Monday, March 07, 2005
(9:21 AM) | Brad:
Sovereignty Week -- On Characterizing the Sovereign
As I think I have mentioned on The Weblog before, I'm a big fan of Herman Melville, and often find myself using his fiction as the engine of my theological reflections. This is all the more true when it comes to the question of sovereignty. (Note: this is probably a lot longer than it should be. Apologies.)Melville's final full-length novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade begins aboard the steamship Fidele, whose destination is the city of the American Mardi Gras, New Orleans. With nothing fully denied or affirmed, completely stable or unstable, The Confidence-Man pulls the wool over its readers' eyes repeatedly. As its seemingly random episodes of peddlers and beggars of uncertain character and intent accumulate, one's confidence in the stability of identity is, equivocally, stressed. Appropriately, its reader ultimately is in the same predicament as the nameless old man at the end of the novel, who, while examining a banknote with his newly purchased "Counterfeit Detector," laments: "'there’s so many marks of all sorts to go by, it makes it a kind of uncertain."' To make matters even more complex, he recognizes that some signs, such as red marks, which by their absence hint at a counterfeit, also cannot always be trusted because "'some good bills get so worn, the red marks get rubbed out. And that's the case with my bill here -- see how old it is -- or else it's a counterfeit, or else -- I don't see right -- or else -- dear, dear me -- I don’t know what else to think.'" His search for the bill unsullied by falseness, and thus for a clearly marked identification of authenticity, is paradigmatic of our own desire to identify the contours of the novel's deception: namely, the differences between, and thus the identities of, conned and con man. Both are, however, wild-goose chases.
The old man's concern here reaches through the ambiguities of a nascent nineteenth-century capitalism, in a way not altogether different from Marx's critique, and provocatively engages the thoroughly theological assumption of / desire for authenticity it betrays as itself a confidence game."Stay, now, here's another sign. It says that, if the bill is good, it must have in one corner, mixed in with the vignette, the figure of a goose, very small, indeed, all but microscopic; and for added precaution, like the figure of Napoleon outlined by the tree, not observable, even if magnified, unless the attention is directed to it. Now, pore over it as I will, I can't see this goose."
"Can't see the goose? why I can; and a famous goose it is. There" (reaching over and pointing to a spot in the vignette).
"I don't see it -- dear me -- I don't see it. Is it a real goose?"
"A perfect goose; beautiful goose."
"Dear, dear, I don't see it."
The theological confidence game of The Confidence-Man, as it were, is characterized on one level by the subtle intertwining of duplicity and sacrifice in its unsubtle biblical and eschatological allusions, which culminate in the novel’s prophetic conclusion: "Something further may follow of this Masquerade." And yet, like the apocalyptic return of a sacrificed Christ and the forgiveness wrought by the blood of a bull, both of which are often believed to be evoked in the final act of the novel, that which was sacrificed remains just beyond the clouds or behind the temple's veil, an infinite object of theological desire. Is perhaps something similar occurring in the Gospel of St. Matthew, where the resurrection, from which Jesus ostensibly claims his identity and authority (Matt. 28.18-20), is also presented and regarded by some, even amongst the disciples (Matt. 28.17), as a "deception" (Matt. 27.63-66; 28.11-15), a counterfeit? Does not the Gospel of Matthew quickly conclude with an affirmation – "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matt. 28.18) -- that Jacques Derrida might paradoxically paraphrase, "There is no secret as such; I deny it." Much like sacramental wine, the presence and memory of Christ, affirmation and denial continually bleed into one another, confusing the sacred good news with the indeterminate, deferred desire of a secret, sacrificial passion.
What, then, can one say of theology in the midst of such a Masquerade? If, as above, it betrays some necessary essence that is to be (impossibly) unveiled, something behind the mask as it were, its character is that of a phenomenological, teleological or liturgical revelation. And yet this revelatory unmasking of wholeness, which of course never "happens" as such -- or at least is deferred to the inaccessible horizons of a messianic self-presence and/or nestled safely away in the sacralized immanence of its discourse -- is only possible in a reflective economy, whereby the Subject of theology is that of a self-characterising return to/of itself. The most obvious threats of theology's reflective split are, on the one hand, the systemic order of a totalitarian sovereignty; and, on the other hand, the nihilistic (or, at the very least, incoherent and ineffectual) immanence of institutional chaos. To move beyond the liminal movement between its transcendent ambitions and its immanent materiality, however, is ultimately self-defeating: if the former renders the Subject of theology nonexistent, the latter renders it mute and inert. The subsequent character of theology in the midst of its apparent impasse is seemingly chaotic, in its freedom of shape and mask, but also maintains a predilection for the self-organisation of coherence, order and homogeneity. Such has been the praxis of the confidence, communication, and maintenance of its discourse.
Importantly, though, the coherence of theological discourse is itself beset by the structurally excessive, incomprehensible (theological) freedom of its untold possibilities and unactualized adaptations; or, in other words, by its necessarily repressed tendency for self-violent revolution and rebirth. In its disciplinary exchange the classical stability of theology's value, as though in a free market, is indeed sacrificed; but what is so often missed is that its self-organizational economy is always already a counterfeit dependence upon the intimate miscegenation of the Subject of theological sovereignty and the Object of theological materiality. As a result, the return on theology's value cannot be limited either to the interplay between the productivity of its material immanence in the Masquerade (i.e., in its discourse) and the transcendence of its sovereign ambitions to unmask, but actively emerges as a symptom of the duplicitous dialectic between the two.
Theology in the masquerade of its reflection and exchange is exemplified most provocatively in another of Melville's novels, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, whose protagonist, too, is crushed under the weight of writing the story of himself: "The cheeks of his soul collapsed in him: he dashed himself in blind fury and swift madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity." Similarly, the sovereign Subject of theology can but loathe the material immanence of its necessary embodiment, which knows not what it does without the transcendental criteria of the Subject. The Object of theological reflection, then, in the name of the Subject suppresses and hates the surplus of freedom without criteria that comes from the dialectic but cannot itself be contained by it.
The state of theology is the pursuit of that which would fill the void left by the Subject-Object split of its, one is tempted to suggest, sinful state. Of course, this pursuit is self-deceptive insofar as it chases that which it cannot actually want. That is to say, without its reflective split, there would be no theology. Its lack of wholeness, its own original sin, makes it what it is. The transcendental ambition for sovereign wholeness, the pure night of "theology without theology," is theology's end: its purpose for being and its impossible suicide / annihilation. Therefore, its real aim is to pursue, in the insane circularity of unrequited desire, wholeness without truly wanting it, in order that "the vomit of its loathed identity" (i.e., the excess that emerges from and paradoxically sustains the desire of its suicidal self-violence) might be effectively held within. The objects of its desire, from the Christian significance of the historical Resurrection to the universal possibility of justice, are the means by which the anticipation of and passion for wholeness are given their faces, but actually function as the forestalling obstacles / masks to it.
Its necessarily adaptive order can fully quell neither the potential eruption of its own reflective remainder, nor the attendant spontaneity and freedom of its radically uncertain discursive and disciplinary directions. The idiosyncratic character of theology becoming-itself is perhaps not unlike what Gilles Deleuze has described in one of his final essays as "pure immanence"; which may, furthermore, embolden us even further to rethink the possibilities of a non-sovereign, materialistic "holiness." In this way, theology gains its comprehensibility in the midst of the self-reflection of its discourse and discipline; but, vitally, remains altogether inadequate to explain why this is so.
In sum, Herman Melville's characterisation of theology is radically unthinkable. Though he is decidedly not a theologian, perhaps even because of his more earnest irreligious intentions, the theological significance of his life and fiction is an incidental / miraculous surplus of the impossible desire for something beyond the Masquerade of Subject-Object. This is the enduring significance of The Confidence-Man: that the wearing of masks does not obscure or defer the revelation theological sovereignty, but is itself the complex theological characterisation of a living excess of unthinkable possibility and freedom.
