Kristeva views anti-Semitism as a rather literary psychological phenomenon:
Anti-Semitism, for which there thus exists an object as phantasmic and ambivalent as the Jew, is a kind of parareligious formation; it is the sociological thrill, flush with history, that believers and nonbelievers alike seek in order to experience abjection. One may suppose, consequently, that anti-Semitism will be the more violent as the social and/or symbolic code is found wanting in the face of developing abjection. That, at any rate, is the situation in our contemporary world, and it is also, for more personal reasons, that of Céline. Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Célinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so because, as I have tried to explain earlier (see pp. 90ff.) the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact–which constitutes abjection.
In this sense Céline's pamphlets are the avowed delirium out of which the work emerges to venture into obscure regions at the limits of identity. If delirium is indeed involved, and Céline himself suggests that it is, that is also the nature of all anti-Semitism, the daily banality of which surrounds us; Nazi excesses or Célinian outbursts, which are cathartic upon the whole, give us a warning while we thirst for sleep and jouissance.
(The Powers of Horror, p. 180)
Hmm. What kind of problem is Kristeva's enjoyment of Céline? (Or my enjoyment of Kristeva?) Is it a question of being persuaded, of losing one's bearings amidst textual pleasures, delirium? Maybe not quite. The feeling of a dirty secret, relishing it. Its exposure. Can I speak of excess here without meaning mass murder?
Labels: abjection, anti-Semitism, Céline, Kristeva, pleasure
Gemma Corradi Fiumara reminds us that the "auscultation" of written texts has been limited to inhabitants of the Gutenberg Galaxy (The Other Side of Listening, p. 30). Given the number of books published annually, does it make sense any longer to speak of inhabiting the galaxy of books? In my corner of the galaxy there are hundreds of books, and tens of thousands in the nearest institutional library. I'm hard pressed to make it through one book a week, though I may consult many more. Nowadays an avid reader with a high book life number could make a dent in Project Gutenberg, but just a dent.
Can we still then speak of communities of readers? That may be a dishonest way to characterize academic intellectual spheres. Professors, translators, editors (one can hope), publishers, reviewers, librarians, students, bursars, airline attendants, code monkeys, authors: all their specialized, unequally valued skills and more are required to make up a contemporary intellectual community, or a minor bookish form of life. Perhaps the practioners of a particular bookish form of life agree upon a language, as Wittgenstein might say (Philosophische Untersuchungen I, No. 241). Are there more and more reading lists that don't contain within their pages all the language one needs to thrive in a bookish form of life? Do contemporary bookish forms of life accept more and more slippage in their languages? Along with every "These are the books you should read!" comes a "Those are books you should not read!" If I sit down to read The Libidinal Economy it will not be because anybody has recommended it to me but because I intend to enjoy it, which is another point I mean to get at. Can "These are some books you might enjoy" institute an agreement on a form of life sufficiently sophisticated for academic culture?
If listening involves an openness more fundamental than the openness of the question, as Gadamer suggests, then Corradi Fiumara's question of why this has this not been a topic of philosophical discussion acquires a certain probity (pp.28-29, citing Truth and Method, pp. 324-325). (I'll note that the if might excuse her from engaging in a pensiero forte.) Corradi Fiumara's philosophy of listening celebrates anomalies (p. 49). The anomaly of the openness of listening appears as anomaly from within a paradigm of hermeneutics; I'm not sure if she means to abandon the hermeneutic paradigm altogether, or, if so, whether there is a name for the paradigm that thinks listening. It may be consistent with a kind of pensiero debole. Corradi Fiumara notably makes frequent references to Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as well as the works of Gianni Vattimo, and Priogine and Stengers. I'm unsure of whether she has a deep commitment to postmodernism; I'll wait to read her more recent books before probing that question further.
Corradi Fiumara draws our attention to the pleasures of auscultation with an argument that reminds of Kuhn's idea that discoveries cannot unequivocably be attributed to particular individuals at particular moments (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 55). She says:
In an open organization of knowledge, even the experiences of pleasure and displeasure might become intsruments of philosophical research as they no longer function as ends in themselves but are amenable to be used as intermediate passages towards a more complex equilibrium. An experience of pleasure may not be confined to the status of an occasion of enjoyment but may be transformed into the announcement or uncovering of unapparent features in the complexity of interactions. Similarly the notion of pain may no longer be relegated to the noncognitive level of frustration but may enhance an awareness of features and factors which cause disturbance. The less pleasure and displeasure are regarded as mere fluctuations of one's inner life the more they can be introduced and used in the enrichment of our philosophical concerns.
(p. 46)
Kuhn and Corradi Fiumara, in their critique of the individual and of the occasion, are operating under a shared ethos of late Twentieth-Century thought. Beyond that, I think Corradi Fiumara has appropriated Kuhn's critique into a metaparadigmatic thinking of her problem (which also speaks to a kind of ethos). There are, nonetheless, elements of a paradigm in her thinking: "complex equilibrium," "complexity of interactions," and elsewhere, a deterritorialization of knowledge (p. 51 and passim). Are these in harmony? That is, if we begin to think a deterritorialized pleasure of auscultation, are we still interested in equilibria, or are we interested in disturbance? Do the pleasures of reading precisely disturb the complex bookish forms of life even as these forms of life celebrate more and more fluid bodies of texts? Is pleasure intrinsically a more unsettling basis of agreement than vocabulary or "the texts themselves"?
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, Kuhn, pensiero debole, pleasure, reading lists, Wittgenstein