imagined (and textualized) in Foxe is very different from actual torture.  What does it mean to "move toward" cruelty without inflicting it? Do any of the texts we've read "move toward" some cruelty in a way that seems to involve either 1) "loving" the cruelty of the neighbor? or 2) loving the cruelty of the neighbor as part of the desire for cruelty within myself? It might be more useful in this regard NOT to focus on particular characters so much as to focus on how the TEXT approaches these issues overall.

Sorry this post came so late this morning--I'm indeed in the middle of some traumatic kernel of a schedule!
  

Difference Between vs Difference Within in the Man of Law's Tale

Reading Schibanoff's article on the Man of Law's Tale, I was struck by the issue of "difference between" versus "difference within" in her discussions of religious othering and antifeminism. As we discussed in class yesterday, it seems as though only one type of difference/othering can be addressed at a time. This is most definitely seems to be the case in Schibanoff's interpretation of the Tale. In her discussion of religious and racial othering, she is concerned primarily with establishing the threatening proximity of the Romans and the Saracens, and the radical difference between Cunstance and the population of Saxon Britain. However, when she moves to a discussion of "mannysh" women, all racial and religious difference is cast aside. The Sultaness and Donegild are discussed as equals. Issues of their position as racial/religious others is not addressed, as it is their threatening proximity to the male position that is brought to the fore. In this case, it appears as though race and religious difference are overridden, as these women's proximity to male-ness becomes more threatening than their position as racial/religious others. These women function as part of the same group - one that threatens the male position - rather than as members of two very different othered groups. It is as though racial otherness is made absolute in order for the examination of their gendered difference to be carried out. Is it possible for us to view these two subversive women simultaneously in terms of their othered racial/religious positions and their proximity to male-ness? Or does viewing their racial difference undermine the power of their gender ambiguity?

Siege of Milan: Is neighbor-love ever impossible?

Towards the end of the first part of The Siege of Milan, as the initial Christian attack against the Saracens has been unsuccessful and the Duke of Normandy is dying in Roland's presence, the Duke makes this speech about seeing soldiers going to heaven: "Loo! I see oure vawarde ledde to hevene/With angells songe and mery stevene...." (316-324). He's been talking to Roland for awhile about what he wants Roland to do if he ever gets back to France, but it's not until this moment that a Saracen standing nearby "brayded owte with a bryghte brande/When he harde hym say soo;/And to the Duke a dynt he dryvede" (325-327). It would appear that the Saracen didn't mind Roland paying his last respects to the Duke until the Duke's speech took a distinctly religious turn.

My question in terms of this moment is this: Is religion here a "traumatic kernel"? Zizek talks about how the "traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor--the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me" (140-141). I think that perhaps we can read this moment in terms of religious hystericization.

Another example of religion as the traumatic kernel in the Neighbor that leads to hystericization would be lines 385-480. Here the Sultan, after hearing Roland give what's basically a credal statement about his faith, laughs and orders a cross to be burned--which becomes an epic failure, of course, with a spectacular explosion that blinds all the Saracens.

So if religion is a traumatic kernel that keeps these two sides from being able to get along, does the text open up any places for redemption to happen? Any places where the two sides can meet? Or could we argue in this case, contrary to R/S/Z, that neighbor-love is impossible, and the text does not want contact between the two sides on any level? Are there times when neighbor-love fails totally and completely?

A Question on Nourishment

I know we're going to talk about these topics in class tomorrow, but this is mostly to post the question in the hope someone else will be able to make more sense out of this than I can.

I keep thinking there should be some sort of connection between Floripas's magical girdle and the two giant babies. The babies die for want of their mother's milk, essentially because Charlemagne is unable to provide them with nourishment. Floripas, on the other hand, is able to provide nourishment to the knights through her magic girdle. I can't help but think that it should be the other way around. Why is Floripas, a Saracen, able to nourish the Christians while a Christian can not nourish the Saracen? Is it simply because Floripas was already a Christian even if she wasn't officially a Christian? Does it lie in the baby giants not accepting the food that Charlemagne offers? If so, would that go back to the question from RSZ about "what if my neighbor wants to die?"? Is this a way of absolving the Christians of the blame for the giant babies' deaths? Charlemagne did not cause their deaths, they caused their own deaths by not accepting the food they were offered?

I'm also wondering if it could have to do with the substance of food itself. Food is an important marker of identity, and what we don't eat can be just as clear a marker as what we do eat. Floripas' girdle feeds magically and helps the knights avoid eating Saracen food. The babies, on the other hand, are offered actual food but reject it and die for want of their mother's milk. Does this symbolically indicate they are offered the chance at a new identity (which they should have already received through baptism) but choose to retain their old one?

I'm curious if anyone has any insight into this.

Any Universalism?

Jeffrey Cohen writes, "But the anxiety which provokes such a dismissal of Kristeva's work is understandable, for any universalism would seem to exclude the determinative power of the local, the contingent, the historical, all of which are central to critical work on ethnicity and race" [emphasis his]. Cohen's project, then is to "[break] the power of universals" via universalizing psychotherapy.

What, then, does he mean when he complains in The Sultan of Babylon of a "dehumanized foe?" It seems to me as if he incorporates language that subverts his goal by tacitly agreeing to what he is attempting to abolish. Because doesn't the category "human" include at least a pinch of universalism, a touch of essence (and any universalism is fatally detrimental to Cohen here)? It seems to me that a project truly intent on deconstructing human universalism would have to abolish the human. It would have to see through to only bodies. So is "humanity" merely a trace, a shorthand for a category that is useful for discussion but really meaningless?

But that is irrational. How can the meaningless be useful for discussion? It seems to me that this deconstruction includes the threads of its own deconstruction. Cohen, by attempting to abolish all universalism has set himself up against the Goliath of language, which penetrates even his own thinking.

Even the smallest mustard seed of the universal, which I am coming to think Kristeva defends pretty well, is utterly devastating him.

Notes from 9/30 Discussion

Hi, I've posted all of the quotations from yesterday's hand-out below for your reference.

Enemy/Friend Distinction: Babylonians/French, Laban/Charlemagne

- “One problem with this [Schmitt’s] account of the political, where we divide the world into friends we identify with and enemies we define ourselves against, is that it is fragile, liable to break down or even to invert and oscillate in the face of complex situations [. . .]A world not anchored by the ‘us’ and ‘them’ oppositions that flourished as recently as the Cold War is one subject to radical instability, both subjectively and politically” (Reinhard 16-17).

Fight between Oliver and Ferumbras

- “On the other hand, to refuse to testify, for the sake of saving the other person’s life, is to treat him as my ‘fellow man,’ mon semblable, whose good (self-preservation, satisfaction of needs) I imagine in the mirror of my own ego. And this is to fail to encounter him as ‘my neighbor,’ mon prochain, whose jouissance I cannot presume to know and which I may in fact betray along with the moral law in not testifying against him” (Reinhard 48).

Textual Pleasure in Violence

- “What prevents us from ‘freely enjoying sexuality’ is not a direct repression, the so-called internalization of inhibitions, but the very excess of enjoyment coagulated into a specific formula which curves/distorts/transfixes our space of enjoyment, closes off new possibilities of enjoyment, condemns the subject to err in the closure of a vicious cycle, compulsively circulating about the same point of (libidinal) reference[. . .]the aim of psychoanalysis is to get the subject to come to terms with the sinthome, with his specific ‘formula of enjoyment.’ Lacan’s insight here is that of the full ontological weight of ‘stuckness’: when one dissolves the sinthome and thus gets fully unstuck, one loses the minimal consistency of one’s own being – in short, what appears as obstacle is a positive condition of possibility” (Zizek 175).

Facelessness and Justice: The Dead on the Battlefield(s)

- “[. . .]the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary. Every preempting of the Other in the guide of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background. And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus on the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it ‘embedded’ in a particular situation” (Zizek 183-84).

Floripas’s Tower and Neighborhood

- “These new sets can be unnatural sets or communities that depend on nothing to hold them together and which cannot even be perceived from any position outside the set – neighborhoods, we might say, that exist within the political without being determined by citizenship, nationality, or any other legal or authchthonous [indigenous, occurring naturally] status[. . .] the logic of the not-all suggests an infinite set of possibilities of social inclusion and association. . .” (Reinhard 63).

cursory thoughts on "Sultan of Babylon"

I found The Sultan of Babylon much more complex in some ways than Floris and Blancheflour. Partly because of its length, obviously, but also because of its large, shifting cast of characters, the poem feels much more chaotic to me. Among the questions that emerged as I was reading, two focused on the portrayal of the Sultan.

First, I wonder why the poem spends so much time, especially at the beginning, narrating the story from the Sultan's perspective. One would expect the poem to tell its story from the prospective of the protagonist(s), but instead we get these long descriptions of the Sultan's motivations for provoking war and his responses when things don't go his way. I wonder if the poet does this intentionally to lead us to sympathize with the Sultan before pushing him away at the very end with the violent scene of his refusal to convert. Like Charlemagne, the Sultan has two people who are dear to him, "Sire Ferumbras, my sone so dere.../ And in my doghter Dame Florypas" (93-96). Yet at the end of the poem, he curses Ferumbras, and "His soule was fet to helle" (3171-3188). Perhaps this is a stretch, but I wonder if the poet is unsuccessfully trying a form of neighbor-love. He ventriloquizes the Sultan's experience, gives him a few sympathetic features, and then rips that apart for us (the Christian medieval audience) with the Sultan's final vituperation.

As a subset of this question, I'm also wondering why the Sultan keeps threatening to reject his gods, being rebuked by priests, and then pleading for forgiveness. This happens several times throughout the poem. Each moment is marked with language that sounds very "Christian": "The prestis assoyled him of that synne,/ Ful lowly for him prayinge" (2453-2454). The Sultan almost sounds Catholic here, confessing, doing penance, and being absolved of his unfaithfulness. One possible reason for these repeated movements toward apostasy could be that the poet is trying to set the Sultan in opposition to Charlemagne, who remains faithful to God throughout the poem. Another reason could again be an attempt at gentrifying or assimilating the Sultan via this Christian language, an attempt which ultimately fails. These repeated apostasies could either be sympathetic (the Sultan recognizes the emptiness of his religion in medieval Christian terms) or non-sympathetic (the Sultan's paganism is exacerbated by his tempestuous unbelief).

So how is the audience supposed to relate to the Sultan, if we take him as a neighbor figure? How does the poet or narrator relate to him? As usual, all of our questions about neighbor-love seem to be applicable here.

Mutual desire as the "gentrified neighbor"?

Patty's article got me thinking about extimité (the other in me, me in the other) which is the traumatic and frightening element of the neighbor, in Zizekian and Reinhardian terms.  In particular, I started wondering about extimité and its applicability to the situation of Floris and Blauncheflour's mutual love during Patty's discussion of the romance's deployment of the phrase "ayther hem other knew" on page 23 of "Amorous Scholastics".  Patty writes:  "The phrase 'ayther hem other knew,' according to the MED, emphasizes a simultaneous reflection of the two together, rendered elsewhere in the Middle English corpus as 'either in other,' or 'mutually.'  It was these final two expressions of this idea from the MED that inspired my questions here.  "Either in other" sounds a lot like extimacy, from a certain standpoint, but the "mutually" seems to fight back a little bit against it, because of its connotations of similarity.  Patty's point, drawing out the ways that "Flower and White Flower mirror and double each other" gestured further away from this initial possibility of extimacy that their overlapping names and this intriguing "either in other" triggered in my mind.  

All this is to say that I wonder whether it would be productive to read Floris and Blauncheflour's perfect, mutual, and fulfilling desire as an example of what Zizek called the "gentrified neighbor."  Here is intimacy and me-in-you, you-in-me that is in no way traumatic or "Real" in psychoanalytic terms, in no way frightening or disrupting of fantasy, but rather fantasy's fullest expression?  This reading would dovetail with Patty's reading that this romance presents a fantasy of mutual affection's power "to overcome the limitations that parental law, region, creed, or custom place upon us," thus encoding "Europe's fantasy that its love of the Arabic world is returned in complimentary degrees, as satisfyingly mutual" (24, 25).  It is, in other words, the fantasy that when we confront the other, we are not frightened by what we see there, either in them or in ourselves.  Zizek and Reinhard would say that such encounters, and our longing for them, miss neighbor-love, in fact, miss the neighbor by focusing on its gentrification into something that we can "safely" approach--that is, without really confronting the disturbing realities about our unknowable selves.  

So to my final (troubling) question:  Would this neighbor-love-inspired reading of Floris and Blauncheflour's passion challenge or complicate, in part at least, Patty's final claim that such fantasies have "progressive" or "ethical" aims?  I am inclined to think so, although I found Patty's article very compelling, and her final point here is on a slightly different tack.  

(Patty, please feel free to publicly correct me if I am misreading you!)

Some comments on Man of Law

Since I can't be in class tomorrow, I thought I would voice a few questions and observations I had about the text.

First of all, I was wondering if it would be useful to return to the friend/enemy/neighbor distinction. As I understand Reinhard's assessment, the idea of a neighborhood with open boundaries is an alternative to the interior/exterior qualities that Schmitt respectively ascribes to friends and enemies. Indeed, at the beginning of the Man of Law Tale, boundaries seem very permeable; there is clearly trade between Rome and Syria, and a conversion allows the Sultan to marry Lady Constance. Of course, the conversion is a significant condition--the Emperor would never have married his daughter to a Muslim, and it converts the marriage into a type of evangelization project-- but regardless, these peoples are clearly able to coexist and make connections among each other. To a certain extent, it seems like the marriage, with its homogenizing condition, solidifies the open neighborhood boundaries so that they now delineate Christian friends, thus excluding those such as the Sultaness who do not want to belong to this particular community. She is not allowed to remain a mere neighbor, but forced to choose and thus reacts violently. I'm not completely sure where I'm going with this; perhaps it just reinforces the need Reinhard expresses for a third way of relating to others, a way that avoids seeking "friendship" based on the homogenizing tendencies Kristeva criticizes.

Anyway, regardless of where the different faults may lie for motivating the Sultaness' actions, I'm also interested, again, in the pragmatic dimension of what we do when someone does choose to be an enemy. The Biblical parables directly related to "love one's neighbor" do not deal with someone who is actively attacking you, nor is turning the other cheek always realistic in the political world. What is one's obligation to the enemy? On the other hand, if the two mothers made themselves enemies, choosing to be foreign to their families, because they felt they were the victims of injustice, perhaps they felt they only had power to react through violence. If this is the case, how would neighbor love apply to those who are not in a position of power or on equal footing? I think the element of hegemony that came up in class a few weeks ago complicates the theories of foreignness and neighbor love; loving a perceived oppressor would entail different processes than, from a position of power, trying to promote equality and respect.

I am also still interested in the role of "Satan," as I mentioned with the Prioress' tale, as a medieval way of labeling "das Ding," the impenetrable core of the Other. Perhaps there's a connection with this and the "hardening of the heart" in Biblical stories; any foreign behavior, or perceived clinging to foreign ideas, would be attributed to demonic agency. Of course, this is unfair to the other, but it would explain how communities living as neighbors could destroy each other with such ease. It also reminds me of our comments about St. Augustine, and sin as the uncanny element of oneself. In this case, it would be important to follow Kristeva and recognize the foreignness in ourselves, so as not to condemn the foreignness in others. And yet, there is ambiguity in the Sultaness--I find her discourse uncannily Christian, as she says would rather die than renege her faith (330-336). Perhaps there is an unconscious recognition of similarity in foreignness that the Christians do not recognize.

Finally, I find it intriguing that at the end of the story, Lady Constance returns home. Does the narrator feel a need for this to happen so that the story can conclude? Are there limits to integration with our neighbors? Will we always prefer to return to our own home? I don't have any formed ideas yet, but I'd like to know what you think.

Freud, Kristeva, and the undead Child

I'm guessing that this may not be a new thought to everyone, but my background in Freud is lacking. Reading Kristeva's discussion of Freud's ideas of the uncanny reminded me of "The Prioress's Tale." Kristeva says that the uncanny is where the "boundaries between imagination and reality are erased" (188). This describes the moment in which the murdered child in the tale begins to sing; a scene which should exist only in fantasy becomes real. It's particularly intriguing because the fantasy is halfway between a happy miracle (the child coming back to life) and a nightmare (a distortion of the very concepts of life and death). Freud's notion of the uncanny describes why the scene is so unsettling. Kristeva (and I think Freud as well) would argue that the distress we feel in response to the singing undead child comes from some kind of knowledge of our own strangeness. Is this our fear of death? Our secret desire for the child's death of that of the Jews? Something even more unnatural? I'm really not sure, but I thought it was interesting.

The idea of the uncanny also explains the appeal of "The Prioress's Tale" and blood libel stories in general (not for us, but the proliferation of the tale type for hundreds of years indicates some sort of appeal). Kristeva mentions the catharsis that can be reached through the reading of disturbing tales. Tales like this allow the reader/listener an encounter with the uncanny which is "safe"; it allows for readers to also experience vengeance and violence without actually getting his/her hands dirty. Kristeva mentions the need to depersonalize the strangeness of the foreigner. I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing she was referring to, but I find it interesting that "The Prioress's Tale" allows for depersonalization of the undead child and the Jews as well as those that kill the Jews in revenge. For us, as modern readers it also depersonalizes Chaucer's audience to a degree.

a few questions about Kristeva

I know it's early, but I wanted to go ahead and post a few thoughts about Kristeva while they're fresh. They can be ignored (or not) as needed.

So this last half of Strangers to Ourselves definitely seems more historical than the first half of the book (or even than most of what we've read so far in this class). I found it very interesting that while Kristeva is attempting to give an account of attitudes towards foreigners in general, she moves from political to psychoanalytic attitudes towards foreignness. Her point in the chapter on the Enlightenment seems to be a marriage of these two qualities by which the "social domain" is not homogeneous but "a union of singularities" (132). She goes on to use similar language about "conflicting shams" (147) and "cosmopolitanism" (173) to call for a new acceptance of all humans as humans, in contrast to the traditional political positions that exclude non-citizens (as though foreigners were not human).

Finally she asks, "How could one tolerate a foreigner if one did not know one was a stranger to oneself?" (182). In some ways this wraps up her political section and launches her into a psychoanalytic discussion of Freud, for whom "that which is strangely uncanny would be that which was... familiar and, under certain conditions... emerges" (183). Kristeva uses Freud's theories to demonstrate her point that our individual, psychoanalytic understanding of ourselves must inform our political position toward foreigners: since we can't know ourselves, we must exist in a position of openness to others, who also can't know themselves.

I'm curious about the "manifesto" on pages 153-154 that calls for this understanding to inform political life by "a progressive and reasonable adjustment of the rights and duties of citizens with respect to non-citizens" (153) and for "an ethics, the fulfillment of which shall depend on education and psychoanalysis" (154). Is this a valid methodology for implementing her understanding of foreignness? In other words, would this work in the real world?

It's also interesting to me that our current attitudes toward others are so based on "trade among nations", as she points out (173). What do we think about the economic (capitalist?) manifestations of otherness? Is it positive that so much of our relationships with "others" depend on economics?

Odradek & Justice in TPT

According to Zizek, odradek is “an object that is transgenerational, immortal, outside finitude, time … jouissance embodied” yet wholly inhuman (164). I’m interested in how this concept of “jouissance realized” relates back to The Prioress’s Tale and the notion of justice, as well as the radical imbalance created by privileging One as neighbor; is odradek what allows us to recognize the capacity for violence within the undead neighbor, per our discussion in class? To some extent, it seems that justice (and the necessity of transformative intercession, i.e. The Prioress’s Tale) as well as redemption are contingent on the violence implicit in the traumatic kernel. Can we understand the Prioress as a vehicle of odradek (as per Kafka's insight into the link between bureaucracy and divine and Lacan's "the father or the worse")? Perhaps this heightened state of self-awareness (could hypocrisy be understood as a facet of piety?) and the Lacanian concept of true universalism (154 “refusal to impose one’s message on all others”) in juxtaposition with Zizek’s interpretation of the asymmetrical definitions of love and hatred (183) figure in here somewhere too...

What's neighbor-love? Not sure - OK, what isn't it?

Perhaps this post is a bit premature as we haven't technically gotten into the Kristeva reading yet, but as I began to dabble into Strangers to Ourselves, I came across a passage that struck a chord for me. As Kristeva catalogues the characteristics of the foreigner throughout the first section, she discusses the notion of hospitality and meeting. In her description of the foreigner - in particular the foreign believer - she discusses how voraciously the foreigner seeks out meetings with others. These meetings seem like productive sites for some kind of neighbor relation, a recognition of otherness that may lead to a recognition of the otherness (or foreignness may be a better word here) within myself. But for Kristeva, these meetings fail to lead to connection or mutual recognition; they do not seems to fit her ideal of "promoting the togetherness of those foreigners we all recognize ourselves to be" (3).

Rather, these meetings or parties turn out to be nothing more than a satisfaction of conscience on the part of the host (because she has invited/accepted/admitted an Other into her home or circle of acquaintance) and a fleeting satisfaction of desire for connection on the part of the foreigner (11). Kristeva's account here seems to be linked up with the notion we have discussed in class about liberal self-righteousness - assuaging our consciences by, for example, watching a documentary about oppressed workers rather than some more effective action.

So, and here's where this particular section becomes problematic for me, the hospitality here (at least of an insincere or conscience-soothing variety) seems to fail as a form of neighbor love because it requires no commitment to the foreigner on the part of the host. But, at least to me, hospitality would seem like an example of neighbor-love in practice, the opening of one's home to stranger(s) as a sign of trust, an action that enables the opportunity for a connection with the other or at least an opportunity for the mutual recognition of otherness. (I should also point out that I acknowledge that this question of hospitality may also be problematic because such a personal relation does not first encounter the faceless Third and so may be reliant on a sense of empathy rather than affect-less love - but in the interest of finding some practical action that might fall into category of neighbor-love, I wanted to pursue this thought.)

Yet, here, hospitality fails because it is the mere show of encountering the neighbor with the thought always in mind (it would seem on the part of the host) that it is a temporary encounter, one that involve no deeper commitment than allowing the foreigner into the home briefly.

This raises for me the question: how deep must or should our commitment to the foreigner (or neighbor) be in order to fulfill the command to love the neighbor? To return to a question that was raised earlier in the semester: is it even possible to love the neighbor beyond the level of surfaces or beyond the level of an empty universal declaration of love?

At this point, I'm not sure to where all of these musings tend, but it was helpful for me to begin to ponder through why this particular potential enactment of neighbor-love seems to fail in this account, in hopes of eventually reaching a better sense of what neighbor-love might look like in action.

Prioress's Tale: Any space for neighbor-love?

So I must confess that even as a medievalist, I find "The Prioress's Tale" one of the more disturbing of the Canterbury Tales narratives. The image of the young child with his throat cut sitting up and singing praise to the Virgin Mary is like something out of a nightmare (l. 649 in the Riverside). On one level, I wonder how the undead child may perhaps correspond to the image of the Muselmann that we encountered in The Neighbor. The child has witnessed a traumatic event, his own death, but he continues to sing the praises of the Virgin, which were partly the cause of his death. He presents a mystery to the abbot until the abbot commands him, with words reminiscent of a magic spell, to give the reason for his strange behavior (l. 644-648). How does the child embody the trauma he witnessed? How does his culture react to this, and how might it tie in with our discussion of the undead neighbor?

On the other hand, it's quite arguable that the problems of neighbor-love arise cluster in this tale around the Jews. The Jews are portrayed as a "waspes nest" of Satan (559), "cursed" (670), etc. They appear to be most definitely outside the boundaries of civilization, opposed to all that is Christian, foes. Yet I find it interesting that the Jews don't do anything until "the serpent Sathanas" (558) incites them to violence. Could the dead child, as the embodiment of the Jews' violent act but also as a (possibly) positive embodiment of Christian praise, work as some sort of figure of mediation between the completely opposed communities? I'm playing with the idea that the Virgin is praised perhaps even more as a result of the murder, which is only possible at the hands of the Jews.

Perhaps I'm trying to be too positive about this, but it seems to me that the tale is much more complicated than it appears at first reading.

The Trouble with Typology

Kathleen Biddick's "Dead Neighbor Archives" offers a complex response to the "political theology" of Neighbor-love by way of her critique of the rhetoric of "sovereign decision" in the theories of Santner and others. Crucial to this critique is her sense that these theories retain a medieval historiographic structure of "typology," that is, a method of thinking about time (and text) that privileges the "figural" over the "literal."   She argues, in sum, that "the undeadness of Christian typological decisionism has insinuated itself into the heart of contemporary political theology and its theories of the  . . .  "miracles."

While some of us no doubt have a fairly clear notion of "typology" and its medieval functioning, I thought a little explanation might help.  A typological notion of history understands Christian time as the fulfillment of notions prefigured by Jewish history in the pre-christian era.  Established by Paul (primarily, but not only, in his Letter to the Romans), this view holds that Christ brought the "New (living) Law" as a fulfillment of the "Old (dead) Law of Moses."  Thus, Christ is the New Adam, Paul the New Moses, etc. etc. The structural relation between Judaism and Christianity is one of prefiguration (Judaism) and fulfillment (Christianity), also of a (deadening) commitment to the literal (Jewish) superseded by a (life giving) commitment to the figural (Christian). You can no doubt see already the problem this notion of history raises to the politics of "neighbor-love." Augustine developed these ideas in the direction of an entire mode of reading: texts have, in the theory of reading developed from his ideas, two primary level: the literal level (that contains and can subsume) the figural level. By the twelfth century, the literal level is regularly equated with the "bran" or the "chaff" of a grain of wheat (and with what Chaucer will call "solaas"--the "surface" pleasure of the text). The figural level is equated with the "kernel" of wheat to be ground into flour (what Chaucer will call "sentence"--the "truth" or "meaning" found at the heart of every grain of text).  [NB: Chaucer uses these terms, but often plays with them in very interesting ways.] The implication of this way of thinking is that the (Christian/figural) "kernal" gives us our real "food"--with obvious resonances to Eucharistic/panis angelica, etc.--while the (Jewish/literal) bran is spiritually undigestible until superseded by the Christian meaning.

The column at the French Cathedral of Vezelay  (picture given above), is one of Biddick's prime examples.  The flour mill is common iconography for typological meaning. In this picture of the capital, we can just make out the OT prophets (sign of Jewish Law) pouring sacks of grain into the Mill while the Apostle Paul turns the Mill handle. Paul is thus enabling the process by which the flour is taken "out of the bran."  The Apostle Paul is prominent in much of the "new" political theology.

So: I wonder what you think of Biddick's account of the typological "remainder" in the rhetorics of miracle and, thus, of "neighbor-love."  What is at stake, do you think, in her critique of "typological decisionism"? What to you think of her larger argument, that typology HASN'T gone away from the "theology" of "neighbor-love"?

We're all in this together. But how?

One thing we know for sure: when you've got psychoanalytically-inclined folk talking about neighbor love, they are going to insist that jouissance has something to do with it. This is worth noting because both Judaism and Christianity might suggest that neighbor love has more to do with emotions we might link to obligation or non-passionate versions of love associated in Christianity with caritas or agape. Whatever else we think of Reinhard and Zizek, it's fair to say that they talk a lot about the fierce pleasure-pain of neighbor love. So Reinhard talks about how destabilizing neighbor love is, and whether we should talk about the neighbor as a woman, and Zizek insists on the violence of neighbor love. Santner seems tame by contrast, and not especially interested in the nature of neighbor love, or how or why it is we might feel love for the neighbor. He is, as Scott suggests, focused instead on the role of God or divine love. What follows is my attempt to clarify what Santner leaves out by leaving out jouissance.

If I understand Santner correctly, neighbor love is a love that is no longer tied to "'mere' object cathexis" and "a representation" (133). What enables this love? It is not, I think, the same as agape or the oblatory love we associate with "giving one's individuality over to a higher unity, cause, ideal or totality (124)." Santner doesn't endorse this version of Christian love associated with agape (and advocated, as Anders Nygren famously argued, most strongly by Martin Luther). With Rosenzweig, Santner argues instead that divine love enables a love that moves from one particularity to another, from one particular neighbor to another. We need (a postsecular version of) God and theological thinking because otherwise we just try to worm our way out of psychic trauma and the hold of convention by celebrating an undifferentiated love or thinking of ourselves as exceptional, trying to forge our own path. So Santner doesn't want (and doesn't think we can have) Luther's god, who dismisses the importance of our love and instead transforms us into vessels of divine love. And he doesn't want (and doesn't think we can have) the god who punished Moses and Aaron and the Israelites (84). Instead he seems to suggest that we have the God of some sort of communal commitment to suspending the fantasy of self-sufficiency and social stability or of obedience and its alternative.

But Santner has much less to say than either Reinhard or Zizek about what the neighbor looks like, how we perceive the neighbor, or even how we might encounter the neighbor. We should be "exposed to the proximity of the neighbor" "without restraint" (131). But why and how would "suspending the obscene libidinal investment in the Law" compel us to be more open to the neighbor? If we were going to play this out, it would be really tempting to think that premodern societies or alternative societies (think of something like our fantasies of the Amish in the U.S. today) are more neighborly than mainstream u.s. society can be. There are some obvious problems with romanticizing premodern or religious societies in this way. But otherwise, we have to do the work that Santner doesn't seem to do here, of figuring out how others (whether as the "other" or "the neighbor", the 2 or the 3) are implicated in our libidinal investments. Or, to put it a bit differently, can Santner help us understand the following question: what is it about our psychic make-up that makes the neighbor matter, anyway?

Santer: If Not God... (Some Questions)

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.

Emily Esola's Post on the Third

Dear All,

Technology is vexing! Emily E is having trouble posting to the blog, so I'm doing this for her. Once you log on to Blogger, you should be able to post a new topic by clicking on the "new post" button in the top right hand corner of the screen.

Without further ado, here's Emily's post:

I think, to point to the place in the text where Zizek gets most disturbingly explicit, the Muselmann as a "neighbor" "at its most traumatic" could help explain the way "privileging a One as the neighbor" is so extreme or violent. 

Zizek first states, "When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, a lack of depth" (161). Thus, the Muselmann is a "neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible" (161). 

Zizek then quickly expands this as it opens up for him the "key dilemma" (which I read, although which is probably incorrect or only partial, as the tragedy inherent in the Muselmann being a, orthe neighbor, "with whom no empathetic relationship is possible"): "What if it is precisely in the guise of the "faceless" face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other's call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing the Muselmann, one hits upon one's responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic?" (161). I think, to return to your question, Constance, that Zizek is here pointing to the "ethical violence" inherent in "choosing against the face, for the third."  The violence, I think, has to do with his idea of what justice means in light of this -- he later writes, "And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background. It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it "embedded" in a particular situation. In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper" (184). So, my conjecture from this is that the person who tries to focus on the face, which is always faceless, of the Muselmann, is in no position to enact justice, here figured as "an empathetic relationship" that is always already impossible because of the "zero-level" of the Muselmann. The very lack of "depth" in his faceless face negates (our) ability to form a relationship with (this), the other, who "should" make our management of the Other's call to responsibility less traumatic, or achievable via the "contingent umbilical link that renders it "embedded" in a particular situation."

So, would there be "violence" in looking away from the (faceless) face of the Muselmann to the faceless Third (a One as the neighbor)? Yes, but it seems that Zizek is highlighting that the alternative, the explicit lack of justice that created the Muselmann in the first place is a violence that we somehow overlook as violence, because it's not our fault that the Muselmann is faceless, that he "shamelessly...exposes" this lack of depth (171). 

Welcome, friends and neighbors!

In the interest of continuing and deepening our conversations on this semester--and as a response to the limitations of Oncourse Forum posting--we've created this blog-space. This can become as creative (and crucial) a space for our work together as you wish, so use it as you see fit. Rather than "require" a certain frequency of posting, we'd rather see what materializes over the course of the semester.

I've imported some of the questions raised on the Oncourse forums to this initial post. Those forums suggest that we have a number of questions on the table, whether first order (i.e. clarifications) or second order (i.e. thought experiments as tests of these theories). These seem to relate to the following categories:

1) Neighbor-love as distinct from "caritas" or "fellow-feeling": i.e. what's all this about jouissance?

2) Redemption occurring in the now rather than future: how does Reinhard's consideration of temporality engage with "love of neighbor" as a redemptive force?

3) The neighbor as "faceless monster," as Zizek puts it--not one we find alluring, but one who demands our attention and love even though we do not find him or her in any way alluring.

Reply here--or make your own post--on these or any other issues. Most of all, welcome!