the other – GV Loewen

Others, The Other, Otherness

Others, The Other, Otherness (Forms of what is not myself)

The Cartesian sense of what a selfhood is remains our modern baseline of how we experience consciousness. It does beg the question, ‘what is thinking?’, addressed much more recently by Heidegger, for instance, but at the same time, it proposes that in whatever form does thought produce and reproduce itself, this event phenomenologically precedes being. It is one of the first instanciations of the idea that existence comes before essence and indeed, is in itself a necessary precedent. Over the ensuing decades, we find that culture (Vico), history (Hume), and eventually, evolution (Darwin) and even the unconscious (Freud) find their way into this precedent-setting existential amalgam which is humanity as we know it. Yet, what does not deviate within this rather self-interested pedigree is how the other is defined. Almost as an afterthought – and in this Buber’s criticism of Heidegger actually extends much further back in the history of ideas; Heidegger, perhaps unfairly, is seen as representing only a specifically dangerous form of auto-ontology – the other-to-self is simply seen as that and not much more. We must wait until the early years of the twentieth century to begin to understand the nuances of the other as a conception which not only markedly departs from that of the self but in fact stands alone without it.

The first systematic attempt to reexamine ‘the other’ comes, ironically in some ways, in Cooley’s 1902 Social Organization. Here, it is at first and once again the self which occupies much attention, but with a difference. His conception of the ‘looking-glass self’, through which the self defines itself as not how I imagine myself nor how others actually imagine me but rather how I imagine others think of me, opens the door to an entirely new way of perceiving the other. Here, the other has become an active agent in my mind. I have no access to her actual thoughts – generally a blessing, one imagines – nor does my own self-image identify with them in any exact manner. Instead, I imagine myself through the lens of the equally imagined other, and the only consolation to this double jeopardy, Cooley tells us, is that everyone else is doing the same thing. Yet this imagined otherhood is not made up of any singular person. G. H. Mead, a colleague of both Schutz on the one side, and the behaviorist John Watson – his Theory of Modern Advertising, 1925, marks the birth of just that; the shill we know today wherein it is the self which is sold on the basis of what others think of us; mark that! – on the other, supplements Cooley’s new definition by understanding the other to be an abstraction of everyone who is not me. He calls this amorphous presence the generalized other.

This conception is not only the source for an imagined social selfhood, Mead argues, but is also the station of socialization in general. This conception embodies, in an indistinct yet homogenous mass, everything we understand to be part of being a self within the folds of the particular society in which we live. The generalized other is the on-the-ground version of both a superego – it is the space of moral suasion, the press of the manual on how to live in this culture – and indeed, also the libidinal limits of the desiring self – it contains the objects of my desire but as well ‘contains’ them in a second sense, that of self-other limitation; she is not me and thus must be treated accordingly. Mead’s novel widening of the aperture of the other away from simply another individual who is too like myself to provide either a morality or, for that matter, a sexuality, combines with his sense that the looking-glass self is yet too partial to navel-gazing to account for the presence of society as a whole, even if it does do an excellent and indeed, even self-sartorial, job of analyzing how I myself engage in self-perception. The generalized other is today the accepted understanding of ‘others’, plural and undifferentiated, coming, akin to the cogito, before the ‘sum’ of consciousness as given to us.

But there are two further distinctions to be found in twentieth century discourse which have contributed to our fuller understanding of what is not myself. First, The Other, in capitals, is taken to refer to what has supplanted, in an invidious manner, the older and pre-modern conception of Godhead. And this characterization could be taken as well advised, for it is both unpleasant and unfair to imagine that what is uncanny for its own sake should somehow ‘replace’ either divinity or yet infinity. Stepping back for a moment, let us recall that it is along phenomenological lines that ‘The Other’ establishes its ‘presence’ as non-presence. Originally hailing from the otherworld, this presence is both sudden and irruptive to our own and the social world in which our mundane lives are played out. It appears to us as part of the irreality of another kind of being, and it is in Husserl that we discover the most dedicated analysis of this form of being, which can take on the aspect of non-being or even that of Parousia. Certainly, I judge myself in this second worlding, which a moment before was unknown to me. Yet our modern millennial is self-contained, and appropriately given the rest of our general focus; thus its uncanniness rests within itself and does not refer to any evaluation at all, let alone one that is both fatal because final. Instead, what is perceived as radically other to myself occurs as momentary rather than momentous, as hallucinatory rather than as visionary, and as being sourced most likely in the altered perception of my own state of mind. For modernity, Godhead is, quite literally, in one’s head.

Since this is an oddly unfulfilling terminus to the career of this second concept, that of The Other, we have populated source-points of this once radical other in extraterrestrial visits (that is, not visitations), or, less logistically demanding on the part of these others as well as being predicted by and predicated from the quantum theory, the presence of interdimensional limens, only seemingly irruptive because they are relatively rare and rattle our reality-cage with a glimpse of what lies just adjacent to it. Quantum cosmology presents an anonymous version of Heidegger’s sense of ‘what is closest to us’. It is impersonal and wholly non-human, and takes on the mantle of a remanential resident only due to our unthinking expectations of what the day-to-day world should be like. Even so, in taking another step back from the astonishment an alternative universe might present to both the senses and to our own biographies given the corresponding fetish associated with the Doppelganger – who is, in this case, more truly a Hinterganger if anything at all – we realize that both extraterrestiality and interdimensionality are neither uncanny nor irruptive, and in fact are mere quantitative extensions of the reality which we already know as generally ‘real’. This too, is somehow disappointing, for it robs the radicality of The Other as previously conceived. To be fair, there must also be some kind of relief present as well, for no alien or double appears in judgment of ourselves.

The third and final guise of the other in modernity is defined as the at first unknown version of the generalized other, and this is, simply, otherness. This concept is originally associated with the phenomenology of the social world, as per Schutz, and is best understood as characterizing a number of zones to be found in his contoured cartography of how the self perceives that same world. What is ‘at hand’ to me as a Dasein is, in Schutz, a presence which denotes something available to me but not necessarily known by me in any detail. If we imagine ourselves looking out from the apex of a perceptual height, as we gaze outward and downward, we trail away from the intimate and then the familiar, off toward the cognizant and thence the unfamiliar but not yet truly strange. Yet further, and approaching the very horizon of my vision, lies the hinterland of my knowledge; things, people, and ideas that I know exist, but of which I have no further interest or knowledge. Beyond this is utter ignorance, mirroring our species’ lack of general knowing about certain reaches of the cosmos. At the same time, I am aware that this space, however alien, remains in the category of the ‘possibly-to-be-known’, either to me or to my fellow-persons. If there actually is anything yet more distant, something which would forever be beyond human comprehension itself, I tend to dismiss it, not only along the lines of a cumulative science – in this epistemological stance, all that is at present unknown is simply something which is yet to be known – as well as along the more personal lines of a ‘need to know’ basis. In this dual take, we redefine the infinite as merely the indefinite.

This, in a word, is the function of the concept of otherness, with perhaps the additional remark that through this quantification of ‘the other’ as an idea, we as well redefine human finitude as merely finiteness, with all that this reduction implies. Oddly, we have come almost full circle: the Cartesian cogito exists only as long as does an agentive consciousness. This consciousness is, in its self-posited existence, conscious only of its own measure as a finite form of being-aware. What is gained by our contemporary tripartite understanding of the other as ‘others’, ‘The Other’, and ‘otherness’, is that we are no longer by default either neurotic or xenophobic about the novel which may obtrude upon our lives. There is a temper of mundanity attached to each of these three conceptions in turn, and, indeed, one by which I can myself participate in their othering capabilities. But what is lost to me, and to my culture more generally, is both the experience of the meaningful uncanny and the ability to create meaning in the face of not only human finitude as an essential element of the species-historical project but as well in the face of mine ownmost death, the completion of my Dasein’s thrown project. In order to reorient myself to this recent condition, I must take what is at first merely unknown to me and somehow reinsert the experience of facing down its momentarily irreal presence as if it were in its essence unknowable.

To do this, to traverse an empirical threshold while maintaining the wonder of transgressing an uncanny limen is no mean trick. To see the other in her radically alien quality and yet immediately lend to her the humane and ethically necessary succor of being recognized as a being like myself, is also a canny challenge. But in either case, whether that cosmic or intimate, what passes for the other today, in its also necessary secular pragmatism, invokes a daring deontology which may yet be premature.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Quest of the Question

The Quest of the Question (Well, you asked)

Greater glory in the sun,

An evening chill upon the air,

Bid imagination run

Much on the Great Questioner;

What He can question, what if questioned I

Can with fitting confidence reply.

W.B. Yeats (1928)

The ability to question is the residuum of faith. It is a uniquely human attribute, unknown to us in any other known creature. One presumes, upon asking a question of any variety, that there will at least be some sort of response. Even the proverbial ‘rhetorical’ question, favored by those who actually desire an absence of response, know that the queried has in fact already responded, and perhaps in kind. This is the element of faith in the question itself; that you will respond. And even if there are a variety of ways to characterize such responses as there may be, from answer to explanation, from retort to explication and so on, the essence of dialogue has been initiated. We are ‘throwing words across’ to one another, and more importantly, contributing, even in some minute manner, to the human conversation which is us.

I have spent my life asking questions. I was fortunate to have no memorably authoritarian teachers nor suchlike mentors, no mockery the result of my childhood, no lasting censure the lot of my adolescence. The one downside to all of this encouragement was that youth, as a matter of course, does not always know how to frame a question, nor even to ask ‘the right’ questions, as long as that is taken in the sense of there being more perceptive means at our disposal than at first glance, and very much not in any narrow sense of what is ‘proper’. For questioning is an act radical to deportment of all kinds. In a life phase where the internalization of the generalized other is front and center most of the time, the ability to question must be honed almost in the shadows. Long live the mentor who can guide a young person through these spaces, at once so close to our beings and yet distant in their dreams.

When I think of the over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork I accomplished, the hundreds of interviews both formal and informal, the sense that within each about another hundred actual queries may have been made – that’s ten thousand questions right there – I am struck with the forbearance shown by so many ‘informants’, as they used to be called in traditional methods courses. Now that said, it is the case that most people enjoy, or are at least willing, to talk about themselves, and who better to do so, we naturally imagine. Even so, the human scientist, pending his tenure, is ever edging closer to aspects of existence which most people take to be ‘personal’. And so the usual etiquette must be observed: ‘Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’, which is, perhaps fittingly, already a personal query. Never have I had the response ‘You already have’, which the Mark Twain or Groucho Marx like wit would engender. But other, much more expected responses do abound: ‘Well, it would depend on what it is.’, or ‘Sure, but don’t expect me to answer it, or give you the answer you want’ (meaning that one’s answer might be incomplete or irrelevant), or, very commonly ‘Of course, fire away’ or the like. The response to this personal prequel depends very much upon the depth of one’s relationship, and this is so for both professional and private circumstance. The ungrammatical quality that typically characterizes the open response – ‘do you mind? Of course (I mind) – is brushed aside by both parties. Sometimes, pending class background, one receives a grammatically correct ‘not at all’, instead of an ‘of course’, but this too is trivial. When I taught methods for many years at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, I called attention to the picayune minutiae of interview technique only because that was what was called for in training, as it were. In the field, much of this drops away, as it tends to do for all strictly academic professionalization, be it in teaching or researching. This is the first lesson of fieldwork, in a sense; that what you already know will only return to aid your quest after the intensive disillusion of you knowing anything at all has concluded. Sometimes, this process takes years.

At the same time, I myself was trained in the generation after the classic if also ludicrous ethnographic pith helmet perception that all one needed was a pencil and a pad of paper and off you go! Yes, there’s always something to be said for adventure, and my sense of my student peers in graduate school was that the desire for excitement, one of the prime motivators for even engaging in fieldwork of any kind, was certainly present. But there is a line between having an adventure and ‘going native’, just as there is a corresponding line between asking an open-ended question in good faith and asking a leading question, the latter occupying a good deal of time in class, explaining to students how not to do so. In general, however, fieldwork produces discussion, dialogues, conversations, interlocutions, and never interrogations. Only the most incompetent researcher or journalist, police officer, doctor or other health care worker – and I have taught numerous of all of the above in my classes – distinguishes himself by his ineptly procedural questioning. Throwing words across is something primordial, and, as stated, makes human existence something distinct from any other known form of life. And while it might take a little bit of cajoling, or even some good-natured chicanery, to bring such a process out in the other, once this has been accomplished, the fieldworker always gets far more than she ever needed or indeed ever bargained for.

But there are other kinds of questions than those professionals need ask. There are literary questions, historical questions, questions of conscience, questions about the nature of existence and the perhaps overdone ‘cosmic’ questions to boot. It would be bad form to simply move from one to another as if in the end they could be so distinctly descried and ahead of time as well, but what I can do is speak to them as if I were speaking to their source, thereby mimicking the ethnographic process but better realizing the De Profundis of its meaning. The literary question revolves round the idea that what is not real can simulate reality so closely that the reader feels like they are living another life. This is the same question that animates ‘immersive’ video game scripts, something I have come to as a writer quite recently. Literature is not living in the same way that art is not life, but the fact that we desire it to accomplish an ‘as if’ for us and time again, speaks in turn to how we perceive our own actual lives. Thus the literary question opens itself onto that existential, and that historical, and through both wider apertures repeats itself with some essential insistence. The question of the future of the world, and we in it, is very much the same question as that of the world’s history as it can be known. But at once we are made aware that we have only asked of this history a certain kind of question, and perhaps it is time to change tacks. Feminism, at its best, is a shining example of this kind of movement, and phenomenology bases its entire discursive presence upon this same perception.

By far the most personally pressing type of question is that of conscience. Conscience is the ethical aspect of consciousness, a kind of interactive compass which, quite aside from marking out moral directions in their ideal cast, responds to the ways of said world and points ad hoc toward directions anew. Just so, for all the adventures a literary cast of heroes may have, ultimately the quest undertaken tests their respective consciences, far more than it does their combined skill sets or slowly evolving knowledge and experience. The lesson in the quest is thus a moral one, or, perhaps, an amoral one, but either way, it is not the world which is finally at stake but rather one’s conscience. Mostly unspoken, questions of conscience require self-reflection, meditation, and a kind of musement which departs from that aesthetic. This ‘silent dialogue’ within each of us as human beings participatory in the wider aspect of species-essence in language and language use, employs anxiety as a catalyst toward concernful being. But because that being must always be ‘in’ the world and at once in itself it must eschew the easier response of simply residing as an ‘in-itself’ – ‘its your world, I’m only living in it’ – and confront the much more challenging sense that I am in-dwelling as a Dasein in that world and thus also the world is of the closest-to-me without quite becoming a ‘mine ownmost’. If this is too turgid, think of it as a way of ferreting oneself into the puzzle of living in a world which is not our own, but to which we must cleave our desires and dreams alike. We do make the worlding of the world kindred to our thrown projects, just as we, as historical beings, write some small part of that world into its holistic history.

Any question promotes a momentary Gestaltkreis. It asks the other to focus her attention on it alone. It invites her into its solemn circle, and commits itself to hearing whatever response there may be. Because the question itself does not shy away from this indefinite finitude, my reply can indeed be uttered with a fitting confidence.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Is Wholly Rational Action Realizable?

Is Wholly Rational Action Realizable?

This to you, who lives beyond my reach and ken

Yet I love thee as I would the one who strains for me alone

I cannot breast such love as my heart now and then

Breaks itself upon the shore that also crushes bone

No wonder you exult the air above, the night that is beyond men

And women both, and all those in between that set in stone

No longer will love be known as ever that

Extant between the fair and fairer seen

And I am but the herald of this wider, longer matte

Laying underneath all two-souled color been

These souls have given up their claim, their pat

Clamor against which I have plugged by ears atween

Enter thus! I both command and commend to thee

So that we may port your soul and souled asunder

Split as is the heavens by the lighted scree

Split as were my eyes and ears and lips by thunder

Such storms as these will ever question me

So I shall ne’er accept the loot of blunder

Enter thus, I beg you in loving supplication

With my tears, my sweat, my mucus, juice and blood alike

Even my offal, but not awful urination

Meant no disrespect but only that with I would strike

Down all who overlook our human situation

And to this I call you to return to us your endless Reich.

In the quotidian of my life, I long for transcendence. Such are the days that have been that the days that will be are resented. But what of the days that might be? What of the moments that seem to uplift our consciousness into another kind of day altogether? What are their source? Can we conjure the magical from the mundane, the sacred from the profane, the very order of nature from the historic disorder of culture?

In the verse, the speaker ‘begs’, calls attention to her ‘loving supplication’ which is surpliced over with all manner of bodily disjecta membra, not in the service of a guttural paean but rather to state that every aspect of her being is involved in the orison. But at first we are called to attend the place of the one who is called and is to be called. She herself is so distant, so removed from the day to day that her very reality is doubted. She is ‘beyond’ both my reach, my experience, and as such it is also implied that such a beyond is separated from the doings of both men and women alike. This object of desire must be a creature of the night air, a being who is thus never at risk of shipwreck, as the speaker tells of herself. And how then to bridge that chasm? Give birth to a higher form of love, a love hitherto unknown and even unknowable. This novel love will no longer hold ‘between the fair and fairer’, and within its embrace those whose souls were separate give over their patent claim to be mere individuals. No, here they are to be only one thing, and yet this is not yet real, which is why the speaker casts herself as merely a ‘herald’ and one who has had to ‘plug her ears’ against the divisive character of previous human relations. The speaker vows to not be either distracted by a base show of emotions, ‘split as were my eyes and ears and lips’, nor by even nature’s display of forces which seem as well to lie beyond the mundane sphere. She also cannot be bought by illusion, the ‘loot of blunder’. Finally, she returns to her own humanity and realizes that this higher love is in fact part of our shared birthright that in turn cannot be ‘overlooked’ and to which she commands the return of that eternal birthright and its ‘endless Reich’.

Weber reminds us that any interpretation of human action in the world must call itself to attend to the fact that in each action there is a representation of something (‘The Nature of Social Action, 1922). And thus in each, there is also a herald, if you will, of the judgment of others upon not only how well I have represented this or that normative or superlative value but whether or not the value is itself worthy of my representation rather than one better, one lesser, or yet none at all. In calling across the ages to the thing that is most desired, be it a deity, a beloved friend, a kindred spirit long deceased, a work of art, we must first be more or less certain that how we value this ‘object’ is how we might imagine it valuing itself. What is the self-valuation of the object of desire? How does it, in other words, desire itself to be desired?

The most common example of the disjunction of such a calling occurs when we fall in love with one who cannot love us in return, or will not. Though this seems an extremity of social action or perhaps better, a moment of social inaction or even non-action, it is nevertheless not an extramundane experience in any sense. Its very lack sabotages any sense that it could become ‘something’ more than a distant desire, or at best, the ‘one that got away’. What Weber refers to as a ‘binding normative force’ in this instance and like others acts to prevent action, places a limit upon our desires – they must be shared and specifically must be shared by the object in question – and brings into play a quasi-discursive challenge to the day to day sociality of human relations. This challenge is issued from ethics.

The more amorphous the object – the divine, the natural, the cosmic, the aesthetic – the easier it is to overlook the ethical angle. Less vague are the dead. They were persons as we now are and yet are, but they are now not subject to personal desires. We might yet imagine they can respond to us through their works, of course. We are not, after all, impinging upon another person who is currently like ourselves or ever will be so again in the future. If we do so impinge upon him, he is more than likely long dead, far beyond our desire in any manner that would suggest an unethical stance. We might even ‘speak ill’ of him, in his unresponsive ‘state’ of being, and still do him no harm at all. This is one reason why a motion toward the transcendent is characterized by non-rational inclinations. In our impersonal ardor, we are ourselves removed from any responsibility towards a known ‘other’ who also lives and thus has her own life to live.

Calling upon the non-human, the past, nature, deity or cosmos as itself a bastion of Being which is non-being, remits any obligation on our parts to take care of the other, to be concerned for her status or her being in the world-as-it-is. This apparently non-ethical distanciation is convenient for anyone who seeks to convince living others that his intentions are pure, noble, and untainted by personal or even personalist agenda. ‘God is on our side’ feels inclusive and even oddly warm. It is non-threatening, at least at first, because someone has issued forth a demand that entails both myself and a transcendental being, of whom I know next to nothing, and can know at best that its non-human character is also not subject to human desires. This too is reassuring, for then I might well imagine that judgment could only emanate from a human or at worst, an historical source. ‘Religion is society worshipping itself’, yes, I may quote to myself, but what of belief? What of spirit? What of that ‘two-souled colour’ that has been the case prior to the novel call for an unheard of union of souls?

What the call to Being limits is our concernfulness for the living other. In its halcyon heraldry, transcendentally oriented orison cleaves the existential fabric that weaves beings together, in favor of contriving an ontological uplink that connects Being and beings in a manner that does vital disservice to both. Yet even in a ‘secularistic’ age, we have need of Being, and not only on our own terms. Being yet has a service to perform, and one about which there are several aspects; 1. It provides the model for rationality bereft of history; it is the ideal type upon which historical types are in counterpoint. 2. It is also a ‘role model’ for persons who are beings but who also occupy social roles which often conflict or are at best regularly strained in the face of one another; Being is unburdened of all roles and yet appears to possess a singular role, it is a form of imagination that owns its vocation rather than being owned by its labour. 3. It is a goal to which beings strive forward; it represents thus an ‘absolute value’ towards which rational action may be generally directed, and 4. Being retains its value as a manner in which to access, cross-culturally and across time, all of the human works, the works of beings, which have attempted to emulate it.

So far we have enumerated the facets of the ultimate object of human desire and also have seen how this ‘customary’ dynamic informs both a commonplace call to another to perform a function for us as well as the uncommon calling to the Other. This one has found herself distant and distanciated not merely from myself but from the world and thus must be called to return. She returns though in altered form and one in which is likened to a selfsame other who in turn cannot exist without my presence; ‘yet I love thee as the one who strains for me alone’. The much vaunted ‘death of God’ as a mere prelude as well as a foreshadowing of the end of mankind is a rootsy manner of expressing the problem of the loss of Being in beings-as-they-are. For a phenomenology, this existentiality insists upon only existing and not therefore being at all. Not that our historical beings must instead possess a profound essentiality about them, as if only those of our own kind and time have realized their spiritual potential, their ethical apogee, or their aesthetic will. It is neither a question of placing existence ‘before’ essence as if the Cartesian ghost in the Mandevillian machine had been awakened by the gnawing patter of the mechanisms at hand. For historical beings, existence is in fact our essential state. Dasein only ‘completes itself’ in its ownmost death.

I would thus suggest that any call to consciousness as either the modern gloss of deity or the post-modern guise of nature is premature. It not only presumes that what we know or what we can know of our own history is complete enough to have a stable and stamina-laden understanding of said consciousness, it also assumes that whatever is left over that we do not know or have yet to fully understand, including that of the collected works of many of our own recent thinkers, is all that is left to consciousness and therefore we have at least sketched its limits. I think we are mistaken on both points. Being as constructed from the history of consciousness alone forsakes the daily desires of myself and others which are never uplifted into either rational discourse or the ‘arational’ archive of human achievement. For we are mostly and daily kindred with the unknown soldiers of histories unwritten. We are beings without Being and yet we must be counted, and counted upon, in order for a history of consciousness to have taken shape and thence continually to redefine itself.

Therefore within this limited context wholly rational action too is not only implausible, it may well be impossible. One, if Being has represented to itself an ideal rationality, then history has seen all such transient representation come and go. Belief in the abstract is not enough for a deity to exist upon. Two, Divinity is itself, as a characteristic of transcendental Being, a Parousia of Being-not, for it cannot claim to be the ideal if it itself sets upon any singular circumstance that history affords it, from the human perspective. Only its radical alien quality may make such a claim; one without history and without a history. And how much value could such a Being have? Similarly, and three, we as beings cannot be beholden to the singular, either in our transient selfhood to which accrues not only differing social roles but also serial and ongoing phases of life which too are quite different from one another. In this sense, Being is but the idealization of a human life once lived and, in the completion of Dasein’s existence alongside that life, an idealized hindsight that connects us once again with the ‘sidereal circle in which the gathering of souls commences’.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Desire to Possess through Transgression

The Desire to Possess through Transgression: an excursus

Durkheim’s brilliant ability to take the mundane and through it understand social structure makes this sort of impression. Deviance is necessary because it reinforces what is normative and we can thus know what it means to transgress without ever having to actually do so. Crime is thus functional, and while the judge, in organic solidarity, ‘speaks nothing of punishment’, he is still evaluating a condition which has been impressed with an imbalance. It is the same metaphor that is used in the health sciences, since the ‘body politic’ takes its Aristotelian homology too seriously in its bid to outlast the eroticism of bodies in general: “…we can say that in biology it is the pathos which conditions the logos because it gives it its name. It is the abnormal which arouses interest in the normal. Norms are recognized as such only when they are broken. Functions are revealed only when they fail.” (Canguilhem, op. cit:208-9). A hammer, to use Heidegger’s oft-cited example, is understood in its very being only when it breaks, fails us, becomes something other than it was fashioned to be. And so we too become ‘something other’ in this manner; indeed, our ‘arousal’ for the normative might be seductive in its own perverse way. Who, after all, desires the norm with the lustful ardor we bring to the taboo? The too-young woman is a cliché at best, at worst a sacrilege, though such a conception is itself akin to an authentic blandishment pronounced upon a sacrality, not so much of childhood itself as females mature at a far faster rate than do males, but rather of the idea that we ourselves should be able to regress so that the youth would actually desire us. This is worse than a joke, and all those who anchor close in to the official definitions of pedophilia – the American Psychiatric Association speaks of ‘prurient interest and desire for children under twelve years of age’ – are attempting to throw themselves across a backward looking chiasmus that has become in due course a chasm. While it is historically accurate to portray the sexual exploitation of young children, those who are not yet biologically sexual in any consistent manner – under most national laws, children under twelve can only have sex with themselves, as it were, and are not beholden to wider legal sanctions as are youth; this is a far cry from the nineteenth century wherein the bourgeois sense of blood and biopower took shape, culminating in our contemporary understanding of childhood; until circa 1892 in the United States, for instance, the universal age of consent was a startling ten years of age – as a figment of the bourgeois imagination, compelled as it was by the sense that it was the heir apparent to the aristocracy and indeed, also divinity, yet there is something more authentic to our protective and at least, official concern that true children are not exposed to eros ‘before their time’. It is, intriguingly, a successful measure of familiality that adults and older children do not exploit the young in this manner. The bourgeois family was understood as a seething crucible of repression, resentment, lust and violence, and in many cases, this combination of Dasein’s entanglements in the world of others was indeed manifest. But if this was the rising class’s predicament, only a bourgeois perception would have privileged its own children and more or less utterly forget about all others. The children of elites were a dying breed in any case, and could be dismissed. The children of the working classes were simply younger animals of the same stock as their parentage, and if they were sexually abused they would accept it as part of their ‘training’. It is only recently, in post-war democracies, that childhood in general has been granted the belated privilege of being sacrosanct: “This explains the problematic, or if one prefers, ambiguous nature of bourgeois consciousness. It also explains [ ] the contradictory reaction of fascinated contempt the idea of ‘success’ has evoked during the last two hundred years.” (Moretti, op. cit:84). On the one hand, the French Revolution ontically exposes a moment in which power is shown to be a simulacra of a certain kind of politics, rather than the traditional obverse of this. The bourgeois sensibility – I must attain the status of the aristocrat but through my own individual merit and not through blood; yet I must make sacral the blood of my class as something preserved and inviolate so that my children may also be meritorious – is ‘by definition’ ambiguous. The supposed meritocracy of bourgeois dominated democracy prefers the nobility of wealth to all other merits. In this it mimics more closely the assignation of divine rule than it would acre to admit. But all of this is old hat. The most important aspect of nineteenth century class self-understanding is that it took upon itself the mantle of authority and not so much power. This is also the age in which direct sexual abuse of children became surrogate in direct physical abuse, which lasts to this day amongst the ironically most recent social groups to ape the status and trappings of bourgeois life: evangelical sub-cultures the world over.

Not unlike the developing world, which is seen as passing through the same industrial and technical phases in a series as did Europe et al before it, sub-cultures once very marginal to the bourgeois revolution are now in that phase of attempting to take over some of the politics and authority of their once betters. They have adopted all of the modernist rationales for the discipline of youth and cloaked it in irrelevant scriptural nonsense which was directed at only very young children, ironically, the very same age group that the nation state defines as chattel today. Such sub-cultures are able to display such oblivious hypocrisy only due to their sense that history in their case does not truly exist, or at least, it is telescoped radically from its inception in the messianic period to its end in an apocalyptic judgement. For them, pursuing the revolution in reality means speaking only of revelation in the imagination: “For a man whose future is almost always imagined starting from past experience, becoming normal again means taking up an interrupted activity or at least an activity deemed equivalent by individual tastes of the social values of the milieu.” (Canguilhem, op. cit:119). Of course, the tendentious and irascible marginalia of the Levant was never ‘normal’ in any contemporary sense. While it may have been that messiahs were a dime a dozen, the vast majority of persons in every culture lived without their credos. This was, after all, the this-worldly aspect of the Pauline injunction. Even so, as Weber has noted in detail, the ‘routinization’ of charisma begins with the first apostolic missions; begins in their wake, as it were, for the mission itself must be couched in a mimesis of the original kerygmatic experience, one in which acolytes must feel the sense that they too can be, or would be, ‘overwhelmed with joy’. But after the fact, one can only experience the glad tidings and not the being himself. Being, on the other hand, is to be found within such revealed truths of existence and is thus intended as universalistic in its ability to impart the same sensations and feelings.

And it is this last dynamic that lasts, so to speak. The living-on through each era casts Being as a shadow over the past. History on the one hand, life on the other. Achievement and newness. For human beings, “…these two desires are not hostile and irreconcilable, but form a homogenous and complementary whole. Only the man who is always able to achieve happiness can [ ] do without it.” (Moretti, op. cit:112). ‘Always able’? Now who is that? Moretti immediately accedes to Freud; no, such constant happiness is in fact impossible and streben, which Freud referred to as a ‘benevolent illusion’, must be recast as being a dynamical synthetic term that brings together two things that are forced upon Dasein, ‘change and freedom’ (cf. ibid:112-3). This is more realistic, surely, but at the same time, any evangel raises neither of these. His version of streben is perfect happiness in the ambit of heavenly arc. This is the lighter side of evangelical satisfaction; the darker is of course that the rest of us our damned. As Natanson comments, “…there are some insults for which apology is out of the question.” (op. cit:185). His general remark may be taken however one wishes, as it is generally applicable to social circumstances in which all of us must find ourselves once in a while, but his conception of ‘noetic failure’, the phenomenological equivalency of what he refers to as ‘social aphasia’, fits the bill. Any reactionary or regressive social movement is proclaiming not so much the end of the world but rather their own inability to adapt to the world as it is. These persons are, aside from their entanglement with an imaginary history, or better, the imaginal cast as if it were history, are always already ‘abnormal’ due to their ‘attachment’ to values which have, in this case and to be fair, for better or worse, been passed by: “To define the abnormal as too much or too little is to recognize the normative character of the so-called normal state. This normal or physiological state is no longer simply a disposition which can be revealed and explained as a fact, but a manifestation of an attachment to some value.” (Canguilhem, op. cit:56-7). Now this is not at all to suggest that all those who do not publicly cleave their hearts to some antique religiosity are necessarily ‘normal’ in any way. But they are normative. And both behind and beyond this sense of what is ‘normal’ lies, as Canguilhem assiduously points out, the conception of perfection (cf. ibid:57).

Perfection is not available in the this-world. Both evangel and once-born agree upon this. The latter shrugs this condition off, arguing that perfection is not necessarily a human or humane thing. The former agrees that ‘too err is human’ but that we should seek to ascend from this sorry condition to something higher. Perfection may not be available here, but it awaits in its fullest presence elsewhere. But the turning away from reality and the celebration of the inner life are the two most important aspects of Bleuler’s original definition of autism (cf. Minkowski, op. cit:74). Evangelism is autism projected.

But if that is so, eroticism, so often portrayed by evangelism as its patent enemy – apparently these persons prefer surrogate sex to the real thing, and perhaps ironically, more radically than do those ‘normative’, since they use their children in this manner under the euphemism of ‘discipline’, a fitting abuse of the word of which the Reich would have been proud – is autism internalized. It is a compulsion betraying itself through self-love, a sensuous narcissism that is oddly more tolerable to others because it involves them, even if only as objects. But to be someone’s ‘toy’ is better than to be someone’s enemy, the masochist argues in turn. This obsession (cf. Natanson, op. cit:264, for references here), because it does not compel the entangled Dasein to seek happiness or contentment either in the otherworld or in the underworld, but rather simply enjoins the other to join the self of self-annihilation – who, in the end, can resist this hortatory appeal when all of us are potentially alienated? – allows the Dasein to imagine that it has triumphed over delusion, specifically, the religious delusion. For the evangelical, sex is not so much a villain as a competitor. It is a decoy of the devil, perhaps his ‘pet’ decoy, to stay within the torrid vocabulary of BDSM for a moment, because the devil wishes to convince humanity that earthly life can be even better than that heavenly. Hieronymous Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ portrays this tension brilliantly and yet not without some sardonic skepticism as well. Hollywood and pulp fiction have transfigured a great artist into a half-man half-bully in their detective Harry Bosch whose ‘manhood’ is expressed at one point by him threatening to assault his own daughter (season one, episode ten). Whether or not evangelicals watch cop shows, this would be one to their taste.

But neither evangelism, our somewhat straw man, nor eroticism, our somewhat stuffed shirt, exemplifies a ‘lack’. Rather, cites Minkowski, we are after a ‘difference’ because it is the entire ‘structure of psychic life’, recall for a moment, this is held to be a unity by almost all of our sources here, that is altered (cf. op. cit:248). What brings these two apparent poles together is that both religion and sex must be pursued as serious hobbies only. The ‘dreaded hobby’ of Adorno is metastasized into a pseudo-vocation that makes time off from work into a consistent ‘vacation’ of the spirit. This word is used advisedly; the spirit does indeed vacate the scene in both eroticism and evangelism. Like art, religion and sex, if taken to the nth degree – the reader should already be aware that the author has no quibbles with either in moderation – can be ‘taken under’ only if some other station is maintained: “In short, the pursuit of art is sanctioned when it is undertaken b people who have achieved identification with some other socially sanctioned role.” (Griff, 1960:221). So our unknowing and unbecoming selves go to workplaces wherein an evangelical or a BDSM artiste lurks, the one hiding in the light which blinds viewers to his ‘true identity’ and the other in the usual murk of the shadows, suitably cliché and melodramatic. Both partake fully of the theatre of comic books; one relishes his superhero aspirations – he has the strength and build to beat his kids, at least – the other his sultry villainy – he has the strength and build to beat women, perhaps, or maybe it is the other way round. Well done both! The only problem is that the rest of us are not inclined, as it were, to tread either set of boards alongside these would-be teachers. Indeed, all sense of pedagogy is lost to the one who ‘knows the truth of things’, as both the evangelist and the eroticist proclaim, the former to the world, alas, but the latter at least only to himself. And there is a good reason why neither is art, in spite of our indirect comparison: “The creative powers of teachers disappear because the teacher tends to lose the learner’s attitude.” (Waller, 1960:341 [1932]). Perhaps the closest normative world analogy to these extremities of entanglement would be the journalist, especially the one who heads up the media room, editors, producers and the like. Kristeva’s amusing update on Proust’s character Mme Verdurin is called to mind, wherein this ‘Mistress’ of what is fit to print is a vulgar Pauline figure – well, how much more vulgar than a fellow who exchanges ethnic identities, travels with an amanuensis with who it would have been culturally normative to be involved in a pederastic relationship, and then criticizes everyone else for being hypocrites will be left to the imagination or perhaps even to one’s taste – who can be everything to everyone and maintain her utter mastery of every situation (cf. Kristeva, op. cit:69-70). All of this “…suggests that the narrator believes in transsexuality, the idea that every individual belongs to (at least) two sexes and that each of us negotiates the officially unbreachable partition of sexual difference by way of an underlying, implicit, ‘involuntary’ passage.” (ibid:71). Transsexuality is itself a transformative concept; it itself has its own ‘transsexual’ character in the loosest sense, shall we say. If we are also charged with narrating our own lives, giving at least the air of existence to a biography that no one else would read let alone write for us, then are we not also faced with the transsexuality of personhood, the eroticizing substrate of an existentiality which knows itself as these changes and not so much as change in principle?

Akin to the narrator whose Pauline burlesque hardens himself against not worldliness but the world, just as passion is available to us but never as a replacement for compassion, so an internal conflict is engendered, given bodily form, sensuous appetites, desireful urges, and the like. It is, in its either vulgar or overindulged sense, a grassroots claimant upon the breaching ‘behavior’ of any scientific or philosophical analytic: “Existential analysis, therefore, constantly has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness.” (Heidegger 1962:359 [1927], italics the text’s). This is not quite the same thing as Boss and Binswanger would later develop out of Heidegger and Freud but the principle of non-acceptance of the normative world remains. This is, by virtue of its ownmost question – not, though, by virtue of the direction such questioning may lead – no different than Paul’s critical interrogation of the cultures of his day. Discursive questioning sanctions its own question, sometimes questionably, pending academic and institutional circumstance. But this aside, there is a socially sanctioned space wherein the question of Being might arise. Yet for the phenomenologist, this is merely another example of what is ‘tranquillized’; one does not feel the violence of the question from within the insulated interior of an institution. It is bracketed in much the same way that the authentic radicality of philosophical reflection brackets the rest of the world, object, other, and norm. For a question is not just an objection. In erotic action, objectification is part of the dynamic that does a violence upon the personhood of the Dasein involved. But this is, ideally, agreed upon as its own social convention. An authenticity of question, the question of Being, does not harbor in its action a ‘safe word’, as it were. This is more than restating the cliché ‘nothing is sacred’. This is more like a carnival, however Pauline in intent. It inverts the social order in order to expose its iniquities and perhaps also its vices. Indeed, it can use vice to expose virtue. This is what any modern erotiste, at least since De Sade, in fact does. The facticality of his repetitive and projected onanistic activity at once takes away any edge of incipient critique – the violence here is all theatrical even if sometimes physically risky; there is a reason, aside from our misplaced esthetics, why BDSM models are young and built like a certain kind of athlete – as well as confronting the ‘vanilla’ Das Man to at least nod his head to his own desires, however suppressed. Even so, we rapidly regress into farce, and much literature of this tenor cannot be said to entirely escape this same fate: “The narrator keeps his characters’ ambiguities alive, and he also engages in the inversion of values, either through the passing of time or by merging disparate points of view into a single instant. In doing so, he amasses contradictory meanings that produce a comical effect drawn from the inadequacy of meaning.” (Kristeva, op. cit:154, italics the text’s). Not to mention his own inadequacy as a writer, perhaps. For him, the reality of his characters is a parody of all that he suspects in real persons around him. What he suspects of himself he keeps to himself, as if he were the carnival landscape embodied, a Las Vegas writ yet smaller and into an interiority which objects to its presence along with the co-presence of a theatrical Eros. If the circumstances are pleasant enough – who would not want to have a young person worship one and service one’s every sensual desire, even if it were not real? And then again, whose to say either way? – then one could call it ‘time well wasted’. But the idea that time was lost, either Time itself or as in Proust, some experience of time that had thence to be regained though in a most circumlocuted fashion as imaginable, is debatable. We are told that Proust maintained both ‘the violence of marginality’ and the ‘grace to construct a world of communion’ (cf. Kristeva, op. cit:171). The nightmare one engenders dreams of the other, one might well imagine. The observation of the first suggests the vision of the second, and so on. Even so, it is very much the wider case that, outside of this ‘lost time’, Dasein runs along, tarries, is distracted, curious, fascinated, just as par for the course. One manifestly does not need Eros to extend, deepen, heighten, or yet transfigure any of these commonplace situations. So what then, does Eros as an existential critic actually and authentically accomplish?

Let us begin again, in a sense: “Common sense misunderstands understanding. And therefore common sense must necessarily pass off as ‘violent’ anything that lies beyond the reach of its understanding or any attempt to go out so far.” (Heidegger, op. cit:363). Right away we have a reiteration of Heidegger’s two basic senses of the ontological structure of Dasein: one, that understanding is mode of Being-in Dasein, and two, that such a Being is ‘constituted as care’ (cf. ibid). Now it is not that ‘common sense’ – a term that is the unabstracted sibling of ‘human nature’; the person who uses the one will inevitably use the other and very often in the same conversation – does not ‘care’ about things. But just here, we have the objectively apprehendable duality that obtains between Anxiety and anxieties: Care and cares separate the authenticity of Dasein’s in-Being in the world and Dasein’s being in the world of forms, norms, and others. Of course we care about things! The problematic term is not care, but rather ‘about’. The denial or avoidance of the primordial structure of Dasein’s subjectitudinal complex is contained in the projection of Sorgeheit only as a reaction to this or that which is already in the aforementioned list of worldly realms. Heidegger is rather stating the Dasein is care, as the primordiality of its also being interpretation or understanding. But in reality Dasein reacts only when its own being is already understood as care. It is almost as if Heidegger is responding to Kant: how do we have an experience (in the first place)? How do we exhibit care or act caringly or ‘care about’? But there is more: “If we make a problem of ‘life’, and then just occasionally have regard for death too, our view is short-sighted.” (ibid, italics the text’s). This is, in a way, saying the least of it. We are rather more literally narrowed, made stenochoric, by this sense that life is to be lived apart from death – here is an in for both ‘common sense’ and human nature’ to respond at once and in chorus, heaven help us – and it is this lack of perspective, this myopia of which Heidegger speaks, that allows for time to be ‘lost’, whether through nostalgia, transference, projection in the analytic sense rather than that Schutzian or phenomenological more broadly, and of the utmost, through eroticism. In his efforts to narrate an autohagiographic epic, Proust comes across more like Augustine than Cervantes. For a gay Jew this would seem to be an error, at least of taste if nothing else. To be fair, Proust also should be credited with maintaining a desire for what is, on the face of it, despicable or even grotesque, so that he can show the rest of us what it means to inhabit the ‘deontic facticality’ of an absurd projection we call ‘social life’, especially one in which D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf were confronted with the same basic problem as was Proust; where lies the meaningfulness of intimacy within social strictures? What can be maintained of the reality of love, for example, which can only gain meaning through the reality of death – Isolde realizes this perhaps right at the proper time – within the structure of social organization as a whole? “It can be maintained only on the condition that one discover what was alluring in the fact that an object is horrible – or shameful – and, in the face of shameful nakedness, make shame and desire a single, violent convulsion.” (Bataille, op. cit:78). Violent, once again, because norms are here not so much transgressed in principle – this occurs during the contemplation of the act – but they are subverted and bent to the new principle of possession. Once possessed ,the object is no longer part of the world of forms, others, or norms, and though much of lovemaking and associated mischief may be highly scripted, Eros as a force is kindred with the neighbor, irruptive and perhaps even uncanny, as when it discloses to participant Daseins the reality of once lived-through horror. Even as it heals, it reveals that healing is necessary. Thus the horror and shame of unshared life is also revealed in its nakedness. The object is horrible, but so are we.

Norms provide cover for their transgressors. The form in which such a blind takes place, takes over, takes cover or even undertakes to fake its own death, is torn asunder by the desire to possess anew and again. Both chicanery and theater aside for a moment – and who can tell the lover from the love? – what Eros itself desires is the dissolution of the personhood of the persons. Generally, even the carnival does not admit to this more radical understanding: “Where there is no such practice or understanding, however, benign deviation becomes malign deviance. To violate the acceptable social patterns is to put myself outside of society, to be alienated from it, to be considered obscene, insane, criminal, traitorous. My freedom is to be whom I choose within a kind of personhood that is never itself in question.” (Allan, in Cook, op. cit:26). More’s the pity, Bataille might respond, but of coursed pity, like forgiveness and guilt, is one of those archaisms that authentic freedom frees itself from. This is not a naked will to power simply due to the facticity of anxiety and the facticality of desire. Power desires but more of itself, but will focuses and restrains power because it, in turn, must be bent to the purpose at hand. At-handedness must become in-handedness, being-in to in-Being, the finite goal must overtake, or even ‘take over’ as being must do to Being, the absolute value. At ne level, of course, is the usual sense that one’s loyalty cannot be divided, at least in public, between self and society. This is Spencer’s discussion, inherited somewhat obliquely from Kant. It is still a reasonable conversation in which to engage, and if it is a trifle Whiggish at least it is not downright quaint. At the same time, the necessity to maintain what is also beautiful – though there is also beauty in horror, as the twentieth century attempted not merely to experience but also to celebrate; perversely, precisely because it desired to make the horrible itself horrible instead of letting the being of horror simply Be – constrains our freedom: “Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world.” (Arendt, op. cit:31). This is why, when political regimes retreat into violence, they lose their authority. Authority is always lost before power. Will might remain but it too does not endure. This is why shame and desire exert a moment of violence, because anything more would destroy both subject and object instead of simply placing them sous rature, as it were. I have used this transparent analogy before, but imagine a Durchstriechung in the form of the Reich’s swastika as juxtaposed with the Buddhist emblem, for instance. Place either over text, certainly, but go further than this; Eros as willed desire must adorn the beloved with some kind of effort at erasure. Not a complete success, for we do not desire the object of desire to simply be obliterated – this is not a private genocide – but rather to behold the beloved dressed in the violence of our will. She may resist but once again, as above, her resistance too is necessary. it brings the horror of desire to the fore, it makes naked the shame of eroticism. This is not the shame of guilt but instead the term used more like ‘is it not a shame that such a beautiful face should be contorted in the agony of ecstasy, that the ‘tears of eros’, to borrow from Bataille, should arouse me so, that her own objective nakedness should be turned to a prosthetic nudity, and so on. I desire to possess her, but on my terms. This is Eros naked, shameful, and yet full of desire.

So while sex, and especially in our time, sexuality, may be a political act, having sex is prepolitical in the Greek sense that Arendt is discussing. Authentic shame cannot be found within its folds, however manifold. No, the shame of a post-agrarian worldview must be felt in the horror of inequality and poverty, very much real and not esthetic, let alone aesthetic, circumstances: “Everything that ‘justifies’ our behavior needs to be reexamined and overturned: how to keep from saying simply that thought is an enterprise of enslavement; it is the subordination of the heart, of passion, to incomplete economic calculation.” (Bataille, op. cit:105). Once again, tell me how this is not a proclamation of the humane, for humanity as a free disclosure of Dasein’s authenticity? Yet for Bataille’s scalpel and scythe, even here there is slight reservation; the term ‘incomplete’ might have been rendered as ‘incompetent’ if one took a different tack. Of course, there is a sense that all is indeed calculated, that suffering if measured out in proportion to the relevance of this or that segment of global society that will act, submissively of course, to keep power channeled the way it has been so: through national states of varying degrees of ultimate power. Now this is shame, and not ‘a shame’ or ‘a pity’. Now this is horror, and not simply horrible or horrifying. Now this requires little reexamination and much overturning.