Читать книгу Fate of the Flesh - Daniel Juan Gil - Страница 5

When ideas are dead, their ghosts usually walk.

—R. G. COLLINGWOOD

In the background of this book is an understanding of secularization as a complex process of transformation in which key religious ideas and frameworks are not simply cast aside but are repeated in changed forms.¹ I use this framework to trace the fate of the deepest and strangest core of Christianity, namely, its foundational claim that Christ was materially resurrected and that his resurrection is the “first fruits” of a more general process of resurrection of the body and its flesh that will eventually befall all human beings. I argue that in the seventeenth century this idea is placed under more and more pressure from an emerging empirical scientific worldview and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology. In the long run of history, of course, the rise of an empirical scientific worldview paves the way for abandoning the notion of resurrection in favor of the purely metaphorical afterlife of being remembered by the living.² But this is not yet in sight in the seventeenth century. Instead, in the seventeenth century the cutting edge of secularization is not in opposition to the notion of resurrection but is coemergent with a historically new form of resurrection belief. At the cutting edge of scientific secularization lies a theory of resurrection in which it is centrally and even exclusively a disembodied soul that lives again (or lives on) after death and where the body is demoted to a mere vehicle for the soul. This view of resurrection reflects and endorses the cardinal ontological distinction upon which early modern empirical science is founded, namely, between a realm of pure matter (including the human body) that is subject to the laws of nature and a realm of pure mind or consciousness or soul that is ruled out of bounds for empirical science. As I shall show, this new (in the seventeenth century) vision of disembodied resurrection as a matter of a soul living on after the death of “its” body makes resurrection safe for science, but it also represents a seismic change to centuries of Christian theology in which the body was central to personhood and therefore central to any hope for an afterlife. As resurrection becomes more and more a matter of the disembodied soul living on after death, the body is demoted to mere flesh and finally abandoned to the grave.

But what is the fate of this abandoned flesh? I argue that seventeenth-century artists, poets, and writers seized upon and strategically deployed the demoted and increasingly outré idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh. They valued this idea for its deranging power and for its ability to drive a potent dissenting discourse based on a reaffirmation of the body and its role in the life of the social and historical person. Influenced by secularization’s focus on the present time, they bend the resurrection of the body and its flesh from an apocalyptic future into the present moment so that they can imagine the resurrection of the body and its flesh to be already underway in the here and now. This starting point enables a theoretical perspective in which a vibrant but strange materiality that transcends human time is understood as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency that define the social person in historical time even as it also remains deeply alien to all such identities and forms of agency, a fleshly life within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person.

I argue that the discursive register in which this notion of the immanent resurrection of the flesh is deployed with the greatest critical payoff is in the seventeenth-century lyric poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson, where it helps define an avant-garde project that combines formal linguistic experimentation with experimentation in the way subjectivity and the world are experienced and conceptualized in light of being flesh in time. Under the pressure of a hypothetical resurrection of the flesh that is already unfolding in the here and now, these poets use poetry, especially formally experimental poetry, to express and take stock of the material strangeness at the heart of the self and therefore to gain a new vision of the person very different from the highly mentalistic and autonomous “buffered self” (to use Charles Taylor’s term) increasingly assumed and reinforced within the key discourses of secular modernity including those associated with empirical science.

A key argument I make is that this deployment of the concept of an immanent resurrection of the flesh in seventeenth-century poetry does not represent a return to some presumptively “pure” or even fundamentalist religious commitment unaffected by the advent of science and critical rationality. Rather, I argue that the immanent materialist theory of resurrection and the critical effects it produces are themselves byproducts of secularizing pressures. Thus, the way this poetry uses the (il)logic of the resurrection of the flesh signals not some kind of rearguard resistance to an emerging secular modernity but an alternative way of working through and responding to secularization pressures. This form of oppositional thinking is as much a product of secularization as the dualist thinking that it attacks is. It is for this reason that I term it not “antisecularization” but “countersecularization.”

The critical thinking that the notion of the immanent resurrection of the flesh drives anticipates the insights of some of our own contemporary critical theory, most especially that of the so-called new materialists, including Jane Bennett.³ Indeed, I argue that the project of understanding the historically situated and socialized person as endowed with a body that contains the “signs and seeds” (as Vaughan terms it) of an apocalyptic resurrection of the flesh breaking into time injects Bennett’s notion of “vibrant matter” with its own forms of nonsubjective agency into the heart of the human person. At the same time, something like Agamben’s “bare life” is obviously also in play in the notion of the vibrant, fleshly life that makes social identities possible and at the same time undermines them.⁴ Finally, the critical effects generated by the search for a “resurrection body” within anticipate the specific insights of the critical sociology and phenomenology associated with Pierre Bourdieu and Martin Heidegger. Among these insights is a recognition of the extent and depth of the ways people are conditioned by their social environment in their very bodies and corporeal habita, together with the notion that bringing the conditioned body fully to mind creates an opening for a transformative reconceptualization of selfhood and agency founded on being a body in the world.

Thus, I argue that the early modern poets I examine use the language of resurrection to do “theory work” that is in important ways analogous to the work done by our contemporary critical theorists. But though I am in dialogue with contemporary critical theorists throughout this book, I have tried wherever possible to allow the seventeenth-century discourse of the resurrection of the body and its flesh to function as critical theory in its own right rather than translating it into the vocabulary of modern critical theory. When I describe the resurrection of the flesh as “critical theory” I draw on the understanding developed by the Frankfurt School, namely, a discourse in which knowledge is transformative of the knower (as against positivistic accounts of knowledge as fundamentally not implicating the knower).⁵ From this standpoint, psychoanalysis and Marxist analysis are critical theory because their proof, so to speak, is in the praxis that they make possible. Obviously I do not believe that the notion of the resurrection of the flesh is “true,” yet as it is deployed by early modern writers it produces indubitable truth effects, namely, a transformative understanding of identity, self, personhood, and how the self in its bodily life is conditioned by yet also capable of transcendence of the social world.

The intuition that under the pressure of the transformative process of secularization religious discourse, including the specifically Christian discourse of the resurrection of the flesh, begins to function as critical theory may be part of the explanation for the “turn to religion” (including the idea of resurrection) in theory work by Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and Jean-Luc Nancy, whose Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body explores the ways that Christian parables (including that of the resurrection of Christ) have retained their force beyond the sphere of religion.⁶ Similarly, in Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Alain Badiou recovers and celebrates a Pauline understanding of the resurrection as an “event” that does not affirm the mastery of the subject and therefore does not affirm conventional indices of identity and the modes of politics indexed to them.⁷ In a somewhat different register, Eric L. Santner’s work on Franz Rosenzweig also suggests the secret paths of secularization that connect explicitly religious discourses (including non-Christian ones) to the discourses of contemporary critical theory.⁸ Even in Bennett’s writings, some recognition that the ultimate fate of religion is to be transformed into critical theory appears in her decision to close the resolutely secular-sounding Vibrant Matter with an updated version of the Nicene Creed: “I will just end with a litany, a kind of Nicene Creed for would-be vital materialists: ‘I believe in one matter-energy, the maker of things seen and unseen, [and so forth]’ ” (122). This conclusion suggests that Bennett’s career-spanning project of finding and tracking the implications of vibrant materiality in the world is in some semiacknowledged way animated by an appropriation and transformation of key religious frameworks and structures of thought. In that sense, Fate of the Flesh represents an effort to restore to our consciousness the prehistory of seemingly secular theoretical discourses such as Bennett’s notion of “vibrant materialism.”

By arguing that despite its historical distance and conceptual weirdness, the seventeenth-century discourse of the resurrection of the body and its flesh nevertheless can and should be taken seriously for the critical insights it made possible in seventeenth-century avant-garde poetry, I see myself engaging in a mode of reading championed by Slavoj Žižek when he advocates reinterpreting the world “through the lens of a ‘minor’ author, text, or conceptual apparatus,” where “minor” means “marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a ‘lower,’ less dignified topic.”⁹ What could be more disavowed by the hegemonic ideology and less dignified today than the “conceptual apparatus” of the ancient Christian hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh? And yet, what conceptual apparatus could shed a more disrupting light on our deepest assumptions about self, agency, and the world in this increasingly rationalized, digitized, and virtualized age?¹⁰