Ereignis

Early this evening, I went to a lecture given by Martin Jay. I won't say much about the lecture here, except that it was called "Historicism and the Event," and was primarily a recounting of the views of a sequence of French philosophers, particularly but not exclusively in the wake of 1968, on the meaning of the notion of the event.

Heidegger came up as an important resource for Derrida and Badiou's thinking here. Wittgenstein was not mentioned during the lecture, but I have been reading him for other reasons. He uses the word that Jay highlighted as being particularly important for Heidegger, 'Ereignis.'

There is the striking formulation from 6.4311: "Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens."

More interesting, though, it seems to me, especially in the context of the lecture, is the longer 6.422 on ethics and consequences, the relevant bit of which is, "Zum Mindesten duerfen diese Folgen nicht Ereignisse sein."

Doubled Reading

Yesterday, I was told that Toni Morrison would be giving a reading here at the ENS the next day. I had seen no signs, had heard nothing. So today I went, a little skeptical, but indeed she was here—standing room only. I wasn’t able to stay for Q&A, which is often the best part of a reading. There were four texts, two of which were from her new novel. Each one was read first in French (by another person, whose name I didn’t catch), and then in the original by Toni Morrison herself. The contrast was striking. The French reader gave the texts a theatricality that Morrison avoided. I want almost to say that they seemed, in French, melodramatic. Certainly Morrison’s writing is sensual and emotionally charged enough that it runs this risk. In the past, I have heard poets read their own work, and have found that I often prefer another person’s vocalization of a poem to the author’s. Not in this case.

I’m not especially familiar with Morrison’s work (I read Beloved in highschool). I left the auditorium thinking that I should, at least, read Jazz.

Nussbaum, animals and compassion

Last night I head Martha Nussbaum speak. The title of her talk was “Compassion: Human and Animal.” During the talk I was immensely impressed. The more I think about it, the less I think it holds together.

The general orientation was to suggest that although humans are usually rated above or equal animals in our capacity for compassion, there are certain ways in which we fail to have even the compassion of which an animal would be capable. She needs first to argue that animals do indeed display compassion. In order to do this she breaks compassion down into three component judgments: similarity, seriousness, and eudemonistic. This last is her own somewhat idiosyncratic coinage, meaning not so much happiness, as goal-oriented judgment.

She has examples, not all of which I found convincing. She argues that often, indeed most perniciously, when humans fail to be sufficiently compassionate, it is part of a refusal to admit to their own bodily nature—that is, the facts of death, aging, various forms of excretion. She calls this, I’m not sure why, ‘anthropodenial.’

Now, she seems to me fairly certain that she is a good judge of what is and is not compassionate behavior. She seems to me to have forgotten how powerful relativist critique really is. One of her examples (the novel Effi Briest) is staged more or less as a pure anti-bourgois morality play. A woman married too early, and consequently has an affair because she is unsatisfied in her marriage. She realizes the wrong she has done, breaks off the affair, and lives happily for many years. Eventually, the fact of the affair comes out, her husband and family reject her, she dies alone, mourned only by her dog. While I and no doubt practically everyone in the room agreed with Nussbaum that the other characters in this novel had failed to display compassion (that is, after all, the whole point), it seems to me awfully fast to leap to the conclusion that it is simply and everywhere true.

By making the link to the compassion of animals, and, crucially, making gender relations the paradigmatic case of anthropodenial causing human suffering, Nussbaum gestures at universality. Indeed, for her the root of our hatred and fear of our bodies seems less to be existential dread of death (if this were the case, she would have little argument against salvationist religion) than early childhood experiences, culminating in potty training. Our intelligence at an early age, coupled with our inability to do anything to assuage our own hurts, this is the human condition, which is repeated in different forms throughout our lives. For Nussbaum, this leads to the equally universal human characteristic of ‘securing’ one’s transcendence by denying it to another. By this logic, white supremacists in the 1920s ‘secured’ whiteness by equating blackness with everything sensual and shameful. Nazis did the same to Jews and—Nussbaum’s central empirical argument—so did right wing Hindu nationalists to Muslims in Gujarat in 2002.

I’m not doing her argument justice here, but I think I can say that I’m very unhappy with the easy universalism, the ahistoricism, and the conceptual slippage. Her argument sounds to me to be an updated form of psychoanalysis with all the attendant traps, above all eurocentrism, but also extrapolation of ‘truth’ from symptom (Tolstoy is certainly not anything like a sexually healthy human being—‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ is not a reliable model for human relationships more generally. It isn’t even an average symptom.)

At any rate, I register objections. It would have been interesting to hear what Frans de Waal had to say in response to Nussbaum, but the fire alarm went off after her talk—I gave up waiting and came home.

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[added, 11/10/07]

A world full of compassionate people is actually not sufficient. That's the marxian point, mostly represented today by critical race theory and this sort of analysis of institutionalized racism. People of good will can still cause systematic discrimination and exploitation.

This is still the case even if we accept the idea that there is such a thing as a baseline 'animal' compassion that all humans ought to exhibit, which I think is a terrible idea.

medieval historiography

Yesterday I attended a talk/mini-conference on Medieval history and historiography. Fascinating stuff, pretty far outside my area of competence (not ready to speak of expertise at all yet). Gabrielle Spiegel and Rachel Fulton, respectively of Johns Hopkins and Chicago were the speakers. There was then a roundtable discussion, and later wine and sushi (also beer and cheese). I'll just say once at the outset, both these talks were immensely impressive and stimulating. Not that I haven't got some objections, especially to Fulton's talk, which I think she designed specifically to get them.

Spiegel’s talk was a lightning summary of what she considered to be the most exciting papers from a recent U Penn conference (soon to be published as a book) called “Representing Medieval History.” It was a little hard to follow, because she spoke quickly and densely. Some highlights, then, from her highlights, with no pretense to total coverage.

Historians today are interested in medieval practices of memorialization and legitimatization. They have examined and rejected the idea that genre conventions are central. Indeed, it seems that genre is important in large measure for it to be transcended as a mode of legitimization, as a way to give authority to whatever text—window, chronicle, statue.

Spiegel spoke especially about the new work on liturgical practices and their relation to the medieval historical imagination. The suggestion is that liturgy—ritualized, cyclical, saturated with symbolism—was a crucial mode of historical understanding. That is, events are linear and literal, but also cyclical and symbolic. Linked to this is the continued assertion that the today-necessary distinctions between documents (evidence) of the past, representations of events/people, and commentary on all these things, were simply not operative for medieval historians. The work on liturgy Spiegel summarized for the audience argued that, and this is a close paraphrase, liturgy was the default mode of medieval historiography. Pointing to particular kinds of chronicles (about which she wrote a book), Spiegel made the counter-assertion that medieval historians were perfectly able to default into genealogical forms—modeled on biblical ones, for instance.

Fulton’s talk was more theoretical and self-consciously provocative. The larger point seemed to be that we remain, somehow, largely trapped within what she prefers to call a Roman-Christian tradition of thought. She cites Marshal Sahlins to the effect that theological categories under-gird social science models in ways that are only just now being recognized. I wish she’d said the name of the article where Sahlins talks about this. This argument has to do, for her, with the apparently unrecognized ways in which early christian practice of worship is continuous with pagan Roman practices of worship. Indeed, the word ‘worship’ is one she we need in order to see this, so as to orient ourselves away from ‘religion’ and ‘belief.’ These are categories built by the Christians themselves in order to be distinguished (since they were so much the same) from the Roman precursors.

Now, what I do know about these centuries suggests strongly to me that there is great continuity between late antiquity and the early medieval period. Indeed, the years between 400 and 800 seem to me fascinating. Byzantine history should step in here, because these are years in which the Byzantines flourished—but for a variety of reasons, this hasn’t happened. I’ve read exactly one book of Byzantine history (John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium). It seems to me intuitive that our historiographical prejudice in favor of the north—France, England, Germany—was bequeathed to us as a profession by history-as-national-history, and is why we don’t do this. Of course, along with Byzantium we ought to get the various Muslim states after the 9^th century. Africa should not be a foreign country to European historians, but it is.

Fulton seems aware of all this, yet she’s not managed to get very far outside of it. I think the way out of the categories that she has identified as problematic is going to be a geographical/disciplinary reorientation, rather than a redoubling of reflexivity. There was some discussion in the round-table period of the ‘technical’ problems associated with what seems like an obvious disciplinary reorientation: in order to do a ‘responsible’ intellectual history of the period, one must be a classicist (Latin and several kinds of Greek), and also do Arabic and probably other languages. Geographically, the focus must be the Mediteranean, which has always been obvious, but which is none the less not recognized as a subspecialty in the way that, say, ‘France’ very much is. The national bequest again.

Fulton also talked about periodization. She is especially concerned with the ‘objectification’ of the middle ages—that is, their creation as a discrete unit of time. I must say that this concern, and the concern about periodization in general, seems a bit overblown to me. It isn’t that there aren’t real problems, or that, as one commentator put it, some questions seem valid only in certain time periods—that’s all true. It’s just that these are standard problems. They are worked out. Periods are set apart by technical difficulties as much as geographical areas are. Not all scholars are energetic enough to jump the barriers set up by the profession—but some are, and the 19^th century specialist who has the energy to take seriously the medieval period will presumably be rewarded for bringing methodological innovation or conceptual breadth across the barriers to his or her own period. That, anyway, is my utopian idea of how these things work.

During the round-table, an opinion was developed or arrived at (that’s a very passive way to say it, but I think it’s more or less what happened) about the way to mitigate the limitations of periodization that arise not just out of professional but also (and I thought this was a good point) out of narrative necessity: multiple temporalities. This is a fancy way of saying: thematize. I think it’s a sensible idea.

I’ve just started looking at J. W. Burrow’s survey The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914. This seems to be his approach. I may return to his book specifically, because it’s useful for me. For the moment: six chapters, each of which roughly covers the whole period of the book, but from the point of view of a different, we might say, conceptual knot. So, the history of science has a periodization that does not match up with the periodization in the history of philosophy. They clash and contrast in interesting ways. A history of ‘high’ politics will interact in productive ways with a history of social structures. This is an old idea—and, one might point out, pretty transparently a model of how the world itself is thought to work.

Gary Wilder and "Freedom Time"

Today I went to a wonderful talk given by Gary Wilder. His book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars [the capitalization there seems odd] was already on one of my lists. Now I’m genuinely excited about it.

He was introducing a new project, which he says will be called “Freedom Time,” and for which he’s already attended a year of law school—this, I think, is probably the best way to do legal history, if you can get someone to pay for it.

He started off with a longish quotation from an unspecified Kant text, and then a little summary of French Imperial Nation-State. His summary made the book sound quite different from what I would have imagined given the title. His point, as he explains it, is to see Negritude as more than just a nativism. It is, rather, a critical theory of modernity (that is, a Critical Theory)—attempting to revise bankrupt positivist and instrumental reason through an appeal to poetic reason. It is a working-through, dialectical overcoming, rather than simple rejection, of modernity. In this project it is hardly alone during the 1930s. I don’t know a great deal about the ideas or figures here—mostly Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor—but from what little I do know, it seems a sensible move.

The payoff for Wilder is that once we think of Negritude as committed to the dialectical overcoming of empire and the colonial situation, rather than a simplistic rejection, we are able to make sense of the political moves made by Césaire and Senghor in the postwar world. Departmentalization and then subsequent attempts to form other supra-national organizations, are not false-consciousness, not (simply) anachronistic. These policies are rather an attempt to preserve certain aspects of the imperial project and reject others. So, for instance, the departmentalization of Martinique was not supposed to be its submission to France, but was rather understood as the first step of a radical re-visioning of Frenchness. Il faut assimiler et pas être assimiler. Wilder makes this argument in large measure by pointing to the self-conscious way in which Césaire mobilized and positioned himself in terms of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher (who was behind the French 1848 abolition of slavery). The largest, and in some sense very obvious structuring observation here is that we, as historians, shouldn’t assume that just because, in the post-1945 world, anti-colonial and Third World movements tended to be nationalist, that means that anti-imperialism anti-racism had to be articulated in terms of national projects. It isn’t so. Negritude, then, shouldn’t be seen as a nativism, or an anti-racism, or anything of the sort, it is rather both genuinely anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist. Again, given what I know about the immediate postwar, it seems to me to be (oh blessed conjunction) both true and a major historiographical trend to say that this period is more radically ‘open’ and undetermined than it has often been presented as having been—this especially in reference to what the shape of Europe ended up being, the viability (meaning) of communism.

This argument is set out with copious reference above all to Walter Benjamin. Adorno, Reinhart Koselleck, Ernst Bloch and others are also mobilized, but Benjamin is the major reference. I won’t try to explain exactly what Wilder is doing, but it has to do with multiple temporalities, and ways of thinking that which didn’t happen, that which did happen (but was impossible), the concept of concrete utopia, and others.

During the talk, all kinds of parallels with what I’ve been reading of Zizek, Badiou and, to a lesser extent, Laclau, were going through my head. A major issue is that of retroaction. This seems to me to be somehow Lacanian in origin (or at least inspiration), but I’m not sure about that. Similarly, the idea that the way, the only way, to move beyond the empire (in this case, the French Empire, rather than simply ‘Empire’) is to push it to its conclusion, or to a particular conclusion, has many echoes in what I’ve been reading.

Similarly, there is clearly a place for Sorel in this discussion of the imbrications, for the thinkers of Negritude, of politics and philosophy. I don’t think Wilder has quite figured out the best way of talking about this yet. He points to the utopian socialists—especially Proudhon—as an inspiration for Senghor and Césaire, but as has been pointed out in another context, a citation isn’t an explanation.

I’m not convinced that Benjaminian temporalities are the right way to talk about what’s happening here. I guess I don’t understand how they advance the discussion beyond the terms of past(s), appropriation and re-writing of them. It is likely, though, that if I read Koselleck (as I should), and more Benjamin, I could be convinced that this terminology is useful.

At any rate, it was a good talk, with some good questions. I’m very glad to have been there.

[also, i just noticed, it should be Négritude throughout. Dunno how that accent got away.]