In a context of today’s multipolar, multicultural, conflict-ridden and differentiated societies, are human beings and political communities condemned to the impossibility of unity and harmony? Or is there a way of possibly reconciling differences without necessarily deflating them and their sources? How does this reconciliation look like and what are the demands of rendering the conditions of its possibility? What kind of subject can enable this possibility? From what vantage point can such subjectivity be recognized and celebrated as a model of human intersubjectivity? What allows one to celebrate and rejoice in one’s life? What does it mean to celebrate life? What kind of life is worth celebrating? Is there a kind of life unworthy of being celebrated or unable to celebrate its existence? How does one celebrate, how does one rejoice?
The protagonist of this essay is Augustine’s confessing subject whom I take as enunciating a possibility of realizing unity not just in the midst of difference, but in fact, only through difference. By unity, I mean here an experience of relationality, a restoration of experiencing uniqueness in togetherness, an encounter of intersubjectivity arising from the singular experience of one’s self made possible by multiplicity. In contrast to more contemporary explanations, I find in Augustine’s confessing self and the model of the confessional not a submissive, dominated or docile subject but one who deliberately and consciously delivers the self in communion with and in reference to others. My Augustine takes off from John Caputo’s claim that the confessional subject reckons with the scattered, incoherent and torn character of subjectivity through the experience of love. Caputo portrays this loving encounter as a deeply perturbing and unhinging experience – a moment of agony and uncertainty, in Augustine’s language, a question that can only be answered by something external to the self. But unlike Caputo, I refuse to relocate this experience outside or against the institutional or confessional structure of religion and reject his thesis that institutional forms of religious experience terminate the perturbing character of love and thus hinge the self back to some formulaic narratives or dogmatic, doctrinal pronouncements. I sense that Caputo’s discomfort with institutional religions and their authorities (despite his recognition of their value) is not as radically unhinged as he declares since it leaves the confessing subject without any space/time to recognize his or her own confession and at the end still privileges a form of subjectivity whose final source of identification and reason lies in the fully enclosed and preserving self. In contrast, I would like to argue that the certainties of orthodoxy radically disrupt self-preservation not simply by antagonizing the self’s certainties but by providing the structure of relationality, otherwise absent in the desert-like experience that stands for Caputo as the paradigmatic space of self-encountering. Against this, I claim that the encounter of an “answer” to the question of the self – one that resists any final explanation – is more realized not by refusing to take part in a communal pilgrimage that seeks for the irresistible and irreducible anticipation of the Final Answer but by taking part in the pilgrimage itself.
My sense is that unless one participates in some kind of an authoritative structure of orthodox religion and participates in its approved practices, one will always be in danger of resting within the certainties of private knowledge or revelation – hence, on the surface, appearing to be caught up in a personal struggle to remain always a question but on a deeper level, actually contented with the guarantee of autonomous, violent and unproductive thought processes – a consequence of inhabiting a non-relational and fantastically imagined abstract world that refuses to take a visible form. Belonging to the historical and concrete structures of orthodox religion, offers the self not certainties to consume or believe, but signs and symbols to engage and relate with, rather than hinged or tied up with. Unlike Caputo, then, I treat orthodoxy not as an imposition but an opportunity of actively learning the symbology and the economy of signs that cannot be simplistically reduced to any just individual or collective interpretation. In their absence, one’s encounter with the self is endangered by formlessness and shapelessness. Orthodoxy on the contrary, allows one to give form and articulated rather than answers to the questioning self. This is only plausible, however, if one believes that questions can never be abstract and that the ability to raise a question requires not necessarily an a priori knowledge of what is proper to ask as Caputo intimates orthodoxy does, but space, structure upon which the question can make sense. This why for me, questions are involved in a paradox: they are openings to the uncertain or in Caputo’s term, the Impossible; yet, their very articulation marks such possibility – that they can or cannot be asked does not certainly refer to whether they are forbidden, or censured at the risk of excommunication, but that they cannot relate with/refer to experiences of others who are one’s companions in the pilgrimage of the self – thus a denial of the need for companionship towards truth. If one then so passionately desires to encounter one’s limits via the Impossible, one must take a route that lead towards the Impossible rather than one that merely returns to the self’s possibilities and at the end, defuse the question of the self. The dangers then in not belonging proceed not from a wrong manner of questioning but from the possibility of unreality caused by not belonging to a group similarly involved in the process of questioning.
Unhinging for me is less of a determined goal than a contingent consequence of an encounter that causes one to be perturbed, released from one’s certitudes and transformed into a question. One does not cause one’s being unhinged. One cannot determine what will cause one’s unhinging, one can only actively seek it by constantly seeking the self in the self’s relations, by ensuring that one is always in the process of relating, referring to and indeed, by becoming a reference point towards something, perhaps, the Impossible.
Augustine’s account of the will’s resolution vis-à-vis praise and worship – a participation in the economy of external signs and symbols of togetherness, rather than possession of the definitive truth of belief – prevents any final resolution to the question but assures the seeking self of the reality of his or her ability to raise oneself as an unceasing question. Praise, worship and sacraments are not so much bearers of a tradition that demonstrates the force of truth in one’s religion as they are mediators that refer to, rise up towards and move in the desiring economy of questioning. Dogmatic pronouncements, doctrinal impositions then are not about preserving or guarding authoritative formulaic narratives; they are on the contrary markers of steadfastedness and commitment to the constant explosion and release of the self from the self towards something/someone that another self can refer and relate to. The institutions of religion then are not institutions that appease the heart, they are institutions that constantly disturb the quietness of one’s peace, disrupting normal time, perturbing the banality and normalcy of the natural rhythms and established rituals of human life and society.
It is for this reason that religion is really not just for lovers, but for the mad. To an extent, then, Caputo is correct: anyone who falls deeply and madly in love with another, with the world or with something that releases one from the intoxication of the self is religious. Perhaps this is why those who antagonize religion are characterized by such anger and hatred for they see in themselves the same love that they so want to be released from!
Michel Foucault was mistaken in my opinion, in condemning the Christian confessional in his genealogy of state power and rationality. While it is true that the confessional subject and the strategies of the Christian confessional created the modern subject who is a target and object of regimes of truth and power – what is elicited really from the confessing self is not so much the truth of the self but the excess of that self. I believe that Slavoj Zizek has recognized the same problem in Foucault’s theory of subjectivity via Lacanian psychoanalysis. My point here is that the truth generated by the confessional – in so far as the confessing subject desires the confession as Augustine does – exceeds the very self confesses his or her truth since the truth of the confessing subject becomes a reference point, a sign that is now capable of pointing to some other truth. Foucault mistook this excess as capable of being utilized by state power and as a result missed out on the radical potentials of the confessing subject – the economy and structure of the loving relationship between the confessing subject and the limits of one’s subjectivity – Caputo’s “impossible” – that resists any final or even partial categorization. The very same shapelessness of this self-excess which is the very same reason why state power can mold it towards its goals is unfortunately (or fortunately, for critics of state power) the very condition of state power’s impossibility. In failing to recognize this, Foucault was unable to resist the reification of state power.
In contrast, the confessional subject of Augustine transforms the confession into an act of love and in the process encounters Love. In this loving relationship, difference (between the one who loves and the one who has loved first, that allows the loving encounter to take place) is not so much effaced nor transcended but re-united/re-bound (religare) – hence one can exclaim: in love, we are no more the same than when we are different! Within this relationship, subjectivity is not so much preserved as it is diffused and made to reside in the possibility of reception and recognition. I guess this is the reality of the surplus of subjectivity – the excess that emerges when the self is emptied yet not collapsed or destroyed completely and what renders this possibility – the experience of the other in the form of a relationship – is the very excess of the willing subject. Augustine’s concept of the will which seeks to dominate and control what is otherwise contingent emerges in its full glorious futility and sterility. Yet it is this very futility and sterility of the will that allows it to become a springboard for action – for a beginning, a recollection – igniting thinking and doing – as Hannah Arendt argues in The Life of the Mind. Insofar as the will then is unable to act on its own, unless broken down by the human capacity to think and remember, the will can still become a crucial resource or faculty that serves as a stabilizing/driving force in the confusing and multiplicitous realm of human action and plurality. It is only when the will and residing in the will is seen as a desirable form of existence can the will now destroy or seek to destroy the fabric of the space that binds human beings together. This goes to say that the isolated character of willing (and nilling) must remain in that isolated context rather than move out into the realm of human relations. And precisely, because isolation can never be receptive to dialogue and persuasion, the transcendence of the will can only be instigated by an experience of an overwhelming violence – the violent love of God. From the horizontal plane upon which the will is negotiated, the movement of transcending its inherent violence is relocated towards an ascending movement – one that takes the will out of its deep, dark and hidden recesses and exposed in the public not to become the principle of human action but precisely to remind the public structure of encounter of the every present possibility of the desire to dominate. In this sense, dominating the will is less about purging it but allowing it to contemplate and realize its own futility. The will and its domination does not warrant punishment but exposure – a confession – for once its pretenses to mark the human encounter and struggle for freedom are unmasked in the process of narration and testimony, the claim to coherence, rationality, directionality and self-sufficiency are also exposed as incapable of realization.
Yet again, the transcendence of the will is less a product of one’s full and adequate capacity to transform it. What transforms is still something/someone uncertain. Thus, the self’s contemplation of its own selfishness can really only occur within the very act of an other self acknowledging the self that presents itself. Thus one, can only present ; understanding and resolution is always indeterminate yet remains in the realm of the possible, for possibility itself, ceases to be a possibility when already defined and determined (see Book XI of The Confessions). At the same time, for Augustine, grace is already proclaimed and not secretly kept and invites everyone to partake of its economy – that is, seek it in its mediated realities. What emerges is an account of subjectivity whose condition of possibility lies in the mediated structure of human encounters. Insofar as men are created realities, sense perception and even the faculties of the mind will always have to conduct themselves in the midst of signs, language and systems of signification binding one to each other and allowing one to recognize one’s own inadequacy and incompleteness such that so long as human beings are not confronted by the futile reality of created beings to fully manifest by themselves their own reconstitution as a subject, the demands of self-emptying will never be appreciated nor realized. The sign character of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity then is both privilege and burden. As signs, one can only refer to that which allows one to gain such a character. This obviously bears tremendous limits and responsibility to understanding and comprehension. I am even tempted to think that Augustine neither assumes nor precludes intersubjective comprehension since human relations and exchange are not as self-transparent as they appear, even in the economy of one’s self to the self. Nonetheless, the guarantee that one’s very capacity to be incomprehensible o the other proceeds from a shared capacity mitigates the tragedy of possibly falling into a solipsistic conclusion while at once allowing the tragedy of self-transparency to come into full appearance. Inconclusiveness, undecidability and indeterminacy are not then, antithetical to the human potential for reconstituting brokenness. In fact, inconclusiveness becomes here a necessary condition for the possible attainment and aspiration for unity.
Confession as Celebration: Difference, Diversity and the Possibility of Unity in Politics
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