Monday, April 26, 2004
(8:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Nietzche
Today is the big day for discussing Flannery O'Connor. Barring complications, I plan on prowling in comment sections rather than "weighing in" with a lengthy post.
In the Common-place Book, Adam Smith quotes Alasdair MacIntyre. I know virtually nothing about MacIntyre, although I love the quote where he says that being asked to die for a modern nation-state is like being asked to die for the phone company. The nation-state is a big deal in Christian circles these days -- it reminds me of how grunge became such a big deal in Christian rock circles somewhere around 1998. Cheap shots aside, here is the quote:
It is of course true that genealogists now occupy professorial chairs with an apparent ease which might have discomfited Nietzche and that even when they praise the aphorism as the genuinely Nietzschean genre, that praise is expressed, as I noted earlier, in conventional academic journals and lectures. If and when some post-Nietzschean is finally invited to give a set of Gifford Lectures, his or her academic hosts can reasonably expect the conventional form of his or her utterance at least partially to neutralize its content. Apprehensions that instead of lectures they would be presented with a set of Gifford aphorisms or Gifford prophecies are surely groundless. Yet that those apprehensions should thus be rendered groundless is itself disquieting.
For what it signals is the capacity of the contemporary university not only to dissolve antagonism, to amasculate hostility, but also in so doing to render itself culturally irrelevant.
I admire a good bluster as much as the next guy, but I fear the problem with our modern post-Nietzscheans may well be their super-abundant cultural relevance. Hanging out at Barnes and Noble last night, I leafed through Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, where he noted that professors were setting aside the Great Monuments of Western Literature in order to study movies, advertisements, etc. I'm sure a PhD program in pornographic studies is forthcoming, if not already extant.
And who can deny the commercial success of heavy theory? It truly is the new literature, the thing to read for those who want to be in the know, who want to be superior -- Derrida is the new Joyce (according to Bloom), Foucault the new Proust (excavating the past), Lacan the new Pound (standing in the background of so many careers). Who can read Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other without being struck by the fact that this is what literature is now? The triumph of theory is an outgrowth of the tremendous success of literature in the modern world, the paradoxical mass-production of subversion. At the beginning of the century, it was a Supreme Court case about the obscenity of Ulysses; at the end, a controversy about Cambridge University's decision to award an honorary degree to Derrida's "cognitive nihilism." (I really am sorry to be landing so hard on Derrida -- it's my class.)
Does this represent a loss? Perhaps in the institutionalization of the impulse of "literature," we did indeed suffer a loss, but the modernists properly-so-called already knew they were writing in order to be archived by university professors. In France, the professors themselves managed to become artists, a feat rendered very difficult for those professors living in the metropole -- but, perhaps, occasionally accomplished nonetheless by the stray American (or the stray Hungarian or Slovene).
We cannot go back to being a Christian society, unless we're willing to unleash the horrific violence that would entail. Calling secularism a religion doesn't change anything, doesn't have any force whatsoever -- at least not when the goal is the reestablishment of Christianity. Neither are we ever going to be able to return to a society in which every schoolchild reads Julius Caesar, unless we're willing to radically restrict the group to be educated. It pains my heart to say it -- my inner imperialist is weeping -- but there really is no going back. And thanks be to God!
(à Gauche's response to Adam Smith's query about the idea of the university contributed significantly to the thought process behind this incoherent -- dare I say aphoristic? -- post. Consider it a response to them both.)
