The Indispensable Rival

REVIEW ESSAY AND RESPONSE

The Indispensable Rival: William Connolly’s Engagement with Augustine of Hippo

K. Roberts Skerrett

Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. By William E. Connolly. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 216 pages. $54.95.

The Augustinian Imperative: Reflections on the Politics of Morality. By William E. Connolly. New ed. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. 192 pages. $65.00.

Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. By William E. Connolly. Expanded ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 272 pages. $19.95.

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW Bradley J. MacDonald engaged political theorist William E. Connolly in a retrospective of his work. It is an interesting conversation, both for what it says and for what it does not. Connolly

K. Roberts Skerrett is associate professor of religious studies at Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA 50112-0806.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 2004, Vol. 72, No. 2, pp. 487–506

DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfh038

© 2004 The American Academy of Religion

488Journal of the American Academy of Religion is an important figure in American cultural studies and political science. From his celebrated The Terms of Political Discourse (1974) and his controversial Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999) to his most recent Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002c), Connolly has been engaged with the conditions and possibilities of freedom in pluralistic democracies.1 In the interview MacDonald asks if Connolly recalls his intellectual development as a linear progression or if there have been “seismic shifts” (165). Connolly responds that he did feel a shift in his thinking in the late 1980s: “The text that pushed me the most initially was Herculine Barbin....I sensed that the implicit conceptions of nature, biology, sex, gender, and ethics governing me were more banal and closed than I had realized, and that to embrace such conceptions is to participate in more cruelty and violence than I had heretofore acknowledged. I began to become a problem to myself” (166).2 Connolly’s most sustained analysis of the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite’s story occurs in The Augustinian Imperative (2002a: 15–30).3 Oddly, neither MacDonald nor Connolly mentions this work; nor is it listed in the references. MacDonald is not the first of Connolly’s interlocutors to pass over his engagement with Augustine. The Augustinian Imperative, which to my mind is pivotal in Connolly’s career, has been sparsely reviewed. One reviewer treated it, creatively enough, as a kind of hysterical fugue (Rubenstein: 1127–1130).4

But Connolly himself has not forgotten Augustine. In the interview with MacDonald, when he recalls the shift in his thinking in the late 1980s, Connolly quotes Augustine—“I began to become a problem to myself”—a phrase repeated twice in The Confessions (1992: 57, 208).

1 The Terms of Political Discourse won the 1999 Benjamin Lippincott Award from the American Political Science Association, given for “a work of exceptional quality still considered significant after a time span of fifteen years.”

2 In 1978 Michel Foucault published a dossier of documents (in French) pertaining to the life of Adelaide Herculine Barbin (born 1838), usually called Alexina. The dossier includes Alexina’s memoir, written shortly before her/his suicide; a medical report by Alexina’s personal physician, Tardieu; a medical opinion (1860) by the specialist Chesnet, where he determines that Alexina is a biological male; and the autopsy report (1869) by Goujon, which further examines the case. The dossier also includes local newspaper articles and legal documents. Alexina legally became Abel Barbin in 1860 and was required to live thereafter as a young man. The English translation, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite (1980), includes an introduction by Foucault. Neither the French nor the English edition includes the sketches of Alexina’s genitals that were made by Goujon at the time of the autopsy. These are published in Dreger: 19–20. There are no extant images of Alexina’s face.

3 See also Connolly’s Politics and Ambiguity (1987: chap. 10) and Identity/Difference (2002b: 33, 187).

4 Another sustained critique occurs in Schoolman’s “Toward a Politics of Darkness.” Schoolman edits Modernity and Political Thought, the series in which The Augustinian Imperative appears, and wrote an introduction to the book (Connolly 2002a: vii–xxv). Schoolman’s vision for the series is to provide opportunities for authors to struggle with an intellectual “familiar,” “who may finally emerge as the hidden architect of all [one] find[s] fascinating and threatening” (in Connolly 2002a: ix).

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Connolly (2002a: xviii) began reading Augustine in the late 1980s when he was about the same age as Augustine was when he wrote the Confessions. Connolly began reading Alexina’s memoir in the early 1980s, but I suspect that the later encounter with Augustine was more provocative and ultimately more constitutive of Connolly’s thinking. For it was this latter encounter, I will argue, that compelled Connolly to delineate the structure of “identity/difference” and to conceive of the “ethos of agonistic respect” in response. Further, I will argue that Connolly’s engagement with Augustine over time has been the crucible of rivalry that pressed Connolly to develop both conceptual and technical resources for realizing agonistic respect. He has gathered these resources through a sort of critical askesis. By this I mean that Connolly has systematically worked at teasing and irritating distinctions that organize political consciousness, relational networks, and institutional arrangements in the United States. Not surprisingly, he has taken aim at conceptions of “nature, biology, sex, gender, and ethics,” as he acknowledges to MacDonald. But he has also taken aim at conventional oppositions between faith/secularism, law/generosity, and, most recently, thinking/technique.

My purpose in this essay, then, is to propose a plot of Connolly’s intellectual development, where the shift in his thinking begins not with tenderness for a lyrical intersexual but, rather, with an experience of intellectual affront. There is a danger of overplaying this; that is, the affront Augustine posed to Connolly was no doubt galvanized by Connolly’s tenderness for Alexina. And perhaps the slower metabolism with which Connolly absorbed Alexina’s memoir over a decade opened eddies of wonder and remorse in his conception of identity/difference—which would complicate Connolly’s rivalry with Augustine from the start. But the plot I propose here works to display a specific, vigorous incitement underlying Connolly’s intellectual development—the incitement of writing near and against a rival.

In a nice coincidence, three different books by Connolly were published in 2002. Expanded editions of Identity/Difference (originally 1991) and The Augustinian Imperative (originally 1993) were brought out, both with new introductions. As it turns out, they are especially appropriate complements to Connolly’s new work, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Reading these three together, I will draw out modes of antagonism and appropriation that have enlivened Connolly’s engagement with Augustine over time. Augustine is the rival, I argue, who stimulated some of Connolly’s most vivid concerns—the paradoxical relation of morality with cruelty, the politics of “fundamentalism,” the ethos of agonistic engagement, and the necessity of cultivating that ethos in the flesh. The new introductions to Identity/Difference and The Augustinian

Imperative mark the transformation of that rivalry over time, as Connolly has developed resources for addressing its paradoxical terms. In Neuropolitics one sees how generative this rivalry in the mode of agonistic respect has been for Connolly, in terms of the sheer inventiveness of the thinking/technique he has developed through and for that engagement. Connolly is not an Augustinian; the impress of Nietzsche, Foucault, or Deleuze, for example, is much more easily traced on him. But tracing the influence of Foucault or Nietzsche on Connolly is a bit like tracing the influence of Paul or the Psalmist on Augustine: It is a genealogy that reassures a right-thinking community that certain appealing conceptions have been properly inseminated. Yet to ignore Augustine’s influence on Connolly is ironic, for one of Connolly’s major preoccupations has been to value the constitutive role of the rival, and it is that value I want to display here.

IConnolly began his engagement with Augustine in Identity/Difference. He brought to this initial encounter a lifelong concern with the political conditions of freedom.5 What kinds of spaces or opportunities are necessary to ensure freedom in human lives? What does it mean to be responsible for our actions? Connolly is, by sensibility and long reflection, suspicious of any accounts of the political subject that fantasize free choice as the cause of individual actions and their consequences. He rejects the image of the liberal subject who is ready to go—given some open space, a few rational principles, and clearly labeled options. None of the terms of this account strikes Connolly as plausible. Yet he is also suspicious of accounts that search for profound sources of incapacity or blameworthiness in the self. In Identity/Difference he stakes out these rejected options in a cruciform pattern: “You might picture western practices of responsibility as two poles crossing each other. The horizontal pole consists at one end of a deep identity to be discovered and the other of a self [who is] formed through radical choice. The vertical pole consists of original sin at one end and mental illness at the other. A variety ofindividuals and groups have been nailed to this cross whenever the problem of evil has become too intense to bear” (2002b: 113). The issue for a democratic political theorist, then, is how to envision human freedom without overplaying responsibility while still seeking to generate sufficient responsibility that one can oppose crushing constraints on human freedom.

5 See Connolly’s Political Science and Ideology (1967), The Terms of Political Discourse (1974), and, with Michael Best, The Politicized Economy (1976).

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The argument of Identity/Difference moves in short spirals of assertion, self-criticism, and revision. But when he reaches the fifth chapter, entitled “A Letter to Augustine,” the gloves come off. Connolly is not a chaste writer, but there is nothing else quite so vengeful as the “Letter” in his other published work: “A spirit of death roams your texts” (2002b: 124); “You embody an impulse to revenge against the human condition” (2002b: 139); “Did you confess everything, Saint Augustine? Did you not, even after your conversion, secretly entertain the thought that the evils produced by this doctrine [of eternal salvation] might not be worth the uncertain insistence that there actually is a being willing and able to carry out its plot?” (2002b: 131). Connolly has never been a Christian; he met Augustine without deference for the other’s saintly glamour and with no incentive to make Augustine come out well in the end: “I write, then, to accuse you, and in doing so to excavate political predispositions in myself and others” (2002b: 124).

In the new introduction to Identity/Difference, though, Connolly expresses regret: “As already indicated, there are things I would modify were this book to be written today. Major among these is ‘A Letter to Augustine’” (2002b: xxx). He suggests, “The problem is that the strategy I adopted to mimic and expose the [Augustinian] code of hereticalization ran the risk of reinscribing it” (2002b: xxx). To be fair, one can detect Connolly’s awareness of this risk in the Letter itself. Curiously, though, Connolly’s retrospective expression of regret belies the passion that underwrites the original Letter—“the strategy,” “the risk,” “I adopted”—painting his earlier self as the sort of free chooser whom his subsequent work powerfully debunks. I suspect, indeed, that Connolly wrote the “Letter to Augustine” before the other chapters of Identity/ Difference, which were then composed to explore the implications of that first energetic response. By placing the Letter toward the end of Identity/Difference and offering it to the reader as a “strategic mimesis” of Augustine’s practice, Connolly disguised the temporal itinerary of his own ethical response. But it does not take any special expertise to guess that the Letter is out of order.6 Then, if one reads it in the order of Connolly’s experience, it marks an encounter with ethical necessity—by which I do not mean the necessity of a rational law but, rather, the necessity of an irresistible “passion to think” (Deleuze, in Connolly 2002c: 94).

6 Connolly confirmed in an e-mail that he did write the “Letter to Augustine” first. I do not deny the mimetic quality of the Letter, but, following Girard, I see that mimesis as symptomatic of rivalry, rather than a “strategic” response to it.

The Augustinian Imperative was published two years later. Though the themes of this book are foreshadowed in Identity/Difference, by 1993 Connolly had clarified and amplified his opposition to Augustine. For Connolly, the hallmark of “the Augustinian imperative” is the relationship it establishes between “fundamentalism” and “heresy.” Connolly rightly identifies a permanent instability in Augustinian theology—God’s omnipotence and perfection are made indispensable to his theology, while human experiences of horror, outrage, and grief constantly cast doubt on these themes.7 Augustine, in Connolly’s view, created a strategy of identity/difference that depends on two selfprotective gestures. The first protects God’s identity as author of the moral order by locating evil in the human will, and the second preserves the believer’s identity by projecting all the doubts and confusions that the first move entails onto the evil will of another. The protection of God’s identity by locating evil in the human will is the template; once one’s God has been so constructed, the next step is to make oneself in the image of that God. And this operation can be repeated to secure the power and legitimacy of political institutions, cultural establishments, and religious groups, as well as normative identities—which are now broadcast around the world. The cost of this strategy, Connolly argues, involves a God and an identity that require that “there must be heresies” in order to project recalcitrant uncertainties that trouble indispensable themes onto recalcitrant others who must be anathematized.8

Connolly begins The Augustinian Imperative with a striking juxtaposition of texts: The Book of Job (see Mitchell) and Herculine Barbin. By reading each text in close sympathy for the protagonists, Connolly shows

7 There is a large contemporary theological literature that opposes classical theodicy. See, e.g., Surin, Söelle, Kitamori, Welch, and Sands.

8 Connolly’s Augustine is not hard to document. In his anti-Pelagian treatise “On Original Sin,” for example, Augustine writes: “Must not every catholic, with all the energies wherewith the Lord endows him, confute this pestilential doctrine [of Pelagius], and oppose it with all vigilance; so that whenever we contend for the truth, compelled to answer, but not fond of the contest, the untaught may be instructed, and that thus the Church may be benefited by that which the enemy devised for her destruction; in accordance with that word of the apostle’s, ‘There must be heresies, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you [1 Cor. xi.19]” (1971a: 245). Prior to his conclusion, Augustine quotes Coelestius, from the proceedings of the latter’s trial before the Council of Carthage: “As touching the transmission of sin, I [Coelestius] have already asserted, that I have heard many persons of acknowledged position in the catholic church deny it altogether; and on the other hand, others affirm it: it may be fairly deemed a matter for inquiry, but not a heresy” (1971a: 238). Augustine (1971a: 246–247) considers Coelestius’s distinction here with some sympathy—he quotes it twice—but he eventually rejects its applicability in the specific case. There are many historical examples where the politics of orthodoxy versus heresy are defamatory, self-righteous, and cruel. For a historical critique of the Nicene controversies, see Williams.

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how the core of suffering for each is generated by orders of identity and morality that cannot compass their experience. Job and Alexina are not just a little ragged at the edges of normative identity or moral order; they are visible and indigestible affronts to both. Yet Connolly shows that the social response to their suffering is not a revision of the norms and orders from which these extraordinary subjects extrude; rather, they are blamed and cast out. Their confusing experiences are initially the object of sophisticated efforts by others to retrench moral order at a deeper level: Job must confess that he has committed secret sins commensurable to his affliction; Alexina must confess and demonstrate that s/he is “in truth” ayoung man. But in each case the pressure on them to confirm, despite appearances, the invisible depths of the normative structures that exclude them greatly increases the affliction of the protagonists. These are forms of suffering, Connolly argues, created by moral orders and normative identities.

Having identified (with) the victims secreted beneath the normative order, Connolly attacks the practice of confession, which he views as a primary method for constructing and installing political subjects into that order. Following Foucault, he treats confession as a method by which subjects are made cohesive and responsible while deepening their dependence on the intervention of another more powerful will. This disciplinary tool sculpts the subject through synergies of power and pleasure: An authoritative power is excited and legitimated by the subject it harries, while the subject is focused and vivified by its exposure to prestigious attention. Confession as discipline turns the subject in the direction of helplessness and guilt, simultaneously inducing the need for a supplemental power—divine or political—to control the will.

Connolly views this sadomasochistic construction of political subjectivity as typically Augustinian. He grapples with Augustine over the theologian’s interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. How, Connolly demands, can Augustine make human “responsibility” for sin the fundamental issue of that scripture? The scripture points to human responsibility for evil, Connolly (2002a: 104–108) suggests, only if there are stakes extrinsic to the biblical text that demand the story point to God’s perfection. He argues that Augustine “reverts to mystery” whenever he cannot reconcile the biblical narrative with God’s perfection. Yet on what basis, Connolly (2002a: 111) asks, does Augustine know, with no mysteriousness, that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good? He argues that Augustine invokes mystery to close the gaps where an unruly question or interpretation might emerge. Mystery does not enfold Augustine’s reading; mystery spackles it, so that the irreducible strangeness of the text

can never diminish the authority of the doctrine that is said to issue from it (Connolly 2002a: 104–111).9

Connolly argues for a tragic reading of Genesis, following Paul Ricoeur and Harold Bloom, where the curiosity of the woman expresses, rather than rends, the open weave of creation. Adam and Eve are children in the garden. They receive instructions and warnings from the Father that they do not fully understand. They cannot know what it means to die; they scarcely know what it means to be naked. The fatal judgment falls on them after they respond to the beauty of an object whose proscription to them seems inexplicable. Yet they learn from the Father that they are responsible for the consequences of their actions, even though they could not have foreseen those consequences and nothing in their motive or intent makes eternal damnation a commensurable penalty (Connolly 2002a: 136–137). Connolly’s reading highlights the bewilderment of the children before an impenetrably generous and punitive God.

Augustine’s reading represses the strangeness of the Genesis story by labeling as deprivations of being all those extrusions of attraction, curiosity, and delight that must be disavowed to maintain divine moral order. Connolly’s reading points to the cruelty within normative identities, the disavowed forms of aversion and ingratitude they foster, in the name of divine purpose or “higher love.” Moreover, if Augustine construes the fault in the human will as privation of being, for Connolly the fault should rather be configured as a rift in the texture of being. One does not fall into the rift; one enters into it inevitably as into the spaciousness of contingency, its plenitude and risk. Connolly argues that the rift “has been demonized by Augustinians living before, during, and after the life of Augustine” (2002a: 121). The concept of the “free will” has been inserted there and then loaded with the burden of sin. In opposition to this, Connolly “affirms the joy of life in the midst of its tragic character” (2002a: 119). Such affirmation does not evade anxiety, grief, or resentment against assaults; but it dispenses with the expectation that one should have been spared entry into that rift, that one is unilaterally responsible for the consequences of entering it, or that one needs to be redeemed

9 In a very different reading, Charles Mathewes highlights the questioning spirit that ripples through the Confessions and breaks out ecstatically in the last three books. Mathewes suggests: “Augustine is telling a story about learning to ask questions—learning, beyond the explicit intellectual form of the question, to inhabit the form of life from which our questions derive” (543). On this account, the whole dynamism of the Confessions is the discovery that “the energies we are trying to express in our many modes of questioning are, for Augustine, the energies that we most deeply are or could be” (Mathewes: 542). Augustine ended the Confessions with the phrase sic aperietur. Translators have often added amen to give firmer closure to the book. But Mathewes (539–540) argues that it is precisely toward the phrase “so [it] shall be opened” that the whole conversio of the Confessions tends.

Skerrett: The Indispensable Rival495 from them. Connolly writes: “The rift in the moment is a gateway; the gateway contains possibilities that point in different directions; each contains an element of irreversibility once it is taken; and no one has the capacity to peer far enough down either path to see exactly where it heads....The rift is a gap, a break, a rupture, a fault that cannot be closed. It recurs eternally” (2002a: 123).

Connolly speculates that every culture, community, or identity generates tension between certain themes that are indispensable, yet remain problematic, to it. The Augustinian strategy of identity/difference may be ubiquitous in western societies because human beings as living, social organisms are not designed to conform to any single identity. We need to organize our lives around norms and orders, but these never quite compass us; and the more imperative it becomes that we inhabit such norms and orders with imperturbable peace, the more threatening our inevitable excesses and unquiet become. We resent this excess in ourselves and so project it onto others, especially those who appear to escape constraints that we ourselves experience as simultaneously imperative and impossible. A ring of disavowed violence, Connolly suggests, will circle any soul or community that claims to live in a state of perpetual harmony and peace.

Yet Connolly also acknowledges that his analysis of an Augustinian politics of difference is both contestable and paradoxical. Paradoxically, although Connolly seeks to expose the violence that circumscribes a powerful moral identity, he is moved to defend a new, allegedly more inclusive and nonviolent identity. In the course of this defense he begins to use tactics of isolation, consolidation, and attack against the “fundamentalist” identity he criticizes precisely for its tactics of isolation, consolidation, and attacks on others. As Connolly observes, one cannot criticize the politics of “fundamentalism” from any positive position without that position becoming implicated in it. It is in struggling with this paradox, I argue, that Connolly encounters the ethical necessity of an irresistible “passion to think.” In The Augustinian Imperative he names the disposition he wants to cultivate in response—agonistic respect. The difficulty and the necessity of realizing that disposition thus create momentum for Connolly’s next two books, The Ethos of Pluralization (1995) and Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999).

Throughout these next books Connolly elaborates what I am calling his method of critical askesis—working to tease and irritate distinctions that structure our familiar political world—identity/difference, masculine/ feminine, reason/faith, secularism/religion, white/black, guilty/innocent. Connolly is not trying to dismantle these distinctions; instead, he exacerbates strains and yearnings that streak across them and collect in the seams

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between. Ascetics work on themselves by creating patches of aching consciousness in order to transform their habitual perceptions and dispositions. By the phrase “critical askesis” I mean that Connolly works by inducing or exacerbating aches in personal and political consciousness along the seams of identity/difference. His goals are, first, to expose structures of identity/difference enough to reduce the motive to anathematize the rival and, second, to foster care for the “plurovocity” of being. It is a practical way to cultivate vibrant patience with those paradoxes of affirmation and anathema that entrap one more deeply if one tries to extricate oneself by force.10

Connolly’s writing becomes both the conceptual register and a practical technique of this askesis. Let me give an example. In The Augustinian Imperative Connolly viewed confession as the primary instrument for Augustinian fundamentalists to “moralize” or “normalize” the self by submitting it to the “torque” of conversion. He was wary of the submission of the subject to prestigious power that such discipline entails. Yet Connolly was also attracted to confessions. Alexina’s memoir and Augustine’s classic are both impassioned “confessions” composed, from time to time, in searing second-person address.11 In each, something exceeds Connolly’s initial framework for interpreting it—something alert, irregular, clamorous, and temporal. It is this “something,” I suggest, that held Connolly’s attention long enough to intuit that confession does more than normalize the subject. Confession allows the expression of raggedness beyond the telling of it, in ways that entrust that raggedness to another.

After the “Letter to Augustine” in Identity/Difference Connolly began to mottle his writing with the second-person address, something he very rarely did in his earlier published writing. In The Augustinian Imperative he addresses whole paragraphs to “you.” The referent is indefinite. Sometimes “you” are one who has dared to “look a crocodile in the eye hovering just above the water level of a swamp” (Connolly 2002a: 10). Sometimes “you” can be drawn away from god, “when hearing or speaking erotically

10 For a sustained explanation of ascetic techniques as means for creating modulations of consciousness, see Glucklich. For a medical-phenomenological account of the way physiological structures influence shifting and layered forms of consciousness, see Leder. Talal Asad, in his recent Formations of the Secular, argues that the secular subject has been conceptualized as an intentional agent for whom pain and passion are unnecessary and legally bracketed intrusions on subjectivity. Connolly’s critical askesis, I suggest, works to debunk that secular image along with some of the basic distinctions that order the discursive economy in which it is embedded.

11 Here is a sample from Alexina’s memoir: “You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth; I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep” (Foucault: 99).

Skerrett: The Indispensable Rival497 charged words in the company of another man’s wife” (Connolly 2002a: 43). Sometimes “you” are an Augustinian, who “may be pressed eventually to become very punitive in your orientation to human life” (Connolly 2002a: 116). And sometimes “you” are Eve: “You can’t return to fateful moments in order to re-write them. You gnash your teeth over the ‘it was’” (Connolly 2002a: 124). Connolly calibrates the risk he takes here to respect the privacy of difference. For you may want to evade the familiarity of that address. And if you do, it will rebound on the writer, as it does in American slang. Or you may imagine a hypothetical third person, less faceless than “one” might be. Or you can meet his address, admitted by Connolly as an uncanny presence. In any case, though, there is frequently a confessional blur around these patches of second-person address; so the reader cannot tell how much of Connolly there may be in “you.” Connolly appropriates the confessional mode in a way that creates fringes of empathy, irony, and humor between you/me. So confession, here, is not merely an instrument of power; it teases out a mode of connection—that cunning, succulent, infinitely exploitable need to address another presence as “you.”

II

If the encounter with Augustine was one of rivalry for Connolly, it was never one of absolute enmity. For, even as he constructed his critical account of the rival, other inspiration and insights rubbed off. In The Augustinian Imperative Connolly argues that Augustinian “fundamentalism” is implicated with indispensable theological themes—the doctrine of aperfect god, of original sin, of supernatural salvation. By prioritizing salvation as the criterion of Augustine’s theology, Connolly must suppress other richly implicated Augustinian themes that contemporary theologians may find more important—the priority of grace, the pervasiveness of love, the obscurity of the will, the beauty and contingency of a world created out of nothing. But if in his critical account of Augustine Connolly has suppressed these themes, he still absorbed them enough to draw on them in the critical askesis he undertook on himself amid rivalry with Augustine. Absorbing some portion of the rival’s faith allowed fringes of empathy and connection to form in the seams of identity/ difference. In that fringed space you are neither inside nor out.

In The Augustinian Imperative Connolly concedes that Augustine “knows how to do things with words....Above all, he knows how to use words as instruments of conversion” (2002a: 85). And he acknowledges that moments of conversion must occur within any ethical practice: “The issue, then, is not whether but how a conversion is effected, what authority relations it inaugurates, what relations it establishes between its identity

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and the differences it constitutes to solidify itself” (2002a: 57). Against Augustinian confession, Connolly recommends a competing technique. In his view one should “cultivate fugitive excesses or surpluses in the experience of life” in order to deepen one’s sense of the richness as well as the contingency of such experience. One should strive to bear excesses that disturb one’s identity without resorting to strategies that intensify moral or normative discipline against oneself or others.12 Connolly calls for “a politics of generosity towards the strangeness in ourselves through attentiveness to whirlwinds within and without” (2002a: 28).

Connolly’s most recent book, Neuropolitics, explores the need for techniques to cultivate such attention. It invites “a return to forgotten questions about how cultural ritual, discipline and arts of self-cultivation infiltrate into patterns of thinking, identity, and ethical sensibility” (Connolly 2002c: 13). And here Connolly argues that “the inventive and compositional dimensions of thinking are essential to freedom of the self and to the cultivation of generosity in ethics and politics” (2002c: 1). Neuropolitics shifts the question of ethics from why we should conform our action to certain ideals to how can we cultivate responsiveness to our ideals in the habits and dispositions that ordinarily move us (Connolly 2002c: 105). For Connolly, like Augustine, knows that it is possible to be wholly convinced on an intellectual plane of some belief or value and find oneself diverting considerable energy in other directions. What sort of freedom do we have to address our lack of choice at the level of excitement or distress or, even more important, our banal tendency to act in ways that go without saying? Connolly knows that in order to change one’s ethical practice, one needs more than a rational principle and a superior tone to realize whatever moral imperative is advanced.

Neuropolitics, I want to venture, is a sort of postsecular, democratic primer on asceticism for the twenty-first century, a theoretical and practical effort to bring “relational techniques of the self” into the main currents of political theory. Augustine is a discreet mentor of this book:

Augustine illuminated the self-forming and compositional capacities of discursive life when he perfected Christian confessional practices. For him the purpose was both to express the faith of Christian believers, and to form the confessors into more faithful beings. The expressive, representational, creative, and self-organizational dimensions of language often work together: in enabling thought, in regulating it, and in strengthening or modifying the sensibility from which it proceeds. (Connolly 2002c: 74)

12 For his earlier exploration of this dynamic, see Connolly 1983.

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The neologism neuropolitics denotes means by which cultural ideals and norms come to be embodied through specific body/brain processes. Ethics, Connolly argues, must be cultivated on multiple, interwoven registers of one’s being in order to generate new possibilities for political thinking and action. He is aware that this move is more intelligible to religious ascetics than it is to secular intellectuals.13

Neuropolitics is an invigorating, ambitious book. The argument ranges from V. S. Ramachandran’s neuropsychology to Deleuze’s film criticism. There are meetings among Henri Bergson, Stanley Kubrick, and neurologist Antonio Damasio and among Nietzsche, chaos theorist Ilya Priorgine, and historian of science Isabelle Stengers. In one chapter Connolly’s evocative meditation on the film Five Easy Pieces takes a turn through Heidegger’s theory of language, goes into a spin with Augustine, and then swerves into a sustained meditation on Nietzsche and self-artistry. In another chapter he weaves exposition of Freud and William James into a discussion of memory, religious experience, and contemporary neuroscience. The book ends with Connolly’s exposition of Paul Virilio’s reflections on speed and global politics as prelude to a bristling critique of Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan neo-Kantianism. Throughout, there are films old and new, speculations, sports, conversations with students, lists of things to do, experiments, drugs, faculty meetings, griefstricken memories of parents and lovers, religious experiences, dancing, disappointments, and, often playing in the background, the irrepressible Talking Heads. Neuropolitics is just as restless as all this sounds, but this wild traffic is choreographed with such invention that it does not seem to matter if there are sometimes uncoordinated figures on the stage. Somehow, like Augustine, Connolly exerts a steady power to order his ranging reflections on his own irresistible disorder.

Neuropolitics expressly addresses the seam between thinking and technique. Like Augustine, Connolly here makes a conceptual argument while simultaneously experimenting with rhetorical and practical techniques to stimulate the sensibility toward which that argument proceeds. He wants to delineate and work on those “corporeal dispositions” that are interwoven with our inchoate ethical judgments. Connolly (2002c: 35) borrows from Antonio R. Damasio the phrase “somatic markers” to denote emotional heuristics below the register of consciousness that expedite rational evaluation and judgment. Much of our ethical and political lives is carried out on registers that never present themselves for

13 Connolly cites Nietzsche for the view that “a mere disciplining of [conscious] thoughts and feelings is virtually nothing...; one first has to convince the body” (2002a: 77). For the constitutive role of asceticism in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Roberts.

analysis in terms of “intentional” choice. We are somatically disposed to certain courses of action before we even perceive that there is an ethical choice to be made. “Somatic markers” are the means by which cultural ideas and practices are woven into bodily experience, generating persistent and powerful cues beneath consciousness. New forms of political relation and opportunities for freedom have to be generated, therefore, at the point where many of our most compelling values have been mixed “into our muscles, skin, gut, and cruder brain regions” (Connolly 2002c: 36). Connolly does not try to make these visceral registers transparent to consciousness, still less to intentional choice, but he wants to create enough awareness of their inertia and their dynamism that the image of the rational free chooser might lose some of its plausibility for us. In its place, we might imagine a much more organic, multilayered being, whose capacity for freedom develops in critical responsiveness with others over time.

Augustine, I think, offers a memorable illustration of the “feedback loop” Connolly explores among doctrine, somatic marker, and technique. I will set it out here because it bears on a belief that Connolly once found indispensable and intolerable in Augustine’s theology—the doctrine of original sin. Augustine persistently legitimated the truth of the doctrine of original sin with reference to the experience of (male) sexual arousal. He (1971a: 251–253, 1971b: 266–267, 1984: 577–582) insisted that the capriciousness of having or not having an erection—which he associated, at various times, with feelings of shame, rage, jealousy, dominance, frigidity, and desperation—proved the fallen nature of man. Augustine’s emotional responses to the autonomic operation of the penis reflect contradictory ideas about masculinity, rationality, and self-control; this conflict organized a somatic marker that made it unthinkable for Augustine that any man could hear an explanation of original sin without experiencing its verification in his own body. Augustine assumed that the somatic marker that guided his rational theological judgment was universal. Using Connolly’s neuropolitical framework, one can delineate a “feedback loop” among theological debates among fourth-century Christian men, cultural ideas about masculinity in North African and late Roman culture, Augustine’s own experience and memories of sexual arousal, and the physiology of male human bodies.14 The doctrine of original sin

14 The state of the penis is controlled by a network of centers in the autonomic branches of the central nervous system—that is, those branches that control “involuntary” responses like heart rate or blood pressure—which play a significant role in both excitement and inhibition of erections. Contemporary researchers have found a reflexive “erection-generating center” located near the tail end of the spine, and a cluster of neurons in the hindbrain provides inhibitory control over the spinal-generated erections much of the time. Certain areas of the cerebral cortex also play a role in sexual arousal, although this is as yet less well investigated (Goldstein).

Skerrett: The Indispensable Rival501 focused and fixed a potentially indifferent somatic phenomenon by giving it specific meaning—the whimsy of the penis became the poena reciproca or “the penalty of man’s finding his own member emulating against himself that very disobedience which he had practiced against God” (Augustine 1971a: 251). The doctrine mixed with emotional hues that guided Augustine’s theological judgment; the somatic marker heaped indisputable vibrancy on the doctrine.

Augustine was a problem to himself, and he worked on himself on a number of registers; writing was both a conceptual index and a technique within that work. Augustine was extraordinary, for example, among late ancient theologians for the number of times he tried to imagine, in writing, a male sexual response that would be “submissive to the power of the gentlest love” (1971a: 251, 1984: 590–592). Just as compelling, though, was his practice of writing so as to regenerate erotic energies—his own and generations of readers’—and convert them toward that Beauty whom he addressed as “You.”15 Meanwhile, Augustine’s sense of the theological significance of sexual arousal specified for him the programmatic requirements of conversion—celibacy was a primary technique he used for transforming the corporeal disposition. And, like many of his contemporary male ascetics, he regarded decline in nocturnal emissions as a symptom of ethical or spiritual regeneration occurring most decisively in registers below the level of thinking or intention.16

In this example one can see that the feedback loop between corporeal disposition and theological doctrine is neither personally idiosyncratic nor determined by genes or unconscious memories. Rather, the example suggests how the experience of male sexual arousal could be braided with complex emotional hues to underwrite the incontestability of a doctrine. On the one hand, this suggests the inertia that doctrines can have—political or theological. On the other, it points to discrete but vital strands— somatic opportunities, emotional responses, religious or cultural beliefs— that must be interwoven to invigorate and stabilize any compelling belief. Yet any one of these strands might also be amplified, quieted, or given other somatic, emotional, or doctrinal cues to complicate it or tease it in one direction or another. The indispensability of any doctrine, then, is never fixed, as theologians and lawyers covertly know. It is constantly shifting in a kaleidoscope of historical and cultural cues woven through

15 For a famous example, see the prayer that begins “Late have I loved you.” Here is a sample: “You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours” (Augustine 1992: 201). See also Miles.

16 See Augustine 1992: book 8, chaps. 7–12, book 10, chaps. 29–30. See also Brown Rouselle.

the vibrant registers of various human bodies and their social relations. The challenge, then, is to put this sort of analysis to work in engaged, yet patient, negotiations of identity/difference. The example, therefore, illustrates Connolly’s argument about corporeal investments in certain doctrines; but it also suggests how Connolly’s critical askesis may be used to work on the sort of “indispensable” doctrines that inspired his initial indictment of Augustine.

CONCLUSION

My review here highlights rivalry as the condition as well as the object of Connolly’s political/ethical theory in the past decade or so. It asserts a reading of Connolly’s work that makes The Augustinian Imperative crucial to his development. Augustine was the indispensable rival, I have argued, who provoked Connolly to delineate the structure of identity/ difference and to cultivate the ethos of agonistic response. For, if the furious “Letter to Augustine” incited a passion to think critically about identity/difference, it also confronted Connolly with the dilemma that thinking was not enough. Thinking enables one to identify paradoxes that link morality to cruelty, orthodoxy to heresy, affirmation to anathema—but thinking by itself does not enable one to change the terms of the paradox or to situate them in new circuits of energy or opportunity. In order for Connolly to address his paradoxical rivalry with Augustine, he had to explore ways to realize that engagement beneath and beyond thought. Paradoxically, as Connolly saw from the start, he would have to absorb some of Augustine’s reflections on the ethical inertia of flesh in order to learn how to chasten his own vengeful spirit. And even if Connolly grasped all of this in his “Letter to Augustine,” that process takes work and time.

Significantly, in the new editions of Identity/Difference and The Augustinian Imperative Connolly takes pains to acknowledge his “indebtedness to Augustine amid difference” and to insist that his ethos of pluralization “clearly does not seek to eliminate Augustinianism or other theistic faiths” (2000a: xxii). The “Augustinian Imperative” even has become the “Augustinian Temptation” (2000a: xviii). These editions of Identity/Difference and The Augustinian Imperative, read along with Neuropolitics, display the conceptual, ascetic, and temporal dimensions of an ethos of agonistic respect. The expanded editions of the earlier books register the transformation of Connolly’s engagement with Augustine, whereas Neuropolitics details Connolly’s discoveries of the resources needed to achieve that transformation in time.

Skerrett: The Indispensable Rival503

Iris Murdoch once observed that we are not free choosers; we are “benighted creatures sunk” in a reality whose complexity we are overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. We need a richer picture of human freedom, she (49) argues, and finer tactics of intervention, scaled to our human capacities, than secular political theory has afforded. Connolly is a political philosopher of freedom. He creates pictures of political subjects as dynamic, layered beings who are always interwoven with other such beings. Things happen at different speeds and with different itineraries and intensities throughout these layers and among these beings. The layers can be pulled into tight and exclusive identities, in which case we become anxious and vengeful because there is always more going on than we can make cohere. Or the layers can be apprehended with a critical askesis that begins with patience to work at their dynamism over time while trying to coordinate effective responses now. To see oneself and others in this way means, I think, that one is better able to recognize the entanglements that braid portions of others’ faith, doubt, horror, love, resentment, or praise into whatever contingent freedom we can have. For an ethos of pluralization is not aimed at improving tolerance, which would underwrite something more like “identity—and difference, too!” Rather, an ethos of pluralization is aimed at underwriting the creativity and strife ofpluralist democracies with an ethical sensibility that cherishes the plenitude of life.

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