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.*

utopian genocide

"Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building...[Genocide] was promoted as a way not to create suffering but to alleviate it.  The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual--always an annoyance to totality--ceases to exist."

Philip Gourevitch, __We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families:  Stories From Rwanda___, 95.  

It is tempting to analyze a few aspects of contemporary American politics from this perspective (post-9/11 wars, the reasoning behind torture) but I will resist.  Instead, I want to think about the role and function of utopian thinking in Christian theology.  It isn't something I've thought about--and Micah D., if you read this, you should let me know what you think.

Genocide builds community in two distinct ways.  First, it brings the community together against a common enemy, a plague or parasite that must be eliminated.  Secondly, the community is brought together for the sake of a better world.  The first aspect--being against an enemy--is subordinated to the second aspect--being for a new world.  The prospect of a new life, a new community, and a new world explains the necessity of being against the enemy.  After all, the enemy is the threat to this new order.  Genocide is never an end in itself, but a means to an end.  The end--the desired goal of genocide--is a new community and a better world (or perhaps a new situation for an existing community, again, for the sake of a better world).

One can trace this genocidal logic back even before colonization (which is where H. Arendt lodges it).  The genocidal logic was built into late-medieval Christian identity, in which Spain needed to expel the Muslims and use blood purity laws to keep track of Jewish converts in order to stabilize Christian European identity.  Right during this time--late 15th century--Spanish explorers started discovering "new" worlds.  Very quickly, these "new" worlds became spaces in which (and through which) Europe could build a new world (and through this new world, express its own identity).  Europe began the process of "reinventing Eden" (to use the title of a great book on the conquest of nature and peoples).  It was this quest for a new world--a new, better, harmonic, edenic world--that justified the abuses of those deemed "native" and the land on which they dwelled.  Acquiring the land was necessary for building a better world; civilizing the natives would bring them into this new world.  Those who were lost were unfit for this new world.  Some--Africans--were fit to labor for this world but must, like Moses perhaps, remain outside of the promised land:  they are useful for but unfit to live in the new world.

Since genocide is an exercise in the quest for a better world, is there any space for the utopian in Christian theology?  What do we make of the "kingdom of God"?  How do we rethink the story of fall/redemption given the way a genocidal impulse has been operating within this story since at least the late middle ages (redemption from the fall through spreading Christian civilization)?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says (in "History and Good [1]" from the __Ethics__), "Christ did not cause the world to cease being the world, and every action that seeks to confuse the world with the kingdom of God is a denial of both Christ and the world.  By grounding responsible action in Jesus Christ we reaffirm precisely the limits of such action.  Because we are dealing with worldly action, this responsibility has a limited scope.  No one has the responsibility of turning the world into the kingdom of God" (224).

For Bonhoeffer, every dream of utopia fails Christologically, for it fails to realize that in Christ, "the world that is passing away has been claimed by God" (224).  All human reality has already been taken on in Christ.  To try to build a new community ignores the fact that Christ has loved and claimed this already existing sinful community.  The community--as it presently exists--has been claimed by Jesus, and thus there is no reason to try to create the kingdom of God on earth.

But does not this claim by Jesus reconstitute the community?  Yes!  There is neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek!  But doesn't this reconstitution of the community in Christ enable the utopian project to begin afresh?  No!  Why?  Because the community is reshaped and formed by Christ (through the Spirit).  It is never a human work; the formation is not mediated by our community (or any outside community) but is Christ's work (it is this point I've been trying to work out in the exchanges with Nick).  The Church testifies--witnesses--to Christ's work and urges others to see and believe it as well.  But it does not possess a form itself that it can then reproduce elsewhere (that belief lies at the very foundation of Christian imperialism, past and present).  

So, then, are utopian writings banned?  To use a Pauline expression--by no means!  But they are welcomed as judged and forgiven.  In other words, following every utopia stands Christ's "not my will but yours be done."  God's work is God's work, not ours, and our calling is to surrender our dreams and hopes to God.  Utopian thought can be valued and appreciated as long as one never forgets that any utopian scheme is sinful and must be surrendered to Christ (placed inside of Christ's cruciform obedience).  We are not excused from wanting to see a more just, more peaceful, more loving and harmonious world; we are not freed from our longings to see a new creation, a reconstituted Eden.  But we know, and must continually remind ourselves, that these dreams are dreams to be surrendered.  They are dreams to be brought into Christ's body, and from there, within that cruciform space, they are dreams that can be embraced.  In Christ, our dreams can be cleansed from our hidden hatred of the world (of the merely human); our hopes can be reordered by Christ's love for the world and for humans as they exist now.  Our actions, therefore, can be organized not by the attempt to create a new world but to let the world exist as the world--to let those in the world live merely human lives.  This work is always partial, always limited, always risky, and hence always needing humility and always standing in need of grace and forgiveness.  "Ultimate ignorance of one's own goodness or evil, together with dependence upon grace, is an essential characteristic of responsible historical action" (Bonhoeffer, 225).  "In God's own good, human good and evil are thus overcome" (227).  

We never know if our actions coincide with God's good (e.g., Judas' action of betraying Christ actually coincided with God's good...).  Far from excusing us to do evil, this fact causes us to know that even our best attempt to do the good might be horrendously evil (it certainly was for those missionaries trying to bring the natives into Christian civilization...).  We must let go of any attempt to be justified, righteous, good, beneficent, or otherwise free from blame.  But, instead of prohibiting action, the acknowledgement of our guilt frees us to act--as merely human actors striving after a merely human world (the merely human world that God has loved and reconciled to Godself in Christ).  

Utopian writings can be valuable--but only from within this perspective:  they are valued as long as one is reminded that what is hoped for is ultimately sinful and must be brought into judgment by Christ.  Therefore, they are extremely valuable--like everything else "merely" human.  But, like everything human, they must be filtered through Christ's love for the individual as he or she is now.  That only spells the death of utopia if utopia is nothing more than the hatred of the concrete, historical human person.  But if that is all utopia is, then genocide--hatred of the concrete human for the sake of the ideal human community--will always be at the core of any utopia.  And genocide will remain the most accurate expression of utopian ideals.