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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804768832 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2011 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
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THE PROBLEM WITH GRACE
Reconfiguring Political TheologyBy Vincent W. Lloyd
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6883-2
Chapter One
LOVE
LOVE OPPOSED TO LAW: THAT IS THE QUINT ESSENTIAL IMAGE OF supersessionism. Where we were once shackled by senseless rules, we are now embraced by that sensuous blend of the affective and the ethical which goes by the name of Love. In the regime of Law, we must be made to do good; in the regime of Love, we do good because we want to do good. Citizens of the City of Man live in a regime of Law; citizens of the City of God live in a regime of Love.
This is the image that grips and enchants us. Yet as soon as it is thought, rather than regurgitated, it becomes almost impossibly perplexing. It is, after all, a metaphor, and a strained one at that. What if all our life was really like love? What if all we did was like that one human practice which seems to have so much appeal, which seems to bring with it affective, ethical, and religious dimensions, to intermingle these dimensions into a fuzzy, spiritual experience? There seems to be no better tool to combat the rational, material, secular character of the modern world than a certain image of love—love as we imagine it in the modern world.
To live in a regime of love: this is a perplexing metaphor because love seems supremely personal, unique to one individual and directed at another for highly contingent, possibly mysterious reasons. To reconcile the specificity of the modern experience of love with the universalities to which the metaphor is applied—the social, the political, the religious: must this require some third, supernatural term that reconciles the universal and the particular, some third, peculiarly Christian term? Or is there a way for the universal to supersede its particular counterparts through its own power? The supersessionist imagination cannot just oppose law and love; it must derive love from law, derive the universal from the particular. Love does not offer an alternative to law, love completes law.
Perhaps it is not in this image of love, this enchanting love, but in the phenomenology of love, in the lived experience of lover and beloved, in the tension and teasing, in the fulfillment and frustration, perhaps in the sorrow and in the confrontation with another being, distinct yet demanding—perhaps this is where the political potential of love resides. This is where Gillian Rose turns in Love's Work, her philosophical memoir, at once a work of autobiography and an ethical-political polemic. The culmination of two decades of investigation of Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, Christian theology, and the Jewish tradition, as well as four decades of living life as sensually suffused as it was intellectually robust, Love's Work offers a (Hegelian, not Husserlian) phenomenology of love. It not only lays the groundwork for understanding love as a virtue but also exposes the supersessionist deviations that enchant love, deviations that lead to frightening political conclusions.
The question of the relationship between love and politics is posed allegorically through Rose's narration of the story of Camelot. The question is posed but not resolved. The resolution, or rather the work of resolution, is the project of Love's Work as a whole. The story Rose retells is this: In a time of endless feuding and bloodshed, King Arthur had a vision. He wanted to create a kingdom based on justice and equality. There would not be favoritism, the rule of law would be respected, and knights would sit at a Round Table to participate in the governance of the regime, each with an equal voice in the kingdom's affairs. A regime founded on justice and equality, King Arthur believed, would be an island of peace and prosperity in a sea of chaos and violence.
King Arthur recruited knights to Camelot who shared his aspirations. The French knight Launcelot, passionate and idealistic, befriended King Arthur and joined the Round Table. King Arthur, too, was idealistic. His ideal was to create a transparent law that would best suit those who lived in Camelot, would best match their customs. Launcelot's ideal, in contrast, was not to take the people as they were, but to transform them, to perfect Camelot. He was idealistic and passionate: when he slew a knight while jousting, he publicly wept.
Launcelot's passion was without restraint, and it brought about his downfall. He fell in love with King Arthur's wife, Guinevere. According to the laws of Camelot, Launcelot had to be banished and Guinevere had to die. But King Arthur deeply loved both his wife and his friend. The king faced a choice. If he followed Camelot's laws, he would stay true to his ideal of governing a kingdom based on the rule of law; however, he would lose those individuals who are dearest to him, Launcelot and Guinevere. If King Arthur made an exception to Camelot's laws, he would be able to save his wife and friend but Camelot would be tainted. The people would know that the laws are not always applied fairly, that exceptions are made for those whom the king favors.
The choice that King Arthur had to make was a choice between his two loves, between his love for the ideal of Camelot and his love for his wife and friend. It was a conflict of ideals, a conflict of loves for ideals, that gave rise to this choice. King Arthur's ideal of transparent and equitable law arising from the customs of the community was incompatible with Launcelot's ideal, the passionate drive for perfection. It is the tension between these pairs of loves which opens a phenomenology of love. Framed by passionate conflict, this is the experience of love: the working of love's apparent conflicts. What proclaims itself most loudly as love gives way to a practice of love. King Arthur and Launcelot began enchanted by the rhetoric of love; through the experience of conflict, King Arthur learned the practice of love. He became skilled in the virtue of love.
King Arthur decided to follow the law, but Launcelot managed to rescue Guinevere before she was executed. The banished Launcelot and King Arthur fight a war which King Arthur won. But Camelot was no longer a peaceful kingdom, and King Arthur had lost his wife and his friend. Rose concludes that, regardless of what choice King Arthur would have made, "the King must now be sad." This is the heart of the allegory: "sadness is the condition of the King" (123). When law is understood as an ideal, whether imposed by a King or a sovereign people, "humanity is forgotten, and so will be the law" (124). The focus on a distant ideal allows lawmakers, be they monarchs or democratic citizens, to forget their personal vulnerability and power, with inevitably grim results. But grim results would have just as surely followed had King Arthur forgotten his ideal and favored his family and friends.
When philosophy is done right, Rose asserts, it is about the sadness of the king. When philosophy is done wrong, it is about finding an easy way out, accepting one of the king's options as obvious, ignoring (but actually repressing) this sadness. The result is melancholy: interminable fixation on suppressed sadness (Rose names neo-Kantianism, poststructuralism, and neopragmatism as victims of this melancholy). Philosophy done the right way acknowledges that, regardless of the choices made, there inevitably will be regret. Philosophy done the right way does not dwell on this regret but is propelled by it back into the fray to try again at getting things right, and to try again at justice. Metaphysics, according to Rose, is "the perception of the difficulty of the law," while ethics is "the development of it ... being at a loss yet exploring various routes, different ways towards the good enough justices, which recognizes the intrinsic and contingent limitations in its exercise" (124).
The work of philosophy is the work of telling stories like the story of Camelot. It begins with discernment, looking carefully into muddy waters. Out of these waters a governing opposition is posited. Then, the philosopher tracks the conflicts to which the governing opposition gives rise. This final stage is animated by what Hegel calls the speculative identity of the governing opposition. The two posited concepts are at once identical and nonidentical. Rules of logic are moot because this is a work of rhetoric, of persuasion. A speculative identity is "a result to be achieved" through adding social and historical detail. This detail makes both claims of identity and nonidentity plausible.
Rose follows Hegel in telling such a story about jurisprudence. Having surveyed the history of jurisprudential thought, she posits natural law, the belief that law has some transcendent foundation, and positive law, the belief that law is a product of human societies, as organizing moments. It is examining the tension between these two moments which becomes the work of the philosopher of law, telling the story of that tension. That one of these moments is taken to point to the transcendent and the other is taken to refuse the transcendent is not coincidental.
For this is the work of philosophy generalized: setting transcendent and immanent apart and witnessing the instability that results. But does this not sound uncomfortably similar, in form if not in content, to supersessionist logic? The problem with supersessionist logic, in its most generic form, is opposing immanent and transcendent, thereby ignoring the ordinary. Rose's phenomenological method certainly opposes immanent and transcendent. That is where it begins. But Rose understands Hegelian phenomenology to be a narrative, a compelling story, not a "first philosophy." In other words, Rose's phenomenology is a rhetorical strategy, a tool to persuade. Yet it would still seem a questionable rhetorical strategy: it attempts to shift the focus away from a supersessionist logic through a discussion organized around the pillars of a supersessionist logic. Regardless of intent, is it not likely that the pillars, transcendence and immanence, will be reinforced rather than displaced?
What is important is "the middle." This is what Rose took to be her innovation, a restoration of what is most powerful from Hegel—and a return to what Hegel really says. The middle is between the posited poles, between the immanent and the transcendent. It involves the difficult work of the ordinary, of negotiating practices and norms. To some readers, the middle appears too difficult, inscrutable—and too much like deconstruction. Why is focusing on the middle not just another way of reveling in the indeterminacy of meaning? But the objection seems less plausible if we take the story of King Arthur as paradigmatic of an opening onto the middle. The point of the parable is not that the concepts of ideal law and ideal love slip into each other, as it would be for a deconstructive reading. The point is that they are both wrong, that we should shake free of their domination and turn our attention elsewhere—to the middle.
Perhaps we can say: Rose's phenomenology is a rhetoric of two which she opposes to a rhetoric of one. A rhetoric of one is organized around inflating or deflating a privileged concept. Various resources are marshaled to advance that one cause, to deliver one packet of information. If the King Arthur story were a rhetoric of one, it would aim to persuade the reader that the concepts of law and love are x and y (or, in the deconstructive case, that x is y). A rhetoric of two is a rhetoric that self-destructs. Its aim is to persuade the reader that the way she currently see things obscures. It persuades by inflating, into caricature, the way things are currently seen. Thus, it is not any two concepts that can be chosen in a rhetoric of two (as would be the case in a deconstructive argument, which would show that any two concepts slip into each other). The two concepts are not taken as given, they are constructed, and they are constructed in such a way as to capture the aspiration of a domain to supersede itself.
A rhetoric of one does not recognize itself as rhetoric so it puts on the pretence of naturalness. Deconstructive rhetoric is parasitic on a text; constructive rhetoric is parasitic on the world. A rhetoric of two is parasitic on its listeners, choosing its poles so as to maximize its appeal to them. A rhetoric of one is necessarily supersessionist. It is animated by an object, whether present or absent, named or unnamed, that effectively exerts a gravitational (that is, libidinal) pull. But it is that very object which is being transformed by its discourse: the one is both cause and effect, origin and end. If it succeeds as rhetoric—that is, if it persuades—it does so because its core is aligned with regnant enchantment, with ideology. It thickens enchantment, offering new, more clever, more eloquent, more sophisticated ways to say what is obvious. It is only by means of a rhetoric of two that we can get to the middle, because a rhetoric of two takes aim squarely at enchantment. How the two pillars, inflated into caricature, contaminate and animate becomes evident as the story of their coevolution unfolds. The dual pillars tell a tragic tale, which is to say they speak of the ordinary. In each moment when they conflict, when the two pillars pull against each other (not just slip into each other), enchantment fails. With each conflict, the desire that animates the poles loses its potency and the grip of enchantment fades. As we will see, love is the rhetoric of two made flesh.
Rose does not explicitly follow this procedure in her discussion of love. She only gestures toward it with the allegory of Camelot. Yet her entire memoir, Love's Work, is doing this philosophical (self-consciously rhetorical) work autobiographically. Before directly approaching Rose's text, let us follow the method I am ascribing to her. Let us turn to ancient Greece in order to sketch what immanent and transcendent, worldly and otherworldly, conceptions of love might look like. As was the case in the Camelot story, such a historical sketch is an allegory; it is history put to use by rhetoric.
In Homeric Greek, forms of the verb philein were used in a broad variety of contexts, ranging from friendship to spousal love. They were also used in contexts which seem quite strange to the modern ear: philos was used reflexively to indicate a special bond with something, rather like the English adjective dear. A soul, heart, life, or breath could be philos, as could a body part, such as a knee. In addition to the reflexive dear usage, philos was used to describe bonds of friendship. When there was some sort of reciprocal agreement between two parties, an agreement creating what might be called a friendship, the individuals became philoi. Gods could have philoi among humans, those whom they favored and whom did them favors. The word also applied to less formal arrangements, such as between comrades in war. The verb philein took on the meaning "to kiss," as a kiss was an action which signified a reciprocal agreement between friends.
To make sense of these varying uses, Émile Benveniste suggests that philein began meaning a formal, reciprocal agreement but later evolved to mean a relationship with "emotional color" involving a "sentimental attitude" beyond the formal institution of friendship. Philos described things that were, broadly, mine: things relating to my household and my family, as well as my physical body and spirit. Philos described "'a scale of affection' involving 'a fixed gradation of friends and relations,'" where a wife was situated near the top of the scale. Affection for one's wife was not qualitatively different from affection for servants or colleagues or even one's own soul. Rather, affection for a wife was different only in quantity, in the special degree to which she was close to oneself. A wife was most dear. In sum, love in the Homeric, pre-Platonic sense was a special quantity of affect, where affect attached to objects and people because of their closeness to oneself. Closeness here does not refer to physical proximity but rather to the amount of comfort and attachment that one has to the object or person in question. The more comfort and attachment, the closer it is. What one loves, on the Homeric view, is that with which one is most comfortable, that to which one is most attached. Love is entirely this-worldly, immanent. It simply describes a fact about human existence. Everyone loves just as everyone eats, just as everyone has parents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE PROBLEM WITH GRACE by Vincent W. Lloyd Copyright © 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: Beyond Supersessionism....................11. Love....................29
2. Faith....................50
3. Hope....................70
4. Tradition....................91
5. Liturgy....................108
6. Sanctity....................128
7. Revelation....................146
8. Prophecy....................165
Conclusion: Politics of the Middle....................187
Appendix: Political Theology as a Rigorous Science....................205
Notes....................221
Bibliography....................229
Index....................237