‘

 
This immense, perforated organum of allusion and enigmatic suggestion is powered by, and ceaselessly returns to, the question of the self, and how at once to escape it, to sacrifice it, to redeem it, and finally to know it. Coleridge appears to have wished, with characteristic roominess of soul, that escape, sacrifice, redemption, and knowledge were somehow combinable categories, allied medicines rather than discordant illnesses of the self.


“Learn to be ignorant,” Rousseau beckons in Emile, “you will betray neither yourself nor others.” The artfulness of this dictum is that it takes the Christian ideal of innocence and (almost) makes it speak Greek, persuading us that the only way to know oneself genuinely is to maintain a prudent ignorance of much that lies beyond the self, and an unreasoned attachment to what is originally one’s own. In Rousseau’s hands, this aspiration is made to sound beautiful and noble, and it remained so in the imaginations of Goethe and Schiller, whose classical ideal of “recaptured naivete” (wiedergewonnene Naivetat) owes much to Rousseau. But beginning in the 19th century and continuing down to our time, the modern ideal of learned ignorance, in coarser hands, took on an altogether different character and became harder and more willful. Once freed from Christian humility, the myth of lost innocence created a powerful thirst in Europe for a re-enchanted world that would fill the voids and erase the indifference that modern man, following Rousseau, now believed to be inseparable from modern life. This yearning is familiar to us in all its forms today: aesthetic, religious, philosophical, political. What is perhaps less apparent is how precisely the sacred image of the innocent child entering the Kingdom of God was transformed into Rousseau’s daydream of Emile only to become the grotesque nightmare of Wagner’s Siegfried. The most profound figure to think through this myth of innocence and make it his own was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was not taken in by Siegfried, for he quickly discerned Wagner’s psychological shallowness and ersatz nobility. Yet Nietzsche’s abandonment of lugubrious Bayreuth, and half-serious promotion of Bizet, was inspired by an even deeper appreciation of the link between ignorance and human happiness. Nietzsche begins his famous essay “On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life” not with the words of the Gospel, “Consider the lilies of the field,” but with the exhortation “Consider the herd grazing before you” — for it is the cow, slowly nibbling its grass, ignorant of the past and unconcerned about the future, that inspires Nietzsche’s admiration. The cow is a master of forgetfulness, an art that modern man, burdened above all by historical knowledge and consciousness, has lost. Man’s new historical knowledge weighs him down; he knows what great men have achieved and feels himself to be small; he knows that other civilizations have risen and collapsed, and feels his own to be contingent and ephemeral. Man’s pursuit of knowledge, now extended from the physical world to the historical world, has rendered him smaller than he once was: The more he knows, the less he is, and the less he is, the less happy he is.


The story is a history of Prometheus, or Hyperion, or the Prodigal, or the Pilgrim, or the Artist. It is also a history of the evolution of Man, or of Dasein, or of the Geister. This is only the template of a story, of course; or to change the metaphor, it is a music that needs different orchestration at different times. It can be given a conventional religious tone, or a purely subjective tone, as with inner-light Protestant mysticism, or for that matter with Shelley or Blake. It can take a nationalistic political setting, or a private and personal setting. The fall may come with knowledge, which involves naming and separating and introducing differences. It can come as it came to ancient Israel, through other lapses, such as the breaking of a covenant, or some may think it came through the invention of capitalism. The hero who leads to the light may be Augustine or Rimbaud, a saint or a decadent. This music was played loudly more than a century before Heidegger, by Schelling and Schiller, Novalis and Hegel. England took it in through Coleridge and the Romantics; America took it in through Emerson, Whitman, and eventually Hollywood. Even in one artist expressions of the theme can range from the sublime to the ridiculous, from “Tintern Abbey” to what a critic of Wordsworth called the namby-pamby of the Lesser Celandine. It takes genius to play the Romantic music without falsifying it, and perhaps even greater genius to play it with a religious tremolo. Heidegger’s claim to genius was allowed because he grafted onto phenomenology a secular version (or at least a non-Christian and philosophical version) of the primal story. He celebrates the primordial unity, which like many Germans he attributes to the Greeks, and which he locates (for some private reason) in the pre-Socratic philosophers. He laments the fall that has plagued philosophy, science, and everyday life ever since. And he promises the ecstatic recovery that sets eternity into time, the mystical moment in which, as his favorite poet, Hölderlin, said, “the imperishable is present within us.”


One irony in the marginalizing of English studies is that they enjoyed their greatest prestige in the secular academy when they held most closely to the tradition of scriptural exegesis from which they derive. In the immediate postwar decades, when English departments were flourishing, intellectual energy was concentrated in something called the New Criticism — a reductive term often taken today to designate a narrow formalism and stipulative method. In fact, many who accepted the rubric were engaged in a broad resistance to what one of their leaders, Cleanth Brooks, called the “quixotic desire” of humanists “to be objective and ‘scientific.’” The New Criticism was still, and unashamedly, driven by an essentially religious impulse — as expressed in the quasi-theological title of Brooks’s notable essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” which argued that trying to distill “‘a prose-sense’ of a poem” as if one could build “a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung” amounts to a kind of blasphemy. As his Yale colleague W.K. Wimsatt explained in another famous essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” the poet — the mind behind the creation — remains an inscrutable creator whose intention can never be fully known, but in whose handiwork one may glimpse something of the sublime idea to which the poem gives form.


Hegel’s sympathetic commentators keep telling us not to worry, that although it might seem more or less equivalent to a cynical defense of the status quo (“Whatever is, is right”), really, in its true determination, it doesn’t mean that. But how can you tell? Hegel presents his system as the very incarnation of freedom. But, as Russell noted, what Hegel describes is “a very superfine brand of freedom. It does not mean that you will be able to keep out of a concentration camp. It does not imply democracy, or a free press.” Why should it?


When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that “direction for thinking,” what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination?

 
Derrida conflates loi and droit for the simple reason that he recognizes neither nature nor reason as standards for anything. In his view, both are caught up in the structures of language, and therefore may be deconstructed. Now, however, he also wishes to claim that there is a concept called justice, and that it stands “outside and beyond the law.” But since this justice cannot be understood through nature or reason, that only leaves one possible means of access to its meaning: revelation. Derrida studiously avoids this term but it is what he is talking about. In Force de loi he speaks of an “idea of justice” as “an experience of the impossible,” something that exists beyond all experience and therefore cannot be articulated. And what cannot be articulated cannot be deconstructed; it can only be experienced in a mystical way.

 
How a Symbolist conception of language could ever be reconciled with Benjamin’s later historical materialism is not clear, but Benjamin maintained that a bridge could be built, “however strained and problematic that bridge might be.” In his literary essays of the 1930s he hints at what such a bridge might look like. In Proust, in Kafka, in the Surrealists, he says, the word retreats from signification in the “bourgeois” sense and resumes its elementary, gestural power. Thus in The Castle, Surveyor K.’s two assistants act out their fetuslike, not yet fully born status by folding up their limbs whenever they can and huddling together in a ball. Gesture is “the supreme form in which truth can appear to us during an age deprived of theological doctrine.” In Adam’s time, the word and the gesture of naming were the same thing. Since then language has undergone a long fall, of which Babel was only one stage. The task of theology is to recover the word, in all its originary, mimetic power, from the sacred texts in which it has been preserved. The task of criticism is not essentially different, for fallen languages can still, in the totality of their intentions, point us toward pure language. Hence the paradox of “The Task of the Translator”: that a translation is a higher thing than its original, in the sense that it gestures toward language before Babel.

 
Adorno’s hidden premise seems to be this: Any serious piece of writing, like any serious work of art, will be produced from the standpoint (in a mystical image borrowed from Walter Benjamin) of “the messianic light.” Like Benjamin, Adorno wants “to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” — an emancipated point of view, beyond the despair of living under the rules of capitalism. Insofar as such a work succeeds in single-mindedly addressing its proper audience, it may well be understood properly by no one — save the Messiah (who, of course, may never appear).


Sen gets quite heated by the suggestion that he has changed his line on the market. “Nothing I’ve ever written was anti-market. Being against the market is like being against conversation. It’s a form of exchange,” he snaps.