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The Postmodern as the Drive towards the Divine
By Michael G. O' Sullivan
“Man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim”1
The postmodern was regarded as affording received philosophical tradition a rupture in the
lines of communication, as foregrounding ontological as opposed to epistemological
concerns. It assigned legitimacy to a consistent and expansive reverence before alterity, a
reverence for, and sacralisation of, the other, always obfuscating the necessary grappling
with self in the face of such alterity. Contemporaneous with the suggested dissolution of
meta-narratives in textual analysis was a renunciation of the reassuring authority of
presence in metaphysics. The designation of ‘presence’ to a whole metaphysical tradition,
was achieved by way of a hermeneutic discourse, a pointed and overtly self-referential
employment of language and its ‘trace’. Implicit in the discourse of hermeneutics is a sense
of transfer, of engaged conceptual movement and of ultimate disclosure, as well as a note of
scriptural exegesis. Meaning is, therefore, always already present, yet disclosed in a
processual investigation, which also somewhat brackets its moment of initiation by way of
an interpretative mechanics that can be traced back to theological exegesis. Deconstruction
and historicity shared postmodernism’s suspicion in being disciplines more intent on
enquiry than results, subordinating ontological convictions to alterity, and to the historical
conditions of possibility. In doing away with ‘facts’ these disciplines engage in selfproliferating interpretations. Yet the fetishisation of alterity and aporetics only serves to
consistently connote what one is striving to overcome. Even the terms Derrida employs to
convey a sense of undecidability e.g. eidos, arche, and ousia, consistently recall a jarring sense of
the sacred. For while the postmodern hermeneutic embraces an aporia of identity, at least
in its ‘faceless’ structuralist regard for models of interpretation, it yet harbours a
comfortable subjectivity. I wish to suggest that while postmodernism, inextricably aligned
with the discourses of deconstruction and historicity, explicitly champions alterity, it
represses an implicit subjectivity only unleashed in the subsequent ‘theological turn’2. It
can be claimed that much of the postmodern literature which foregrounds “anarchic
collectives” and “anonymous experience” through a specific ‘play’ of literary tropes e.g.
pastiche and parody, very often pursues a “private perfection”, a private perfection
1
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001, p. 10.
I am referring here to the large body of work, which has emerged in recent years, and which explicitly
speaks for an essential potentiality in the language of religion for the discourses of philosophy and critical
theory. A selection of such works includes: De Vries, Hent. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant
to Derrida, London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002, Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil
Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002, Derrida, Jacques and Gianni Vattimo (Eds.). Religion. Stanford University
Press: Stanford, 1998, Vattimo, Gianni. After Christianity. London: Columbia University Press, 2002.
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connoting notions of personal salvation in the criticism which today embraces tones of
religiosity.
This paper will inspect some strands of the postmodern in regard to literary theory.
Postmodernism’s desire to present the unpresentable, and to destabilise the transparency of
representation, neglected the formal problems which made its message possible. Literary
postmodernism displays a precocious engagement with metafiction as opposed to metaphysics,
yet it is a talking about fiction that wants to address radically new fiction with a radically new
criticism. Criticism, therefore, began to invest heavily in a phenomenological language
which could provide new figures which would not require their literary retelling or
explanation. This phenomenological language saw literary criticism regard itself as
trenchantly ethical, freed from the constraints of figurative delineations. Such ‘ethical’
criticism, flourishing under the contemporary ethical delirium, will be inspected for its
curious relation with earlier forms of theological interpretation and for its role in initiating
a theological turn on the back of post-structuralism’s and postmodernism’s demise.
Ethical criticism possesses a somewhat naïve epistemological premise, in that it is an
affirmative philosophy which does not appear to question the validity of texts to mean.
Andrew Gibson’s work on postmodernity and the novel in Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel3
tempers the textual alusiveness of the postmodern with a move towards Levinasian
phenomenology, thereby opening the literary up, by way of a phenomenological discourse
and critique, to its contemporary religiosity. Literary criticism customarily works, through
an analysis of that which is deemed unique to the literary discourse, namely figuration, to
account for the potential for difference and divide existing between discourses such as the
religious and the literary. Gibson’s style of criticism, a style representative of a certain drift
in the discourse under postmodernism, sets up an account of the ethical nature of narrative
through a reading of Levinas. Yet what such a criticism frequently turns upon is an
adoption of certain lietmotifs from the Levinasian oeuvre, which then come to adorn states
of being in relation to narrative. Criticism becomes a kind of filter whereby the terms
which are most expressive of the particular critic’s sense of narration are allowed to trickle
through unaltered from philosophical texts, so as to adorn the presentation of extracts
from particular novels. Criticism becomes less the analysis of figure than its steady
accumulation, collecting all the figurative leftovers and shavings from philosophy’s
exertions. Gibson writes:
The novels I’ll be considering work to promote the ethical self-disquiet and selfantagonism, the ‘movement outwards’ that Levinas sets in ethical opposition to fascism.
They do so, precisely, in relation to question of gender. In postmodern fiction, gender is
increasingly emerging, not just as a more or less ambivalent state, but as an activity, a
performance, a becoming, or a site where identities may intersect, proliferate and undo one
another. (42)
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So it is that these novels, are seen to promote the ethical self-disquiet, or the ‘movement
outwards’ that Levinas sets in opposition to fascism. There is a problematic transmutation
of terminology across discrete ideological domains in this extract. The literary critic always
eager to disentangle the figurative, employs the figure of ‘movement outwards’ in a literary
critical fashion before its use within such a discourse has been justified or explained. The
phrase which Levinas employs within a primary ethic of intersubjectivity is
unproblematically translated and assigned to the relationship between reader and text.
Levinas’s employment of the term works at an ethical level the institution of criticism will
always already assign to its own particular ethic. There is a polyvalent metaphoricity at
work in that Levinas’s ‘movement outwards’ is first regarded as synonymous with ethical
self-disquiet, and then transposed to speak as a form of political opposition. Gibson’s
introduction, in this extract, “The novels I’ll be considering” upsets the context, both
conceptually and linguistically, from which Levinas consistently speaks. If we can refer to
such an old-hat literary critical term as tone, then the tone of address Gibson works to
configure disfigures any possible ‘participation’ in a Levinasian ethical encounter.
In attempting to speak for a quasi-phenomenological style of literary criticism
prevalent in postmodernism, which too easily allows itself room for the religious, it is most
valuable to inspect some phenomenological neologisms. Levinas coins the term excendance as
“the spontaneous and immediate desire to escape the limits of the self, a desire generated as
those limits are experienced in their narrowness”.4 This coinage shines as an apparition for
the literary critic from the philosopher’s text. The theologian of old was admonished for
the “open evaluation of revelatory signs, miracles, and prophecies” as it would lure him
into “impertinent speculations and doubts,”5 and the literary critic who employs the
luminosity of philosophical neologisms without wholly evaluating their new site of
revelation may recall such a theologism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written on the
curious tendency of Deconstruction to read the “logic of metaphors absolutely literally”6,
and it is a habit which postmodern literary theory itself mastered. To engage in an
intentional reading of neologisms, borrowed most often from phenomenological
discourses, disregards the conditions of possibility of metaphoricity itself, and the critic
becomes like the scribes and scriptural exegetes of old. Kant writes that the theologian
“leaps over the wall of ecclesiastical faith”7 when he ventures into the realm of allegory,
thereby fleeing into the “free and open field of private judgment and philosophy”. Literary
3
Gibson, Andrew. Ethics, Postmodernity, and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge, 1999.
The concept of excendance is crucial to Levinas’searly philosophical text De l’évasion (1935), and Andrew
Gibson pays it much attention in a discussion of the “movement or process that precedes the encounter with
alterity”, p. 36.
5
De Vries, Hent. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. London: The John Hopkins
University Press, 2002, p. 70.
6
See “The New Historicism, Political Commitment, and the Postmodern Critic”. The Post-Colonial Critic:
Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. ed. Sarah Harasym. London: Routledge, 1990.
7
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1992, p. 286.
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criticism has since then set itself the task of speaking for allegory and figuration, offering a
sense of experience or erlebnis8 which can very often explain ecclesiastical faith and
philosophy to one another. Postmodern literary theory persistently recalls a religiosity of
the text, whereby the literary exegetes forget the strictures of their trade and search for
figurations “that must be considered real revelation and so taken literally”9 as Kant said of
the older theological orders. Biblical theologians “admit that what is presented in “all too
human or literal terms” must be understood in a rational or spiritual manner more
“worthy of God””10, and in like manner we are almost urged by postmodern literary critics
to accept such ‘literary terms’. The post-structuralist fetishisation of the text, and its
furious self-proliferation, acts with an almost divine regard for neologisms repelling any
rigorous account of their mode of being.
Does the embrace of a pointedly religious hermeneutic following the postmodern
episteme, speak for a ‘philosophical’ take on theology which re-creates religion in its own
image? As Aldo Gargani has suggested “a recovery of the signs of the religious tradition
that have not been thought through to the end” may signify a “recovery of the signs and of
the annunciations immanent within the history of a religious tradition” so that they
become “figures for an interpretative perspective on life”11. But does this propose anything more than
a new literary formalism? One must ask oneself why literary criticism and indeed
philosophy is looking to a “recovery of the signs and of the annunciations” immanent
within a religious tradition. Derrida phrases his look towards religion in a similar manner
in his reading of Czech philosopher Patocka; “in saying that Christianity has not been thought
right through [my italics] Patocka intends that such a task be undertaken; not only by means
of a more thorough thematization but also by means of a political and historical setting-intrain”12. One is led to believe that there is a certain autotelic quality to the religious figures,
an inherent essence which can somehow be “thought through to [its] end”. One would
imagine that the religious figure has a certain pre-eminence within a certain discourse,
namely the religious, and that once extricated from such a discourse its capabilities must be
redeployed. Such a bandying about of figures neglects the import of theories of figuration.
Religious discourses presume a distinct sense of metaphoricity, and any correlation of
postmodernism’s agenda of invoking the unpresentable, and negative theology’s13 refusal to
account for God with any predicate of existence, must hinge, for its essential clarity, on a
8
“Experience” in the sense of Erlebnis, not Erfahrung. We mean a given moment caught up in stream of lived
experience rather than being part of the spectacle of public awareness
9
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1992, p. 263-264.
10
De Vries, Hent. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. London: The John Hopkins
University Press, 2002, p. 76.
11
Derrida, Jacques and Ganni Vattimo (Eds.). Religion. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998, p. 114.
12
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 28.
13
I am referring here to a particular brand of scriptural exegesis which writers like Arthur Bradley have
regarded as most similar to the discourse of deconstruction. Bradley writes that “Negative theology negates
the transcendental only in order to reaffirm it as the genuine transcendental article and not just idolatry”
“Thinking the outside: Foucault, Derrida and negative theology”. Textual Practice. 16(1), 2002, 69.
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distinct understanding of figuration. Postmodernism approached Baudrillard’s ‘viral stage’
seeking to overstep established referentiality with a sense of value irradiating in all
directions, “filling in all interstices without bearing reference to anything except by way of
mere continuity”14. For religion and specifically for negative theology referentiality or
predication is only negated so that it can be reappropriated in a higher positivity15.
Religious discourse always pre-empts the mystery of the godhead, whereas the postmodern
unleashes a homogenous stream of referentiality. I wish to suggest here that this curious
overlap between the postmodern and the via negativa, may have ushered in a ‘theological
turn’ in critical thought, one which transmutes the dying strains of postmodernity into a
quasi-religiosity.
The postmodern episteme, therefore, might be regarded as institutionally enabling of the
resurgence of the discourse of the divine, of the ‘theological turn’, in contemporary theory.
The only means for preserving the rich potentiality of the divide between literature and
theology is by retracing the contours of their respective figurations. The postmodern
discourse neglected the means which allows language to endlessly proliferate, blurring
tropes in a process seeking to parody figuration, but only falling back on a metalinguistic
awareness which must ultimately define itself through such tropes. In The Gift of Death
Jacques Derrida intends that the call to responsibility must be undertaken; not only by
means of a more thorough thematization but also by means of a political and historical
setting-in-train, advocated according to Patocka’s logic of a messianic eschatology that is
“nevertheless indissociable from phenomenology” [my italics]16. One wonders what is meant here by a
more thorough thematization, and by the likening of phenomenology to messianic
eschatology? Does Derrida see something of the unfinished project of Christianity in his
own writings? Do his own invented tropes (différance, hinge etc.) rely upon a theological
thematisation as yet unsubstantiated? The conflation of phenomenology and messianic
eschatology might also appear curiously negligent of how phenomenology regards the
aesthetic. Maurice Natanson’s phenomenological reading of the artwork, to name but one,
distinguishes nicely between two types of phenomenology:
The phenomenology which is in literature is not the same creature as the
phenomenology which is properly understood in work on phenomenology of
literature, a paradigmatic example of which is Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work
of Art. ......my interest lies in the manner in which a literary work, in some
instances, may reveal a phenomenological structure which has been formed or
14
Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. London: Macmillan, 1991, p. 136.
See Arthur Bradley “Thinking the outside: Foucault, Derrida and negative theology”. Textual Practice. 16(1),
2002, 58. Bradley perceives some interesting similarities between the work of Derrida and Foucault in
relation to negative theology.
16
Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 28.
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shaped by the literary work in which it has been confined or in which it has lain
imminent.17
Natanson gives pre-eminence to the literary work for being able to shape and form this
particular phenomenological structure, this ‘messianic eschatology’ which Derrida posits as
indissociable from phenomenology. It is the primacy of the literary work which thereby
necessitates a reworking of its figurative conditions of possibility.
Postmodern literary criticism, if you like, manifested itself very often under the guise of
being ethical. Literary critics bowed down to the unfamiliar figures they borrowed from
philosopher’s like Levinas, taking phenomenological neologisms from accounts of
intersubjectivity, to unproblematically stand for the relationship between a reader and her
text. Alain Badiou has written on the contemporary ‘delirium of ethics’, and an interesting
parallel can be set up between the figurative neglect already spoken of in postmodern
literary theory and the societal lag he mentions. He writes that the term ‘ethics’ should be
“referred back to particular situations”, that it should become the “enduring maxim of singular
processes”18, whereas criticism’s drift towards the divine will always delay such a singular
process. The implicit ‘defer’ of différance, and the grounded other which alterity resists
always move beyond notions of singularity. Postmodernism’s restless energy connotes an
elsewhere that theology’s presentations in “all too human or literal terms”19 consign to a
transcendental signified. The sacralisation of alterity and its spotlighted other also allowed
for an ontological shift within the domain of ethical thought. The postmodern has brought
us to a state in which, for Alain Badiou, “ethics is conceived as an a priori ability to discern
Evil,... as the ultimate principle of judgement, in particular political judgement: good is
what intervenes visibly against an Evil that is identifiable a priori”20. It is no wonder
Derrida’s recent writings embrace a sort of return to the sacred, for Ethics is once again
regarded as the baptism against an evil ‘original sin’. It is as if the temporary forget, the
momentary suspension of belief in a perseverance of being which the postmodern initiated
in favour of alterity allowed an unwanted guest into our house, an a priori understanding of
evil which is unwilling to take up its hat and bid us adieu.
So we may ultimately end up with a changing of the guard at philosophy’s gates.
Much phenomenological discourse has employed literature as an aid to lightening its
metaphysical load, and much contemporary literary criticism has, in turn, seized upon such
motivations to speak for an inherent ethicity of narrative and literature. It now appears
that the process is nearing its end and literature is being replaced in this role by religion.
17
Natanson, Maurice. The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. Foreword. Judith Butler. Princeton: Princeton
U.P., 1998, p. 8.
18
Alain Badiou. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001, p. 3.
19
De Vries, Hent. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. London: The John Hopkins
University Press, 2002, p. 76.
20
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001, p. 8.
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Yet it is the linguistic conditions of possibility, which consistently allow philosophy and
literary theory to employ “[religious] figures for an interpretative perspective on life”,
which persistently demands addressing. Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach to narrative
enables us to re-evaluate such a newfound religiosity of the text. His structuration of
narrative defamiliarises the easy correlation of Literature with phenomenology’s late turn
to religious ethics. In reading Aristotle, he states that in poetics, the composition of the
action by the poet governs the ethical quality of the characters21. Modernism, however,
coupled with the turn-of-the-century outgrowth of phenomenological discourse, afforded
narrative an altered conception of action. The turn inwards necessitated a denudation of
received conceptions of action and event. Formal advances such as interior monologue and
‘third observer’ encompassed and interrogated notions of action, as well as reworking the
conditions of possibility for an older sense of the term. This development upsets the ‘order
of ethical qualities’ which Ricoeur regards the representation of action and the organization
of the events as enframing and emphasising. The subordination of character to action is no
longer so easily discerned, and any prior correlation of ethics and action is now
undermined. If Ricoeur now regards the ‘complete event’ as the speaker’s ambition to
bring a new experience to language and to share it with someone else, then narrative has
shifted to assess our very ambitions. How does narrative’s encroachment into the
presignified, the à venir, work to estrange us from an older sense of event? Ricoeur’s
interpretation of narrative by way of the ‘complete event’ through which the speaker
attempts to bring a new experience to language allows a new reading also of the
postmodern text. He does not employ phrases from a pure phenomenology, but rather
reworks the old established figures of literary discourse so as to explore their semantic
possibilities. His writings serve as an interesting alternative to the quasi-phenomenological
discourses which align themselves with a ‘messianic eschatology’.
Ricoeur raises an interesting question in relation to philosophy’s power of denomination in
accounting for conceptions which language’s paucity is unable to speak for. He states that
the creation of new meanings in “connection with the advent of a new manner of
questioning, places language in a state of semantic deficiency”22. He suggests that it is
catachresis which is thereby called for, stating that it can as easily be, in this case, metonymy
or synecdoche, as it can be metaphor. It is then that he draws perhaps an interesting
distinction between his own and what might be perceived as a more postmodern regard for
metaphor:
Therefore, speaking of metaphor in philosophy, we must draw a line
boldly between the relatively banal case of an ‘extended’ use of the words of
ordinary language in response to a deficiency in naming and the case – to my
mind singularly more interesting - where philosophical discourse deliberately has
recourse to living metaphor in order to draw new meanings from some semantic
21
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1, p. 37
Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. Trans. Robert
Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 291.
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impertinence and to bring to light new aspects of reality by means of semantic
innovation.23
Here Ricoeur draws an interesting distinction between what he terms a ‘relatively banal
case of an extended use’ of ordinary language, and a semantic innovation. He speaks for a
writing which will draw its potential from a re-evaluation of existing models of reference,
before merely re-naming what is deficient. It is suggestive of a greater willingness to seek
out the obscured semantic contours of ‘ordinary language’ before engaging in a naming
always eager to start afresh. In such a light, contemporary theory’s employment of
religious rhetoric appears symptomatic of a restricted economy of semantic endeavour.
23
Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. Trans. Robert
Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, SJ. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 291.