Re-Imagining the Future of George W. Bush

Let's get serious about justice. This man is covered with the blood of innocents--from Texas to the Middle East. It's time to put our legal system where our rhetoric is. Criminality conducted under color of law has no place in American civic life.

Re-Imagining the Political

The political imagination is all but dead. Mistaking what passes for politics today as "the political" in Arendt's utopian sense is to play into the hands of the status quo. So-called "progressive" politics--which I pragmatically support--is merely the attempt to shield ourselves from the worst among us by means of the mediocre. Sure, I'll take Obama over HRC and I would even take HRC over any Bush, McCain, Giuliani, Neo-Fascist Wannabe. By the same token, I would prefer being hit with a stick over being stabbed with a knife, and being stabbed with a knife over a shot-gun blast to the head. In each case, I am merely estimating my chances of survival. Democrat or Republican, like Coke or Pepsi, is a Hobson's choice. The fact that the vast majority of Americans are resigned to this state of affairs suggests to me that we have entered a phase of what Arendt called "totalitarianism."

A transgressive moral praxis is an effort to extricate oneself from this trap--and, in the process, to find oneself: morally, politically, religiously.

Actually, I take that part about HRC back. HRC is no Bill Clinton. She is Richard Nixon in a skirt. She's a Lieberman Republican--a wolf in sheep's clothing. She is not a choice.

But enough of politics. Onward and upward to the political!

Transgressive Moral Praxis?

Perhaps an example would help...

Mazeppism

Mazeppism is a transgressive humanism.

The Mazeppist explores the transgressive potential of Terence's "homo sum" and the Muslim shahadah.

As any hermeneutics worthy of the mantle of Hermes, Mazeppist hermeneutics transgress through pluralism, humanism, and a commitment to sect-shattering, border-crossing haeresis.

The Mazeppist appropriates Marx's Theses on Feuerbach as principles of a transgressive ethos, translating the XIth thesis into a principle of moral praxis:

While intellectuals fulfill their responsibility to interpret the world in various ways,
they fail to discharge that responsibility completely if they do not succeed in, first,
articulating and, second, enacting, a transgressive moral practice.

Of all Heidegger's "children," perhaps the one whose thought was most akin to Mazeppism was the Hannah Arendt of The Human Condition. Margaret Canovan compares Arendt's analysis of the human condition to "a table around which people are gathered...only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense."

The Mazeppist is the annoying guest who insists on bringing the uninvited to the table, and seating them next to the host.

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Nine)

Tying together some of the foregoing threads, I would like to say that a Mazeppist is an individual who discovers herself through hermeneutical appropriations of, and resistances to, the exigencies presented by her moment and milieux. Our moment and milieux are the United States, post-9/11. Mazeppism is a conscious and conscientious effort of self-invention/ self-discovery. In the darkness and poverty of our time, the goal of the Mazeppist is to grow, like Wallace Stevens' philosopher, "fat against the autumn winds/in an autumn that will be perpetual."

Or something like that...

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Eight)

It is not my intention to disparage (completely) Derrida's contribution to recent philosophy. He provided us with a potent reminder that, as Abrams put it in "Construing and Deconstructing" (1983), "...the communicative efficacy of language rests on no other or better ground than that both writers and readers tacitly accept and apply the regularities and limits of an inherited social and linguistic contract." Of course, for those who have been paying attention, Derrida's message was forcefully driven home by Gorgias of Leontini's (d. ca. 376 BCE) reply to Parmenides' poem "On Nature." Human beings are forgetful and easily bored; therefore, repetition is something of a tonic. Thank you, Jacques.

For these very reasons, it is important, again, in the present context, to remind ourselves that Existentialism is not, as it is often portrayed, a philosophy of nihilism--though nihilists and even, as Mailer suggests, "psychopaths" do, from time to time, find its tropes and symbols useful. This should come as no surprise: nihilists and psychopaths also find the tropes and symbolism of religious traditions useful (Virginia Tech's late Mr. Cho appears to have regarded himself as a kind of "Christ figure" and explicitly compared himself to Moses).

Existentialist hermeneutics explore the semantic openness of language. Such exploration ought not to be construed (necessarily) as an endorsement of any particular use of language. Existentialist hermeneutics are conducted in service to a particular conception of the ethical: one in which individual authenticity is articulated in terms of the limits upon human freedom. Linguistic openness bears a synechdochic relation to an Existentialist ontological ethic. As Wittgenstein remarked: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

In light of its emphasis upon human authenticity and human freedom and its literary involvement, Existentialism is an heir to Romantic philosophy--an observation which brings us full circle to where we started. It also points us in the direction we are headed. As Duncan Heath suggests in his splendid little book Introducing Romanticism: "Perhaps a new Romanticism will provide us with a way out of the impasse of postmodernism." The work of M. H. Abrams has quietly and modestly pointed the way to such a position for many years.

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Seven)

He who laughs last...

This is a recent photo of the Romantic-
Pluralist critic M. H. Abrams. In the essay "The Deconstructive Angel" (1977), Abrams penned what I consider to be the finest single sentence on Derrida: "For Derrida's chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in which meanings are reduced to a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral reverberation from sign to sign of ghostly nonpresences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void."

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Six)

The importance of Sartre for the articulation of any existentialist position cannot be overestimated. His contribution was seminal. Though he recognized Heidegger's work as an important interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology, he was always selective in his incorporation of Heidegger's insights into his own thinking. This was, in itself, a great (but too often underappreciated) service to modern philosophy. In his selective use of Heidegger, Sartre was careful to quarantine the pernicious irrationalism (in the form of a secularized Apophatic Theology) that pervades Heideggerian discourse. In so doing, he immunized his own thought against a virus that renders far too much deconstructive criticism self-referential beyond repair. His vigilance on this score was driven by a Cartesian rationality and atheistic anthropocentrism. Merleau-Ponty then set about to undermine the dualism that Sartre's reliance upon Descartes imported into his ontology while Gabriel Marcel argued that Sartre's insights could be usefully appropriated without adhering to his atheism and anthropocentrism. Both projects (Merleau-Ponty's and Marcel's) remain unfinished and continue to be worth pursuing. European intellectuals, seduced first by the Siren call of Structuralism and then by Derrida's Heideggerian post-Structuralism, appear to have moved on to other things. American intellectuals have largely followed suit. Norman Mailer's invocation of the term "existentialism" in The White Negro was--and continues to be--highly suggestive of a way to pick up the threads that the heirs of these giants of 20th century Continental thinking left behind.

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Five)

To latter-day Romantic Orientalist, Victor Turner's liminal figure, and Norman Mailer's White Negro (a.k.a., American existentialist), we can add Ebrahim Moosa's recent appreciation of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE) as one who occupied the dihliz or "threshold position" with respect to various antinomies in Classical Islamic thought (see Moosa, Ghazali & the Poetics of Imagination, Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005). In every case, we find ourselves strapped to the runaway stallion (or was it a mare?), wolves stalking us on every side. "To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary)," Mailer wrote, "one must be religious, one must have one's sense of the 'purpose'--whatever the purpose may be--but a life which is directed by one's faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious...." It is difficult to read these words without hearing the echoes of Gabriel Marcel (whose little book The Philosophy of Existentialism is still in print). Marcel's work stands as a kind of intervention in the Sartrean existentialist trajectory--to "return" existentialism to the embodied hermeneutic that Kierkegaard had left us and that Sartre, very much the Cartesian, threatened to rationalize beyond recognition.

I happen to think that Sartre's own contributions to this early articulation of an embodied hermeneutic are under-appreciated. If nothing else--and Sartre added so much more--his trademark provocations were the sand in the oyster that produced Marcel's and also Merleau-Ponty's (especially significant) philosophical pearls.

A Brief Intermission

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Four)

Mailer on the intellectual antecedents of the White Negro: "If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage..."

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Three)

In a post-9/11, post-Saidian world, the Mazeppist re-invents the "American Existentialist" as a border-crossing figure. As Mailer wrote in The White Negro, "to be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself--one must know one's desires, one's rages, one's anguish, one must be aware of the character of one's frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one's sense of the "purpose"--whatever the purpose may be--but a life which is directed by one's faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one's emotions provide their profound conviction."

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Two)

We have, for starters, a post-9/11, post-Saidian Romantic Orientalist: one who understands that even "Orientals" (including a group of Egyptian poets and literary critics who flourished during the first half of the 20th century) embraced Romanticism--and, at the same time, staunchly opposed European colonialism and imperialism; who understands that the Romantics--who were human, all-too-human--often looked "East" for inspiration. In so doing, these Romantics saw the "Orient" in flawed ways, yes, but they also cherished the differences from the "West" that the East represented. Salutary differences as far as these Romantics were concerned. Easterners had not lost touch with mystery, with the inexplicable. Enlightenment did not necessarily entail the banishment of all shadow from the intellectual landscape. The Romantic Orientalist wishes to sit at the feet of Eastern wisdom--without repudiating her Western sense of self. What she repudiates is the exclusivist either/or of Aristotelian logic, arguing instead for an inclusive (Romantic) logic of both/and.

Those who respond to the Mazeppist's allegiance to his or her nuanced reading of the Romantic Orientalist project with censoriousness only affirm, through their censoriousness, that exclusionary thinking is something to oppose. Those who jump uncritically upon a Saidian band-wagon are fighting the last war.

The Mazeppist is the "spiritual heir" to the Atomic Age's "White Negro" or, as Mailer puts it elsewhere in his essay of that name, an "American Existentialist." Now there is a loaded term; before we go about unpacking it, I want to add another term that I think belongs in the mix: what Victor Turner called "liminal personae" or "Threshold Persons." This needs to be added BEFORE we start thinking left-bank intellectualisme, because left-bank intellectualisme has very little purchase upon the meaning of the phrase "American Existentialist" (or Romantic Orientalist or White Negro or Mazeppist). The Mazeppist is a threshold figure, someone who exhibits the ambiguous attributes of Turner's "liminality": a condition or person who eludes or slips through "the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial." Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.

Mazeppa, a European, is rejected by his own people and sent to die in the wilderness (Turner: "...liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness..."). The wild horse he is lashed to gallops east. Gallops EAST. Mazeppa is rescued (I will not say "saved") by Tartar tribesmen. These tribal peoples recognize him as one who has cheated the fate assigned to him by the cultural space into which he was born and raised. Many recognize his liminality and prize him for it: he is special, a rare occurrence, a rare occasion. He has died to the old nonsense and risen to new possibilities.

Among Europeans, these possibilities raise to a fever pitch inculcated ancestral anxieties . The Mazeppist's personal embodiment of cultural miscegenation is a screaming obscenity in his place of origin. It is a test for those who rejected him and, as we shall see, it is likewise a test for those who embrace him thinking that he intends a repudiation of his past.

Once one has died to the old nonsense and risen to new possibilities, someone else's old nonsense is no more acceptable to him than the old nonsense he has risen above.

What Is A Mazeppist? (Part One)

Based upon the information supplied in this Blog, one is entitled to assume that a Mazeppist is a variety of Romantic Orientalist. That no doubt seems like an odd thing to be and you won't get an argument from me on that score. It is a variety of madness--but not without method and, I would add, not without justification. In a post-9/11 world, a Mazeppist is the latest version of what Norman Mailer, after the madness of the Second World War and the dropping of the A-Bomb, called "the white negro."

If you do not recall this essay, allow me to refresh your recollection. It was originally published in Dissent in 1957.

Mailer argued that we may never be able to determine "the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in history...we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonoured, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city..."

As if this were not bad enough, Mailer noted for the record that the threat which the Nuclear Age posed to the well-being of the planet and every one of its inhabitants was co-mingled with the threats of political repression that the governments which claimed to be protecting us from nuclear holocaust employed in the name of "national security" in a time of (albeit "cold") war. Not only could we not trust the "enemy," we could not trust our neighbors--for they might be in league with the enemy. The Myth of the Fifth Column is very powerful in this country.

Mailer wrote: "It is on this bleak scene that a phenomoneon has appeared: the American existentialist--the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l'univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on the uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self..."

I think that this is an interesting piece of sociological writing--comparable to James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." It contains a number of compelling observations which appear to be mixed with a generous helping of Mailer's own desire to transform into virtues some of his own personal predilections. I do not intend by this criticism to undermine the work: I think it was brilliant when published and that it remains, to this day, suggestive. Indeed, I think it becomes more suggestive by the day, in light of the Bush regime's twisted, cynical, and exploitive relationship to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. But more on this anon...