Per Caritatem

In order to deal with Douglass’s “disciplinary issues,” his master at the time, Thomas Auld, sent the young boy of sixteen to Mr. Covey, a man known in the community as a slave-breaker. Prior to his arrival and in spite of overwhelming obstacles, Douglass had already learned to read. Though his literacy opened up new worlds for him and allowed him to express himself as well as to know himself more profoundly, it also produced discontent and a deep sense of loss having realized what he could have been had he been a (white) free man as opposed to a (black) slave.  In other words, Douglass’s literacy no doubt afforded him a freedom of sorts within the oppressive, racialized society in which he lived; nonetheless, his newly found mental freedom was not sufficient.  After all under the all-pervasive white gaze of a racialized society, no matter how educated he became, he continued to be viewed and treated as less than a person, as property, as a tool for the white man’s projects and economic gains. The insufficiency of this “inner” freedom is seen in Douglass’s narration of his fight with Covey.

Describing his first six months with Covey, he writes, “scarce a week passed without his whipping me.  I was seldom free from a sore back.”[1] He then recounts how Covey worked him day and night and in all weather conditions and how at last the brutal, inhumane work schedules and regimented violence broke him.

I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me.  Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me.  I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute![2]

Although Douglass had attained a level of freedom through literacy—an accomplishment that was itself an “argument” against the white hegemonic discourse pronouncing blacks as subhuman, incapable of “higher” rational reflection, and thus in need of (white) masters—he, as an embodied, incarnate being remained bound and subject to the (irrational) whims of white society.  No matter how literate, educated, and articulate he became, the dominant discourse scripted him as subhuman while the racialized social apparatuses—including Covey’s panoptic plantation—actively sought to suppress his intellectual achievements and to crush his spirit, reducing him to a beast-like existence in order to “prove” the veracity of their narrative.

After one of Covey’s particularly cruel, near-death beatings, Douglass decides to flee. Reluctantly and out of necessity he eventually returns to Covey’s plantation.  His return leads to a physical confrontation with Covey, who, with rope in hand tackles Douglass in a stable and attempts to tie him up.  Rather than remain a docile slave, Douglass decides to defend himself and to fight even if his action results in his own death. “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.”[3] His resolve took Covey by surprise, and Douglass could see for the first time fear and uncertainty in his master’s eyes.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative as a Challenge to Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic

If we bring Douglass’s narrative into conversation with Hegel’s discussion of what is commonly called the master/slave dialectic, some rather interesting insights as well as challenges surface.  Hegel devotes several paragraphs (178-196) in the Phenomenology of Spirit to the master/slave or, as Miller translates the terms, the “lord” and the “bondsman” relationship. Recognition by the other is central to Hegel’s account of the actualization of self-consciousness.  The self requires the recognition of another “I” which corresponds to itself with respect to equality, freedom and independence, as neither recognition of one’s own existence nor consciousness of a mere independent external object provides the requisite certainty Hegel claims is needed for the full actualization of self-consciousness.  The recognition among the “I’s”, in other words, must be mutual—each self must recognize the other as an independent, equal, free “I.” As the struggle for self-consciousness unfolds, a problem arises because at first each “I” sees the other “I” only as an object, a thing external to itself and to be used for its projects and plans.  As Hegel puts it, at this stage they exist as two conflicting manifestations of consciousness; “one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another.  The former is lord, the other is bondsman.”[4] According to Hegel’s narrative, in this initial struggle between the two consciousnesses, the bondsman shows his servile nature in that he would rather preserve his life than lose it and thus submits to the lord or master becoming a tool for the latter’s “pure enjoyment.”[5] In such an arrangement, the relationship and recognition involved is clearly asymmetrical, unequal. Ironically, this one-sidedness which seems to benefit the master, according to Hegel’s dialectical logic, turns out as advantageous to the slave.  Because acquiring full selfhood requires the other, if the other is servile, dependent, enslaved, and so forth, then the self who seeks recognition becomes these things as well.  The situation is much better for the bondsman, as his essential reality has been the lord, an “I” existing for-itself not for-an-other.  Keeping with Hegel’s logic, because the slave and master are integrally connected, the truth of the master has been from the beginning implicit in the slave.  As Hegel explains,

It [servitude] does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and being-for-self, for it has experienced this [in] its own essential nature. For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations.[6]

Hegel goes on to state that this radical uprooting and disruption of one’s stability is “absolute negativity, pure being-for-self” and as such is implicit in the bondman’s consciousness.[7] As the dialectic demands, this “moment of pure being-for-self” does not remain implicit but becomes explicit for the slave “for in the lord it exists for him [the slave] as his object.”[8]

Then Hegel begins to focus on the role of labor and how this too sets the slave free. Having achieved self-consciousness through his experience of “the fear of death, the absolute Lord” in which the master’s free, self-consciousness becomes his ideal object, the slave’s relation to labor is transformed. In short, through his labor, the slave “becomes conscious of what he truly is,” another “I” and not a mere thing. The master was moved by desire to gain recognition through an other, the slave, and thus to overpower him.  However, the master’s relationship with the slave was unequal, distorted, and reduced the slave to a mere tool for his enjoyment. Given this arrangement, the master’s relation with the material realm is mediated through the slave. The slave, in contrast, works directly with the material realm, cultivating it and infusing it so to speak with his own creative ideas and mental energy. In so doing, the slave comes to respect the material realm on its own terms, working creatively with it and leaving something of himself in it as a gift to others. Thus, through his labor, the slave, in contrast with his master, experiences nature as having its own independence and integrity, its own permanence and objectivity.  Why? Because the master’s desire compelling him to conquer and treat the slave as a labor-machine operates by way of destruction, negating the other and leaving only lack and unfulfilled desire—an instance of Hegel’s bad infinite.  “[T]hat is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence.  Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.”[9] With the permanence provided intelligent shaping or “formative activity,”[10] the object produced via the slave’s labor acquires a lasting quality, a form or design that is both intelligible and transferrable over time—using Aristotle’s language inflected through a Hegelian grammar—we might say, it has become in-formed matter and possesses its own integrity.  “It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.”[11] In addition, because he has had to labor neither for himself nor his own projects, the slave has learned to suspend his desires.  Having habituated himself this way, he works creatively with nature, respecting and valuing it rather than seeing it as a means to satisfy his insatiable desires.  What at first seemed to produce only alienation—perpetual labor for an other and never for oneself—ultimately came to be understood as “formative activity,”[12] a distinctively human activity involving cognitive capacities to creatively shape, form and interact with the material world, valuing its integrity, and allowing it to be other. In short, with the triple complex:  fear of the master de-stabilzing the self, service for the master’s sake denying one’s own desires, and labor as “formative activity” resulting in a free relationship with the material realm—together enable the slave to discover himself as an “I” in harmony with the world.  It is not by accident that the next section of the Phenomenology transitions into Stoicism—a view emphasizing inner freedom, a rationally ordered universe, detachment from and indifference to external realities and occurrences outside of one’s control, and an acceptance of one’s place within the larger ordered, rational whole.

Notes

[2] Ibid., 58.

[3] Ibid., 64.

[4] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 115, paragraph 189.

[5] Ibid., 115–6, paragraph 190.

[6] Ibid., 117, paragraph 194.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 118.

[10] Ibid., 119.

[11] Ibid., 118.

[12] Ibid., 119.

*The first image was copied from this website:  http://americanmasterworks.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

*The second image was copied from this website:  http://almoscollectibles.com/afroamericanpaintings.html.

In the opening chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass immediately introduces the reader to a theme that he will develop and elaborate throughout his autobiography, namely, the reduction of slaves to the status of (non-rational) animal or beast.  As Douglass explains, he, like most slaves, was uncertain as to his actual age and had never seen any record of his own birth.[1] “By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.”[2] To inquire of one’s master concerning records, one’s birth date, and related matters was to show signs of a “restless spirit.”[3] Not only was Douglass kept ignorant of his own age, but he had to rely on what he could weave together from fragmented conversations and bits of gossip he had overheard regarding the identity of his father.  “My father was a white man.  He was admitted to be such by all I ever heard speak of my parentage.  The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father.”[4] Liaisons of this sort between masters and female slaves were common and point (among other things) to the irrationality of the hegemonic, pro-slavery discourse and the self-deception in which its participants engaged.  That is, on the one hand, slaves were said to be non-persons, sub-human, more or less beasts; yet, masters regularly raped and sexually abused their slaves, indicating that they themselves did not believe their own narrative but were unwilling to give up their place of privilege and the “benefits” that came with it.  The institution of chattel slavery, founded upon bio-behavioral racial essentialism and maintained through various legal, cultural, and economic structures and strictures, created a lawless space for white, male slaveowners.   Like Gyges hidden from sight when sporting his magical ring and bent on satisfying his desires at the expense of others, these men used the “invisibility powers” of institutional and systemic racism and their privileged place within that system to exploit and destroy fellow human beings.

by John W. Jones

The other side, so to speak, of the dominant narrative’s construction of the slave’s subjectivity is its active erasing or re-scripting his or her history and culture.  One way to engage in this erasure is to dis-integrate, divide, and ultimately destroy familial bonds.  Douglass’s account of his own experience of forced separation from his mother suggests that the practice was common, and highlights its negative impact.  “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. […] Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it.”[5] The child is then moved to a different location, perhaps a different plantation altogether and is placed with an elderly female slave, who, given her frailty and age, is neither profitable to the master nor pleasurable.  As Douglass observes, this practice renders virtually impossible the emotional bonding that ought to occur between mother and child, and resulted in many women suppressing their affections for their children.[6] Although he was able to spend a few hours with his mother in the evenings—after she had worked a full day and walked twelve miles to visit him—Douglass was not allowed to visit her when she fell ill, nor was he permitted to be present when she died and was laid to rest.[7] “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Significant temporal markers that most of us take for granted—one’s own birth date—as well as the spatial presence required for familial cohesion to occur, were denied Douglass.  His spatio-temporal existence, like the other beasts of the field, was disciplined, shaped, and determined by the work day and work season—“planting-time, harvest- time, cherry-time, spring-time.”[8]Here we have the forced reduction of man to homo economicus; however, the term is infused with new meaning.  The slave as economic being is in no way motivated by self-interest and is treated as a non-rational animal, a mere means benefitting the master’s self-serving ends.

Notes

[2] Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 15.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 15, 16.

[6] Ibid., 16.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 15.

* John W. Jones’s  painting, “Slave Mother and Child” was taken from this website: http://www.colorsofmaoney.com/prints_by_john_jones.htm.

Actor and hip hop artist, Dante Terrell Smith, better known as “Mos Def,” grew up in Brooklyn and exhibited musical and acting talents at an early age.  Mos focused on musical theater in high school, attended New York University, and went on to establish himself as both as an actor and a significant voice in the world of hip hop, recording several solo and collaborative albums.  Mos’s lyrics are filled with layers of socio-political and religious commentary and critique, allowing for multiple interpretations and dialogic interdisciplinary engagements.  Below I offer one possible way to enter into dialogue with a song called “Mathematics” from his 1999 debut solo album, Black on Both Sides.

The body of the song opens with a six line stanza rhythmically interweaving the numbers one through ten in between concrete, historical particulars (Pete Rose—i.e. “Charlie Hustle”) to more abstract, universal, and religious allusions (e.g., “Seven firmaments of heaven to hell, 8 Million Stories to tell”).  Then in the next stanza, Mos moves away from the abstract and becomes more personal.  In these nine lines, he highlights how the poetics of a socially conscious hip hop—in particular the voice that it gives to the voiceless— lifts the “powerless up” from the social sinkholes of stigmatized spaces (ghettos, prisons, and “streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing”) and, in his case, has allowed him to overcome some of the socio-political obstacles faced by African Americans so that he might speak on behalf of suffering others.  Yet, as the last three lines indicate living in a condition both created and abandoned by the state—not to mention a socially ostracized, stigmatized “space” (projects, no-go zones etc.)—breeds violence, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness among those forced to occupy those infernal spaces.

The body of my text posesses extra strength
Power-liftin powerless up, out of this, towerin’ inferno
My ink so hot it burn through the journal
I’m blacker than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle
Hip-Hop past all your tall social hurdles|
like the nationwide projects, prison-industry complex
Broken glass wall better keep your alarm set
Streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing
Say evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dream

The next section begins to develop and elaborate the kind of “mathematics” Mos has in mind.  Having to live in such inhumane circumstances of course takes its toll on a person’s psychological, emotional, and physical well-being, and often paradoxically, accelerates and intensifies the construction of the subjectivities that the hegemonic class had hoped to eradicate. As Mos explains, those who internalize the stigma and negativity imposed on them by the dominant narrative—the “chain cats”—end up dead, crushed in spirit and ground to dust for the economic gain of the (largely white) elite class.

But you chain cats get they CHA-POW, who dead now
Killin’ fields need blood to graze the cash cow
It’s a number game, but shit don’t add up somehow

When your world—the social space into which you have been thrown by forces outside of your control—is created, founded, and built upon injustice and exploitation, even something as supposedly clear-cut, steady, dispassionate, and uncontroversial as mathematics becomes a site of socio-political polysemous meanings.  So how does the “shit” not add up? Here are a few examples.

Like I got, sixteen to thirty-two bars to rock it
but only 15% of profits, ever see my pockets
like sixty-nine billion in the last twenty years
spent on national defense but folks still live in fear
like nearly half of America’s largest cities is one-quarter black
That’s why they gave Ricky Ross all the crack
Sixteen ounces to a pound, twenty more to a ki
A five minute sentence hearing and you no longer free

First, Mos critiques the music industry whose sights are set not on artistry and beauty but on profits.  Then he highlights the government’s out of control spending on national defense while simultaneously creating an atmosphere of public panic of the socially constructed “terrorist” as the new “other” to fear. Lastly, he offers his interpretation of the Ricky Ross case.  In a series of controversial articles in 1996, Gary Webb argued that the new all-out war on drugs had a disproportionate impact on blacks, particularly young black males on the lower end of the socio-economic and educational spectrum.  In the Ross case, as Webb explains, you have on one side, “Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” Both men were arrested for major drug trafficking offenses; however, according to Web’s story, even though Blandon testified in court that “the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA’s army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua’s new socialist Sandinista government,” and admitted that his modus operandi was to employ guys like Ross, “a South-Central teen-ager who had the gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army’s cocaine, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ghettos,” after all the deals were made in the “justice” system, guess which one ends up in the hole after his “five minute hearing”?—Ricky Ross.[1] The section ends with a jab at the new big brother State with its surveillance techniques now legalized and expanded beyond panoptic prisons.

The next seven lines continue to describe life in the urban hellholes, the ghettos and hyper-ghettos where people become hardened and turn to crime and other parallel economic (and often illegal) structures carved out in response to socio-political and economic ostracism and spatial confinement.  Note again the hopelessness and the sense of human potential wasted.

Rock your hardhat black cause you in the Terrordome
full of hard niggaz, large niggaz, dice tumblers
Young teens and prison greens facin’ life numbers
Crack mothers, crack babies and AIDS patients
Young bloods can’t spell but they could rock you in PlayStation
This new math is whippin motherfuckers’ ass
You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add
It’s mathematics

Next we have a structural mirroring of the opening stanza playing off the one through ten number theme and closing with an eleven line description of the “numbers” problem where dead-end low wage (non-salaried and hence no benefits–health insurance, retirement fund, etc.) jobs and poverty-stricken living produce and give rise to drug use, trafficking, and other criminal activities.

Yo, it’s one universal law but two sides to every story
Three strikes and you be in for life, manditory
Four MC’s murdered in the last four years
I ain’t tryin to be the fifth one, the millenium is here
Yo it’s 6 Million Ways to Die, from the seven deadly thrills
Eight-year olds gettin found with 9 mill’s
It’s 10 P.M., where your seeds at? What’s the deal
He on the hill puffin krill [crack cocaine] to keep they belly filled
Light in the ass with heavy steel, sights on the pretty shit in life
Young soldiers tryin’ to earn they next stripe
When the average minimum wage is $5.15
You best believe you gotta find a new ground to get C.R.E.A.M.[2]

The white unemployment rate, is nearly more than triple for black
so frontliners got they gun in your back
Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
and end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence

From the hopelessness of the ghetto, you move to the hopelessness of the prison and the cycle continues; however, along the way, should you survive the prison camp, the panoptic gaze makes sure that the negative narrative inscribed in your body and indelibly marking your soul stays with you—no bars needed as confinement, stigmatization, segregated spaces, and negated freedom operate on the outside through a network just as rigidly structured and socially impermeable as the hierarchical social strata of the carceral system. Lastly, Mos doesn’t mince words about the role race plays in this deadly numbers game.  Whether chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, or hyper-incarceration, “blackness” continues as the mutable target socially constructed in the past as (subhuman) “thing” and now as the “dangerous other” whom, since we can no longer legally lynch, must be destroyed by more socially acceptable means.

And even if you get out of prison still livin’
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it
It’s all mathematics

Notes

[2] I had no idea what C.R.E.A.M. meant, but after a bit of searching here I found out that it is an acronym which stands for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” and was made famous “by the Wu-Tang clan […] to describe money. Ever since the Wu-Tang commenced their rap reign in the early 90’s, CREAM has become the universal hip-hop word for money.”

Although elsewhere I bring Douglass’s insights into conversation with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, here I want to focus on how Douglass’s observations converge and resonate with Rieger’s thoughts on the myth of the (autonomous) individual. Rieger is in no way suggesting that the humanity, subjectivity, or agency of a marginalized or oppressed person is or can be totally eradicated by the dominant culture, narratives, or “master” subjectivities.  Rather, like Douglass, Rieger’s point, which presupposes and affirms human solidarity, is that we are both socially constructed and self-constructed.  Thus, on the one hand, Rieger emphasizes how under the current rule of Empire “subjectivity is being actively colonized at the level of the cultural, the emotional, and even the spiritual,” and those in the dominant position of privilege can “happily encourage others to take things into their own hands—to become active subjects, in other words—without having to be too worried that this will ever become a reality,” thus strengthening “the myth that the powerful have gained power by becoming active [autonomous] subjects themselves […] and putting blame on all others who fail.”[1] Yet, on the other hand, Rieger stresses the agency and creative possibilities of human beings, even when they find themselves in demoralizing, inhumane, and oppressive socio-political contexts like chattel slavery or colonialism.

The good news […] is that, despite all its efforts, Empire is never able to control and co-opt subjectivity and desire totally and absolutely. A first sense that subjectivity cannot be co-opted grows entirely out of an observation of the ambivalence of the status quo. The Empire’s power and influence may be substantial and all-encompassing, but are never absolute, never without ambivalence. Even subjectivity that has seemingly been erased by Empire keeps erupting, at times in unexpected places. It is a significant datum of history that even slaves—people who were not supposed to have any subjectivity at all—were able to reassert their subjectivity, rise up, and challenge the Empire. The Judeo-Christian traditions are founded on such a slave uprising in the Exodus and on many other stories of resistance by people who were considered lacking subjectivity in the ancient world.[2]

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and countless other “erupting” subjectivities refused the pre-scripted (racialized) narrative of the dominant culture and chose instead various paths of resistance, (re)scripting their identities, (re)asserting their humanity, and gifting us with living memorials of hope to encourage us in times of doubt and despair.  In light of the double construction of subjectivities—that is, our social and self-construction—there are no autonomous self-made subjects; yet, there is no reason to conclude that social construction and agency are mutually exclusive or that the former necessarily eradicates the latter.

Notes

[2] Ibid.

In the context of discussing Lacan’s distinction between “realism” as that which the dominant group takes as reality—master narratives, nationalisms etc. belong here—and the real, the underside of “realism,” Joerg Rieger highlights the “myth of individualism.”

Individualism is the sort of master narrative that those in power who share in the dominant subjectivity tell about themselves in order to cover up and repress the real—that is, all those who have contributed to their success and those on whose backs their success is ultimately built.  This repressed world of the individualist includes teachers, parents, and peers, but also housekeepers, workers who produce at low ages, and all the other service providers and subordinates in the command structure.[1]

Rieger continues, accenting the ways in which the narrative of individualism is intimately connected with the construction of dominant subjectivities.

The seemingly self-made dominant subject must tell realism’s story of individualism and repress the real; this is the only way to avoid being challenged by another kind of subjectivity that is part of the real.  The Lacanian notion of the repressed real helps us see that there is no autonomous subject.  Individualism is merely the myth of the powerful; even the dominant subjectivity cannot exist in isolation.  Oppressors who seek to safeguard their own subjectivity by perpetuating the master narrative of individualism simply fool themselves because their identity is invariably built in relation to others and, more specifically, on the back of others.[2]

Here Rieger highlights the fact that the so-called “self-made dominant subject” is always already in relation to others.  More to the point, such “self-made” individuals—particularly those quite content to live within rather than beyond the “spirit of the Empire”—constitute their subjectivities and identities in relation to those whom they script, oppress, exploit, marginalize, and confine to urban and (to borrow Glenn Loury’s term) other “nether” non-spaces of existence.

In his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass captures our heteronomous (rather than autonomous) way of being in the world in his narration of the reciprocal nature of the master/slave relation.  Covey, a particularly merciless slave owner, was renowned for his “ability” to break slaves, and Douglass, unfortunately, became existentially acquainted with Covey’s “skills” in cruelty on a regular basis.  After one of Covey’s near-death beatings, Douglass decided to flee; however, feeling trapped, hungry, and having no permanent place to reside, he eventually returned to the plantation.  Recognizing that his return will result in some form of violent “discipline” at Covey’s hands, Douglass experiences a “conversion” of sorts.  That is, rather than remain a docile slave, he chooses the (active) path of resistance; when Covey attacked him with rope in hand, Douglass—at that time a teenager—defended himself and took his “master” to task.  “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.”[3] Douglass’s response caught Covey completely off-guard, and for the first time Douglass saw Covey tremble—the myth of the autonomous “self-made dominant” subject began to unravel.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.  Rather than hand Douglass over to the authorities or have him severely beaten or hung—all common and accepted practices in that day—Covey does nothing.  For the remainder of his “disciplinary training” on Covey’s plantation, Douglass receives no further violent treatment from his “master.”  How are we to understand Covey’s response?  As Douglass explains,

Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker.  It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished.[4]

Covey, as a member of the elite slave-owning class, was in fact not an autonomous subject, whose supposed “success” might serve as an exemplar for other aspiring (white, male) members of society.  Instead, Covey’s identity, his sense of self, his subjectivity was deeply connected to those whom he sought to “break.” When the socio-political status of the underclass changes, the mythmakers tend to awaken from their contented slumber and new myths must be crafted to keep the public in a state of alarm and uneasiness, fearing the hegemonic-scripted “other,” who, after all, wants to take what rightfully belongs to them (i.e. the dominant class and those imbibing their myths).  (Does this story sound familiar?)[5] Stay tuned for Part II…

Notes

[2] Ibid., 48.

[3] Frederick Douglass, In Douglass: Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave/ My Bondage and My Freedom/ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.  Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 64.

[4] Ibid., 65-6.

[5] The forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod (July 2010) is one contemporary variation on this rather worn out theme. Consider, for example, the “chapters” in this story— the N.A.A.C.P. challenges the Tea Party leaders to expel the racist elements from among their ranks resulting in Tea Party member Mark Williams’ expulsion; Andrew Breitbart posts a highly edited video clip of Ms. Sherrod’s alleged “reverse racist” speech at a N.A.A.C.P. meeting, which was immediately aired on Fox News and later shown to be an excerpted clip from a speech in which Ms. Sherrod was recounting her own story of racial reconciliation.  These events (not to mention others) suggest that race (and, given the context, race relations in the United States in particular), race-baiting, and the media’s role in constructing racial identities continue as significant socio-political problems that must be engaged.  These issues are in no way resolved or behind us simply because Barack Obama holds the highest public office in America. See, for example, Frank Rich’s assessment of the Sherrod incident in his New York Times editorial, “There’s a Battle Outside and It is Still Ragin’.” The New York Times, July 24, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html?_r=1 (accessed  7/26/10).

* The first image, South Carolina Slaves, by an unknown artist was copied from this website:  http://www.voiceseducation.org/category/tag/fugitive-slave-law.   The second image, Slave Revolt, was published in The Abolitionist in 1802 and was likewise copied from the same website.

In reading various texts—whether of a philosophical, political, literary, or economic nature—it is striking how many authors offer a (re)reading of the Genesis Fall narrative and then proceed to use their particular reading as the hermeneutical lens through which they explicate their position as a whole or at least to illuminate some significant theme integral to their position.  Consider Hegel’s interpretation of the Fall as necessary for the ultimate good of humankind, or Kant’s re-reading of Genesis in his essay, Conjectural Beginning of Human History, where he claims that the original transgression actually causes reason to emerge.  That is, prior to the Fall, humans did not possess a moral or rational capacity for such a decision. However, with the Fall, we overcame our “tutelage” to nature (i.e., instinctual animal-like existence).  For Kant, within the human race itself and from the very beginning, there is an inherent struggle, a tension between sociability and unsociability.  This is quite different than the traditional Christian narrative, which affirms the current dis-integration of humans, that is, an inner struggle of desires that tear at our very being and which was not present from the beginning; rather, this unnatural condition is a result of our willful turn away (“fall”) from the Triune Creator.

Friedrich Hayek, economist, philosopher, self-professed promoter of liberalism even writing an essay to distance himself from conservatism,[1] ardent defender of free-market capitalism, and winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, though in no way an advocate of Christian Holy Writ, offers a narrative about economics that, as Jung Mo Sung observes, shares certain structural similarities with the Genesis Fall narrative. Though himself an agnostic, Hayek acknowledges rather begrudgingly that beneficial practices have resulted from religious beliefs, in particular, monotheistic religious beliefs, “which are not true—or verifiable or testable in the same sense as are scientific statements and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation” (The Final Conceit, 136–7).  If Hayek were a Christian, we might interpret this statement as allowing for the possibility of truths that are revealed by faith—suprarational, not irrational truths; however, given Hayek’s rejection of Christianity, this interpretation is not an option.  Interestingly, Hayek’s view of economics has deeply influenced the way that many conservative Christians (as well as others) think about the free market.  (This is not in itself “damning” in my view, as many non-Christian philosophies, insights, etc. have been appropriated by Christians for the furtherance of their tradition and to aid in the explication of their own teachings; however, what would be “damning” is if the teaching or ethos appropriated is fundamentally at odds with the Christian faith, tradition, and teachings of Christ himself).

Upon reception of the Nobel Prize in economics, Hayek presented a lecture entitled, “The Pretence of Knowledge.” In the lecture, he speaks against a “scientist” approach to economics which attempts to apply “habits of thought to fields different from that in which they have been formed.”[2] In other words, according to Hayek, economics does not belong with the “hard” (physical) sciences, as it deals with complex phenomena that are not quantifiable, observable, measurable, etc. in the same way that the phenomena of the physical sciences are.  One might grant this conclusion; yet, Hayek goes further, claiming that because we cannot understand, completely master, etc. a phenomena as complex as the market, attempts to do so are dangerous and harmful.  For Hayek, the great economic crisis of the 1970s was due to Keynesian interventionist policies.  Like Adam and Eve, whose desire to be omniscient overtook them, moving them to partake of the fruit of the forbidden tree and thus created havoc for them and others beyond their wildest dreams, so too, according to Hayek, do those who dare steer the invisible hand of the free market system lead us to our doom.  “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”[3] There is no doubt that certain kinds of interventionist policies could be used for tyrannical, totalitarian purposes; however, does it necessarily follow that they must?  One could become very pessimistic about any attempts to regulate or direct the market for purposes of social justice. One could also choose to believe that social and economic problems will somehow solve themselves through the unintended effects of the Smithian benevolent, invisible hand.  (I am not claiming that these are the only possible options). To opt for the second possibility, as Sung highlights, is not only an act of faith, but an (irrational) leap of faith.

[I]f it is true that we cannot sufficiently understand the factors and dynamics of the market so that we can intervene in it, how can we know that the market always produces beneficial effects or that it is essentially a ‘force for good’? Is knowing that the market always produces beneficial effects not a pretension of knowledge of the market? Since one cannot prove this providential character of the market, we have here a ‘leap of faith’ in the affirmation of the essentially beneficent quality of free market.[4]

Hayek, highly influenced by philosopher Karl Popper (and, it seems, Popper’s literal reading of Plato’s Republic as a blueprint for totalitarianism!), held to an (obviously non-theistic) view of evolutionary morality, which as I understand it—and I am open to correction here as I have not read the entire book and am no expert on Hayek’s work—suggests that we move beyond primitive instincts—“rules of solidarity and altruism” (The Fatal Conceit, 13) and “treat[ing] all men as neighbors.”  Why?  “For those now living within the extended order gain from not treating one another as neighbors, and by applying, in their interactions, rules of the extended order [=”free market economy”]—instead of the rules of solidarity and altruism” (Ibid.). Somehow, I just don’t think Jesus would approve.

Notes

[2] “Friedrich August von Hayek – Prize Lecture.” Nobelprize.org. 22 Jul 2010 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beyond the Spirit of Empire, p. 82.

* The Invisible Hand Image was created by Mark Bailen and was copied from this website.

In his essay, “What is Enlightenment?”, Foucault notes that Baudelaire heralds artist Constantin Guys as an example of modernity.  As Foucault explains, “what makes him [Guys] the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire’s eyes is that, just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world.  His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; ‘natural’ things become ‘more than natural,’ ‘beautiful’ things become ‘more than beautiful,’ and individual objects appear ‘endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of [their] creator.’  For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.  Bauderlairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it” (41, emphases added).

Does this not sound like Foucault’s own project? That is, as Foucault’s analyses of delinquents, the insane, and the sick evidence, we must turn our attention to the real, concrete instances of “life on the ground.” For instance, we must look to the various oppressions of the marginalized and exploited, as well as other subjectivities created through the complex interplay of social apparatuses, institutions, discourses etc. In so doing, we see how subjects are in fact not autonomous, exposing what Joerg Rieger calls, “the myth of individualism,”[1] but rather are shaped by the particular practices, institutions, language, and myriad other beyond-our-control  convergences and socio-political relations into which we are born into and live out our existence.  Even so, as Foucault explicitly affirms, particularly in his later essays and interviews,[2] we are nonetheless agents who can in fact resist other-imposed narratives; social construction for Foucault does not go “all the way down.”  Rather, as human free agents, we can transgress self and other imposed limits, narratives etc.  All this highlights Foucault’s attempt to balance and give full weight to both social and self construction, an issue which he believes is thematized in modernity.  On the one hand, we must pay “extreme attention to what is real” (i.e. study and analyze the ways in which disciplinary practices are inscribed upon the bodies of prisoners creating very specific subjectivities). On the other hand, as free agents, we engage these realities—albeit social and not natural realities— “with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects and violates [them]” (41).  Resistance, for Foucault, is decidedly, not futile.

Notes

[2] See, for example, Foucault’s essay, “The Subject and Power.”

In his book, Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key,  co-authored with Néstor Míguez and Jung Mo Sung, Joerg Rieger discusses how the production of a specific kind of desire functions within capitalistic Empires.  “Demand is infinite since, unlike needs, desires are infinite as well.  Thus, unlimited desire provides the basis for unlimited consumerism.  As a result, limited resources must be negotiated with potentially infinite desires” (58).  Rieger then turns to Girard’s notion of “mimetic desire.”  As its name indicates, mimetic desire is “not the ordinary desire of particular objects but the imitation of other people’s desire”[1] (58).  On this model, a “conflictual relation” emerges between the one who imitates another’s desire and the one whose desire is imitated.[2] This kind of struggle or conflict relation does not apply merely to individuals but to relations between larger social configurations.  As one can imagine, poorer nations often find their natural resources exploited, not to mention the exploitation of workers, that is, human beings de-valued and transformed into a cheap labor force so that desires of the wealthy can be satiated—not that they actually are satiated.  Such inhumane, instrumental treatment of course affects how the poor perceive themselves.  The poor, however, are not the only ones whose  subjectivities are shaped (internally and externally) by this never-ending-always-chasing-after-more social apparatus, the subjectivities of the wealthy are likewise constructed.  As Rieger explains,

Mimetic desire helps us to understand some of the deeper levels of human relationships and subjectivity under the current conditions of Empire, Subjectivity itself becomes what we might call ‘mimetic subjectivity’.  Competition is not simply based on the scarcity of desirable objects, as is often assumed, it is based on mimetic desire.  What drives economic progress, consumption, and the progress of the structures of Empire from this point of view, is that others want what the wealthy already have.  The result is the extraordinarily intense competition that has come to be accepted as the essence of free-market economies.  It is not hard to see that there is little room for [… ] an active subject, except at the very top of society.  But even there a constant battle ensues about who tops the lists, who is wealthier and more powerful, […] Mimetic desire can never be satisfied.  The problem is compounded, of course, for those who cannot keep up. When they are drawn into this system, they can only perceive themselves as failures, as theorists from the Southern Hemisphere have pointed out.  What makes this mimetic desire so effective in the pursuit of Empire is that it seems to have a snowball effect, and it seems that we are witnessing this effect in extreme forms today.  Moreover, there is a built-in reciprocity that leads to further escalation, since, in Girard’s words, “the model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of its imitator’ [Girard, “Mimesis and Violence,” 12] (48-49).

Notes

[2] Ibid., 147.

In between dissertation reading and writing, I have been spending time with a wonderful book, Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key,  co-authored by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung.  (Professor Rieger, is, I am delighted to say, the third reader of my dissertation).  I hope to have at least some time this summer to devote a few substantive blog posts to this book, which I have found thoroughly refreshing and on the mark with its assessments of our market-driven way of being.  In the meantime, let me whet your appetite with this witty excerpt discussing the market as “financial games”  involved “virtual goods” and played for the benefit of the elite few at the expense of the exposed many.

[I]n the economic jargon imposed by the businesses of hegemonic communication “the markets”, or even in the singular “the market”, does not refer any more to places for the exchange of goods, where producers and artisans sell and exchange their products.  It does not even refer to the most abstract derivations of the celebration of the buying and selling transaction.  Rather the market now refers to financial games.  The notion that the ‘market formulates prices’ within industrial capitalism has now given way to finances.  The great fortunes of today are not established by the possession of material goods but rather from bank accounts, financial wealth and other forms of “virtual goods” such as trademarks, patents, images, use of business ‘logos’ in the form of merchandizing, and so on.  Things virtual, fantasy or fetish, to use Marxist language, have replaced, scammed, and annulled what is real.  It is just like the story of the witty tailors who scammed the emperor by selling him a robe of non-existent cloth and telling the gullible crowd that only the wise can see it. So everyone refrained from telling the emperor that he did not have any clothes on, for then they would be considered stupid.  Today we all believe that things exist that others say exist, even though personally we do not see them. But in this case we have all been forced to wear these invisible robes and we all fear to discover that we are naked. The only one who is dressed is the emperor (“Empire, Religion, and the Political,” in Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung, 11–12).

In the context of analyzing a scholarly dialogue between Seyla Benhabib and Judith Bulter, David Stern makes a helpful distinction between a situated, rather than a displaced subject. Having discussed Seyla Benhabib’s articulation of weaker and stronger postmodern views of socially constructed subjectivities,[1] Stern adds, “[i]n the weaker version of the thesis, the subject is situated in a world, but remains a subject capable of intentional action and autonomy.”[2] In contrast, the strong view—held, for example, by Judith Butler—claims that the subject is socially constructed “all the way down.”[3] As Stern explains, Benhabib opts for the weaker postmodern thesis wherein a situated subject “is a subjectivity that is not merely a passive product of the ways it is affected by the world.”[4] For Benhabib, we are no doubt influenced and formed by various cultural narratives, “nevertheless we must still argue that we are not merely extensions of our histories, [but] vis-à-vis our own stories we are in the position of author and character at once.”[5] Particularly in light of Foucault’s later essays and interviews, one could make a strong case that Behabib’s situated subject is more or less equivalent to Foucault’s doubly-constructed subject.

Following Benhabib’s author/character analogy, I propose the activity of jazz improvisation as way to think about the situated or doubly-constructed subject.  Jazz improvisers belong to a tradition, which they themselves shape and by which they are shaped. The particular melodic lines they utilize, the musicians they imitate and “quote,” the kinds of instruments they play—an electric rather than an acoustic guitar, a synthesizer rather than a piano—and even performance opportunities are all socially and historically conditioned.  Nonetheless, the various ways in which they take up, re-shape, innovate, and expand the givens of tradition/s, highlights the subject-pole of construction.  In other words, though the improviser-subject is embedded in a socio-historical milieu that forms her, she is able to contribute to and even radically alter her context.  As she willfully and intentionally works out these changes, innovations, and reconfigurations in dialogue with the tradition, her own subjectivity is likewise reconstituted.[6] Her musical voice, style, and signature come to be otherwise.  The ability to maneuver within and utilize the very structures, mechanisms, and discourses shaping us for emancipatory, re-creative purposes sits well with Foucault’s analyses of the subject.

Notes

[2] Stern, “The Return of the Subject?,” 111.

[3] Ibid., 112.

[4] Ibid., 111.

[5] Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism,” 21.

[6] For a more detailed discussion of the ways in which a musician is both shaped by and reshapes musical traditions, see Nielsen, “What Has Coltrane to Do With Mozart,” especially 67–8.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference held annually in Philadelphia, you may read about the event on their website.  Today I found out that my abstract was accepted, and I eagerly look forward to attending and to spending time with some of my very good friends in Philadelphia. If you also plan to attend, please  let me know.  I always enjoy these conferences, especially the conversations before, after, and in-between sessions.  For those interested, I’ve posted a copy of my abstract.

St. Augustine and Frederick Douglass:  Counternarratives from the Underside as a Mode of Resistance and Confessio

As Michel Foucault famously said, “Where there is power, there is resistance.”  Slave narratives and religious autobiographies are examples of such resistance possibilities, as they assert the existence and humanity of those forced into socio-political non-existence.  Autobiography of some form or fashion is not absent in the Christian tradition, and perhaps the most famous autobiography or better, confessio, comes from the great North African theologian, St. Augustine.  In stark contrast with Enlightenment thinkers (e.g. Immanuel Kant), Augustine understands himself heteronomously, that is, as one created in the image of God, and who, as image, is always-already in relation to an Other.  In this essay, I explore the ways the slave narrative, focusing primarily on Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, continues and expands Augustine’s trajectory. Like Douglass, part of Augustine’s project in the Confessions is to re-articulate the Christian narrative so as to show its significance in the present and to locate himself within God’s story.  In other words, instead of simply accepting the dominant discourse of what it means to be successful, happy, and so on, Augustine challenged the socio-political norms and values and offered a different narrative, the Christian narrative.  Unlike Augustine, Douglass himself was a slave who wrote under the strains of the oppressive context of chattel slavery—a system that many, if not most, white American Christians supported.  In light of this historical difference, I examine the political, literary and other challenges faced by the latter, highlighting the creative ways in which Douglass, like Augustine, wrote against the social grain to establish his identity in the Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.  Undoubtedly, genuine differences exist between these two thinkers; nonetheless, both were eloquent orators who employed the power of rhetoric to critique the cultural and religious practices of their day.  Whether interpreting and applying Scripture in fresh, new ways or highlighting the inconsistencies of the hegemonic discourses of their respective eras, Douglass and Augustine challenged the glory narratives of the powerful—that is, powerful in the eyes of the world—and choose instead, as did their Lord-turned-slave, to identify with the weak of the world.

I recently read John M.G. Barclay’s excellent essay, “Neither Jew Nor Greek:  Multiculturalism and the New Perspective on Paul.”  In the first major section,  Barclay provides a clear concise overview of the main players of the New Perspective on Paul (henceforth, NPP). His sketch begins with Krister Stendal’s groundbreaking essay, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” moves to E.P. Sanders’ notion of “covenantal nomism” as presented in his book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and then turns to James D.G. Dunn’s contributions via his commentaries on St. Paul, viz., “his explorations of the social aspects of Paul’s critical engagement with Judaism” (202).  Particularly important given our post-Holocaust existence is the fact that the NPP scholars are sensitive to the unfortunately marred history of Christian scholarship and its participation in anti-Semitism.

The second section of Barclay’s essay is devoted to a discussion of the social and ideological background of the NPP.  Here the major subdivisions include the following, all of which characterize the NPP’s methodological stance: (1) a self-conscious theological respect for Judaism, (2) a turning “from an individualistic to a communal reading of Pauline theology” (i.e. Bultmann’s existentialist Heideggerian-inspired readings are out), (3) a concern for multiculturalism and difference.

The third section focuses on Daniel Boyarin’s reading of St. Paul as expressed in his book, A Radical Jew:  Paul and the Politics of Identity.  Barclay finds Boyarin’s engaging, insightful, sympathetic and attentive to St. Paul’s unique role in the Christianity; yet, he finds Boyarin’s reading at times to miss the ways in which St. Paul’s works might be applied fruitfully to our current concerns with multiculturalism and difference.

The fourth and final section of the essay involves a more sustained discussion of St. Paul and multiculturalism.  It is here in the first part of this final section that I want to linger.  Barclay opens by drawing our attention to the fact that “[a]ll Jews in the Graeco-Roman world were affected to some degree by the dominant Hellenistic culture” (209).  Given that Hellenization had a variety of inflections, Barclay offers a helpful distinction between “acculturation” and “assimilation.”  The former speaks of the “adoption of Hellenistic speech, literary forms, values and philosophies); the latter refers to “social integration into Hellenistic society” (209).  A Jew fluent in high Greek might be acculturated but not assimilated.  What bound Jews together most intimately were social and religious practices such as

aniconic monotheism (the refusal to participate in non-Jewish religion), the male mark of circumcision (which among other things, limited marriage relations), the dietary laws (which restricted social intercourse) and the observance of the Sabbath (which affected employment relations).  Such customs defined Jewish difference:  they created social boundaries between Jew and Greek, even where the two might otherwise speak the same language and employ the same though-forms.  Greeks who wished to become Jews (as some did), needed to adopt precisely these social practices to achieve full integration into the Jewish community (209).

Part of what made the apostle Paul so controversial was his proclamation that Gentiles need not embrace these social practices to be full members of the Abrahamic covenant.  Rather, through faith in Christ, they too could enter into intimate life with YHWH and receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  Gentiles, of course, must manifest this new life in their actions, and St. Paul did exhort them to live free of idols—in line with Jewish custom and a requirement so to speak of monotheism.  However, St. Paul “did not allow the other three ‘social markers’ [i.e. dietary laws, circumcision and required observance of feast days] to characterize the common life of believers] (210).  On this point, Barclay states,

[i]n this sense Paul preached to Gentiles a partially ‘dejudaized Judaism’ and attempted to create church communities which were multiethnic and multicultural:  in Christ ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek’ (Gal. 3:28)” (210).  Contra Boyarin, Barclay claims that St. Paul was not engaging in a spiritual or allegorical interpretative move—he was “not reaching behind Jewish particulars to some abstract ‘essence’ or disembodies ‘ideal’:  he was placing alongside the Jewish community another which was equally physical and embodied in social reality.  To be sure, he can relativize circumcision by claiming that what counts is ‘faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6), but that faith and love are designed to take extremely practical shape in the life of a community (Gal. 5:13-6:10).  Similarly, he will not allow the Roman churches to define themselves by distinction in food or drink, but the ‘righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ which he puts in their place (Rom. 14:17) are meant to have immediate impact on their common life, not least in their common meals (Rom. 14:1-15:6) (210).

Consequently, Barclay believes that Boyarin is wrong to conclude that St. Paul engages in an allegorical hermeneutic on these points in order to locate a common human essence.  Instead, according to Barclay, St. Paul seeks “to enable an alternative form of community which could bridge ethnic and cultural divisions by creating new patterns of common life” (210).  In sum, St. Paul’s aim is not to “eradicate” or “erase” cultural differences, but to “relativize” them (211).  He continues to respect Jewish customs (circumcision) and to hold the Jews in high regard, especially given their function in salvation history (recipients of the covenant and the Torah).  Christ was after all a  Jew, and we must neither forget nor attempt to downplay his Jewishness;  yet, He is “now the Lord of both Jews and Gentiles, who call on him in faith on the same terms, whatever their cultural identity” (211).  St. Paul is free to draw from both the Jewish and Greek traditions in order to translate the Gospel more effectively into various contexts to people of diverse ethnic, religious, and socio-cultural backgrounds.  “No one’s culture is despised or demonized, but by the same token none is absolutized or allowed to gain hegemony” (211).

Having read my first Žižek book, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, this past semester in a faculty/student reading group, I have to say that, among other things, I am not quite sure what to make of his reading of the “feminine” or “femininity.” Likewise, and this is my caveat  prefatory disclaimer, my knowledge of Freud and Lacan is limited, both of which seem fundamental to Žižek’s reading of women.  With that said, here are a few of the questions that arose as I read chapter 3 of the aforementioned book.  On the one hand, in this work generally speaking, Žižek seems to manifest (problematic) dichotomizing tendencies such as the following:  Judaism verses Christianity, masculinity verses femininity, the “male” religion of Judaism verses the “female” orientation of Christianity—for example, the Pharisees have a “male” approach to the Law and the world, whereas Jesus’ attitude toward the Law expresses a “female” sensitivity. Also, I wonder whether for Žižek, female or femininity ultimately translates into a lack?  What does it mean that Žižek situates woman on the side of the “real” and men on the side of the “symbolic”?  Does it mean that womens’ material existence must ultimately be negated, extinguished?  He seems to suggest that desire is always focused on loss and thus has an intimate relation with the death drive.  If this is the case, why should we accept that claim?

If lack always equals loss for Žižek, then I wonder whether this “loss-logic” is part of his misread of Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross (von Balthasar writes an entire book on the positive theological meaning of the Godforsakeness of God, viz. Mysterium Paschale)?  Contra Žižek, couldn’t Jesus’ cry of “desire” for the Father arise out of a plenitude rather than a lack—a love that is willing even to go to hell in order to stand in solidarity with humans who have freely rejected God?

Also, the Catholic Christian tradition holds that materiality is ultimately redeemable because of its “connection” to the divine.  We see this is the sacrament of the Eucharist, which occurs again and again—the material revealing the divine which can never be exhausted.  Here the material (including the female body) has value then because of this connection with divine plenitude.  If I am not mistaken, I believe that John Milbank offers a critique of Žižek along these lines:  he cannot be a consistent materialist because matter ultimately has value only by virtue of participation in the divine.

On the other hand, perhaps Žižek could be read, following Lacan, as saying something along these lines. In Žižek:  A Very Critical Introduction, Marcus Pound, having commented on the un-representability of feminine sexuality, goes on to explain, “there is no objectifying trait that defines woman as a whole in the way that castration defines men as a whole” (107); this is the meaning of Lacan’s claim, “The woman does not exist” (107).  The idea is that men share a common identity as “castrated,” whereas women have no such common unitary trait. Theirs is the logic of the “Not-All.” Thus, they cannot be reduced to mothers or simply the “other set” to men.  Rather, they are the “open-set” (108-9).  If this is Žižek’s point, then I find it much more appealing and worthy of further development, as it navigates around a dichotomizing and ultimately subject-less view of women and avoids some of the problems noted above.

However, I must say that generally speaking Žižek’s work has a—how shall I put it—rather phallocentric aura about it.  At the end of the day, I’m with Foucault and find these psychoanalytic Freudian hand-me-down-ism-inspired theories to be misguided and part of the social construction of a particularly modern subject seeking in a supposed “hidden, repressed” sexuality the ultimate meaning of life.  Nonsense.  There’s no doubt about it, though– Žižek is quite entertaining.  Let me end my musings in the “spirit” of Žižek-ese:  could it be that “women” in fact do share a “unitary trait,” namely, menstruation?  If so, then is Pound’s more positive reading of Žižek’s view on women negated?  There you have it, the “orthodox fox” deconstructs the Slovenian “rock star” philosopher.

The final theme of chapter four is Schuld’s analysis of a Foucauldian interpretation of modern “healing” as a “transfiguring cure requiring critical intervention by specialists” (154). On Foucault’s account, “the potential danger of these dynamics of normalization—those that feed off our fears of pathology as well as those that entice us with visions of self-affirming health—is that the seeming naturalness of this ‘matrix of individualization’ is warranted by a host of expensively trained and licensed experts” (154).  Because we now turn for our every need to specialists of various kinds—specialists with particular knowledge of which we have little or no access apart from submitting ourselves to their care—our relation to these experts is unbalanced.  As Schuld explains, “many of the normalizing power relations operating within our … culture are asymmetrical and nonreciprocal.  These ‘canonical bits of knowledge’ are the privileged possession of an elite few … as such, they are beyond the grasp of those for and on whom they are applied.  Although self-knowledge supposedly resides within persons who are confessing, it nevertheless lies beyond their grasp. Thus, those who are pursuing the truth do not control this relationship” (154). The psychiatrist-patient relationship is a perfect example of an asymmetrical power relation.

Next, Schuld turns to biotechnologies and the science of genetics, which she believes function as a hermeneutical key of sorts in our culture.  To unpack her claim, she contrasts the new biogenetics paradigm with an Augustinian paradigm.  In the latter view, one is engaged generation after generation in an on-going struggle with sin and evil, whereas in the biogenetic (or biopower) framework, a utopian theme of final victory over our maladies surfaces.  That is, we begin to believe that “by manipulating our malleable bodies down to their tiniest micro-dynamics of power,” we can at last “be liberated from imperfection and fallibility, and along with this, the myth of the good shepherd that has governed our relations in various ways for so long” (155-156).  Though Schuld sees the confidence of the new paradigm as illusory, she points out that “such hopes create social realities” and argues that “hand in hand with this desire to be free of imperfections and guidance is the desire to be free of the obligations, burdens, and risks of caring for others and allow ourselves to be cared for.  Trying to insulate ourselves from the exposure of being influenced by others does not, … necessarily increase our safety; it inevitably opens us to new and potentially more pernicious (because less examined) vulnerabilities” (156).

As we have become accustomed to and completely comfortable with the new paradigm, we have transferred our faith to a new god, placed our hope in a telos-less progress, and we continue to search feverishly for something, anything that might resemble love.  We have replaced the old narratives with new ones and a new magisterium guards with dogmatic zeal its sacred scientific discourses, shielding them from critique with shouts of “objectivity.”

By placing so much hope…in an illusionary promise that we can liberate ourselves from relational fragility, ambiguity, and finitude, we have culturally invested, through the fervency of our faith, scientific discourses with hallowed power and given them sanctuary from historical and political critiques.  Ironically, we have made ourselves more rather than less susceptible to the uncertainties we sought to escape…By giving ourselves over uncritically to an invasive power of our own making, we have intimately exposed ourselves not only to socially exploitable technologies of personal formation and control but also to devastating disappointments when we realize it is not liberating and redemptive (157).

Schuld ends by saying that on her reading, “Augustine would agree with Foucault that such efforts are fueled by arrogance, a deluded sense of self-importance, and a refusal to acknowledge the limitations of finitude” (157).

Next, Schuld discusses the second theme structuring her analysis:  Foucault’s interpretations of “infirmity” as the new hermeneutical lens through which we, “enlightened” (post)moderns, decipher human difference, deviation, and deficiency.  With the shift from the medieval emphasis upon salvation and the soul to the modern emphasis on science and mechanized matter-in-motion, we likewise have a shift in governing metaphors.  As Schuld explains,  “[t]ransformations of the self are no longer interpreted in terms of the movement from sin to salvation, but from pathology to well-being” (148).  Instead of pursing purity in a Cassian ethic of chastity, we now strive for “physical vigor and mental health.”  Salvation, now defined as health, well-being and security is not sought after in the next world but in this world.

The “modern scientific-medicalized paradigms” claim to offer a neutral, “objective” account.  They “presume to stand at a safe remove from traditional disputes over what constitutes the good…Such discourses tend to ignore the moral and social biases of those who decipher information and the moral and social consequences of their determinations.  Because knowledge is always put to use by fallible human beings in a practical world of competing interests and visions, we are deluding ourselves…if we believe that questions of truth can be disentangled from questions of normative worth and value.  Even what appears to be most self-evidently natural is inevitably situated in a cultural context, and thus, shot through with social meanings and moral ambiguities” (149).  In other words, scientists too are human beings, shaped by specific cultures, language games, and personal proclivities—all of which influence their scientific pursuits and findings.

According to Foucault, with the shift from a religious frame to a scientific frame, the categories of “normal” and “abnormal” not only replace but alter in significant ways what was formerly understood as sin and a fallen state in need not of medical correction but of grace.  “Once moral and religious discourses are transposed into a scientific key, a whole range of human frailties and fallibilities … are ‘placed under the rule of the normal and the pathological’” (149).  Of those classified as “abnormal,” Foucault is particularly interested in “children, women, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the condemned.” For example, in his book, Birth of the Clinic, he provides vivid descriptions of what a mentally ill person undergoes in a mental hospital in order to impress upon us the extreme lengths to which our culture is willing to go in order to try and “eliminate disorder and clean up social messes” (150).

In place of exile or physical torture for illicit acts, the new modes of societal exclusion and punishment, or rather rehabilitation, involve updated, scientifically compatible differentiating techniques.  For example, in contrast to “commemorative accounts” and “genealogies,” one now “becomes known by scientifically defined variances and anomalies” (151).  Instead of legends of brave saints, we produce “distinctively modern epic genres—the psychological autobiography and the carefully monitored and charted case study” (151).  In sum, Schuld states, “No longer moral transgressions and guilt, no longer honor and shame, no longer action and social consequence, but nature and defect analyzed through rational quantitative study govern the relations of power of those falling outside expected norms, values and behaviors” (151).

With these things in view, some of Foucault’s passions and concerns come into focus.  For instance, he wants us to be acutely aware of how an “uncompromising passion for clarity about and control over our frailties and infirmities suffuses our culture” (151). Its presence can be felt in self-help bookstores, in gyms with their personal trainers, counselors etc.  We are all “vulnerable to becoming scientifically normalized subjects and scientifically normalizing judges” (151).

In our modern “confessional” techniques, we, like the ancients and the medievals, dwell on selected personal experiences, and by applying socially constructed interpretations to them, we establish individualized identities” (152).  We have turned everything, sex included, into a discourse. “We have culturally created as modern ‘confessing animals’ a new field of pleasure, the pleasure of analysis, and an unexamined devotion to the self-knowledge and bliss that it promises” (152).  In this modern myth, not only those regarded as “abnormal” but also the “seemingly normal are haunted by dark yearnings that must be brought out into the light and liberated” (152).  But isn’t this, after all, very similar to the medieval practice of confession?  Didn’t Christians back then and even those today who practice some form of confession, formally or otherwise, attempt to bring to light those shadowy places of the soul?  According to Schuld, “[i]n some ways, this mirrors Augustine’s conception of the universality of sin and the need for continual confession.  But here, ‘fragments of darkness’ are countered not through confessing our fallibility and need for mercy and sanctifying grace but through bold exercises of autonomy.  Not self-forgetting love and self-surrender but self-assertion frees one from all such dangerous impulses” (153)

Foucault is interested in how “technologies” of confession shape one’s personal and communal identity.  He understands, for example, the emergence of monastic practices of self-examination as “power technologies that enabled persons to navigate themselves and others” through common perils (136).  These “self-examining and [self-]renunciating practices” are likewise structured by various “relational rules” (137).  Though such practices were a significant part of the Christian Middle Ages (and of course are still operative today), Foucault is interested in the ways that the modern State alters, incorporates, and puts them to use for secular purposes.  Augustine, like Foucault, recognized that the Christian practice of confession whether spoken or written was “never simply an act of expression; it was an act of making or constructing”; it was an act of remaking the individual (137). As the self turns inward, it discovers various hidden places and “encircling shadows,” and this leads the self to an understanding that it will not be abandoned, but retrieved by the Good Shepherd.  “The biblical images of the good shepherd establish the basic social expectations in early Christian monastic culture and shape…a complex field of social power within which persons search for self-knowledge, truth and perfection” (139).  The confessor-confessee relationship does involve an assymetrical dynamic; that is, each partner has a definite role and must play by certain “rules.”  As Schuld explains, “[s]tructuring the social relations of this narrative…are…on one side, a selfless kindness whose only concern is the welfare of those who need tending…On the other side, being looked after in such a way calls for and exemplifies a social response that is grateful, humble and obedient.  Ever-present care can only be assured by renouncing the self in ‘a kind of everyday death’ and thereby becoming utterly trusting of and reliant on the devoted other” (139).  For Foucault, this asymmetrical dynamic, lays the ground rules for “a strange game” whose success can only be achieved by a “detachment with respect to oneself and the establishing of a relationship with oneself which tends toward a destruction of the form of the self” (140).  However, as he warms to the idea of “monastic technologies,” Foucault comes to see it more as a “chastity-oriented asceticism” in which renunciation works on the self as a whole (140).  This new perspective comes via Cassian’s insight that vices and virtues have an inherent interconnection (140).  “To reform one, they must be reformed together.  Purity, therefore, is always a labor involving the whole, even though it works on particulars as it strives for a harmonious self-identity.  Yet, the individual cannot reach the truth on his own and thus must labor “by way of submission to the wise mediation of another” (140).

Given that power relations can be both positive and negative, formative and de-forming, Foucault highlights some possible dangers in confessional technologies.   It’s not that relation is asymmetrical that makes it problematic—for Foucault, asymmetry is not a social evil in and of itself (141).  Nonetheless, he takes issue with such relationships on two fronts:  (1) “it inhibits a fluid and reversible flow of power among participants”; (2) “It increases the opportunities to manipulate and exploit others without their being sufficiently aware or sufficiently empowered to resist” (141).  Moreover, Foucault’s suspicions and concerns regarding asymmetrical power relations grow as such relations take on new forms and are instantiated in modern institutions (for example, hospitals, schools, prisons etc.)  As Schuld observes,

[b]y examining fractures and shifts that surface as ancient monastic practices of confession become institutionalized for medieval and Tridentine purposes, we begin to see the lay of geography that modernity builds itself on and adapts to its own secular ends. […] Foucault … signals that something important has occurred, changing how these cultures comprehend and respond to the dangers of the desiring person  (141).

Next, Schuld traces two conceptions of the self that lead up to our situation of a “scientized self.” Both involve practices of the self and of sex.  In the early monastic attitude, the focus was not on a list of forbidden or permitted actions.  Rather, in Cassian’s ethic of chastity, changes were made to a “moving whole, not to isolated fragments” (143).  In contrast, the later medieval and early modern developments, created a rigid systematic codification in which “compilations of rules, acts, and satisfactions could be classified in unambiguous categories of kind and degree, making it easier for persons to sort, identify, evaluate, and effectively make reparations for explicitly detailed transgressions” (142).  Thus, uncertainties and apprehensions could be controlled with exactitude.  With regard to the second more rigid and codified approach, Foucault highlights a two-fold danger:  (1) Rather than desexualize the self, the intense concentration on specific details would have actually sexualized one’s religious identity (144). (2) “In analytically breaking down the subject into fragments and privileging sexual vices and virtues over other formative desires, there is a dual danger of neglecting valuable aspects of the self while marginalizing and hounding others” (144).

Part of Foucault’s project involves a genealogical retrieval of the changes occuring in specific cultural practices from one epoch to another. The modern era, according to Foucault, has been formed significantly by incorporating their own secular version of Christian confessional techniques.  In other words, our present story is built on many older ones.  In important ways our drama is similar to the ancient ascetics; however, we have translated former religious practices into a scientized realm replete with its experts as to what is best for our de-souled bodies.

[W]e exercise powerful practices on our desiring selves and submit ourselves to the wise counsel of others as we pursue promises of truth and perfection. Even in the most secular corners of the world, the story of the good shepherd still generally governs our expectations…we [still] set our hopes on living under some protective knowledge that is shielded from error (145).

Our modern drama, however, is different from the former drama in that we refuse “to acknowledge that we in fact live storied lives” (145).  We desire a security that drama with its contingencies cannot provide.  “For Foucault this change in sentiment is the principal reason that our particular story has proven so compelling. It is a story that promises to alleviate such fears and clean out all dangerous spaces, and it claims to have the power to do precisely that because it is no longer a story” (146-7). 

Lastly, our search for the purity of truth and the safety of certitude becomes validated scientifically (147).  The modern version of confession employs a variety of techniques that claim to yield an “unclouded knowledge of ourselves and others through the rarified and neutral viewpoint of science” (147). However, the presuppositions of the modern drama, despite its efforts to “withdraw itself from the messiness of the drama…traditions and rituals…manifests elements of them all” (for example, Foucault’s description of the “carefully staged” regimens of a hospital, 147).  Though the modern drama has different costumes, props and stages, it “still has privileged players and spaces and ritualized patterns of interaction with coded contents” (147).  Its claim to objectivity, precision and cool disinterest … “bolsters our confidence that finally we have managed to leave behind fallibility, contingency, uncertainty and disorder” (147). 

Modern Transformations of Sin and Salvation

Both Foucault and Augustine understand that the “search for knowledge, truth, and ultimate fulfillment orients all of one’s relations” (131).  Likewise, both thinkers discern “that the truths we pursue and the perfection and happiness we anticipate” involve costs (131).  As Schuld observes, Foucault pens his work in a largely anthropocentric, rather than theocentric cultural context.  Consequently, “his questioning about the personal and communal costs of our peculiarly modern appetites for knowledge, truth, emancipation, and perfection refers to how these have come to be grounded exclusively in the human subject” (132).  Over the course of his studies, Foucault concludes that the basic desire to know who we are, the risks involved and how to best attain fulfillment, still have the same all-encompassing focus as was the case in antiquity.  “What has changed is where we look for that essential truth and how we bring others into our search” (132).  The new turn is to seek answers from those who offer themselves as “experts”—psychiatrists, physicians, scientists of various sorts.

Part of Schuld’s project is an attempt to analyze “from Foucault’s perspective the cultural transformations involved in modern aspirations for a “redeeming” self-knowledge and truth” (132).  The following three theological and sociohistorical themes provide a basic structure for her analysis of Foucault’s account:  (1) interpretations of “confession” in shaping personal and communal identity; (2)  interpretations of “infirmity” in sanctioning cultural responses to human differences, deviations, and imperfections; and (3)  interpretations of “healing” as a process of convalescence or transfiguring cure requiring critical intervention by specialists (133).  Foucault claims that in various ways, all of the above “have been appropriated from early Christian practices and tailored for secular purposes so that the social desires attending each have shifted significantly from a paradigm of sin and salvation to one of ‘pseudo-scientific’ pathology and well-being” (133).

Before discussing the first theme (i.e., interpretations of “confession”), Schuld acknowledges that Foucault’s work as a historian has been criticized, and his investigation of early Christian culture is both limited and unbalanced. Nonetheless, Schuld’s interests lie in “[Foucault’s] broader strokes that give shape to a central modern transformation that has great import for theology” (135). As to his views of Christian practices, Schuld opts to focus on his later writings, which are more sympathetic in his examination of monastic texts, particularly the works of John Cassian.

Foucault uncovers the “bare cultural beams” upon which the new social superstructure will be built and used for new purposes as the culture shifts from its privileging of truth in theology and philosophy to science (136).  This superstructure appears to Foucault to be grounded in what were understood as four religious dangers:  (1) “the endlessly desiring person who cannot control his intentions, thoughts, whims, fantasies, and dreams;” (2) “the hidden and ingenious nature of concupiscence that can only be seized and eradicated through painstaking coercion;” (3) “the ease with which evil can be made to appear good so that one can never know the real root of desire or trust even the most fleeting and innocuous-seeming images and sensations;” (4) “the inability of individuals to decipher adequately the spiritual temptations and struggles taking place within them so that for salvation they have to seek the aid of a human intermediary” (136).

The subsequent posts will be devoted to Schuld’s three theological and sociohistorical themes that structure her investigation.  Thus, part V will focus Foucault’s interpretations of “confession.”

Having discussed Augustine’s ethics of humility and wisdom of sorrow, Schuld turns to consider how Foucault can be used to “broaden Augustine’s analysis of the desires for an illusory human perfection” (Reconsidering Power and Love, 124).

Foucault, like Augustine, focuses on human finitude, making the reader aware of the “ever-shifting ground of contingencies on which they build expectations of certitude and perfection” (125).  In addition, Foucault finds the idea of the modern, autonomous subject unsustainable and thus deconstructs the “myth of personhood as self-originating being,” highlighting the inevitability of historical and social fragility (125).  Though Foucault’s emphasis on human finitude shares certain similarities with Augustine’s, there are also significant differences.  For instance, Augustine’s account is cast in relation to God, whereas Foucault’s is not.

A second area of overlap between these two thinkers surfaces in their desire to challenge cultural norms and values.  As Schuld observes, in the Confessions Augustine describes how he underwent a process of socio-political “naturalization” in which various accepted “norms” conditioned him, both and body and soul.  “Like Augustine, much of [Foucault’s] own self-emptying involves taking the ‘natural’ and making it seem strange” (127).  Here again we find continuities and discontinuities in their respective accounts. Both thinkers emphasize the need for a “self-emptying” and even training of our desires; however, what they believe this self-emptying will accomplish differs significantly.  “For Foucault, decentering the self opens unexplored terrain for artistic self-creation” (128).  Whereas for Augustine, “deconstruction is always in preparation for a relational self-identity that is given, not made.  He understands himself as participating in a co-creation, but this is a graced process” (128).

Next, Schuld focuses on Foucault’s rejection of so-called “neutral” and “disinterested modes of knowledge.  Given the inescapability of our social conditioning, we simply cannot come to any subject—science or otherwise—as if we were a blank slate.  Our socio-historical context always already implicates us, and there is no transcendental perch upon which we can stand in order to secure a purely “objective,” non-implicated perspective.  “On Foucault’s view, modern arrogant modes of knowledge secure their own refuge of power by defining themselves with certitude as ‘purely’ neutral and disinterested…Anyone assaulting their shielding tactics is thereby attacking a consecrated sanctuary…To question, then, how particular truths socially and historically function becomes an act of blasphemy” (128-129). The specific discourses that Foucault has in mind are those “that associate themselves with scientific or pseudo-scientific language and practices” (129).  One of Foucault’s greatest concerns is what happens “when such presumptuous modes of knowledge take as their task examining, classifying, and eradicating the frailties and imperfections of human lives” (129).  Ironically, however, these discourses have gained power through the desires of those who want to be free of “blemishes” and “defects.”  So it seems that modern attempts to flee one’s fragility actually makes one more vulnerable (129).

In contrast with Augustine’s Christocentric perspective, for Foucault, “humbled modes of knowledge … are … those that make room for knowledges that have been judged inadequate and dismissed as of no account” (129).  Such a “chastened perspective recognizes its own contingency” and refrains from making universal “normative assessments and judgments” of others (129).

Lastly, Foucault has a special interest in providing a voice for the marginalized or what Schuld refers to as the “low-ranking” knowledges (e.g., the psychiatric patient, the infirm, the criminal, the deviant, or the defective), i.e., those groups and individuals that have been devalued by the privileged discourses (130). Here Schuld encourages the Church heed Foucault’s call to listen to the “disqualified voices” and “open itself to the advice and labors that arise from the ‘untrained’ in specific locales” (130).  Through an appreciation of the difficulties that “subjugated knowledges” experience in the attempt to compete with “culturally privileged discourses,” the Church can benefit from Foucault’s insights and be emboldened to offer their own distinctive social critiques (131).

According to St. Augustine, the cross disturbs all shallow optimisms—whether that of the wise (i.e. philosophers) or of the hoi polloi—and challenges us with the reality of suffering and affliction that so characterizes life in this world.  Thus, the cross is a constant reminder that this world is out of joint, dislocated, and we too are disfigured, permeated with this dislocation.  When confronted with the reality of the cross, our futile attempts to construct a world of unassailable happiness are laid bare, uncovered, and exposed as delusional.    As Schuld explains,

on Augustine’s view, coming face-to-face with the harshness, the stark corporeality of the crucifixion is imperative for grasping the relational significance of Christ as mediator.  As Christ is pierced with the implacable realities of finitude, the faithful have pressed upon them their own limits as creatures…Christ must reach to the faithful in their weakness; they cannot reach him (120).

The way in which the en-fleshed, crucified-as-a-slave Christ gives himself for the turned-in-on-themselves fallen ones wreaks havoc on the classical mind.  Why?  Because God-become-Man enters fully into the messiness of life, knowing full well that his destiny involves suffering, loss, betrayal and separation from His most intimate (Trinitarian) love.  “He does not minister to and transform the lowliness of suffering from the heights of heaven; he fully descends into it.  He participates in humanity’s lowliness by becoming lowly himself” (122).  We do not ascend to God, he (con)descends to us, clothed in our frailty, stooping and lisping that we might hear, touch and feel something of his divine reality.

Unlike earthly glory, association with Christ’s glory involves entering into Christ’s humility and accepting the “shame of the cross.”  Paradoxically, the person who embraces the “shame of the cross” is transformed—ever so slowly, often imperceptibly, and always peppered with periods of repeated regressivity—and begins to sense the significance of an other-focused existence.  Unlike the knowledge of the philosophers, the resulting cross-produced self-knowledge is tempered with humility.  “The wisdom and virtues that are re-formed in light of the cross are…from the standpoint a successful world, tragic virtues:  they are shaped and moved by the painful awareness of human frailties, shortfalls, dependencies, and finitude” (121).  The cross yields wisdom, but it is a wisdom birthed through sorrow and brokenness—a non-solipsistic wisdom that awakens a desire within the transformed person to act compassionately toward others.

Embracing the “shame of the cross” moves one from the “hollowness of naïve optimism to the hope of sacrificial love” (122). As Schuld explains, the life of sacrificial love is motivated by two beliefs: (1) “God loves without reserve,” and (2) his “boundless love is founded on sheer mercy rather than human merit” (122).  When these two beliefs grip the heart, they protect the believer from the twin threats of self-deceptive arrogance and the downward spiral of hopelessness.  Our need for others once again comes to the fore—to be is to be in relation to an Other and others. “The solidarity of the community, Augustine reminds his followers, depends on individual and collective remembrances of these relational insights and on their reenactment in the concrete deeds of mercy.  The constant interweaving of sacrifice and compassion knits the entire community together” (122). The solidarity created through sacrificial love among the believing community does not override the solidarity of all human beings in Adam; the latter, though fallen, still retain their status as bearers of the divine image.

Next, Schuld discusses the role of confession in the believing community.  Augustine’s own confessions and reflections can be seen as a form of “sacrifice” that is “meant to nourish … bonds of social solidarity” (123).   When confession is understood in a “self-emptying” way, it fulfills two functions for the community:  First, it keeps one thankful and mindful of his/her need for God’s mercy and sustaining power, thus encouraging a mindset that protects one from both despair and arrogance. Second, “[a]s a public activity, it disturbs the pride of others” (123).  Confession marks Augustine as an anti-(Greek) hero.  Augustine’s own (ongoing) confessions reveal his continued moral, spiritual, and cognitive struggles not simply prior to but also following his radical embrace of Christ as narrated in book VIII of the Confessions.  Augustine’s honesty and open confession of his own failings help to remind the community of their finitude and relational dependence.  In this way, Augustine’s life of non-glorification serves as an anti-heroic model, which “punctures the pretensions of his fellow Christians” (124).

Rather than repeat common (post)modern (mis)interpretations of Augustine and Foucault—interpretations that tend to flatten Augustine through caricature and reduce Foucault to a spokesperson for a social determinism—Schuld takes seriously Augustine’s ethic of humility, believing that this will enable one to better understand Foucault’s critical value (124). Schuld is not advocating an uncritical acceptance of either figure; however, she believes that we must evaluate the personal successes and failures of each thinker, as well as the socio-cultural trends and thought patterns that shaped them by engaging and analyzing their own critical reflections (124).