Solace in Oblivion

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the journals and anthologies in which the following pieces appeared, in slightly different form:

Thank you to Boris Gasparov at Columbia University and my mentors at the CUNY Graduate Center – Elizabeth Beaujour, Mary Ann Caws, Vincent Crapanzano, Amy Mandelker, Paul Oppenheimer, Burton Pike, Julia Przybòs, and Richard Wolin – with whom I first explored some of this material. To Lela Nargi, Margarit Ordukhanyan, and Nicole Ridgway for guidance on portions of this manuscript. To the members of the Faculty Writing Seminar at Hunter College for all of their helpful feedback – Monica Calabritto, Sarah Chinn, Meryem Deniz, Phil Ewell, Yasha Klots, Larry Kowerski, Marty Lucas, Andy Polsky, Calvin Smiley, Shanti Thakur, John Wallach, Laura Wolf-Powers, and Jia Xu. To the organizers of the many panels on which I first presented much of this material, at meetings of the American Comparative Literature Association, the German Studies Association, the International Comparative Literature Association, the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy, and the Society for French Studies. To Laurel Plapp at Peter Lang Oxford, with whom it has been a pleasure to work, as well as series editor Florian Mussgnug and my very helpful anonymous reader. Thank you all.

Introduction

Theorize Transcendence

Jumping Off

During a commencement speech at Harvard University in 1975, when asked to “Give us a poem!,” Muhammad Ali spontaneously composed one of the shortest poems in the English language – “Me. We.” – emphasizing the move he felt we all must make from selfishness to selflessness.¹ This book is an attempt to explore the tension incipient in that distinction and in that attempted move, in the form of a problem that religious thinkers around the world have grappled with for millennia – the immanence-transcendence problem, the attempt to approach the edges of the material world in order to access the divine. This book considers immanence and transcendence in modern Continental European literature in an effort to understand the various ways in which authors approach this dynamic – how they conceive of its problems and solutions, how they frame it, and how they may break that frame.

In general, the theory of immanence holds that the divine is manifest in the material world, suggesting that the spiritual permeates everyday human experience. Theories of transcendence, by contrast, see the divine as outside of or above the material world, and thus accessing the divine is a challenge. In Christianity, the transcendent God is only revealed immanently in the incarnate Christ. Traditional Jewish exegesis, or Pardes, is composed of four stages that lead from the most literal to the most esoteric, the first three “revealed” stages indicating the immanence of God in specific individuals, such as Abraham. Hinduism, on the other hand, subsumes immanent ←1 | 2→personal gods into a greater transcendent being – Brahman, the ultimate reality in the universe. Meanwhile Buddhism, at least in the Dzogchen school, for example, strives to dissolve any distinction between immanence and transcendence altogether. Despite this heterogeneity of views, adherents of most schools of religious thought use the same jumping off point, for they would likely agree that the question of whether and how human beings might experience transcendence can only be understood when contrasted with our experience of immanence. But in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment eras of European history – that is, in the last two and half centuries – these debates have been further problematized by another development: the rise of secularism.

I am quite aware, and somewhat uneasy about the fact that, while some of the theorists discussed here are female, the majority of the authors ←2 | 3→analyzed in this collection are male. This is because I wanted to look at the authors that have spoken to me most personally over the last thirty-five years or so, which have been admittedly male, as well as admittedly White. The last essay in the collection to be written, “Ghost Your Past,” considers writers such as Marie NDiaye, Ulrike Meinhof, and Audre Lorde (alongside Frantz Fanon and Darryl Pinckney), which reflects the considerations of my present scholarship – namely, a current interest in primarily non-White, male authors. In not addressing many female authors, I also have not delved into feminist theory concerning immanence-transcendence, which has challenged the notion of a mind-body split, as has affect theory. Thus, the selection of authors and texts is idiosyncratic and disparate because it evinces my personal preferences over the arc of my adult life. Thus, this book is a collection of interlinked essays, rather than a set of chapters with a single narrative through-line.

Much of the theoretical discussion of transcendence that has taken place in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been among French and Francophone social theorists, such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Émile Durkheim, Frantz Fanon, René Girard, Alexandre Kojève, Emmanuel Levinas, and Paul Ricœur. More recently, some of the most useful contributions to the discussion have come in the form of commentaries on these theorists’ work by religion scholars and sociologists, such as Tiina Arppe, Zeynep Direk, James Dodd, Eddo Evink, and Michael Staudigl, whose syntheses I have often found at least as useful as the original theorists themselves. These theories focus on the binaries immanent-transcendent, sacred-profane, religion-irreligion, as well as a number of other overlapping areas of inquiry, such as phenomenology, affectivity, the sublime, moral violence, and social bonding. Within this literature, there has been much discussion in the last decade or so of the “affective turn,” a move toward a larger definition and recognition of our lives as feeling beings.² But Tiina Arppe argues of the affectivity theories of Durkheim, Bataille, and Girard that:

That is, human beings feel the need for detachment as well as for attachment to each other, so that emotion does not overwhelm us at times, and ←4 | 5→lead to violence. Feeling our emotions is crucial to social cohesion, but one could easily argue that they must be moderated so that we can maintain some kind of rationality and not inflict harm on ourselves or others.

Others have argued that, in a supposedly secular age, we neither experience “big transcendence” in the joining of our body or soul with an Absolute, nor do we even experience “little transcendence” through forms of knowledge, consciousness of our larger history, through our political processes, or in the experience of nature or artistic expression. Michael Staudigl argues that the concepts of transcendence and immanence have changed over time, particularly in the Romantic era: “Now ‘transcendence’ neither refers any more to the classical onto-theological figure of the absolute, ultimately transcendent, ‘wholly other,’ nor can it be recast as a ‘transcendence within the confines of immanence alone’ (be it the immanence of the logos, history, or inter-textuality).”⁴ He wonders, though, whether “the experience of transcendence simply [is] mediated (or otherwise occasioned) by practices of self-transcendence.”⁵ That is to say, if transcendence is no longer felt as approaching the divine, perhaps it can only be experienced in our transcendence of our most human aspects, be they personal traits or our social norms. But such a distinction between transcending the limitations of the self and transcending social confines requires a social core within which an individual subject fits, as well as a set of circumstances or values that one can transcend. Such a schema assumes that the rules of a social core are more or less agreed upon by its members, which may be a large assumption. In a colonial context, or of that of an invasion by an outside force, for example, consensus about what constitutes a single social core may not exist at all. This is true of subcultures, counterpublics, and marginalized groups, which embrace core values that may differ from societal norms. And thus, the sociopolitical realm is not usually where transcendence is to be found. Rather transcendence, more often than not, seems to concern the individual within a set of societal relations – real or imagined. Interestingly, a high degree of self-transcendence has been seen by psychiatrists such as Claude Cloninger as linked to both high degrees of spirituality and to psychotic tendencies such as schizotypy, ←5 | 6→the continuum of personality characteristics from merely imaginative to fully schizophrenic.⁶ This may be because a schizotypal personality tends to focus intensely on a single personal narrative that does not jibe with the reality of that person’s circumstances.