Power, Love and Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged

Power, Love and Evil Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged

At the Interface

Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Nancy Mardas

Advisory Board Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson Professor Margaret Chatterjee Dr Wayne Cristaudo Dr Mira Crouch Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Dr Jones Irwin Professor Asa Kasher

Dr Martin McGoldrick Revd Stephen Morris Professor John Parry Professor Peter L. Twohig Professor S Ram Vemuri Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E

Volume 42 A volume in the At the Interface project ‘Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness’

Probing the Boundaries

Power, Love and Evil Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged

Wayne Cristaudo

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2338-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

To Matthew whose death is part of the shame of the world and the young woman who said “I’m damaged” and then showed me what she meant.

Through me you go into the city of weeping; Through me you go into eternal pain; Through me you go among the lost people. Justice is what moved my exalted Maker; I was the invention of the power of God, Of his wisdom, and of his primal love. Dante’s The Inferno. Words on the gates of hell. Damaged by you, damaged by me. Lyrics from “Damaged” by Black Flag.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank: Lou, Betty, Tony and Ann Cristaudo, Jennifer Buckley, Bernadette Dempsey, Bob Catley, Paul Corcoran, Mike Dyson, Mark Huessy, Frances Huessy, Ray Huessy, Harold Stahmer, Claudia Landgraf, Gabrielle MacIntyre, Catherine Mahoney, Freya von Moltke, Lelani Paras, Ulrich Paetzholdt, Elfed Roberts, Patrick Schmitt, Natasha Skradol, Woodrow Stephens, Janusz Syzak, Engelhard Weigl, Father Gregory O’Leary, Amanda Ryder, Lisa Young, and (long-suffering fellow musicians) Eric Bouvet, Lucille Bruyard, Sid Kidman, Stan Mastripolito, John West-Sooby (who has not only been a partner in musical crime, but for some very enjoyable years joined me in teaching the subject Power, Love and Evil at the University of Adelaide); also Michael GormannThelen, the best ideas smuggler in the business, who, at a critical stage, helped me see a way through the mess, and Wendy Baker who edited, agonised and provoked me every inch of the way to get it right (even though she does not always share my argument). Thanks also to Rob Fisher, editor in chief of this series and founder of the Perspectives in Evil and Wickedness Conferences which have provided a wonderful forum to explore these ideas. I am indebted to the University of Adelaide for having provided a home and support for most of the project - and the many, many students I taught there whose love got me through hard times, also the University of Hong Kong, for having given me the opportunity to complete it. And then there is Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), the now almost forgotten Christian social thinker/ sociologist/ historian and teacher (and friend of the much better known Franz Rosenzweig), whose name is woven constantly throughout this work. I discovered his writings at the same time as I realized the inadequacy of the philosophical direction I had been taking for so many years. This is not a book on him, but it is a book I could not have written without him. Hence the frequency with which his ideas appear in these pages.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1:

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

13

Chapter 2:

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

27

Chapter 3:

Evil and the Phantasmic

45

Chapter 4:

Damage: A Logic of Evil

55

Chapter 5:

Denial and the Elimination of Evil and Evil’s Elimination of the Subject in Denial

71

Chapter 6:

Truth and Faith, or Forms and Signs of Life’s Power

89

Chapter 7:

Love and the Limits of Justice

115

Chapter 8:

Alchemising Evil

129

Endnotes

147

Index

161

Introduction What is real is generative. That is, the real is what creates subsequent events, subsequent actions, subsequent facts. What is generative is thus by definition a power. This book takes seriously the idea that love and evil are powers. They are generative and hence as real as any material forces. More, of all the powers of life, these are the two most pregnant with meaning, hence the most generative of what is specifically human. It is not true that all we need is love, but it is true that where love is lacking nothing else amounts to very much at all. And, if love really is the means for overcoming evil, its absence is the guarantee of despair and destruction. We express what we value. We value what we love. We also “value” evil in the sense that evil is the enemy of what we love and we wish to protect love from evil. For the most part, what terrorises us and what we hate we discern as evil. Yet, paradoxically, this does not rule out evil itself arising from love, even being generated by a kind of love, which, due to the hell of its effects, can be seen as a love in reverse or misdirected love - the demonic being as Kierkegaard so succinctly put it, the truth in reverse. Evil thrives in love’s brokenness, that is why it wants love to break down - love’s brokenness is what evil really loves and seeks. But in doing this, it creates the conditions under which love must arise again, lest we perish. Love generates freely; evil forces the love out of us. The paradox of evil is that it is death, sickness (mal as the French language remind us), destruction, violation, terror, horror and yet its very existence is what brings forth love that would otherwise never be generated. Not all love is generated in response to evil. But love is the power for regeneration in the wastelands created by evil. More than fifteen hundred years ago St Augustine provided a remarkably rich analysis of the relationship between love and evil, having perceived that evil results from the wrong kind of love, from love of the wrong thing, from love of our own self and the things we want for ourselves at the expense of our neighbour and the source of love itself, which Augustine equated with God the creator. Many hearts in the contemporary world cannot abide the God of love who Augustine worshipped, believing that this God was not lovable enough because he bred more hate and ignorance than love and wisdom. 1 Irrespective of the rightness of wrongness of such a judgment, or the power or impotence that accompanies building our selves and world with or without a sign of God’s presence, profound insights about evil lay embedded in theology, and to lose such insights as those of Augustine’s does us no good.

2

Introduction

___________________________________________________________ This book began with deep dissatisfaction about the direction and achievements of much contemporary philosophy and social theory. 2 That dissatisfaction derives from one devastating negative fact about much of the impact of social philosophy in the last century. In the main it had sought after justice or more power for a specific group, and it did not consider love as a real force, preferring instead to focus upon marks and demarcations of social power. Freud and his followers were an important exception, though Freud was ever a disciple of Spinoza and the mechanistic philosophers in that he equated love with desire and the universe as always in obedience to laws which we could eventually map out. Christian theologians had another idea - the idea of agape, that love was a divine or cosmic gift, and it could come unexpectedly out of nowhere and hit us at any moment. Such love would change the course of a person’s life completely, just as it could change the course of the world. I think Spinoza a profound thinker and a better man than those now forgotten members of his synagogue who expelled and cursed him, and those Christians who wanted to hunt down, persecute and punish or eliminate him and his followers. But I think the Judaeo-Christian’s tradition of agape leaves an enduringly powerful truth about love’s nature which cannot simply be captured by the concept of eros. The Christian tradition’s preoccupation with love also created a way of looking at intelligence which eluded both pre-Christian and more modern and post-modern understandings of the role of the mind: it saw the purpose of intelligence as discerning where love lies, where it can be tapped, where and how one should surrender to it. That tradition saw that love (like evil) makes the real. To be sure, Plato and Aristotle had been grasping for this, Aristotle making the unmoved mover create out of love, and Plato making his creator god tend to things both small and large. But it is initially the Jews, Christians and (post-Christian) neo-Platonists who elevate love’s role to a position enabling later philosophers and poets to identify the light of intellect with the light of love. When Christendom’s greatest poet/ philosopher Dante sang, in The Divine Comedy, of the love that moved the sun and other stars, he was singing of the power that illumines, the light that activates, and that which we draw upon to exist. Likewise when he said that hell is without intellect, he did not mean that syllogisms or even facts are not recognized in hell, but that the zones of horror and terror are created by people who act without love’s light, without making light, without generating it. The minds of the damned are at work when they do evil but not the loving light of their souls, and hence death is served. This insight, which had already been deeply embedded within the Christian world when he wrote The Divine Comedy, resonates

Wayne Cristaudo

3

___________________________________________________________ in Friedrich Schlegel’s note that: “Love is the intellectual intuition of life.” 3 Such insights are closely related to the fact that the self is constantly reshaped by the powers it feeds and is fed by. Throughout the day one is inevitably formed by numerous bodies apart from the biological and physical, such as one’s familial relationships, one’s workrelationships, one’s amiable relationships, one’s commercial relationships. Just as we creatures are constellations of forces and parts, we also are parts in the formation of greater wholes, often far more fleeting than those who compose them and far more durable. If our eye could see what we form collaboratively, not only spatially, but also temporally - in our communications, touchings, dealings, calls and responses - we would be hard pressed to deny that the collective formations in which we enter (as lovers, members of families, neighbourhoods, tribes, workplaces, nations, up to the world as a whole) are as real as we insist we are, which is neither more nor less real than the neurons, synapses, nerves, muscles, cells, tissues, thoughts, emotions which make us up. Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton’s rival for the claim of being the discoverer of the infinitesimal calculus, placed this insight at the cornerstone of his philosophy. He realized that every body and hence every creature is an expression of the drives bringing it into existence and he held that there were two metaphysical substances essential to the process - the monad, the qualitative point of consciousness that expresses the totality of powers forming an entity, and God, that which totalises the combination of all monads (what guarantees harmony). His teaching can be traced back at least to the sixth century neo-Platonist, Proclus, (whose teaching is a dynamic refinement of the neo-Platonists Plotinus, Iamblichus, Plato himself and Pythagoras, the source of much inspiration for Plato) who taught the essential vital multiplicity of any unity. The idea of the multiplicity in unity has much in common with the ancient atomists. But it differs from the tradition of Democritus and Leucippius by its making of consciousness, not the accidental product of a combination, but the intrinsically necessary and hence irreducible correlate of any existent. Love is, inter alia, the name we give to that process where consciousness is ecstatically enhanced by the union of life with life. David Fidelier, in his essay “Eros and the Circle of Divine Love,” neatly summarises Proclus’ cosmic vision: “the entire universe, reaching from the highest to the lowest, is united in one magnificent circuit, animated by the motive power of love.” 4 The same idea underpins Dante’s vision of a cosmic fusion of romance and transcendence. The ever-lingering presence of this way of seeing reality can be discerned almost as soon as we hear someone singing about how love will overcome everything, how eternal

4

Introduction

___________________________________________________________ their love is, how infinitely desperate someone is in their need for love, and how much hell someone is in if they lack love. The correlate of seeing the cosmos this way is that love is the binding of creatures in God’s creative expansion, as Giordano Bruno, the great Renaissance neo-Platonist and martyr to the truth of the infinity of the world and the infinity of love’s forms, put it. 5 Seen thus love is everpushing through the cosmos in search of its sovereignty over all obstacles. This vision of philosophers, poets, singers and sages persists in some quarters in spite of all the evidence to the contrary that life is wreckage and death and turmoil and horror and calamity piled upon calamity. This vision is motivated by faith, and it is a faith that builds worlds. It is grounded in the facts that we live, that we do not all choose suicide, that we make futures, that we not only recollect the past, but seek to find what once was thought irretrievably lost. It is a faith in response to love’s refusal to be conquered by death, a faith in love’s eternal resilience. It is a faith that love speaks to us as a species, even if it not always heard by every group or individual. Perhaps the only way men and women could sufficiently express the depth of the meaning they saw in the experience of love was to make it not just a god, but the essence of The God. Being the essence of the one God, love could no longer be Ishtar, Aphrodite, or Venus, that is the embodiment of a love that could be trumped by a higher power, a love that could become war, or be raped or consort, for sheer pleasure, with the evil of war. How desperate must men and women have been to sacrifice erotic desire, to make almost every reference to it a sin, a crime, a problem, and instead to run and remain in wilderness and caves awaiting a love of infinite power? To be sure it was too much, much too much - Venus and eros could not die. The erotic too was a power that could be placed in service to love, which is why the troubadours and their progeny - and Dante most successfully - could respond to her cries. With the help of neoPlatonic notions of eros’ immortality, the troubadours brought Venus back from her banishment by insisting upon her compatibility with the transcendent ends of love. The impetus that sprang from the Jewish faith and Christianity, if not the eventual momentum, was not unique. For example, dharma and devotion, selflessness and surrender - central tenets of Hinduism and carried over into Buddhism - are all requisites of the love that deploys its creatures to do its bidding rather than follow their own sensuousness and will. Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when Eastern religions poured into the West from theosophy and anthroposophy, the primary message, as exemplified in the discourses of the Dalai Lama, was love. In the Western philosophical tradition, Empedocles had made love

Wayne Cristaudo

5

___________________________________________________________ and hate the two primordial cosmic forces, although from Plato on, and with some exceptions, the philosophical tradition tended to make love subordinate to wisdom and the virtues. While it may be argued that Islam overlaps with the strands of the Jewish faith and Christianity which elevate justice above love, the greatest poet of Islam, Rumi, is, with Dante, the greatest of singers of cosmic love. This underlying insight that love itself is the power of powers was widely scattered throughout the world. The West was no less barbaric, brutal and greedy than any other region on the planet, yet from every pulpit throughout every Christian land the God of love was praised and his flock worshipped him. There was, at least, a common faith that the highest and most venerable truth was the truth of God’s love. And time and time again this God was reinvoked from the bitter depths of each new hell that had been created by human greed and cruelty. Indeed it was out of the most brutal conditions and experiences that his name was called in the very first place. As Nietzsche reminds us, the God of love was not first called by the victors and the prosperous of the ancient world, but the conquered, the broken, the enslaved. Just as love became One, so did evil. The very condensation of the power of love required an equal concentration of the demonic and dark forces. How else was the evil of love’s absence to be explained? The totally Other, he had his minions and dist-angelic equivalents in the reverse image of the kingdom of heaven - a fire that burnt eternally without purifying, a fire that was divine justice’s eternal punishment. That the human imagination, that the souls and hearts and minds of so many, wove so many threads of this great cosmic play of two antagonistic primordial forces played no small part in an integrated vision of life’s meaning. The depth, complexity and power of the vision were also fed by the trickle and, then, flood of polymorphous energies of the pagan myths and gods and feast days which eventually has thrown us back into a polytheistic cosmopolitan culture tenuously held together by the glue of monotheistic remnants. In spite of its multitudinous crimes, Christians took the God of love outside of his original location in Judea and brought him to the world, where he provided an astonishing coherence to aspects of life which we now compartmentalise and isolate from each other. That process of compartmentalising the world, originally into matters of conscience and public worship and the public and the private, and then moving to scientific “objects” and universal norms, the side of the true and the progressive, and mere belief and “subjectivity,” the side of ignorance and falsity, has occurred in tandem with the disintegration and dissolution of Christianity’s cultural/ political hegemony in the West. The Christian world’s failure to create peace within itself, combined with its power to

6

Introduction

___________________________________________________________ absorb and reconfigure past potencies (what bears the short-hand, and somewhat simplistic, name of the Renaissance) played no small part in preparing the way for its own demise in much of where it had previously reigned. The basis of that demise was the reactivation, intensification and elaboration of pre-Christian philosophical ideas deriving from Stoics, Epicureans, and magicians. The seeds of modern science and ethics were Epicurean and Stoic: the cosmos is one (Stoic) and consists of material particles/ force in motion (Epicurean); virtue must be directed to the public good (Stoic) and each should seek private pleasure (Epicurean). But the austerity of Stoicism and Epicureanism was too close to the renunciativeness of Christianity to satisfy the new hunger of worldliness in the West that had sprung up again from the simple appreciation of nature typified by Hildegard of Bingen and St Francis and spread like fire with the Italian Renaissance and then with Luther’s turn back to the health and beauty of the every-day of God’s creations, as opposed to the sordid and monstrous desires which he saw as enflamed by the deprivations incurred through the monastic life. Prior to Luther, the great Renaissance scholar and philosopher Marsilio Ficino was busy translating not only Plato, most of whose great works had been lost to the West, but also the mystical, magical, astrological and alchemical collection gathered under the signature of Hermes Trismesgistus. While the means of the Hermetic tradition were to be gradually supplanted by science (but, as every recent study of Newton will emphasise, even the greatest exponent of the new science busied himself assiduously with alchemy and astrology), that tradition had always held out the promise of mastery of the materials of this world so that one could do one’s will. But the self received its greatest boost with the genesis of commercial societies and liberal democratic political systems whose very existence were bound up with the judicial subject whose earthly rights and opportunities were no longer to be seen as belonging to one merely by means of one’s superior birth. Christian churches had taught continuously that although men and women of different rank had different obligations toward God and their fellows, all were loved by God; in God’s eyes, all souls were to be weighed in the same balance. But the emergence of commercial society took this further and transformed political and social life by connecting the self’s rights and judicial status with the range of powers each encompassed and could activate in connection with others who called them forth and with whom one could associate and generate more power, virtue, wealth and value. One’s powers were one’s property - and while liberalism originally only granted political rights to property holders in the most restrictive understanding of the term (that is, property as land), eventually it had to include not only landholders, but all those adults, with some exceptions

Wayne Cristaudo

7

___________________________________________________________ such as prisoners and the insane, whose powers could contribute to the common wealth. According to Franz Rosenzweig, Goethe (whose Faust is the West’s grand symbolic synthesis of the demonic, magical and Christian) provides the earliest clear formulation of the modern Western soul in a youthful prayer of his that runs: “Labor of my hands that I/ finish, grant, oh Fortune high.” 6 This prayer, said Rosenzweig, is a prayer of “unbelief,” “which is at the same time a wholly believing prayer, namely believing in creaturely fashion.” 7 It is, he argued, also the prayer now prayed by all Christians, which, for Rosenzweig, meant all whose mores had their source in the Christian tradition, including those who thought themselves as atheists. That is, Rosenzweig understood with astonishing clarity that within the West each person hopes that his or her will shall be blessed. Such a hope, such a prayer is, as he rightly saw, the old pagan love of fate. Not “Thy will be done,” but “would that My will be divinised.” The elevation of our own will was the signal that God’s time was coming to pass, just as the elevation of the one God had signalled the passing of the gods. But there is something about our species that cannot simply let the past be. Perhaps it is the resilience of whatever it is that has been divinised that haunts the solitude of the self. Just as the gods would not rest forever, 8 God too is not so easily silenced, and all the while the self feels itself a mere usurper of the throne. Christianity, for all its initial abandonment of the ways of the world, or rather perhaps for having being renunciative for so long, harnessed a remarkable potency in its shaping of the soul. The very institutions that made the Enlightenment possible (albeit that had also acted as fetters against the burning new spirit) had also sprung up in Christian soil. 9 But in the main we tend to recall the latest grievance rather than earlier bounties. Now what remains of Christianity in the West is disjointed and uncertain. Perhaps it could be argued that the spirit of Christianity was being poured into secular forms in a post-religious (Johannine) age, as was argued by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Rosenstock-Huessy. That is, it was precisely what was genuinely Christian about its spirit that has led to the casting off of the intrusions, irrelevancies, and superstitions. Certainly Christendom also proved remarkably fertile in its revival of the university, the impetus it gave to the visual and musical arts, its legal, political, especially parliamentary, and corporate formations. The case has also been well made by Ivan Illich that it is precisely the perversion of Christian forms that has characterised the West; that is, the West’s sad fate is that it took over the deeds and fruits of Christian conviviality, free acts of love undertaken by extraordinary souls who set up spiritual orders and institutions such as orphanages and

8

Introduction

___________________________________________________________ hospitals and poor houses for helping their brothers and sisters, and reproduced them mechanically with rules and norms, thereby creating a range of spiritless/ heartless institutions which deform us. 10 Certainly we who live in the West live in a world which is simultaneously the most technologically powerful and politically and economically free society that has ever existed. Yet for all its potency, for all the faith of modernity in the creative knowing self, in material prosperity, individual liberty and social equality which in turn would supposedly provide the foundations for satisfying lives, the great explosions of the twentieth century have been matched by a widespread sense of inner disintegration. With its swirling blackish-blue seas and turbulent dark orange skies, suggestive of volcanic action, and its precarious bridge on which two background spectral shapes move behind a foreground figure who is nothing but a deafening silent scream, Edvard Munch’s painting of 1893, “The Scream,” not unlike other contemporary works by Vincent van Gogh and James Ensor, took his viewers into that new territory that was to typify one of the major purposes of much twentieth century art: the deployment of artistic materials to reveal the terror and anxiety that men and women felt about life. Munch’s screaming figure, while recognizably human, is misshapen and un-gendered: it is anyone and no one, the typically alienated, isolated, horrified being who has no cause to scream, yet is nothing other than the product of all those forces of life (that is, nature (depicted by horrifying sky and sea) human artifice (the bridge) and humans) which conspire to form the scream. In Munch we see how far modern men and women have come from the vision of life in which humanity was the crown of creation, and nature was something which was to be perfected by “man” who was made in God’s image. If one compares Munch’s “The Scream” with the figures in hell produced by that much earlier painter of human terror, Hieronymous Bosch, what strikes us is that whereas Bosch’s hell is the creation of disastrous human choices, terrors caused by sin, people thrown into nightmarish cruelties that result from not following the way that God has laid out for them, in Munch there is no moral background or compass, simply the terror of life itself. Nothing, apart from everything, has caused Munch’s figure to scream, and he/she/it is screaming at nothing and everything. The scream is the horrific recognition of the terror of life, that there is nothing to shield us from the terror. Behind this scream is the widespread anxiety that we are unloved, that there is no love that can reach us. Today, as opposed to the general consensus of academicians in the social sciences and humanities that our major obstacles are due to the inequities and deficiencies of social structures, works of popular

Wayne Cristaudo

9

___________________________________________________________ psychology and our expressive media concur repeatedly that the lack and abuse of love is the major source of evil that confronts us. This has been particularly widely felt in the last twenty or so years as the word “damage” has permeated popular culture and the focus of our psychological attention has been moved to the abuse of children within families, and church and state institutions. The damage that we do each other and that has been done to us has been, quite rightly, seen as a central problem in our social making. The serial killer is the social symbol within popular culture to remind us of the price that is paid for the trauma of love’s failure. The insight is not new. Dostoevsky’s Smerdyakov is but the incarnation of the evil that has bred him; Shakespeare’s Edmund, a rejected son who comes back to show his father the terrible reality he has failed to see before he has eyes so vilely plucked out. And before that the Jewish Bible and/ or Old Testament taught that the sins of the fathers would be visited upon their children. Not that this explains all evil, but it is why the Jewish people so long ago were convinced that the way to prevent evil was through building a body of love, by loving the neighbour. The modern world has satisfied our hunger but not our souls. Our souls still want love and we have not yet formed the body of love that we crave. The following explorations in this book are deeply indebted to our religious and theological traditions, and are based upon the methodological point that the truth of a sign is to be gauged by the potencies it generates, which also means that the truth resides in both the religious and the secular, or, in Hegel’s terms, the infinite and the finite. In the end, it is the real itself that every philosophy must seek to grasp and to express and to realize. That means refusing to accept the dogmatic limitations of naturalism, especially its failure to grasp the depth of insight into reality embedded in religious rituals and symbols and speech-ways. It also means moving beyond and outside the circulatory system of the established rituals, texts and names of God and his prophets and holy ones - the totality of life’s significations is always more than the totality of significations of books, rituals, and customs. Only thus is the genuine sacredness they contain preserved from the evil done in their names. The hypostatic act of every religious fanatic is the equation of their personal understanding of God with God. If we believe that of all life’s powers it is love which provides us with our greatest guidance for the organization and orchestration of life’s other powers, that it is love which staves off the darkness and heals our despair, which is to say if we really believe what we now seem to be ceaselessly telling ourselves through our songs and stories, irrespective of what we believe about this or that or even the existence of God, then it is absurd, sinful even, if we are permitted a theological term, to shield lovelessness behind the sign of religion.

10

Introduction

___________________________________________________________ In changing our vocabulary we change our world and the stuff of ourselves. Words like God and gods, not to mention the devil, cling tenaciously to our vocabulary and our symbolization. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, created the character Ivan Karamazov to represent a tragic aspect of the modern soul. Ivan first of all says he believes in God, then he refuses to acknowledge such a God who would callously sacrifice children to his higher purposes, and then that he does not believe in God. When he has a nervous breakdown the devil visits him, and the question is raised: if the devil exists does that mean God must also exist? In the modern world, the question of God’s existence is a non-question for many people because there is no need to speak of gods or God. But amongst those who feel secure without God, quite a number experience demons and devils. God and devil are a tag team. When one suffers enough from devils, and when one has lost all faith in doctors, drugs and psychiatrists, then one is forced to cry out. God is revealed at that moment to be that aspect of life we call upon when no other person or natural power suffices for what we wish to call. As Eric Gans says: “God is whoever is named by the name we call out in our panic.” 11 Kafka writes in “The Great Wall of China”: “Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds and its very self.” 12 We used to call (a) god that force which compelled the tearing. Now we call it psychosis. We all, rightly because it is terrible, fear the tearing. But our attempt to stave it off only makes the compulsion more compelling. From dust to dust and in God’s image. God is the breath between the dust, the breath that gathers the dust to form the miracle of new life. How foolish and palpably absurd it would have seemed to a Roman if he had been told that it was not the emperor, nor the richest and most politically powerful men in Rome who were really the most powerful men in the Empire, but a small group of uneducated Jews living on the perimeter of the Empire. How more absurd it would have seemed had that same Roman heard that these Jews believed in a nobody who died a criminal’s death and that he was the Son of David, the Son of Man and the Son of God, and that from him would spring inspirations and ideas and acts which would help bring down the Empire and form a new world. Eventually kings and emperors would bow down before images of this man as a baby and dying on the cross. This faith of the men and women generated more reality than the power that was already there; their absurd faith was far more real than the solid sensible acts of acceptance of the visibly existing powers of the day. No amount of understanding how power is presently formed, produced and distributed can help us predict

Wayne Cristaudo

11

___________________________________________________________ what can be achieved by acts of love. On the other hand, we can know that the worst powers in the world love to fill the void left by love’s absence.

1. Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

“Lack of love is behind all serious conflict.” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Christian Future Or the Modern Mind Outrun (New York: Harper and Row, 1966) 155.

In 1954 a German émigré Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy gave a series of undergraduate lectures at Dartmouth College. They were called Lectures on Comparative Religion. Although he had become a Christian in his teens, he had been born into a Jewish family and he had known he could not continue to work in a German university after the Nazis had come to power. After leaving Germany in 1933, and after three years at Harvard (he was dismissed for daring in his history courses to talk of God as if he were a real power whose presence could be found in human social life and human history), he taught and lived in rural Vermont until his death in 1973. His course was remarkable in that he never really got around to comparing religions. Rosenstock-Huessy thought it a thorough waste of time to teach students who knew nothing about religion to distinguish between religions. Instead he lectured on what he saw as being the range of experiences from which religions derived. He talked about what religion bound together, what it made and how it made, and hence why it mattered. To be sure, the coughs, bangs on desks (falling heads?) and occasional dull-witted questions which one can hear on the tape recording of those lectures give the impression of a class room of slouching and bored students, staring out into the fields waiting for the clock to run down as they suffer the rants and tirades directed at them and the laziness of things American. Some of the students, however, including the few that had lugged the enormous tape recorders into his class to capture his words for posterity, felt that they were witness to something very special: that here, amongst the dozing and the stuttering sentences broken by the odd fit of yelling, an aspect of the Holy Spirit irrupted from out of the thick German accent of this small, barrel-chested man, lecturing without notes, veering between anecdotes and historical example, seemingly in no direction other than where the last word prompted him. These were the students who

14

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

___________________________________________________________ knew that this man was helping form who they would be for the rest of their lives. Almost fifty years after those classes I saw a video of a seventyyear-old man who had been in Rosenstock-Huessy’s class give a more than passable re-enactment of a Rosenstock-Huessy lecture (with make-up and German accent ), who said just that - and the room in which it was said held many others who had been his students and felt the same thing. They were the ones who had heard and responded. They knew what spirit is. Rosenstock-Huessy said many things about speech and language, about society and history; he was an exponent of what he called metanomics which he defined as “the search for the omnipresence of God in the most contradictory patterns of human society.” 13 He taught that only by understanding and acting metanomically, by appreciating the truth and potency of heterogeneity, could a fruitful and peaceful world be genuinely achieved. (In this he anticipated much of the post-structuralist and postmodernist critique of the dangers of totalism and homogeneity.) In numerous works he also advocated what he called the grammatical method - how we commune creates what kind of community we are, what we form and how we are formed is shaped by the matrix of our communicative interactions. The word is the call and the command, the expression of love, hope and faith that welds us through our cries and our response, our questions and answers, our prayers and dreams across spaces and times; though it is also the breach, the curse and the refusal to continue with a way of life. The range of ways of world- and self-making find themselves socially embedded in our different accentuations of space (the inner and outer) and time (backward and forward), as well as the different accentuations of aspects of living processes and relationships. Our speech, and hence our grammar, is not something outside or apart from the cosmos itself, but a biological act, 14 “an attempt to enact the processes of the cosmos always and everywhere.” 15 In this respect religion, like all human endeavours, is rooted in the grammar of the soul which is but the expression of part of the cosmos, a different part to what can be conveyed through poetry or science or philosophy, but by no means less real (reality, for Rosenstock-Huessy, was not what conformed to “objectivity”, for our projections (what he calls prejects) are not unreal, even though they are not “objects.”) Thus for Rosenstock-Huessy, religion’s geographical and historical prevalence was indicative of its being an essential response to life’s urgencies. It preceded secular consciousness because the forces of the world first command a response to the bindings and connections and transformations of life; life originally requires the essential words of religion: yes, no, thank you, please.

Wayne Cristaudo

15

___________________________________________________________ The high point of the lecture series was reached when he told his students that religions disclose the nature of change and that there are essentially five components which the different religions of the world have responded to: the mechanical, the organic, the operative (that is, a purposeful energetic transformation), the passionate and the sacrificial. Rosenstock-Huessy saw that the moderns suffered under the horrendous delusion that they had things reasonably well under control - that they did not need to understand how to respond. And he contrasted the modern self-assurance with the ancients who felt surrounded by these five cycles of constant change. The Jews, he said, saw these five cycles as the “Elohim”, the “parts” in which Yahweh appears. They are also the essential divinities of the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians and Aztecs. The very names of the days of the week, (if we exclude the additions of the days of the sun and moon) he argues, reflect this understanding of reality: Tuesday = Mars = Aries = war or sheer force, or mere energy; Wednesday = Mercury = Hermes = metabolism; Thursday = Jupiter = Zeus = deliberation or rational purpose and willing; Friday = Venus = Aphrodite = passionate love; Saturday = Saturn = Cronus = catastrophe. 16 According to Rosenstock-Huessy the ancients saw that there was a hierarchy in the process of creation and that at the apex of creation is catastrophe. “And at that point - catastrophe means “the turning point” - there is a decision - a decision to believe in the division of interests or to believe in the solidarity of the whole universe.” 17 Faith in the solidarity within the whole universe is, for Rosenstock-Huessy, the key to the orientation which is so often covered by the word religion. That faith, for Rosenstock-Huessy, can be found in the earliest formations of human beings as they find themselves in a spirited universe and then come to distinguish the different cosmic forces, the gods, which hold sway over them, before coming to a realization of the greater concordance of powers that unite past and future. That concordance, originally expressed as plural in the Elohim of the Jews, is then given the name of Yahweh and later becomes the Father of Jesus, and one of the Trinity. Like his close friend Franz Rosenzweig, Rosenstock-Huessy believed that what set apart the Jewish and Christian traditions from other traditions was their belief in the redemption (Rosenzweig) or salvation (Rosenstock-Huessy) of humanity and the world, which, as Rosenzweig said in The Star of Redemption, would also be the redemption of God himself. In 1916 Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig engaged in a fierce correspondence concerning the respective meanings of Judaism and Christianity; Rosenstock-Huessy, a Jew who had become a Christian, was trying to convert Rosenzweig, a secular Jew who had, in part due to

16

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

___________________________________________________________ Rosenstock-Huessy’s example, become a practising Jew. Eventually Rosenstock-Huessy would accept that Rosenzweig was right to stay a Jew and that the events of World War 11 had shown that the truth carried by Jews must be honoured by Christians and pagans if the world was to be redeemed. 18 For Rosenstock-Huessy, the modern world was inescapably a fusion of potencies generated by pagans, Christians and Jews and that each person was heir to all three - the Christian, for him, being the bridge between the other two. To a considerable extent, the messianic desire for a world at peace has remained an essential residue of the Jewish and Christian faith in solidarity, though not without severe challenges from ultra-nationalists, and fascists of one sort or another. The faith in this solidarity was also fundamental to the belief, from Locke to Voltaire to Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, that political differences could be solved by the harmonising of economic interests. It was the same messianic appeal behind the socialists and communist. Nevertheless, we have no more found the secret to the avoidance of catastrophe on the macro level than we have on the micro level. But, perhaps surprisingly given how struggle or war (of classes/ nature/ types) was the common denominator of Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche, today our institutions, and our thinking about them, mainly proceed on the belief that peace is the norm, with catastrophe as the exception. Each new catastrophe irrupts out of some darkness. Analysts are brought into explain how this particular catastrophe has occurred. And yet over us always hangs death - the death of the individual, the death of a life-way, the death of a type, the death of an activity. Life demands that we be incorporated into it by dissolving us completely, by our being sacrificed for its continuance. That catastrophe is necessary is not a metaphysical theory, but part of the record of every life which, from the moment of birth, faces death. Our response to what death means shapes our preparation for it; and our preparation for it, in turn, orientates us toward it. Do we prepare by walking into it purposefully, or denying it, or plunging frenziedly into it, or trying to run away from it, or gesturing and posturing about it? How we answer these questions plays a decisive role in what we make of ourselves. According to Rosenstock-Huessy there are three major orientations to catastrophe. The first he equates with the pagan way. It is one of denial or deprecation, which is a way that is not incompatible with belief in the soul’s immortality, nor with heroism in the face of death: indeed, both are pagan responses. But it devalues death’s impact upon life by retaining it within the realm of the natural. Thus we return to nature, much in the manner of inorganic or vegetative matter, by dissolving into

Wayne Cristaudo

17

___________________________________________________________ it, or we are reborn (as with the belief of the Buddhists and Pythagoreans and their various offshoots) until we are freed from the prison of the body and the world’s appearances. But in either case (to formulate this in the manner of Franz Rosenzweig), for the pagan, catastrophe is not an essential moment in the triadic redemption of God, world and humanity. The second is the Jewish way, the way of messianic expectancy. It looks at the world from the perspective of the Day of Judgment. Thus there is a general and decisive attunement to the impending catastrophe, a fundamental awareness that this order will not last because it is rotten. Concomitantly, one’s loyalties must be to God rather than to the bindings of society. The third he equates with the Christian view of the world: attentiveness to the exact moment of engulfment and letting go, being reborn, thus death is a condition of life, not in a cyclical manner (again the pagan), but in an accumulation of potencies across time. The last position would be impossible without the second, but both are bent on a different manner of orientation to the first. The reason for this is that both are more attuned to the how of evil’s swellings, to the culminating potency of the invisible powers which if formed a certain way can only end in horror and terror. The Jewish and Christian orientation is also shaped by an emphasis upon the relative paltriness of our own powers. One might say of the pagan that the denial to which Rosenstock-Huessy alludes is based upon two complementary, albeit seemingly opposite positions: one condemns us to the tyranny of fates (the modern version being metaphysical determinism) and the hope that the wheel will turn again; the other elevates belief in our powers urging us that we can perhaps conquer anything. In both, divine assistance counts for little. In the case of “the tyranny of fates,” god counters god and fate counters all. In the other case, the gods are unnecessary: “I hate all gods,” says Aeschylus’ Prometheus. This voice of defiance will be heard over two thousand years later by Karl Marx who quotes him in his doctoral dissertation on the difference between Democritus’ and Epicurus’ philosophy of nature. Both pagan positions ill prepare us for how to deal with evil: the one dupes us into thinking we can do nothing about it, and that whatever we do is pretty well as good as anything else. Cultural relativism is a variant. And when De Sade makes the connection with cultural relativism and evil’s non-existence, while simultaneously showing us a cosmos that is nothing but evil, we should learn from his attentiveness to the logic of the modern’s faith in determinism and freedom. The other position, that one which elevates out freedom and our self above all, dupes us into thinking that it is not such a great problem and that we can solve it. Kant’s philosophical dualism, with its self that is simultaneously empirically

18

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

___________________________________________________________ determined but noumenally free, is the perfect modern metaphysical resolution of the problem: we are determined but we can think of ourselves as free, even though we might not be. It might be perfectly reasonable, but it does not help us deal with evil very much. At least no more than morality does - and is it not noticeable that we can live in a world where there is so much moral instruction, while evils compound at no less a rate than previously? The catastrophes of the modern have certainly not been less than the catastrophes of the ancient or medieval worlds, so if we believe the intellect has any role in orienting us to the future, then catastrophe needs to be taken seriously and not merely deferred until that moment when its imminence is feverishly celebrated, as it was by the delirious crowds who, having tried to stave off the catastrophe for so long, plunged into the Great War. Our second point is that catastrophe is the result of things that must be and have no means to come into the world other than bursting through all the lies, acts of denial, and delusions of a world that cannot be loved enough to be sustained. Catastrophe is the indispensable and terrible component of creation. We are all formed by catastrophe. To his students at rural Dartmouth, Rosenstock-Huessy would gesture “every stone ... that lies here at the bottom of Hanover field is the result of tremendous catastrophe.” 19 Not only that, we live off of the gifts of catastrophe which is no consolation to those destroyed, who are sacrificed by the collision of unleashed forces. We do not know what we are making at the catastrophic moment of creation. In Out of Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy traces how the everyday freedoms that modern men and women take for granted were born out of the “cries to heaven,” out of the great social catastrophes of the last millennium, the great secular and clerical revolutions which were generated in Western Europe and have contributed so much to the world we inhabit. For example, while the university was a Greek invention, its revival and modern basis lay in the scholastic contribution to the Crusade started by the Papal Revolution. Likewise, the freedom to choose professions was not the result of disinterested philosophical reflection, but a necessity forced by the Reformation (which Rosenstock-Huessy calls the German Revolution and which he classifies among the secular revolutions because of the worldliness of the enterprise) when hundreds of thousands of nuns and monks left their orders. The English Revolution helped entrench freedom of property rights even beyond death, and the American and French Revolutions secured patents and copyright, the right to capitalise on individual talent. And, for Rosenstock-Huessy, who was not a communist, the Russian Revolution staked its demand for world

Wayne Cristaudo

19

___________________________________________________________ revolution upon protection of the worker thereby, to draw upon the subtitle of Out of Revolution, making the matter one etched in “Western man’s autobiography.” In other words, each of these achievements were once “completely irreconcilable with existing ways of life.” 20 When Rosenstock-Huessy says of his analysis of the great secular and clerical revolutions that “we shall treat the last 900 years as one present day, the heritage of which we must all receive before it is allowed to go down and go buried,” 21 he is reminding us both of how the present is a multiplicity of the past’s radiances become firm and of our propensity to forget that the real is not merely the immediate. Catastrophe is traumatic and trauma is life’s way of opening us to the painful truths which we do not want to confront, which we would rather flee or forget. Trauma is the eye of the wound: through trauma our wounds force us to feel what our eyes were too blind to see. The damaged - those who are broken and violated by catastrophe - know this. Catastrophe awakens. And this is so privately and collectively. To have had a knife at one’s throat as a child and to have been told that if anyone learns what has happened then you will be killed, or to have watched a mother refuse to face the fact that her husband is raping her daughter, that contains within it all manner of truths. Cowardice, bravery, insightfulness, folly, weakness - the truths of character and the ability to discern what flows from behaviours and actions, to have some notion of real consequence, that’s what is central to anyone who has experienced damage. To know what is true and what is false in a person’s character, to know where the fault lines are in the constellations of relationships which people participate in, that’s to know something true. Being traumatised is a way of being in the world that is alert to what destabilizes and destroys. Social catastrophe is mass damage, the potential for the mass waking up of its survivors. But survival also demands that the wound be closed. Otherwise we cannot function. The war-veteran who screams at night in a suburb where all others sleep, knows what these others do not know. He has been there, in hell’s midst. He is cursed by his truth and he may end his days never being able to facilitate it into the routines of so many of his fellows for whom the war he has lived through is no more real than a television show. Our wounds become our scars; our scars are coagulated insights into a world that only pain de-veils. Touch the scar and go back into that world which only pain could open one into. When we forget how to touch the scars of our collective memory that is a sign that we have become indifferent to the contiguity between pain and evil, to the pain that is born of evil. While the forgetting of trauma is life’s way of enabling us to persist, forgetting can also condemn us to not seeing the catastrophe that is

20

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

___________________________________________________________ imminent, simply because we do not grasp that reality is always process. And what is real is not simply determined by what we know. On the contrary catastrophe is life’s way of imprinting knowledge about the real upon us in the only way it can if we refuse to move willingly by love through terror and pain. Evil is the name we give to the infliction, the return of the forgotten and the repressed that would terrorize us into not letting the present persist into the future; it is the bloody carving into the skin of the future by the undealt with which would not vanish as we thoughtlessly thought or foolishly hoped it simply might, which is of no consolation whatever to the random victim of crime or the sacrificed generations of the follies, lies and cruelty of the past. When Nietzsche said that evil was a concept invented by the resentful who needed an after-world as a means of seeking escape and solace from the harshness of this life, he had merely shown that he did not know evil. Evil was not, as Nietzsche said, simply a word that Jews and Christians created because they had had the misfortune to be conquered peoples, peoples who were expressions of declining will to power. Dostoevsky was far closer to the truth when he saw that evil was the result of suffering that had been so great that it had destroyed the capacity to love. Evil, for Dostoevsky, was not a negative category created by the resentful as a means of capturing and limiting the strong (Nietzsche wrongly thought that strength and weaknesses were absolute, but evil merely relative). Rather, evil is the result of suffering, which has, in turn, destroyed the capacity to love. Evil creates resentment and the resentful obliterate living and flourishing processes: that is, they do evil. Evil requires total obliteration: the things of this world, the after-world and God. 22 We may do evil on a grand social scale within the guise of priest or soldier, political hero or tyrant. It may also start, as with Smerdyakov from The Brothers Karamazov, on the small scale of a boy who tortures cats to death, and who then, as an adult, sticks pins in bread he gives to hungry dogs before he goes onto commit murder and take revenge on all around him, dragging as many into the nothingness of his own feelings and hatreds that have been generated out of the world’s failure to love at the right time. Ultimately, again as Dostoevsky saw, that resentment is often the consequence of evil having taken hold of a soul vulnerable enough to have its damage fester to hate. That is why when adults do terrible things to children they are setting up evils that reach far into the future. It was this realization that lay behind Alice Miller’s sharp rebuke of Freud, that although having heard the stories of hysterical women who spoke of the sexual abuse they had experienced as children, he refused to countenance how widespread sexual abuse could be. Instead of hearing the cries of

Wayne Cristaudo

21

___________________________________________________________ anguish of the abused he developed the theory of the sexual longing of the infant, a longing which when unsatisfied lead to the repressions and neuroses that plague the adult and play such a role in his/ her life-choices. One might wish to defend Freud for having opened us up to explore the sexual feelings of children, but it was the work of psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, and artists, novelists and musicians and film-makers and television script writers who, particularly in the last twenty years, have forced the community to recognize the evil that comes from making children the forced sacrifice of adult sexual desire/ pleasure and violence. Evil is the ripping of the heart and whose heart is really ripped, whose soul is torn from its world and cast into horror, that person knows that evil is a state of being. It is not a mere idea (Kant) or concept or sign exhausted by semiotic analysis (Nietzsche). Nor is it merely pain conceived as the opposite of pleasure (Spinoza), nor is it something that is culturally relative (Nietzsche again or de Sade) - cultures vary over the how of love and the what of evil, just as they vary in dietary habits, but spiritual nourishment (love) is no less necessary for staving off evil than food for staving off starvation. Nor is its something that would vanish if private property would vanish (Rousseau and Marx); it has been misunderstood by all these modern philosophies which could not save humanity from the convulsions of two world wars, nor from its swelling macrocosmic dimensions. The reality of evil is known to those who have been in it - and to those who merely reflect upon evil, it means but little until it confronts them. Evil is the result of countless mediations but anyone who has been in its immediacy does not doubt the reality of the state of being. And to deny the horrible importance of anyone being in that state is to sanction it and to act as an enabler for it. Hence too it is of the utmost importance not to merely dissolve it into the fog of misfortune and fatality. And here I think Nietzsche had wildly underestimated how tortured the Greeks were by the reality of evil and how their tragedies so closely cohere to the same truth that came out of Jewish suffering - that being born is to be condemned to acts of cosmic transgression. A great part of the tragic condition of the Greeks came from their commitment to fatality, a commitment shared by Nietzsche and one that ultimately leaves us resigned to not exploring the full range of powers that life places at our disposal. Catastrophes can be microcosmic or macrocosmic; but the microcosmic catastrophes, the personal catastrophes are still macrocosmic, crossing generations. The so called microcosmic are splintered and seemingly disconnected, though when we see statistical data (of the numbers of victims of rapes, or murders, or incest, the numbers of people

22

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

___________________________________________________________ institutionalised by traumas) we get a sense of just how wide-spread the damage and breakage, the full catastrophe of evil is even in peacetime. But when the catastrophe takes on the form of war or prison camps, when it is institutionally marshalled its visibility becomes unavoidable. Evil, then, is catastrophic, but this does not undo the role of catastrophe in the process of cosmic and social creation. If we dare to face the hard, indeed awful, truth that the world cannot be divorced from its conditions, then we must also concede that the neat ethical compartmentalisations of good and evil are born of counterfactuals and they bear little or no relationship to what and who we are, apart from the capacity to work towards creating a reality redeemed from evil. But to do that we have nothing but our faith in our being better in the future and the potency of what we summon or our responsiveness to powers which summon us. The moralist does see part of the truth: that the deployment of evil means leaves evil still in the world. But the truth of life’s perpetuity contains another part: that evil is a cumulative force, and the more forces are swept up in its swell, the greater is its death and destruction. If there is one lesson above all that should have been imprinted on humanity forever (and sadly, even after two world wars which both were so much worse because of appeasement, it hasn’t been) it was: all attempts at appeasement in the face of cumulative evil only made the inevitable conflict so much worse. The same is true of denial. Appeasement and denial are the two mechanisms generated by fear to try and avoid evil which only succeed in showing how lacking we are in dealing with it. Where the moralist has right on his or her side is early in the day. Morality’s successes are invisible; not because there are none, but because moral success negates the very entrance of a particular evil into the world. When evil is widely visible, it has already won. Then the moralist will always be defeated. And the reality will be a grim rebuke of all moral ideals - the behaviour of prisoners and the reality of what goes on in prisons, like the behaviour of soldiers and the reality of war, only provides one further matter for a police investigation, trial and punishment. As a species we learn slowly. Our failures in love leave evil like rust or, to use Hannah Arendt’s metaphor, spoor (which is not to accept a metaphysical commitment to evil being only banal). A world’s breakage can be seen as evil itself searching for love. Evil teaches us what we must never repeat unless we want to reap the same consequences. Evil forces us to bond when we steadfastly refuse to take more benign paths of cooperation. It forces the love that we refused to give freely. Or to say it another way, without going into hell there is little likelihood of redemption. For example, nothing has contributed more to expanding

Wayne Cristaudo

23

___________________________________________________________ consciousness about the moral intolerableness of racism than the evils of Nazism. Only when humanity saw its evils did it seriously confront the link between its thoughtless everyday cruelties, envy and bigotries, its mechanisms of exclusion and prejudice and the stench of the deeds caused by deformed and callous hearts - though what is learnt can be unlearnt, and the truth can always be denied. This does not make Nazism good, but it tells us of the power of one generation to identify the evils that have created the sacrifice of another and to refuse to continue that modality of sacrifice. We constantly make sacrifices of each other - the Jewish refusal to continue with earthly sacrifice, Christ’s appeal to be the last sacrifice for all sins points to a world in which we no longer need to achieve our goods through mutual sacrifice - the realization of that condition of fellowship would be the realization of the redemption of the world. But such a realization will only occur when evil has not merely disappeared as an idea, but when the powers of life are mutually and freely transferred, when the formations of energies reaching from past to future do not collide and smash from the limitation of crossed and diminished purposes. We have the power of rebuilding out of the catastrophes that come from those crossed and limited purposes by comprehending and acting upon life through time’s four dimensions: past, present, future and eternity (eternity being the purposeful unity of the other three dimensions, a perspective akin to the reflective moment of creator or [auto-]biographer.) This realization about the relationship between good and evil has been encapsulated in the traditional Christian (but not only Christian) doctrine that the devil does not undo God’s design, but rather God weaves the by-products of evil into an even greater design than his original creation. 23 Toward the end of Paradise Lost, in conformity with this tradition, Milton has Adam declare: “O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense,/ That all this good of evil shall produce,/ And evil turn to good more wonderful/ Than that by which creation first brought forth/ Light out of darkness!” 24 And Friar Lawrence in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “(There’s) nought so vile on the earth dot’h live/ But to the earth some special good dot’h give.” 25 Even at its most mundane level, we can see how much creativity and industry is generated from evil, how many artists, scholars, publishers, businesses, etc. put bread on their table because they are literally feeding off evil. Nevertheless, it is not true that evil always produces good, or that it always happens for some good. Evil is not an element in a closed metaphysical system - its countenances, opportunities and entrances are infinite. Yet sometimes, and in the limited vision of the times that our species still has now, evil is the only way that the better can be. To a large extent this extraction of life from what is most destructive of it, is what the doctrine of redemption is: the consciousness

24

Catastrophe and the Necessity of Evil

___________________________________________________________ of the reintegration and salvation of what, through evil, had been deemed lost. None of this, however, helps those whose lives have been the sacrifice. With few exceptions everything great and profound that humans achieve in the world is the result of the defiance of limits that men and women have come to accept as the realm of reality. Great evil, like saintliness or great virtue, oversteps the limits of reality by rendering the impossible possible. The more the self defies the limits of the real the more malign or benign its impact upon the formation in which it is a part. Violence is the most elemental refusal to accept the limits of that state of stasis holding an association together. The stasis itself, however, can only originally be achieved by overcoming or curbing the elemental collision of violent forces. Once that stasis has been achieved, what was once elemental and “normal” is no longer “normal,” but a dis-ease. The self that is damaged by the stasis, that is, that is not cultivated sufficiently for its form to grow, by expressing itself violently is merely expressing itself in its most elemental/ infantile/ barbaric manner. It is a symptom of the failure of the boundaries of the formation in which it operates and of the creative capacity of the self to form its world anew. Our species steadfastly refuses to conform to the “good.” The accumulations of hate and fear pile up until the forces must unleash. Again, Rosenstock-Huessy in Out of Revolution details the explosive effect that acts of repression and un-dealt with injustices have when they incubate over years or generations: the effect of the murder of St Thomas More on the English Revolution and of Johannes Huss on the German Revolution (the Reformation), on the expulsion and murder of the Huguenots on the French Revolution; of the murder of the Decembrists on the Russian Revolution. Each group that seeks to reform the future so that it can find a place worth occupying is led by the cries of the dead who refuse to sleep until they can be properly mourned. Peace only exists where people reconcile their own projections with each other and the institutions into which they are born. That we are born into a world which others have made means that every social arrangement is decaying unless the new generation rejuvenates it. At the social level there is a deep paradox noted by many of the great political thinkers, such as Machiavelli and Hegel, that the very thing which most citizens desire (widespread prosperity) fosters a dangerous complacency and the seeds of degeneracy. A world of great material prosperity, if it is not one that has been born out of an enduring love for the future and if it is not one that inculcates amongst its inhabitants a love to bring that future into the present, is a world on the precipice of its own annihilation. Whether our world is on the verge of catastrophe can be gauged from the

Wayne Cristaudo

25

___________________________________________________________ answer to the question: how much love does it generate? But whether they get it or whether our souls are strong enough to give and receive it, that is the question.

2. Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence … Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love. Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers, 1966.

Western civilisation emerged from a religion which took sacrifice as the final and most precious aspect of love’s power: not beatitude, as the Platonist and mystic would have it, nor pleasure, as the mechanists and Freud would have it, but the sacrifice of God to God, of a God that sacrifices himself as a way of telling us something profound about the inescapable conditions of creation itself. Again, the abstractions of moral philosophers and scholastic theologians want nothing of this truth because it is terrible. Yet it supports Rosenstock-Huessy’s words that “God is darkness, is secret.” 26 That is why he also sees the acceptance of this as the essential characterisation of religion. “He is outside the religious sphere who denies this unity of the necessary and the terrible.” 27 All societies are sacrificial orders: for all life is dependent upon sacrifice. The cross-cultural act of sacrifice to the gods is but the elemental and subsequent ritualistic enactment of this recognition. That this can all too easily be transposed from vital ritual/ symbolic ordering and direction of the power of imagination for collective orientation to psycho-pathology can be seen in such examples as the Aztecs whose gods seemed to be demanding ever more human sacrifices for the group’s survival. (Human

28

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ sacrifices were chosen, as the Dominican priest, Las Casas, pointed out in his In Defense of the Indians, because they were the greatest gifts that could be offered). Fetishism occurs when a truth which generates our collective and individual power is turned into a superstition in which human powers are de-vitalised. The truth that the early Christians saw was that life is sacrificial order, and by God providing himself as the sacrifice, he had demonstrated that he neither needed nor wanted us to sacrifice each other for him: the only thing desired, indeed commanded, was to love each other. Love bears within it its sacrifice which is also the redemption and reward of the sacrificed. It was the word of love that became flesh, the Son, and the early Christians were so convinced of this power that they willingly were prepared to be the sacrifice, as Jesus himself was, so that that this need to tear at each other for the expansion of life’s powers and benefits need never happen again. Such a belief may seem extremely naïve, but that is why Christians readily accepted that they were fools in the eyes of the world. The human hunger for a meaningful life/ death is so great that there are always those ready to be the sacrifice for some purpose. The human capacity to spawn idolatrous purposes, purposes which throw people into the nothingness of stupidity’s endless appetite, might lead us to believe that any who are willing sacrifices in the midst of life’s catastrophes are but fools, or equally foolish, are saints or martyrs. But there is one way to distinguish the difference: whether one is a sacrifice to love or to hate, or, what amounts to the same thing, to die for loving love’s expansion or loving hate’s expansion. Love’s ultimate demand is a sacrificial one; but that is also evil’s ultimate demand. The life and death of the one sacrificed reveals the power that is served through the sacrifice. In the deaths of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmuth von Moltke (whose crime was to have been close to Stauffenberg and to have discussed plans for a post-war Germany) we see two examples who answered love’s demand and were sacrificed to the idolatrous and demonic love of a movement whose only legacy was as a paradigmatic example of evil (and pompous stupidity in the realm of ideas). Both were executed when the Nazis knew they had lost the war. The fact that National Socialists were killing people when their plans were all lost, or that the party, army and nation were taking orders from a mad man (so brilliantly portrayed in that great cinematic study of evil, Der Untergang) who demanded the destruction of the entire race he had claimed to lead, only served to highlight the nothingness of the death wish at its centre - ideas as mere pretences for the maximisation of destruction. Whereas Bonhoeffer advocated Hitler’s assassination (thereby, in speech at least, taking himself outside of the protective province of the

Wayne Cristaudo

29

___________________________________________________________ martyr), 28 von Moltke held that such an act, if successful, would simply provide Germans with an excuse not to accept the reality of National Socialism; its failure could subsequently be blamed, not on its own corrupt character, but its enemies, just as the loss of World War 1 could be blamed on the traitors of Germany. The tactical difference between the men is ultimately of less significance than the common spirit which infuses their respective choices. The integrity of both men was not a matter of choice; nothing would trivialise their acts more than to see it in terms of a free choice or a rational action. Rather, their respective wholeness, their integrity was the result of their incapacity to allow themselves to be torn to pieces by a spirit that also demanded death, both literal and spiritual. The paradox of their deaths was that at a time when Germany’s fate was one of violent disintegration, a blast of energies which could only be quelled by more explosive forces being marshalled against it, the acts of integration by people like Bonhoeffer, von Moltke, and the Scholl siblings were invariably suicidal. The only meaningful risks in Germany at the time were risks of death; all authentic risks are sacrifices, sacrifices, in the first instance, of the stable ground for the mere air which accompanies the leap. The power of von Moltke’s integrity is movingly visible in the final letter he sent to Freya, his wife, where he thanks God for his preparation for his task and surveys the spiritual coherence of his life and death. At the very moment when there was danger that I might be drawn into active preparations of a putsch - it was in the evening of the 19th that Stauffenberg came to Peter I was taken away, so that I should be and remain free from all connection with the use of violence. Then he planted in me my socialist leanings, which freed me, as a big landowner, from all suspicion of representing interests. Then he humbled me as I have never been humbled before, so that I had to lose all pride, so that at last I understand my sinfulness after 38 years, so that I learn to beg for his forgiveness and trust his mercy. 29 Here we are witness to a life that is really lived, a life whose meaning does not end for the one living it at the moment of death. To see this as merely the delusion of someone who has a superstitious faith in another world is to miss the point completely. That this is a life lived in faith is what is so startling, for it is faith in the significance of its meaning beyond itself. The faith is in the life itself, a life that is fully past, present and future; it is a life where the manner and imminence of death only

30

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ intensifies its purpose. Not a curse - but, gratitude. The defeat of evil in this act of defiance is due to its inversion of all that makes evil so powerful. Evil wants to break; but von Moltke is not broken. His corpse is not the proof of their victory; on the contrary, that National Socialism is now a byword for infamy, stupidity and heartlessness shows that in their deeds they had deprived themselves of being creators of a fruitful future. Even those who draw their energy from the poison of National Socialism have to be in denial about the death camps and the evil that it spawned. Whereas anyone who reads von Moltke’s letters is drawn into something marvellous (much more marvellous than what the Surrealists had suggested was the end of their endeavours - for that was simply titillation in the face of the horrors of the world, a truth born out by the need for the surrealists to involve themselves in a meaningful political commitment). What is marvellous is simply the love of the world and the future that stands up in the midst of what is trying to extinguish von Moltke’s capacity to love. This is what was really at stake in the execution of man like that - the opposition between loves, between one who saw the sacrificial nature of love as divine, and who willingly went under for that, and those poor souls serving a phantasmic beloved who could only deliver mass death, who could only promise a world worthy of life by killing. His description of the infinite disparity between himself and his Nazi prosecutor, a disparity which turns upon a mere difference of love’s orientation, goes to the heart of the difference between divine love and idolatry, between a love that will carry across the times, and be remembered because of the marvellousness of its potency, and a love that shows itself to have been wasted. Hitler was undoubtedly loved, but the love for Hitler was inseparable for the need to hate an other. Thus those who loved so poorly were condemned to infamy by the next generation who were born into shame and haunted by what their fathers and mothers may have done. Reading the exchange between Freisler and von Moltke one sees the difference between a Mensch (one who knows the real meaning of who and what he serves, and hence forms a kind of wholeness which is deserving of example) and a fool (one who serves a power bereft of any right to a future). In one of his tirades Freisler said to me: ‘Only in one respect are we and Christians alike: we demand the whole man!’ I don’t know if the others sitting there took it all in, for it was a sort of dialogue ... Of the whole gang, Freisler was the only one who recognized me, and of the whole gang he is the only one who knows why he has to kill me. There was nothing about ‘a complicated

Wayne Cristaudo

31

___________________________________________________________ man’ or ‘complicated thoughts’ or ‘ideology,’ but ‘the fig leaf is off.’ But only for Herr Freisler. We talked, as it were in a vacuum. He made not a single joke at my expense, as he had done with Delp and Eugen. No, this was grim earnest: ‘From whom do you take your orders? From the Beyond or from Adolf Hitler?’ ‘Who commands your loyalty and your faith?’ All rhetorical questions, of course, anyhow, Freisler is the first National Socialist who has grasped who I am, and the good Müller is a simpleton in comparison. 30 Freisler’s National Socialism and von Moltke’s Christianity are two plunges into existence in search of powers infinitely beyond their particularity. Freisler’s infinitude, however, is damned because it depends upon a source of hatred and reaction, an anti-life that held out a promise of fulfilment only at the expense of reality and love. The tribalistic impulse which fed National Socialism was, on the one hand, borne out of love of one’s own kind, but that love could not be fulfilled because the “own kind” that was loved was facile and non-existent. The German joke which encapsulates the ridiculousness of the telos of the National Socialist genetic dream - tall like Göbels, blond like Hitler and slim like Goering contains the entire absurdity of the Nazi vision of humanity. It was not that Nazism lacked sacrifice or heroism or devoted disciples. It was the wasting of such virtues that was intrinsic to its character. Even without the grotesquely “comic” racial theory, all such services of the spirit were bound to be wasted, because the end was out of kilter with the time. Nazism was an attempt to impose a tribalistic and militaristic order upon the human future at a time when the truth had already been revealed: that the powers which lay within humanity’s reach require cooperation and exchange relationships on a global scale. (That this can also be a source of great destruction is not to be denied - everything depends upon which spirit, whether it be that of love or the phantasmic, is served in the act.) Nazism was out of time in its inception, but its out-of-timeness was initially timely: a defeated and humiliated people wanting to salvage their pride and lost lands retreating into a past that would entail massive destruction, rather than reaching out faithfully for the hidden gifts of the future; (it took World War 11 for the phantasm generated by German nationalism to dissipate). Fear of the future fed into the worship of a leader who would be like a father to his children and protect them from the wicked demons that persecuted them. By the time Freisler was saying to von Moltke that Nazism demanded the whole man, Freisler himself knew that he was out of time, that after twelve years the Thousand Year Reich

32

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ were coming to an end. This is precisely what phantasmic love does - it makes the grotesquely unreal look as if there is no other choice, as if it is the only real. Freisler felt he had to do what he did. The fact that it was all over made no difference. In demanding the execution of von Moltke, he was acknowledging that divine sacrifice was at the centre of the truth of existence, but he could not see that von Moltke was a martyr and he another murdering fool. Whereas von Moltke could see himself from the vantage point of his being a sacrifice to the future, of being the kind of man that young Germans could later look back on and say “Here at least was one who resisted. Here was one that said No, that did No and did not cry for himself amidst the hell my (forebears) created. Here is one reason why being German is not synonymous with being unworthy of feasting at a future banquet. Here is a full human being.” The integrity which characterises von Moltke has nothing to do with the kind of lucid reasoning which typifies moral philosophising. In a sense ideas have nothing whatever to do with real ethical commitment. “Not in the flight of ideas but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living. God’s command is enough and your faith in Him to sustain you,” says Bonhoeffer. 31 For Bonhoeffer genuine ethics had little to do with the “reasonable people [who fail] to perceive either the depths of evil or the depths of the holy. With the best of intentions they believe that a little reason will suffice them to clamp together the parting timbers of the building.” And he adds: Still more distressing is the utter failure of all ethical fanatics. The fanatic believes that he can oppose the power of evil with the purity of his will and of his principle. But since it is part of the nature of fanaticism that it loses sight of the totality of evil and rushes like a bull at the red cloth instead of at the man who holds it, the fanatic inevitably ends by tiring and admitting defeat. 32 Bonhoeffer well knew that in National Socialist Germany moral philosophy was still being taught in the universities and although some, like Professor Huber (who died invoking Fichtean and Kantian ideas of dignity), found resources in the idealist heritage of Germany, by and large that heritage could still be taught in all calmness while students and faculty disappeared never to be heard of again. Of course there were “Christians” who collaborated with National Socialism, but the leading National Socialist ideologues themselves knew that Christianity was something that had to be killed.

Wayne Cristaudo

33

___________________________________________________________ If Bonhoeffer and von Moltke exemplify the truth of Christianity in its most radiant manner, it is also true to say that Nazism was made possible by the hatred of, and intolerance toward, the Jews that had sprung up on Christian soil and been articulated in papal bulls, bishop synods and imperial and ecclesiastical and national laws. During World War 1 Franz Rosenzweig, while serving in the German army, wrote of Christianity’s “eternal hatred for the Jew.” 33 In the most shocking transformation of things into their opposites (Christianity began as a Jewish sect reviled by the orthodox Pharisees) the Jews became the sacrifice because of Christianity’s spiritual failure and the evil that resulted there-from. That is, the Christian world’s evil failure came back to damn Christendom - and no matter how many fruits one can point to in the heritage of the Christian world this one poison alone makes it necessary for anyone who remains a Christian, and hence committed to the law of love of God by the gospels and church, and using the former, in much the same way as Kierkegaard, neighbour and enemy, to see the contradictory appeals demanded did, to assess the deficiencies of the latter. The Jews were denied even that freedom that was available to men like Bonhoeffer and von Moltke: the freedom to be a willing sacrifice. Wherever even this choice is taken from one the dehumanization and the de-divinisation of the hearts of the phantasm’s servants has become absolute. It was in the midst of this absolute godlessness that a beautiful soul wrote in her diaries from the Westerbork concentration camp: “And if God does not help me to go on, then I shall have to help God.” 34 Had Etty Hillesum been the sole victim of Nazi brutality that would have been enough to condemn the movement unto eternity. Had she but written that one line, she would be eternally deserving of our remembrance. All social grouping is dependent upon love, and it is no less true for the fascist or terrorist than it is for the cosmopolitan and multiculturalist, no less true for those who adored Hitler or Stalin as for members of the Baha’i faith, or Catholics and Shia or Sunni Muslims. The great political monsters of totalitarianism were able to be so evil precisely because they generated so much love, love towards them and love, hope and faith in a future for people which they promised would be heavenly for people just like them. “I cannot distance myself from the love of my people,” 35 said Hitler to crowds of adorers ranging across both genders, all ages, all classes. Likewise, Stalin knew that the key to power lay in being both feared and loved (as Machiavelli taught as the most likely way of political success). The less loved a political monster the less he or she can mobilise. Conversely, the more potential for mobilisation, the greater the possibility for the perpetration of all kinds of evil and destruction. It is also

34

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ significant that the close relationship of love and faith is invoked time and time again by totalitarian leaders. An intimation of this conjuring up of the demonic in populist politics had been sensed by Kierkegaard who had claimed that the populist movements of 1848, that had ignited Europe, would come to be recognized as religious movements: religious because they are embedded in the sacrificial dimension of experience, which is precisely the domain of the religious as such. Communism and Nazism were the secular religious movements of the twentieth century and the cult of the personality but the expression of the idolatrous expressions of those movements. While the National Socialists undertook all the murder and torture under the name of, and in the love for, Adolph Hitler, those like Bonhoeffer, von Moltke, Hillesum, the Scholls and others all sought a name more inclusive. The traditional name for that inclusiveness was God. Of course there were communists who resisted National Socialism and were heroes. The great trial of the communists was also a trial conducted under the “sanctity”/ authority of a name: did one side with Joseph Stalin, the signifier of (ostensibly) real political success and hence the incarnation of the communist movement, or did one side with the spirit of the movement and resist the idolatry, the proof of which lay in the Moscow Trials, betrayals of Spanish communists, and the transformation of the Soviet states into great prison camps where neighbours and family members spied on each other? But each communist who refused to comply with the idolatrous form found him or herself tempted again and again with another one - Trotsky, Mao, Tito. Always and everywhere the questions: In what name? In whose service? Those who stood for the human future were also beckoned by the voices of the past. Those who responded to that as a means of conquering the horror of the present did not flinch from using the name of God. But it was not the name as such that was all important but the significance and meaning of the sacrificial act. In Germany a large part of the reason for the disaster was the extent of spiritual lost-ness that was all too manifest in the bankruptcy of its speech. To the theologically attuned, like Bonhoeffer and von Moltke, the fact of the Protestant Churches’ pact with Hitler was the most conspicuous manifestation of that bankruptcy. Such idolatry was possible because one failed to see what the demonic was and the demonic could be wrapped in the name of the saviour. Take, for example, a book that appeared in Germany in 1937 entitled Positive Christianity in the Third Reich by D. Cajius Fabricus. The book concludes with the sentence: “But the energy and great wisdom of our Führer will assuredly find the proper way out of all difficulties, and we as Christian National Socialists firmly believe that the Guide of the

Wayne Cristaudo

35

___________________________________________________________ history of nations will direct the most sacred cause of the German people to a glorious end.” 36 The book takes as its centre the National Socialist principle of racial rejuvenation and is replete with the hybrid of pseudobiologism and nature as divine struggle/order that is typified in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I have no idea whether the writer knew that he was deliberately twisting the universalism of neighbourly love that is at the core of Christianity into the closed confine of the German people or was an all too willing doltish dupe of the National Socialists, who had the Christians in their sight for the next round of racial/ spiritual hygiene. More important than the name invoked, which as we have just seen can be twisted for purposes that are precisely the opposite of what is supposed to be generated by its invocation, is the state of the soul making the invocation. The radiance that shines forth from the letters of Bonhoeffer, von Motlke and Hillesum is what is all-important. For them that radiance is bound with the supplication of the name. In itself this does not mean that the radiance is thereby emitted. But it does mean that such a supplication finds its efficacy in these instances, thereby demonstrating that the supplicated power is not dead. In this sense the Other is a real power; what activates is real. To the philosopher who responds that this is just the power of imagination, there is a question s/he must answer: is the (imagined?) content of the power that is summoned by the name merely exchangeable for another imagined power? To which the reply “one cannot exhaust the possible powers imagined” only shows the weakness of the argument. For it is this name now that is all important, how it prepares for this death. Let us not confuse the issue by noting the universal feature of heroism or willingness to die for a belief. The appeal to difference must not mask the genuinely different by a false sameness (what irony there is in the deployment of relativist arguments to try and establish such shabby absolutes). The manner of dying and its meaning is the real issue: what kinds of life the death gives birth to. Horst Wessel gave birth to countless meaningless deaths in service to concentration camps and torture chambers of the Gestapo; the same is true of Bolshevik heroic sacrifice. Evil is wastage that passes itself off as meaningful. Evil could be responsible for the deaths of men and women like von Moltke and Hillesum, but their radiance was what defeated death. Von Moltke wrote the following words to his wife, powerfully showing the clarity of mind and peace of heart that he takes with him into hell’s earthly furnace and the constellation of names to which we look toward heaven: The last 24 hours of my life are in no way different from any others. I always imagined that one would feel shock

36

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ ... I wonder if I am a bit high, for I can’t deny that my mood is positively elated. I only beg the Lord in Heaven that he will keep me in it, for it is surely easier for the flesh to die like that. How merciful the Lord has been to me! Even at the risk of sounding hysterical: I am so full of gratitude … the whole room could have roared like Herr Freisler and all the walls could have shaken, it would have made no difference to me; it was truly as it says in Isaiah 43:2: When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. -That is: your soul. There is only one thing I want to mention in my defence: (Luther’s ‘A Mighty Fortress’) nehmen sie den Leib, Gut, Ehr, Kind und Weib, lass fahren dahin, sie haben's kein Gewinn, das Reich muss uns doch bleibe [ they may take the body, honour, my goods, child and wief, but they have had no victory, the Kingdom remains with us] . 37 It is this same radiance that we see in remarks by Etty Hillesum: The latest news is that all Jews will be transported out of Holland through Drenthe Province and then onto Poland. And the English radio has reported that 700,000 Jews perished last year alone, in Germany and the occupied territories. And even if we stay alive, we shall carry the wounds with us throughout our lives. And yet I do not think that life is meaningless. And God is not accountable to us for the senseless harm we cause one another. We are accountable to Him! I have already died a thousand deaths in a thousand concentration camps. I know about everything and am no longer appalled by the latest reports. In one way or another I know it all. And yet I find life beautiful and meaningful. From minute to minute. 38 Finding the beauty and meaningfulness of life in the midst of hell requires a faith so strong, yet simple and pure that it is not surprising that it is a faith as rare as it is wondrous. For the question is: what are the choices here? Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy provides a reasoning for broadly similar circumstances, but Hillesum’s chosen response was not

Wayne Cristaudo

37

___________________________________________________________ based upon reason. Nor is it a merely moral choice. It was, most basically, the choice of love for love itself, of love for the love, which even in its most barbarous defacements, refuses to turn away from the radiance of the immediate and an immortal future, beyond the future of the lost souls creating the hell in which she and they too would be caught. She writes: Living and dying, sorrow and joy, the blisters on my feet and the jasmine behind the house. The persecution, the unspeakable horrors - it is all one in me, and I accept it all as one mighty whole, and begin to grasp it better if only for myself, without being able to explain to anyone else how it all hangs together … Yes, we carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all of history. The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us. And we have to take everything that comes: the bad with the good, which does not mean we cannot devote our life to curing the bad. But we must know what motives inspire our struggle, and we must begin with ourselves, every day anew. 39 And finally there is an entry simply entitled “Sunday’s Morning Prayer”: Dear God. These are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing, God. Just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with care about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. 40

38

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ I have used the word faith for the expression of and opening to love that is exhibited by Etty Hillesum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmuth von Moltke, but it is not necessarily the case that such faith has been even thought about prior to the catastrophe. A powerful account of this can be found in Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling. It describes the trauma and ensuing wisdom that is born and nurtured in the seven years of imprisonment after his kidnapping by the organization Islamic Jihad. He recounts how in the midst of an evil created by zealots, who produce the very evil they hope to redeem the world from, he comes to learn that his life prior to his captivity was shallow and purposeless. Whereas Keenan’s captors justified their acts of torture, and the accompanying sexual satisfaction, under the sign of God, Keenan comes to find the meaning of God as love. In the Preface to An Evil Cradling he calls the story of his capture “a love story.” 41 In Keenan’s case the God to whom he prays was not a conclusion reached by argument, but a presence. Reflecting upon his conversations with John McCarthy, with whom he had been locked up, he says: We talked not of a God in the Christian tradition but some force more primitive, more immediate and more vital, a presence rather than a set of beliefs … In its own way our isolation had expanded the heart, not to reach out to a detached God but to find and become part of whatever ‘God’ might be. 42 Keenan writing shows just how spent the sign of God has become in the West when he emphasises the separation between the power he is attempting to describe and invoke and that power appealed to by the Christian tradition. Yet he is, like Hillesum, Bonhoeffer and von Moltke, appealing to the very power which gave whatever truth there was to Christianity and the Jewish faith. When Keenan says of his captors that they could never understand that “real power embraces: it cannot destroy,” 43 he is identifying the fundamental lack in their very being which finds itself refracted onto, and produced by, the retributive, vengeful, torturing, sexually repressive God whom they serve. The faith described above comes from looking into the heart of the world’s pain and somehow being able to draw upon a potency of love. It is the power itself that is more important than the name, just as it is the trail of acts which are the real testament of a belief. In My Traitor’s Heart, a sad chronicle of his own damage and that of South Africa as a whole (near the end of its crumbling apartheid regime), Rian Malan is astonished by the powerful testimony of Creina Alcock. She is the widow of Neil

Wayne Cristaudo

39

___________________________________________________________ Alcock, a man who was murdered in a tribal crossfire. Neil Alcock and Creina (who as a young woman fell in love with him when she went to write a newspaper story on him) had dedicated their lives to bringing peace and improvement to one of the poorest regions of South Africa. So loved was Alcock, that after his death a crowd of Zulus gathered to celebrate his divinity. 44 In addition to Creina having to bear the murder of her husband, Malan recounts the thefts, physical violence and betrayals to which she is subjected in that God-forsaken region she voluntarily inhabited (though a more thoughtful theological reflection would add that what people call “God-forsaken” is really the terrain that is most in need of God, terrain that has been formed by the blocking out of God, so that he cannot enter with his gifts.) After describing the sheer terror she felt after having received her second death threat she says: I felt utterly betrayed by loving. All the things I had ever been told about love just weren’t true. It was all full of false promises. I understood that love was a safety and a protection, and that if you loved you would be rewarded by someone loving you back. Or at least not wanting to damage you. But it wasn’t true, any of it. I knew that if I stayed, this was how it was going to be: it would never get any better; it would stay the same or get worse. I thought, if you are really going to live in Africa, you have to be able to look at it and say, This is the way of love, down this road: Look at it hard. This is where it is going to lead you. I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat. I felt I was being asked to try to love enough not to be afraid of the consequences. I realize that love, even if it ends in defeat, gives you a kind of honour; but without love, you have no honour at all. Love is able to enable you to transcend defeat … The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness. 45 The truth about life expressed by Hillesum, Creina Alcock, Bonhoeffer, von Moltke and Keenan is all the one truth. Where this truth finds expression is of far less importance than that it does find expression. This is the truth that forms the world and bursts into the world; this is the truth that evil forms to close off. This is the truth that reduces all metaphysical pronouncements to shame and mere verbosity. Martin

40

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ Heidegger, for example, belonged to a generation which wished to erase the past’s phantasmic presence in order to free up the present for the future. In this respect, as different as his politics were, he was of the same generation as the surrealists, and committed to the same task as Sartre. As different as their methods were, all wanted to rebuild the life-world with elements untarnished by the past’s diseases. Yet when he was tested, when he had to choose which power to serve, his philosophy could not help him make a better choice than serve Adolph Hitler. His post-war self-serving apologetics, and absolute refusal to consider that he had anything to atone for, only succeeded in making his followers insist on the intellectual integrity of separating the man from his philosophy. No philosopher in the ancient world would have thought it possible for a philosopher to protect his philosophy by insisting upon the separation between the error of his own act and the fundamental truth of his philosophy. That is an indication of how saturated in words our life-worlds are today, and how the act is disassociated from, concealed and smothered by ideas. The truth that love’s ultimate demand discloses is evident in the life and only in the life. It is not a truth reached by argument. Indeed argument, while relevant to certain kinds of truths, has nothing whatever to do with the truth that is one’s life. Arguments rarely wake one up from existential slumber, and men like Heidegger and Sartre, who spoke out in favour of mass murdering regimes, will (in a time less encumbered by its ideological polarisations and commitments) be seen as having contributed to the murdering slumber of the twentieth century. Of all the philosophical reflections upon politics in the twentieth century, one work is prominent for having made a simple stand with its No, and for having the courage to insist upon calling things by their simple names. That work was Albert Camus’ The Rebel, a work which made him immediately hated and now merely ignored by intellectuals in France. The central thought upon which the whole book turns is: We are living in the era of premeditation and perfect crimes. Our criminals are no longer those helpless children who pleaded love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults, and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges. 46 Camus understood that the ideological polarisations of his century all converged around the same fundamental act: the act of mass murder. Unlike the truth that has mobilized von Moltke, Etty Hillesum,

Wayne Cristaudo

41

___________________________________________________________ Creina Alcock, Brian Keenan and every genuine respondent to love’s ultimate demand, the “truths” of political ideologies demanded murder. Dostoevsky powerfully demonstrates in his account of Ivan’s nightmare and the discourses of Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov that the search for universal justice must lead to mass murder because human beings, once deluded that they possess the status of a man-god, are boundless in appetites and will have no brake upon them. The moralistic appeal to universal humanity and subsequent ease with which a humanistic political goal can justify mass murder to reach its end is one of the most luciferic aspects of modernity. God’s power, by definition, cannot be harmed by humans, and hence those who would destroy him can only destroy an idea of him. But those who are intent on murdering him come closest to achieving their aim by killing the creature created in his image. In this respect the luciferic revolt of the young Marx, evident in such poems and plays as Oulanem, materialized in the gulags. And while Marx’s historical and economic arguments about capitalism were more sophisticated and influential than his Satanic juvenilia, they were no more real than the hatred of his youth. Indeed the temptation of every superior mind is the temptation of its service. For it is only in its service to upbuilding love or tearing-down destruction that the real quality of ideas can be judged. Yet the academic mind is trained almost exclusively to consider the idea as a thing in itself, as something to be judged on the basis of its consistency within the range of elements it sustains. And when it discovers techniques, which provide the illusion that one is studying real material relationships instead of ideas, the abstract game has no methodological corrective. Thus, for example, Marx had accused Hegel of being enchanted by the Idea of his own philosophy, its absolute idealism. But he did not see that he was doing the same thing when he claimed that the essence of a society was its mode of production and that this mode had a discernible logic and development which would mean it was possible to know who was the “historical agent of perpetual peace” (to use Kant’s phrase) and which mode of production would secure it. Such a truth could only be grasped if one knew the range and extent of all the potencies constituting a social totality, which is impossible, which is also why the theory could not be realized. 47 Just as love’s ultimate demand provides no phantasmic conclusion - Christ’s penultimate sentence, “My God why hast thou forsaken me,” points to the absoluteness of death and the necessity of the abandonment of all superstitious hopes - the phantasmic requirement for mass murder is done with a mountain of reasons - racial science, class science, economic necessity, reasons about humanity’s ultimate irrationality, reasons for the Reason of History. No totalitarian regime

42

Sacrifice: Love’s Ultimate Demand

___________________________________________________________ would be possible were it not for the army of intellectuals who provide reasons for who is to be murdered and why they must be murdered. As with all phantasmic formations, the twentieth century’s preoccupation with revolution grew out of the “truth” of rebellion. The truth of solidarity is generated by human rebellion against the cruel inflictions of one group’s will and means upon the other. “I rebel therefore we exist” 48 is Camus’ formulation of the truth at the heart of solidarity. In so far as collective action is our inescapable lot, he rightly says “human solidarity is metaphysical.” 49 Hence, for Camus, any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity, simultaneously loses the right to be called rebellion and actually becomes an accomplice to murder. 50 The curse of modernity, for Camus, is that the limits in the meeting of minds that make it possible for us to form a rebellious body have been exploded by abstractions. These abstractions have become the great temptations to which modern men and women have succumbed. They provide the illusion that our rebellion could reach completion. But what has happened in the process of mystification is that the specific injustices to be overthrown have been lost, and the promise of injustice itself has been seized, as anyone who could embody its presence must be expurgated. Rebellion thereby morphs into mass murder. We are an age whose capacity for murder is commensurate with our capacity to make abstractions. It is not that other ages have not known massive violence. But such violence was not justifiable on philosophical grounds. Camus has seen that between rebellion and metaphysical revolt the burning issue is the truth of the love that is expended: Rebellion proves … that it is the very movement of life and that it cannot be denied without renouncing life. Its purest outburst, on each occasion, gives birth to existence. Thus, it is love and fecundity or it is nothing at all. Revolution without honour, calculated revolution which, in preferring an abstract concept of man to a man of flesh and blood, denies existence as many times as is necessary and puts resentment in the place of love. 51 The failure to love properly is our hell. “The secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life. Its blind men entertain the puerile belief that to love one single day of life amounts to justifying whole centuries of oppression.” The absurdity of our existence, which formed the original gesture of Camus’ philosophy, cannot be the great excuse for murder and cruelty, as de Sade drooled, Nietzsche affirmed or Ivan Karamazov feared.

Wayne Cristaudo

43

___________________________________________________________ It is an opportunity to enjoy the “brief love of the earth”, that same earth which “remains our first and last love.” 52 Camus’ great formulation was “to live without appeal” and although von Moltke was a Christian and Hillesum a Jew, their very appeal is identical to Camus’ “without appeal.” The paradox at work here hangs on the truth of love’s ultimate demand. It is a refusal to participate in the phantasmic order which has made the martyr the necessary sacrifice for the potential breaking up of the phantasmic (dis)order. The fanatic is convinced that if this or that group is expunged then the world will be right; it will be free of evil. The martyr is reconciled to his or her role in being the Other of evil, not because of any moral sense of superiority - a moral reprobate like Oscar Schindler is just as likely, if not more so, to respond to love’s ultimate demand than someone who lives by moral reasoning. How many people have lost their souls and minds and hearts through their moral reasoning? Those who are the sacrifice make of their life a gift to the future. Their refusal to feed the energy acts as a kind of conductor, relaying evil outside of the world. In time those sacrificial acts may be remembered and become essential for the next generation’s integrity, enabling it to know that it is not just the spawn of evil.

3. Evil and the Phantasmic “And out of good still to find means of evil.” John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, line 165.

Without love there can be no evil. This is why Augustine called evil a privative, a nothing. It needs something good to destroy, whether that is innocence, beauty or someone’s possessions. Ultimately it is love itself that evil seeks to negate through the substitutions of the love that ultimately leads to the nothing. 53 Love’s first act is creation and evil’s is de-creation. Love seeks the reintegration and salvation of what, through evil, had been deemed lost. Evil, on the other hand, is the perennial attempt to negate. “I am the spirit that always negates,” says Goethe’s Mephisto “and rightly so because everything that arises deserves to perish; it would be better if nothing were to come into being … I am part of that part that once was everything, a part of the darkness which gave birth to light.” 54 Part of the paradoxical nature of Goethe’s insight is that evil too arises from love. That is why it is love’s most significant secondary power. Evil is love of hate, love of folly, love of indifference, love of revenge, love of the self, love of cruelty, love of the power to dominate, love of wealth, love of the rule, love of the secure, love of pleasure and innumerable other loves. These may all be summed up in one formulation: evil is love of the phantasmic representation of love’s need. 55 Evil is the (crowd of) phantasm(s) that thrives on our love at our and the world’s expense. It is the inadequate love that parades itself as adequate, the lie that gives itself as truth - the spectre of our love’s inadequacy and our unworthiness to live in the love that can be dreamt of, but which is rarely realized. The phantasmic appropriates the sign of love’s creative presence, bringing with it a range of orientations - hard facts and seemingly inviolable reasons - and moral obligations that serve no other purpose than the phantasm’s own persistence. Nothing, absolutely nothing that was once the sign of love’s Holy Spirit is immune from phantasmic

46

Evil and the Phantasmic

___________________________________________________________ attachment: not the Bible, not the sign of the star, nor the cross, not the meditating Buddha, not the words of the moral imperative. Love is a spirit whose form must ever keep changing shape so that it can be. Its presence seems perpetual because its manifestness continues to break through the chambers of hell that we continually create on earth. Its presence can be found everywhere: the act of generosity of victor to vanquished, the gesture of comfort to the impoverished, the defiance of murderous rules, the love that transgresses ethnic and racial and religious and gender strictures, the lover who bends over his beloved to protect her from the stoning of the righteous, the repentant murderer. Traditions are remade on the basis of such acts (the Christian church, for example, on the back of a repentant liar and a repentant murdering fanatic) and men and women become blessed by the cumulative power of such remakings. This is why there exist faith and hope: that love, as the power of powers, the potency among potencies makes possible a coherence and arrangement and fecundity that would be impossible were it absent. There were many qualities which were considered important enough to be divinised (both under polytheism and monotheism) before God’s most revered characteristic was designated as Love. Now millions of pagans and Jews and Christians share their belief that it is the greatest purpose in the world, thereby acknowledging it as an omnipotent and omnipresent power, a power which we, nevertheless, en-veil in service to our phantasms, in our evil. There is as much of the phantasmic in the superstitions people use to protect themselves from evil as there is in the superstitions which are meant to invoke God. Indeed the traditional signs and paraphernalia of holiness, goodness and authority are the places where the phantasmic is most empowered. Every tradition is also a phantasmic tradition. At which point the phantasmic takes over the collective spirit of a group can be gauged from the dominance of love’s lack or, what amounts to the same thing, the dominance of deforming, deathly and damnable loves over, to use St Paul’s formulation, the power that “builds up.” Our collective history is the story of our phantasms, of the demons we have worshipped and which have supped on our blood. Every time we are released from a dominant phantasm the fruits and blessings of our creative powers flow across the generations. (We are never all released on earth - that is the dream of heaven - for phantasms are as much personal as collective.) But those very fruits and blessings readily lend themselves to becoming part of the phantasmic arsenal for the devouring of subsequent generations: the law, the state, the church, the market, technology, science, the idea of freedom, the word itself - all have, at times, become instruments of death.

Wayne Cristaudo

47

___________________________________________________________ The devil or demonic is but another name for the phantasmic, an insight lost in an age which has accepted what Baudelaire, in his prose poem “The Gambler,” called the greatest ruse of the devil - the belief that he does not exist. Much more attuned were those people who realized that the demonic is plural, that there are Mammon, Beelzebub, Lucifer, and a pantheon of powers whose very existence is dependent upon our service to their needs and to their ghoulish poisonous gifts. We have mostly lost the art of seeing processes and we live, perilously, on abstractions and truncations, neither more nor less than other peoples on the verge or in the midst of collective damnation. The phantasmic, like us, lives off abstractions and truncations: its presence accumulates and is activated through its concealment so that people literally don’t know what they are doing; it returns us to ourselves in a truncated fashion. All we have to protect ourselves against the phantasmic are our souls and hearts and speech and openness to the power that empowers those aspects of ourselves. Such protection is not magical - it is not a ticket releasing one from the suffering that our brothers and sisters and children and parents endure in hell’s midst. On the contrary, many of those who have most profoundly grasped what love is, and who have been called by love to serve it, are martyrs to the evil of the time, that has reached out across the times like a claw sweeping up those who don’t know what has crushed the life out of them or why. Evil and love are real. They are substances because they are generative. They are both spun out of time and they weave us: our formations and mal-formations are cross generational, the results of decades and centuries, if not millennia, of the service and deeds, the desires and sacrifices, the failures and success of love. Love’s deficiency is its phantasm’s (evil’s) presence. That is a law that we rarely countenance and truncated thinking prevents us from ingesting such a truth. Yet we must also not forget that the phantasmic brings with it its own pay-off, a satiation that, for some, more than suffices, and there have been no end of those who are apologists of the phantasmic. (Although, some of those very apologists are themselves but servants of love itself playing with the signs of the demonic in much the same way that the demonic deploys the signs of the Holy Spirit.) Initially only few see evil in its earliest phase, just as only few see the full-blown phantasm as phantasm. The first enemies of a phantasm are widely hated and often killed because people live under its rule. A phantasm provides a (group of) people - its servants - with their daily bread, their sense of purpose, their social reproduction. Its ubiquity is unquestionable; its power is so strong that no other reality seems conceivable. Phantasms are walled by the

48

Evil and the Phantasmic

___________________________________________________________ collective loss of mind and hearts of their mignons. The non-believer is viewed with a mixture of laughter and scoffs, total incredulity and then rage before the mignons will imprison and/or kill someone who speaks the truth. The end of a phantasm means the end of a world. But phantasms run their course; they are overthrown by love and other phantasms. Men and women need direction and it is not a bad thing that they do so, any more than it is a bad thing that they have bodies. As sign-ificant beings we need commandments. That is why, as Rosenstock-Huessy perceptively observes in his writings on speech, the original grammatical move is the imperative. The imperative is the condition that ensures survival, and hence perpetuity. The indicative, the recounting of fact supplying the basis of proof, the seeming basis of the scientific attitude (seeming because a scientist is, as Nietzsche observed, already under the imperative of the will to truth) requires an order for it to be. The imperative is the voice of order, the divine voice. God first speaks in the imperative mood. That we have a destiny, that our significations are under a higher sign, a voice which having created us, leaves us to name the world that we inherit - this was recognized by the biblical writers who felt commanded to chronicle creation. Just as God commands so too does the phantasm. Its commandments are embedded in the most basic structures of our interactions. Western men and women have long since turned the commandment telling that God is a jealous God into a phantasm and hence have been deaf to the truth of that commandment. The sign of God is precisely the sign that is meant to point to that which is real creative love and which is not phantasmic. Hence for Jews even the name must remain unpronounceable, just as Muslims insisted God could not be pictorially represented, and Meister Eckhart emphasised the need to renounce any predicate that we attach to God. The commandment which forbids the representation and worship of false idols is, in fact, a life-line against the jealousy of the phantasms. 56 For phantasms are absolutely jealous - so jealous that they will have fathers kill their children, children renounce their parents, brothers and sisters kill each other, civil wars, religious wars, death camps. Everywhere these can be found there is the proof of the phantasmic triumph over love. Phantasms are by nature schismatic, brutal, and murderous. And they provide an endless source of justification for the hell they perpetuate. Yet nothing is more “moral” and law abiding than a phantasm - phantasms provide moral justification for cruelty and murder. The phantasm is the “moral” and legal voice of the lost, the voice that drives the blind who do not see the most blatant incongruity, between word and deed. And the lost are the well-respected sleepwalking citizens,

Wayne Cristaudo

49

___________________________________________________________ dutifully building the scaffolds of the next hell, which they think is peace and security. Phantasms are stronger than individuals and appeals to individuality, as a source of protection against the phantasm, are themselves phantasmic. I have said it already but it needs to be constantly borne in mind, and it is fundamental to the way of seeing expressed in this book: the fate of one who challenges a phantasm at its zenith is, almost invariably, death. The only consolation for the martyr is that his or her death will contribute to the destruction of the phantasm that has devoured him or her. But a phantasm cannot be killed by violence. It will just move around, much as World War 1 moved to World War 11 and onto the Cold War and still Ares moves. Indeed the phantasm of war is one of the most persistent phantasms of the species - ever the same, just the names and dates and technologies change. This too does not stop pacifism also being a phantasm. Phantasms are more constant than cultures, as gods live longer than mere mortals. A phantasm survives by virtue of its sheer implacability, by virtue of the seeming impossibility of its non-persistence. Each phantasm strives to be God, and each is, in polytheistic terms, a god. “The power who puts questions into our mouths and makes us answer them is our God. The power which makes the atheist fight for atheism is his God,” 57 and “[a] god is any power which does something indispensable, something which no one else can do,” are Rosenstock-Huessy’s formulations. In our existence we may move from god to god but it wears us down, and we secretly make a compact with one god at the expense of the others. Each god demands to be worshipped as the source of all life. This is what choice constantly stands before men and women: what power do they serve? Love is the one power that repeatedly puts itself before us, promising redemption, but its presence is repeatedly obscured by phantasms. By focusing upon one power we enter into labyrinths of worldmaking that we could never do without such devotion. Our worship is “rewarded”; yet, always, the other gods become jealous, and their neglect is at our peril. Gods demand to be worshipped, lest they die and take (parts of) us with them. Like us, they seek immortality and that can only be attained through our sacrifice. Thus the sun god of the Aztecs could only survive by the constant provision of human hearts, and the phenomenon of human sacrifice to the gods appears to be universal. The earliest sign left to us that human beings recognized that love was the circuit breaker of a world doomed to perpetual cycles of hell is in the biblical idea of God providing the sacrifice for Abraham. The God of the Israelites is defined by his not demanding sacrifice from human beings. 58 The one place in the

50

Evil and the Phantasmic

___________________________________________________________ Old Testament where human sacrifice is raised again is in the story of Jeptha in the book of Judges: Jeptha vows to God that if he returns home victorious in his battle with the Ammonites he will offer whoever first comes through his door - the sacrifice happens to be his daughter. The story trembles with numerous interpretations, but not the least important being that it is Jeptha himself who has valued his life so highly that he will unwittingly promise anything for his own safety Another, more anodyne, interpretation is that the offering means that the daughter lives as a temple virgin rather than a blood sacrifice. Christianity opened up the prospect for its own dissolution as a religion by providing a logic for the questions: if we loved each other weren’t we in effect fulfilling God’s command and showing him, through our deed to the Other in his image, the truth of our faith in love and the acceptance of the wisdom of his command? And wasn’t the praise demanded by the One God of the Jews to be seen and heard in the life and living speech of his creatures (who were making the word flesh) and not in the mere saying of words? Wouldn’t the reality of paradise that we seek and paradise is the true resting place of the imagination - be visible in the loving fellowship of each with each? And having been made in the image of God wouldn’t our unity be the reconciliation of our humanity with our divinity? Of course that has not happened because so much of Christianity itself had become phantasmic so that men and women were happy simply to be done with it; its signs seen but as the putrefying lies and imbecilities of fools and scoundrels. “How could anyone be such a fool as to believe in a god?” - this was the dominant thought of many philosophers whose grasp of reality was drawn from the semantic field that wove modernity. “The death of God,” “the disenchantment of the world,” “the gods have fled”: these formulations simply leave us once more with the choice between divinities - between the phantasmic and love itself released from its phantasmic attachments. Every new age is a new semantic field; old signifiers no longer activate in the way they once did. Meanings which were once of the utmost importance now often mean, for all but the well attuned, something else or nothing at all. Part of the phantasmic significance of an age which has riven its expressive (religious/ artist/ populist arsenal of signifiers) and reflexive modes (fact and normative-based sites of cultural mediation and reproduction such as law, education, fact-based media) of speech is that we struggle to connect with the past because the range of our signifiers is so fundamentally different from that of past ages. Until the phantasmic triumph of secularism/ scientism the identification of demonic forces (which of itself does not suffice to spare anyone) was part of everyday communication: so it was from ancient times and still is in the sphere of

Wayne Cristaudo

51

___________________________________________________________ expressive speech to the extent it is not tyrannized by the phantasm of our reflexive culture - Christianity and the Jewish faith, of course, dividing superterrestrial powers into the divine (love) and the demonic (phantasmic). Reflexive discourse originally emerges as a means to deal with the phantasmic, which does not stop it from taking on qualities every bit as, and sometimes more phantasmic than the expressivist realm of a culture’s signs. But just as a phantasm is ubiquitous for an age, after it has been banished it is as if only an idiot would have served such a phantasm. Spotting the phantasms of past ages is easy, effortless because all the work was done by those who died and suffered in the fight to overthrow it. Likewise spotting the phantasms of other nations/ cultures/ groups is easy precisely because it a member of another group is outside of the “line of its logic.” Dispossession is a costly struggle - always. Truth that has not been fought for is quickly lost. That is why intergenerational transmission of values is so weak, and why one’s generation’s values and plans are not mechanically absorbed by another. People quickly forget the sufferings that others have made on their behalf; this is also why gratitude is frequently so fleeting, and why each generation finds itself dealing with its own peculiar phantasms and evils. The transmission of love across time, through institutions and speech, is one of humanity’s greatest powers, but the recipient cannot fail to replenish their inheritance without consequence. And each generation passes on its failures and shortcomings, its sins, as much as its acts of greatness. Collective life can no more be sustained by continual thoughtlessness than the individual body by a diet consisting only of soda pop and French fries. A phantasm always exists because of a reality. It is a spectre that is parasitical on a founded truth - and to talk of truth that is not founded, that does not cost, that is sheer immediacy (as if scientific disinterest were not purchased at great cost and were as natural as flight is to birds) is just one more of the phantasms that keep us asleep. Phantasmic history is the history of the usurpation of one phantasm by another, much along the lines of Hesiod’s account of divine usurpation in Theogony. While phantasmic history is a succession of usurpation, the sequential nature of truth is a consequence of our temporality. One danger to which we continually fall as long as we are ruled by the phantasmic rather than heavenly order (the reality that is accessible through the full deployment of all that life can offer) is that most of us forget the reality upon which the phantasmic was parasitical. The demise of a phantasm frequently brings with it the seeming extinction of the living truth. The extinction fortunately - such is life’s grace - is only seeming. A truth need not die forever - and time and time again men and

52

Evil and the Phantasmic

___________________________________________________________ women learn the extraordinary durability of life’s potencies, potencies long thought dead, discovered to be incubating, awaiting the time of their reception (like Rabelais’ frozen words which will thaw in that future when there are those who have the ears to hear). Something in human beings knows this and, hence, the further we advance into the future, the more we seek to understand the past. We are the species that is gifted with the potentiality of temporality, whose present is shaped by its grasp of past and its orientation toward the future. The past teaches us that the dead can still live, can still have the power to transform, can still be generative of the real. And the most persistent fear of all is death. We only know death from the side of life - we only know the death of others from the side of our life, and even those who have had “the experience of death” and come back to tell the tale (“near death experiences”) are back on this side. Most significantly we do not know that death is terrible - although we may believe it is. The narratives about death break down into two basic kinds: that there is nothing or that there is something, whether reincarnation, heaven and hell, or movement through different planes of existence, or return to the one universe (with or without there being the prospect of a continuous consciousness). In fact, though, our thought of what it entails is no more helpful than the thought of what any activity entails before it is lived. Like being born, learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to love death is a gift of life - one that is given to all. Of all the things we may believe about death - whether through logic or premonition - that is the only one we know with certainty. Our fear is phantasmic. We really have no idea exactly what it means, which also means we have no idea what a blessing it could be, a point widely held among ancient philosophers. To wish to prolong life, to sustain it and venerate it because it is lovable and to do so out of love may be precisely what is the link between good life and good death, but to stave off death at any cost (whether individually or collectively) is ghastly, is phantasmic and one further recipe for evil. Openness to death and openness to life is the most empowering way of being open to love: these are the only preparation for death one needs. Stories about what may happen after death, if seen as imaginings and speculations, may play their part in assisting people to have a good life. The open imagination is one of our greatest powers - it is a major source of our world-making, but when it is alloyed with undue fear it becomes another ground of the phantasmic. Living without fear of death is the beginning of phantasmic rejection. This too has its phantasmic counterpart in death or suicide cults: the suicide bomber is the phantasm of the martyr - a phantasm that Islamists even cover up with the same term (but whose meaning is the

Wayne Cristaudo

53

___________________________________________________________ exact opposite: a martyr is the willing sacrifice to evil, who refuses to do evil to stop evil, who hopes to be the circuit breaker of evil’s perpetuity). The suicide bomber is no circuit breaker, but one more perpetrator of the violence which is part of the hell of the world he or she wishes to end, but, in fact, only further perpetuates. What is said of undue fear of death is also true of undue fear of pain. Pain is not evil - yet it can be an evil, and our undue fear of it may also be a source of evil. But this is true of love of pleasure and wealth as well. The phantasm can be devoted to asceticism or the life of pleasure - it can be found as much in the pseudo-spiritual “you-can-have-it-all” cults as in the “you-must renounce-the-world” cults. The phantasm is boundless in its forms of attachment. Wherever love forms so too does the phantasmic. The world as we know it will end when we are no longer living in service to phantasms. Then our imagination will roam freely as a wave on which we ride. The world holds untapped potencies extending even to the dream of immortality and the complete play of the imagination, which would make us explorers of all the powers of life, from the infinitely small and large. Such a world cannot be achieved through politics or economics or science alone - and we see how each of these fields of life may subvert the benefits of the other. The real destroyer is the human heart, and the heart is formed over time: as much as we might want to and try, we do not simply form our own heart - we are all made by others and remake each other. We can make each other whole enough or damaged.

4. Damage: A Logic of Evil. 59 I am the slayer of the soul destroyer of the dream The nightmares which recur and wake you up with their screams. I am the end of innocence the planting of the fear That eats away inside your mind and kills you year by year. I am the words you cannot speak the acts that you regret The twisted childhood memories that you cannot forget I am the terror in your voice as painfully you plead To fight the urges inside of you to end up just like me. A “poem written by a child molester,” Bulletin with Newsweek 10 August 1993, 27. “You see, I want some good to come out of this.” Gary to his brother Mikal in Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (London: Penguin, 1994). “For those of you who doubt it this is a love story.” The narrator of Josephine Hart’s, Damage (London: Arrow, 1991), 216. Damage and damnation (the old French dam, damme and Latin damnum both meaning loss supply the common root) have a logic whose key “moments” are: untimely loss of innocence, unbearable suffering, a heightened sensitivity to the presence of evil and, in some cases, a determination to release oneself from that state by finding a further sacrificial victim, just as they themselves have been a sacrificed to evil. To be damaged means to be in great pain through not being whole, being broken, often irreparably. Frequently being damaged means to act in such a way that someone will take the pain so that the damaged can leave the sphere of damnation - to feel damaged is to feel damned. To be damaged is invariably to inflict damage, to keep the cycle going, to re-enact the event, to release through re-enactment. That’s the logic. Damage is evil; evil is damaging. That’s the definition of evil for our time. And our time is

56

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ one which has been preoccupied with damage. Certainly the logic has been tracked by Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and the word is not new. Gamaliel Bradford (1863-1932) wrote a book called Damaged Souls 60 long before Black Flag sang “damaged by you, damaged by me” or Trent Reznor sang “lost my faith in everything ... fuck the rest and stab it dead/ broken bruised forgotten sore/ too fucked up to care anymore,” in “Somewhat Damaged,” long before almost anything by Tori Amos, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and countless other bands who have sung of their damage. I do not know if the novelist J.B. Ballard was correct in his observation that “the volatile landscape of the mid-60s … made a virtue of psychic damage,” 61 but by the 1990s the word was part of everyday vocabulary. Its currency can be gauged by the question on the cover of Time Magazine, of 10 June 1991 “Does Evil Exist? Is it just the damage of a difficult world? Or something darker?” But there were two works that appeared in the 1990s which provide excellent explorations of the logic of damage: Mikal Gilmore’s autobiographical account of his family and his brother Gary in Shot in the Heart and Josephine Hart’s novel, Damage. In Hart’s case the very title of the book indicates that damage is her subject. And while Gilmore’s study does not deploy the word “damage” in the title, the word circulates with such frequency and at such critical moments throughout the book that a fairly accurate summary of the book would be: it is a study of familial and generational damage. The pivotal point of the book is when Mikal halts the flow of the narrative and contemplates a school photograph of Gary: When I look at this photograph, I see a damaged boy. Or more accurately, I see the face of a broken angel as it looks away from the easy certainty that everyone else is looking toward and contemplates taking on the devil’s face for a lifetime fit. 62 On the surface, Damage and Shot in the Heart would seem to be about two very different things. Hart’s novel tells a story of sexual obsession (which is what Louis Malle’s film concentrates on to the exclusion of the most important passages of dialogue in the book) between the unnamed narrator and his son’s (Martyn’s) lover and fiancée (Anna Barton). Shot in the Heart, on the other hand, is the history of how the violence of a family shapes the boy who is pushed from one violent institution (his family) to another (reform school then prison) until he, seemingly senselessly, kills two young men. He then becomes an international celebrity by forcing the state’s hand with his execution.

Wayne Cristaudo

57

___________________________________________________________ Different surface narratives notwithstanding, Damage and Shot are both essentially about the re-creation or restaging of traumatic events in order to find release and redemption from the hell into which Anna and Gary have both been cast. The sexual obsession of Damage is only a part of a deeper longing. For Martyn’s father, it is a means of breaking out of a life of sleep-walking and “exploding” into life; something in him longs for the pain, destruction, and evil that will wake him up. For Anna, sex is a force she deploys to help her restage the event that has so deeply traumatised her. She has been damaged by the suicide of her incestuous brother, and her life is ruled by the need to pass on the damage, to find a sacrifice that will receive her pain and thus release her from the hell of her existence. She is not physically violent, but she carefully discerns the fault-lines in the family she enters in order to brutally reveal the truth of the untruth binding the family members. Just as her trauma sprung from within a family, where the calm surface concealed far more turbulent energies, she enters into another family to uncoil the tumultuous energies that are just waiting to be tapped by someone who can “see” the evil behind the veneer of goodness and comfort. The novel’s horrifying denouement - the death of her fiancé when he discovers Anna and his father in bed together - is the genuine climax that she has been craving. In Gary Gilmore’s case, the senseless and brutal killing of two young men is a re-enactment of the senseless violence to which he was subject as a young boy. The rage he had stored up at his father and the systemic control mechanisms of reform schools and prisons was released on two men as innocent as he once was. Gary’s raw aggression is as common amongst men who are damaged as Anna’s more contrived and cunning deployment of sex is among women who have been victims of incest. But what made Gary’s story such a significant one was his expansion of the stage upon which his re-enactment took place: from a small town affair, no more newsworthy than the thousands of other senselessly violent murders that take place each year, into a world-wide media event in which he would orchestrate his own murder and reactivate the killing machine of the state of Utah. To be damaged is to experience the world as an infliction. It is to experience the cosmos in the exact opposite to Dante’s formulation “the love that moves the sun and other stars.” Receiving the rays of such love requires an openness to undeformed love (as opposed to self-deformed love) and being patient with the divine sequence of life’s gifts. Being damaged is to have been deprived of the right type of love at the right time. Hence there is no single way to become damaged. Being out of control, being deluded about one’s actions, being stupid, selfish, or all

58

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ manners of inattentiveness, in addition to wanting to inflict harm, are all ways of doing damage. In Hart’s novel, the damage suffered by Anna comes from her brother’s suicide, due to her turning away from their incestuous relationship and her showing interest in another boy. Aston, the brother, may have wanted to punish Anna, though his primary motivation seems to have been to end his own agony. What he would not have foreseen is that the trauma induced in Anna would create in her the need to re-enact the incestuous pattern and destroy an entire family just as her family had been destroyed. By enticing father and son into a transgressive relationship, she has staged an impending catastrophe where the ones not knowing (Martyn, his mother, and sister) must be traumatised on the discovery of the truth created by her and the father. In Anna we see a soul whose damage has created a desolate self forever haunted by an impossible and ultimately deadly desire. Generally it is not uncommon for the victim of incest to split the self into a “too good to be true” (which is how both Martyn and his father see Anna) and an evil destructive shadow (which is exactly how the narrator’s wife, Ingrid, experiences her). 63 Anna, in the most controlled and monstrous manner, is calmly and compulsively seeking for a sacrifice to release herself from the agony that Aston has passed onto her. The evil in this novel is bound up with every member of the field. Anna’s evil is intentional, but never solitary; it is always dependent upon the reaction of others. The father’s evil is due to reckless indifference and selfishness of the most vital and insatiable kind. But just as essential to the evil are the innocent sacrifices, including Anna, as a young girl, and possibly even Aston. In a tragic sense, all of the innocent are either guilty of unawareness or (in Ingrid’s case) inaction. But, as inane and inappropriate as it would be to take this in terms of moral or judicial responsibility, the fact is that innocence feeds evil through its very existence and attractiveness. Innocence is the constant reminder of life before the fall: the fall into life as well as the fall of a life. To those whose experience of life is governed by its disintegrativeness, who are entrapped in the horrendous scatteredness of evil, the fragile unity of innocence is an unsurpassable temptation, a wondrous promise of a lost world. Without innocence there could no more be evil than there could be evil if creative and redemptive love did not exist. Evil is, inter alia, the thwarting of the hope of direct transition from innocence to redemptive love. It is always the end of innocence - innocence is a state too pure for the world’s possibilities. Evil is supra-individual. It can only exist where there is association and it makes as much sense to talk of a spirit of evil, to describe a complex of associations, as it does to talk about a spirit of a

Wayne Cristaudo

59

___________________________________________________________ class, a group, a marriage, a friendship, a band, and so on. Evil is a vital substance that occupies a field; the paradox is that it is inseparable from the field. It is not reducible just to the one doing its final overt acts; again, the unintended acts which help form evil. The metaphor of hell fire is apposite for how evil works when it takes control of a territory; it is a conflagration devouring all in its way. Evil’s course is not immediately stopped by the sheer presence of goodness. (However, an act of goodness, like an act of evil, lives beyond the time of its immediate expression.) It is the absence of the swirling cumulative nature of “lesser or unnoticeable evils” that was so conspicuous in the first full length telling of the Gilmore story, The Executioner’s Song, by one of America’s most popular novelists, Norman Mailer. 64 The book came in a little under 1100 pages, and for all its detail didn’t begin to answer the question of why Gary killed Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell and then demanded the reactivation of the death penalty. It didn’t do this because Mailer addressed the question of who Gilmore was without any accurate information about the family in which Gary had been de-formed. Gary’s brother Mikal, on the other hand, knew where the murders of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell began. He understood the supra-individual quality of evil. The murders began before Gary’s birth and were prepared for in his childhood. Mikal knows that everyone in that household was damaged, and the damage didn’t start with Gary’s mother, Bessie, or his father, Frank Senior. On Bessie’s side there is her grandfather Alma, who “would pull off the wooden leg” to beat his wife and children so severely that at times they had to be hospitalized and her father Will, who also beat his family, on one occasion tying his son George to a tree and beating him unconscious. As for George, after he returned home from having been one of the soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, he would entice his young nieces and their friends into a room where he forced them to look at his photo collection of emaciated survivors of the camps, of piles of corpses, and the pornographic pictures he had picked up in Paris. On the other side of the family, Frank Senior’s childhood was based on abandonment and lies, a pattern he reproduced in his adult life by continually adopting false identities and collecting and abandoning wives and children. In Mikal’s description of the Gilmore family, we are not witnessing a family that is vastly different from many other families. But it is precisely through the details of the story that we are able to realize just how common and widespread the generation of evil is. The violence in such families is so fundamental to its perpetuity that only the most extreme deeds expose how badly de-formed the association is. The moralist and jurist in us want someone to take responsibility. And while the need to break out of the pattern is

60

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ indisputable, the issue of responsibility is, Sartre notwithstanding, a judicial or moral category, not an existential one. That is, it is not derived from the reality of the situation but from a hope for change. The tragedy of evil is that no one is responsible, but many always are. That is why Dostoevsky provides the formulation “We are all responsible from everybody” in The Brothers Karamazov as a means to try to overcome the damage that he sees that has befallen the Russian soul of his generation. Of course, the jurist in us responds: “This is too much!” It is far easier to blame the perpetrator or, failing that, the parents. The category error we all make time and time again is that we thoughtlessly confuse role and reality, name and outward characteristics. Alma, Will, and Frank Senior were no more able to be real “adults” or real parents, that is able to love and equip their children for life’s trials, than they could fly to the moon on broomsticks. What is true of them is true of the other “parents” who brutalize, sexually abuse, and abandon their children. It is so easy to say, “People like this shouldn’t have children.” But they do and they will. Unlike Alma and others, Mikal and his brother Frank acquired the wisdom not to have children, because they knew they were too damaged. Their wisdom was purchased with Gary’s murders. In sum, just as it takes many lifetimes (not discounting the odd miracle) to make even moderately good parents and children, it took many lifetimes to make Gary’s parents and hence to make Gary. This hard truth of the slowness of life-forming processes is one that the ancients and tribal peoples took very seriously. But we moderns do not wish to entertain such a possibility, lest it interfere with the accelerated modern rhythms of social and economic reproduction and our moral, judicial, and political faith in individual sovereignty. However, it is this hard truth of the time required to nurture life that plays such a deep part in Mikal’s book. And it leads him at one point to write: “I need to interrupt here for a moment. An important thing just happened: The murderer in our story was born.” He then meditates upon the question: what separates this blue-eyed baby from the chilling blue-eyed killer on death row? His final answer is a “history of destruction.” Shot, as I have stressed, is not a moral treatise, and, if we are forced to use a philosophical description, it is much more a phenomenological depiction of the evils that culminate in Gary’s murders. Such a treatment bypasses the metaphysical and ultimately uselessly abstract question: “Was he predetermined to commit murder?” At the same time it forces us to consider the much more concrete and hence much more important questions: “What damage was awaiting Gary as soon as he was born into the world?” and “What were Gary’s responses to the cruelty and violence that were inflicted on him at such a young

Wayne Cristaudo

61

___________________________________________________________ age?” The question of Gary’s own will is really meaningless if we fail to address who Gary was and how he was formed. 65 Perhaps nothing so powerfully anticipates the damage awaiting Gary than the story Mikal tells of the naming of Gary. Some few thinkers, including Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, have attended to the importance of naming. It is one of our most ancient creative acts. It simultaneously injects a sense of destiny already deemed into the bearer of the new name, while leaving open space for the name to take on its own significance, to make its destiny afresh in the world. We are called and re-called by our names. In Gary’s case, his very name was hateful to his father, reminding him of Grady, the man who had stolen a former wife from him. In fact, Gary was the name chosen by his mother, but before he had received that name, Frank Senior had named him Faye Robert: Faye being the name of his mother, whom he hated; Robert the name of his other son, whom he not only, rightly, suspected of having an affair with Bessie, but also, wrongly, suspected was the true father of the boy. Days later, Faye Robert had been renamed Doyle by the woman manager of the Hotel Doyle, the hotel where the family had checked in. And whilst still a baby, as if to treat the name as a laughing stock, Frank Senior then thrust the surname of Laffo upon him, as he took off from Bessie and bounced bad cheques. This left Frank Senior in jail and Gary abandoned in an orphanage. After detailing this horrible story, Mikal ruefully reflects: There’s a horribly ironic twist that comes from all this name switching: What it means is, Gary Gilmore was never born; he would only die. (Years later, in fact, the federal penitentiary system would refuse me access to my brother’s file because I could not prove that any such person by his name had ever been born, or had ever had an official name change.) 66 Just as the very act of Gary’s naming was so loveless and hopeless, Frank’s own lovelessness would beat the blue-eyed boy into the cruel and twisted shape of a chilling killer. And Frank’s beating of Gary, like Gary’s murders, was his own beating back at the world that had beat him. Of course, there are many other important ingredients, including personal characteristics that assist the transition. The saddest thing in Gary’s case is that in any other environment, some of the qualities that helped turn him into a murderer, under other conditions, could have been virtues, namely outrage at injustice and courage. 67 Gary himself had said that the fateful point in his life was as a thirteen-year-old when he decided

62

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ to take a short cut through a thicket of brier bushes. What had seemed an easy short cut turned into a huge, tangled and all but impenetrable mass of thorns. Instead of turning around, Gary fought for hours until he made his way, cut and bleeding, through the thick brier patch. That day he learnt, as Mikal notes, “to kill or silence the part of himself that needed to cry out in fear or pain.” 68 The image of Gary cutting his way through the thicket of thorns is almost an archetypical depiction of a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. Under other circumstances something beautiful and strong would have awaited him, instead of his own sad bloody monstrousness. That Gary knew that he was worth more than a beating bag for his father and “correctional” guards, and that he would not passively accept their brutality seemingly speaks of something courageous and strong. And yet, as Mikal had noted, what could and should have been courage and strength were now much darker forces: Gary “finally found the power to ruin his own life and to extinguish any other life that it might take to effect that destruction.” 69 From that point on one could easily take as a gloss for Gary’s life the line that Anna Barton offers her lover, by way of a warning: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.” 70 The story of the final formation of Gary’s willfulness helps answer the question that is invariably asked when one learns of the childhood abuse suffered by a killer: “But why do so few become murderers, when so many are abused?” A part of the answer is that the killer, who as a child suffered deeply from injustice, often became more defiant and more courageous in the face of injustice, and then more pathologically determined to show the world the injustice he or she has suffered. The self’s need for mimesis and outward expression which is so important in human self-definition and understanding, from tribal ritual to epic to drama through to our entertainment society, is but the soul’s need to express and feed off others’ expressions of its loves and hates. The self that has been de-formed, unless re-formed, must express itself in the deformed way it appears in the world. None of the other Gilmore boys was as willful as Gary, but as Mikal notes, each one was damaged and the world was very lucky that only one of the Gilmore boys turned into a murderer. Frank Junior, like Mikal, wracked by guilt by what Gary had done, was a vagrant shuffling through the loneliest haunts he could find to be spared visibility. Mikal rightly underscores the common condition uniting the murderer and his living-dead brother: That one child killed and the other did not is, obviously, an important matter. But the fact that my brother Frank

Wayne Cristaudo

63

___________________________________________________________ wasn’t a killer does not mean he did not also suffer a damage worthy of killing. There are all kinds of ways to die in this world. Some die without taking others with them. It’s a victory, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it the same as redemption. 71 Then there is Mikal’s other brother Gaylen, who died of knife wounds inflicted by a husband of one of the many married women he slept with. His sexual preference was for women who were already in committed relationships, if possible with friends of his. Gaylen didn’t damage other families and relationships by killing people. He simply, much more like Anna Barton, risked killing other people’s relationships by combining that most volatile of human cocktails: desire mixed with deceit, leaving room for jealousy to do the rest. As for Mikal himself, his damage has a special twist. Not only was he born into a family of such devastating damage, but he was singled out to be the recipient of his father’s love. Perhaps this helped him focus his energies and develop his acute descriptive powers. Today we have largely become insensitive to the religious echo of professing and the responsibility before God of one’s undertaking in the word “profession,” though the German Beruf retains perhaps more starkly the religious sense of being called. But if one has any ear for what Mikal is saying, that is, if one takes him as seriously as the pain of the subject requires, Mikal was called to be the witness of his brother and what made him. Shot is his response to that call, the book that his profession had prepared him for, and the declaration he is called to make publicly, if not before God, at least before another of his names, the judges of the world. His book is an attempt at atonement. The price Mikal pays for being a loved member of the family and witness to its evil is daily and nightly horror. One of the important truths that Shot addresses is the hauntedness of damage. Mikal’s mother Bessie lived in fear of haunted houses and ghosts, and Mikal, who does not want to believe in them, cannot escape them. The fact that Mikal does not want to believe in ghosts and demons is as irrelevant to their presence as Ivan’s disbelief in God is to his nightmarish encounter with the devil in The Brothers Karamazov. The dreams are as much a part of Mikal’s life as hunger or the need to breathe. Devils and ghosts are part and parcel of the field of damage, no less tangible to the damaged than the clear objects of daylight are to the rest of us. They inhabit a different zone of our being, a zone that our reflexive discourses generally explain as unreal. It is a zone which psychiatrists, not altogether successfully, try to dissolve through drugs and therapy. But sanity is not preserved by simply saying, “I am

64

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ sane.” Nor do ghosts stop haunting or demons stop visiting those who say, “You don’t exist.” It is a difficult thing not to assume that the lines of vision that we are used to in daylight and the demarcation of the shapes of daily-life that we work with are the only lines and shapes. But being damaged opens up other lines of vision, other shapes and meanings than the ones we effortlessly, and more often than not thoughtlessly, take as reality. Such an opening facilitates a deeper grasp of reality, yet it is also dangerous, teetering on the delusional in so far as it tunnels concentration and vision upon the (potentially) evil, whilst blocking out the multiplicity of the countervailing forces of love. That the damned would experience evil in a personified form, while of no surprise to religious adherents throughout the world, is something that those of us whose names for the processes of reality have been cleansed by the rays of the secularised spirit find difficult to swallow. Yet feeling damned and seeing the world in a damned way brings with it its own logic, its own modality of perception and accompanying objectifications. While the devil is not visible in the glare of Enlightenment, evil is more problematic. 72 The damaged, and those sensitised by evil, see and deal with evil as a substance, as a real force no less real than the wind. Indeed, wind and evil are similar in so far as everybody witnesses their effects. In the case of evil, those sufficiently attuned to the swirl of energies that characterises evil are able to see the evil in the behaviours between people who are carrying out or facilitating evil through their manipulations or thoughtless behaviours before the effects are manifest. Those who have not been personally awakened by evil or who have forgotten and whose attention has lapsed (that is, the overwhelming majority) have a way of seeing that makes daily life more facile (in the best and worst sense). That is, the overwhelming majority has a shallower, but broader visual field. (Perhaps this was not always the case, especially in a more religious age when awareness of one’s own sinful nature was a constant of daily life, though such a sensitivity to evil was far from being all good or healthy; evil had other ways of spreading itself). That shallow field means that the majority, most of the time, does not see evil in formation. In the main, evil is recognised after it is too late. The corollary of this is that the shallowness of most people’s visual field, that makes so facile (in the best sense of the word) the reproduction of daily life, is also of great advantage to those who knowingly do evil. We are all made and makers. The damaged, though, have been made in a certain way. They have been robbed of the world as it looks, and in many ways is, to the innocent and the un-broken; the latter, the majority, are, from under this optic, “nothing special,” and they continually contribute to the evil of the world through their daily

Wayne Cristaudo

65

___________________________________________________________ inattentions. The damaged know of their own lost-ness. What they are seeking is a way out of the loss, isolation, pain and sense of damnation, that is, release from the agony. To be released from the unbearable agony of the world and to see the intrinsic harmony and unity of life is to be redeemed. It is not my point to argue that there is any redemption beyond this world, but people certainly believe that there is redemption beyond the state of the world or beyond one’s state in the world (it is one thing uniting secularists with faith in politics and people of diverse religious faiths). The motif of “redemption through striving” of Goethe’s Faust captures an important insight into the human condition itself, namely that we must move and that very necessity of movement opens up the possibility of the redemption of our life’s meaning. In this sense, in so far as we all move, we all potentially seek redemption, and our daily diet of television shows and films and novels is continually inventing scenarios of redemption to entertain us. Evil and saintliness represent the two extremities of striving. And who can say that the path of the saint is not open to the damaged? Certainly, the belief is widely felt in our culture. Christianity, departing so radically from Greek ethical thinking in this respect, makes as its cornerstone the belief that we are all fallen/sinners/damaged. And sinners can be saved in an instant by surrender to his/her maker. Certainly also, in a secular age we are still nourished by stories of those who have turned around and redeemed their lives by deeds of compassionate service. 73 But there is one huge problem with the path of the saint for the damaged. At its most demanding moment, the saint’s path is the martyr’s path, not a hero’s path. The difference, so often blurred in discussion of the martyr and the hero, is of fundamental importance to the point I am making. The martyr must embrace a faith so completely that his or her own death is recognized as the necessary condition of doing God’s work in a world full of evil. In so far as the damaged are driven by life/ death itself to find a sacrificial victim to release them from the damnation they are driven by life’s sacrificial commandment. But the saint knows that he or she must themselves be the sacrifice. Their life and death can - depending on God’s timing - become an inspiration, not today, maybe not even tomorrow, to conduct the energies of life into new configurations other than those that have been de-formed and/or destroyed by the implosions and explosions of evil. The martyr dies rather than contributes in any way to evil (just as Mikal is a witness, Frank Jr. is a martyr to the family). The consolation of surrender that is at the heart of genuine martyrdom and redemption is the antithesis to the absolute lack of surrender to, absolute mistrust and absolute defiance of life which characterises damage. Being damaged is to

66

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ be death’s servant rather than life’s. And the greatest of questions regarding life’s meaning is: which serves which - life death, or death life? Being damaged brings with it the knowledge that one is dead in life and hence the overwhelming sense that death is stronger than life. The price for martyrdom if formed into a universal moral law, though, is extreme. Many would say, perhaps not wrongly, that it is mad or fanatical. It renounces all willingness to deploy violence on behalf of all others, including infants and the most vulnerable. All are surrendered; everyone is expected to pay the same price as the martyrs themselves though, there is little reason to believe that Jesus believed that all would follow him as a martyr. But it is precisely the defiance of this allencompassing command that binds together the damaged and the hero. The hero, like the martyr, risks his or her own death for something higher (God, the empire, the state, the city, the family, the beloved, and so on), but he or she is willing to use violence, and hence evil, as part of that fight. The forces of destruction are not activated by the martyr, rather they are absorbed in the faith to open up the way for God’s will to come back into a world too violent and evil for his presence. The martyr’s faith in God’s activity is absolute; the hero has faith in a cause or even God, but he or she also must act and that may require, as we have said, the expenditure of violence. The martyr and the damaged are both sacrificial victims. But the damaged have not initially chosen their status. Or to say it slightly differently, the martyr knows that the world is full of evil and does not expect people to act other than they do; there is total surrender, hence no expectation other than God’s love being stronger than anyone’s death. The damaged, though, have been ripped from their state of innocence, their childish expectations dashed. Their sense of injustice is first and foremost a sense of the injustice of their own suffering, understandable given the severity of injury that is sufficiently traumatic to the soul. The hero is a closer relative to the damaged than the martyr is to the damaged for another reason. The hero’s survival skills must be finely honed in order to stay of heroic service. The damaged too, as we have said, make survival of tantamount importance but, like the hero, the damaged person skirts close to the edge of death. Death is an ever-present temptation, a gaping opportunity for redemption and release. Yet survival, that is continuation in the damaged state, is the reality that can be trusted. It is purchased with the belief that there is no façade separating reality and appearance. And there is precious little that the damaged can trust apart from their own capacity to survive. To them the self is the most reliable thing, because being damaged shows that the rest of the world is not trustworthy. Being damaged means folding the self in upon itself as a protective mode against the flow of the too

Wayne Cristaudo

67

___________________________________________________________ harsh world. Within that fold, one seemingly has control. But no one can have total control - the recognition of which is widespread amongst religions and philosophies which teach the doctrine of surrender of the self to God, Christ, the Soul, Reason, and the Tao among others. The damaged, as farseeing as they are in their sharper attunement to what is and does damage, are, nevertheless, enmeshed in an illusion, namely that they are in control. They may have the patience, will, intelligence, tenacity, and so on to push into regions and set up situations others would not dream of doing or surviving. But they lack control in so far as their behaviours are themselves compulsive. Compulsiveness is by no means a bad thing; the greatest things come by compulsions, but it is the formation of the soul that gives our compulsions their fruit. Damaged souls are souls whose compulsions are also deformed. Unless the damaged can heal, the damaged are damned to patterns of striving that reflect, and hence reinforce, their damage. If all striving by its very nature is striving for redemption, then the striving that increases the hold of negation over the living, that expands the nought of a self that is at once in control (in freakish control) due to its inward folding (so mysticlike, yet one abysmal step short of the mystic’s total surrender), is striving into the nothing. It is a negative striving that is equally a negative redemption. That is a path that does indeed have redemptive qualities, but it is only achieved by going further into evil, by doing evil and by shattering lives so that others “suffer into truth” (to use Aeschylus’ phrase). Taking our cue from Harold Bloom’s gnostic apothegm that “what can be broken should be broken,” we are all on earth to be broken. The only question is how and when. We call those evil who take it upon themselves to do the breaking, that is, who abandon the deeply felt belief that we are on earth to flourish. Only God or, in our more secular age, nature alone - and not nature working through men and women with careless, selfish, or destructive intent - has the right to introduce the hour and means of breakage. The damaged have usually been broken before their time, and some deep part of them knows this. The paradox of negative redemption is this: nothing better alerts us to the forces that facilitate premature breaking than an act of evil. The devastating consequences of evil force people to wake up to the evil they spawn or feed. In Hart’s novel there is an added dimension, which is the narrator’s hunger to be touched by evil. A man or a woman who is hungry for life but is incapable of feeling has a particular kind of energy. It is as if they bore a mark upon their forehead and it is like a life/death line to the damaged person, a line of energy that promises a transference from one to

68

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ the other. The vampire is a common way in which this kind of psychic disposition finds a mytho-poetic representation. The vampire is the damaged person who must drain the energy (drink the blood) of the living. The importance of sexual charisma as a seductive strategy is a common way in which the energy transfer begins. The uninitiated, the victim, is drawn to the charismatic power and inner depth of the damaged soul. Damage, to repeat, gives depth because the psychic wound means that the damaged one is constantly in a state of being in pain, and not just lifelessly moving across the surface of being. What is in fact a tortured and terrible state of existence can seem to be awesomely deep, wonderfully interesting. Hart has put her finger on, or rather dug into, an important and little understood, phenomenon: that souls communicate their innermost needs at a level preceding speech, that certain kinds of people are powerfully drawn to each other to learn about life, to be in life, to sacrifice themselves and others. The fact that lives and families are destroyed as a consequence of this kind of psychic attraction is precisely the point. That the “innocent” one doesn’t know it is happening is also frequently an essential part of the experience. This aspect of the experience is also powerfully drawn in the novel. First there is the narrator’s laughable belief that he is in control, as if there will be no serious consequences, as if this kind of action could not irrupt into the surface smashing his, his son’s, and his wife’s reality to bits. That he believes he is in control only goes to show how much he has to learn, how desperately he needs to learn, and that is the real purpose of the sexual obsession. The experience we are talking about here is not primarily about the triumph of erotic love, but about the transmission of knowledge that uses the erotic as a basis for its possibility. Martyn’s father has sex with Anna Barton so that he can gain a wisdom; Anna Barton has sex with Martyn’s father so that she can produce a wisdom and in so doing release herself from a burden. The wisdom is generated by the death of the son, and the truth of what father, wife, and son and daughter really had exploding into existence - what they really had was not a loving constellation, but an unfeeling numbness, a dwelling incapable of protecting itself from one of the most fundamental forces of life. Sex is a force, but its end frequently has less to do with pleasure than energistic transference; in such a case as this its purpose is for the truth of a group created reality to reveal itself for what it really is. Damage is a love story because it tells the story of what love and its lack do. Although the erotic is the way in which the love commences, by the novel’s end Martyn’s father carries within himself a kind of love that is way deeper than the erotic. His compulsive love for Anna has been so powerful that it has

Wayne Cristaudo

69

___________________________________________________________ destroyed everything around him. After that, sex is only a minor, if not altogether irrelevant, power. In the stories of the “fictional” Anna Barton and the “real” Gary Gilmore, we can discern how damaged people may do evil to awaken people to the evil of the world, to a world formed by the very evil that has befallen them. Having become the sacrifice of the evil of others, they seek out some other to sacrifice. The world becomes for them a theatre in which they re-enact the damage done to them in order to redeem themselves from hell. But their (negative) redemption increases the expanding circles of hell. Evil is not transcended by them; they are, and remain, its perpetrators as well as its victims. Any transcendence that occurs after their actions is by way of the others’ love being stronger, over time, than the realm of death that has been enlarged. The awakening into evil is a brutal and cruel affair; it is no less an awakening because of that. That Martyn’s father wishes to be awoken into life, to be redeemed from his slumber, means that there is an exchange of deadly and dangerous gifts. In Gary’s case, he shows the world the evil of the random violence of rage that he was subject to as a boy by randomly killing in moments of rage two young men. But then he ups the stakes by demanding the killing machine of the State be reactivated, thus, as Mikal notes, forcing the State to be complicit in his own murder. As he writes: He made them (the State of Utah and death penalty advocates) not just his allies, but he also transformed them into his servants: men who would kill at his bidding, to suit his own ideals of ruin and redemption. By insisting on his own execution - and in effect directing the legal machinery that would bring that execution about - Gary seemed to be saying: There’s really nothing you can do to punish me. Because this is precisely what I want, this is my will. You will help me with my final murder. 74 He had opened the floodgates for a mass of new killings. What, he asks, does it matter that all these rapists and murderers are going to die? For him, they all deserved to die. He had already died as a young boy because of the behaviour of men who, if not on death row, should have been (from his perspective at least). What elevated Gary’s theatrical enactment above countless other ones, which occur each day and are propelled by the overwhelmingly similar intergenerational patterns and

70

Damage: A Logic of Evil

___________________________________________________________ motives, was that with his demand to be executed things stopped and people, even on the other side of the world, took notice. In his telling of the story, Mikal shows the extent of the evil that had formed Gary and that had expressed itself in his murders. To this extent he goes someway towards redeeming (though not undoing) the evil by educating his readers into the truth about the role that intergenerational damage played in Gary’s evil. His redemptive act, the writing of the book, occurred years after Gary’s murders and execution. That I write of this now (thirty years after I was first strangely touched by the spirit of his name) is further testimony to the continuity of the importance of his redemptive striving and the way in which that striving continues across space and time. It does not make Gary’s evil any less evil, any less negative. On the contrary, Mikal specifically states (and Gary agreed) that he thinks Gary would not only have escaped if he could have but he would have murdered Mikal himself and anyone else who stood in his way. The damaged seek phantasmic redemption - and yet in their very evil they point the way to true redemption. Their lack of love points to the need for love; the terror of what they do discloses the terror that is born of the lack. The damaged point to the martyr that they are not; the unwilling sacrifice finds another unwilling sacrifice. They point to what was stolen from them: their capacity to participate in a bond and logos of mutual redemption. Madness is the other refuge of the broken soul. While those who are lost in madness may do evil, the judicial category of mens rea has no bearing on the truth that madness is frequently the creation of evil, a means of becoming a broken witness to the world’s evil. Indeed, apart from the transfer of evil from one to another, the expanding circle of its seriality, madness is the most common creation of that conspiracy of deliberate and mindless evil (folly). Madness (not always, of course - my point here is not about making a dogmatic denial of cases where natural chemical deficiencies may create delusion or psychosis) is frequently the enforced sacrifice that comes from evil. The chain of responsibility is a useless one for getting to evil’s truth, a mere distraction from the matter at hand. And finally, the folly of indifference and blindness, to which we all at times succumb, is the medium through which evil spreads. 75

5. Denial and the Elimination of Evil and Evil’s Elimination of the Subject in Denial “…Our whole image of murder has been so warped by the modern screen that I doubt if we’d recognize the face of the beast until the knife was coming down our own guts.” Lester Bangs, “Bye Bye Sidney, Be Good,” in Mainline, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader edited by John Morthland (New York: Anchor, 2003), 375. In his allegorical play of 1958, Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Biedermann and the Arsonists), the Swiss writer Max Frisch depicted the blindness to evil that has been part of the West’s history in its treatment of communism and fascism. Its application is, however, universal for it is a perfect study in how evil relies upon truth’s denial. The play was as prophetic for left and right wing terrorism (that would play such a part in Germany and Italy during the 1960s and 70s) as it is today for the Islamic fundamentalists who teach that: The confrontation that Islam calls for with these godless and apostate regimes, does not know Socratic debates, Platonic ideals nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun. 76 Gottlieb Biedermann (literally the respectable [bieder] man) lives in a neighbourhood where there has been a spate of arson attacks. When the play commences we find him reading of yet another attack, only to be interrupted by his housemaid who tells him that there is a stranger at the door who refuses to leave. In spite of Biedermann’s initial and rather weak attempts to get rid of the man, the stranger makes himself completely at home. Through playing upon his guilt, weaknesses, goodwill and, most of all, his wanting to believe that evil is not in his presence, the stranger, Josef Schmittz, manages to have Biedermann accept him as if were a family member. Even after Biedermann finds Schmittz in his loft with an ex-prisoner, Eisenring, storing drums of petrol and making wicks and

72

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ fuses, Biedermann wants to believe everything is perfectly normal. Although occasionally he grumbles and insists upon his rights, even threatening to kick them out, he likes the feeling of being humanitarian. His wilful blindness and incapacity to act against these arsonists, who increasingly make no secret of their intention, is neatly contrasted by Frisch with Biedermann’s earlier heartless treatment of a former employer, who has committed suicide because of Biedermann’s cruelty, and his widow. In the end it is Biedermann who gives the arsonists the matches to burn down his house, explaining later to his wife that had these men been real arsonists they would have had their own matches. The play marvellously portrays that failure of intelligence, which is one of humanity’s seeming constants, and which is not, of itself, overcome by reading and philosophising. Indeed, Frisch’s suspicion of the role of intellectuals in helping fan the infernos of the twentieth century is conspicuous in his choosing an academic/doctor of philosophy to be the ring leader of the arsonists. The play is not subtle, nor meant to be. As in Greek tragedy, it has a chorus to provide warning and commentary on the protagonist’s blindness and inevitable undoing. But the rawness of its allegorical character makes it an extremely powerful exploration of misplaced loyalties, wilful ignorance, and fear of the truth of how evil works. There are three passages in the play which I think cut to the core of the problem of why, in an age where people are educated and morally coached from kindergarten on, evil returns again and again threatening the most elementary securities and stabilities of social life. One comes from the chorus quite early in the play: The timid is blinder than blind Quivering from hope that there is nothing that is supposed to be evil With friendship he receives it, Defenceless, ach, fear makes one tired Hoping the best ... Until it is too late. 77 The other from the chorus leader: He, who, at breakfast, reads the morning paper, which on a daily basis supplies him with an interpretation of events and saves himself having to use his own sense, in order to know what danger exists and gets scandalized by the latest event, -that is, he who experiences daily what

Wayne Cristaudo

73

___________________________________________________________ happened yesterday, this man has difficulty discerning what is happening right now under his own roof. 78 And finally the arsonist Eisenring tells Biedermann that the third best camouflage of evil is wit, the second sentimentality, but‚ the best and most assured camouflage is still always “the blank and naked truth. Funnily enough, no one believes it.” 79 Perhaps the claim that no one believes it is too strong. But it is much easier to interpolate new realities into more familiar forms rather that act upon the evil that parades nakedly before one. Responding to evil is hard work, which is why most people only act when it is too late, when there is no other option. Yet not responding to it enables its growth. Indeed, for evil to gather enough momentum to burst things apart it must first be insinuated within things - it becomes familiar, and familiarity restores our sense of comfort. What happens in society at large is really a more complex variant of what takes place in abusive relationships: abuse becomes cemented through the gradual acceptance of what begins as an exceptional act of violence. Initial anger by the victim, invariably accompanying remorse by the perpetrator, eventually becomes routine. Behaviours that did not originally fit the character of the abusive partner become the key characteristics, and the “sweet,” “sensitive,” “thoughtful,” “troubled” person with whom one commenced the relationship is now a raging psychopath occupying one’s soul and en-helling one - only momentarily returning to the fantasy self that hides the monstrous energies of hate. Until the cycle is broken the “victim” finds themself entertaining reasons to justify behaviours, making compromises that were previously beyond the pale of her/ his dreams of the acceptable sphere of intimacy. The same is true of how civil war or terrorism becomes routinized. The terrorists’ initial demands are wildly out of kilter with a society’s mores, but eventually they take on the appearance of reasonableness. And compromise with terrorists seems reasonable, just as the distinction between understanding why someone/ group is mal-formed and accepting mal-formeds’ reasons are not only reasonable, but anyone who doesn’t is seen as feeding the problem - anything that seems to stave off mass slaughter starts to seem reasonable. This damaged logic becomes hermetically sealed by the relativising of terror and freedom fighting - a distinction which the defenders of the phantasmic will assure everyone is impossible to make, and which demands the deployment of the damaged logic of the denial of innocence, and the justification of killing or kidnapping anyone who has the least association with the other that is to be eliminated.

74

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ In the aftermath of World War 11 the most common defence of the German people - even used by the accused in the most famous of Nuremberg trials, including Göring and Speer - was that they had no idea what Hitler was really up to, even though Hitler’s rise to power was formed on a speech-wave whose key elements were the elimination of the Jews, Germany’s right to create another Reich and the need for Lebensraum. It was true that Hitler would talk of peace to appease those who needed appeasement and who could not confront the inevitable meaning of the militarised socio-political reconfigurations of Germany. Likewise he had written in Mein Kampf (that book that every German after the war claimed not to have read but which, nevertheless, sat perched in bookshelves throughout the Reich and available to anyone who wanted to know what was happening) that the Jews were mere bacteria who had to be expunged in the great struggle of nature. While Jews were being thrown out of their houses, beaten up and having their businesses shut down and while laws were enforced depriving them of the most basic civil liberties, the propaganda machine was legitimising everything by depicting them as sub-human and portraying the new camps as pleasant holiday-like facilities which would provide entertainment, work and exercise opportunities - as if the camps were the summit of humanitarian behaviour and the Nazi-constructed environments far more beneficial to Jews than the ghettoes they already inhabited. He ever day discursive acceptance of the evil nothingness of the Jew and the normalcy of militaristic politics were the essential conditions of the holocaust and Germany’s plunge into hell. And while all this was happening German movies were appealing to the same sweet romantic sterilities of middle class life as Hollywood. The unreal was the condition of the real’s possibility: the façade was needed to enable hell to grow. The logic of denial was no different with communism. Although Marx had spent most of his time trying to prove that communism must emerge from capitalism, anyone who thought about what it actually means to take away people’s property, to install a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which Marx and Engels thought was inevitable, should have seen that a secret police and mass prisons or death camps (the anarchist Bakunin foretold it all) would be the result were such words to become flesh. For how else could one ensure that private property relations could not sprout in a post-revolutionary society? And even had they not thought that far ahead Lenin (long before Stalin took over the state structures that had been Leninised) had spoken publicly about what would happen to any counter-revolutionaries, profiteers and work slackers - execution. 80 The evils of twentieth century totalitarianism proceeded by a series of common appeals all operating in a perverse field of choices that

Wayne Cristaudo

75

___________________________________________________________ were based in “common sense”: under Nazism, the appeal of the nation, of the right of a people to self-determination, to protect itself from its enemies, to unite a people who had been victimised by arbitrary national borders; under communism, the appeal of a future without war (the product of classes), without poverty (the product initially of scarcity and then capitalism) and without exploitation. The reason that more people were killed under communism (The Black Book of Communism makes the estimation of one hundred million) 81 than fascism is that its appeal is nobler, more humanitarian, more universal and hence more divinely sanctioned - God himself having to be overcome because he is just an excuse for exploitation. Thus the Bolsheviks made a hero of Judas. Hence also the constant substitution of the nobility of the idea of communism by its defenders for the horror of the actuality generated by the bloody collision of ideality and reality. Before either Hitler or Stalin had seized power Franz Rosenzweig had come up with the pithy formulation of fanaticism being grounded in “love of the next but one” in place of the love of the neighbour. He had before him the example of Nietzsche whose contempt for contemporary men and women could only be overcome by his longing for the Übermensch of the future. For Rosenzweig, who is not unsympathetic to much of Nietzsche, Nietzsche is a sinner and fanatic. Richard A. Cohen’s chapter, “Rosenzweig versus Nietzsche,” in his Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas makes the point well when he says that for Rosenzweig, Nietzsche “is too old for life and the love of the neighbour, too demanding of a future far far away, a leap and not a bridge, lightning and thunder but not light and wisdom.” 82 What we often call evil is precisely that which parades as virtue, which contains virtues but virtues which are only for us and our dream this but not that, not the neighbour that is there but the neighbour that could be, not the bourgeois, not the Jew, not the Arab, not the black, not the white, not the new, not the different, not the old, not the … Ideologies which spawn evil are infinite in their permutations and rationalisations, arresting in the bizarreness of their contradictions (the Japanese, for example, being made honorary Aryans), but they are also identical - and in the most rigid manner - in their ends: the use of might for the cultivation of fear, purposeless suffering dressed up as purposeful and mass death. That people force the sacrifice of one generation for a future is indeed a hard truth that results from love often being able to find no other way to release itself from evil’s overwhelming presence in the present than by sacrificing its presence in the present for the future. Yet the paradox is that the condition in which this becomes inevitable, a necessity that moralists can no more stop than storms and lightning, is due to evil’s

76

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ growth when one’s ignores the person who is immediately there in favour of the imagined one of the future. Common loves, whether love of order/ material goods/ an idea of future/one’s tribe etc., fuse groups (bands of thieves, as Augustine reminded his readers, as much as members of states). But when that commonality is a wall, it is the opposite of love’s essence which wants to go ever further, fuse more and build more. In a remarkable passage Franz Rosenzweig talks of the movement of God’s love (which is also the key to understanding what Rosenzweig means by revelation), thereby giving us a sense of love at its most powerful: Revelation knows of no ‘all-loving’ father; God’s love is ever wholly of the moment and to the point at which it is directed, and only in the infinity of time does it reach one point after another, step by step, and inform the All. God’s love loves where it loves and whom it loves. No question has the right to approach it, for each question will one day have its answer when God loves him too, even that questioner who feels himself abandoned by God’s love. God always loves only whom and what he loves; but his love is distinguished from an ‘all-love’ only by a Not-yet: apart from what he already loves, God loves everything, only not yet. His love roams the world with an ever-fresh drive. It is always and wholly of today, but all the dead past and future will one day be devoured in this victorious today. This love is the eternal victory over death. The creation which death crowns and concludes cannot stand up to it; it must submit to it at every instant and thereby in the final analysis also in the sum of all instants, in eternity. 83 That evil too moves in a similar manner from one to one to one is a fact easily overlooked by our more structurally governed thought patterns which are formed upon a mechanistic metaphysical matrix. Institutions are powerhouses put in place to achieve ends that are desired across groups and generations, but their effectiveness and eventual durability is dependent upon the commitment of those within them to sustain them. This does not mean that some institutions are not formed with evil intent. But even with institutions which are formed to create a great common good, they become susceptible to evil and hence subject to corruption because they are living. Further the significance of a range of

Wayne Cristaudo

77

___________________________________________________________ potencies can only be gauged by their interaction with other potencies. Time changes all, and institutions are in reciprocal relationships with other institutions. Because the powers of life are only revealed through us to us theologically we might say each person comes with a message from God and a task to perform for God - our interdependency is the sine qua non of the possibility of a blessed future. This is why, then, to ignore the one who is the neighbour is to break the whole chain of potencies which can enliven our world and ourselves. When a neighbour is marked as a mere “it” to be eradicated, the obstacle to the reign of the triumphant good, the eradicators are creating their own future hells - and even if they do not grasp this, their children and grandchildren will have to face the consequences and bear the shame of the wretchedness that their forebears have created. And the bearers of guilt will indeed consign these same forebears to hell - they have to, it is the only way that they can live again. This is as true of present generations in countries like the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand whose past conquest of and crimes against indigenous people (and in the case of the USA with its slavery) stubbornly remains a cry to be heard as it is with country’s bearing the burden of war guilt. Some countries bear this moment of repentance seemingly interminably. But the living are invariably forced to respond to the dead’s need for rest; history is inevitably a moral science because it is an attunement to ghosts. But in the tumult of evil, men and women easily forget that their deeds will one day be re-membered, re-called and re-viewed - even if not for them; those who are evil’s (often somnambulant) willing agents forget that they or their offspring will have to face again others who do not think like that, who have not completely lost their minds. Being an agent of evil, at a group level, invariably requires having lost one’s mind, and then one’s soul. Evil does not ask its mignons to call it by its name. On the contrary, it requires that it not be called by its name, that it be called by other far more venerable, more beautiful names. Plotinus touches on this phenomenon while making another point about evil when he says: Evil is not alone: by virtue of the nature of good, the power of Good, it is not Evil only: it appears necessarily bound around with chains of Beauty, like some captive bound in fetters of gold: and beneath these it is hidden, so that while it must exist, it may not be seen by the gods, and that men need not always have evil before their eyes, but that when it comes before them they may

78

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ still not be destitute of images of the Good and Beautiful for their Remembrance. Plotinus’ emphasis is upon the real beauty that is corrupted in evil, but he rightly sees that evil is attracted because of the allurement of beauty’s promise. The promise that attracts evil’s minions is inevitably an insubstantial promise, an unreality that later generations find as inexplicably stupid as most of today’s Eastern European educated youths find communism, and Western educated youths find National Socialism. But the allurement of the promise is bound up with the yearnings of the time. The scouring of past, present and future by a caste - its intellectuals, poets and priests - is a means of social survival. The danger is that when the yearning is coming from a people whose hearts have been brutalised, narrowed and shrunken, its “brains’ trust” will, in the main, relay back to the collective the collective’s own deficiencies in its reading of the world. They will supply the reasons of the distorted hearts’ requirements. This need not be the case with all - but those who do not serve the phantasm will find themselves outcast by their peers. This is why mass-murdering regimes have always been able to find intelligent people to legitimise their murder, to facilitate further social loss of the mind and further loss of soul. It would be tiresome to recount all those brilliant men and women in the twentieth century who placed their minds and hearts in service to murderous regimes. Indeed in a time where men and women readily look to the congruence between thought and act, idea and history, instead of as separate realities (strangely something urged by so many today who do not do what they say) - twentieth century intellectuals may well be judged as more thoughtless and heartless than most ages. And one might say are not all regimes murderous? Which is to be sure indicative of evil’s ubiquity. But I think it is worth pausing upon the example of Islamism whose (re-)surging presence in the West owes no small part to the West’s loss of its mind, to a rather widespread denial which if not overcome will take us back again to death camps Modern values were to a significant extent the result of a world shaped by a religion which was almost ever Jesus’ renunciation of the ways of the world in favour of the ways of the kingdom to come and the overwhelming number of his followers’ attachment to this world and its ways and the eventual (and by no means completely successful and stable) victories of tolerance, liberal democracy and human rights. The faith of modern Western societies is a precarious faith which has been secured at the cost of great suffering and is still in the process of being tried - indeed Islamism may turn out to be its greatest trial, and there is no guarantee it

Wayne Cristaudo

79

___________________________________________________________ will pass this trial. Only if modern fruits are sufficiently loved (and love requires attention and attending to) will they be protected: “love is worth nothing until it has been tested by its own defeat,” as Creina Alcock says. 84 The West’s precariousness is not only due to enemies from without or people from within harbouring other political visions, but mostly from the relative emptiness and unhappiness of so many people’s lives who live under the system. This is all too visible to followers of Islam who see how widespread is this emptiness. Political security of itself does not nourish the soul and the West’s failure to provide a sense of spiritual purpose to so many of its people makes it susceptible to spiritual alternatives, some of which have enriched it enormously, others which may drag it back into the political nightmares it has sought to escape from. Underpinning the West’s faith in human rights is the entire institutional tradition of a dual kingdom that reaches from Jesus’ “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God’s what is God’s” through to Augustine’s “city of God and earthly city,” Gelasius’ “two swords” doctrine, the separation of Holy Roman Emperor and Papacy, and the doctrine of the separation of church and state. This would eventually lead to the right of the individual conscience not to belong to a Church, nor hold a belief in God at all. There is no such doctrine in Islam. Enormous differences separate the two great proselytizing religions and their founders: Jesus always and everywhere renounces the sword as the means to build the kingdom in the knowledge that his followers will be killed while Mohammad and Allah require their followers to wield swords for the establishment of peace (hence the sacramental nature of jihad in Islam); Jesus is celibate while Mohammad has many wives; Jesus sees stoning as but one more example of evil doing evil while Mohammad sees it is as not only a legitimate but divinely sanctioned form of punishment. Today in the West, to even list these differences angers people who either are unaware of the life of Mohammed or wish to downplay such trivialities lest offence be caused. Thus has tolerance itself become a phantasm in the West, a phantasm which disarms its followers against intolerance. When Islam first became part of mass modern Western consciousness, with the Iranian revolution, people in the West had no idea of its significance. Amongst the very few exceptions was Ralph Gaïl, who shortly after Khomeini had returned to take the leadership of the successful revolution against the Shah in 1979, translated into French a selection of writings by Ayatollah Khomeini entitled Principes Politiques, Philosophiques, Sociaux et Religieux. 85 Gaïl’s rational for the translation was to alert people to the hatred of modern life that was in Khomeini’s teachings. He saw the next face of fascism in these works. Significantly,

80

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ the German edition of the work, Meine Worte: Weisheiten, Warnungen and Weisungen (My Words: Wisdoms, Warnings, Orders) was published as a Playboy report. That the writings of a man obsessed with purity and the West’s impurities would have his words gathered between the covers of a magazine empire that represented everything the Ayatollah wanted to destroy gives the text a kind of world historic irony. For Khomeini, the Islamic government is subordinate to the law of Islam and that law comes directly from God, and for that reason it must remain unchangeable - these beliefs are thoroughly orthodox Muslim ideas held as much by Sunnis as Shi’ites. In this respect, then, Khomeini was a devout Muslim who believed in the timeless truth of the Qur’an and the global scope of its application. 86 For Khomeini, unlike those wanting to find more moderate Islamic pathways, if the Qur’an is to be believed then one cannot shirk such injunctions (which the context clearly enough shows is to war) as: Oh ye who believe! What is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the Cause of Allah, ye cling heavily to the earth? Do ye prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For Allah hath power over all things? 87 Thus Khomeni says: The holy war means the conquest of non-Muslim territories ... it is the duty of every mature man capable of bearing arms, to engage voluntarily in this war of conquest whose goal it is to establish the rule of the law of the Koran from one end of the world to the other. 88 And unlike those who have sought to render jihad more liberalfriendly by interpreting it as spiritual struggle, 89 Khomeini simply states: Those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world … Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you

Wayne Cristaudo

81

___________________________________________________________ all! ... Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can only be open to the Holy Warrior! There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths urgings Muslims to value war and fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. 90 For Khomeini, the West - and he makes the equation of the West and Europe rather than the USA - is nothing other than “the totality of dictators full of injustice and hence‚ all humanity must hit this bearer of discord with iron energy.” 91 For Khomeini everything is as simple as the plain word he learnt as a child from the Qur’an and the hadith and sunnah: there is no sense of allegory, no sense of life’s complexity. Prior to the Iranian revolution he believed it would only take a year of applying Islamic legal punishments before every kind of injustice and immorality would be purged, would be torn out by the roots. 92 The tearing out by the roots is the language of every purity regime, the language of all who find humanity itself to be the obstacle to the truth and end of existence. What waits at the end of existence for Khomeini is a garden and rivers, much as can be found in many a park, with attending virgins. 93 Of course there are many Christians who have similarly literal views of heaven (albeit without the virgins). But the key difference between heaven in the gospels, especially in Jesus’ sermons, and the Qur’an is that references to it in the former are invariably vague and made by way of parable, while in the latter heaven is “described.” Believing that what was written once is written forever (having no notion of a God that moves over time as the God of the Jews does or as the Holy Spirit does), Khomeini would have most of God’s creation be the devil’s (again there have been no shortage of Christian sects believing the same). What is equally astonishing in this simplistic bifurcation of everything into Islam and the rest is how it supports the most horrific and inane categorisations of its oppositions so that impurity can be classified into eleven things: “urine, excrement, sperm, bones, blood, the dog, the pig, the non-Muslim man and the non-Muslim woman, wine, beer, the sweat of the excrement-eating camel.” 94 The impurity of non-Muslims also extends to children. 95 By contrast to non-Muslim men and women, and beer, beer yeast is not impure. And while a camel which eats human excrement is impure, other animals that do so are not. 96

82

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ It says much about what occupies Khomeini’s attention that he can write the following: If one has committed sodomy with the ox, the sheep or the camel, its excrement becomes impure. And its milk is unusable. One must kill and burn the animal as quickly as possible and take care that the one who has sodomised the animal pays its owner its proper price. 97 In 1979 philosophers and social theorists were by and large not thinking about Islam. Marxism/ post-Marxism had accepted Marx’s declaration that religion is the opium of the people and that was that. A notable exception to this was Michel Foucault. Foucault was probably the most important radical social theorist of his generation. His studies of prisons, psychiatric wards and of the history of sexuality, as well as his more philosophical works are often exhilarating. While he has many critics who take issue with him on historical facts and examples, his enormous popularity derives from his often profound analyses of the dark sides of the processes and institutions of normalisation characterising advanced modern societies. 98 As brilliant as he was (and in spite of my belief that he shares the defect of all neo-Hegelian thinking of failing to adequately factor in the tragic character and grim compromises of social existence – the flaw of every untimely messianist), his thinking about the Islamic revolution in Iran serves as a salutary lesson in the denial of the real. Indeed I choose him and this example because he was brilliant and was yet so terribly wrong on this issue. Foucault had met the Ayatollah Khomeini and after the revolution he went to Iran to see it first hand. Unlike Gaïl, Foucault was an apologist for the new regime. His view was that industrial capitalism was “the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine” and hence that one needed to think about politics from “point zero” - (now such a metaphor resonates with “the year zero” of Pol Pot.) 99 The two things he most wanted from politics - egalitarianism and populist justice - he saw in Islam (in spite of a famous debate in which he ridiculed Chomsky for believing in such an old fashion notion as justice). In tones of a disciple he wrote a thinly veiled apology posing as description: For Shi’ites, the Qur’an is just because it expresses the will of God, but God himself wanted to be just. It is justice that made law and not law that made justice. Of course, one must find this justice in ‘the’ text dictated

Wayne Cristaudo

83

___________________________________________________________ by God to the prophet. However, one can also decipher it in the life, the sayings, the wisdom, and the exemplary sacrifices of the imams, born, after Ali, in the house of the Prophet, and persecuted by the corrupt government of the caliphs, these arrogant aristocrats who had forgotten the old egalitarian system of justice. While also waiting for the twelfth Imam, who, by becoming visible, will re-establish the egalitarian system in its perfection, it is necessary, through knowledge, through the love of Ali and of his descendents, and even through martyrdom, to defend the community of believers against the evil power. Consequently, it is a matter of organization. Among the Shi’ite clergy, religious authority is not determined by hierarchy. One follows only the one to whom one wants to listen. The Grand Ayatollahs of the moment. Those who, in facing down the king, his police, and the army, have just caused an entire people to come out into the streets, were not enthroned by anybody. They were listened to. 100 When an Iranian exile in France, a woman who signed herself “Atoussa H.,” wrote into Nouvel Observateur in the edition of 6 November, 1978, criticising his judgment and indicating the coming horrors that fundamentalism would have for women and lovers, Foucault responded, with all the bullying weight of the school teacher. 101 What he found “intolerable” about Atoussa H.’s letter was her “merging together” of all forms of Islam into one and then “scorning” Islam under the thousand-year-old-reproach of “fanaticism.” His rejoinder concludes with the patronising and irrelevant response to her criticism: “In order to approach it [Islam] with a minimum of intelligence, the first condition is not to begin by bringing in hatred.” 102 What Foucault had dismissed as hatred was merely the expression of genuine and reasonable fears from a woman who understood the region and the way its religion operated and effected women. A common and pernicious tactic which shuts down opposition to the growth of a phantasm is the equation of criticism with hatred, and hatred of the act with hatred of a person. Our ability to see the world with any kind of clarity requires just these differences. And it was with great cost that the idea of the individual free from all encumbrances was invented by liberal thinkers. To be sure it is a “fiction,” and it is a mistake to think that it can tell us something about our essence. Moreover, there are times when its application is a hindrance to truth. But it is a

84

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ reminder that we can always be one more thing, and we must not be bound to the particular bonds that a particular group want us to remain tied to unto death. Hence it may well be an act of love and not hatred to see the pathology of the neighbour and call it by its name, just as the neighbour may be doing one a great service by calling attention to one’s own pathologies. Love requires disintegration so that we can be reintegrated in ways not yet known and have access to powers and possibilities not yet tested by love’s roamings. This is the real reason for criticism, which, when carried out in service to love itself, is not a gesture of extermination, but a call to cooperation in building a redemptive future. Foucault’s bullyingly pseudo-moral appeal to intellectual subtlety/ complexity was exemplified a mind in denial helping the incarnation of evil. Khomeini had made no secret of what future he was creating, and whereas Atoussa H stood in the truth of her knowledge and warned of the horror to come, Foucault was, unawares, swept up in the force of hate of Khomeini’s antiWestern Islamism. The Playboy report of 1979 did something much more simple, and hence cruder, than Foucault’s dazzling polemical apology for Khomeini: it simply cited Khomeini himself. Complex is a term that appears time and time again in Foucault’s love songs to Iran. That’s not surprising. Whenever people are going to be in denial about the manifestly obvious they need to bypass its presence - and the insistence upon complexity in the face of truth’s starkly shocking simplicity is a favoured myopia-inducing move in evil’s swirling. Good judgment means being able to distinguish which matters are complex and which are simple, and acting accordingly. Unlike the substance of Foucault’s more brilliant philosophical works, like The Order of Things, there was nothing complex in anything Khomeini said. It barely needs saying, except to point out the damaged logic of this episode on Foucault’s life, that he would undoubtedly have been executed on account of his life-style had he lived in Iran. It must be said that Foucault was chastened by this experience and that his final political gestures all occupy the much safer, more consistent and more liberal ground of challenging any abuse of power wherever there are abuses of power. While war is often a product of compelling forces this is not true of terrorists who blow up civilians - the undertaking of such acts is often the real end for souls who only know this way of having purpose in the world - the impossibility of the stated goals is an indication that the end is merely a rationalisation of the deeds. Every society is an organism for the favouring and cultivation of types and behaviours. East Germany, for example, favoured the sneak and the government did its best to turn its

Wayne Cristaudo

85

___________________________________________________________ entire population into sneaks. Khomeini and Torquemada did their best to create societies in which fear, torture and cruelty were part of every-day life: their reality was not the purification of souls in preparedness for heaven, but the creation of one caste of souls whose pleasure would be in the infliction of pain and cruelty and another caste who would be compliant, who would not think for themselves, whose intelligence would be clamped, and whose bodies and desire-flows would be enshrouded in fear and guilt. People like Khomeini, Robespierre, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and Hitler create Sadian types who roam the streets looking to round up the misfortunate with their ordinary loves and desires and subject them to the ecstatic imaginative flights of terror and cruelty which they label the divine or reason or history, or the race or, or, or... All these names are but masks of the demonic, (the) (d)evil. Dehumanising the other as “the impure” invariably fosters amongst “the pure” the belief that they have the right to torture, abuse and even rape their enemy 103 - rape rooms and rape camps are often the sanctioned means of dealing with the impure. This too is just another cipher for the real purpose at work behind the ideology, the real type of person around which the social network is being shaped The language of purity is the language used to destroy all the wonderful impurities which give life its complexity. The only metaphor of purity which deserves veneration is that of the purity of heart - because the pure heart refers to one who has no hidden evil, who does no want to subject the people of the world to his or her cruel desires. Invariably the only purity that the likes of Khomeini create is pure evil, a world imploding in on itself, where life’s expansive nature is thwarted and blood and tears become the everyday currency. But a man like Khomeini can only do that if his way is paved for him. The Qur’an is a book from another time, and when its commands are strictly followed it paves the way for men like Khomeini and bin Laden and the kinds of cruelties which they divinize. Islam confronts the Western world with a set of problems few imagined it would be facing. By and large the intelligentsia of the West did not notice its emergence. And neither the right’s economic nor the left’s social justice preoccupations have equipped them for the terrible truth that it now confronts. Above all, and in the first instance, one must simply see it. Being in denial about the evil of the other is just a s myopic as being in denial about the evil of one’s own: both assist evil’s potency. Even if one sees it in the other, this does not make one any less susceptible to evil’s charms upon oneself. Even when we side against a more evil regime, we too are affected by the field of evil in which that regime participates. Nazism and colonialism generated great evils, but that does not mean that the bombing of Dresden was not an evil, that the raping of

86

Denial and the Elimination of Evil

___________________________________________________________ hundreds of thousands of German women by advancing Russian troops was not evil, that because Saddam Hussein was evil what happened in Abu Ghraib was not, that because the Belgian colonialist army committed evil in the Congo, that the evils that followed their departure were any less devastating. Justice and self-defence are two of the more common ways in which (the d)evil is able to achieve its end of reigning on earth. Both begin as matters of survival and dire necessity. 104 It is undeniable that at times the threatening evil is of such a scale that one must fight it or perish. Our resistances to certain evils may well be better than the alternatives, but that only shows us the grimness of a world where evil is a constant presence. Nevertheless, the web of legitimacy that is woven around actions undertaken in reaction to evil (for justice or in self defence) repeatedly leads to further acts of evil: that justice requires prisons, and prisons are breeding grounds for evil, that defensive wars turn to total wars are not anomalies but typical of the way in which legitimacy feeds evil - here is where thinkers like Foucault are right. The truth of St Paul’s claim that “all have sinned” is that it is a constant reminder of our dark capacities. 105 It is not that “they” are evil and “we” are good, it is that we all fall under evil’s grip at any moment. And because evil has its rewards - its delights and joys - the temptation is constant. Revenge is a joyous act, just as fighting in war can be - “call up the joy of war,” says Homer’s Achilles in a most revealing line. 106 We can do anything, no matter how terrible, if we believe we can justify it. And our subterranean appetite for blood is constantly seeking a way for consciousness to give it permission to be satiated. That is why intelligence as such is never the primary drive of itself, but always in service to some higher power. Plato thought of it as the good or the appearance of the good; but the dualist traditions of the divine and demonic I think most powerfully express the truth of the ease with which the intellect becomes corrupted, becomes inadequate for helping us flourish in the world that we have made. Humanity has served one phantasm after another in its search for love, and every object of its love has found itself transformed from an upbuilding to an enslaving power. The transition from life to death is accompanied by a dogmatism of “either-you-are-for-or-you-are-againstus” thinking. “Either-or” thinking is always (the d)evil’s moment of inevitable triumph, for the triumph is in the antagonism, in the necessity of negation, which does not mean that there are not clusters of forces that are ensconced within traditions which are pernicious and need to be called by their proper names. The idea of calling things by their proper names is one that has tended to vanish in our contemporary relativistic culture. But the

Wayne Cristaudo

87

___________________________________________________________ basis of that calling is something very simple: it is the calling attention to the cruel and brutal, what kills and suppresses love. There is a dialogical component that is essential to the intellect’s proper function because to address evil means to address not only oneself but also another. That is essential because evil always spreads through indifference, denial, folly or sheer negation. On the other hand, genuine communion does not mean being silent about the evils the neighbour is generating when they are generating them, nor is it being defensive when the neighbour notes one’s own contribution to the world’s evil. It is to be in the hard place of the common acceptance of our deficiencies. Evil hides itself until it is ready. Yet it is not a completely invisible power: it is a power that arises among us, and hence it is not part of what we usually designate as nature (and hence not part of natural science), anymore than the tangible but invisible spirit of any group is. If we observe what we do to each other it is something that we can discern in its development. There are always ways to downplay it, and this problem is compounded by the fact that human choices are so often tragic: we counter one evil by another (for example, we stop criminals by imprisoning them, invaders by war, tyrants by rebellion). And even if we refuse to do this we can never be sure that our refusal does not contribute to even more evil.

6. Truth and Faith, or Forms and Signs of Life’s Power

“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks out nor conceals, but gives a sign.” Heraclitus, fragment 247.

Not being the exclusive property of philosophy, truth does not comfortably conform to the philosophical creations of relativism or absolutism. It was unfortunate that Nietzsche still played by the rules of this sad dualism, which was not only evident in his relativist metaphysical claims but in his account of truth as perspective. The idea of truth as perspective suffers from its inability to deal with the fact of adjustment from lesser to greater comprehension, something which, as Plato had already argued convincingly, requires the deployment of capacities that aren’t simply perspectival: we may perceive a group of letters, but their meaning requires intellection, just as we may hear two sentences, but the information those statements disclose may only be revealed through an inference. Indeed relativism constantly breaks down because it invokes an absolute to sustain itself. For example, when relativism is advanced to explain differences in such things as individual tastes, perceptions and beliefs, it is built upon the falsity of the rock of the individual. Historical relativism breaks down on the illusory rock of history. Cultural relativism breaks down because there is no rock of culture. There are always and everywhere only processes and it is the truth discerned in these processes themselves that tempt us into making them take on the illusion of firmness. There are no ultimate points of individuation, unless they are monads, as Leibniz argued, that is non-spatial logical, perceptive qualities. We can think of such possibilities, but they have nothing to do with what we usually call individuals, historical periods or cultures: one and all they are composites, and their composition is infinitely complex, that is, it is impossible to define all the attributes of a living individual thing, or group of thing that we nominate with a label (again Leibniz had seen this and it is at the basis of his idea of the identity of indiscernibles). There are at least two reasons why this must be so. One is the sheer contingency and inescapable contiguity of things, so that what we identify as an individual is a created being that is continually being

90

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ recreated. Concomitantly, what we identify as individuals, ourselves included, is, as Kant partially, though correctly, explained with his concept of the manifold, the result of a synthetic act of consciousness which selects some relationships while factoring out others - though, this process is partly cultivated, hence partly social, and not just, as Kant suggests, an act of the I. All things together is as much an inescapable truth of the preSocratics as the mechanists. A physical law such as gravity is the selective application and demonstration of reciprocity. Again, the mechanists were forced to conclude that this meant that material particles were infinitely small and infinitely large. This, to say it again, means there are no individual things only infinite relations. Things are the momentary and selective combinations which form a kind of unity, sometimes (always, as Leibniz claimed?) having consciousness. Instability and disunity pertains to everything. Unity and stability are epiphenomena of processes. We stabilize ourselves and our world by reference to such unities. We have to. But if we think that such epiphenomena provide bedrocks of truth we wrap ourselves in our simple-mindedness. But this does not mean that truth is something that is adequately explained by the term “absolute” either. Absolutism is based on the same falsity as relativism. It breaks down for the same reasons as relativism, as described above. The argument I have used against relativism is usually one used against absolutism by defenders of relativism. That is, we are creatures who engage with our life-world, hence our predications continually expand, and in that expansion the world itself is changed. The reason truth is not absolute is because it is also revelatory, and what is revealed is revealed through time, just as we are revealed to ourselves and each other through time. Temporality makes absolutization mostly a quixotic affair. The eternity of mathematics and a few moral principles may be the exception that, by alerting us to eternity, reminds us that time has four dimensions - and truth can no more be relegated to one of those dimensions than time itself. The truth will always break out from the prison that we make it enter to suit our present and narrow purposes. All of this leaves out the most important aspect of truth - the underlying forces behind the creative and searching act. Truth cannot be separated from our acts. It is not as if the human universe is adequately explained by nature, that is, by referring to it apart from culture, beliefs, equipment, the gamut of our problems, speeches, addictions, wants. Those who have lost faith in our irruptive powers are tempted to worship the nothing. Indeed when life is hell - nothing is pure bliss. Religions, generally, do not start with the mind’s disinterested inquiry, but with the reality of earth having become hell. Hence their great temptation is to substitute the nothing for redemption. When the Buddha says that “all

Wayne Cristaudo

91

___________________________________________________________ life is suffering” we hear the voice of one who has touched the pain of the inside of the world and seen nothing as preferable. The difference between Christianity and Buddhism can be seen in the last two words of the line of St Paul that “the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now.” 107 The “until now” is the triadic escape path of love, faith and hope which makes life itself worth embracing - again. But this time free of death. Both Buddha and Christ offered humanity a way of not contributing to the hell of the world. Not surprisingly, this did not stop them becoming means by which the damaged do further damaged, did not stop the malformed further mal-forming the world. What we take as real commands us. The nihilist is supposedly commanded by the belief in the reality of the nothing taking primacy over the truth that irrupts from, between and to us. However, nihilism is not what it purports to be. Where nihilism is consistent there is no life. If we don’t choose suicide, we love life more than death. Nihilism only looks to be the truth if we forget that we ourselves are both part of creation and creative forces. All living things are creative forces. If we think the world is a thing, an object or a combination of material particles, then the world must look nihilistic. It is what it is - Spinoza’s metaphysics provide the definitive rational description of a world in which forces - materialist, spirit, nature and God - all meld into a unity in which every moment is as purposeful as every other moment. His philosophy is simultaneously pantheistic and nihilistic. Unlike the naturally Stoic Spinoza, who devoted himself to the intellectual love of nature/God and who does not draw nihilistic conclusions, content as he was to remain within the scholar’s more staid existence, his “baddest” heir, de Sade, responded to the overthrow of transcendence with recurrent waking dreams of sexual gratification involving the torturing and murdering of small children. If we look to nature for meaning we cannot overleap the fact that we are part of it - again de Sade is consistent, more so than Spinoza by restoring the quality of his own evil to nature. The great trick of naturalism is that it takes us out of nature at the moment that meaning is central (it only puts us back in as an object or subject, and we are more than both) there is no meaning in what nature does apart from what it does, yet here we are natural beings dreaming and speaking of gods and God, of immortality, of rebirths and redemptions, of infinities. Nihilism is naturalism that wants nature to speak like humans and when it doesn’t it tells us there is no meaning in life. But the meaning of life is always not just the “is” but the moment after the next step or process. Whatever pulls one force to the next force is part of the meaning of that force - what the pre-mechanistic philosophers happily called its nature, which is the mystery that is revealed only in its evolution/ development. What

92

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ something is is what it becomes. To say that life is meaningless, is part of the very meaning of a life that speaks the sentence. Nihilism is a strategy in life’s self-disclosure, that is, it is part of the truth. Nihilism is but another way in which life has meaning. But to invest everything with meaning may be equally to divest everything of meaning, in which case meaninglessness and meaningfulness may be one and the same: the middle term here is everything. Well and good, provided we realize that it is not what we think about life that is the finality of life, but what life, in thought and silence, in act, speech and scattering is - and we do not see very much of it, yet we know it happens. Nihilism puts a weight upon consciousness which consciousness cannot bear, and then it is the complaint that there is no meaning. But to weigh nihilism up on the scales of its self-consistency is as illusory as to take an idea as if it were something apart from the people who think, live and are implicated in ideas. That is the great danger of all philosophizing. But it is made all the time in social theory which divorces social groupings from the personalities and characters who compose them, as if these were the most trivial of contingencies, of no consequence whatever, instead of living souls, whose lives are formed by unrepeatable moments of synchronicity and serendipity, and who have the potential to make unpredictable creations. The only way nihilism can be genuinely or accurately assessed is not by looking for the internal consistency of the proposition that either the world has meaning or it has not, that is by considering the proposition on the basis of a philosophical conception of truth (as if truth were the discovery of philosophers and the peculiar privilege of philosophy). Rather, we get a better insight into the truth of nihilism (what it is really as opposed to how we define it) by looking at the actions of those who believe the world is meaningless and the locations in which this occurs the creators of punk rock for example, or of Dadaist art. Nihilism is sometimes the healthy response to the lie that truth makes itself manifest through interrogation and trial. Nietzsche, who considered himself the thinker who forced humanity to acknowledge the nothing in the centre of its truths, also insisted that the nothing was fecund, that art was more than truth and the truth of what we are was our artistic projection of the what within the nothing. That what is the love of life, or, for Nietzsche, that aspect of life (either its up-building or declining) form whose expression we are. Thus in the oncoming darkness that Nietzsche held would be one of great terror, he has Zarathustra sing:

Wayne Cristaudo

93

___________________________________________________________ Night has come; only now all the songs of lovers awaken. And my soul too is the song of a lover. Something unstilled, unstillable is within me; it wants to be voiced. A craving for love is within me; it speaks the language of love. 108 When Rosenstock-Huessy wrote that “The heart of man either falls in love with somebody or something, or it falls ill. It can never go unoccupied. And the great question is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever an old love or fear has lost its hold,” 109 he was emphasising that our collective (often enforced and accumulated over time) and personal loves and hatred are our most basic guides to how we build our lives. Our collective and personal loves and hatreds expressed in our deeds, our service, our prostrations and commitments, are the only prayers that matter. As he also puts it, in the opening line of the Introduction to Out of Revolution: “Our passions give life to the world.” We can say of societies what Norman O’Brown says in Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis: they are answers to prayers, to the longings that have been collectively cultivated and expressed over generations. All societies are prayer formations, constellations of longings and responses to the soul’s need for purpose and direction. The different social formations and cultures of the earth show us the different prayers, the range of prostrations, supplications and summonings that men and women have made to be delivered from evil. Each time a collective finds itself en-helled in its world it cries out for more and reaches into a different future that will require its disintegration so that it can be reborn, free from the unbearable sufferings that have accumulated over time. The evolution of social formations are almost invariably answers to prayers of the damned - the Church out of the misery of subjection under empire, Western secular society out of the immense suffering of the religious wars, democracies out of the human squander of aristocratic excess, the United Nations and European Union formed out of the horrors of the World Wars. But there is also an internal dissolution that frequently takes place in the human soul, a sense of self-disgust even that is spawned in the relative safety and prosperity of the city. The self disgust today in the West - so palpably manifest in various forms of youth culture, particularly music, or in the nostalgic narratives enshrouding indigenous life continues in the vein of remorse and the sense of loss expressed by Montaigne and Rousseau which is itself but a trope of a more ancient psychic disposition. Fifteen hundred years before Homer’s Iliad, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, we find the most remarkable account of the sadness and longing of a dying order. Indeed it is such a remarkable contrast to

94

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ Homer precisely because it reflects a tiredness and sense of the passing and unworthiness of the powers that had been attended. The story of Gilgamesh is, amongst other things, one of power and powerlessness in the environment where power is first concentrated and stored - the city. The site of concentration is also the area of most lost-ness. And even to enter it one must forego one’s nature and take on a new one of restlessness unto death. Is this not also what is stated in the book of Genesis? Cain (the cultivator) is the murderer of his brother Abel (the shepherd who was closer to God and animals) and he “who dwells in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” As Jacques Ellul notes in The Meaning of the City: “The land of Nod is a literal translation of the Hebrew ‘the land of wandering’.” Cain is condemned to wander eternally and hopelessly, ever in search of God’s presence. He will produce children (unlike Abel) and he will have a dwelling. He will choose his own goal, which is the abyss between himself and God. In the city he finds a fortress in which he can find security and control, but in it he finds solitude, slavery and sin. As Ellul translates, “The city is … the Watching Angel, the Vengeance and Terror.” 110 The Epic of Gilgamesh hails the invention of communicative forms as a response to dissatisfaction with how we make the world. Likewise, Babylonian wisdom literature and the Bible, shaped as it is by the attempt to register and chronicle the power of a voice that is the source of creation, revelation and redemption that emerges because of the overwhelming sense of despair with the ways of the world which have enslaved the children of Abraham. It is the expression of the experience of those who refused to serve Egyptian gods because those gods empowered enslavers who feasted on death and cruelty. Yahweh will love and deliver his people from a world that is an abomination of what the world should be. The power of faith is so strong because people see what is generated by its absence. This is the way truth works, not as a disinterested response to a problem, but as the emergent reality of a situation and the activation of powers hitherto unseen. Yahweh did not appear earlier because he was not summoned. Likewise the Father. Likewise Allah. Likewise the numerical cosmic silence of naturalism. God(s) and humanity each respond to the cries of the other. And the truth of each lies, not in their mere objectivity but in their deeds: objectivity in all but the most elementary truths changes over time and no amount of staring at natural man three thousand years ago would give one the least idea of what capacities this “being” could activate and hence become. A philosophical revolution took place in the aftermath of Nietzsche and it was a revolution which was directed against both the naturalistic and anthropocentric worldviews which spanned the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. It is at the core of Franz

Wayne Cristaudo

95

___________________________________________________________ Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption and it is equally significant in the work of Rosenstock-Huessy and Buber. Other forebears of it are Friedrich Jacobi (see below), Johann Georg Hamann, F.W.J. Schelling, and Ludwig Feuerbach - not in his claim that God is the predicate, man the subject, but in his insistence on the central importance of love and community and dialogue. Nietzsche had himself, in his short essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense, somewhat prepared the way for it when he wrote of truth being “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,” 111 but Nietzsche never overcame his naturalistic metaphysical inheritance (hence Spinoza is seen by him as his true precursor and hence also the continual references to physiology and race). Likewise his anthropocentrism, which he shares with Feuerbach and Marx, leads him to emphasize that it is “a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.” Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption takes a step that renders both naturalism and anthropocentrism an impossible philosophical option: by grasping that the signs or names of God, man and world as irreducibles. That is, because in no discursive formation in which any one of these names is significant can it be subjected without loss of meaning to isomorphic substitution. Naturalism and anthropocentricism take nature and man, respectively, as irreducible, but they do so by virtue of an oscillation between nature and man so that they cannot completely shake each other off. Marx and Nietzsche, united as they are in their opposition to God’s transcendence, are happy to talk about nature, even if they want to emphasize social or cultural/ historical nature. But Rosenzweig does not ask after the object as such but after the significance of the sign. Rather he insists that when we concede that a power is what it does (which naturalism can barely refute - as is evident in Spinoza’s conception of power) then we have no right to drop those powers which mobilise action simply because they do not fit into the our dogma of our epistemology (a similar move had been made in Schelling’s and Hegel’s critiques of Kant). Our life-world would not be our life-world were the sign of God eliminated because men and women have shaped the world and themselves in response to that sign, just as they have shaped it another way once they believed in its non-existence. But of God, as of man and of world, Rosenzweig says, we know nothing except through the activations which lead us back to its presence. Marx and Nietzsche to some extent get around this by their appeal to eschatological imminence - but the failure of the “last judgment” to materialize under the conditions they had predicted forces us back to recovering lost signs and incubating powers and not

96

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ merely starting in the emptiness of the zero that is supposedly the new dawn. Rosenzweig’s move is somewhat conservative in that it overturns the judgment of naturalists that (the) God(s), once revealed as spectres of the imagination, can be put to death. This move gives God (gods) not only a reprieve but total immunity: God’s work has been his history, his achievement, his peoples - Yahweh’s truth is His people; Jesus’ Father His people; Mohammad’s Allah His people; the Greek gods their people. Seen in this light, God, man and world form a triadic totality which cannot be dissolved because the predications of each require reference from the other. The naturalist, of course, does not need to do this, but the world is not merely the natural world; it is the world of our signs and significance, our responses and passions. For Rosenzweig, the argument was built around the uniqueness of the Jewish life, but his philosophy has gained an audience beyond Jews because of its affirmation of the contingent in the face of totalising forces which would asphyxiate them. In this respect there is a much more radical dimension to his work, as was appreciated by Walter Benjamin. At the heart of this revolution is the simple, yet irrefutable idea that a sign or name which is active in the world is not a nothing but a power. Rosenzweig is simply not interested in making this power conform to the same matrix of facticity as a natural object - and apart from a dogmatic definition about what constitutes the real there is no irrefutable reason why it should conform. When Schelling had emphasised the primacy of being above logic in his argument with Hegel, he had also moved in this direction. That God, language and the body of believers form a world is not a fact to be denied but to be explained. The relationship becomes something to be overthrown when the lives lived become en-helled rather than nourished, which, after the Thirty Years War and the religious wars of the previous centuries, not to mention the earlier wars between Ghibillines and Guelfs, had become the case in Europe. (Significantly, God has had more of a future in the United States than Western Europe because his reputation was less sullied by war there.) But by the time of the early twentieth century a number of thinkers, no doubt beneficiaries of a number of hermeneutical techniques that were also indebted to naturalism, which had reshaped potential (educated) understandings of God by having reshaped our understanding of the world, had seen that the new God/s of secularism (the most bellicose being the God of nationalism) were no less destructive and far less potent in their creative formation than the old God. It is in this light that Rosenzweig had claimed that philosophy and theology could not proceed without their mutual reliance upon each

Wayne Cristaudo

97

___________________________________________________________ other. That such a position had been reached so shortly after Nietzsche’s certainty that God was dead, by someone who agreed in so many respects with Nietzsche’s critique of idealism, was perhaps not as strange as might at first be surmised. Nietzsche had responded to the meaning of Dionysus and had wished to see the Greek spirit reborn - but the Greek spirit was one, which Nietzsche never tired of repeating, where slavery and war and tragic dissolution ever had to be factored in. Rosenzweig was attentive to Yahweh (whose proof of eternity could be witnessed from the durability of the eternal people, the Jews) and he wished to reactivate the Jewish spirit in Germany for people who had, for the most part, only a dim and shadowy notion of what it might be - that he did so at the time he did made him one of the most important Jewish German thinkers to the Jewish community of the twentieth century. What Rosenzweig had achieved, along with others who took this same dialogical turn, not necessarily in a manner tied to the Jewish faith, was one more of those gestalt switches in the form of commun(ic)ation which enriches the circles of truth that constitute and enrich us. The need to bring theology back into philosophy for Rosenzweig was bound up with the realization that each mode of human action is carried forth by its own manner of speech. Rosenstock-Huessy had written in The Soul’s Know How (the first draft of which, now lost, was in fact a letter to Rosenzweig) that religion was “a mere container of language.” 112 The philosophical revolution that Rosenzweig was part of can itself be seen as yet another manifestation of the way in which people seek to get out of the hell of their lives by reforming themselves through new truths which are themselves only disclosed through new forms. The history of our communicative forms are in the main the history of our struggles to overthrow forces which once gave nourishment but have turned into tyrants. We can see this very clearly in the various Greek innovations in communicative forms, where each new form of expression tended to be indicative of responses to the traumas of the Greek experience which could not be adequately worked through by the dominant communicative form of earlier generations. Epic poetry, for example, was one of the creations of war - at once a celebration of the many forces that formed the Oneness of the Greek spirit (as RosenstockHuessy perceptively noted in his lectures on Greek philosophy which begin with the importance on Book 2 of The Iliad where Homer names all the Greek armies at Troy) and also a means to alert people to the necessity and virtue of war lest they forget and perish as the far more civilized Trojans had done. What, though, had seemed necessary for those living in the afterglow of the heroic age, by the time of Hesiod was not enough.

98

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ Whereas Homer was happy to play his part as a mere bard, Hesiod takes on the role of moral guide - a task that seems motivated from the overwhelming sense of despair at the heartless injustice of kings and the wealthy. So deep is Hesiod’s despair that it seems that the cosmos itself with its pantheon of plotting murderous divinities inevitably leave us but prey to the savagery of more powerful forces. Homer arose out of the agony into which men and gods had plunged each other (each blaming the other), but the surge of vitality that accompanied the pursuit and protection of beauty and bounty as well as battle itself could, nevertheless, sustain Homer and his audience in a manner that could no longer sustain Hesiod. Whereas in Homer Zeus’ strength is alone what gives him supremacy, in Hesiod he turns to Zeus as a moral saviour, an all seeing god whose task it is to provide justice, while he, Hesiod, counsels his fellow men on the dangers of women and the virtue of hard work. The revolution that gives birth to philosophy also seems to be the response to an overwhelming need to find more secure orientation than can be gained by what, by then, had become the overwhelming burden of mytho-poetic speech. Hence the attack upon poets by Xenophanes and Heraclitus (who also attacks pretty well all other philosophers as well). The attack reaches its zenith in Plato who introduces the then novel and subsequently fateful distinction between logos and mythos. This move was itself the result of trauma - the trauma was the death of Socrates, which Plato saw as caused by those who traded in mythoi, the poets. 113 Socrates himself had been driven by the search for virtue because he could not bear the dreadful chaos into which Greece had been thrown by the Peloponnesian wars. His ti esti(n) (the what is?) subjects everything to scrutiny and thus throws into disarray all that the Greeks had thought could be taken for granted as essential to civic life and virtue. Our entire reflexive culture is built upon this radical turning around from the Greek way of doing things, but it was only by such a radical break from the energies of everyday life that Socrates believed it was possible to escape the seemingly interminable destruction into which the Greeks had fallen. For Plato, Socrates had found the way out, but the ruling powers which created and seemingly benefited from this chaos had conspired, by murdering Socrates, to block the exit. Thus he took an even more radical path than Socrates and he set himself against all the forces from which the Greeks drew their truth: statesmen, poets, and orators. He also refuted Aristophanes’ equation of sophistry and philosophy by condemning the newest contender for civic guidance, sophistry (one widely mistrusted among the Greeks), and then demonstrating that philosophy and sophistry were guided by fundamentally different procedures, the former by dialectic, the latter by crude eristics. Thus Plato proceeded to show that

Wayne Cristaudo

99

___________________________________________________________ sophistry, oratory, poetry, and bad statesmanship were all variants of the same family of blinding forces. Only a stable overarching illuminating form, accessible to philosophy alone, could free humanity from the terror into which it seemed forever condemned to suffer. To be sure in the development of our communicative forms there are also moments of inventiveness born out of celebration, the poetry of the troubadours which emerges from the pleasures of court life might be a case in point, others out of boredom (Baudelaire’s dark lyricism). But generally humanity’s most inventive moments arise out of a feeling of despair, a feeling that the world and the self must be remade, and that the source of life must be redefined, renamed and our self and our world reconfigured through our obeisance toward the new power which offers so much more promise than the old. This happened as much when God became dissolved into nature, and pantheism, deism and the varieties of naturalistic religion paved the way for mass acceptance of a godless world, as it did when peoples sought to have all the answers to life’s prayers come under the designation of the One god, who presided over the earth. Initially this was usually the sky god (as in Egypt and also in Hesiod), who eventually, in Greece, becomes intelligence’s own goodness (Aristotle finesses Plato’s idea of the good and the divinisation of the intellect with the idea of the unmoved mover), or, for the Jews, the God of the righteous, demanding fear and love, who would clear away the alternative divinities of the enslavers or territorial enemies of the Jews. That each new formation brings with it its own kind of pathologies, its evils, is inevitable; people continually generate evil irrespective of the material conditions under which they operate, irrespective of the formations within which they gather, irrespective of their political goals. Once social structures are embedded and routinized, the passions and sacrificial character of the origins, the originary energy, recede. Only time will tell if people remain sufficiently nourished by their originary powers to replenish them. That certain activities were dependent on, bound up with specific forms which were inherent to them was something that Aristotle saw with great astuteness, and in spite of some formations such as the family (in modern industrial societies) or the state (in underdeveloped regions) frequently being dysfunctional and opportunities for horrendous evil - they persevere until the goods they can deliver are able to be generated and nurtured by other more nourishing forms. Or else they break down altogether when a group descends into hell. But evil, like love, matters; love and evil are forces of materializations, and the ways of love and evil are the ways of our materializations. Without love of heroes, no epic poetry; without love of justice, no Hesiod (in spite of Plato’s highly unfair critique of Hesiod);

100

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ without love of wisdom, no philosophy; and without philosophy, no modern sciences, no economics and none of the modern political ideologies. Without love of God, no fraternity, equality, liberty. And the myth of romance, a myth that is so ubiquitous in modern industrial secular societies, is a materialization of love, in this case the love of love, the failure of which can cause so much neurosis and emptiness and familial breakdown in the modern world. Our loves form modes of communication and we are made through our commun(ication)ions. Whereas evil creates hell which is a place of desperate inventiveness, our loves open up new potencies which are unimaginable to peoples of earlier ages. One might speak of forms evolving as if there is a kind of spiritual progress at work, but because no forms of social existence are safe from evil such talk is quite meaningless. What remains constant is that human beings face one fundamental question that is formulated and answered more in the act than in the detached state of deliberation: is this life I am living bearable? The answer “No” is the compulsion to change, but even “Yes” contains the restlessness of “is there more than this? and am I more? what mysteries lay within and without?” The plurality of ways in which human beings have formed themselves gives us the history of our answers to these questions. And the ways that human beings have formed themselves revolve around the answers of what powers they have served. Where a group or a person finds itself largely determines which powers are to be attended to, which powers are to be summoned and which ones rule. Whether the powers still feed/ nourish/ function/ orientate/ empower within the life-world which they have helped shaped is what ensures their continuity. Though, powers may persist long after they do this, and they will do so until the group dependent upon them searches elsewhere or dies. That orientation and a feeling of empowerment can involve murder and slaughter is far from being an exceptional condition. On the contrary, all societies are somewhat damaged; all societies produce their damned; damnation is often not the choice of the damned - the damned are frequently the sacrifice of previous generations’ inability to see the world they have been making. Some societies at some times are so damaged that all its members are in hell. Further, we should never underestimate the capacity of human beings to love hell - Augustine and de Sade both grasped that there is a pay off to damnation: Augustine’s formulation that love is the gravity that bears us to where we are is based on the insight that the love of the self and the worldly things which are not subordinate to love of love’s source easily become a means of loving the enclosures of our desires, which then tear apart at the self and the world. Our deeds become us and call for repetition and continuity in the whispers of desire. How easily it becomes

Wayne Cristaudo

101

___________________________________________________________ that the murderer loves murdering, the self-loathing loves self-loathing, the thief theft, the executioner executing - though, notes Augustine not for ever. The same point, without the rider of eternity, was made in a more drooling and ghoulish way by de Sade. Having reduced man to his appetites he sought their ecstatic entanglement on the life/death access where sex and murder meet ugliness and the despoilment of innocence. Thus too we can ask of any collective formation: what power(s) are we serving? - is it serving the mystery that is life itself, and that means more life, immortality - though not in a manner foreclosed (as if the what is our conscious mind itself) or is it serving death, annihilation? In fact, the what, why and how of the powers to be attended in any social formation are an expanding circle. They are the manner of the mystery, the forces directing the content of a society/ culture’s / group’s lived experience. Freedom, which is as rare as it is precious, is serving a force that enriches and frees up more life. Freedom is often the act of No irrespective of the sacrifice that it requires. Love has many faces - some grotesque, some hellishly beguiling - but it is also the name that we give to the mystery’s manifestation and evocation, the mystery’s matter in its perpetuity. Creation and redemption are the expression of this love in perpetuity: redemption being the recreation beyond death - pure loving life that refuses extinction. This is the idea behind the Jewish vision of the coming of the Kingdom, where “the world must become wholly alive.” 114 Rosenzweig saw that the profundity of the vision of the Jews lay in being open to the revelation of the triple redemption of all that has been seen as the ground of things, the sources of life’s potency: the redemption of God (the gods being a pagan and hence sundered and preliminary version for Rosenzweig), man and world. There is no greater expression of the meaning of love’s potency than the idea that God himself is redeemed, that God himself is open to the entreaties of humanity’s love for redemption, that he is transformed and becomes more than he is. This extension of the essence is the key to the meaning of spirit. Spirit moves and is not restricted by essence, it is alive into the infinite and infinitely alive in its ability to charge and activate the finite. This idea of the infinite loving God and God’s infinite love (taken up and transposed onto the ethical plane, though not without acknowledging its theological derivation, by the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas) is the real difference between a way of looking at life that is prepared to be open to all its powers and a way that seeks to shrink the spirit within the confines of a mind and heart closed to the possibilities of love. Indeed we can estimate the closed-ness of a human heart by its certitude of the closed-ness it ascribes to God’s vision and by its inflexibility in the face of the wave of

102

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ possibilities and openings to love’s generosity (or grace, in more theological language). What powers, then, we attend to are ultimately the powers we are willing to respond to, to be sustained by and also to sustain through our faith; our faith is reflected back to us in the world that we have made that in turn makes us. This point was well made in the late eighteenth century by the (now almost forgotten) German writer and philosopher, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. He argued against the swelling enthusiasm of the time for the naturalistic philosophy of Spinoza (which had inspired even Goethe) and the Fichtean philosophy of idealism which had taken the Cartesian ego to heights truly undreamt of by Descartes himself by making it the self-postulating act of all world-making. Jacobi was perceptive enough to see that naturalism and idealism (exemplified, by Jacobi, in Fichte’s egoic philosophy) were two aspects of the same process of thinking. The point had, to some extent, already been verified by Schelling’s attempt to find the point of indifference as he sought to demonstrate how the potencies of nature and the elaborate and developing framings of nature in the sciences by the ego had to ultimately concur in the one source. Jacobi’s point was less abstruse and “scientific” than Schelling’s, but I think even more important. Our world, he said, is not reason or nature incarnate. Rather, it is created “from instructions, expositions, models, discipline, aid; from counsel and deed, service and command.” 115 For Jacobi, the new philosophy’s emphasis upon nature or reason is based upon an elementary act of omission: All constitutions derive from a higher Being; they were all theocratic in origin. The first indispensable need, both for the individual men and society too, is a God. Complete submission to a superior authority; strict, holy, obedience - this has been the spirit of every age that has brought forth an abundance of great deeds, great sentiments, great men. 116 Chronologically, if we are to believe what our stories tell us about ourselves (and not simply see them as only a series of delusions) then we must conclude that humanity searched everywhere to find its place in the cosmos and to orientate itself so that it could adequately receive the powers that would sustain it. Jacobi is quite right to point out that the belief in a god is one of the more primordial acts of human beings. The elevation of the self within the Renaissance and then through idealist and post-idealist philosophers (the anthropocentric turn of Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche) is a very late thought. Originally, everywhere,

Wayne Cristaudo

103

___________________________________________________________ human powers are considered to be received powers, and from what we can gather, and as the Frankforts in their Before Philosophy have argued, the world is not conceived of as people surrounded by things, but as a cosmos that is full of vital and communicative powers: gods, men and world form a vital unity which is originally full of meaning. As responsive creatures the powers (the Frankforts suggest they are originally “thous,” a world of things - even the human as thing - is the result of a way of thinking culminating in the metaphysic of naturalism) that are attended are essential to what we can do and what we can be. 117 The powers of the world may be received from a cosmic supernatural power diffused in the living world in which human beings find themselves - thus rocks and trees are spirits trembling and singing with as much life and purpose as men and women - or from animals who assume divine form in Egypt and the Near East. 118 Indeed H.W. Saggs argues that the logic of transition was from a numinous view of the natural world to a supernatural being controlling the world which was originally conceived in animal (theriomorphic) form. 119 Drawing upon Near Eastern myths of the third millennium (BCE) he argues that these animal gods were eventually vanquished by anthropomorphic gods - though not all theriomorphic powers disappeared. “Some,” says Saggs, “remained as demons.” 120 We also find evidence of the way in which humans see themselves as dependent upon animals for their powers in totemism, a phenomenon widespread in tribal societies in North America, as well as amongst “the Siberians, the Melanesians and Polynesians (the so-called ‘spirit animals’), the Australians, and many African peoples. It even appears in a degraded form in European folklore and magic, i.e. the animal ‘familiar’ of the wizard.” 121 It is in the context of this “primitive” quasi-vitalistic view of reality that “our earliest religious observances” - the burial of the dead need to be placed. 122 As Johannes Maringer writes in The Gods of Prehistoric Man: Primitive man must assuredly have believed in an afterlife. The position in which he often buried his dead, namely that of sleep, would seem to indicate that he conceived of death as a form of sleep. This inference is strengthened by the curious ‘pillow’ under the head of the youth at Le Moustier. Whether this sleep was regarded as a transitional stage prior to an awakening in another world it is hard to say. Only at La Ferrassie do we find a certain placing of the dead in the direction of the setting sun. 123

104

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ All being in the world is orientation and hence dependency upon signs which enable the possibility of survival and growth. The dead who occupy a strange place between continued immediacy - via dreams and memories - and bodily decomposition are able to supply orientation to the living group. They have entered earlier into a different state of being than those still living. And just as they spoke to the living when they were here, they now speak in dreams or in the quite flows of memory to the living about their world beyond life. The dead are the original pioneers of reality. Just as the elders of the tribe must be obeyed for group survival, so too are the ancestors listened to and obeyed about what is in the future, beyond this here and now. The wisdom of the future lies with those who have already been there, and to have been there means to have been born long ago. The urgency of the need to survive is the fundamental urgency of all group life: and it seems that human survival begins with the circular information trail from life through to death and from death back to life. If, then, the mytho-poetic consciousness with its emotion driven connectedness of impressions goes hand in hand with the practice of burying of the dead it would also seem that reality appears more as a field of powers in which the living and the dead are part of one order of being. But being itself is in constant flux, in constant emergence and withdrawal. There is no human history until there is already a creation story so that humanity’s understanding of its destiny is inescapably linked to understanding of its origin. And it is neither men nor blind nature which creates but the gods, and the gods bestow power and take it away. Thus while the Pharaoh is a man-god, his manliness requires that he receive the divine anointment. Before there can be man there must be gods. Behind every Pharaoh is the Ka, the “power behind the throne.” 124 “The Egyptian Ka... authorized him to govern in wisdom, knowledge in right perception and insight, glory permanence, as Horus, the reborn son of the ever dying, ever resurrecting Osiris.” 125 And although Mesopotamia exhibits a different mode of cosmic governance, political power was also closely associated with the gods. The Mesopotamian state was itself a reflection of the cosmos, which was a state. As Thorkild Jacobsen writes: Political influence was wielded in the universe only by those members who, by virtue of the power inherent in them, could be classed as gods. They alone were true citizens in the political sense. 126 In the case of Mesopotamia the whole reason for human existence was to serve the gods. The state was dedicated to the service, the

Wayne Cristaudo

105

___________________________________________________________ daily care and feeding of the divine protectors of the cities Again as Jacobsen writes: The only true sovereign state, independent of all external control, is the state which the universe itself constitutes, the state governed by the assembly of the gods. This state, moreover, is the state which dominates the territory of Mesopotamia; the gods own the land, the big estates, in the country. Lastly, since man was created especially for the benefit of the gods, his purpose is to serve the gods. Therefore no human institution can have as its primary aim in the welfare of its own members; it must seek primarily the welfare of the gods. 127 Our history shows us that we form selves and worlds through actions and reactions on the basis of signs and callings and not just natural forces - and hence that faith, (as Jacobi argued reworking Hume) is an ontological category. 128 The human world is faithed into existence. We cannot know that the good world we think we are building will, in fact, be good. We can have faith it is, we can hope it is, and we can pray that it is. But faith, hope and prayer (understood as the speech driven by the real end of our devotion) are not luminous in themselves, and only as good as the end that is directing and consuming our energies and talents. Jacobi also rightly saw that the most revered sign, at least in Europe since its Christianization, was (or had been) God. Because we are signifying creatures, generating and responding to signs, we have unnatural, supernatural natures. This is because the deployment of signs gives us a fundamentally different approach to time and space than can be found in other creatures who lack the complex signifying capacity of human beings. Through signs, humanity is able to undertake the great transferences between its members: from past into future, from the future into the present, and from inside and outside. That is, speech (the name we give to our signifying capacity) enables our species to redistribute and reorganise the universe, and not just observe and conform to it, as if it were an “object” and we were “subjects,” a moribund and sterile dogma that has been passed from philosophers to social scientists. 129 For that redistribution to successfully occur requires re-membering the living processes that facilitate our creations, explorations, revelations, reorganizations, commandments - the entire gamut of the experience, enhancement and redemption of life. And that means recalling the entire process, not just the results and residues. That in turn requires the deployment of the entire register of human speech, all the speech genres

106

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ (to use Bakhtin’s formulation) we are capable of. The world we make is made through the expansion of our “utterances.” 130 Our habitat is open and ever being remade, ever being called forth, a mystery that does not merely correspond to our will or knowledge - the sciences which specify the “objects” we can calculate are but one more speech genre, one more creative interaction. To be sure the speech practices of natural science are powerful ones, but while the sciences frequently rely upon controlled conditions, the consequences of their deployment defy the Cartesian faith that we can dismantle the world piece by piece with our cognition and safely put it back together again. In our communicative acts we constantly generate what is not intended, what is unforseen and what is uncontrollable. This is because whenever two dialogue, a third is created, and that is what changes the world. It is the contingencies of surprise that draw us into our future. The great danger that confronts each age is that it takes the predominance of speech genre or form as the measure of truth. Each kind of speech, then, is expressive of a way of being in the world, and each way of being in the world opens up some attribute of the powers which remain hidden from another kind of speech. In our framing we summon. Vico had made this point in his The New Science when he argued that history was composed of three ages and each of these ages was accompanied by its own language: These are (1) The age of the gods, in which the gentiles believed they lived under divine governments, and everything was commanded them by auspices and oracles, which are the oldest institutions in profane history. (2) The age of the heroes, in which they reigned everywhere in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore there were established first the popular commonwealths and then the monarchies, both of which are forms of human government. In harmony with these three kinds of nature and government, three kinds of language were spoken which compose the vocabulary of this Science: (1) That of the time of the families where gentile men were newly received into humanity. This, we shall find, was a mute language of signs and physical objects having natural relations to the ideas that they wished to express. (2) That spoken by means of heroic emblems,

Wayne Cristaudo

107

___________________________________________________________ or similitudes, comparisons, images, metaphors, and natural descriptions, which make up the great body of the heroic language which was spoken at the time the heroes reigned. (3) Human language using words agreed upon by the people, a language of which they are absolute lords, and which is proper to the popular commonwealths and monarchical states; a language whereby the people may fix the meaning of the laws by which the nobles as well as the plebs are bound. Hence, among all nations, once the laws had been put into the vulgar tongue, the science of laws passed from the control of the nobles. Hitherto, among all nations, the nobles, being also priests, had kept the laws in a secret language as a sacred thing. That is the natural reason for the secrecy of the laws among the Roman patricians until popular liberty arose. 131 Vico’s idea was taken up by Northrop Frye in his The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, where he pauses upon the fundamentally different ways in which reality is framed/ spoken into existence by the epic, the philosophical and the scientific. Of the first he writes that there is: relatively little emphasis on a clear separation of subject and object: the emphasis falls rather on the feeling that subject and object are linked by a common power or energy ... A corollary of this principle is that there may be a potential magic in the use of any words. Words in such a context are words of power and dynamic forces … Thus knowing the name of a god or elemental spirit may give the knower some control over it; puns and popular etymologies involved in the naming of people and places affect the character of whatever thing or person is given the name … All words in this phase of language are concrete: there are no true verbal abstractions. 132 All of this changes with Plato where: we enter a different phase of language, one that is ‘hieratic,’ partly in the sense of being produced by an intellectual elite. The basis of expression here is

108

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ moving from the metaphorical, with its sense of identity of life or power or energy between man and nature (‘this is that’), to a relationship that is rather metonymic (‘this is put for that’). Specifically, words are ‘put for’ thoughts, and are the outward expressions of an inner reality. But this reality is not merely ‘inside’. Thoughts indicate the existence of a transcendent order ‘above’, which only thinking can communicate with and which only words can express. Thus metonymic language is, or tends to become, analogical language. 133 The history of philosophical speech shows the gradual emergence of the dominance of the indicative mood, an emergence from what Frye describes as “a series of gnarled epigrammatic and oracular statements that are not to be argued about but must be accepted and pondered,” through the grand narrative poem of Parmenides’ Way of Being, to the investigations, trickeries, and banter of Socrates and his interlocutors, to the late dialogues of Plato and finally the thoroughly uncluttered prosaic investigations of Aristotle. The difficulty of that emergence, that is the difficulty of humanity achieving an orientation to the real based upon “definitions” can be gauged from the fact that even as philosophy, in the personage of Parmenides, invents its most potent anti-poetic concept, the concept of Being - a concept whose inauguration hails the most thorough breach with the personalised gods of the poets - it still retains poetic and magical elements at its core. 134 It may well be, as Jacques Derrida has claimed, that philosophy can never free itself from its other, that philosophy without metaphor is impossible. Certainly neither Parmenides nor Plato are able to provide a paradigm of reason completely free from myth. And Plato who so longs for the ideas does not dispense with, perhaps cannot dispense with the dialogue form even in his most torturous dialectical exercises such as the Parmenides in which the form is but a clumsy device to get the real show on the road. Nevertheless, in the creation of philosophical speech (with the salutary exception of Heraclitus), stability of the form as a means of making the world manageable, as Plato insisted, is an act of necessity; it is the whole point of the enterprise. Although, philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, were swift to renounce Plato’s ontology, they merely introduced different means to achieve the necessary stability. Indeed Aristotle’s conception of substance combined with his discovery or invention of the science of logic provided an even more stable basis for philosophical investigation than Plato’s timeless ontology. Aristotle had insisted that his philosophy was based on observation and experience, but the categories of substance and

Wayne Cristaudo

109

___________________________________________________________ accident and the mould of logic meant that every experience could be stabilised forever. What was logical was always logical, what was illogical was always illogical. Logic froze time; the categories became the nets to capture the living. But while philosophy has generated a number of speech genres and ways of world making, its most “powerful” offspring - natural science - would rise up against it, claiming that what was not observable in nature was but words. Science’s “ungrateful” response to philosophy was not unlike Plato’s ingratitude to poetry - for essential elements of philosophy were originally imminent in poetry. 135 According to Frye, the emergence of modern science coincides with “the third phase” of language, which he sees as originating in the theoretical insights of Locke and Francis Bacon. One might want to argue about the details of the founding fathers of the mechanical philosophy, but Frye is quite right to detect that in the methods and framings of mechanism there emerges a new orientation to reality. Here, he points out, we start with a clear separation of subject and object, in which the subject exposes itself, in sense experience, to the impact of an objective world. The objective world is the order of nature; thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are there to serve the mechanisms of reflection. Continuous prose is still employed, but all deductive procedures are increasingly subordinated to a primary inductive and fact-gathering process. The criterion of truth is related to the external source of the description rather than to the inner consistency of the argument. Its controlling figure, then, is a king of simile: a true verbal structure is one that is like what it describes. The problem of illusion and reality therefore becomes a central one in third-phase language. The intrinsic rationality of a speech claim does not suffice to make it true, as is the case with Plato and Aristotle. The “evolution” of these three phases of language is equally a metaphysical transformation. As Frye writes: In the first, or metaphorical, phase of language, the unifying element of verbal expression is the ‘god’, or personal nature-spirit. In the second phase the conception of a transcendent ‘God’ moves into the center of the order of words. In the third phase the criterion of reality is the source of sense experience in the order of nature, where ‘God’ is not to be found, and where ‘gods’ are no longer believed in. Hence for the third phase of language the word “god” becomes linguistically unfunctional, except when confined to special areas outside its jurisdiction. Mythological

110

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ space became separated from scientific space with the new astronomy of the seventeenth century, and mythological time from scientific time with nineteenthcentury geology and biology. 136 And just as the spread of the philosophical conception of monotheism eroded the polytheistic cultures which had preceded or rivalled it, the cultural spread of mechanism has, at least in large strata of culture, led to a phasing out of the significance of God. God is dead, is the logical conclusion of mechanism. As Frye puts it: In a conception of language where no premises are beyond scrutiny, there is nothing to stop anyone from returning to square one and the question: Is there a God? What is significant about this is that the answer, if it is to remain within the framework of third phase language, can only be no, because any question beginning with ‘is there’ is, so to speak, already an ungodly question, and ‘a god’ is for all practical purposes no God. 137 What also happens in the third phase of language, as Nietzsche so astutely saw was that power as a substance in itself replaces God. As he wrote in one of his posthumously published notes: “The only way to make sense of the concept of God would be: God not as a driving power, but rather as the Maximal-Condition, as an epoch -: a point of development in the will to power.” 138 Long before Nietzsche, two of the more culturally daring and philosophically astute mechanistic philosophers, Spinoza and Hobbes, knew exactly what conclusions were the corollaries of mechanistic science: that power no longer emanated from a person, and that the person was itself the product of impersonal forces. Likewise, emotions (including love and fear) were but the epiphenomena of material forces. How different the mechanistic view of power as such is from premechanistic cosmologies can be seen by contrasting them with the following passage of Pseudo-Dionysius (the Areopagite), the fifth/sixth century mystic and writer, in his treatise On Divine Names. In this work Pseudo-Dionysius provided a definition of the divinity based upon His equation with power that managed not only to span Christian orthodox and neo-Platonist understandings of the relationship between the signs of God and power, but which held sway at least up until and including Aquinas and Dante. “We say,” writes Dionysius:

Wayne Cristaudo

111

___________________________________________________________ that Almighty God is Power, as pre-having, and superhaving, every power in Himself, and as Author of every power, and producing everything as beseems a Power inflexible and un-encompassed, and as being Author of the very existence of power, either the universal or particular, and as boundless in power, not only by the production of all power, but by being above all, even the self-existent Power, and by His superior power, and by His bringing into existence, ad infinitum, endless powers other than the existing powers; and by the fact that the endless powers, even when brought into existence without end, are not able to blunt the superendless production of His power-making power; and by the unutterable and unknown, and inconceivable nature of His all-surpassing power, which, through abundance of the powerful, gives power even to weakness, and holds together and preserves the remotest of its echoes; as also we may see even with regard to the powerful insensible perception, that the super-brilliant lights reach even to obscure visions, and they say, that the loud sounds enter even into ears which are not very well adapted to the reception of sounds. For that which does not hear at all is not hearing; and that which does not see at all is not sight. 139 As different as the ways of framing the powers of the real are that we find in Homer, Pseudo-Dionysius and Spinoza, we are heirs to the range of potencies that are stored within the grammar of the soul, within the speech streams we flow upon. All the speech ways of humanity express the powers of reality for we are reality. But this we is not exclusively a subject that can invent itself sui generis - even though periodically this we attempts to reinvent itself in just this manner, only to find it must return to its older symbolic stock. Our language carries signs which disclose ourselves to ourselves in relationship to past, present, future, inside and outside in ways that we do not control, in no small part due to the truth of the world’s resistances and the callings of our various transcendences. Of course there are claims which can be repudiated when the speaker makes an appeal to a piece of the world ignorant of the range of signs which protect and preserve our truths about it. But the indicative mood can no longer form an alliance with the subjunctive to rule us, as Kant’s believed it should in his critical philosophy which made science

112

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ plus morals the twin pillars upon which we would become fully human (it only took a short time after Kant had erected his system before he himself saw he needed to account for art and biology and history). While our technologies are bound up with the grammar of the indicative and the objective orientation demanded by experiment, in a world where anonymity and loneliness are so prevalent, the lyrical voice is every bit as an essential condition of nourishment as our technologies hence we surround ourselves with voices telling us they love us. Human experience is so shot through with commun(icat)ion that only what Georges Bataille calls our “limit experiences” (those ecstatic and disintegrative moments such as orgasm or agony) can transgress its boundaries. Yet even the fact that one writes about what these limit experiences are indicates how communication is wrapped within and around experience. We are such that when we have a limit experience we want to talk/ write/ sing/shout about it - if for no other reason than that we want further access to that realm without the intrusions of others or the world trying to control us or prevent it. We communicate to transform (and preservation is also a form of transformation). This also means that the powers of our species are not known in themselves. We reveal ourselves through each other - different relationships with each other and the world bring out different responses and each other, as Levinas reminds us, is totally other, a challenge and a mystery and an infinite opening. This is also why, again, the grounds of nature and the self are unreal platforms from which to fathom what we are. Having placed truth within the domain of speech does not make it less demanding. On the contrary, the emphasis upon speech as the way to truth, as the expression of truth as the re-vealer, de-veiler and veiler of truth, only serves to confirm the multiformity of truth and our own multiformity in relationship to truth. We are empowered to reveal or veil ourselves from ourselves, each other and the other of the world whose mysteries too only reveal themselves as processes over time and through the solidarity and violations which we, under specific formations, generate. At its most simple level the truth of something is the infinity of its effects, the sum of its actions. The being of a thing is inseparable from its becoming. The truth of its being is what it is: what it is is infinite. The truth is a circulatory process. Life is not something that is independent of truth, rather truth is, inter alia, the name we give to what we come to recognize as the inescapable, the resiliently irresistible that we mourn through the gamut of our resistances. The inescapable is not just the resistant forces or configuration of what we experience as the outside world, it is equally the inescapable that compels us. Schelling called this

Wayne Cristaudo

113

___________________________________________________________ “intellectual-intuition,” a capacity to see and know in the manner that brilliant and insightful poets and painters see and know; we are moved by them when they do this because our own capacities, our insight and our store of powers are opened. The truth is bound up with creation - with our creative capacities. But our capacities and our truths are also commanded by what we respond to and what we respond to is in constant flux. Fire and logos, as Heraclitus knew, go together. Truth is irruption, the irruption of powers summoned by and responsive to faith. The powers of a life-world are the expression of the power of the truth and faith of that world - they are not separable; where faith is lacking the truths of the world are unsustainable. The world that we see everywhere is due to faith: the faith of Jesus and his disciples were the seeds which generated the Christian world and Western civilization. The same is true of faith in Mohammad and Buddha. It is just as true as the faith that men like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and Descartes and Spinoza inspired. Equally as true of men like Locke, or Marx and Hitler. Faith itself is no indicator of goodness of outcome; and even the faith of the good will eventually be appropriated by the wicked who will commit their evils in their name. Yet it is not a nothing, and it is shaped by the power it places itself in service to. The question of what service is the key to the gift of the mind the gift which can enable us to discern love’s place and direction. This insight was at the heart of Dante’s understanding of the intellect, the enormous importance of which can be gauged from his ability to bring together the forms of religion, poetry (as well as its species of epic and lyric), philosophy, and the sciences. Dante saw that the pagan concept of the intellect was fundamentally deficient in its failure to appreciate that the virtues of the intellect are incomplete if not conjoined with the forces of faith, hope and love. These forces cannot simply be grasped by the intellect’s self-probity. In this schema, then, it is not the intellect as such which is not sui generis. It is love that lights the intellect, just as it is the intellect that illumines the lovable. The intellect thus is only really what it is when it is luminous, when it is up-building, and when it works with and for love, which itself is carried further by the invisible powers of hope and faith. It is this recognition of faith’s power that led Hildegard of Bingen to say that the visible powers are the weak powers, the invisible ones the strong ones. 140 New power rarely comes from where we expect: that is, in part, why it is so powerful. A new power reorganizes the entire world in order for it to fit in, which is to say it explodes previously entrenched modalities of expression: forcing the compliance of the old to the sovereignty of the new. When we only note the power that is fully there

114

Truth and Faith

___________________________________________________________ when it is there we are doomed to pile falsehood upon falsehood, yesterday’s truth upon the day before yesterday’s truth. The power of love and evil generate truth. They are truth’s masters and makers. Love is what binds bodies; evil what cruelly breaks and disintegrates thereby facilitating new formation. Truth too is a body the body of truth. Here there is much truth in Foucault’s recognition of our institutions being discursive regimes. And his own corpus is an attempt to forge a new body of bearers of a will to truth to break away from truths that are experienced as soul-destroying. A body of truth like every body is in flux. We are always participating in new creature-creation. We live, as Bruno said, in bonds, always, and our freedom is the movement from bond to bond and the sense we have of the fulfilment of the particular bond that has us, the sense we have of the plenitude of our servitude. We long to be connected, absorbed into life. The ways and means of that absorption are multiple the way of the mystic, the adventurer, the family, the lover, friendship, the arts, politics, commerce, to name just some - always and everywhere binding the great search for unity. This search also involves the attempt to condemn/ destroy/ obliterate/ let lay dead what unbinds - one of our earliest collective moves. A truth is something that must be guarded; it must be nurtured. It begins in fragility. A truth may come as gift, but it can leave us swiftly. We have to make an effort to live in the truth that has come upon us and which nourishes us if we wish it and its benefits to continue: for that is what truth is, something carried across time by being embodied and re-enacted. Truth can leave us as we sleep - until evil wakes us up.

7. Love and the Limits of Justice

“‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra in Portable Nietzsche, 217.

Love and hatred are the forces of creation and evil is the terrifying act which forces us to hate and love more than we ever thought was possible. That is what the writers of the Old Testament knew who made Satan the adversary who assisted God’s work. It is also what Goethe saw as the essential character of Mephistopheles, that devilish clown who quite likes the “old fellow” and who knows that he is “the part of every power which always wants evil and always creates good.” 141 The devil is he who always negates, always destroys, who enables Faust to destroy not only the one he loves, but all of those who matter to the one he loves, including his and Gretchen’s own child. Once Faust has made the formulation “In the beginning was the deed”, he is able to enter into the stream of life, from which he had hitherto been separated. But that stream is generated out of love, and that’s why Faust can only be redeemed once he loves, and the quality of his love will be tested. His inner impurities are all given reality through his deeds. Mephistopheles knows only too well the real character of Faust’s sentiments which push his claims of love. Faust is a poem which radically departs from the Enlightenment humanism which stands behind the swelling liberal and radical sentiments of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. If its celebration of energy makes it understandable why Karl Marx could hold it in such esteem, its message, nevertheless, runs directly counter to any kind of social narrative which would make the purpose of creation the emancipation and protection of the victims and the weak. And nothing could be further from Kant’s moral legalism than Faust. Faust is an unfettered celebration of individual possibility; there is no deference to the collective. On the contrary, it shows the hypocrisy and fear which holds society together, and it shows how the creator must free himself from routines and restraints of the everyday. It is, however, not a political tract. Politically Goethe was so much more conservative than most of his artistic contemporaries. He was never a friend of the French Revolution and he had no radical sympathies.

116

Love and the Limits of Justice

___________________________________________________________ Yet there is nothing conservative about Faust. It is purely and simply a dramatic poem which captures and sings the requirements of creation. Goethe is looking for what generates more and better life. In this respect he was the father of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard who both saw that one of the terrible delusions of modernity was that in the pursuit of everyday comforts we would lose sight of the truth that out of despair may come greatness and that greatness does not need a group of elected or appointed people to make it happen. The greatest blessings of humanity happen primarily because of the loves and hates of those who pass on their pain and find ways to redeem it. The horrors of slavery lay at the basis of the good times of rock and roll. This does not mean that in the infliction of cruelty one can morally justify the act to oneself because of what one will achieve: no slave trader knew he was contributing to something called rock and roll. What it means is that we do not know where suffering will take us. Nor do we know where its lack make take us. Indeed, the lack of suffering may itself simply lead us to devise unconsciously different ways to suffer so that we can create. In no small number of instances, lack of suffering may be equivalent to creative death. In contrast with Goethe and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is the kind of thinking which above all wants to create lives without suffering. Of itself this may be noble and ultimately desirable, but the manner of the elimination is all-important, likewise the content. For the elimination of suffering may be one further way in which the death-force is served. It is in this light that the sovereignty of the ideas of justice and equality (as the good themselves) within our reflexive culture need to be looked at with some incredulity, especially when, in a secular age, they would be the essence of what demands the minds’ and hearts’ complete service, that is they would be the heirs of God. In this respect, the logic of our reflexive culture continues to operate within the paradigm of the Enlightened philosophe whose task was to free society of prejudice and thereby contribute to a more just one. As P. N. Furbank reminds his readers in his biography of Diderot, the philosophe “was a man who not only reasoned but lived by reason, and was thus “a pre-eminently social and civic-minded individual, one who - as the anonymous article in the Encylopédie was to put it - regarded civil society as his ‘divinity’, and to whom Reason was what grace is to the Christian.” 142 It was the same Enlightenment, though, that was so troubled by the realization that reason is never disinterested. Hence it is never pure, with the possible exception, although this concession is far from always granted, for purely formal elements of logic or, as Kant had argued, cognition. Whereas a reformist Christian like Luther saw reason as always God- or devil-driven, we might say love or death driven, the

Wayne Cristaudo

117

___________________________________________________________ Enlightenment view of reason was that it is always driven by hidden, natural (for the mechanists), or (after Marx and Nietzsche) social/ cultural determinations and forces. Our reflexive culture’s faith in reason is faith in a reason always troubled by ideological/ cultural identities. That is to say, we inheritors of this faith in civil society are pulled between faith in justice as equality and the questions: “Whose justice? Which rationality?” 143 With the later questions justice dissolves back into power as such, which is why also Carl Schmitt was able to survive his Nazi past, and become one of the most widely hailed political and legal philosophers of the twentieth century. Equality (again more due to widespread faith than irrefutable reasons) repeatedly emerges as the moral savior of justice, as what gives it its divine status. But it is constantly thwarted by the economic imperatives of growth and prosperity, the “reality of the bottom line,” as politicians like to say. Thus, in spite of some consent among certain groups with common interests and shared stakes in the discourses of our reflexive culture, we remain as torn apart as the god Dionysus when it comes to being sure about either justice’s content or the real scope of its demands. Yet the repeated appeal to its help alone shows that it is a great power. But love is a greater power than justice. For it is love in its most demanding form - sacrifice - which is necessary for justice to be born. And justice cannot sustain itself indefinitely if it is not fed by love. The grave danger of making justice the predominant power of social life is that in its pursuit we continue to build a loveless, anodyne and anonymous world which becomes ever more legally bound. For justice is realized only in law. But law, when it is merely human law, has no connection with the love we hunger after, but rather it is the compromise and curtailment of this range of desires/ behaviours for that which is always elusive and which love seeks. To be idolatrous toward justice distracts us from seeing the evil that is generated and that does not fall into justice’s net - the evil of extra-legal manipulations and deceits and emotional abuses and their kin. For the Jews and Muslims for whom God’s law and God’s love is one, justice is close to Godliness. But the political culture of modern secular societies inherits the dualisms that were generated within the Christian world, not the least of which is the separation between human and divine law as irreconcilable legislative spheres. To be sure, the great Christian teachers of natural law, such as Aquinas, saw that human law should conform as much as possible to natural law (natural law being the law of the reason that we have as natural beings and which is granted us by God). But the Christian mistrust of worldly powers alerts us to the realization that God’s love and God’s justice will never find complete

118

Love and the Limits of Justice

___________________________________________________________ expression within any regime. While there is no shortage of secular rulers who would have their citizens believe that they can provide all that is necessary for the good life, secular regimes do not need to reconcile the justice they provide with God’s love. And where liberal democratic regimes have emerged, in spite of the propaganda of the particular legislators occupying office, there has been a general acceptance of the limits of justice. That is, most people know that justice will not deliver us our highest goods, just as it will not deliver us all from evil; justice only ever delivers some people from some evils. Justice is a moment in the movement of evil - it is a reactive force. Matters are not helped by the modern concept of justice, as opposed to the more classical and nuanced understandings offered by Plato and Aristotle, being so focused upon distributive questions and being so dependent upon the idea of equality. Equality is a late addition to justice. It is a very long way from it origin, which is revenge. Injustice is an infliction, a deprivation of part of one’s life, whether in the form of the body or property. Justice is originally the reaction to this infliction. It is the drawing of life from the perpetrator of wrong in order to revitalize those affected by the wounding, a lifeline, a means of revitalisation, a replenishing of energy. The blood feud is the first expression of justice. It is not, in its inception, impartial or disinterested. It is as remote from being a philosophical idea as a child is from being an adult. It is a necessary act of restoration and reparation, a way of rebuilding, healing wounds - moving into a new body that has resulted from a dangerous or deadly infliction of the creature we had previously formed. Closely related to this is the fact that initially law is the way to ameliorate violence within a protected domain, to prevent the potentially ceaseless animosity caused by violence and to stabilize social formations in order to protect individual and group violence by securing one’s status and protection of one’s property and setting out the conditions of their entitlement. Justice is originally a retributive force, although even by the time of Aristotle the question of just distribution takes on a matter of urgency: for, as Aristotle saw with typical clarity, states are wrecked by the animosity generated by envy and greed, by great poverty and great opulence. In modern economies with the great unequal distributions of wealth that occur a range of questions have arisen about economic growth and justice. Marx, for example, believed that to talk of capitalism’s inequities was not a question of justice but of economic inefficiencies which only socialism could solve - had socialism been an effective economic model Marx’s argument would have been more compelling. On the other side of politics Friedrich von Hayek claimed that the idea of

Wayne Cristaudo

119

___________________________________________________________ distributive justice was a piece of superstition and that the mechanics of its implementation would play political and economic havoc as a body of redistributors would arbitrarily favour one set of issues and claimants at the expense of another, ultimately making the rule of law unworkable, as people would inevitably see all the talk of justice as mere pork-barrelling and self-interest. As one of the few economists who correctly predicted why command economies would lead to bottle necking, lagging production and inevitable consumer shortages in both quantity and quality, Hayek’s arguments are always worth considering. In contrast to Hayek’s and Marx’s mistrust of the idea of distributive justice, was John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice which was a work dedicated to providing a distributive theory of justice based upon the simple idea of justice as fairness. In the last quarter of the last century few books did as much to revive the discipline of political theory as this one. It was celebrated and criticised in a never-ending stream of journal articles, especially throughout the seventies and eighties. The critics divided into two main camps: those who found fault with the model because they had problems with the excessive reliance upon the concept of equality, and those who found the model not sufficiently egalitarian. Others also noted the abstractness of the ends being sought. Essentially Rawls wanted an abstract good, freedom, to be parcelled out in an abstract way, fairly, so that another abstract good, social equality, could be attained. It is difficult to imagine a work more contrary to the vision of Goethe, not to mention Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Irrespective of the virtues or otherwise of the idea of distributive justice, Rawls’ social vision is symptomatic of a way of conceiving of social and political life which is based upon an importance given to social justice and a conception of power where love and evil can be safely ignored. In this respect it continues in the tradition of Kant, who had said that one should be able to erect a constitution to contain even a race of devils. In Kant’s case, he was explicit about the need to expel all passion and any appeal to love because these, he said, were heteronomous forces, which only sullied any judgment or rule grounded in the moral autonomy of the rational subject: indeed, a subject could only be rational, autonomous and governed strictly by the formal nature of its own syllogistic capacity. Law would generate law. Thus could the moral law underpin just laws (whose observance was not dependent upon the purity of the moral will of those complying with it) and a republican government would guarantee our freedom because it would be but the extension of our moral autonomy. What critics of Kant had objected to immediately was his claim that self-consistency was a sufficient criterion to evaluate the worthiness

120

Love and the Limits of Justice

___________________________________________________________ of a moral claim to have universal status and thereby be a moral law. As Hegel argued, the value of the subject to be universalised already is operating within a concrete sphere of life with its own ends and purposes, what Hegel called “the ethical life.” Instead of playing games where one is involved in pretending one does not know whether we should do something, one needs to look at the specific ethical form under which one is operating and see how that forms part of the ethical life of the entire community. Perhaps nothing so shows the problem as the case used by Kant in his argument that it is never morally permissible to tell a lie: the example is of someone intent on murder asking a third party, who is shielding the potential victim, about the latter’s whereabouts. Kant’s argument is that by lying one renders truth impossible and the “liar” is depriving the intending murderer of his humanity and moral dignity. But the question Kant’s formalism cannot answer is: what is the proper unit of meaning which should be used for the formulation of the moral law? Why stop at “lying” rather than “lying to a potential murderer,” which is the commonsensical answer? Ultimately Kant’s kind of formalism is unconvincing, and hence, in spite of much of Kant resonating through international human rights legislation, the formalism has never carried weight. While Rawls is attracted to the virtues of principles, his formalism is far less stringent than Kant’s and hence more seductive. Rawls believed he was defining a principle of justice for a liberal democratic society which would be so reasonable that it could command social consensus. His starting point was to come up with a reasonable procedure and then, once that had been established, to identify the principle which he thought must emerge from that procedure. The procedure he came up with was the idea of “a veil of ignorance.” That is, a fair procedure would be one in which no one had any knowledge of his or her life condition; no one would know their status, their identity, or their interests. Parties, behind the veil of ignorance, seeking a just principle would design the principle, not knowing where their place in society might be after the principle was applied. The point of this was that only then could one be completely impartial. They would, in other words, come up with the fairest set of conditions because they might not have an advantaged place within the society. Many critics attacked Rawls for the idealism of the method. Some argued that no one could do this because it is neither possible nor desirable to detach oneself so completely from oneself or one’s community. Some argued that some would take a risk in the hope that they may be privileged, so there was no guarantee that this procedure would deliver a fair conception of justice. But Rawls was not so much wrong in the desire to find a universal principle in which one takes

Wayne Cristaudo

121

___________________________________________________________ one’s interests out of the picture - for the impartiality he tried to reach through this method is to a large extent what people want from judges (and justice as equality, as fairness, is a judicial ideal). Rather the problem with the theory lay in the fundamental idea of power at the basis of the project. From the outset Rawls has an idea in his mind about the kinds of things which are necessary for a good life - they are rights, liberties and wealth. These things are what give people power. This is indeed the typical well-meaning “liberal” view of power. It is, quite deliberately and certainly it is well intentioned, strictly egalitarian and idealist, as is evident from the principle this procedure yielded: “first, people must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair and equal opportunity; and second, they must be of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged member.” 144 Rawls goes into enormously elaborate detail about the procedure (the Theory of Justice is over five hundred pages long) honing each concept so that its precision can maximise the argument. But he does not deal with the fact that the idea around which being a victim gravitates is so arbitrary. This is most conspicuous when we take the term at the heart of the “difference principle,” the “least advantaged.” It is meaningless because one cannot measure this. This is because life’s favours (which may prove to be curses) and life’s misfortunes (which may turn out to be blessings) are unevenly distributed. Rawls does not seriously deal with the fact that suffering is not necessarily bad, let alone unavoidable. The issue I am underscoring here is not whether the state should or should not interfere or deal with this set of hardships as opposed to that set - a political problem which is enmeshed in issues of social mores, scarcity, competing claimants, political opportunity, interest group pressure and the like. Rather it is the issue of whether a signal is being sent out to have people construct their hardship in such a way that they become caught up in a competition about whose hardship is greater in order to procure an advantage from it. It is a recipe for self-pity and selfishness, no less corrosive than the selfishness at the other end of the wealth scale. The problem goes to the heart of the affliction facing modern industrial societies, which is not, in spite of an army of academicians and journalists who would lead us to think money and power solve everything, an affliction of shortage of money, and nor of insufficient political equality, but, as Julie Kristeva, succinctly says, “crises of love.” 145 These crises are the crises of everyday lovelessness, they stretch across classes and genders and races and ethnic groups. They are the lacks that display themselves in the range of addictions and they show the empty centre of modern men and women; rights and money do not and cannot fill them. Freedom of itself does not fill them either - the panoply of bonds available in a liberal

122

Love and the Limits of Justice

___________________________________________________________ society does not change the fact that some are deadly and some enriching, and that what seems lovely may be deadly and what is hard may be enriching. Nor does addiction or despair become alleviated through the spread of equality. In his depiction of veiled selves and under the singular term “disadvantaged,” a term that relates directly to and remains limited to opportunities of material resources and office holding, Rawls has smothered such qualities and conditions as ugliness, sickness, dying, loneliness, foul-smelling-ness, psychopathy, self-loathing, pathetic-ness, not to mention being a loudmouth, or strange - that is the massive variety of life’s afflictions which, in the course of a life-time escape none. Rawls is well meaning and not a fanatic, but the world he believes he is fixing is an abstract one that has little to do with the contingencies and sufferings and loves of everyday life. Indeed, he is so convinced of his abstractions and of the ability to justly manage society he even argues that luck has to be eliminated; merit too is false because it is based on luck rather than justice. Rawls has simply done what so many other people who think about power do in our society - he has oversimplified its nature so that it serves a particular political purpose, but at the expense of the truth about reality. This allows for material benefit from affirmative action programmes, or administrative positions chosen on the basis of such a principle, but its price is the furtherance of the widespread delusion that this kind of justice would enhance people’s power and make for a richer and more rewarding life for the society as a whole. Further its selectivity about what is most important takes our attention away from where human attention is most needed. If the trouble with society is its vacuity, the indifference toward the neighbour, an overall lovelessness that spans the generations and which devours people internally, a strategy like Rawls’ may make more people “Comfortably Numb,” but to what good purpose? Rawls’ Theory of Justice, like ever discourse which wants to equalise the unequal social reality which lies before it, takes creation as finished. It wants to redistribute what has already been made, been done, instead of exploring the creative prospects of, to take up Rosenzweig’s formulation, Self-World and God making, which is what love does. Love is a greater power than justice because it is a more creative power, but also because, as Emmanuel Levinas says, “Justice comes from love … Love must always watch over justice.” 146 But it is a much harder power to fathom than justice, because it is not an abstraction. There is no definition that is worth very much, though there are infinite poetic opportunities for its expression. And one must know something about love to be able to discern its presence and absence, while one can have almost no selfknowledge but write about social injustice and social inequality. Love as a

Wayne Cristaudo

123

___________________________________________________________ flowing force is not, nor can ever be, an idea. Justice, on the other hand, easily slips into being an idea as soon as law is detached from love - and God is the only sign we know that is capable of completely harmonising love, law and justice, though even his history suggests his justice and love easily fall into tension with each other. As opposed to Rawls and those who wish to lean too heavily on justice, it is important to bear in mind that a power in its initial phases is always fragile and that the genuine cry for justice in a heartless world may be the beginning of great power. The cry for justice is often a means for mobilizing hearts and hands and minds. Rosenstock-Huessy in a letter to Will Herberg, where he praises him for his critique of Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, made the point that natural right is misunderstood if it is not grasped in the Jewish way: as the right to implore one’s neighbour for help (that very right which the Nazis took away from the Jews, and which all totalitarian regimes extinguish in their “enemies.”) 147 Justice becomes a great power when it is a response to a living cry. But what makes it so powerful is the brutal shock and horror of injustice, the loudness of the wound that makes the universe itself cry out. The potency of justice lies in the fragility of its cry. And hence it is as much bound up with feelings as reasons; reasons about the human lifeworlds are always “laid over” our feelings, hence their susceptibility to becoming mere rationalisation, rather than illuminations. Thus too our feelings about injustice are often our best guide, but our feelings become blunted and lose their way when we don’t pay proper attention to our experiences - and there is no more pernicious move made by the reflexive mind than the pronouncement that someone is merely the “bearer” of the variable they wish to construct an “agent” under. Outside of certain creative careers or buying real estate or involvement with espionage, no one has ever met an “agent,” nor a “man,” nor “a woman,” nor “a bourgeois, nor “a worker,” nor “a white,” a “black,” etc.. The powers and limits of a person cannot be contained in boxes. The more abstract and general our demands for justice, the less useful and truthful justice becomes. Justice requires practical wisdom, not merely the application of a general principle. But because justice strives to be law, and because human law and love have long ceased to be identical, justice is ever in danger of turning into its opposite, of becoming reason at the expense of our attention to the reason behind the cry. Indeed this too is the problem with politicised speech becoming primary, de facto to be sure in the Christian world, but de jure under the triumph of humanism. With “just” policy and “just” laws as its end, and “just” judges, “just” policemen, “just” jailers, we superimpose an idealist world over this one where there is a vast chain of “good,” “well behaved” human beings who

124

Love and the Limits of Justice

___________________________________________________________ are ostensibly mere receptacles for the law in its pure radiance. Even in the formulation one can see that where justice is claimed too often, it is but a smokescreen. Further, it is not that scrutinizing the behaviour of judges and policemen is of no social importance, nor that prisons need not be scrutinized. That is not the point. Of course we can posit counterfactuals and use them to assess what is, and be prompted into action by them. The problems is that when we pay too much homage to these counterfactuals and delude ourselves about what we can do by following the path from morality to justice to law, as if law smoothed out the contingencies of life rather than was a means for generating new contingencies. Every prison, every type of confinement of the freely circulating energy, is the verification that evil forces force. In this sense evil is victorious even when justice holds sway, a point that was central to Foucault’s work and which gives it a validity beyond any empirical errors he has been criticized for. To counter evil we form a variety of techniques and we give them legal status. We must even legitimate the forces (evils) we will use. They must be just. Justice cannot overleap the vital spirits or energies that we are. We want to believe that it can. Evil still spreads in ostensibly just places. How could it not? How could life simply stop because we decide to use language a certain way and to perform certain kinds of actions with certain rituals? Of course, anyone who thinks about what really goes on in the sites of justice will know that while some, perhaps even many, at certain times will try to ensure that justice be done, evil too will still get done. Evil does not need majorities to take effect. It is simply an energy wanting to be active; it is just doing its thing. And we are its material. And the language and sites of justice is as much part of it as anything else, including (mist-directed) love, i.e. love under its direction and in its service. In fine, those who believe too much in law see evil as a contingency that law can conquer and bring within its fold. The doctrine of original sin, by contrast, shows a much more profound understanding of what we are capable of, even when we make laws and prisons. Even in the deepest hell love can manifest; even in the most just kingdom evil can hatch. One does not despair of the injustice of justice if one does not begin with an exaggerated faith in it in the first place. Justice is a survival tactic, a reaction to powers over which we have little or no control and which do not fit our plans and desires. The good it brings is due to the wrong and suffering experienced. All who receive real justice understand that it would be far better had the injustice not been done in the first place. Good lawmaking in a just society tries to limit the future wrong; the belief that we can have a society where there will be no future wrong is to

Wayne Cristaudo

125

___________________________________________________________ misunderstand the power of justice and the power of evil. It is a religious faith. The realization of heaven on earth will not be the triumph of justice, but the dissolution of law and justice altogether. Is this possible? All evidence suggests not. But we are the species who continually renders the impossible possible. But that rendering, to repeat, will not be realized primarily through justice. Justice is too narrow a conduit to transport all the energies we need for such a large task. That the lion will lay down with the lamb is part of the messianic faith that has done so much good and evil. Those story tellers and subsequent writers of Genesis had the astonishing thought that if we could return to the beginning of creation and be witness to each irruption we would know that life is good, we would witness, after the birth of each new creation, the source itself affirming, as if overtaken by surprise, the wondrousness of the heavens, the earth, its fruits and creatures. Such wonders compel even a brooding, hitherto silent, force to praise its own makings after its stirrings create. Those storytellers of the birth were in many ways no different from other storytellers dispersed in the various social formations that had (no less astonishingly than life itself) evolved to orientate, protect and enslave the inner and outer powers as well as others of their and other kinds. The feeling that life is astonishing is one of the earliest motives of storytelling. How such astonishment came to be precedes the telling of that other primordial narrative: that it is terrifying. How could something so astonishing, so good (“and it was good” booms the creator after each new creative command is realized) become so terrifying? One answer, again from the storytellers of Genesis, was that a line of perverse possibilities, a line of temptation (to be greater than the creator) ran through the creatures: the serpent to the woman to the man. The elevation of animality, beauty and misplaced trust above the mysterious act of creation was seen as both the source of misery and the beginning of a new comprehension of labour and death. Previously, in Eden, labour and death did not exist. Men and women and creatures, then, conspired through a series of mutual temptations, seductions, delusions, false responsibilities, and evasions so that they fell into knowledge of labour and death in order to have the very meaning of their existence reconfigured by the reality of their knowledge. The Messiah would come into this world and take us forward, yet back, purified and wiser where evil would no longer touch us. The one who would overcome evil. The evil all gathered and sent to their place of damnation. A world without evil. We dream on and on and believe that God too shares this dream. But in the time we live in, in the time where the Messiah will never come or has either come and left a trail of bloody ruins as well as new forms to

126

Love and the Limits of Justice

___________________________________________________________ contain the spirit, evil is ever connected to the earth and to us. We must learn how to deal with evil, how to see all the world as formations in process, some evil, some not, but even the not as potentially so. The messianic might, in other words, not have anything to do with him who comes because either he has already come or will never come, or will come and be mistaken as a madman, or not be seen, except by the mad and the fanatical. Instead, together we will form the Messiah. As RosenstockHuessy puts it, citing Gregory of Nyssa: “Humanity should become God. But that cannot happen without all other human beings becoming God.” 148 But the formation will be the product of the unknown (grace) combined with our own goodness of heart and the potency of our vision: a vision that sees the evil in our own heart, that does not just see it in the Other or at the moment when it is too late, when the victims are already screaming. This is ultimately the difference between the fruits of morality and that of love. As Jacques Ellul writes in The Subversion of Christianity: Revelation is an attack on all morality, as is wonderfully shown by the parables of the kingdom of heaven, that of the prodigal son, that of the talents, that of the eleventhhour laborers, that of the unfaithful steward, and many others. In all the parables the person who serves as an example has not lived a moral life. The one who is rejected is the one who has lived a moral life. Naturally this does not mean that we are counselled to become robbers, murderers, adulterers, etc. On the contrary, the behaviours to which we are summoned surpasses morality, all morality, which is shown to be an obstacle to encounter with God. Love obeys no morality and gives birth to no morality. None of the great categories of revealed truth is relative to morality or can give birth to it; freedom, truth, light, Word, and holiness do not belong at all to the order of morality. What they evoke is a mode of being, a model of life that is very free, that involves constant risks, that is constantly renewed. 149 The creation of the kingdom of heaven is not a moral or just act but an act of great love, a love that we as a species have frequently dreamt and sung of, hoped and prayed and, as is our damnable stupidity and desperateness, killed for (thereby having substituted the dedication and discipline, which is its precondition, for fanaticism, puritanism, selfrighteousness and rules and laws and fears of our own powers). “Yes,”

Wayne Cristaudo

127

___________________________________________________________ says (the d)evil, “I am the Other. Never you. Never you.” And with a kiss adds “I love you.”

10. Alchemising Evil

“Organized religion had left most of us bored, at best. The standard way of looking at political faith had failed. Now we were looking for a light shining bright enough to illuminate our worlds and our minds … We were looking for God.” Bill Bentley’s cd notes to Roky Erickson’s I Have Always Been Here Before: The Roky Erickson Anthology, Shout Factory, 2005. “Tendency of modern poetry to Satanism.” Notebook entry of 1797 by Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, edited by E. Behler with J.J. Anstett and Hans Eichner (Munich, 1958-) 18:24, 64.

Our dealings with evil extend from the attempts to annihilate the evil ones, to attempts to purify ourselves so that it leaves us untouched, to attempts to transmute the energies of evil onto other planes where the hunger for evil is satisfied without evil’s accompanying destruction taking place. The first of these strategies is what binds ideologies and movements as seemingly different as National Socialists, revolutionary communists, ethnic or national chauvinists, Islamists, crusaders and witch-burning Puritans - indeed all perpetrators of reigns of terror done in the name of some God. Robespierre’s chilling formulation “virtue is terror” applies as much to men and women in pursuit of secular purity as religious purity. This is the strategy whereby evil does its work in the name of its destruction, and where humans become devils as they pretend to be saints. The evil enemy thereby legitimates the “good” evil. Groups who believe they are divinely sanctioned to destroy the supposed bearers of evil place themselves beyond the realm of dialogue and beyond the possibility of the metanomic because they cannot bear contradiction - they can, however, deploy its existence, and the tolerance which sustains it, as a means to eliminate it. Speech for such groups is a closed circuit, a petrifying force which will be self-devouring once it has

130

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ extinguished its other. In spite of this pattern of (the d)evil being played out so often, the commonality of the form creating the same content is overlooked by those who are dragged into its formation by the allurement of the contingencies of the moment. But we should never overlook the number of souls seeking the thrill of their own and others’ hell, nor the willingness of members of a group to pass over all sense of right and wrong toward others, nor the rationalisations operating within a collective to legitimate the infliction of violence, nor the attraction that control over others has for those who can barely control themselves. That groups may have to defend themselves with force from the possibility of annihilation is undeniable. And the mere appeal to tolerance by those who would live tolerantly easily becomes a moment in denial’s arsenal. Tolerance is a grave danger when one assumes that all men and women seek the same ends, and that all want to enrich life’s possibilities and actualities. Defence against evil is always tragic, but whatever nobility one can achieve in such a situation - the point has already been made powerfully by Camus - lies in the acceptance of the limits of one’s task, and of the specific evil one is confronting, an attempt which becomes a delusion when it too becomes faith in the elimination of evil per se. Such defence is an act which may generate bonds of love in the struggle to overcome the evil the group is fighting, but it does not of itself touch the other modes of generation of evil in the group’s midst. Fighting evil is already an openness to evil - which is what saints and martyrs know. Hence they seek to overcome evil by means of their own purity, or rather their complete openness to the purity of (God’s/ the way of) love. The saint’s shape can be discerned, in spite of other important differences, in the Jewish faith, Christianity, Buddhism Taoism and some Sufis. It is not Mohammad’s way - his way is the way of the warrior described above. The saint’s way is an arduous way and for the few. The lack of its genuine mass appeal can best be seen by the distance between the life of Christ and the evils done in his name, between the rare moments of saintliness and the routine moments of destruction. The existence of such souls as saints is a source of constant nourishment for many who cannot themselves live in such purity of heart but can appreciate its radiance, perhaps by even striving to do so. To some extent all religious ritual and prayer is an attempt at self-purification, and may provide stability and strength of character. But of itself ritual does not make a saint and it can just as easily be part of the routines of the demonic. The third way is the way of sublimation or alchemy. It is a way in which love strikes a deal with evil by recognizing its truth as a form of energy while seeking to find an outlet in which love too can flourish.

Wayne Cristaudo

131

___________________________________________________________ Whereas the first two ways are ways of purity - a false and a true purity the alchemical way is a way of working with rather than expunging impurity. Rather than seek to change our nature it is concerned with discovering new sites for that nature to be expressed. We mainly recall alchemy for being the attempt to change lead into gold, but it was also the means by which the energies of the material world, as well as the energies of the alchemists themselves, would be purified. Thus Proclus, the neoPlatonist alchemist (the practicioner of what he calls the sacred art) writes in Diadochus: Just as [true] lovers move on beyond the beauty perceived through the senses until they reach the Sole Cause of all beauty and all perception (noêtôn), so too, the experts in sacred matters (hoi hieratikoi), starting with the Sympathy connecting visible things both to one another and to the Invisible Powers, and having understood that all things are to be found in all things, they established the Sacred Science (tên epistêmên tên hieratikên). They marvelled at seeing those things which come last in those which come first, and viceversa; earthly things in the heavens in a causal and celestial manner, and heavenly things on the earth in a terrestrial way … Working in this way, the masters of the Sacred Art attracted some things through Sympathy and repelled others through Antipathy. For instance [as an example of antipathy], sulphur and bitumen (asphaltos) purify through the sharpness of their smell, and one sprinkles seawater because it partakes of the empyrean (or fiery) power. And so in their Initiations [or Consecrations] and other Divine Ceremonies (tais teletais de kai tais allais peri tous theous therapeias) they would choose the appropriate animals and other materials … Longing to go beyond these and similar things [that is, they wanted to go beyond the powers inherent in physical objects], they came to know the Daemonic Powers which are essentially linked to the activities of nature and physical bodies, and by this means they drew down (epêgagonto) these Powers in order to communicate (sunousian) with them. From the Daemonic Powers they moved straight up towards the actual Doings of the Gods (autas…tas tôn

132

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ theôn…poiêseis), instructed in some matters by the Gods themselves, but in others moved by their own efforts to an accurate conception of the appropriate symbols. And so, leaving nature and physical operations below, they came to directly experience (echrêsanto) the Primordial (prôtourgois) and Divine Powers. 150 While there were Christian alchemists, such as Ficino and Paracelsus, the alchemical way is generally the pagan way par excellence. That is, it is a way that ranges across all known cultures and it is an excellent way. It is the best of the pagan, the best of all. And hence it is not renounced by the transcendences of Judaism or Christianity which both preserve the alchemical in their own forms of world making. The pagan is the creative force itself, perhaps most evident in that art and the state are pagan creations (again a point made by Rosenzweig in his The Star of Redemption). All peoples, even the Jews, participate in the realm of the pagan. If the earth is to be redeemed it may be because of the love of a power articulated originally by the Jews who instructed us to love each other - and this love was only glimpsed in shattered forms from the pagan perspective before it became universalised through Christianity as a meaningful command, even if not widely obeyed. Nevertheless, the genius of the pagan is its devotion to creative (and destructive) forms of the spirit. Our creative forms exist to enriched us in as powerful a manner as possible, to extend our capacities through time and across generations. To put it theologically, can we truly be the wonder that would redeem God’s creation by being worthy companions and thus redeeming him from his loving solitude were it not for our inventiveness of forms of love and creativity? Plato wrote of love, in The Symposium, that it leads us to immortalise ourselves in our institutions. But he saw that it did not stop there - love drove us to transcend the bodily completely. Of this transcendence we have no knowledge - intimations, in dreams and visions, faith and hope, perhaps reasons - all but mad promises. But we are the species that dreams of immortality and through our faith and work seek to realize it. Some, like Plato, are driven to think of the body as the tomb of the soul and hence they seek to flee it. Even Buddhism’s nothing taps into the same dream. Others, like Jews and Christians, tend toward the body itself being resurrected (though one finds neo-Platonist variants here). Some, like de Sade and Spinoza, immortalize matter. Certainly there is a line of continuity between the desire to live forever in Christianity and the modern scientific attempt to cure us of all disease and pain. When Descartes laid out the vision of the new world for future scientists in The

Wayne Cristaudo

133

___________________________________________________________ Discourse on Method he believed that medicine would eventually cure us of disease and death. Modern science has followed ever since in this faith. The place of immortality is ultimately less importance than the fact of its lingering presence in our myths, prayers and deeds. That it may be quixotic no more makes us abandon the possibility of it as something to be longed for than the perpetual injustice of the world makes us long for a world without injustice. The idea of the last judgment points to a world in which all our deeds are known and those who are worthy of perpetuity come back to life. As subjects, though, we are always sources of spirits and forces beyond us: our subjectivity is always epiphenomenal and the moment of its self-consciousness - as opposed to apperception - only ever forms a part of our life, the waking part, and not even for its complete duration. It is ultimately the deeds - and the love (itself but a deed) that motivates them which is at the root our intentionality, which is redeemable. In the purity of creation love flows into its deeds, and we are but the vehicles for that flow. This process was observed by the writers of the Bhagavad-gita, by the writers of the Bible, by all who seek even the momentary transcendence of the act of perfection (such as artists and athletes). Our desire for transcendence is intimately bound to our acts of transcendence, and our transcendences are intimately bound with the forms and arenas in which they may take place. The redemption of ourselves and of the world is but the victory of our transcendences over our inertia and petrification and destruction. Our great aids in this process are the creations of zones and arenas of transcendence. These are meaningless without the vital presence of souls that justify their existence, and they are ever endangered by energies which would offer false transcendence - wealth and fame for example, luxurious by-products which need not, but can so easily, conspire to destroy gifts of nature and genius. All our forms of ethical life and civil society have no other rationale than the furtherance of life’s perpetuity and transcendences, whether that be in the most elementary manner as a means of the species’ mere survival (the basis of the family, the tribe and the state) or the enhancement of choices and opportunities for life’s enjoyments and our explorations of each other, the world and God(s). We are - and always will be - a long way from having discovered all of these forms - and as a species the danger is that cataclysms destroy our knowledge of what we once knew. Further, unless we realize the redemptive nature of the task we are engaged in, unless we see that as the purpose of life, then we do not realize the potency of the powers at our disposal. The Church was the greatest attempt ever to integrate the richness of pagan life within a universal framework. We have learnt much

134

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ about why it failed, but we need to relearn from its achievements even if that overarching form is still a precursor to something altogether new. All of this stands in the closest relationship to the alchemical process of life’s enrichment. From the moment that tribes have sought to transmute actual war into war-games there has been an awareness of the process of the transference of energies from the plane of the real, with the assurances of destruction, to an imaginative arena where the spirits giving birth to the conflict may walk or fly away. The great poetic account of this transmutation is given in Homer’s The Iliad and it was not merely a poetic fantasy for the Greeks for whom the Olympic games was a moment of peace in an endless sea of conflict. Homer gives us a glimpse of a future where war’s joys are transposed onto a field of play so that the wretchedness of real war is banished. His description of the games, held on the verge of Troy’s destruction, is a cause for tears of joy. For here we see the greatness of Achilles restored, after his rage had sent him outside of the limits of humanity (limits already rendered barbaric by the Greek armies having been reduced to little more than brigands and marauders squabbling for booty). We first encounter Achilles’ strength of character and leadership capacity in the first book of The Iliad where he tries to restore some sense to the raging Agamemnon. He speaks for the common cause and he does so with heart, but his humiliation at the hands of Agamemnon sets his soul on fire, and that blaze contributes to the near destruction of the Greeks. But in the games he is wisdom and magnanimity incarnate. If one weeps for joy at the restoration of his humanity - perhaps bigger and larger in this zone of peace - there is also the knowing sorrow of his imminent death. And then there are the tears for the fall of Troy, for what will befall Priam and Andromache and for Hector who was a wonderful and loyal man. Homer sings of heroes and he has his heroes admire the heroic quality in itself, irrespective of whose side one is fighting on. But his song is also of the sorrow of wastage of such beautiful energies and possibilities which will leave one side vanquished and even the victors robbed of their loved ones. When Priam and Achilles embrace and engage in their admiration of each other, the reader cannot help but ask - but why must this moment of triumph and peace pass? Why must the matter go forward unto bloody death and annihilation? For the Greeks there was no other way. But their genius (to use an old term fallen out of fashion in a time which is sensitive to the need to see the contributions of all to God’s glory and less sensitive to the genius of creation’s moments) lay in their discovery of means of sublimation - along with the games, the theatre and the democratic state itself.

Wayne Cristaudo

135

___________________________________________________________ With the theatre, as Aristotle powerfully understood, they had discovered that the violent forces of life could be transposed into a zone where they could be played out for an audience. The release of fear and pity had a potentially sobering effect for an audience who could share in the suffering of their fellows. The theatre provided the opportunity to take note and learn from another’s suffering (something that Plato did not adequately grasp). It also provided a further opportunity for people to communicate and commune with each other in a common state of empathy. With democracy a political form had been discovered in which conflict - concerning interests, ends and means of a community - could be mediated and compromises worked out which could benefit all by ameliorating the potential for civil war and the need to overthrow leaders. Democracy was never a guarantee that human decisions would be excellent or its citizens just (though modern radical democrats since Rousseau have tended to assume this). And in this respect Plato’s criticisms of democracy - its tendency to demagogy and flattery, its blindness to its own injustices, and its danger of imploding and giving way to its enemies, thus opening the way for tyranny - still carry weight. But no other form of governance has so successfully solved the problem of peaceful succession, even if its record with external peace is mitigated by the character of its citizens and its geo-political circumstances. Politics is no doubt an important means for the production and coordination of energy - but there is a widespread tendency among intellectuals to exaggerate its importance as a means of creation, which comes from an exaggerated emphasis on the will. The limitations of the political are the limitations of the kinds of forms of transcendence that conform to the specific configurations of political action - which is but one range of possible actions summoning and activating an appropriate range of potencies, and leaving a plethora of others untouched. Potencies need to be called forth, and we do this from the world, from the mystery that was once happily called God and from each other and the possibilities of calling are shaped by the energies that are produced, stored and distributed within a particular formation or social site. With the games we can see how easy it was for them to degenerate when we consider that the Romans, the people who considered themselves the heirs to the Greeks and the most cultivated people on earth, preferred the blood of gladiators and men and women being torn apart by beasts, to games where the pursuit of the perfection of the competitors - as the most compelling and vivid exhibition of what a man or woman could achieve - was the end of the activity. In Homer’s depiction of the games he shows the joy of the competitors. Achilles so forgets himself in his

136

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ enthusiasm that he acknowledges Agamemnon as his superior (in javelin throwing) - that is, he transcends all his old grievances and rancour at being made to feel inferior to a man he constantly describes as of lesser worth than himself. In sport men and women can dissolve themselves into the achievement of their goal. Saints, artists, sportsmen and women are amongst those whose lives are formed in the knowledge that love is the disintegration of one self into a higher self. Witnessing this dissolution, and the triumph that it brings with it, is an electric activity for its audience. Sports lovers know that sometimes they are participating in a great feast of the spirit - a feast that bonds supporters, not just to each other but to the game itself. All athletic training is exactly this: the pursuit of something higher; a victory, which at its highest level, is the pushing of the boundaries of the humanly possible. Hence too cheating in sport is a violation of the sacred, something that sounds silly to people who see sport as frivolity, but not to the kid who uttered those words now immortalised in the American psyche, “Say it ain’t so Joe.” That kid knew, through his love, that the sacred is higher than victory and that money is pathetic in comparison. That sport is an extraordinary example of the transmutation of the potential dangers of youthful energy is something that is often ignored, for we tend to take its cultural presence in the Western world for granted. One may be more appreciative if one recalls first that war is primarily conducted by young men - young men who often have no place allocated to them in their society to undertake more peaceful activities and whose restlessness, sense of adventure and wrath at perceived injustice periodically leads them in search of generals or a new order. Thus too it is not surprising that for Machiavelli one of the major problems of statecraft was the question of what to do with the vigorous energies of young men. He believed that a republic was the best political form for dealing with it, as young (and not just young) men would compete with each other for honours within the state and they would be used in imperial maintenance and, where desirable and realistic, expansion. In peacetime Machiavelli feared that prosperity would lead to the implosion of vital energies, and lethargy and contentment would make a kingdom vulnerable to its enemies. Amongst the world’s religions Islam’s founder was particularly attuned to the vigour of masculine energy - thus the importance of the division of booty, the prospect of polygamy, the prohibition of alcohol, the need to veil women so that men do not get excited, the promise of virgins for martyrs and the sacramental place it gives to the Jihad. Whereas Machiavelli and Mohammad were writing for a time where peace between nations and peoples was conceived at best as short lived (never possible for Machiavelli, and not until all the world is Muslim for Mohammad), the

Wayne Cristaudo

137

___________________________________________________________ theorists of modern liberal states envisaged that commercial societies had no need of war to achieve enduring prosperity and eventual perpetual peace. The emergence of modern sport in modern industrial societies has proven to be a major source of entertainment for young men and, to no inconsiderable extent, for young women. It remains one arena in which energies that have the potential to do so much harm are largely contained and used to provide joy. We are reminded of how wildly dangerous these energies are when every so often a members of a sporting team are charged with pack rape. The alchemizing of energies is not a fail-safe mechanism - nothing is fail-safe - but it does provide a safety that is far more immediately benign than explosive outbreaks of wrath in revolutionary periods. A similar process to what occurs in sport in modern industrial societies also takes place in music and dance. This too can be seen to have its basis in the Greeks, in the Dionysian cults from which drama eventually emerged. The creation of zones for the release of frustration and anger - whether in the form of gangsta rap or death metal and other genres - is a means whereby hate of the world’s hypocrisy or the sheer emptiness and blandness of the world that parents are offering their children becomes creative. Millions of youth are listening to songs of evil, suicide, murder, mass destruction and, more generally, the demonic. 151 It itself is but another mode of the aesthetic of the demonic in which de Sade excelled, and whose lyric prototype is to be found in Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. Baudelaire understood that the production and distribution of energy in modern life - from its city, street and housescapes to its economic sites to its stimulants and intoxicants (including the places where they could be procured - brothels, pubs, opium dens) - could not be simply wished away by a retreat to nature’s pristine state, as an older generation of romantics who took their cue from Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker held. Further, he understood that the modern is both an alchemical process and a kind of Satanic defiance: albeit it was a defiance based upon the tangible reality of the evil spawned by the spleen and ennui of the modern. Baudelaire felt himself to be almost alone amongst French intellectuals in taking evil and the demonic as a real substance - hence he was a curious hybrid of atheist and Catholic, of the secular and the religious. The transition within romanticism that leads from the Rousseauian idyll to Baudelaire’s dark lyric of the decadent is repeated within rock (after it has dropped its roll). Having absorbed the foundational elements of blues and sweetening it with the melodic range of folk (“the peoples’ classicism”), which was invariably bound up with love of each other and love of nature (From a Flower to a Garden being

138

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ the name of an earnest Donovan album without a drop of self-parody), heavy metal takes them into dark lyrical, hammering rhythmic and cacophonous sonic directions and punk will slash it all to ribbons of anger. By 2000 the mainstream of youth music was being nudged by lyrics such as Slipknot’s “fuck it all! fuck this world!/ fuck everything that you stand for!/ don’t belong/ don’t exist!/ don’t give a shit!/ don’t ever judge me!” 152 Almost a decade earlier Kurt Cobaine, no less angry, but in a masochistic pose sang: “Rape me Rape me, my friend Rape me again I’m not the only one Do it and do it Again,” while in the 70s the Sex Pistols sang as shocking a song as has ever been written: “Belsen was a Gas” which urges people to kill somebody, kill yourself. Our society has created zones of hell where one can sing any and everything. Sometimes there is humour, and often the music is breathtaking in the beauty that emerges through all its discordances and sonic distortions. With such lyrics and the constant parading of demonic symbolism it is no surprising that such activity is dangerous. Indeed even when rock music was more about hip-swivelling than suicidal tendencies and deeds, let alone the carving up and disposal of dead bodies (as much of it today is), it was seen as the devil’s music. Attacks upon the power of music to corrupt the soul, don’t, of course, start with Christians burning records of Elvis Presley. They go back to Plato’s attacks on music from the first book of his Republic when he spoke of music inserting itself into our consciousness and then leading to the overthrow of all public order. A relatively recent reworking of Plato’s critique can be found in Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music where he attacks the music of monsters (he singles out REM [!] and Nirvana) thus: Music soothes, cheers and pacifies; it threatens the power of the monsters, who live by violence and lawlessness, Those lonely … beings are astounded by music, which speaks of another order of being - the order which ‘the footstep hears, as the dance begins.’ It is this very order that is threatened by the monsters of popular culture. But much of it is also a kind of negation of music, a dehumanizing of the spirit of song. 153 For Scruton, as with Plato, music is not primarily about expressing the hell within us, but creating harmony within ourselves so that we become more integrated with each other, that is to say, more civilized. Scruton sees contemporary popular music as responsible for creating monsters and pushing society into social anarchy. As with Plato,

Wayne Cristaudo

139

___________________________________________________________ his argument emphasizes the mimetic dimension of human beings while attempting to devise a stable and harmonious social and political order. To be sure, a host of bands would be flattered that they are creating a more anarchic and terrifying social disorder. But while the Platonic dogma that leads from discordant sound and song to discordant society may have an intuitive appeal to it, it does not strike me as being supported by any facts. The popular music before and during the two world wars of the last century was hardly music of rage and discordance; popular music in Nazi Germany was as light and breezy as popular music in the rest of Europe. 154 And the concentration camp guard did not go home and crank up Cradle of Filth or Human Piss Parade. Plato and Scruton, at best, have cause and effect the wrong way round: that is, sensitivity to the discordances of the world and within the self may well lead people to search for discordant modes of expression (an insight at the basis of the mystery schools and philosophically appropriated by Aristotle in his theory of the cathartic nature of poetry). This hypothesis would, at least, fit with the fact that while there may be a lot of order in the modern world, not a lot of people feel harmony within it. Radiohead’s “Fitter, Happier,” which begins with “fitter happier/ more productive/ comfortable/ not drinking too much/ regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week)/ getting on better with your associate employee/ contemporaries/ at ease/ eating well (no more microwave dinners and/ saturated fats)” and ends with “fitter healthier and more productive/ a pig/ in a cage/ on antibiotics,” is but a variant on Nietzsche’s “last man” which beautifully captures the bi-polar character of the age: the luxury of comfort and the hell of the soul’s spiritual desert. Or, as Smashing Pumpkins put it in “here is no why” from their album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness: “and in your sad machines/ you’ll forever stay/ desperate and displeased - with who you are.” The real problem, however, is not only that people don’t feel harmony, it is that often people don’t feel at all. It was precisely this recognition that led to the creation of punk music. As Richard Hell put it some thirty years ago: “People don’t have to try not to feel anything anymore; they just can’t.” 155 Or as Johnny Rotten said, in just two words, “Pretty Vacant.” Thus when Scruton makes the claim about the social value of harmony, rhythm and melody that has been lost on the youth (and not just the youth) of today, he fails to really grasp the disease he wants to cure. That is, feeling monstrous is the price being paid for being able to feel at all. His moral opprobrium has blinded him to the inefficacy of his cure. The moralist may wish that people with their complex and contradictory needs could simply be forced into the template of the ideal;

140

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ the religious or ideological zealot may readily kill those whose don’t. The example of a music which expresses the society’s discordances with itself is an act which any metanomical thinking understands as having value precisely because it expresses the real needs and longings of those dissatisfied with the world of which it too must be a part. What is allimportant in the music of hate is that it is still music, and it is the shared creation and communion that is the positive loving spirit in operation. Of course, the gap between word/ music and the signified deed must be retained if this is to be said. But that it is retained so often, and breached so rarely, is of the utmost importance. Anyone familiar with rock or metal magazines will know that the bands who sing their hatred are, with one or two exceptions, not themselves murderers and rapists and that they do not want anyone to actually kill or rape someone. Also important is that there is no target group of the hatred. A white power band, for example, in its blaming of all ills on a variable such as race remains less in service to the dancing devil than the killing devil, precisely because the music is merely a means to a specific political end involving the real extermination of actual victims. But bands which seek to expose the demonic reality of a world of hypocrisy, through their adoption of the demonic, are reflecting back the demonic hearts of the “pure” to the “pure” who fail to see their role in the build-up of the world’s evils. The most powerful truth that comes out of the slew of bands who play (the d)evil(’s) music is that they do not simply make the monster the Other, but a real condition to be dealt with. Those who are in hell know the world is not the way it seems. The stable normal is not the real as such but most often a façade or mask that conceals the more brutal behaviours and energies of the monstrous the monstrous is not a departure from the normal, but a coeval, vital and creative presence. Not to acknowledge it and work with it is to be deluded. It may seem perverse to argue that there is something beneficial in the preparation for youth’s entrance into adulthood via a musical odyssey through the perversions that make up hell: but to see the damage and to express it thus is far superior to having one’s son march into a high school and randomly shoot out all his inexpressible hate of the world that we have made. Certainly, there are those who find the mimesis of hatred an intoxicant which fuels their own hate, but the hatefulness of one’s own soul, and the hatefulness of the world will not disappear because we all learn to sing happy songs. The bands from hell are conductors of energy who externalize and give shape to powers which would otherwise threaten to engulf and drive us mad, largely due to the amorphous and depletive character of the energy of despair and depression. Through its artistic transmutation the

Wayne Cristaudo

141

___________________________________________________________ feeling of evil, or the pain that is the sign of its presence, has found a place to be, and another way to be. It is no longer everywhere and all the time. Moreover, as an element of a music and song its very nature is changed. One ceases to be in total despair when one has sufficient energy to leave the despair and use it as energy for creation. Even the most Satanic bands, who sing of the liberation of death, vindicate the opposite through their staying alive to sing and play, through the ecstatic shape that they conjure up and participate in. The music, then, is the vital sign of the triumph of life over death. Such an approach to spirit may well be called a negative theology, for it does surround itself with symbols of darkness, despair, destruction and death which are inescapable components of life (and, no doubt, such sites of expression are fraught with danger). These Ds put a mighty brake on the “progressivist” world-view shared by modern conservative and radicals alike who focus their attention upon material accumulation, administrative systems, and social manipulation, and have the idolatrous belief that political action can solve spiritual problems. It does not matter what kind of society we live in, the truth of darkness, despair, destruction and death must find expression. These four Ds have entered through music, through the machines, technologies and rhythmic motions that are appropriate for the age. We might say they have created a form of music in order to make themselves visible in a world which rationalizes, compartmentalizes, and hides their presence, as if they were mere contingencies of existence, mere intruders who interrupt the mechanical repetitions and routines of a peaceable life of plenty. In modern socio-economic formations, which demand sacrifice from so many to provide the goods and services we have, a means for the conduction of social energy has evolved that is socially benign. It is a means for releasing the energies of despair and destruction that build up in our world: it is a way for the demonic to itself find a form in which communal love, even within the common love of the negative and the negation, creates something more healthy than its alternative - a story, a play, or song about suicide or murder rather than an actual suicide or murder. Art for all it limitations is the essential accompaniment of our contemporary world-making, even more necessary, more essential than religion for many in the industrial world, particularly Europe - and indeed, a constant means for conveying the enduring symbols and regions of experience originally activated by and received within the religious. This is not to say it will suffice and the more ritual-bound structures and strictures of religion will not also reoccupy the empty zones untouched and unsatisfied by art. While our modes of entertainment (including professional sport) are (with various degrees of spirit and success) expressions of love’s

142

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ triumph over death - most notably for the artists themselves - creation triggering more creation is love’s fulfilment. Whatever its shortcomings and all politics falls short of life’s power and, at best, is just one of love’s spirits - the basis of the liberal conception of economic freedom is a fundamental recognition of the role of freedom and creation in the expansion and transmutation of our powers and the world. This is, for example, the basis of John Stuart Mill’s argument for a society based upon liberty: Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one. Those who have most natural feeling, are always those whose cultivated feelings may be made the strongest. The same strong susceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control. It is through the cultivation of these, that society both does its duty and protects its interests: not by rejecting the stuff of which heroes are made, because it knows not how to make them. A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character. If, in addition to being his own, his impulses are strong, and are under the government of a strong will, he has an energetic character. Whoever thinks that individuality of desires and impulses should not be encouraged to unfold itself, must maintain that society has no need of strong natures - is not the better for containing many persons who have much character and that a high general average of energy is not desirable. 156 Like Tocqueville, whom he admired, Mill was aware of the dangers of modern political freedom turning against itself as groups would band together to hold back the freedom of others for their own political and economic advancement in the name of equality. Mill himself became increasingly open to the possibilities of socialism being a superior

Wayne Cristaudo

143

___________________________________________________________ economic system, a move not uncommon amongst his contemporaries. Whether rightly or wrongly, the view he had of individual liberty was thoroughly consistent with earlier political liberals who believed that by people pursuing their own economic interests they would be driven to be more creative and attuned to the wants of others. Earlier still, in his imagined Abbey of Thélème, Rabelais had formulated the simple creed of the modern - “do what thou will.” His reason for the creed was that the suppression of appetites had turned our spirits small and mean and stupid, and only by a rejuvenated vitality of the passions could we live again in the fullness destined for us. A similar kind of thinking stands behind Mandeville’s famous phrase, “private vices, public benefits,” virtue frequently being but a mask by means of which the selfish can advance their interests, whereas true social advancement consists in the pursuit of appetites, unhindered by the “virtuous.” In all such cases the appeal is to the unharnessed creative energy which is to be had by our goals being commensurate with the liberty to follow our nature. Modern industrial economies do not provide all the spiritual and economic nourishment people need, indeed in some ways and some groups they are among the least adequate social formations for doing this and freedom is frequently constrained by circumstance as well as ability. Even when modern societies are successful in creating high living standards and comparatively high levels of employment (something a number of states choose not to grant so that those in employment may have higher living standards than they otherwise would have) they have not eliminated the horrific boredom and meaninglessness of many people’s lives, not to mention the mass infantilisation that is generated within them. Yet the commercially driven economy is a system that coordinates vast amounts of energy and there are great pockets of vitality and inventiveness to be found within it. The socialist appeal to solidarity was an appeal to one of love’s virtue - but society is too big of a master, and it is never experienced in its entirety, when it is invoked there is always an abstract dimension behind the appeal. Only specific relationships sustain love. Loving the neighbour is a more concrete imperative, and that is hard enough as to be impossible on a universal scale. The love of reward, on the other hand, is an elementary kind of love compared to these higher kinds of love and it may often have negative consequences; but it is a real energy. And it is this energy that is tapped into by the market. But it is the love of the creative activity within which one is engaged which is our strongest hope for a common future and the real test of the market’s right to a future will lay in its ability to facilitate inventiveness, creativity and the forms of solidarity they require.

144

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ The market is a massive communicative and creative field for the production, storage, distribution and transference of energy, for the communication of wants and desires and means for their satiation. It also brokers in the trial and error of talents to be traded on the basis of demand and profit. The great potential of the market is that it opens up the range of possible demands for potencies - the dangers so well expressed by the young Hegel and in Marx is that for a number of industries, particularly those in need of “unskilled” labour - human talents and possibilities are reduced to mechanized movements no less stultifying and wasteful than slavery. While it is not the case that there is a necessarily happy congruence between our productive and consumption-based interests and capacities, modern industrial societies are comparatively more rewarding of the vast array of our attributes, whether inherited or cultivated. Attributes - such as good looks, mental agility, street-wiseness, sexiness, ability to mimic, tallness, youthfulness, ability to blow, nimble fingers, strong hands, acute hearing, a steady hand, a fine eye, a sense of humour, a good sense of balance, command of language (who could catalogue the limits?) - are sought with sufficient frequency to enable relatively large numbers of people to earn their livelihoods. Talents are not, nor can they be, evenly distributed throughout a society. Although they are expressed and are developed socially, and developed over large blocks of time, they are also natural gifts; and nature and society are more wily and abundant in gifts than any school teacher’s or bureaucrat’s plans and dreams. If one begins from the position that civil society is bad because inequality exists and that the state can solve all our social problems, then one has little chance of ever seeing what most people do with their power. This was the position of the young Karl Marx who, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, argued that the horror of capitalism lay in its subordination of all life’s powers under the one overarching power of money. Marx’s insights into alienation retain sufficient salience for these writings to still exercise their power and humanity. Even apart from the fact that the danger of interpreting the totality of a society through the prism of the dominant mode of production is based upon an a priori assumption, which undoubtedly sometimes has great heuristic value, it is phantasmic to see one class of people as the bearers of evil and their opponents as saint-like, if not in their being, in their structural historical function. Marx was convinced that when capital and capitalists were eliminated most of our social ills - such as unemployment, poverty, alienation and crime - would be eliminated. And hence to that end he saw our freedom consisting in a series of absences: the absence of private property, the division of labour, the law, the state, money. Indeed the very things which Shakespeare’s Gonzalo, based on a speech taken from

Wayne Cristaudo

145

___________________________________________________________ Montaigne’s “On Cannibals,” spoke of as being absent in a truly human paradise were all for Marx obstacles in the way of the realization of what he called our “species being.” Marx’s vision, as Walter Benjamin correctly saw, was a messianic one - sullied by the faith in its imminent political realization. But the value and hence historical steadfastness of all these (to be sure limited and frequently restrictive forms which Marx sought to abolish) is that they facilitate the process of energistic transfer which is the key to our growth. The value of such an analysis as Marx’s, though, lies in reminding us that these are all secondary powers, and when they become the ends themselves to be worshipped - and all powers (like all Greek gods) tempt us into idolatry - then they become death forces and incarnations of the very evil we sought to overcome through their original deployment. Nevertheless, commercial society can only be sustained, as Locke suggested, by making reasonableness and cooperation “natural” conditions for the peaceful protection and accumulation of property and, as Montesquieu argued more convincingly, if people develop the virtues of industriousness. The economic success of countries such as South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong is bound up with the virtues of industriousness and discipline that have been developed over time, just as states embroiled in war and corruption find it much harder to develop. Prosperous commercial societies, then, suggest that their success is due to the elimination of certain kinds of evil. But evil does not magically vanish from the modern commercialised world. The (d)evil just becomes corporate. Being able to alchemise some forms of evil does not means it all disappears - evil, like love, is always on the move, and is constantly being generated by us. Thus evil does not cease because there is no war. It can create all the conditions of war in those who live in peace, in the peacetime arenas of courts, for example - something that Plato was particularly attuned to as he observed how oratory functioned in ancient Athens to deprive good people of their reputation and property. Indeed evil circulates in ever kind of structure. Where it lacks oxygen is where people love what they are doing and what they do is enhancing the neighbour so that love itself grows - so easy to say and so hard to do. Every attempt to say how this love should be is a lie - the forms of love’s expansion are also the very forms in which evil is generated. We simply cannot tell from the mere presence of a form whether love is dominant or even present (although once evil has accumulated sufficiently its dominance is all too visible): a family can be in the grip of evil, just as an office, a club, a tribe, or a state can be. We also cannot say a priori how love must be passed on. Love is the free gift which deploys whatever powers it can for its expansion. We create hell by demanding that love look this way and not

146

Alchemising Evil

___________________________________________________________ that way, take this shape and not that; this is the real truth which is being sought for and defended when people valorise difference and defend a range of multi-cultural policies. 157 But culture is not, no more than the family or liberal society, love itself. Love sends forth one spirit after the other to realize its immortal longing; every time we attempt to contain it as just this belonging to those just like us, it dies, and we die with it, which is what (the d)evil wants. The tears of the God of love are but the tears from our own bloody flesh when (the d)evil triumphs.

Notes 1. Spinoza rightly asked why it was that those who so insisted that they served a loving God were so singularly intolerant and deficient in the love they espoused. Almost a hundred years earlier Montaigne had pondered the same question, indicating that peoples who were closer to nature lived more healthy and fulfilled lives. And Rabelais invented giants to show us how small we had become through the maddening stupidity of our political, legal, academic and religious superstitions. 2. Though there has been a turn in the direction I seek to follow exhibited in books such as Julia Kristeva’s Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Luce Irigaray’s The Way of Love (London: Continuum, 2004) - however both are more attached to the vocabulary of the psychoanalytic paradigm than my reflections have taken me - and Gillian Rose’s beautiful and poignant book, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life (New York: Schocken, 1997), a work which represents a radical departure from her earlier neo-Hegelianism and which was written after she had been diagnosed with cancer. While doing my last revision of this book I also came across Jean-Luc Marion’s, The Erotic Phenomenon, translated by Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). I was delighted to find such a kindred spirit. I share his dissatisfaction with philosophy’s shortcomings in the face of love. 3. Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1791-1801, edited and introduced by Hans Eichner (London: Athlone, 1957), note number 1471, 151. 4. David Fidelier, ‘Eros and the Circle of Divine Love,’ in Lapis Magazine Online at . 5. See his A General Account of Bonding in Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity And Essays on Magic, edited by Richard Blackwell and Robert de Luccca, introduced by Alfonso Ingegno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, translated by William Hallo (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 275. 7. Ibid, 283. 8. On the resilience of the pagan gods see Jean Seznec’s The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, translated by Barbara Sessions (Princeton New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981). 9. See for example Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (Norwich, Vermont: Argo, 1969), Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal

148 ___________________________________________________________ Tradition, (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), Rodney Stark’s, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), and Thomas E. Woods Jr’s, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, (Washington DC: Regnery, 2005). 10. Ivan Illich and David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, as told to David Cayley (Toronto: Anansi, 2005). 11. Eric Gans “The Unique Source of Religion and Morality,” in Anthropoetics 1, No. 1, June 1995, 1. 12. Franz Kafka, “The Great Wall of China,” in The Basic Kafka, Introduction by Erich Heller (New York: Washington Square, 1979), 71. 13. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vermont: Argo, 1970), 42. 14. Ibid, 59. 15. Ibid, 132. 16. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Comparative Religion - 1954, transcript, Lecture 11 (Norwich, Vermont:Argo, 1992). 17. Ibid, Lecture 19, 10. 18. See my “Redemption and Messianism in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption” in Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German Thought, edited by Wayne Cristaudo and Wendy Baker (Adelaide: ATF, 2006). For his continuing relevance as a social thinker one should read the various, and always interesting, pieces which refer to Rosenzweig by the anonymous journalist “Spengler” in Asiatimes Online. 19. Rosenstock-Huessy (1992), Lecture 20, 9. 20. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 31. 21. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 12. 22. See my essay “Parricide and Deicide in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,” in Great Ideas in the Western Literary Canon with Peter Poiana, (Lanham: University Press of America, 2003). 23. Kant’s introduction of the (“regulative”) idea of moral progress into nature as a means of counter-balancing his dogmatic ethical ground of intentionality is a great example of a philosophy having to recognize truth, even when the system wants to protect his “dignity” from it. 24. John Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 469-473. 25. Ibid, II, 3. 26. Rosenstock-Huessy, Lecture 8, 17. 27. Rosenstock-Huessy, Lecture 20, 10. 28. Bonhoeffer reluctantly arrived at a decision in favour of assassination. But even this willingness to do violence must be seen in the light of the one true law of the spirit which is lacking from the fanatic -

149 ___________________________________________________________ here is an absolute singularity at work, a singularity which is not a reduction of a specific to a type, the enemy at large which can become anyone whom is sacrificed for the ultimate end. 29. Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya, 1939 - 1945, edited and translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), January 11, 1945, 410. 30. Ibid, 408-409. 31. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, translated by Neville Horton Smith (London: SCM, 1955), xv. 32. Ibid, 4-5. 33. Rosenzweig, 415. 34. Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, The Diaries , 1941-43 and Letters from Westerbork, with a foreword by Eva Hoffman, introduction and notes by Jan Gaarlandt, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 173. 35. Hitler can be seen saying this in the television documentary, Hitler: A Profile - the Seducer. In spite of this, the commentator of the show says that Hitler was motivated not by any love of the German people. Apart from the obvious mythical shrinkage of what constituted the “German,” the commentator wants to hang onto a pure interpretation of love, and does not see that love is, as the old saw rightly gets it, (a) blind (force) and that its purity comes from the purity of the what of its love and the preparedness to be changed by that power of reconfiguration. A love, such as Hitler and the Hitlerites had, is based upon rigidity and annihilhation, hence a love that is hostile to life and in its intermingling with hatred is evil. 36. D. Cajius Fabricus, Positive Christianity in the Third Reich (publisher not named, 1937), 72. 37. Helmuth von Moltke Letters to Freya 1939-1945, translated by Beate Ruhm von Oppen (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990), January 10, 1945. 38. Hillesum, 150. 39. Hillesum, 154-5. 40. Hillesum, 178. 41. Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling, (New York: Vintage, 1992). 42. Ibid, 99. 43. Ibid, 147. 44. “Neil Alcock had become a god - the first white god in Africa, as far as anybody knows.” Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart Blood and Bad Dreams: A South African Explores the Madness in His Country, His Tribe and Himself, (London: Vintage, 1991), 425.

150 ___________________________________________________________ 45. Ibid, 409. 46. Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by Herbert Read (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975 [1951]), 11. What he says here applies to every one of any political persuasion who rationalizes any murder as if it were not a terrible crime. And yet Camus does not give himself the moral luxury and existential cop-out of being an intellectual pacifist. 47. See my “Hegel, Marx and the Absolute Infinite,” in International Studies in Philosophy, XXIV/I, 1992, 1-16. 48. Camus, 28. 49. Ibid, 23. 50. Ibid, 27. 51. Ibid, 268. 52. Ibid, 269. 53. Augustine’s understanding of evil as privative has to be understood within the context of his neo-Platonic understanding of what is meant by the real - the real is what truly is, what is not destined to be conquered by death: God and the soul are real, for Augustine. 54. Goethe’s Faust, Part One (my translation), 1337-1350. 55. The concept of phantasm is an essential component of Pierre Klossowski’s work. But his use of the term and the purpose he deploys it for are not mine. My use is closer to Lacan’s - but I do not wish my use of it to suggest I am a Lacanian, even less a Freudian. Lacan’s focus, interests and accompanying vocabulary are very different to mine. The neo-Hegelians, with their concept of estrangement/ alienation/ reification, had intimations of the problem, but they quickly succumbed to their own phantasms of species-being, the self and communism. 56. None of the above safe guards, however, prevented the God of the creation of heaven and earth from also becoming part of a phantasmic order. 57. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 725. 58. Leviticus, 18:21; 20:2. 59. Part of this chapter has appeared in “Damage: A Logic of Evil,” in Minding Evil: Explorations of Human Iniquity, edited by Margaret Sönser Breen (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2005), 87-108. 60. Gamaliel Bradford, Damaged Souls (London: Constable, no date). 61. J.B. Ballard, The Kindness of Women, (London: Harper Collins, 1991), 151. 62. Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart Shot, 189. Also see 156, 210, 333, 339, in which Mikal emphasizes the role that damage plays in the story.

151 ___________________________________________________________ 63. See, for example, Sylvia Fraser, My Fathers House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987). 64. Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (New York: Vintage, 1979). But even had he had information about the Gilmore family, Mailer’s role in the Jack Abbott affair makes one doubt whether he was capable of seeing what Gilmore was a part of and what was making him. While Mailer was researching The Executioner’s Song, Abbott had begun corresponding with Mailer about prison life. On the basis of his literary ability, Mailer campaigned for Abbott’s release, which was secured. Within days of getting out of prison, Abbott stabbed and killed a waiter who wouldn’t let him use a toilet. Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast (New York: Vintage, 1981), the book that briefly made him a literary star, is such a hateful, and hence powerful, yet self-pitying, work that only someone who has no idea of what damage does and what the damaged can do would have not read the intent to kill in the text. 65. Gilmore, 271. 66. Ibid, 122. 67. Ibid, 175-176 where Mikal after saying “the outrage and unfairness of being beat that way became a sticking point in his heart” recounts how Gary would spend his entire life enacting the drama of his father’s punishment challenging guards to beat him harder then challenging them yet again by abusing them. Not insignificantly, Gary’s last words were: “There will always be a father.” 68. Ibid, 183. 69. Ibid, 183 70. Hart, 42. 71. Gilmore, 271-272. 72. Jeffrey Burton Russell’s The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), the culmination of a number of previous books on the devil, is an excellent exploration of why it is foolish to dismiss talk of the devil as delusional, instead of exploring more thoughtfully what such depictions of the devil tell us about the collective wisdom we have gathered about evil. 73. The story of Jimmy Boyle’s transformation from one of England’s most wanted gangsters to youth worker and sculptor (detailed in his Sense of Freedom (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1977) is a classic story of redemption. 74. Gilmore, ii, emphasis in original. 75. There are countless literary, cinematic and televised depictions of this phenomenon, but few works in any form depict with such precision how evil and folly create madness as Shakespeare’s analysis of it in

152 ___________________________________________________________ Hamlet and King Lear. They conjure worlds where the powers of love have been banished (Cordelia), forced to go into disguise and hence constrained (Kent, Edgar), thwarted by inexperience and parental loyalty (Ophelia), or denied and thus betrayed (Hamlet, Ophelia). In King Lear, Lear is driven mad by his own folly, and Gloucester’s folly creates the condition which makes Edgar have to feign madness (though in his feigning he experiences what it feels like to be deprived of everything except nature’s barest and harshest, thus pushing him beyond the bound of civilisation and into the life of a mad beggar). Ophelia is driven mad by the folly of Polonius, her father. And what drives her will also ultimately lead Laertes into evil, through his conspiracy with Claudius, before losing his life through the dealing. Hamlet, like Edgar, feigns madness, only later to concede that he was, indeed, mad. Hamlet is driven mad by a range of things, which include: his mother’s folly and total denial of the torment her actions have upon him; a traumatic truth conveyed by supernatural means and hence outside of the ken of the public (and legal) view; his being torn between the need to avenge his father and scruples of killing someone, made more complicated by the ir-real means by which he has “knowledge”; and above all his being surrounded by people who have betrayed him and to whom he cannot speak, or even be heard by. With the exception of Horatio, what should be Hamlet’s circle of nourishment friends and family - is populated by hearts infected by treachery. Hamlet can only catch the truth through artifice (the play within the play) in a world whose artifice is such that truth and honour are forced to flee not only the confines of the state and the confines of reason’s reasonable assurances, but, what by nature should be the most honest channels of love, between mother and son, between lovers and between friends. In Hamlet Shakespeare, inter alia, explores the servitude of folly to evil and hence the expansion of evil through its unwitting pawns. However, evil ultimately reveals itself to be foolish: Claudius loses all that he had schemed for, including Gertrude, for whose love he had, in part at least, plotted and set in motion the chain of evils with which the play deals. Likewise, in King Lear we see how folly creates the evil that brings about one’s own doing. Goneril and Regan’s obsequious and manipulative and brutal characters have all been cultivated by their father, so that when he asks the question to have his vanity stroked, they tell what he wants to hear rather than the truth, which as Cordelia (Christ-like in the purity of her folly as Shakespeare underlines) learns, is foolish to tell in the eyes of the world of her father. Having given up his power at the wrong time, Lear is forced into madness by the evil that his own folly has generated in the form of his two daughters who have cast him out, and by his

153 ___________________________________________________________ overwhelming guilt and grief at the wrong he has done to the one daughter who was the very incarnation of the love that had been cultivated by what was best in Lear. Cordelia’s only folly was her truth, and her banishment was Lear’s greatest act of folly. His madness, then, was the abyss his own folly had pushed him into. (In Hamlet madness is the last refuge for one betrayed by love’s usual channels of support.) As so often and brilliantly in Shakespeare the tragedy of one family finds its mirror image in that of another. The family of Gloucester and his sons mirrors that of the family of Lear’s daughters. The additional and differing element is that Gloucester’s folly is not his vanity, but his indifference to the significance of his own actions, in general, and, in particular, the son he has created (while he holds Edmund no less dear than his legitimate son Edgar, Edmund “hath been our nine years, and away he shall again”). He has no idea how smart and how resentful - and what a deadly combination those two characteristics are - is the son he barely knows. Just as Lear must go mad to fully experience selfknowledge, Gloucester loses his eyes in order to see what he has done. For both it is all too much. Evil and madness are the world’s all too much which extinguish its bearers as well as any others who are not powerful/ insightful/ lucky enough to escape its abyss. 76 Astonishingly this is not a criticism of Islamism, but a fundamentalist call to arms. It comes from the Al Qaeda Manual, which can be viewed at: . See also: “The manual was located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an al Qaeda member’s home. The manual was found in a computer file described as ‘the military series’ related to the ‘Declaration of Jihad’.” 77. Max Frisch, Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Biedermann and the Arsonists) (Frankfurt/am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969 [1958]) 32. My translation. 78. Ibid, 44 79. Ibid, 54. 80. As he wrote in a letter on the 1922 Russian Criminal Code: “The courts must not ban terror - to promise that would be deception or selfdeception - but must formulate the motives underlying it, legalise it as a principle, plainly without any make believe or embellishment.” Cited in R.W. Makepeace, Marxist Ideology and Soviet Criminal Law (London: Croom Helm, 1980) 108. 81. Stephan Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge Massachusetts: University Press, 1999). The political hostility to this book

154 ___________________________________________________________ that greeted its publication in some intellectual quarters was a remarkable illustration of the phantasmatized consciousness. 82. Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 87-88. 83. Rosenzweig, 164. 84. Malan, 409. 85. Ayatollah Khomeini, Principes Politiques, Philosophiques, Sociaux et Religieux, selected and translated into French by Ralph Gaïl, (Editions Libres-Hallier: Paris, 1979.) 86. I quote from the German edition, Khomeini, Meine Wörte, 18. 87. Qur’an, Sūrah 9, 38-39, translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2000). 88. Khomeini, 20. 89. See for example Richard Bonney, Jihad: From Qur’an to Bin Laden, (London: Palgrave, 2005). Such works have to downplay the explicit canonical texts which make it so abundantly clear that Jihad is expected of every Muslim capable of fighting, and that those who conduct it are most loved by Allah. The holy role of warfare in Islam is treated with crystal clarity in Al Bukhari volume 4 in its lengthy account of Jihad. A succinct and explicit statement is also provided by Bukhari, 3:46:694, and Muslim, 1:149 “I asked the Prophet, ‘What is the best deed?’ He replied, ‘To believe in Allah and to fight for His Cause.’” The context makes it clear that “fight” means “fight” in the most literal way. Andrew Bostom also provides translations of a number of the most famous Islamic legalists who also underscore its importance. These hadith and legalists find textual back up in such passages (and there are far, far more) from the Koran as 2: 190-192; 2: 216; 4: 95-96; 8: 38-39; 8: 65-67; 9:5; 47: 4. 90. Khomeini, 11-12. 91. Ibid, 21. 92. Ibid, 21-22. 93. The banality of the ends of political purification is always staggering stupidity - whether it be the fishing and hunting offered by Marx, the sense of superiority of the superman by Nietzsche - superbly parodied by Chesterton in his portrait of the superman as a kind of chicken who dies when exposed to a breeze - Chesterton was a man who understood idolatry, see his “How I Found the Superman” in his Selected Essays, (London: Collins, 1936) - the blond tough guys and girls of Hitlerism, or eating pineapples on the moon offered by the Soviets. In a documentary on the Red Brigade two of Aldo Moro’s murderers reflected

155 ___________________________________________________________ that at the time they committed the murder what they wanted was to live peacefully in the countryside. 94. Khomeini, 53. 95. Ibid, 56. 96. To be sure, in the Jewish Bible and Old Testament one finds laws and classifications which are barbaric. But God’s movement is also part of his redemption. Concomitantly, history is intrinsic to both traditions as he reveals himself and is revealed to himself through time, thus does he change his mind and make new decisions. This is not how revelation is conceived in the Qur’an, and such a reading of God, from the Muslim perspective, suggests deficiencies in the Jewish and Christian concepts of God - while from the Christian and Jewish perspectives the God of the Qur’an is not a living God but an inflexible tyrant. However, it is difficult, if not impossible to read the Qur’an without invoking history - especially when one is confronted by the contradiction between how Christians and Jews should be treated. Invariably scholars distinguish between the texts that were written when Mohammad was in Mecca and those when he was in Medina. But the Qur’an’s uni-vocularity and a-historical God (Allah’s word is written and everything necessary to know God is in the Qur’an this too is neither the Jewish nor the Christian way) mitigate against the development of the kind of hermeneutical traditions which characterise Jewish and Christian scholarship. 97. Khomeini, 52. 98. James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault (London: Harper Collins) powerfully brings out just how damaged Foucault was and how that enabled him to see the damaging mechanisms in the world around him. See, for example, 314 and 316. 99. “Dialogue between Michel Foucault and Baqir Parham: On Marx, Islam, Christianity and Revolution,” in Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 185. 100. Ibid, 201-2. 101. Ibid. See chapter 3. Also “The Seductions of Islamism Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution,” New Politics 10/1, whole no. 37, Summer 2004. Online version at . 102. Ibid, 210. 103. This is from Muhammad bin Abdullah, about how his movement away from Islam in 1971 which began with the Pakistani slaughtering the

156 ___________________________________________________________ Bangladeshis: “I saw a well-equipped invading army indiscriminately killing millions of civilians and raping two hundred thousand women. Eight million uprooted people walked barefoot to take refuge in a neighboring country. The institution of Islamic leadership supported the invading army actively, in capturing and killing freedom fighters and nonMuslims, and raping women on a massive scale. Each of four thousand mosques became the ideological powerhouses of the mass killers and mass rapists, and these killers and rapists - these Islamists - were the same people of the same land as the freedom fighters and raped women. That was the civilians of Bangladesh and the killer army of Pakistan in 1971. All the Muslim countries and communities of the world either stood idle, or actively sided with the killers and rapists in the name of Islam.” Muhammad bin Abdullah, “Now I am Guided” in Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, edited by Ibn Warraq (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003), 294. In the eyes of the world, any sympathy for Serbian territorial claims in Bosnia-Herzegovina was lost with the discovery of systematized rape camps. 104. This and some of the following paragraphs also appear in my essay entitled “Evil and the Loss of Intellect” to appear in Perspectives on Evil volume 8 to be published by Rodopi. 105. Romans 3: 23. 106. Homer, The Iliad, 19.178-9. 107. Romans, 8: 22. 108. Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1954), 217. 109. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 4. 110. Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), translated by Dennis Pardee, 1-9. 111. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” in The Portable Nietzsche, 46. 112. This appears in English under the title Practical Knowledge of the Soul, translated by Mark Huessy and Freya von Moltke, edited by Clinton C. Gardner (Norwich, Vermont: Argo, 1988), 41. 113. Aristophanes’ lampooning of Socrates in the Clouds as a sophist who taught his students how to make the weaker argument look the stronger and who causes turmoil between father and sons is singled out in Plato’s Apology as being the real source of the accusation that Socrates had corrupted the youth and had worshipped strange new gods. According to Plato, it was another representative of the poets, Meletus, who led the charge among the living accusers. 114. Rosenzweig, 223.

157 ___________________________________________________________ 115. Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785) in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel AllWill: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, translated and introduced by George di Giovanni (Montreal& Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1994), 244. 116. Ibid, 244. 117. H. and H. A. Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 14. 118. Eric Hornung argues that “fetishes, animal powers, and abstract powers of nature existed side by side” in the evolution of Egyptian religion. Yet as Hornung also points out that from the chalcolithic period (much of the 4th millennium BCE) numerous animal graves with grave goods have been found which suggest a cult of sacred animals or divine powers in animal. Hornung Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many translated by John Baines (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), see 83, 101 and chapter 2. 119. H.W. Saggs, Civilization Before Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 271. 120. Ibid, 288. 121. H. W. Saggs, The Age of the Gods: A Study in the Origins of Culture in Prehistoric Europe and the Ancient East (New York, Howard Fertig, 1970 [1928]), 39. 122. Ibid, 23. 123. Johnannes Maringer, The Gods of Prehistoric Man, translated by Mary Ilford (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960), 18. And “The fact of death does not seem to be grasped by the living. The otherness of death was, of course, very apparent: a living being had become stiff, cold, pale, already in process of decomposition. Yet somehow, in this corpse, the living person continued,” 19. 124. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, I am an Impure Thinker (Norwich: Vermont: Argo, 1970), 37. 125. Ibid, 45. 126. H. and H. A. Frankfort, 163. 127. Ibid, 200. 128. In particular see David Hume On Faith. 129. See for example, ‘The Uni-versity of Logic, language and Literature’ in Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Norwich, Vermont: Argo, 1972) introduction by Clinton Gardner. 130. See “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, translated by Vern McGee (University of Texas Press, 1986).

158 ___________________________________________________________ 131. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, revised translations of the third edition of 1744 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948), 20. 132. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 5. 133. Ibid, 7-8. 134. See Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, California: Golden Sufi Centre). 135. In his Sociology Rosenstock-Huessy makes the interesting observation that “Homer’s favourite word is of course the little word ‘as’. But ‘the one and the other,’ ‘someone else,’ ‘somehow,’ ‘somewhere,’ ‘anybody’ and above all ‘something’ are his real words of disenchantment. These words transform the god of this city or the rites of this clan into ‘a’ God and into ‘a’ rite. From Homer the entire Greek philosophy and science received the new words of comparison, which contain the ‘someone,’ ‘something,’ ‘how’ and ‘a.’” Soziologie: Bd.II. Die Vollzahl der Zeiten, (Kohlhammer, 1958), 225. Laslo Versényi Man’s Measure: A Study of the Greek Image of Man from Homer, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), and The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, translated T.G. Rosenmeyer, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953) also make through cases that the role of visibility and vision in Greek epic also play a major role in the Greeks developing “ideas”, forms for the mind’s eye. 136. Frye, 15. 137. Ibid, 16. 138. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke III: Aus dem Nachlaß der Achziger Jahre, edited by Karl Schlechta (München: Carl Hanser, 1969), 585. 139. The Divine Names can be found, transcribed by Roger Pearse, Ipswich, UK, 2004, online at Early Church Fathers Additional Texts. It is transcribed from the 1897 edition of the Dionysius the Areopagite, Works. . 140. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen Volume 1, translated by J. Baird and R. Ehrman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 97-98. 142. Goethe, Faust, lines 1335-1336. 142. P. N. Furbank, Diderot (London: Minerva, 1992), 23. 143. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press) is the title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s anti-Rawlsian book of 1989. 144. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (revised edition Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 266. 145. Our crises are “crises of love. Let’s admit it: lacks of love.” Kristeva, Tales of Love, 7.

159 ___________________________________________________________ 146. Emmauel Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice and Love,” in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Continuum, 2006), 92. 147. It is worth quoting some of this rich letter dated October 19, 1954, item 471 of reel 9 of the Microfilmed Works of Rosenstock-Huessy available through Argo Press, Norwich Vermont: “John Quincy Adams in his fight against the Gag Rule once said the inimitably glorious words: The foremost natural right is the right of a human being to implore his fellow man’s help. No congress, no slaveholder party may abolish this right. Mr Strauss knows in his heart of hearts that the Jews all over the world have survived on this natural right. Why can he not see it? Why must he deny it? Why must he make it dependent upon the nonsense of a syllogism? Id est, on something extraneous to the immediate right before my system of law is thought out? In this country, Biblical natural law was a necessity after 1660. As the regicides had taken refuge to this country; Peters lived near Holy Oak, their very existence was bound up - as they were outcasts of British law - with natural Law. But it was the covenant of the rainbow for Sem, Ham, Japhet, and no stoic - Platonic nonsense which prevented the people of New England to lynch Peters … The Jews and the Christians and the Pagans meet in this natural Right of Petition, of appeal as Priam could implore Achilles. The first chief Justice of the United States, Wilson, lectured on Natural Law as the Biblical Order before the Revelation of Sinai … Franz Rosenzweig wrote that we were all reconciled in Adam. And that this was the reason why he had to listen to me despite of one (sic) being Jewish the other Christian … Biblical Faith … does not allow for one minute to speak of God without Man or of Man without God. For biblical faith lives by the fact that to speak is an act of faith in God. We have a God who speaketh, and who makes us speak. Perhaps the only permissible definition of god is that he is the power who makes Man speak.” 148. Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Gesetze der christlichen Zeitrechnung, Rudolf Hermeier and Jochen Lübbers (Münster: Agenda, 2004), 280. 149. Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity, translated by Geoffrey Bromiley (Michigan: Eerdmans, 1986), 71. 150. This translation can be found at . 151. The point I am making about music is relevant to literary and cinematic developments and tastes of our time. 152. From Slipknot’s 1999 album ‘Surfacing’. 153. Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 504.

160 ___________________________________________________________ 154. Peter Wicke points out that in 1938 sixty percent of radio programmes in Nazi Germany were devoted to dance and light music. See “Sentimentality and High Pathos: Popular Music in Fascist Germany,” translated by Richard Deveson, Popular Music 5, 1985, 154−5. 155. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock 'N' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N' Roll (New York: Vintage, 1987). 156. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Essay on Bentham, edited by Mary Warnock (London: Fontana,1962), 189. 157. The widespread valorization and essentialisation of culture involves a similar error to the one Kant perceived in the philosophy of David Hume. When it is argued that culture X sees love in this way, while culture Y in that way, this is very interesting, and it is a way of opening our minds to the endless fecundity of love, but it is not an argument about the relativity or unreality of love, any more than Hume’s argument about different people framing different laws on the basis of different associations was a compelling argument against the existence of nature’s lawfulness. Different patterns of causation indicate, as Kant, rightly said, not that laws are meaningless because all knowledge is relative, but rather the a priori character of the concept of causality. Kant rightly grasped that the idea of a “law of nature” involved a priori elements which had to be distinguished from the content of nature’s laws, which may be understood indifferent ways at different times and places. (Where Kant erred was in his claim that he had completely identified the a priori components of our framing of a law and the way those elements were generated.) While I do not wish to suggest that love is a priori in a Kantian manner, my argument about its being a primary power and cultural forms being secondary is analogous to Kant’s point. Love (and this is also true of evil) is a power that precedes our conceptualization of it, and its effects and movements are no more dependent on how it is construed than any other natural forces. The argument put forward by the cultural determinist and relativist is the equivalent of an argument that nutritional laws or chemical processes we don’t understand or think about don’t operate because we have no knowledge of them.

161 ___________________________________________________________

Index Abraham, Aeschylus, Alchemy, Alcock, Creina and Neil, Allah, Aphrodite, see Venus Aquinas, Thomas, Arendt, Hannah, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Atoussa H, Augustine, Bacon, Francis, Bakhtin, Mikhail, Bakunin, Mikhail, Ballard, J.G., Bangs, Lester, Bataille, Georges, Baudelaire, Charles, Benjamin, Walter, Bible, Bin Laden, Osama, Bloom, Harold, Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Bradford, Gamliel, Bruno, Giordano, Buber, Martin, Buddhism, Caesar, Julius, Capitalism, Catastrophe, Chesterton, G.K., Christ, Jesus, Christianity: passim Cohen, Leonard, Cohen, Richard A.,

49, 94 17, 67 6, 130, 131 38, 39, 41, 79, 149 79, 80, 94, 96, 154, 155 24, 110, 117, 148, 158 22 98, 156 2, 99, 108, 109, 118, 135, 139 83-84 1, 45, 76, 79, 100, 101, 150 109 106 74 56, 150 71 112 47, 99, 137 96, 145 9, 46, 94, 107, 133, 155, 158 85, 154 67 7, 28, 29, 32-36, 38 56, 150 4, 114, 147 61, 95 4, 91, 130, 132 79, 136 41, 74, 75, 82, 118, 144, 148 13, 15-24, 28, 38 154 15, 28, 41, 66, 67, 78, 79, 81, 91, 96, 113, 130, 152 27 75

162 ___________________________________________________________ Communism, Dada, Dalai Lama, Dante (Dante Aligheri), Darwin, Charles, Democracy, Democritus, Derrida, Jacques, Descartes, René, Devil,

34, 71, 74, 78, 150, 153 92 4 1, 3, 4, 5, 57, 110, 113 16 78, 135 3, 17 108 102, 113, 132 10, 23, 47, 57, 63, 64, 81, 115, 116, 138, 140 Dionysius the Areopagite, 110, 111 Dionysus, 97, 117 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 9, 10, 20, 41, 56, 60 Ellul, Jacques, 94, 126 Epic of Gilgamesh, 93, 94 Epicurus, 17 Erickson, Roky, 129 Fabricus, D. Cajius, 34 Faith, passim Fascism see Nazism Feuerbach, Ludwig, 95, 102 Fichte, J.G., 32, 102 Ficino, Marsilio, 6, 132 Folly, 19, 45, 70, 87 Foucault, Michel, 82-84, 86, 114, 124 Freisler, Roland, 30-32, 36 French Revolution, 18, 24, 125 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 20, 21 Frisch, Max, 71, 72 Frye, Northrop, 107-110 Gaïl, Ralph, 79, 82 Galileo, Galilei, 113 Gans, Eric, 10, 148 Gilmore, Gary, 57, 59, 61, 62, 69, 151 Gilmore, Mikal, 55, 56, 62, 150, 151 Leibniz, Gottfried, 3, 89, 90 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 45, 65, 102, 115, 116, 119, 150, 158 Hamann, Georg, 95 Hart, Josephine, 55, 56, 58, 67, 68, 151

163 ___________________________________________________________ Hayek, Frierich von, Hegel, Georg W.F., Heidegger, Martin, Hell, Richard, Heraclitus, Hildegard of Bingen, Hillesum, Etty, Hitler, Adolph, Hobbes, Thomas, Homer, Hornung, Eric, Huber, Kurt, Huss, Johannes, Idolatry, Illich, Ivan, Intellectuals, Irigaray, Luce, Islam, Jacobi, Friedrich, Jacobsen, Thorkild, Jews,

Justice, Kafka, Franz, Kant, Immanuel, Keenan, Brian, Khomeini, Ayatollah, Kierkegaard, Søren, Kingsley, Peter, Klossowski, Pierre, Kristeva, Julie, Lacan, Jacques, Lenin, Vladimir, Levinas, Emmanuel,

118, 119 9, 24, 41, 82, 95, 96, 120, 144, 147, 150 40 139 89, 98, 108, 113 6, 113, 158 33-37, 39, 40, 43, 149 28, 30-35, 40, 74, 75, 85, 113, 149 110 86, 93, 97, 98, 111, 134-135, 156, 158 157 32 24 30, 34, 145, 154 7, 148 3, 40, 42, 72, 78, 84, 91, 107, 113, 135, 150, 154, 157 147 5, 38, 52, 71, 79-85, 129, 136, 153156 95, 102, 105, 157 104, 105 2, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 21 23, 33, 36, 38, 43, 46, 48, 51, 74, 75, 81, 96, 97, 99, 101, 117, 123, 130, 155, 159 1, 2, 5, 41, 82, 83, 85, 86, 98, 99, 115-125, 159 10, 148 16, 17, 21, 32, 41, 90, 95, 111, 112, 115, 116, 119, 120, 148, 160 38-39, 41, 149 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 157, 155 1, 33, 34, 116, 119 158 150 121, 147, 158 150 74 75, 101, 112, 122, 154, 159

164 ___________________________________________________________ Locke, John, Luther, Martin, Machiavelli, Niccolo, MacIntyre, Alisdair, Madness, Mailer, Norman, Malan, Rian, Mandeville, Bernard de, Man-god, Mao Tse Tung, Maringer, Johannes, Martyr, Marx, Karl, Metanomic, Mill, John Stuart, Miller, Alice, Miller, James, Milton, John, Mohammad, Moltke, Freya von, Moltke, Helmuth von, Montaigne, Munch, Edvard, Nazism, Nationalism, Naturalism, Neo-Platonism, Newton, Isaac, Nietzsche, Friedrich,

Nihilism, Pagan, Parmenides, Paul, St, Phantasmic,

16, 109, 113, 145 6, 36, 116 24, 33, 136 3, 158 70, 149 59, 151 38, 39, 149, 154 143 41, 104 34, 85 103, 157 4, 28, 29, 32, 43, 49, 52, 53, 65, 66, 70, 83, 130, 136 16, 17, 21, 41, 74, 82, 95, 113, 115, 117-119, 144, 145, 150, 153-155 14, 129, 140 142, 160 20 155 23, 45, 148 79, 96, 113, 130, 136, 155 3, 28, 156 28-35, 38-40, 43 93, 145, 147 8 23, 31, 33, 34, 75, 85 31, 96 9, 91, 94, 95, 96, 102, 103 2, 3, 4, 110, 131, 132, 150, 159 3, 6 5, 16, 20, 21, 42, 48, 75, 89, 92, 94, 95, 97, 102, 110, 115, 116, 117, 119, 139, 154, 156, 158 91-92 5, 7, 16, 17, 46, 74, 101, 113, 118, 132, 133, 147, 159 108 46, 86, 91 30, 31, 32, 40-43, 45-53, 70, 73, 144

165 ___________________________________________________________ Plato,

2 - 6, 27, 71, 86, 98,99, 107, 108, 110, 118, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 145, 150, 156, 159 Plotinus, 3, 77, 78 Prayer, 7, 14, 37, 93, 99, 105, 130, 133 Proclus, 3, 131, 159 Pythagoras, 3 Qur’an, 80-82, 85, 154, 155 Rabelais, François, 52, 143, 147 Rawls, John, 119-123, 158 Redemption, 15, 17, 22, 23, 28, 49, 57, 63, 65-70, 91, 94, 95, 101, 105, 132 133, 147, 148, 151, 155 Religion, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 27, 50, 67, 78, 79, 81-83, 90, 97, 99, 113, 129, 136, 141, 148 Renaissance, 4, 6, 102, 147 Revelation, 76, 94, 101, 105, 126, 155, 159 Reznor, Trent, 56 Robespierre, Maximilien, 85, 129 Rock music, 89, 103, 116, 137, 138, 140, 160 Rose, Gillian, 147 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 7, 13-19, 24, 27, 48, 49, 61, 93, 95, 97, 123, 126, 148, 150, 156-159 Rosenzweig, Franz, 7, 15-17, 33, 61, 75, 76, 95-97, 101, 122, 132, 147-149, 154, 156, 159 Russian Revolution, 18, 24 Rumi, 5 Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 151 De Sade, Marquis, 17, 21, 42, 91, 100, 101, 132, 137 Saggs, H.W., 103, 157 Saintliness, 24, 27, 28, 65, 129-130, 136, 144 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 40, 60 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, 95, 96, 102, 112 Schlegel, Friedrich, 3, 129, 147 Scholl,Sophie and Hans, 29, 34 Scruton, Roger, 138, 139, 159 Socrates, 98, 108, 156 Spinoza, Baruch, 2, 21, 91, 95, 102, 110, 111, 113, 132, 147, 157 Sport, 36, 125, 136, 137, 141

166 ___________________________________________________________ Stalin, Joseph, Stoicism, Surrealism, Venus, Vico, Giambattista, Warraq, Ibn, Wars,

Wisdom, Yahweh,

33, 34, 74, 75, 85 6, 91, 159 30, 40 4, 15 106, 107, 158 156 4, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 29, 31, 40, 49, 73-75, 80, 81, 84, 87, 96, 97, 134137, 145 1, 5, 34, 38, 50, 60, 68, 75, 83, 94, 100, 104, 123, 134, 158 15, 94, 96, 97