The Perils of the One, by Stathis Gourgouris (preface)

The Perils of T H E O N E

Stathis Gourgouris

PREFACE

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or a long time now, I’ve come to terms with the fact that books write themselves—and not just books, all compositions. I don’t mean to subjectify the object. I am just pointing to what, in my experience at least, seems unavoidable. Compositions emerge from some irreducible improvisation, even if they’re never actualized and remain just flashes of thought. What enables them to be constituted is a specific time and space that they come to occupy uniquely. This space-time dimension belongs to them fully and may be thought of as the fold within which they are generated. Of course, once actualized, fully composed, and objectified, they belong to the space-time of history, within which they may continue to live or die, freed not only from the author’s intentions but from their own parameters of composition.

Composite projects and artworks, series or suites, exhibitions or installations, collections of poetry—indeed, all multiple iterations within a specific formal or thematic rubric—dramatize this contingent space-time even further.

The uniqueness of each part is implicated in a nexus that exceeds it without abolishing it. The Perils of the One likewise belongs to a nexus I have titled “lessons in secular criticism,” but it is hardly situated in a sequence. It bears both an inaugural mark and the mark of consequence.

The still ongoing “lessons in secular criticism” project—a third book, titled Nothing Sacred, is nearly completed—has followed a long and circuitous trajectory, very much on track with the immanent and improvisational nature of its name. As secular criticism is foremost a practice and not a

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theory, whatever elements may figure as its theoretical principles at different points in time cannot hold on to the primacy of concept that would characterize a systematic work. Whatever may be the conceptual sovereignty of such theoretical vantage points in their own time, it is always provisional. It comes and goes, sometimes like the tide (where a certain repetition itself holds theoretical sway), but other times by way of what all sovereignty inevitably faces: vanishing with the same groundbreaking force that it had once emerged.

In this trajectory, the “Thinking Out Loud Lectures in Philosophy and Society” that I gave at the Sydney State Library, which then formed the backbone of Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013), signify all at once the distillation, culmination, and general framework of the entire fifteen-year-long research project.

In comparison, The Perils of the One includes some of the earliest and most formative material of the project. For example, the first version of “The Lesson of Pierre Clastres” was created back in 1999, while in fact I was in the midst of writing Does Literature Think? Indeed, at that time, I had very much considered the essay on Clastres to belong to those studies in mythographic thinking, and surely in its present form it serves as a sort of bridge document, testifying to the endemic connection between the secular criticism project and the epistemology of literature project. The same can be said of the discussion of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s notorious remarks about 9/11 or of Sigmund Freud’s mythistorical fictions of Moses, to take opening and closing examples among multiple such moments and figures strewn throughout the book. The intersections between these two projects are tangible. The radical creative capacities of mythic and poietic thinking are constitutive of the secular imagination, as well as necessary to any sort of critical encounter with social reality that does not compromise its political significance.

From this standpoint, all the work I have ever done, in all its range of forms and perspectives, historical or philosophical, artistic or performative, consists of nothing more than an attempt to negotiate the encounter between the poetic and the political. Poiēsis and krisis are practices that are enmeshed in my mind.

One can never make a judgment without creating a form. And no created form exists in some pure aesthetic plenitude, transcendentally immune from the politics of its own emergence. We can choose to separate, to isolate—perhaps with the provisional advantage of gaining a certain perspective—but this too is a critical decision, a judgment, and it bears a politics, no matter if we choose to ignore the fact of this politics, and it bears a form, no matter if we can’t quite conceive or concede this form’s existence. Secular criticism is the sort of practice that first and foremost acknowledges the worldliness of all creation and resists the presumption that critique is impartial.

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The term secular criticism belongs to Edward Said and I deploy it very much in his spirit, even if not quite in his language, as a kind of open-ended interrogative encounter with the world that not only disdains but uncompromisingly subverts, battles, and outdoes any sort of transcendentalist resolution of social and historical problems. The task of secular criticism is to confront socialhistorical situations where authority is assumed to emerge from elsewhere— and to do so from within those situations. This is why it is not a theory but a practice. This is also why, as a practice, it is always involved, in one form or another, in a deconstruction of transcendence. The fact that I begin the book with an essay called “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” which is an examination of Edward Said’s overall epistemology, is hardly incidental.

This deconstruction of transcendence is not merely formal; it engages a specific politics—as does all deconstruction worthy of its name, whether acknowledged or not. In other words, I am not merely interested in a philosophical critique of transcendence in favor of, say, a philosophy of immanence (even if I have been personally partial to immanent criticism since my earliest studies of Adorno). Rather, I conduct a critique of the politics of transcendence as this is manifested in a broad range of historical instances and theoretical languages, always careful to remain attentive to the historical and geographical specifics but impervious to those commands that aim at the construction of specific identities. This process is inevitably long and circuitous. Said often reminds us that secular interpretation requires a certain historical slowness, as opposed to the ahistorical speed scale of identity-making and identity politics, religious or secular regardless.

By contesting a politics of transcendence in favor of a politics of transformation, I not only mean to engage with occasions where a religious imaginary exhaustively occupies the domain of the political (even if these are increasingly prevalent in our time), but equally the less apparent secularist metaphysics of so-called Western democracies. The latter is a misnomer all around, not only by the political-philosophical standards of democracy but also by the geocultural standards that continue to confine societies of global immigration and contentious cultural differences to the vacuous toponym of “the West.” Whether it faces the legacy of Kantian transcendentalist morality or the indomitable (pseudo) rationalism of market economics and technocracy, secular criticism proceeds along the same interrogative path as when it faces any politics of faith.

If one is to engage responsibly in this sort of Saidian practice, the task of secular criticism would spare none of its critical capacity in the face of uninterrogated secularist mentalities, which exhibit the same faith in an origin of authority believed to transcend their social-historical boundaries as do the religious faithful in their ubiquitous divinity. The trajectory of the institutional politics of secularism since Said’s writings in the 1980s has not altered the landscape of his argument. On the contrary, it registers the superlative

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confirmation of his argument, evident most of all in the way that Said’s writing is often ignored or disparaged by the avatars of academic anti-secularism. In the end, an essential political and epistemological point is evaded: the critique of religion and the critique of secularism are actually the same work—the work of secular criticism.

Moreover, a critique of the politics of transcendence does not mean adopting a self-referential framework, where, for example, the social is explored in terms of society, the historical in terms of history, etc.—a framework, in other words, presumed to be closed and bound by its own repetition, tautologically immanent in that sense. On the contrary, such critique opens up spaces where no interrogation of the social, the historical, the political—indeed, I would add, the anthropological—can take place without confronting the enigma of socialimaginary institution: namely, the psychohistorical process by which societies produce and reproduce themselves and their others, their identities and their alterities.

This process is always in excess of whatever already exists, whatever is already instituted, even if, as is most often the case, this excess is duly occluded and erased from memory. In other words, social-imaginary institution isn’t a process of mere social reproduction, no matter what contortions in the collective unconscious are always needed to ensure simple reproduction. The enigma of social-imaginary institution is, in another language, the enigma of discontinuity in history. From this standpoint, the question raised by the task of secular criticism can be rephrased: Can we conceive the political as a realm of society’s self-critical interrogation of its destiny and not reduce it to the schema of power becoming external to society, independent of society? Or, from another angle, can we envision the social-historical realm without necessarily falling back on some specific framework of social organization or discipline, without having to translate the terms of the social-historical to the classic relation between command and obedience?

✳✳✳ Here, it is necessary to interject an elaboration on how I use the term transcendence in light also of various criticisms raised to my use of it in Lessons in Secular Criticism. I understand the concern behind the charge that I may be violating a core principle of philosophy by erasing the difference between the transcendent and the transcendental. There is no secret, I am certainly not a Kantian and I cast doubt on the presumption that this difference is a core principle of philosophy. I don’t recognize the Kantian difference in the same way I don’t recognize Heidegger’s ontological difference. In fact, the two are kin frameworks. Kant names as transcendent those principles that exceed experience, and this is necessary to him in order to posit an impartial, categorical

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ethics—a transcendental ethics that is based on a priori principles even if these principles are nominally worldly. It’s certainly not clear to me what exactly exceeds experience, if our notion of experience is not reduced to the scientifically empirical or even more to some sort of subjective psychology but covers a range of social-historical material that cannot be determined or limited a priori. Instead, the a priori determination of principles that stand on their own terms is precisely the mark of authority presumed-to-be elsewhere, which, as I said earlier, secular criticism relentlessly confronts.

The fact that this a priori and elsewhere are conceivable—or, more accurately, determinable—by the faculty of reason means nothing to me. Reason does not exist as such—any more than Being exists as such. Both are phantasms created by the human animal as aspects of its specific mode of living/being-in-theworld. They are sublime phantasms, they may even have become existentially necessary phantasms, but as phantasms they are themselves subject to the interminable (and indeterminable) range of subjective experience: the interminable and indeterminable variations of the interplay between life and death.

But this is not the place to consume ourselves in this debate.

The most legitimate objection is the one which rightfully protests that without the possibility of exceeding one’s situation no change is possible. It is not clear to me, however, that to exceed your situation presupposes a verifiable existing standpoint already assumed to be beyond your situation. Here, basic Aristotle is useful: the elemental notion that to change means at the very least to move. I take this notion as a point of departure without consenting to Aristotelian entelechy, to what he sees as the teleological necessity embedded in every being. We are not concerned here with ends, embedded or otherwise. To move elsewhere than where you are (situated) does not mean to move forward or backward, better or worse. It just means to alter your position.

One can object that this means no alteration, but mere variation. Yet, I don’t think the notion of variation can measure up to or sustain its meaning against the notion of excess—of exceeding one’s situation. Variation remains within the playfield of the situation. It confirms its reference frame by confining difference to the realm of identity, even if identity may be thought to be pluralized by its variation. In any case, a transcendent standpoint (at least in Kantian terms) requires an understanding of something beyond mere variation.

So, the big question becomes how to measure the production of difference versus the production of otherness in relation to a situation. While variation is a matter of difference, radical alteration means the production of otherness. The wager for me is how this production of otherness can take place without presupposing a transcendent standpoint that enables it—even in potentia—and at the same time without producing (performing) a semblance or assumption of a transcendent point as a result: that is, neither a transcendental end point (telos)

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of alteration nor a transcendent point as a priori archē (enabling potential) of alteration.

We have to be able to imagine—and give language to—the possibility that one can exceed one’s situation from within the terms of that situation by altering the terms of that situation. This does not mean that this is the work of the mind—of the intellectual will or any other such trope (reason or imagination) that would confine us within the well-known Enlightenment/Romanticism nexus of the “external” self-sufficient subject. There are plenty of “internal/ objective” factors that can activate the potential in any situation to unravel within its own terms and thus to be altered and to exceed—if you will, transcend—itself.

Of course, it’s perfectly understandable why human beings desire to imagine self-sufficient transcendent/transcendental spaces, or even the idea of transcendence as something in itself, as independent of situation and action. But this isn’t to say that human beings must do so in order to change, in order to exceed their situation. Nor is it to say that, once they change or exceed their situation, they must attribute this fact to a transcendental process.

The greatest obstacle in this discussion is, of course, the problem of change— radical change. I’m not interested in the rationalist-objectivist desire or need for the transcendent point to serve as external point of evaluation, judgment, or critique. I don’t believe that such a point is sustainable in the same way that I don’t believe perfect impartiality in judgment is sustainable. In order, however, not to get mired in subjectivist self-enclosure, we have to give ground to the situation as fact, as a mark in space, however determinable or not. How this mark in space is altered—how it moves or how we move from it—has to account also for how we move by means of it, how we exceed it by means of it, or how we make it exceed itself from within it. Otherwise, we wade in subjectivist enclosure, which would encompass even the most indeterminate transcendent/ transcendental standpoint.

The question that haunts this whole issue is, how can anything be altered if in fact it resides all within itself? Much of this I have answered in the essay “Confronting Heteronomy” in Lessons in Secular Criticism. Surely, an amoeba as an entity all-within-itself cannot radically alter itself. It is altered by some wholly other externality: a counter-organism, a drug, a poisonous environment.

From that standpoint, transcendence is nothing else but a name for the abyss that signifies the otherness of existence—indeed, a name that occludes (and occults) the otherness of existence as if it is a thing, a something that can be handled. But single-cell organisms aside, the symbiotic complexity of life does not allow such easy designations of externality, where a name, a sacred name or a sacred space, can be invented to seal the abyss. And even so, why should such projections of altering externality, however ambiguous and complex and whatever may be their names, necessarily mark a transcendent horizon? Can

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we retain a radical notion of existential otherness without imputing transcendence to it? That’s the profound wager of secular criticism.

✳✳✳ In the end, the problem of transcendence per se is secondary relative to my concern with how transcendence seems unavoidably imagined as a unitary horizon. However inventively conceivable or vaguely determinable, an Elsewhere is never plural. In fact, no transcendentalized authority can be plural, even if its subjectivity is presumed to be plural. We need not elaborate here on the obvious problem with political notions such as “the people” or, in the Spinoza-derived idiom, “the multitude”; their revolutionary transcendentalism abolishes their subjective plurality. But this is the case also when the subject does indeed remain plural. For instance, insofar as they became a transcendental authority, “the workers” were reduced either to “the proletariat” or, in more guarded but nonetheless still monological fashion, to “the workers’ movement.”

I mention outright these political terms—and without in fact dwelling on the more obvious ones: the state, the nation, the community, and the like—so as not to begin where one conventionally considers secular criticism to begin: the critique of religion. There is no doubt, of course, that a great part of this book addresses monotheistic transcendentalism in this regard. All theistic religions have some form of transcendentalism in common, but monotheistic religions, no matter whether they enact heterogeneous or differential rituals of devotion to divinity, posit a framework of authority that not only emerges from elsewhere but determines this elsewhere to be monological—or, to use a language of Latin derivation, unique, unitary, and, insofar as it produces a speech, universal. In this specific sense, the general aim of this framework of lessons is to address the perils of monological thinking in the entire range from monotheism to universalism in both “East” and “West.”

Universalism is not just the prerogative of Christianity; in Christianity it’s just explicitly professed. It exists in all three religions of the Book, as the characterization itself suggests. The divine text’s purchase of the truth is not just one’s own, the truth of the faithful; it’s the one-and-only truth of the universe.

The singularity of the perspective—the exclusivity, the exceptionalism, whether of “the chosen people” or the authentic faith that produces infidels everywhere— does not alleviate the totalizing power of this truth. In a strange way, this oneand-only truth is not an end but a means, a perfect and total instrument. By means of it, appalling (even if sublime) ends are achieved. That’s the essence of fundamentalist logic, which is not exclusive to religion but would include militant universalism and its zealots—all zealots, regardless: “their actions may be appalling, but their quotations are perfect.”1

praise for The Perils of the One “The Perils of the One is an exhilarating volume, an extended and variegated exercise in ‘secular criticism’ grounded on deep erudition and poetic sensibility.

This book is much more than an engagement with thinkers and scholars; it is a rich, exemplary reflection on the meaning of criticism and politics.”

—Gil Anidjar, author of Blood: A Critique of Christianity “The Perils of the One demonstrates Stathis Gourgouris’s sustained commitment to extending the bounds of secular criticism and calls forth an active engagement with poetics as a way of living with worldly conviction. He gives us life lessons: not instructions on how to live, but something more like music lessons—an invitation to compose with the material pleasures of aesthetic experience and everyday coexistence.”

—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic “Gourgouris offers a bold deconstruction of every form of sacralization in our political discourses and practices. In the ‘monotheistic’ confusion of unity and community, he sees the permanent origin of an injection of transcendence, therefore death, into our projects of emancipation. If ever a radical form of secular criticism was possible, this is it.”

—Étienne Balibar, author of Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics “Analyzing the self-contradictory and self-congratulatory perils of the One, Gourgouris gives us a deeply engaging exploration of a notion that still haunts our thinking and acting.”

—Hent de Vries, coeditor of Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World

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