Читать книгу The Fall of Literary Theory - Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen - Страница 11

CHAPTER ONE

The Fall from Territory

Human interactions—whether interactions between individuals, or cultural and social groups—have a strong tendency to suffer from an essential problem: identity, or the “I,” matters more than how we live together and how we share the world’s resources. Human beings appear unable to do away with the conflictual nature of relationality, no matter what the grounds of their interaction. Even now, in an age of democratic liberalism assumed as the peak of civilization, the early 21st century has already been witnessing several waves of intolerance and bloodshed that are largely attributable to cultural, religious, political, and economical tensions.

The emphasis on difference and acceptance in the global context has been the mainstream discourse of the West for a long time—until recently, that is. Phrases such as “affirmative action,” “global community,” and “minority support” were quite commonplace at the end of the 20th Century. Though they never went away in the early 21st Century, the September 11 events ushered us into the new millennium and, with them, a reluctance to embrace difference developed, as I will explain bellow; the first black presidency also triggered a counter-reaction of rejecting diversity, which gave momentum to Donald Trump’s followers and led to his election. Also, the destabilization of the Middle East through several wars and the rise of ISIS led to a wave of protectionist nationalism in the West, especially more recently, with the flood of Syrian refugees who fled to Western countries over several years. In spite of all these unfortunate dynamics, the majority of people in Western cultures still wish to do away with the oppressiveness of metaphysical centers and embrace multiculturalism, while continuing to celebrate the fact that ultimate truths have been deconstructed in the age of postmodern thought. This only proves that the movement away from absolutist thought must forge on.

To return to the numerous criticisms of postmodernism, the underlying dissatisfaction with the loss of grounding that deconstruction and postmodernism imply are a symptom of how uncomfortable such a loss can truly make those accustomed to certainties, which explains why many people are “tired” (should we read “scared”?) of political correctness and tolerance. In his notorious critique of postmodern theory, Terry Eagleton complains that discourse stopped being “about something for somebody,” while it makes “language itself one’s cherished object,”1 which he calls language’s ultimate act of narcissism. Fredric Jameson claims in a quite similar fashion that postmodernism’s insistence on language distracts from historicity and throws the contemporary world into an aesthetic mode that emerges “as an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity.”2 Again, such critics fail to see the connection between modernist and postmodernist de-centering of power, which has been at work since the end of the 19th century, and the actual changes that have taken place in the world in the last century: successes of women rights movements, of affirmative action in education, and many others, whose momentum cannot really be stopped today by some dramatic (and hasty, desperate, ineffective) executive actions coming from the White House.

Right after the attack on the Twin Towers on September 2001, journalist Edward Rothstein, and many others, hurried to explain the attack as one of the many negative effects of postmodern globalization and decentralization of Western power. Unlike Jameson and Eagleton, who demanded more social involvement on the part of “theory,” Rothstein’s criticism saw in postmodern thought a reflection of the dissolution of power, which allows the cultural “Other” to take a more active role in the world; according to Rothstein, this Other needs to be contained, not coddled. He believes that globalization (the merger between the world’s cultures and economies) should only take place along with a return of foundationalism and the reinstatement of the West as the upholder of “truth.”3 This is precisely the approach of Donald Trump’s White House, running counter to some of the global progress that has already been made, in an attempt to resurrect the past that is most likely doomed to fail (though it can certainly have a big impact on the world).

After September 11th 2001, several wars followed. What they triggered was, expectedly, a war of words as well. Very divergent opinions in relation to terrorism and America’s response to it were, and to this day are being voiced. In 2003, the Iraq war had a lot of supporters (many regretting that support after a few years), and many a flag were displayed in front of people’s houses. Others protested against the wars, particularly the one in Iraq, pretty much going against the discourse established by the media and politicians at the onset of the war. What that hegemonic discourse seemed to suggest was that the violence of the Middle East’s reaction to globalization confirmed the need for a more brutal enforcement of Western hegemony in the world. The justification of such a mentality as Rothstein’s and other journalists’ and commentators’ was, at the time, that the spirit of freedom endorsed by the market had come under attack.

In reinstating the West (particularly the US) as holding the key to effective globalization, globalization was thrown back into historicity by being revealed more overtly as continuous with the Western history of power. One aspect to the larger problem of silencing critiques of the West’s global agenda was the attack on poststructuralist theory. Purging globalization of the decentralized “theory” that interfered with its effectiveness made it easier to justify the wars against Middle Eastern nations. William Spanos, a Vietnam scholar, immediately made the connection between the emerging wars at the dawn of the 21st century and America’s other wars, particularly Vietnam. He suggested that, aside from the economic and political rationale behind all American wars, there is also an ontological principle of “Truth” that informs liberal/capitalist societies.4 That was part of the celebratory discourse that accompanied the new wars: it was the justification for the return of Truth that was celebrated in the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that began in 2002 and 2003.

A closer look at Rothstein’s commentary sheds light on this renewed call for ontological truth and imperial “clarity” regarding America’s errand in the global wilderness, to use Spanos’ terms. It is a good starting point for an analysis of the stakes involved in identity (particularly American identity) and its tendency to territorialize that which participates in its formation. Globalism can be seen as a stage where America is continuously forging its identity, in competition with other identities.

Within two weeks of the terrorist attacks in 2001, The New York Times published an article by Rothstein, in which he in effect expressed relief that terrorism gave new justification for America to act as an imperialistic world power. He gave voice to what seemed to be in the mind of many Americans, given the haste with which many people embraced the idea of a war with Afghanistan and Iraq, following the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001.5 Instead of reading the terrorist attacks as a reaction to globalization, people who saw terrorism as an aberration (branding terrorist acts as motivated by inexplicable hatred) perceived those who opposed globalization as problems to be solved by furthering this process of globalization. Rothstein was happy to dismiss all the efforts of theorists such as Derrida and those of cultural activists (such as those in support of minority rights) to shed the burden of metaphysical thought, which had become oppressive to those not aligned with power or with “the center.”

In order to advocate the return of the metaphysical center, Rothstein called the efforts of postmodern thought and deconstruction “illusions.” He predicted that the negative connotations that the concept of imperialism had acquired were going to be reversed so that, in his vision of globalization, “instead of exploitation, imperialism is now being associated with democratic reform, sometimes to the great satisfaction of its subjects.”6 What he seemed to imply was that this “great satisfaction” was incidental, not even necessarily desirable or planned for, but it was one positive outcome of the necessary process of imperialist subjection. Rothstein concluded that the world clearly needed the power of the West, particularly of the United States, to be reasserted in “continuous and continuing decisions, active involvement in the destiny of nations …. Sounds familiar, yet strange. An old idea transformed. Call it Empire.”7

These statements, certainly not singular in the political and intellectual scene at the very beginning of this century, contained a whole history of thought behind them. When we entered the age of diversity, traditional Western values became exposed as constructed, so it was comforting to find (again) a context suitable to uttering such words that advocate “Empire.” This is just more proof that, even though the contemporary world has witnessed major transformations, such as women’s rights, affirmative action, or others, some foundational patterns of thought remain intact. There is always a new territory to defend, and in the “current events” this territory is not merely “the United States,” but rather something that is defined as the identity of the United States, namely, freedom. In relation to the American Mission in Vietnam, for instance, Spanos recalled that the discourse of freedom, spouted at the Vietnamese people as the “‘self-evident’ New World truths” and rejected by a radically different culture, instigated “the violent remapping of Vietnam.”8 In other words, Vietnam had to be turned into the territory of freedom.

The perversity of an abstract territory (which could be things like nation, religious belief, utopian imaginings of perfect societies, or something like freedom) is that it can be applied to anything and translated into any ideology. This is how Islam can be disputed by pacifists and terror-mongers alike, and this is also how American “freedom” can be hijacked by anyone to the point that it becomes a paradoxical concept when it is disputed within the United States. In Conservative terms, freedom is associated with the freedom of the market, so the enemies of extreme capitalism are enemies of freedom; in Liberal terms, freedom is associated with diversity, so that those who are (or appear) intolerant are blamed for destroying the spirit of free expression of identity that the country was founded on. Each side (in its more extreme version, even if merely portrayed as such) can become at any given time the enemy of freedom.

To go back to the turn-of-the-millennium example of 9/11, 2001, George W. Bush wanted to force freedom upon Iraq, and that project of hijacking an entire culture to save, as he claimed, American freedom, created a new brand of anti-American hatred. Right after September 11th, then-President Bush announced that “our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks …. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.”9 In this identification of territory, nation, and the abstract concept of identity, the purpose of retrieving what came under attack and defending a territory that is an identity was set forth in one stroke. This is a clear demonstration of the fact that the stakes in language become stakes in the interactions between identities: in this case, the identity of America as the territory of freedom that has to be defended. The way identity is defined can be justification for violence.

It is not surprising, therefore, that these foundational patterns of thought trigger the same response on the other side—or rather, that there are factions elsewhere in the world that seek in the political discourse of the West precisely what is foundational, to counter it with their own centered thought, very assertive of identity and very destructive to the Other. “Death to America!” is not even revolutionary anymore, but has become an abstract concept that identifies the Other as fallen, corrupted, and a justification for an assertion of a certain kind of violent self (the “terrorist”). In the decade and a half following the two declarations of war, it has become clear that the vast majority of Iraqis and Afghanis did not desire the conflict to begin with, but there were elements in the Middle East (glorified gangs, if you will) that wanted the wars to continue. After the Iraq war ended, the purging of the Other (which was a moral purging, more than a physical one) also ended, so there was a need to revamp the enemy’s identity and make it more inclusive.

When US troops started retreating, “America” as an entity became too far away and, as I said, was becoming too abstract. ISIS (or ISIL) initiated, in more recent history, a new stratagem by which anyone, including their own people, could be seen as Other. Not unlike the effort of the Nazis, ISIS has turned into Other anyone who can be seen as fallen from true identity (“true Islam”) in some way: not only did Westerners become targets, but also anyone corrupted by the West, converted to a Western religion, or with Western affiliations or sympathies. The idea that the Other has to be purged became very soon a practice: filmed decapitations flooded the Internet and other media, kidnappings either brought more financial resources or more adherents (in the Middle East or even in Western countries) through the gruesome killings that gave these terrorist gangs celebrity status.

Many things are disturbing in these scenarios, and everyone recognizes the danger of fundamentalist thought. We recognize how heavily it relies on othering the enemy, making straw men of whoever is convenient to eliminate at the time. But this is obvious, and everyone hopes that ISIS, despite its seemingly endless resources (amassed from oil, ivory, ransom money), will never expand enough to allow events of a bigger magnitude, such as nation conquest, or large-scale ethnic and religious cleansing. What I find even more problematic than accepting that these glorified gangs are violent, and that the violence comes from asserting an identity even against their own people (who are seen, perhaps, as not radical enough), is that even in the face of unthinkable violence, there are many who are not willing to admit that the idea behind the violence is problematic. There are many who believe that these gangs are just corrupted versions of idealism, because it can’t possibly be the idea itself that is the cause of violence. Just as people are willing to call a historic phenomenon such as the Christian Inquisition a corruption of good, true Christianity, or as many try to rescue Marxist theory from the misguided practices in communist countries, there is a denial that the problem in fact lies with idealist identification itself. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow was willing to redeem British imperialism when comparing it to the barbaric Roman practices, because he claimed that the British were backed up by an idea, which made the horrors of colonialism bearable since it was at least for a noble cause.

I find it equally disturbing that many reactions to ISIS’ violence only focus on the localized, corrupted, “mad” versions of fundamentalist thought, instead of acknowledging that any manifestation of certainty, especially the religious type of certainty in assuming an identity, is what has always caused tremendous violence throughout history and is still causing it today. When the French cartoonists were killed in 2015, the people who reacted to it (especially on the Internet) hurried, for a while, to claim, “I am Charlie”—to express their horror at the pointless violence directed toward famous (and infamous) Charlie Hebdo and his team of cartoonists. Yet the wave of sympathy quickly dwindled, and another reaction became popular: Charlie Hebdo went too far in his satire. And why? Racist cartoons and cartoons meant to shock and appall were not the main charge against him: what was worse was that he challenged the idea of religion. Critiquing fundamentalist religious gangs (in short, terrorists) is problematic, apparently, because people’s religious beliefs are untouchable. Even in a democratic state, such as France, ideas behind actions are expected to be off the table, while people should feel free to criticize violent actions. But how is it not obvious that ideas, too, should come under scrutiny? What makes idealist thinking superior to the more complex thought that comes from a questioning mind?

In 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires became Pope Francis, and he has been challenging Catholic idealism ever since. Not to say that he is not a “good Catholic,” but he redefines what that actually means, and he ties it less to coherent (Catholic) identity and more to how one relates to others in the world. It is an impressive transformation of approach for the Catholic Church, and some people are even retracting their support in protest, as if the Pope were a politician. The practice, again, threatens the idea.

In one of his most famous speeches on the Vatican Radio at the conclusion of the Synod, the Pope explains in eerily deconstructive fashion that doctrine is what threatens Christian practice, and some of the moments of desolation and tension he has encountered in his Synod journey had to do with “a temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises (the spirit) …. The temptation to a destructive tendency to goodness, that in the name of a deceptive mercy binds the wounds without first curing them and treating them.”10 This Pope is an inheritor of the deconstructive age, and with his new focus on society as a living thing, where relationality matters more than identity, he has been able to embrace people of other faiths, and even people without religious faith. He has come closest to the Other and farthest from the self-identical than any Pope in history. But there’s a long way to go before his flock follows in his path.

This brings me to my main purpose in writing this book: to seek to understand why the self-identical thought pattern is still so persistent and prevalent in our world—however globalized the world may have become—that it is still so tempting to perceive identity as perfectible and unique; this is a deeply engrained choice that places identity above relationality, creating tensions between potential identities. For the sake of what one believes in (be it one’s religious faith—Islamic, Judeo-Christian, Buddhist or a derivative, let’s say, of the major religions—or be it one’s national identity—American or Iraqi, Greek or German, Iranian or Kurdish, Hungarian or Romanian), other identities are disputed, fought, and even entirely suppressed.

It should not be, therefore, so bewildering that there is always something left to defend even after history has been shattered by dictators and after we appeared to have learned from these moments enough to make us wish to leave behind imperialism and totalitarianism. Even though Nazism or Eastern European communism are now seen as extremes of social violence, the cruelty of such systems can easily be repeated in today’s world, when bombs still kill hundreds of people in one strike. Something persists; we are very eager to forget the lessons of history, and the same mistakes are repeated over and over. This is due to the fact that there is always a territory that we want to define and defend.

To clarify my use of the term “territory,” I need to explain first why it is connected to “identity.” Animals tend to approximate the borders of their (spatial) territory and defend it against others of the same species, or against another species. Humans, too, continue to mark and defend something that is still called territory, although for us the notion of territory has become increasingly more complex. If we consider its etymology (derived from Latin terra = land), a narrow definition is that of a space enclosed within boundaries. Gradually, the definition has included any conceivable object within the notion of territory. Defending the territory has also gradually become more and more connected to the notion of owning (it is defended because it is possessed), which has led to an identification of territory with property. Property is a word that is more abstract and encompasses more than the initial territory (land), and derives from Latin proprietatem, signifying “characteristic” but also acquiring the meaning “possession.” The convergence of “territory” and “property” has inscribed the notion of territory under a much broader spectrum of meanings, so that much more than land can be owned and therefore defended.

We have seen throughout history an array of troubling eras when women, slaves, or other marginalized groups were considered possessions (and let’s not forget that human trafficking is still massively taking place even now). In this day and age, animals are still not considered independent and sentient enough for us to abandon the horrible ways in which we “own” them (and exploit them); there are many other outrageous items we lay claim on: even human genes can become both individual property and capital (as in disputes between some American scientists),11 and today people can buy Moon property and stars, as well as virtual property. In a country such as Romania, the state includes rainwater as taxable property.12 Indeed, the notion of territory has long been more than land and has increasingly included elements without physicality, even the most abstract elements imaginable, such as freedom. Sometimes a number of these elements, or even one only, are what defines the territory. These elements give rise to the stake to be defended, often to the death. The stake, therefore, can be the territory occupied by an individual, group or community defined either by language, system of beliefs, lifestyle, or any other factors that confer identity through possession.

In a Lacanian sense, in the example of post-9/11 wars, freedom is the ultimate signifier for the identity that is necessary in order to justify the “desire” for war against the cultural Other. In the discourse of power (in the quote I used before from George W. Bush), freedom is the signifier that Americans are expected to identify with, in order to cope with the threat of the Other. The abstract concept “freedom” is spatialized and reified, since back in 2003, the most captivating metaphor that legitimized the US attacks on other nations was that of the Twin Towers representing freedom under attack. In President Bush’s first address about September 11th, 2001, he established this metaphor that would later guide and justify all subsequent acts of destruction: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”13 Being American is equated with being free, which has constituted American identity since its inception (and there is always a claim that freedom is under attack). This identity gave momentum to expanding the “American” territory first westward, within spatial boundaries, and then toward any spatial or abstract territory that could be “Westernized.”

One of the explanations for what territory constitutes, which still affects the way we perceive our identity within a territory and allows for such wars to occur, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s separation between territory (what he calls property) and “natural” rights. All that needs to happen, according to Rousseau, is the reconciliation of social laws with the natural needs of “free” individuals. For the purpose of “eternal concord” and mutual protection, Rousseau suggests that the law is an addition over nature, or natural identity, which prevents conflict.14 Unfortunately, he observes, the law has not been efficient in preventing oppression because it forgets, in the process of distributing property, the natural rights of some to the detriment of others, so that the social structure “irretrievably destroyed natural liberty.”15 What seems to happen is that, somehow, territory becomes secondary to something that is supposed to exist prior to it and outside of it (a natural, free identity), which allows people to envision a redistribution of physical territory according to something that would define this natural identity (in my example, “freedom”). What Rousseau overlooked (perhaps not informed, as thinkers today, by an awareness of language determinacy) is the close connectedness that exists between the territory whose origins he traces back to a time when people started working the land and living together, and the concepts that he sees as part of identity. For him, this identity is independent of and overrules the physicality of territory. In the name of pure identity, everybody has the right to seize a territory and make it part of that identity. For instance, the United States is already a territory secured for freedom, but other parts of the world need to be appropriated for the sake of this freedom.

It is important to recognize that both territory and identity are part of the same process: the subjection to language. A discussion of language is therefore crucial to the understanding of identity and territory: it is through language that “characteristics,” or properties that belong to the world (even abstract ones), are perceived as organically part of the process of acquiring an identity. Identity is, in a way, the ability of a human being to maintain the same characteristics (i.e. territories, ideologies, social and historic attributes, and so on). The problem at hand comes from the fact that territory, even in its most abstract embodiment, is closely related to identity, to the point that it becomes identity. In order to elaborate on the survival of the destructive nature of territory and identity, the next chapters are organized as follows:

Chapter Two will offer an explanation of the reason why the concept of the fall is extremely important in understanding not only the processes of identity formation, but also the violence of identity. Chapter Two also explains why I am referring to three “falls” as related to identity and to language. After this clarification, I will pursue three main avenues (related to the three “falls”) in the chapters focused on literary analysis (Chapters Three, Four, and Five) and used for the purpose of exemplification. In attempting to demonstrate how language creates subjects devoted to their identity (often to the death, of themselves or others), I offer three ways to study fall and identity, to show how each of them is in its own way destructive. There may be other kinds of fall, but history tends to revolve around three main perspectives: 1) The emphasis on social identity, to which the individual has to sacrifice either an object (which can be abstract), or other individuals, to acquire identity; this sacrifice will be explained as the mythical fall from—and toward—innocence; 2) The emphasis on individual identity, to which something from the social system, or the connection to the community as a whole, is sacrificed for the sake of “authentic,” personalized, identity; this sacrifice will be explained as the fall from—and toward—authenticity; 3) the emphasis on non-identity, to which social and individual meaning are sacrificed for the sake of the negative of identity, explained as the fall from—and toward a different kind of—meaning.

The first “fall,” or mode that determines the formation of identity, is what I will refer to as the mythical fall, or the fall from innocence. More traditionally present in different societies and particularly in the history of the West, the mythical or social identity relies on a notion that there is a perfect social structure that needs to be recreated on earth (shaped after its initial lost model, which is mythical or religious, and essentially utopian). We could say that this identity mode is based on three assumptions: that something (ideal identity) actually existed in the past, that it was lost at some point due to some form of impurity interfering with the social/mythical world, and that this identity is retrievable. In other words, what has been lost in the fall from a perfect world can be, in this first perspective, recreated, brought back into actuality, if only all the imperfections or corrupting elements in the social system can be eliminated. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel, for instance, are punished by God because “Israel has brought defilement on himself./ Their misdeeds have barred the way back to their God.” There is always the promise that “He has torn us, but he will heal us,/ he has wounded us, but he will bind up our wounds …. Let us strive to know the Lord,/ whose coming is as sure as sunrise.”16 This is the fall that haunts social organizations, even in their most atheistic forms (atheism itself can be, functionally, a religion), such as the communist utopia. For instance, communist doctrine is modeled on the basic taboos and rules of the Christian Ten Commandments, replacing God with an abstract collective god of the proletariat.

Any social structure that places emphasis on the rules of interaction, also creating a hierarchy of interaction, will likely deem individual life disposable. Rousseau transfers the power of God to the power of the social collective, “founded on convention.”17 Friedrich Nietzsche sees in Rousseau a seducer who, in advocating “society” as a new god, continues the momentum of Christianity into the French Revolution.18 It is very clear that the power to dismiss individuality in view of the promise of social perfection remains as strong as in Christianity: the social contract is sacred; to transgress it, “To violate the contract by which [the body politic] exists would be to annihilate itself; and that which is nothing can produce nothing.” There are huge implications in this statement: there is a threat to individuality to be “nothing” rather than something; to be able to remain something, a transgressing individual has to accept death because “it is to secure himself from being the victim of assassins that a man consents to die if he becomes an assassin.”19 It appears that it is against the chaos of an “other,” even the Other within the self, that the individual has to inscribe himself or herself within a system that brings order to human interaction. From the notion of protection derives the notion of restriction, since there is no protection without the definition of what and whom (what territory) is to be protected, and against what intruder. That is why the “citizen,” the inhabitant of a territory, is protected by an act such as the American Constitution. At the same time, the Constitution dictates that the individual will accept punishment in case of transgression, so that the Constitution can continue to protect its citizens. In the name of order, dictated by a law—whether it is the law of God, or human law—individual life becomes irrelevant to the pursuit of social/moral perfection, in the Western mythical momentum.

As Rousseau suggests, this promise of perfection is always under threat. There is always an enemy that stands in the way of achieving social perfection, whether it is another community (race, nation, continent), a class that interferes with the order imposed by the dominant class, or certain individuals who are excluded or exclude themselves from within a community (the barbarian, the diseased, the abnormal). There is a very obvious opposition between members who aspire to perfection, in a community, and those who stand in the way of that perfection, and who need to be either subdued or eliminated. Yet this opposition is contained in the notion of identity: identity would not be perfectible without the element that contaminates it.

Derrida explains that a structural tendency such as Rousseau’s is prompted by the fear that the contaminating element is already inside: “just as Rousseau and Saussure will do in response to the same necessity, yet without discovering other relations between the intimate and the alien, Plato maintains both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficent penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside.”20 In other words, the idea that constructs the identity (all the way from Plato) is infected by the fear of its own corruptibility, which at the same time is the only way that identity can be conceived: as potentially uncorrupted.

The pagan god, the demon, the possessed, the cultural Other, the Jew, the American, the terrorist: all are different modes of perceiving what is not redeemable toward order, depending on what defines the community whose order has been infected and whose purity needs to be retrieved. Rothstein identifies the Middle Eastern “reluctant” nations as “the beast,” bringing back the binary of civilization versus wilderness that has informed most colonizing and imperialistic acts.21 In one of his State of the Union Addresses, President Bush was drawing precisely on this tradition of hierarchical identity that divides the civilized (Western and Westernized) world from the threat of whatever “territory” is left outside of this civilization. He notoriously called this corrupting territory the “axis of evil,” the “terrorist parasites” (intruding elements), that endangered the civilized world in unprecedented ways. President Bush territorialized abstract concepts with the same type of moral stroke that defines opposing identities: “A terrorist underworld … operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the center of large cities.”22 It appears that, due to the disseminated nature of the terrorists (they could be anywhere, originating anywhere), they are even more abstract than an enemy such as “communism” during the Cold War. Although communism was also believed to be easily and threateningly disseminated, it had a very specific territory of origin (in terms of the practice of communism). In the case of terrorism, its territory is so corrupting that it lies at the very heart of freedom, contaminating it (or, as Derrida would say, writing it).

The most restrictive societies (for instance, totalitarian societies) offer to their subjects hypothetical access to the innocence from which the social system has fallen, turning innocence into an individual and collective stake; innocence needs to be retrieved at the cost of human life, for the sake of social perfection. It is not a coincidence that the people who died in the Twin Tower collapse were identified as innocent after the fact, so that in the name of their innocence anything was permitted, any destruction. In The Toronto Star, Jody Williams (Nobel Laureate for Peace) noted that “When innocent civilian lives are taken in any kind of military or terrorist attack, the mind recoils, [so that] individual freedoms are subordinated to the survival of the state.”23 She warned against the danger that the concept of innocence could obliterate any regard for individual life in the name of a larger purpose that took its momentum from innocence. At the same time, she understood innocence as the hallmark of the victim as well, her fear being that more innocents would suffer. The stake of innocence could be therefore preserved, despite her effort to critique its implications. Similarly, after the events in 2001, in addressing his people, Osama bin Laden maintained the same opposition between good and evil, a conflict in the name of which he stressed “the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy.”24 His statements prove that violence, on either side, places individual life into well defined identity categories, which perpetuates the mythical perception of the world.

In order to demonstrate the extent to which innocence as identity can be harmful to life, as well as the processes of subjection that come into play in this cycle of violence, I use Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in Chapter Three as an example to pinpoint the dynamics of subordination of the individual to the community and to the concept of innocence. I will interpret the character of Billy Budd as both a representation and a victim of innocence.

Next, I will refer to the second mode of perceiving fallenness and individuality as the fall from authenticity. It is a “fall” inward, in the space where the meaning that is corrupted by the outside world can still be retrieved. Walt Whitman’s poetry is a good example of this search for meaning that would spring from the self and return to the self to make it whole, in the metaphor of a spider (in “A Noiseless Patient Spider”): “And you O my soul where you stand/, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space/, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them/, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold/, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”25 These lines are a perfect example of the “surrounded” yet “detached” self (the authentic inner identity of the “I”) is the organizing principle that provides meaning to the randomness of the outside world by attaching the “thread” somewhere.

This return to the self does not happen in a vacuum, which is why I will explain it also as a fall. The shift inward is, historically, most often a reaction to the oppressiveness of the social/mythical order. This reaction is mainly that of the individuals who cannot gain acceptance in this order. Following their rebellion, these individuals are deemed inadequate and cannot aspire toward unfallenness, or innocence. To come to terms with themselves and still see themselves as redeemable for identity, these individuals tend to try either to revolutionize the social order (with the example of the French Revolution and the end of European feudalism), or to retreat from the social system into the space of their individual selves. Modernist dissatisfaction with traditional society and the turn toward the self as a locus of meaning provide very straightforward examples of such retreats or escapes. If we look at one of the most beloved modernist poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” this withdrawal into the self appears as problematic, insofar as it is still a promise of meaning, not a fulfillment. The poet finds torment in the refusal of the outside world to speak to him: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”26 In the search for meaning within himself, although he hopes for answers, Prufrock is left with questions. That is why he is not able to say, as he wishes he could say, “I am Lazarus, come back from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,”27 which is where the second set of problems addressed by this book (as the second kind of fall) is located.

In turn, the social structure from which the individual is alienated responds (as to any threat, if individualism is perceived as such), by forging an even harsher social order that refines earlier limits (as, for instance, socialism and communism striving to abolish private property). Social and cultural revolutions tend to be ambivalent, in the sense that they may be inclined to favor the individual (as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, or American Transcendentalism), but at the same time they try to offer a new, improved social order. This second order still fails to distance itself enough from the emphasis on social identity because, in offering a better way to organize society, it maintains to some degree the ideal of innocence and social perfection. A very obvious example is American individualism, structured as a new social order, and centered around the ideal of innocence. Literary texts that explore the “American Dream” as the ideal of individual fulfillment tend to point to the impossibility of that individual to succeed without getting entangled in the web of corrupting social forces, so that the struggle for self-identity can lead to tragedy, as portrayed, for instance, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In this modern tragedy, the individual who maintains the ideal of innocence as opposed to the corrupted nature of the world of success is crushed in his attempt to find a place where both innocence and success (personal fulfillment) can be reconciled.

Innocence, then, is what remains at stake when corrupting elements threaten the system. The paradox of individuality is that it still remains a territory, a subjected identity, even in its most “free” self-perception, which is why freedom functions both as social binder and as individualizing force. On the other hand, the complete divorce from the social world, in the name of individual identity, shifts the stakes toward a different kind of fall. Dissatisfaction with the social system taken to an extreme (as a tendency in existentialist and modernist thought) tries to change the emphasis altogether, and to claim that the social order distracts from attaining identity, because identity is a personal issue. Authentic being is what has been lost and needs to be retrieved, and this is a personal struggle. Unsurprisingly, only the individual is assumed to know who he or she will become, identity-wise, on condition that all social distractions are eliminated. The problem is that identity still remains a stake, which renders others and even the self disposable. This makes individual identity perhaps as dangerous and as potentially violent as the collective one. In Chapter Three, Absalom, Absalom! is the example I use to illustrate how individual identity turns against others and against the self. In William Faulkner’s novel, Thomas Sutpen “falls,” or plunges, into a downward spiral that can only end in his death, since he has given himself no choice but to follow his identity toward destruction.

The third mode of perceiving identity, which I call the fall from meaning, functions by denying that identity is a stake and trying to show that it is a social construct. Deconstructive criticism of the media, for instance, focuses on the fact that the objects and images that we deem necessary for our identity (such as a certain car, a certain body lotion, a certain body type that we try to attain) are not naturally part of us, but language has tricked us into believing that there is an identity to be desired, and that these objects help us achieve it. Both identity and its objects are constructs, illusions created by culture and language.

This type of fall shakes the foundations of “meaning” (or truth) sustaining identity, deeming such concepts obsolete. This is, as critics of postmodernism pointed out, not new at all. The Platonic thesis/antithesis pattern of debate was already de-emphasizing meaning, not to mention the Sophists themselves. The one aspect of the critique leveled against postmodern thought that I happen to agree with is that, when it focuses on the negation of meaning and of identity (as in the case of several thinkers and writers), this creates a new problem, as the negation of these essential concepts reveals that the social and individual identities are a function of language and there is nothing outside of it. Derrida himself very carefully avoided this trap by making it clear that there is a danger in simplifying a complex world by reducing it to a set of binaries, which is why he continuously revised his own theories so they would not be easy to simplify.

The temptation, when one exposes the constructed nature of language, is to feel as if something has been lost, once meaning is abandoned as a unifying concept. Let us suppose that identity and meaning (social or individual) are, in fact, constructed inside of language, and that there is no real behind these constructions: it is tempting to think that another meaning, another identity can be acquired in actuality, or “really” acquired (if traditional meaning is gone). The emphasis on identity and meaning as somehow “missing” creates the need for a new meaning and a new identity.

Many critics may find Derrida frustrating, because he refuses to offer “new meaning” in the place of the one he apparently made disappear like a magician. To him, however, meaning is no longer the point. The questioning of identity itself is the point, instead of offering another identity. This is how postmodernism got itself into trouble (and with it, its theoretical counterparts, the misunderstood versions of poststructuralism and deconstruction): it did not always manage to make this point strongly enough: challenging and deconstructing meaning were advanced primarily to show how dangerous fixed meaning can be, not because there was another, better meaning out there waiting to replace it. It is then unavoidable that, in some variants of postmodern thought, loss of meaning brings about a desire to retrieve it.

Postmodern thought often comes across as throwing the world into a non-centered space where everything is “contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations.”28 This is, of course, Eagleton’s understanding and subsequent critique of postmodernism. When unified meaning is seen as lost, it becomes a stake all the more. Eagleton, Jameson, Satya Mohanty, Richard Rorty, and others have urged the world to return to law and authority, or some kind of center (whether a traditional center, or one more open and community-oriented), or new values or humanisms. It may be true that certain problems within the postmodern age have proven insurmountable: the apparent openness of a pluralistic society does not solve the issues of social inequality because it does not, in fact, include everybody in the space of power, but perpetuates the center-margin dichotomy, where “political correctness,” for instance, is the new (yet still white) master. A shift in the terms used to address a different race does not change the fact of racial oppression; the exclusion of violence from schoolbooks29 does not prevent schools from becoming more and more the ground where violence is perpetuated.

It appears that, although social structures, along with the terminology used to describe them, have changed on the surface, some kind of center has been preserved in a more subtle way. This is why, years after Eagleton’s angry criticism has made itself heard, it became obvious that much of the world was all too eager to return to the reliable, old fashioned good and evil rhetoric, instead of hiding behind politically correct words. Take, for instance, the support that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq found in 2002 and 2003; fast forward to 2016–17 and note the enthusiasm with parts of the population are cheering the attacks on political correctness and are taking off the gloves in relation to other cultures. It appears that, in the 21st Century, advocating for the destruction of an evil Other has brought back the lost joy to those who were feeling deprived of meaning by having to accept too much “diversity.” Such frustration explains why a large number of Americans are so eager to see the return of “telling it like it is,” or speaking freely against the pesky Other.

The loss of meaning is a problem created by diverse, complex, deconstructive thought, though such a problem was never the intention of poststructuralism or deconstruction. It was, true enough, an unavoidable byproduct of these thinkers’ efforts: how could one expect, or even conceive, that everyone would feel comfortable not having the grounding that cultural and social spaces had always offered? That is why the voices that protested the loss, or fall from meaning have been loud and persistent to this day, and now and then have been known to win elections. To them, theory is just the emperor’s new clothes and has nothing useful to offer.

When the desire for the lost meaning is coupled with the discourses of power, it becomes all the more dangerous. To reiterate, following the attack on the United States in 2001, identity (as “freedom”) gained new ground; meaning reasserted itself as a powerful stake in the social system. Let us look again at the shockingly loud and bold proposition in that New York Times article by Rothstein. Rothstein was expressing relief when he imagined that postmodern thinking had taken a serious blow, and “Empire” had returned. He was crying out for a return to a transcendent ethical perspective, since “differences, say, between democracies and absolutist societies or between types of armed conflict are essential now.”30 Based on Rothstein’s example, it looks as though there is a perception that someone is denying us the right to meaning, which leads to a revival of the need for meaning and the return to the violence of the system, by making meaning as a stake. This stake in itself can become destructive.

If loss of meaning is perceived as a void, this void is the new space where identity will be forged. Non-meaning can become oppressive and subvert any attempt to reconcile with previous perspectives, leaving little room for relationality and interaction. Satya Mohanty is an adherent to the idea that postmodern thought is pure relativism, and for this reason he argues that postmodernism obscures the very real social contexts in which people relate, where “otherness appears not as insular or merely contiguous but as a complex historical phenomenon.”31

Other thinkers, such as Lyotard or Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, try to find, and believe to have found, an outside of language where they envision a new identity in the pagan, in art, in the schizophrenic flow, and so on. These alternatives can create a new type of violence: the one that, in the name of non-identity, is directed toward any identity that is conceived inside of language. For example, as atheism is, functionally, a religion (it works by elimination or by creating outsiders of its boundaries), so is non-identity still an identity, still a delimitation that closes off communication. I hope this idea will become clearer in Chapter Five, where I examine Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and I show how the void of meaninglessness estranges people from each other and even from themselves; in effect, despite the positive critiques of structure, the emphasis on meaninglessness undermines poststructuralism’s extremely important steps against traditionalist thought, and at the same time it hinders human interaction. To stay true to the non-finite “event” that Derrida wanted deconstruction to be, there is a need for a new way to communicate that does not become re-inscribed in binary extremes, in this case those of identity and non-identity.

Identity can allow for non-competitive, non-destructive relationality only if we understand it as necessarily contaminated at every step by living with others. The main purpose of offering a new approach to theory in this book is to show that our identities do not have to be spoken or reified (read: fought for at our expense and at the expense of others). We would be better off seeing it as the secret that we keep from the others and from ourselves until it can reveal itself in a harmless way. The energy employed in self-definition can be redirected toward living and relating to others. If the multiplicity of identities that we encounter and that we allow inside keep the secret alive and growing, it will allow us to grow too, within the social world. To arrive at this conclusion, I look at a few theoretical approaches in Chapter Six, and then analyze Rudolfo Anaya’s Tortuga and Toni Morrison’s Beloved to demonstrate how identity can be understood as an open, not even necessary concept, once the individual (Anaya’s sick boy nicknamed Tortuga and Morrison’s Sethe) overcomes stagnation and allows others to contribute to his or her becoming.