Paul De Man notes Harold Bloom’s insight that with respect to one poet’s influence on a later one, “the encounter must take place and that it takes precedence over any other events, biographical or historical, in the poet’s experience.
This means that texts originate in contact with other texts rather than in contact with the events or the agents of life (unless, of course, these agents or events are themselves treated as texts). To say that literature is based on influence is to say that it is intratextual. And intratextual relationships necessarily contain a moment that is interpretative. […] The main insight of The Anxiety of Influence is the categorical assertion that this reading be a misreading or, as Bloom calls it, a ‘misprision.’” (Paul De Man, “Review: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom,” Comparative Literature 26, no. 3 (1974), 269–275: 273)
De Man then briefly observes that Bloom’s six “revisionary ratios” (clinamen, tessera, apophrades, askesis, daemonization, kenosis), for describing the temporal/historical relations between texts, are not only paradigmatic rhetorical structures but explicitly concern substitution, metonymy, misreading, impropriety, etc. (Tessera, for instance, refers to the “potentially misleading totalization from part to whole of synecdoche” (De Man 274).) De Man’s greater point, however, is to demonstrate that Bloom’s influence model depends on a linguistic and intratextual, rather than temporal and psychological, schema.
“If the substantial emphasis is temporal, the structural stress entirely falls on substitution as a key concept. And from the moment we begin to deal with substitutive systems, we are governed by linguistic rather than by natural or psychological models: one can always substitute one word for another but one cannot, by a mere act of the will, substitute night for day or bliss for gloom. However, the very ease with which the linguistic substitution, or trope, can be carried out hides the fact that it is epistemologically unreliable. It remains something of a mystery how rhetorical figures have been so minutely described and classified over the centuries with relatively little attention paid to their mischievous powers over the truth and falsehood of statements.” (De Man 274)
But lest we consider De Man’s attempts to render Bloom’s work compatible with or intelligible through a deconstructionist lens, it should first be noted that Bloom was always less subject to this gesture than receptively considerate of it. In “Emerson and Ammons: A Coda”, for instance, Bloom appears happy to include deconstruction in the list of ‘revisionary ratios’ between one text and another. So while De Man is surely right to indicate the intratextual fundament of these ratios, this point should not obscure the manner in which these ratios are performed and executed. They assume, that is, a decidedly topological, extended figure:
“When the latecomer initially swerves (clinamen) from his poetic father, he brings about a contraction or withdrawal of meaning from the father, and makes/breaks his own false creation (fresh wandering or error-about-poetry). The answering movement, antithetical to this primary, is the one I have called tessera, a completion that is also an opposition, or restorer of some of the degrees-of-difference between ancestral text and the new poem.” (Harold Bloom, “Emerson and Ammons: A Coda,” Diacritics 3, no. 4 (1973), 45–46: 46)
For Bloom, the relation between texts is a relation between poets, and this relation is in effect a repetitive career-long struggle with influence and dependence, on the one hand, and originality and freedom, on the other. A Kabbalistic dialectic of fragmentation and reconstitution, fall and resurrection, is directly imposed on this oedipal anxiety. “Applying the Lurianic dialectics to my own litany of evasions, one could say that a breaking-of-the-vessels always intervenes between every primary and every antithetical movement that a latecomer’s poem makes in relation to a precursor’s text” (Bloom, “Emerson and Ammons,” 46). Further, insofar as the original shattering and final reconstitution are ‘stages’ marking a creative career – rather than, say, textual moments occurring haphazardly across a body of work, a single text, or within the same feature – the oscillations between primary and antithetical movements are governed by a much larger, programmatic arc that draws the ‘latecomer’ (much like, say, a satellite colliding with the planet that ‘gave’ it its orbit) back home to his father-predecessor.
The figuration of this relation is accomplished through the “dialectical pair of ratios, kenosis (or undoing as discontinuity) and daemonization [return, restitution]” (46). Bloom, for instance, reserves the first for describing the “wildest, finest, and freest” (46) series of Ammons’ texts – that is, with respect to their distant anchor in Emerson (“Kenosis is the particular mark of an astonishing series of poems […]” (46)). Whereas, the “answering voice in Ammons, his daemonization or Tikkun for this contraction of the self, begins in ‘Saliences’ and continues […]” (46) until the arc has traced its widest possible ambit of freedom. Bloom then predicts “an even more strenuous pattern of contraction, catastrophe, restitution, a dialectical alternation of a severer self-curtailment (askesis) and an answering return of lost voices and almost-abandoned meanings (apophrades)” (46). But while this model can certainly be seen to reflect a real relation or impetus between certain texts or authors, the explanation of why an economy of wandering and return should exclusively be ‘catastrophic’ (or for that matter for the same reason define the highest value) remains largely undeveloped. As De Man notes, “It would take only one small step, without having to change the premise, to make the same statement in a jovial rather than a saturnine mood, and to replace the anxiety by a serene, pre-Johnsonian theory of decorous imitation” (De Man 273).
Bloom, to be sure, locates at the nexus of kenosis and daemonization a mediating self-discipline (askesis) that ‘at the last moment’ curtails the betrayal and returns the son to his almost-abandoned father (apophrades). But why prize “contraction” when, before ‘return’ is imminent or inevitable, kenosis, the undoing, is so ‘wild, fine, and free’? It is at this point that the economy of disavowal and return becomes truly an ‘economy’; for, rather explicitly, the poet’s return is compelled and enforced – requiring self-discipline, producing anxiety – by an inner need to settle a debt. It is a “restitution” of ‘property’ to its proper owner, a returning of what was borrowed and almost stolen. The dialectic of kenosis and daemonization is thus at heart an ethical circle – (or rather it is ethical only because it is circular) – motored by an internal dialectic of guilt and reluctance, one that tightens, moreover, with each turn of the gyre (–with each “answering return” a “severer self-curtailment”). And though for Bloom influence can only be ‘misprision’ (that is, improper and always already without allegiance), the ‘precursor’ nonetheless shines through as the formal cause and origin of even its faintest, or most abusive, employment.
The value of kenosis is likewise in large measure dependent on the subsequent contraction (daemonization) that revokes it or makes it justifiable; a poet’s wild departures from a predecessor are only acceptable to the extent that the poet returns and renews allegiance. The career and corpus – and so the future historian looking back – thus define a posthumous structure that descends (backwards, often) on particular texts and weighs each, conspicuously, against a totality that can only seem arbitrary or unfair from too many angles. Indeed, Coleridge’s kenosis with respect to Milton receives none of the fanfare of Ammons’, if only because it was not completed afterwards with a complementary return. Bloom first observes:
“But the next revisionary ratio, the kenosis or self-emptying, seems to me almost obsessive in Coleridge’s poetry, for what is the total situation of the Ancient Mariner but a repetition-compulsion, which his poet breaks for himself only by the writing of the poem, and then breaks only momentarily. Coleridge has contemplated an Epic on the Origin of Evil, but we may ask: where would Coleridge, if pressed, have located the origin of evil in himself? His Mariner is neither depraved in will nor even disobedient, but is merely ignorant, and the spiritual machinery his crime sets in motion is so ambiguously presented as to be finally beyond analysis. […] (Harold Bloom, “Coleridge: The Anxiety of Influence,” Diacritics 2, no. 1 (1972), 36–41: 40)
Passing over the question of why “ignorance” is unworthy of thematic treatment, Bloom asks, rhetorically, “what was Coleridge the poet trying to do for himself as a poet? To which I would answer: trying to free himself from the inhibitions of Miltonic influence, by humbling his poetic self, and so humbling the Miltonic in the process. The Mariner does not empty himself out; he starts empty and acquires a Primary Imagination through his suffering. But, for Coleridge, the poem is a kenosis, and what is being humbled is the Miltonic Sublime’s account of the Origin of Evil.” (40)
II.
If one poet is complicatedly ‘indebted’ to another poet, that is one thing, but if criticism theoretically privileges that textual relation over any other, or excessively isolates that aspect of a text as the essential feature, then the critique has turned the corner from explication to aesthetic regime. However, the converse argument can just as easily be made with respect to the criticism that, in critiquing the privileging of these features, declares them applied, enforced, invented – an ‘effect’, in short, of the overextension itself. Indeed, in practicing ‘wild, free’ kenosis one is quickly rendered eligible for the counterpart error: the defining of ‘curtailment’ as supervenient. This error (or naïveté) substitutes the ‘influences’ imposed on the creative subject for a ‘raw material’ to mince and meld with freedom and without repercussion. Does not undoing and discontinuity somehow frequently manage to promise reconstitution just when we think it most free, detached, and clear in the open? Behind De Man’s hapless wonder over Bloom’s totalizing anxiety can we not discern the disingenuousness of a ‘calculation’ that is always, in its peculiar mixture of rigor and evasion, ‘helplessly’ right?
Indeed, De Man, in a remarkable turn, isolates Bloom’s kenosis as a figure of de-construction itself:
“Kenosis is a more complex case, because it is the only class in which a figure is used to undo systematically the substantial claim implied in the use of another figure; it is the figure of a figure, in which one de-constructs the universe produced by the other. As opposed to tessera, kenosis breaks up a totality into discontinuous fragments: it substitutes a contiguity (in temporal terms, a repetition) for an analogy or resemblance (in temporal terms, a genesis) and thus rediscovers, in its turn, the familiar metaphor–metonymy opposition, though with an epistemological twist that was lacking in Jakobson’s version.” (De Man 274–275)
This remark, for our purposes, opens onto two substantial lines of thought: Heidegger’s concept of destruktion and Jakobson’s concept of metonymy. Both, in their own way, discover and expose the concealed contingency of what otherwise appears self-evident, universal, timeless. The former deals with tradition and the obscuring of its own sources, an epistemological logic, while the latter deals more with signification, language, and the provisional accrual of ‘associations’ (opposed to the elucidation of ‘definitions’ and ‘proper’ meanings). Heidegger’s destruktion, the prototype of De Man’s de-construction, thus stresses the ‘ossification’ of knowledge, with an insistence on the difficulty of even determining its nature or relative value: that is, tradition, by virtue of being tradition, conceals its criteria (for being traditional) behind a self-evidence that resists easy interrogation:
“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it ‘transmits’ is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial ‘sources’ from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Row, 1962), 43.)
As readers and subjects we are thus confronted with only the terminal result of a long critical process; the actual (one would think, historical) production of what now appears self-evident thereby remains, in effect, forgotten for its product. Therefore, “this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved” (Heidegger 44). Now, while this perspective, which is resumed later in Being and Time under the sign of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, has of course found divisive heritage in Gadamer’s ‘hermeneutics’ (Truth and Method), on the one hand, and Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, on the other, for our purposes it will suffice to say that the former stresses retrieval, recovery, tradition, drawing close to a ‘proper’ or centered meaning, while the latter stresses play, difference, a plurality of irreducibly dissonant positions. (It is nonetheless clear that for Heidegger destruktion involves less an anarchic dispersal of tradition than a critique of its ‘ossified’ contents; after all, there is the explicit promise that some of the concepts ‘handed down’ will prove to have been “genuinely drawn” from the “primordial ‘sources’”.)
Our interest in this general problematic is however for the most part confined to Bloom’s kenosis, De Man’s de-construction, and the dialectic of flight and return at stake between them. Let us turn, then, keeping Heidegger’s destruktion in mind, to the literary and epistemological history of kenosis.
Kenosis, as it were, refers specifically to a limited and relatively exceptional characterization of the relation between Jesus and God (or, rather, the formation of the relation itself). The term is almost exclusively associated with the hymn reproduced by Paul in Philippians 2:5–11, wherein God’s incarnation as Jesus is described as a loss or “self-emptying” of divine qualities:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form
of God
did not regard equality with
God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human
likeness.
And being found in human
form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the
point of death–
even on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted
him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and
under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:5–11, New Revised Standard Version)
This is also the passage to which Bloom makes explicit reference in his use of the term kenosis:
“Kenosis, which is a breaking-device similar to the defence mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition-compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul, where it means the humbling or emptying-out of Jesus by himself, when he accepts reduction from Divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he ceased to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing, that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems.” (Bloom, “Coleridge,” 39)
Kenosis occupies an equally profound place in poststructuralist conceptions of identity and difference, at least to the extent that they have been formulated out of the writings of Hegel and perhaps Levinas. –But first, a brief explication of the passage.
Generally speaking, debate over the passage has focused on its reference to “the preëxistent state of Christ, the emptying himself of some measure of that preëxistent glory and his subsequent exaltation to the right hand of God” (Milton S. Terry, “The Great Kenotic Text (Phil. 2:5–11.),” The Biblical World 17, no. 4 (1901), 292–296: 292–293). Contestation has accordingly arisen over the nature of this formation of one identity out of another, a difference in self that is also somehow between selves, but two selves destined to reunite, if not literally as one – in that Jesus will remain at the “right hand” – then theoretically or spiritually. Though the literature on the relation between Jesus and God is in effect endless, the kenotic passage characteristically expresses this relation as one where Jesus preexists his body and literally emerges out of God. It therefore suggests an enclosure to this difference, a difference ‘within’ as well as ‘without’, and such that the redemption is a return or circle.
Theological and textual questions concerned with this passage likewise encounter symptomatic difficulties in interpreting relations between Jesus and God, if only because relations between them must always already be ‘within’ them/him. Terry, for instance, concludes that if “God highly exalted him” then this exaltation must not only be a “consequence of his humiliation” but also a “reward or recompense” (Terry 293). But if “Nothing in the whole passage is plainer than the explicit distinction between God and Christ” (Terry 293) is not this distinction itself pursuant to the act in question? It is Christ’s/God’s self-emptying, after all, that renders the dissociation between Christ and God explicit. (Indeed, we cannot simply say ‘Christ emptied himself’ without observing the proleptic redundancy – in the sense, that is, of ‘the poison hung in the sick air’ – enforced upon the sentence. This is no small ‘communicative’ problem, but, rather, the force of the question.)
Thus, if the exaltation is indeed “the meritorious result of the self-humiliation” (Terry 293), then Christ’s resurrection, which is a return to where he started, is also the collecting of a debt. But is this to suggest that Christ humbles himself in stooping to human form in order to receive reward? This reading would, again, have to belie the fact that it was his descent that produced not only a debt but, in one and the same move, both the debtor and the creditor ‘within’ a circumscribed identity. In this view, God would, in effect, split himself into one who owes the other. Indeed, it would appear that the identity paradox posed by kenosis specifically works to render the usual sense of debt and credit, reward and consequence, cause and effect, especially immaterial (in both senses of the term).
But if the specific textual event of kenosis (Phil. 2:5–11) describes a particular abstract relation that resists explication and visual description, how might it inform readings of relations between Jesus and God elsewhere in the New Testament? For, if the difference between them is circumscribed by the affirmation of their identity in the kenotic moment, what could possibly serve to renew, apply, or affirm this circumscription in passages where Jesus is for all intents and purposes narratively alone? Can the kenotic passage form a criterion for reading the character of Jesus as a difference within God — or, by virtue of the scene or moment in question, is this relative within/without always a matter of context? It is in this sense that difference within identity, or identity as difference from itself – especially between the limited human Jesus and the objective omniscient God (who are not simply different but in a certain sense opposite) – gives rise to a textual ‘dialectic’ – which is to say, the categorization of acts of Jesus according to whichever of his split persona appears most prevalent.
“One clear instance is Gregory’s response to the kenotic motif found in Philippians 2:7. At one point in the Theological Orations Gregory [of Nazianzus] interprets this metaphor as indicating that the Son of God assumed ‘what he was not’ [page] while at the same time continuing to be ‘what he was.’ Yet later, in a passage emphasizing the condescension of the incarnate life, he asserts that the Son put aside ‘what he was’ and assumed ‘what he was not.’
Such Christological ambiguity on Gregory’s part forms the background for the specific example chosen, namely, his exegesis of Jon 11:33 and 43 as it occurs in the Third Theological Oration. This is the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus. Jesus said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ Such a question undoubtedly implies ignorance on Jesus’ part. Hence Gregory’s comment: ‘He asks where Lazarus was laid for he was a man (anthrōpos gar ēn).’ Subsequently Jesus commanded, ‘Lazarus, come forth!’ Such a command unmistakably suggests divine power. So Gregory’s assertion: ‘He raises Lazarus for he was God (theos gar ēn).’” (Oration 29.19; J. Barbel, ed., Gregor von Nazians: Die fünf theologischen Reden (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1963), op. cit., p. 160; cited in David F. Winslow, “Christology and Exegesis in the Cappadocians,” Church History 40, no. 4 (1971), 389–396: 390–391)
In this view, a more or less strict alternation would govern the Jesus/God difference. They are exclusive to, if continuous with, each other. The oscillation (in Jesus) between God and himself would therefore only nominally recover the identity that circumscribes both, while in effect interpreting kenotic ‘difference within identity’ as a division ‘against’ oneself more than a difference ‘as’ oneself. And while the relations described by Gregory certainly characterize given moments, they are by no means representative of, nor wholly consistent with, other kenotic moments, much less the kenotic passage itself.
I only introduce the possibility of deriving, from Phil. 2:5–11, a ‘dialectic’ characterization of Jesus in order to draw in greater contrast contemporary philosophical interest in God’s subjectivity. This turn, as it were, is for the most part due to Hegel. Indeed, where much of the scholarship on kenosis has focused on Jesus’ interiority, Hegel focused on God’s exteriority. Following Luther’s well-known translation of Paul’s kenosis as Entäußerung (‘the separation of the Self through an externalization’), Hegel likewise discerned in this double movement of externalization and reconciliation a model for subjectivity (and history, art, language, etc.). Thomas Altizer, who has written much on Hegel’s relation to kenosis, describes it in Hegelian terms as such: “The true God who can be known as being ‘in-itself’ (in sich), can only actually be so known by the negative movement of God’s being ‘for-itself’ (für sich), and that is a self-negating or self-emptying movement, a movement in which Spirit realizes itself as Subject only by abandoning itself as Substance, and that itself is the life or movement of Trieb or kenosis” (Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Hegel and the Christian God,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 1 (1991), 71–91: 75).
It is in this sense that kenosis became, for Hegel, a generic philosophic concept capable of diverse application. For the Hegelian subject, kenosis is both an incarnation of form – an outwardizing or utterance (Äusserung) – and an externalization of something otherwise interior and self-identical. One is constituted through a detour through ‘the other’. One ‘abandons’ oneself through speech, through desire, through perception, to external effects that in turn reply and contribute to the one abandoned to them, not as simple projections of an inner life, but as investments of the self in external phenomena. Derrida thus describes the relation between kenosis, Hegel, and what he agrees to be the force behind definitions of modern subjectivity.
“The process which assures a ‘mutual fashioning’ (this is a deliberate plastic expression) of the two instances of kenosis, the divine and the human, that of God and that of the ‘modern subjectivity’, would be a process inherent to the Vorstellung, that is, a representation which at the same time exteriorizes and interiorizes (Entäußerung/Erinnerung). In exteriorizing, in extra-posing its object, it alienates and empties itself, it sacrifices itself, according to a movement which already belongs to the Being of God and hence is in this way represented. The representation effectively represents it and not as a simple figurative projection.” (Jacques Derrida, “A time for farewells: Heidegger (read by) Hegel (read by) Malabou,” preface to The future of Hegel: plasticity, temporality, and dialectic, by Catherine Malabou, tr. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004), vii–xlvii: xliv)
In Levinas, as well, a kenotic self-emptying opens the subject to ‘the other’, experience, God, etc. It is the touch of the Infinite that renders it specific, real, and accessible. As an evacuation of the self to ‘make way’ for the other, Levinas’ kenosis is an “expulsion of self outside of itself … the self emptying itself of itself” (Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 110–111, quoted in Paul Ricoeur, “Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence,’” tr. Matthew Escobar, Yale French Studies 104 (2004), 82–99: 92. Originally published as Autrement: Lecture d’Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997).) A similar reading is performed by Hélène Cixous, albeit with respect to reading: for her, kenosis is a relentless process of ‘de-selfing’ and ‘de-egoization’ to find the proper distance from which to hear the other.
III.
Thus, to return full circle, how might these appropriations of kenosis relate to De Man’s critique of Bloom?
First, a few general observations: in Bloom’s kenotic schema, the precursor (in the above examples, Emerson and Milton) functions as God externalizing himself as, respectively, Ammons and Coleridge (Jesus). But, since a “breaking-of-the-vessels” intervenes, externalization is not necessarily also internalization (daemonization). Ammons completes the circuit, while Coleridge does not.
Different strands of the poststructural tradition likewise take up different aspects of the kenotic passage. (1) The de-construction or ‘undoing’ of tradition: kenosis, at least in De Man’s usage, here refers to Bloom’s figure but not necessarily to the New Testament kenosis that implies a return. (2) Hegelian subjectivity, externalization/internalization of desire, language, perception, the constitution of the self through the other. (3) Self-emptying to clear a space for ‘the other’, a form of receptivity and reading, the precondition of immersion.
De Man’s remarks thus attempt to relate the first to the second. The ‘undoing’ of tradition is identified as specifically kenotic. But what, then, relates ‘undoing’ to ‘externalization/internalization’, especially when De Man seems to reject the countermovement of daemonization, return, reconstitution? Which is to ask: Can we in any way speak of a kenotic ‘undoing’ (of tradition or of a text) that does not ‘always already’ promise (or threaten) this movement with return, reconstitution?
The key perhaps lies in ‘where’ De Man and Bloom respectively identify this return. For the former, the misreading (which he relates to Bloom’s ‘misprision’) is already a return. In this view, which he elaborates on elsewhere (e.g. Paul De Man, “‘Conclusions’ Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’ Messenger Lecture, Cornell University Lecture, March 4, 1983,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985), 25–46), the ‘original’ reading is just another misreading. Ammons thus redefines Emerson and does not simply return to him. Bloom would likely agree, but with the qualification that not every reading redefines another and that this is precisely what is at stake. Ammons achieved a redefinition (of Emerson), while Coleridge (of Milton) did not. Hence, the breaking of the vessels. Or, as Cixous stresses in a slightly different vein, the subjective process of gaining access to a text implies everywhere the threat of failure, breakage. Textual kenosis, if conceived as a self-emptying for something/someone else, cannot help but approach the hermeneutic.
But we have already mixed models. We are speaking of the relation between texts as if they are enclosed by a representation that circumscribes their externality (as some kind of internality), as if there is something that always ensures a bond or fealty between readings. And this, I suspect, is the treachery of the kenosis figure’s displacement from theology to philosophy. On that subject, Levinas would appear to have something entirely different to say, though I have not yet read the key essay in quesion — Emmanuel Lévinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” in In the Time of Nations, tr. Michael B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1994). Although I think it is safe to say that his take on kenosis, hermeneutics, and the ‘breaking of the vessels’ will be much less Christian in model and spirit.
