Two Tongues Behind These Teeth: reading scripture beyond mastery

Sometimes it's easier to begin with words that are not mine, but belong to another--foreign, in a sense. Outside (foris), on the other side of the door (fores), coming from a far and distant land. In a quotation, the outside becomes my own, or, from the opposite side, perhaps I am forced to walk through the door. But neither option interests me here. I am seeking something else, something that is neither inside nor outside, neither the air coming in nor passing out. The words I want to quote are words that can never become my own; I can never bring them in, nor can I ever fully exit into them. They have a different master.

To quote words that are still being spoken, no, that are still addressing, no, confronting, interrupting my own speech. I can never begin, or each beginning is just a stutter, a gasp of breath as I prepare my monologue, only to be silenced before the first word passes through my lips. The momentum cut short--silence! Listen to me! The shout muffles my exhale and hinders my speech. I am not mute, only speechless, but it is uncomfortable nonetheless.

A confession: the interruption is probably only vexing because I think I have the right to speak and to be heard. To get a word in edge wise, to have to insert my voice in a gap, to make a claim with my posture because my voice cannot be heard are not skills I have had to learn. I presume from the beginning to be a master over the words. I was born into that position, and it has always been cultivated. Gifted and Talented, Honors, AP, a B.A. with a thesis, a Masters degree. As a small boy I sat in the back of the class, ignoring the teacher--with her permission--to work at my own, accelerated pace. I have been reared to think that my voice ought to rise above the rest, and so, I take a deep breath, as I have been prodigiously prepared to do, and start to form the first word in my mouth, with my jaw pulled back and my lips parted to say what I have been taught to say--I--when, from somewhere beyond me, a shout--listen to me!

These words I cannot quote because they are addressed to me. I cannot bring them in, I cannot analyze them, I cannot exercise control. They are a command that renders me powerless. Whose tongue is trying to enter my mouth? Note: my mouth.

It is not with a word, a shibboleth, that we will manage to pass. Tongue in our mouths, we must change tongues, another tongue must come into our mouths, and into our bodies another body (Cixous, __Stigmata__, 107).

A living tongue in my mouth, a tongue that silences me and claims my speech--my mouth is no longer my own, and yet, do I not have the same tongue? A single mouth occupied by a foreign tongue, a tongue from outside that now dwells behind the wall, behind my teeth. A tongue that claims my own tongue, that has the power to render me mute, that does render me mute (or, what amounts to the same thing, for Paul, that blinds his eyes), and yet, commands me to speak. My words are still my own, and yet, strangely, they have been taken away from me.

Part of me wants to claim that I am brought into a kind of liminal existence (ex-sistere), between two tongues, but that is too easy. And false. I still have my same tongue, and, after all, we can never stand (sistere) in the pause between each breath. But now, with my tongue, or, in fact, my tongue itself, is claimed by another tongue, brought under its authority and freed--yes, freed--to do what it could not do on its own, that is, to respond.

For Christ's sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him (Phil 2:8-9). Or perhaps Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant (2 Cor 3:5-6). And again, I will boast all the more gladly of my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me (2 Cor 12:9). I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified...My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God (1 Cor 2:1-5). And most clearly: we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus' sake (2 Cor. 4:5).

It is not a matter of being silenced, of possessing a new tongue, but of being freed from attempting to master this other tongue. The one who speaks to me does not ask me to drop my own language, to abandon my tongue, but claims my very words for his and her own purpose (presuming you are willing, as I am, to refer to the Spirit in the feminine). My speech and my proclamation are not an exhibition of my mastery, Paul declares, but were hollowed out and made weak so that Christ's power would be manifest.

I take this to be a hermeneutical principle. As Karl Barth puts it (yes, again with Karl Barth), Scripture itself is a really truly living, acting and speaking subject which only as such can be truly heard and received by the Church and in the Church (CD I/2, 672). Scripture is not a dead voice. I cannot imprison it in a forgotten past or absorb it into my own poetic or mystical or ethical present. It stands outside of me, yet within me. I neither go out nor absorb--I am wounded by it: stigma stings, pierces, makes holes, separates with pinched marks and in the same movement distinguishes--re-marks--inscribes, writes. Stigma wounds and spurs, stimulates (Cixous, p. xiii). I have suffered the loss of all things. Which means, as Paul makes clear, freedom, life, joy, salvation: wounded so the power of Christ may dwell in me.

It would be foolish to make concrete proposals here--as if, after all of this, we could list off a series of hermeneutic principles. I do not mean that there are no principles, but only that the principles come later, to help us when we tire of the voice and want to find new ways to claim those words as our possession. They help us resist the urge to rip that foreign tongue out of our mouths. The fact that we--confession, that I--so quickly want to find some stabilizing principles reveals just how uncomfortable I am when I discover that I am not the master. But fortunately, Scripture resists all of my attempts to bring it under control, for it does not claim to exist for itself but to point away from itself. It points away to the one who brings freedom and joy to all those he wounds--a new name and a new life to those rendered incapable of mastery (and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him, Gen 32:25).

It seems fitting to give the final word to someone else, and so I will quote a passage I have quoted before, but to which I keep returning:

Writing is a passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me--the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live--that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?--a feminine one, a masculine one, some?--several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always disturbs the relationship to "reality," produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject's socialization. It is distressing, it wears you out; and for men, this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat, something intolerable (Cixous, Sorties, in __The Newly Born Woman__, 86).

Can I wear your clothes? (missions and alienation)

Portrait of Nicolas Trigault in Chinese Costume, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1617

The early Jesuit missionaries to China translated themselves into the native garb. As a religious order, they first wore buddhist robes, projecting an image as new, religious messengers. The first missionary, Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607) made the decision, saying, "Now the robes are being cut and soon we will be made into Chinese" (quoted in __Journey to the East__ by Liam Matthew Brockey, p. 33). The robes, however, were soon dropped, as the missionaries decided on a new image: as educated literati. The Buddhist monks were not as socially powerful as Ruggieri imagined; his first companion, Matteo Ricci, donned the outfit of a mandarin scholar (of Confucius), and even grew out his hair and beard so as to allay himself more closely with this educated and socially powerful class. When describing his new costume, Ricci declared that the robes were "very similar to what the Venetians use in Venice" (43).

The robes were habitable because familiar: the missionaries could see themselves in those clothes. The robes were habitable because the Chinese were habitable: soon we will be made into Chinese. Not so different. Literate. Educated. Hierarchically organized. A different experience from the Africans. Primitives. Without proper clothing, proper society, or proper religion. Not even the inverse, but the absence: a human void (quick, take the empty land!).

If I had time, I would love to investigate missionary fashion. Clothing as the marker of a habitable population. A people we think approximates us. Or is too far away. Whose outfits--or lack there of--suggest a human absence. The naked savage. Lacking civilization. A bad thing. Then a good thing. When people tired of civilization. The noble savage. We can now see ourselves in their naked bodies.

Our image of ourselves, standing in between. No encounter. We create the identities. Who do you say you are? No response. Or, every response, a translation. Who do I think you say you are? What? I can't understand you. What language are you speaking? (I was told earlier this week, by an Iraqi refugee, that I would soon learn to speak refugee....)

There is no point lamenting our inability to have a direct encounter. We can never move beyond ourselves. We must be thrust out of the way. From outside. Someone must take our place. If they dare.

Salvation means alienation, and "salvation is of the Jews" (Jn. 4.22). And because people will not be alienated even for their own salvation, they roll away the alienation on to the Jew (Barth, CD I/2, 511).

Let us not lie to ourselves. Any "alienation" that comes easy is another form of donning chinese clothes. An easy move. I have already absorbed them. They can reflect me. I can see myself in them. They are habitable, so I will wear their clothes. No alienation, just absorption. In their clothes, I translate them. More so, I absorb them. Engulf them from within. I hypostasize their culture. It is I who hold up their lifeless clothes. It is I who animate. It is I who am....the Spirit.

Blasphemy. The dangerous edge of empathy, of seeing myself in others. A loving attack, all the more vicious because it is an empathy over which I am the master. The terms are under my control. I choose whose clothes I will wear.

No one will be alienated, not even for salvation. It is an offer we refuse, a gift we reject. But to refuse our own alienation, to reject salvation, is to...turn against the Jews. To roll off our alienation and place it on another, the Jews (how often "primitive" African religion was understood as a degraded form of Judaism...).

We cannot be saved "unless we are prepared to become Jews with the Jews." Barth penned this in the 1930s. "By being hostile to Jewish blood, the world simply proves that it is the world: blind and deaf and stupid to the ways of God" (511). "In the Jew, the non-Jew has to recognize himself...and in the Jew he has to recognize Christ, the Messiah of Israel" (511). The one we rejected, the one on whom we rolled off our alienation, the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. Let us be clear: the one who comes to displace us is the one we want to kill. The one we do kill. But, by the grace of God, the one who lives again!

Christ's flesh, a space of alienation. A wound. The stigmata--an opening of the flesh, a making of space. A way of becoming habitable by what is foreign.

In Jesus, we are brought out of the dialectic of habitation. No longer are you the one who threatens to occupy me, to cut open my flesh. Nor I to you. A space exists between us, which neither of us can occupy, or, more properly, a space which already occupies us both: a shared wound.

For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.

To live for the one who died and was raised for us. It is a call to alienation; to salvation.

It's a call we know we will resist.

Not a matter of changing clothes then. Of entering "the other." Of celebrating difference. The offer of alienation is a devastating offer. A gift of becoming ill at ease. It makes us hesitate. We no longer know where we stand. Or, more precisely, we finally see that where we stand (and who we are) is never something we can possess. We cannot speak the truth of who we are. Someone stands in our way, blocking our vision, halting our speech. It is either a terrifying assault. Or a gift of joy. This one is the end of ourselves--hallelujah!

In the end, the clothes don't matter. You are never a space I can inhabit. Yet, we can never leave each other behind. We are bound to a space between us that neither of us can navigate. Which doesn't mean it is impassible. For it is a space that has already been traversed. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. (It is only from here that we can move beyond Rilke, who wrote, "love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other").

Lord Jesus, help me love my neighbor, the stranger whom I despise (the samaritan!), the one who speaks to me of my own alienation, and who therefore, I want to reject. Help me see them as a reminder of your grace, as a testimony to your resurrection, and as a renewed invitation to live by your Spirit, with thanksgiving and joy.

Witnessing: Barth, Cixous, and the Art of Writing

"Witnessing means pointing in a specific direction beyond the self and on to another. Witnessing is thus service to this other in which the witness vouches for the truth of the other, the service which consists in referring to this other...Standing in this service, the biblical witnesses point beyond themselves...One might recall John the Baptist in Grunewald's Crucifixion, especially his prodigious index finger. Could anyone point away from himself more impressively and completely ('he must increase, but I must decrease')...This is what the Fourth Evangelist wanted to say about this John, and therefore about another John, and therefore quite unmistakably about every 'John.'" Karl Barth, CD I.1.4.3, 109-110 [112].

So much to say about this painting--but we are only following one path here, the path to which Barth points us, the path of pointing away. Follow the prodigious finger.

To go ahead and say it: the phallic finger. Prodigious--extraordinary in size, abnormal, a miracle perhaps. Or a monstrosity. Perhaps all--that prodigious finger is not an end in itself. What it is--abnormal, excessive, monster, miracle--comes not from within, but from without. From where it points. Or, to whom. But Barth is right: it is a prodigious finger/phallus.

The object of desire, the one to whom the finger points: the monstrosity of (as) Christ. The prodigy, prodigium, Latin for monster. Or omen. Christ, the prodigy, the monstrous omen. "The prodigy is not only prewarning, but activation of the calamity at hand" (__Greek and Indo-European Etymology in Action: Proto-Indo-European *aǵ-__, Raimo Anttila, 114). The prodigious finger pointing away, pointing to the prodigy, the calamity at hand, the death of Christ.

Here we enter into the undoing. The phallic finger does not inscribe itself. It is not the goal, or object of attention. It exists in the painting as a sign, as a witness, as something to move past. It is magnified, enlarged, made prodigious so as to draw attention to its shrinking. Above the finger, it is written: he must increase but I must decrease. Enlarged, to draw attention to its shrinking. To his shrinking. To he shrinking.

Let us turn from shrinking and look at the large--and grotesque--feet of Christ. With the nail through the center, and blood dripping off the individual toes. The feet must have died first. They look ashen; even more than the rest of the dead, diseased, broken, bloody body. (I remember stories, in the Bible, about covering feet, and laying at the feet, and recall: a euphemism). Prodigious, dead feet.

Jesus' hands are also unusual. His fingers point--not to another person in the painting, but to the one absent, God, above. If there were time--I'm trying not to ramble...--we could examine those hands. One other person imitates those splayed fingers--Mary Magdalene, the smallest figure in the painting. Also, the only other one (besides Jesus) who isn't standing on her feet. The prodigious finger, pointing away from itself, towards the one with opened, uncontrolled, grasping hands. And thoroughly dead feet. (He came in the likeness of sinful flesh...).

"Writing is a passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling place of the other in me--the other that I am and am not, that I don't know how to be, but that I feel passing, that makes me live--that tears me apart, disturbs me, changes me, who?--a feminine one, a masculine one, some?--several, some unknown, which is indeed what gives me the desire to know and from which all life soars. This peopling gives neither rest nor security, always disturbs the relationship to "reality," produces an uncertainty that gets in the way of the subject's socialization. It is distressing, it wears you out; and for men, this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat, something intolerable" (Cixous, Sorties, in __The Newly Born Woman__, 86).

The permeability, the vulnerability, speaks of the end of self-mastery. Christ is the end of self-mastery. The death of human autonomy (self-government); the shriveling up of the enlarged...feet. For men, this is a threat. He must increase, I must decrease. The object of desire--the one to whom John's prodigious finger points--the crucified Christ. The death of the "phallogocentric" economy. Desired. Desirable. Lovely and teeming with life.

Cixous emphasizes writing; she performs a new writing, one not intoxicated by the desire to contain, conquer, control. Free from self-mastery, which involves (by necessity) an opposition to others: I, not you, am master. Beyond mastery, a different space, another way to write, another way to live, another way to relate. She thinks she's merely dreaming.

"Without the ambivalence, the liability to misunderstanding and the vulnerability with which [preaching] takes place, with which it is itself one event among many others, it could not be real proclamation" (Barth, 91 [94]). God speaks--the event of God's Word occurs--not in spite of, but through the weakness of our proclamation. To be a witness is to be weak. To be a witness is to have one's whole life amount to the task of pointing away, of highlighting not the self, but another. Not any other, either. But the Wholly Other--the Weakest Other, God in flesh.

Barth sometimes downplay the importance of the human form, the style of the presentation ("dogmatics does not seek to give a positive, stimulating and edifying presentation," p. 80 [82]). But he fundamentally recognizes its importance. The form does not guarantee that God speaks. God speaks always out of God's freedom. Nevertheless, one can point to Christ in a way that actually points to oneself (the kingdom of the Selfsame, in Cixous' terms). One can witness to one's strength; which means one can point away from Christ, and thus, even in the form of witnessing, one can fail to witness at all. The form matters. The way we write matters. It displays who we think we are, and, by God's grace, the one to whom we point.

To write in a way that embraces the dead, prodigious, monstrous, saving omen of Christ. And his dead feet. A challenge. Joyful, exhilarating, and terrifying. "For men, this permeability, this nonexclusion is a threat." The threat of losing control. "She lets the other tongue of a thousand tongues speak--the tongue, sound without barrier or death" (Sorties, 88). A beautiful picture of the feast we celebrated two weeks ago--Pentecost. Life beyond the dead feet. Come, Holy Spirit.

unmasking the unmasked

In "Unmasked!", Cixous examines the Theatre as a place free from misogyny, a space free from "countless symptoms, stiffness, blindness, treachery, uneasiness, hypocrisy, death and rape drives, denial" (179).  What I find interesting, and want to look at briefly, is how Cixous tries to ground the religious on a kind of misogynistic hatred of "the unclean" and yet, in the end, her exploration of Theatre deploys not just religious language, but also the same kind of binary oppositions she wants to avoid.

The religious, for Cixous, operates along the logic of clean-unclean.  The Bible (she quotes from Leviticus) creates clear boundaries, inside-outside, and outside is a "no man's land," meaning, the outside, is the feminine.  A woman giving birth to a son is unclean for a week; for a daughter, the uncleanness lingers, twice as long (Cixous, 173-74).  The unclean is not just the outside, it is at the boundary, or a place of mixture.  Cixous declares that true writing is a "free traveler along edges and abysms...That writing suffers in fact the fate of birds, women, the unclean" (174).  Through the economy of cleanliness, the world becomes divided, separated, and built on oppositions.  No longer is creation seen down at the root, where "nothing is simple," where everything is "twisted, doubled up, entangled" (175).  

Cixous turns to Theatre as a refuge from this religious economy (or order) of cleanliness.  In Theatre, all boundaries become blurry, and therefore everyone, male and female, lives in a kind of (feminine) border area, a "no man's land."  To enter into the Theatre, as an actor, is to become undone, "stripped from head to foot down to one's self" (179).  The actors lose themselves; they become unknown, disfigured, "practically to the point of becoming nobody" (180).  The mask comes on, and now the person(a) is a new person(a).  The mask prevents the stripped-self from "getting its face back" (180).  All who enter are negated:  "one woman one man or the other, the space is ready to receive them without distinction, as to sex, age, race.  There is no particularity" (180); the Theatre is a "kingdom that stretches beyond oppositions and exclusions" (181).  In the Theatre, in acting, we come to know that "all creatures contain infinite possibilities of being an other.  One possibility is just as good as another" (182).

Yet, this theatrical space is reconfigured and spoken of only in terms of inside-outside, of inclusion and exclusion, and hence, as a religion.  The Theatre "was once a Temple...and doesn't forget it" (179).  Is this a Temple-beyond, a truly new space, a new kingdom?  Or does it also bring with it the same logic and the same code?  

I shall speak about the actors.  They have arrived.

Undecided, detached, undressed, without any rank, unarmed, without any particularity.  Joyously prepared for fate.  There are no brothers, there are no wars.  He might have been she....They have become unknown  (179).

Religious idealism at its best!  A glorious scene, the kingdom fulfilled, here and now, in our midst, and I am....inside!  

For there are 'the happy few,' a small number, the miracles, a handful of charming grains of sand in the desert of millennia.  (177).

And I am...she is....one of those few!  I do not favor closing borders, I exist on the boundaries, and thus, I am...inside.  A new inside.  The boundary as the inside.  "This extreme boundary state can last only so long as it is performed, acted, created" (182).  Theatre is, therefore, liturgy, or ritual, whereby I am brought from the outside into the inside, into the kingdom.  And the kingdom is here, at the Temple of Theatre, and not there, not elsewhere.  

To be in the kingdom is to be beyond particularity--there is no particularity.  The kingdom of the boundary, the kingdom of difference is now the universal kingdom.  Difference so wide spread, so celebrated, that it ceases to be, or make, any difference.  An unreal difference.  Is this not a return of Enlightenment, of Kant's Cosmopolis:  the universal society, now founded on the theatrical reduction-as-celebration of difference.  To contain infinite possibilities is to contain all possibilities, which means to contain all differences within a single, universal.  Through acting (and watching), "a transfiguration comes into the bare shell" (181).  To peer behind the mask (unmasking) reveals, not a new kingdom, but the old, the empty, universal, all-powerful, ever elusive self-defining self.  Now, however, it is defining itself in its indefinite, undefinable qualities.  Nevertheless, behind the mask, is the same old ideal, universal self.   

Be that as it may, one should not let go of Cixous too quickly.  For, where can we go?  Back to a more benevolent ordering of religion, of inside and outside (i.e., the Christian colonial project)?  Can we be certain that our own returns, our own attempted escapes, fare any better?  Has not Cixous done what we all do--the best we all can do?  Has not unmasking "the unmasked" also unmasked every unmasking, including our own?  Is not her critique on the religious a religious critique of the religious, and hence, an important critique of our religion (and religious critique)?  To put it plainly:  in dismissing Cixous, do we not end up doing what we criticize her for doing?  Cixous reveals so clearly what we have to avoid and yet, in the end, fail to avoid.  All of us.  

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.  For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.  Wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!  (Romans 7:21-25, ESV).

Christians long to (and often have) interpreted Paul here as speaking of his life as a "religious" or devout Jew prior to his encounter with Jesus.  But this misreading simply leads to the illusion that our own attempts to escape the logic of "death and rape drives" are vastly superior to Cixous.  A simple reading of Church History should be enough to show that this is wrong.  

"Only in God can men be so utterly dismembered" (Barth, Romans, 286).  Dismemberment is not our work, it is God's.  Our religion--even that of the Church Fathers, or the Reformers--stands just as firmly under Christ's condemnation and forgiveness as does Cixous' religion of Theatre.  But what the Church sees that Cixous does not, is that in Jesus, there is a way to live beyond mere particularity (seen as opposition) that does not become empty universality:  that is what Paul calls life in Christ.  However, what the Church must recognize and confess is that Cixous does not see this possibility in Christ not simply because we have not embodied it (which is true) but because we have not embodied it while proclaiming to embody it.  Jesus, like the Theatre for Cixous, became a way of articulating our own thoughts, dreams, and visions of the kingdom.  But Jesus, unlike the Theatre, should, can, and in fact does stand against our Jesus-religion (and every religious striving).  In Jesus we can acknowledge the sinfulness of our religion, and know that Jesus is not just against us, but for us, and with us, even in our sinful religious strivings for a better world.  

Life in Jesus is not a new self-possessed form of life; it is not one religious option among others, and therefore, as Barth strives to make clear, it can never be contrasted with others.  "Perhaps also--in so far as we are 'not we' and 'have not'--those 'others', that is to say, the many who are contrasted with us, cease to be others who do 'not have', but are they who hear us speaking in their tongues the wonderful works of God" (Barth, 274).  We are on the outside, as those who have not, like others who have not, speaking about God's faithfulness to us--all of us--who have, nothing.  Life in Jesus does not allow us to create a new inside, for he has brought all "outside" into his body.  To bring Cixous back:  Jesus is the "no man's land," the feminine, unclean, crucified, weak, enslaved, and victorious Christ.  In Jesus, our own failings to justly inhabit the world are exposed, condemned, forgiven, and restored.  We live, not on the new inside, trying to condemn or convert the outside, but on the outside, knowing that every outside is already inside, and only exists inside, inside of the no-man's land of Jesus' body, a land we inhabit without ever possessing.  

Second Time Around, with the Help of Cixous

"Broken men, we dare to use unbroken language.  We must not forget that we are speaking in parables and after the manner of men [Rom 6:18]" Karl Barth, __Commentary on Romans__, 221.

"At a gallop, the snail!  We scribble while crawling in the wake of God" Helene Cixous, __Stigmata__, 39.

"We don't have the last word:  truth always has the word before, and we runt out of breath at its heals" Cixous, 37.

Perhaps Cixous is a better way to get at Barth.  Or, as Barth would prefer, to get past Barth, to move beyond the signpost to stay on the heals of...Truth.  

"Without End, No, State of Drawingness, No, Rather:  The Executioner's Taking Off" is an essay on writing essays.  Cixous writes to capture the creation, the moment of unfolding, or "the passing (of the) truth" (Stigmata, 28).  She does not seek the finished thought, the clean product or the polished idea.  She does not pretend to say the last word.  She writes essays.  Not probings, or musings, or ponderings.  No aimless wandering thought; nor first stabs at the truth.  But a wrestling, or, as she says, a combat:  "every drawing (is) combat(s) itself.  Drawing is the emblem of all our hidden, intestine combats.  There we see the soul's entrails" (36).  The essay is a drawing; it captures the combat.  

We combat--what?  Ourselves?  Not exactly.  We strive--because "truth strikes us.  Opens our heart.  Our lips" (29).  We are encountered--we catch a glimpse, an internal sight (in-sight), a momentary vision, and we stumble.  We struggle.  "Truth strikes us."  We cannot draw or write a crisp thought--"how then to draw a firm footing, when our soul is merely a staggering...We all go along at the same pace, with an uncertain foot" (38).  Our soul staggers along and so we fight within ourselves.  We struggle along after the truth:  "time, the body, are our slow vehicles, our chariots without wheels" (39).  

Theologians (including myself) are often "those who seek the finished.  Those who seek to portray cleanly, the most properly" (28).  Barth, like Cixous, reminds us of our place--we are broken, our vision is partial, limited, fragmented; it is--we are--a collection of glimpses and struggles of faltering steps, hesitations, and approximations.  We (our thoughts) are never ultimate, but perpetually penultimate, perpetually a step behind, and hence, never resting, never secure, always--questioning.  Advancing through and with and in questions, or as Cixous puts it, "We are advancing backwards" (38).  Advancing because struck...by Truth.  Backwards because the moment--the happening or event--occurs to us, creatures.  

We are encountered--and so we speak.  Cixous tries to write off repentance, but the idea circumscribes her essay.  The word 'repentance' "jumped on to my page, it spread everywhere, however much I denied it.  One says this word and that's it" (40).  Why the adamant refusal to repent--"we who draw are innocent" (28)?  Because the situation is impossible.  She is--and we are--compelled to speak, and yet we must speak what remains beyond us--we must speak the Truth.  We are struck by Truth.  We "don't have salvation:  it is dealt us like a blow, we faint.  We awake with a start, quick a pencil, and take down the ultimate glimmer of illumination, however much we say: 'what's the difference, we've seen our vision already,' we never resign ourselves" (39).  We never resign because we are compelled to speak, to write, to draw...furiously.  Quickly.  Boldly.  

Yet Cixous recognizes something problematic in writing essays.  The self is uncommitted.  It seeks to justify its hesitancy.  It knows it will encounter errors--how can it not--and wants to reassure itself:  "error is not lie:  it is approximation.  Sign that we are on track" (29).  That response should settle the question.  Yet 'repentance' keeps invading the text.  Repentance lurks because the defense might be only a justification.  What if our defense is...a lie?  Error is not lie, but what if we should repent of our errors?  What if we should write, or worse, should have written, something other than an essay?  What if we ought to dare to use an "unbroken language" (Barth)?

"When one is poorly informed, one hesitates to take a position.  And there was powerful official misinformation" (Gourevitch, 139).  The words of Bishop Misago, a man accused of supporting Hutu-power, of preventing Tutsis from reaching places of refuge, of calling Tutsi priests "cockroaches," and of promising police protection to ninety Tutsi schoolchildren who were slaughtered (by those police) three days later.  Hesitancy is not always a virtue.  Cixous agrees; and the theme of repentance haunts her essay.  

Barth, like Cixous, recognizes that we cannot comprehend the meaning of our existence.  Nevertheless, both Cixous and Barth agree that Truth encounters us in our "twilight" (Barth's phrase).  The "righteousness of God in Jesus Christ is a possession which breaks through this twilight, bringing the knowledge which sets even human existence ablaze.  The revelation and observation--of the Unknown God--whereby men know themselves to be known and begotten by Him whom they are not" (Barth, 226).  In Jesus, we see Truth as a person (I am the Truth; In the Beginning was the Word..and the Word became flesh), and not just any person, most certainly not an ambivalent person.  Jesus is a person for us.  In Jesus, we see God as a person for us; we see God bearing our sins for us.  We see--it hits us in a moment, like a flash.  The twilight is ripped apart by lightning--we see, and yet, the vision is lost.  So begins our stumbling.  

Nevertheless, our stumbling is not the final answer.  Though broken, we dare to speak an unbroken language.  We dare--and can dare--because we know that what we say is a parable.  We are free to make an error--to stumble forward along the heels of Truth--because we see that Truth is a person, and this person is for us.  We repent because we know, in Jesus, we are forgiven.  We are free to act, to speak boldly, to draw cleanly because we know that neither our finished products nor our struggling attempts can bear the stamp of Truth; we know this, and yet, we know that, Truth has condescended to come into our terms, to speak our language--to come in the flesh, in the form of a slave, under the conditions of our sin.  We can repent for our errors and our sins because we know that our best efforts fall short--the unbroken language is beyond us--and yet, the one from outside, the Eternal Truth, has been drawn into (on the pages of) our stuttering.  We stutter without shame not because we live without the need of forgiveness, but because we are forgiven.  Because we are forgiven, we can live...without knowing who we are.  "As soon as we draw (as soon as, following the pen, we advance into the unknown, hearts beating, mad with desire) we are little, we do know know, we start out avidly, we're going to lose ourselves" (Cixous, 26).  In Jesus, we see that this loss of ourselves is our judgement-as-forgiveness, and thus, a joyful retrieval of our (still necessary) stumbling.  "I advance error by error, with erring steps, by the force of error.  It's suffering, but it's joy" (Cixous, 29).  

*I am trying to let Cixous help me rethink my last post on "Pragmatic Identity."  I'm hoping to think through a bit more clearly what it means to live from beyond ourselves, as well as to open up the possibility of this ecstatic existence being, well, joyful.*