The icon

276 Pages·2012·1.31 MB·English

Narrow Gates
Strait Ways
The Postmodern Sacred
and the Icon
†
David Vella
Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory
Cardiff School of English, Communication, and Philosophy
Cardiff University
May 2012
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DECLARATION
This work has not been submitted in substance for any other degree or award at this or any other
university or place of learning, nor is being submitted concurrently in candidature for any
degree or other award.
Signed Date June 2012
STATEMENT 1
This thesisis being submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD.
Signed Date June 2012
STATEMENT 2
This thesis is the result of my own independent work/investigation, except where otherwise
stated.
Other sources are acknowledged by explicit references. The views expressed are my own.
Signed Date June 2012
STATEMENT 3
I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-
library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations.
Signed Date June 2012
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Narrow Gates, Strait Ways:
The Postmodern Sacred
and the Icon
Thesis Abstract
This study compares two prevalent notions in postmodern philosophy and
critical-cultural theory: the sacred and the icon. On the one hand, the sacred has often
been described as the exposure to an abyssal reality that is completely foreign to human
perception and control. This deeply subversive event is presented through two of its
most influential thinkers, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. On the other hand,
the icon marks the experience of a sensitivity to the singular selfhood of the other. It
comprises a loving receptivity to its unique identity, in particular the identity of the
human or divine stranger who is excluded or victimized by human narratives and
structures. Intrinsic to the ethical scene, as I show through Emmanuel Levinas and
Richard Kearney, is an interaction rather than a subjugation of the subject by the other.
This project seeks to present the similarities and differences between the sacred
and the icon. In particular, it calls for a certain relationship between them, allowing
both to be observed in each other’s respective light. Both are thus re-examined through
their relation to each other. Moreover, this bond is seen to be ethically significant for
either phenomenon and it helps redefine the sacred and the icon in a manner that is
closer to actual experience. It also perceives either one in terms of a practical efficacy.
To exemplify these views, the Christian mystical experience known as the ‘passive dark
night of the soul’ is explored insofar as it constitutes one of the most radical instances of
the icon. Crucial to this relationship is its exposure of the possible shortcomings and
misjudgements of previous conceptions of the sacred. A potential new role for the
sacred is indicated: a function that is at once more ethical and constructive.
Above all, the underlying concern of this study is the very nature of this
interaction of the two extremes. Throughout, it shows this affiliation as dialectical by
nature. Between the sacred and the icon, a process of a mutual coinciding and
estranging takes place.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my supervisor and friend Dr. Laurent Milesi for his
unfailing help and guidance in this study. I am grateful especially for his deep and
accurate insights into Jacques Derrida’s thought, which have time and again proved
invaluable for my research.
A deep gratitude must go to my mother, Maria, and my father, Mario, for their
unwavering support and patience during the endless conception and gestation of this
work. Thank you for your loving forbearance when you had to hear my self-reassuring
response, ‘I’ll be finished within a few more days’, for what must have been hundreds
of times.
I am also grateful to my sister, Ruth, whose company has been invaluable
especially in my own dark nights of the soul that this study has on occasion instructed
me in. Acknowledgement is also owed to various friends with whom I have passed a
wonderful time and many a stimulating hour in conversation.
Lastly, I wish to dedicate this work to my late aunt, Doris, whose affection and
kindness will never be forgotten.
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Contents
Introduction
Towards a Dialogic Phenomenology 6
Chapter 1
Monomanaics and Neurotics
(The Sacred as Obsession in Bataille and Blanchot) 28
Chapter 2
Intersecting at the No-place
(The Malady of the Gift in Two Strait Ways) 66
Chapter 3
When the No-place Becomes a Person
(The Icon and its Conversions) 116
Chapter 4
In Indecision, By Indecision, I Will Decide
(The Leap into Two Great Abysses) 171
Chapter 5
‘Twixt Exposure and Action
(Icon Narratives and their Redeeming) 226
Conclusion
A Chiasmic Play of Two Extremes
(The Sacred and the Icon Interacting through the Metaphor Dialectic) 260
Works Cited 271
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Introduction
†
Towards
a Dialogic
Phenomenology
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The postmodern sacred and the icon are the central thematic of this study.
Narrow Gates, Strait Ways is a comparative inquiry of these two philosophical domains
that have been of considerable significance in twentieth and twenty-first century
philosophy and critical theory. Both represent experiences of the limit: moments when
subjectivity is faced with what is foreign to its understanding. The postmodern sacred
and the icon refer to what is infinitely outside the ego: an unknown reality that ever
challenges the sovereignty of the ego and its appropriations.
☼☼☼
The Postmodern Sacred
Defining the Postmodern: A Search for Absolute Alterity
The term ‘postmodernism’ is a notoriously complex, contentious, and vague
term. If anything, however, it can be broadly described as a reaction to modernity. It is
a defining and radical response to modern thought.1
Very often, critical and cultural theory and philosophy see the inaugural act of
modernity as taking place in the seventeenth-century with the creation of the Cartesian
subject.2 The philosophical works that follow are seen to carry on a certain method or a
certain preference that had been initiated in René Descartes’ works. This, generally
1Throughout this study, I have chosen to use the term ‘postmodernism’ rather than ‘postmodernity’
because of the specific connotations this suggests. Rather than an aesthetic or literary movement,
‘postmodernism’ is here used in relationto the philosophy together with critical and cultural theory that
take place after modern philosophy and in reaction to this philosophy. In this sense it is a term that
defines aparticularway of thinking that comes after modern thought and criticizes it. ‘Postmodernity’
usually has a broad and much more encompassing signification. It is usually understood to describe
society in general after modernity. The label refers to the condition or state of being of society after
modernity. It also signifies the economic and cultural states of such a society. Postmodernism would
thus be a subcategory of postmodernity (see for instance‘Post-modernity vs Post-modernism?’,
http://thehoopoesodyssey.blogspot.fr/2008/07/post-modernity-vs-post-modernism.html; Martin Irvine,
‘“The Postmodern”, “Postmodernism”, “Postmodernity”: Approaches to Po-Mo’,
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/pomo.html; Ihab Hassan, ‘From Postmodernism to
Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context’,
http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm; Mikhail Epstein, ‘The Place of
Postmodernism in Postmodernity’,http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/epstein.html).
2See Mark C. Taylor,Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xxii.
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speaking, is human reason. ‘Let us suppose […]’, remark John D. Caputo and Michael
J. Scanlon in their introduction to God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, that modernity
revolves around
an act of exclusion or bracketing; that the modern epoch turns on an epoche, a
methodological imperative, in which modernity made up its mind to abide by
human reason alone. In the via moderna, the rule will be that we are to make
our way along a way (meta-odos) illuminated by the light of reason alone, of
what was called reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.3
Modern thought hinges upon an unconditional conviction that reason will deliver
mankind. Anything else that does not conform to its understanding of reason is of no
concern whatsoever.
In reaction to this, postmodernism can be very generally described as an attempt
to capture an ‘experience’ that is foreign to our pre-established forms of thinking. This
experience is impossible in the sense that it does not belong to those possibilities
derived from what modern philosophy has called ‘reason’. It does not emerge in any
way from the conditions of our perceptions; those same conditions through which we
understand ourselves and our world. It is completely alien to them. We are subject to
an experience that is impossible for all our possibles. Postmodernism, Caputo
announces, initiates ‘a new Enlightenment […] arising from a deep desire for what,
given the constraints and conditions imposed by modernity, is precisely not possible,
which for that reason is precisely what we most deeply desire’.4 Mark C. Taylor
likewiseobserves that
[t]he search for irreducible difference and radical otherness obsesses many of
our most imaginative and creative artists, writers, philosophers, psychologists,
and theologians. Although it recurs throughout the century, concern with
difference and otherness is a distinguishing trait of thinkers who can be
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described as ‘postmodern’.
The term ‘alterity’ is often used to designate this reality that is extraneous to our
perceptions. Richard Kearney refers to postmodernism as a ‘fixation with inaccessible
3John D. Caputo, Michael J. Scanlon,‘Introduction: Apology for the Impossible: Religion and
Postmodernism’,inGod, the Gift, and Postmodernism, ed. John D. Caputo, Michael J. Scanlon
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 2.
4Caputo, Scanlon, ‘Introduction’, inGod, p. 3.
5Taylor,Altarity, p. xxi.
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alterity’.6 From Latin alteritatem, which means, ‘being outside’, alterity means ‘the
state of being other or different; diversity, otherness’.7 As Kearney points out, the
alterity that is the focus of many postmodern writings is so absolute that any attempt at
trying to make sense of it proves to be futile. In postmodernism, otherness is
unrecognizable to us. ‘Faced with such putative indetermination, we cannot tell the
difference between one kind of other and another […].’8 Before the postmodern
alterity, we have no way of knowing whether what we are experiencing is benevolent or
malevolent to us. We do not know whether what we are exposed to is an other in need
of our help and care, an other who seeks to hurt us, or something else entirely.
Defining the Sacred: An Alterity of Extreme Paradoxical Natures
The absolute alterity evoked by the various postmodern writers is presented
through different types of characteristics. There are different kinds of radical otherness
as portrayed by post-Heideggerian philosophical and theoretical thought. Among these,
one can mention Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the Real and the Other together with Jean-
Luc Marion’s God without Being. The sacred is described as postmodern in that it
constitutes another form or expression of this absolute alterity. It is indeed one of the
most frequent subjects in postmodernism. Thinkers such as Georges Bataille, Maurice
Blanchot, Mark C. Taylor, and Kevin Hart all often reveal a preoccupation with this
theme in their works.
In the sacred event there occurs a deeply unsettling encounter with a completely
foreign reality. This reality is too foreign to be related to any other, good or evil, any
divinity, religion, or theology. It eschews all attempts at apprehending it. Moreover, it
radically affects the selfhood of him or her who experiences it. Selfhood is subverted
and altered. One finds oneself being dispossessed by this unknown force.
Underlying the sacred as presented in this study are certain particular attributes.
These features distinguish it from the various other varieties of alterity suggested by
postmodern thinkers. Moreover, these constituents can also be traced in writings that
6 Richard Kearney,Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), p.
10.
7Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Catherine Soannes, Angus Stevenson, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
8Kearney,Strangers, p. 10.
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describe an otherness through various other designations, sometimes alongside the
‘sacred’. Bataille, for instance, also calls this particular phenomenon ‘inner experience’
and ‘sovereignty’, while Blanchot calls it ‘neuter’ and ‘outside’. Taylor refers to it as
‘altarity’, Levinas as ‘there is’, Lyotard, Kristeva, and Žižek as the ‘sublime’, while
Derrida and Caputo as ‘khora’.
What I call the sacred refers to a more extended range of views of alterity than is
usually presupposed when this notion is alluded to. Indeed, ‘concepts’ such as khora
and the sublime are very often not found in relation to the subject.9 Despite its more
extensive meaning in this study, however, the term ‘sacred’ is retained and favoured
because of its Latin etymology. The connotations implicit in this word clearly indicate
the set of characteristics that capture the type of experience I am here seeking to
explore.
‘Sacred’ is derived from the Latin noun ‘sacer’. Sacer means holy as well as
soiled, the morally and spiritually pure as well as the impure or the tainted.10 The
sacred domain is a reality that is outside the realm of being and beings as lived by the
subject. Its exteriority is both above being and below being. It is a place that is both a
divine transcendence and a monstrous abyss. Bataille is one of the first thinkers of the
sacred who draws attention to this double meaning in such works as Erotism, Visions of
Excess, and Inner Experience. The sacred realm, he claims, accedes to both the divine
and the profane, the eschatological and the scatological. Deeply spiritual and mystical
phenomena tap into the sacred reality just as much as those which are debauched, base,
and degrading by nature. Thereby, experiences that deeply transgress social rules,
religious and civic, are also included as potential means of exposure to this inscrutable
region. Just like the deeply spiritual and mystical experiences of some believers, acts of
blasphemy, drunkenness, sexual obscenities, murder, destruction of any sort, and so
forth, likewise lead to the same reality. In this respect, Blanchot also emphasizes
profane experiences that are related to some form of extreme suffering. In addition to
some spiritual events, the sacred, he suggests, can be reached through a severe physical
or mental affliction, despair, horror, ennui, or an intense monotony of the mundane.
9See for instance Kevin Hart’s idea of the sacred, inThe Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004), pp. 3-11.
10See Hart,Gaze, p. 41.