From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, say or the Antigone — and sees how it has been adapted by later artists. It derives its logic and its focus through a linear genealogy — a sequence of works descended from an original text, interrelating with each other. The second type takes a post-Classical author and sees how this particular artist works with a classical paradigm — Dante’s antiquity, Wagner’s Greeks. It derives its logic and focus in the vision of a single artist, reading antiquity. The third type takes a more general cultural model and explores how classical antiquity has provided models and inspiration in a time in history or in a genre or an artistic movement: the Victorians and ancient Greece; modernism and the classical body. In this case, there is potentially a more diffuse focus and potentially a wider set of cultural questions. The specific problem for contemporary reception studies is how these three models fit together. When looking at the reception of the Antigone (say), how much can the broader vision of any one artist find a place in the analysis? When looking at an individual artist, how much can cultural context or the reception history of a particular text play a part?

Ted Hughes and the Classics is very much a work of type two. It looks at how one artist reads antiquity — adopts, adapts, translates, manipulates the texts of the classical past in his poetry. It has a tight focus, for sure, and one cost of such a focus is that there is very little sense of the wider reception of classics in the twentieth century. Thus we get Ted Hughes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses but very little of how this might fit into a tradition of the reception of Ovid’s epic; Hughes on democracy, but very little on the class and education issues Hughes invokes. You get what it says on the tin: this is “Ted Hughes and the Classics”.

This volume is the seventh or eighth in the Classical Presences series edited by Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. It has already published some exceptional volumes, both in terms of the sheer quality of research and in terms of the interest of the topics. The series has made a name for itself in supporting both monographs and collections of essays on the cutting edge of reception theory — feminism and myth, French political thought and the classics, African version of Greek drama (and so forth). In such a context, this volume, edited by Roger Rees, is rather more conservative in scope and ambition. It looks at Hughes’ works in roughly chronological order, roughly by genre, and discusses his allusions to classical texts, his translations, and his general classicizing techniques.

The authors and titles of the individual chapters:

• Keith Sagar, ‘Ted Hughes and the classics’
• Stuart Gilespie, ‘Hughes’ first translation: ‘The Storm from Homer, OdysseyV’
• Lorna Hardwick, ‘Can (modern) poets do classical drama?’
• John Talbot, ‘Eliot’s Seneca, Ted Hughes’ Oedipus‘
• Janna Stigen Drangsholt, ‘Living Myths’.
• Vanda Zajko, ‘”Mutilated towards alignment?”: Prometheus on his Crag and the “Cambridge School” of anthropology’
• Neil Roberts, Hughes’s myth: the classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds‘
• Roger Rees, ‘Between monarchy and democracy: neo-classicism and the laureate poetry of Ted Hughes’
• Garrett Jacobsen, ‘”A holiday in a rest home”: Ted Hughes and the vates in Tales from Ovid‘
• Anne-Marie Tatham, ‘Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Jennifer Ingleheart, ‘The transformations of the Actaeon myth: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Genevieve Lively, ‘Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy’
• Michael Silk, ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic language’
• Hallie Marshall, ‘The Hughes Version: Commercial Considerations and Dramatic Imagination’
• Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Classics reanimated: Ted Hughes and reflexive translation’
• David Gervais, ‘Beyond tragedy: Ted Hughes, Racine and Euripides’

Cheddar Mortadelle Cosmos, 2005, by Philippe Mayaux

My last post on the Biblical and philosophical concept of “kenosis” ended with a reference to Emmanuel Levinas, whose essay, “Judaism and Kenosis,” though unread at the time seemed to promise an altogether different approach that that found in contemporary and poststructuralist philosophies, which remain in large part derived from the Christian tradition. From Luther to Hegel to Derrida and Cixous, kenosis refers to the achievement of empathy, immersion, and other forms of ‘embodiment’ and ‘externalization’. For Levinas and the tradition he captures, kenosis suggests the opposite, an impasse between existences.

Levinas’ essay, for its part, radically departs from this, Christian tradition and sketches out, in my opinion, the more enlightening, the more philosophically authentic position. Where the Christian model stresses a seamless movement between, or transcendence of, ontological orders, the Judaic perspective stresses unbridgeable, unresolvable differences; which, I think, describes our world more closely than does the secular philosophical legacy of incarnation, identification. A fundamental schism in philosophy is thus revealed in the posing of this question, which is itself already a Christian one. Indeed, as one would expect, Levinas quickly reminds us that, “There is probably no need, here, to remind ourselves that the idea of divine incarnation is foreign to Jewish spirituality.” (Levinas Kenosis 114)

That being said, Levinas goes on to point out, in schematic terms, comparable sensibilities in the Judaic tradition and isolates key Talmudic passages where God descends and inhabits human misery, and precisely through that descent is found to be all the more exalted.

But the fact that kenosis, of the humility of a God who is willing to come down to the level of the servile conditions of the human (of which St Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians [2:6–8] speaks), or an ontological modality quite close to the one this Greek word evokes in the Christian mind – the fact that kenosis also has its full meaning in the religious sensibility of Judaism is demonstrated in the first instance by biblical texts themselves. Terms evoking Divine Majesty and loftiness are often followed or preceded by those describing a God bending down to look at human misery or inhabiting that misery. The structure of the text underlines that ambivalence or that enigma of humility in the biblical God. Thus, in verse 3 of Psalm 147, ‘He who healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds’ is the same one who, in the following verse, ‘counteth the number of the stars, [page] and giveth them all their names.’ Psalm 113 sings of ‘the elevation above all nations and the glory above the heavens’ of ‘our God that is enthroned on high’; but He ‘looketh down low upon heaven and upon the earth.’ The psalm ends with God’s care for the barren woman, whose despair is deeper than that of the poor person whom God ’causes to rise up out of the dunghill.’ As if to say that exaltation were at its height in these very acts of humbling! The importance of these verses for Judaism is emphasized by the fact that they have become part of Judaic liturgy.

But what is significant for Jewish ‘theology’ as such is the express Talmudic attestation of that importance: there is an inseparable bond between God’s descent and his elevation. (Emmanuel Levinas, “Judaism and Kenosis,” in In the Time of the Nations. Translated by Michael B. Smith. London: The Athlone Press, 1994: 114–115)

That much is shared with the Christian tradition. In each, God’s love for humanity involves inhabiting, or adopting, human feelings and thus in some way the human form. But beyond these generalities, there is little in common between the two.

Levinas’ reading of Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi’s parable “The Moon that makes itself Little”, from his treatise Hulin, expresses this distinction succinctly. “This parable,” he writes, ”approaches the theme without hiding the ontological or logical ‘upsets’ latent in the kenosis.” (Levinas Kenosis 116) Whereas Christian kenosis not only hides the logical upsets, but revels in them, ben Pazi’s parable isolates the upset, lingers on it, and ultimately fails to find satisfaction or resolution.

As a metaphor for God’s authorial power, and so for the structure of the universe itself (with God at the top and lesser entities below), the parable describes, through a dialogue between God and the Moon, a “dissatisfied silence” that cuts across all of creation, potentially undermining the ineffable order into which God has shuffled his subjects.

“The parable, cast in the form of a dialogue between Eternal God and the Moon, is supposedly motivated by a contradiction brought out in Genesis 1:16, which announces the creation of ‘two great lights,’ but right afterward refers to ‘the greater light’ and ‘the lesser light,’ as if, between the first and second half of the same verse, one of the great lights had diminished. The contradiction is set in relation to Numbers 28:15, which specifies the sacrifices to be performed for the new moon.” (Levinas Kenosis 116)

The problem concerns the status of the lesser light relative the greater one. By what law or reasoning, the Moon wants to know, are distinctions formed, and powers and orders assigned? It is as if, for reasons entirely external to the subjects affected, decisions are made concerning their fate, their status, and their hierarchical value. Justice itself seems to vanish in the moment an order of justice is created.

Immediately after the creation of the two great lights, one of them, the Moon, said to the Creator: ‘Sovereign of the world, can two kings wear the same crown?’ And God answered: ‘Go, therefore, and make yourself smaller!’

Was the moon unable, out of pride or vanity, to share the greatness she had received with the Sun? And was not the order she was given, ‘to make herself smaller,’ the just punishment for such pretentiousness? Or was the Moon, troubled by a precocious philosophical concern, affirming the necessity of a hierarchical order in being? Did she already intuit the ‘negativity’ between equals and discern that greatness cannot be shared – that the sharing of greatness is war? Rather than commanding a punishment unjustly imposed, perhaps what the voice of God proposed was the greatness of smallness – of humility, of the abnegation of night. The nobility of the best ones: smallness equal to greatness, and compatible with it. (Levinas Kenosis 116–117)

“Perhaps” is the key word here. Theories are offered; excuses are made; possible reasonings flushed out, but each, in its turn, is proved insufficient. The greatness of smallness, though an attractive idea in its own right, is ultimately a plain contradiction. That one only “plays the part” of the small, and one the part of the big, with each being equal by virtue of their equally but playing a part, is no consolation. The apparent difference cannot be whisked away through so much reasoning. God, it seems, cannot explain himself, and the Moon is not buying it:

‘I just expressed a sensible idea: is that any reason to make me smaller?’ says the Moon in answer to the Master of the World. Hierarchy is necessary, but I already see that it is necessarily unjust. The ontology of the creature is contradictory. It is dangerous to utter truths! As for the greatness of smallness, I do not at the outset see it as being as great as greatness. Is not the ‘glorious lowering’ a scandal to reason? The Moon’s argument is then taken into account. ‘Thou shalt reign day and night,’ says the Lord, ‘while the reign of the Sun will be limited to the day.’ A discreetness in light – is this already a decline? There are lights without brilliance whose lustre the Sun cannot dim: there are insights of the intuitive mind that systematic reasoning, in its glorious clarity, cannot refute. The wisdom of the night remains visible during the day.

‘What would be the advantage of shedding light in full daylight?’ says the Moon. The role of second brilliance cannot heal the wounded ego. And the civilization of triumphant science will one day invalidate all instinctive knowledge and all truths without proof. This is an antimony on the essence of the intellect, between God and the Moon! (Levinas Kenosis 117)

Concessions are made. Space and time are divvyed up to conceal this inaugural injustice. The organization of the universe itself starts to seem like one big compromise, as if the real creation, not the nominal one, took place through negotiations with, of all things, the created. The dialogue continues with a “discussion of the lunar calendar, of days and nights, versus the solar calendar, of years and history. The Sun and Moon are not just lights, but movement, time – history. To the solar calendar of the nations is added Israel’s lunar calendar: universal history, and individual history.” (Levinas Kenosis 117)

The argument, remarkably enough, is never settled. The greatness of humility can never be the greatness of greatness.

“Perhaps it is true that neither the light of thought nor the glory of history can tolerate the alleged greatness of humility. Perhaps its majesty has meaning only in the holiness of the person, where, as exaltation of renunciation in the justice of the just, it is the humanity of man and the image of God! Hence the Creator’s last attempt to console the Moon, offended by her title of ‘lesser light.’ ‘The names of the just evoke your title: Jacob, called littled in Amos 7:2, Samule the Little (a holy rabbi of the Talmudic period), King David, called Little David in I Samuel 17:14.’

Like any tedious argument or negotiation, this one can only peter out, without closure or sure resolution. There’s no final entreaty, no last evening-out. A fundamental inequity is seen to pervade, and possibly constitute, the very structure of the world.  There will be no appeasing the Moon, and the Moon sees no point in pressing it further.

‘The Moon has since then remained without any arguments. But Eternal God sees that she is not satisfied.’ A dissatisfaction without arguments, a dissatisfied silence! This is perhaps the residual ambiguity that surrounds the greatness of the saintly and humble who risk being taken for failures! The residue of the stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself. To this there is no response, but for this, precisely, Holiness takes on the responsibility. Here is the humility of God assuming responsibility for this ambiguity. The greatness of humility is also in the humiliation of greatness. It is the sublime kenosis of a God who accepts the questioning of his holiness in a world incapable of restricting itself to the light of his Revelation.‘ (Levinas Kenosis 118)

The parable of the Moon is not, of course, just about the Moon and Creation. Taken more generally, it’s about the humble, good life that, confined to its own unrecognized corner of the world, risks being mistaken for a failure. In being lesser, or in being recognized as lesser, while in some other sense being greater, the saintly, the humble are doomed to inherit, according to Levinas, a “residual ambiguity” with which they must struggle endlessly.

Taking a philosophical turn, Levinas finally defines this inner struggle or dissatisfaction as the ”stubborn contention of a nature persevering in its being, imperturbably affirming itself”, and in this respect, the Moon is an unmistakable figuration of the self, the subject. At once aware of itself and its place in the greater order, the Moon questions both without the possibility of satisfaction. This profound impasse, it would seem, is what most distinguishes the Judaic from the Christian conception of kenosis.

“The cris were loud advertisements called out by the Paris street vendors, and composed according to a certain versified form; each cry had four lines offering and praising a certain merchandise…We must recall that not only was all advertising oral and loud in those days, actually a cry, but that all announcements, orders, and laws were made in this loud oral form…This fact should not be ignored when studying the style of the sixteenth century and especially the style of Rabelais” (The Bakhtin Reader, 218).

Like the street vendor, Rabelais in his authorial introductions is loud and boastful, as quick to praise the (wise) reader who has bought his book as condemn the (stupid) reader who has not. “Shit on them,” as Rabelais says. Can you imagine Mary Higgins Clark saying such a thing? I can’t.

In fact, if it wasn’t for Victor Lange’s footnote, you might not know that the performance reviewed by Lessing (below) was of a play written by Lessing himself. For that reason (but not that reason alone), the suggestiveness for which he was famous seems to shine through all the more clearly in this strange, brief, hamstrung review of a performance of his own Miss Sara Sampson.

“It is not possible to demand more from art than what Mdlle. Henseln achieved in the role of Sara, and indeed the play altogether was well performed. It is a little too long and it is therefore generally shortened at most theatres. Whether the author would be well satisfied with all these excisions, I almost incline to doubt. We know what authors are, if we want to take from them a mere bit of padding they cry out: You touch my life! It is true that by leaving out parts the excessive length of a play is clumsily remedied, and I do not understand how it is possible to shorten a scene without changing the whole sequence of a dialogue. But if the author does not like these foreign abbreviations, why does he not curtail it himself, if he thinks it is worth the trouble and is not one of those persons who put children into the world and then withdraw their hands from them for ever.” (”G. E. Lessing, ”No. 13,” in Hamburg Dramaturgy. Translated by Helen Zimmern. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1890 (1962): 38).

Gravelot, 'Drawings for the illustrations of Boccaccio's Decamerone', 1757.

Colin Burrow’s review of the most recent English version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (The London Review of Books: 12 March 2009) is less an evaluation of the merits of J.G. Nichols’s translation than an occasion to reopen some pertinent questions regarding the psychological dimension of literary narrative. Though the Decameron’s own generic heritage is mixed–its 100 novelle or short stories combine the French fabliaux, the Ovidian vignette, and the dirty joke, among other things–there is no doubting the profound impact it has had on the subsequent literary tradition. Besides his immense influence on English poets (Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats included), Boccaccio is often cited as a sort of proto-novelist, an ancestor of Cervantes, Fielding, Eliot, and Dickens. Burrow starts by pointing out what’s possibly misleading about this genealogy, but ends by making a provocative argument for why it is, in fact, appropriate. The answer in both cases depends upon how we understand the psychological depth of the narrative–that is, how far the story goes in exploring the internal space of its characters, what Burrow takes to mean their motives, emotions, and private thoughts.

Burrow begins by pointing out that unlike the novels of say Dickens or Eliot, the Decameron leaves the psychological space of its characters “underdeveloped.” Boccaccio does not seem much interested in this space, almost to the point of insensitivity. In one striking example Burrow makes much of, Boccaccio tells us very little about how Griselda felt after her husband pretended to kill her children in an elaborately cruel test of her loyalty (it turns out that Gualtieri, the husband, merely banished them). A modern novelist would no doubt have spent some time describing the range of emotions that such an act would occasion. And for Gualtieri to emerge as a full character rather than just a stock villain, the novelist would need to do some work explaining what motivated his actions in the first place. Yet Boccaccio does neither; he simply tells us what the cruel husband did and little else.  As a storyteller, Boccaccio “just lets actions speak.”

The modern reader might conclude that Boccaccio is a dull writer, or that the rich psychological portraits of say a Henry James or Jane Austen were simply beyond him. Burrow sees the temptation but has a ready response: Boccaccio’s spare narrative style is purposeful. The sense of “blankness” that we get from reading the Decameron is productive; the blanks are there for us to fill in. It is precisely Boccaccio’s withholding of psychological information that makes us so eager to speculate about the internal space of his characters. As Burrow puts it: “Boccaccio’s great art is to make his readers want to supply the tragic emotions that he does not directly represent.” This “art” makes Boccaccio the sort of proto-novelist we have come to think, and Burrow’s most daring claim comes here:

“The Decameron generates the novel in the form of anticipatory nostalgia: Boccaccio seems not just to be insensitive, but to be actively canceling out of his fiction a novelistic inwardness which hasn’t yet been invented.”

Burrow’s argument is a little too ingenious. First, we might ask: why should absence of psychological data signify a deep psychological “inwardness,” instead of, well, an absence? The its-meaningful-because-its-not-there argument is usually specious, here as well. One could read that absence in several other ways: as suggesting that Boccaccio viewed the human psyche as a dark abyss that we can’t grasp, thus the absence; or that the 14th century didn’t have a notion of the internal human psyche at all, thus the absence. My point is this: before we eagerly construct an inward psychological space for Boccaccio’s characters, doesn’t it seem more reasonable to question whether there is even such an “inwardness” to know?

If we answer “no,” it does not then follow, as Burrow seems to think, that the Decameron is psychologically shallow. Rather, we might question how good a criterion “inwardness” is, or what view of the person such a term implies. Burrow’s picture of “inwardness” looks something like this: there is an internal space of motivations, emotions, and thoughts in each of us, mostly invisible; and it is this space which houses the deepest parts of our selves, the stuff that makes us who we are. It is where character resides, both literary and personal. Burrow seems to take his picture of “inwardness” as more or less uncontroversial, a settled issue, when the philosophical literature in both traditions suggests otherwise. But leaving the philosophical discussions aside, this picture creates (or is determined by?) a quite strange account of why we read and write literature. As Burrow seems to see it, the novelist’s task is to bring that “inward” psychological space of his characters to light. In turn, the job of the reader is to contemplate, be moved by, and/or evaluate this picture of the character, to ask, as Burrow does: “how can it be that Griselda does not complain? What does Gualtieri think she feels? What does he think he’s doing? And what does she feel?” When the writer does not do that first job, as in the case with Boccaccio, we will do it for him. Burrow might actually be right about the persistence of this readerly impulse, but isn’t the kind of speculative psychology Burrow models here wrongheaded, not to mention unhelpful? As anyone who has been in a Lit. class can attest, group speculation about the psychology of fictional characters can become tiresome and often uninteresting. In many ways, the literature teacher tries to work against this knee-jerk, arm-chair psychology, to equip his/her students with some sort of vocabulary (be it formalist, historical, ideological, etc.) to prevent that sort of speculation. Even when that vocabulary is “psychoanalytic,” it often pushes beyond the thin sort of questioning we see modeled here in Burrow’s review.

Arguments such as Burrow’s flatter us too much, I think; great writers like Boccaccio somehow managed to “anticipate” our modernity by the force of their “art,” even though their narrative equipment wasn’t quite up to speed yet.  And the really great artists, to paraphrase some prominent arguments about Shakespeare, helped invent some of the features of our modern humanity (see Harold Bloom’s argument in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human). The tone of such arguments tends toward the triumphant and celebratory, but the compliments strike me as backhanded. Past texts are deemed important or worthy of our attention insofar as they contribute to some preferred view of ourselves: as “modern,”  complex, irreducibly unique persons, with an “inwardness” we carry around like a secret.

We should be skeptical of this way of reading literature, as well as the limited view of the person it implies (where is the intersubejctive or dialogical self amidst all this priveleged “inwardness”?).  When an historically distant text surprises or even disgusts us, that should be an opportunity to view some of our ethical and aesthetic assumptions in a new light, to challenge, to argue, to reconsider, to poke around. Estrangement–both from our ideas about human psychology and narrative–should be cultivated, not assimilated into a newer, more ingenious literary history. Give me cruel Gualtieri and patient Griselda as is.

Prompted by a recent PC and Pixel cartoon, Mark Liberman over at Language Log gives a quick overview of the state of ‘linguistic profiling’ technology. (”As you can see, the best of the systems are doing pretty well at recognizing languages, but not so well at distinguishing one dialect from another.”)

What’s especially interesting about the cartoon itself, however, is its close resonance with the related term shibboleth, which ‘refers to any distinguishing practice which is indicative of one’s social or regional orgin’.

The English term originates from the Hebrew word “shibboleth” (שיבולת) and derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible “in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish members of a group (the Ephraimites), whose dialect lacked a /ʃ/ sound (as in shoe), from members of a group (the Gileadites) whose dialect did include such a sound.”

Just as the victorious Gileadites subjected the retreating Ephraimites to a dialect test, to identify and kill those attempting to cross the Jordan River back into their home territory, the test in the PC and Pixel cartoon is administered by security personnel in an airport, with similar intent.

Though there is no overt reference to the War on Terror, the milieu in which this scene takes place is clearly that of a security culture. To the extent that a language test can be envisioned as a form security, without even the need for explanation or pretext, is itself reflective of how thoroughly ‘belonging’ has been detached from ‘origin’.

Twin-brothers Charlie, left, and Donald Kaufman (both played by Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation.

Towards the end of his epic history of the concept of “milieu”, Leo Spitzer briefly goes over the origin of the closely-related English word, “environment” – which was coined, it turns out, by Thomas Carlyle in an article on Goethe, published in Miscellanies (1827).

And “what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in question are themselves a translation of Goethe (Dichtung und Wahrheit, book XIII): following upon a passage in which Goethe had emphasized the gloominess of contemporary ‘Poetical Literature’ in England, comes a new paragraph”:

In such an element, with such an environment of circumstances, with studies and tastes of this sort (In einem solchen Element, bei solcher Umgebung, bei Liebhabereien und Studien dieser Art); harassed by unsatisfied desires . . . ; with the sole prospect of dragging on a languid, spiritless, mere civic, life [it is easy to understand that young Germans of the Werther type should be tempted to commit suicide] (quoted in Spitzer 205)

The lines Carlyle omits from the translated passage, lines which maintain precisely that unique sense of an affective surroundings, give an altogether different impression of the ‘quality’ “environment” purports to represent:

“But the Element and Umgebung of Goethe are only to be understood by reference to his lines which Carlyle omitted: a passage in which Goethe states that Ossian had found a perfect ‘Locale’ for English melancholy: the heath, a ‘Caledonian night’ lit by the moon, when dead heroes and maidens once fair came back to ghostly life. Thus Goethe, thinking of the Ossianic landscape, was speaking of an ‘element’ of nature, while Umgebung represented a mid-term between natural and spiritual surroundings (this is shown clearly by the words that follow, Liebhabereien and Studien, which are definitely concerned with the spiritual).” (Spitzer 204–205)

What Carlyle’s use of the word “environment” serves to occlude, then, is the very concept of a poetic-theatrical “Locale”, in this case the Ossian, melancholic heath. Indeed, for Spitzer, Carlyle’s “bombastic and overstuffed phrase environment of circumstances” –- which would repeat throughout Carlyle’s work, he points out, always with a “rather circumscribed nature” (205) –- specifically works to trade in affective for deterministic models of ‘influence’.

In place of a poetic landscape or scene, and the pseudo-spiritual affects that ‘pervade’ it, Carlyle opts for the more biological-sociological image of definite, fixed ‘circumstances’. Though both words “suggest a ‘quality’ inherent to the surroundings [...] with milieu the quality is more personal and more intangible than with environment — and less deterministic: environment is the term of a sociologist who thinks in terms of fixed factors, milieu the more spontaneous expression of a human being who feels, rather than analyzes.” (Spitzer 206)

Goethe’s Umgebung indeed appears to lack a proper English correlate. Even milieu, which didn’t make an appearance in English until 1877, fails to capture the spiritual, affective connotation of Goethe’s Locale. English characterizations of the relation between self and surroundings are in this respect simply too exact. Indeed, reacting against the prevalence of a deterministic element in words like environment William James used the word tone instead — but even here the totality or completeness of a ’scene’ or ’situation’, as implied by Umgebung, is effectively lost.

Chris Cooper, who plays orchid thief John Laroche, will go to any lengths to find rare species of the flower.

One solution to this problem can be found, I think, in Deleuze’s use of the term milieu in his two works on Cinema.

In terms comparable to Goethe’s “Locale”, Deleuze discusses ’stock’ filmic backgrounds or settings — which are perhaps the modern-day counterpart of the literary ’scene’. Where for Goethe Ossian had “found a perfect Locale for” an English emotion or complex, for Deleuze, the cinematic set or background suggests an equally “originary world” lodged midway between symbolic and literal orders.

“Take a house, a country, or a region. These are real milieux of geographical and social actualisation. But it looks as if, in whole or in part, they communicate from within with originary worlds. The originary world may be marked by the artificiality of the set (a comic opera kingdom, a studio forest, or marsh) as much as by the authenticity of a preserved zone (a genuine desert, a virgin forest). It is recognisable by its formless character.” (Deleuze 123)

The “formless character” of the milieu is at once a function of its open generality, with all the associations that come with it, and its nonetheless coherent, enclosed identity. So while the milieu can be a more or less static background, “it is also the set which unites everything, not in an organisation, but making all the parts converge in an immense rubbish-dump or swamp” (Deleuze 124). Like Ossian’s melancholic heath, the studio forest or artificial marsh “actualizes” a mood as much as a setting essential to the plot — which is to say, it endows the scene with a pervasive, intangible aura as much as it serves as literal site for definite narrative events.

Take the famous last scene of Adaptation. for instance. On the one hand, the swamp is a recognizable stock cinematic setting, the cliche of cliches (making it all the more fitting for a sell-out screenwriter to meet his end in), but on the other hand it is the natural terminus of a storyline devoted to orchids. In this last scene, in fact, the historic cinematic overdetermination of the swamp setting even seems to reach a logical conclusion, or point of exhaustion: which is to say, though its status as artificial device does fold back on itself in a last bout of self-consciously forced exertion (–the swamp that kills the writer seems to have been written by him), it also manages to sincerely retain that melancholic note essential to the figuration of the orchid as otherworldly and intangible, alluring but dangerous. In spite of, or perhaps in collaboration with, Kaufman’s irony, some mystical, cinematic force in the end withholds the orchid from total corruption or capture, as if it were much more than a flower but also (because we are, after all, only in a swamp in the Everglades) much less than the power for which it is persistently mistaken.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. [Link]

Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics (Part 2).” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3, No. 2 (December 1942): 169–218. [Link]

In any event, the play’s comparison between metrical form and free verse, as they concern ‘mass production’ - the one of poems, the other of poets, – seems to suggest that these two poetic modes have much more in common than they would each like to believe.

The drama fails to ignite, as did the duel (Abercrombie neatly bested Pound by suggesting as his choice of weapon that they pelt each other with copies of their unsold books), but it’s interesting for the scenario Frost embeds it in. Pound is Ezekiel Poise (a name poking fun at Pound’s Idaho medievalism by combining poesy and Boise) who has set up a poetry bureau in which rich young idiots are coached in free verse, which Poise then supplies to tame editors who would ‘publish anything Ezekiel sends them’. Imagists made much of the similarities between metrical form and production-line values, but the implication here is that it’s free verse which allows the ‘mass production of poets’, by simply making things too easy.

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.

Hugo Friedrich called translation “enrichment.” That he is still working within the Schliermachian idea can be seen in Friedrich’s idea that the flow of translation is always one way: something is being enriched in either the target or source language at the expense of exactitude in the other. Translation is imperfect, and one side must always suffer.

Levinas and Benjamin have slightly different takes on this, both of which I think are more dynamic and thus harder to put in practice unless you’re a gifted linguist (George Steiner comes to mind as a fruitful example of the Benjaminian style).

Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator is noteworthy in its celebration and indeed ennobling of the oft-neglected art of translation, here raised (in his mystical Marxist manner) to the level of “task.” The task of the translator, it turns out, is a central task for humanity: it is one of the only acts (maybe the only?) through which one gets a glimpse of “pure language.” Benjamin thinks translation strips language down from the physical husk that covers it (all the physical stuff we do with our voice box, mouth, and lips; all the physicality of the written word on the page) in order to reveal the pure essence at its core: MEANING. Benjamin’s ideal translation, as he says at the end, would be an interlinear version of the Bible in every human language, lined up one on top of the other.

For Levinas, translation is necessary for both the translated text and the culture doing the translating. There is no one-way enrichment like there is in Schliermacher and Friedrich. In fact, translation is only the site “around” which different periods of history communicate–translation is where two periods interface. What they communicate are “thinkable meanings.” Here is Levinas’s idea of “exegesis” in Nine Talmudic Readings:

To evoke freedom and non-dogmatism in exegesis today means one of two things. Either it means being a proponent of the historical method…or to engage in structuralist analysis. No one can refuse the insights of history. But we do not think they are sufficient for everything…Our first task is therefore to read in a way that respects [the text's] givens and conventions, without mixing in the questions arising for a philologist or historian to the meaning that derives from its juxtapositions. Did audiences in Shakespeare’s theatre spend their time showing off their critical sense by pointing out that there were only wooden boards where the stage sign indicated a palace or a forest? It is only after this initial task of reading the text within its own conventions that we will try to translate the meaning suggested by its particulars into a modern language…Our approach assumes that the different periods of history can communicate around thinkable meanings, whatever the variations in the signifying material which suggests them.

Note the phrase “thinkable meanings”: if things are capable of being thought they are just as capable of not being thought. Meaning is not always there, hidden, waiting to be found, as for Benjamin. The process of translation is central for Levinas, for it is in that process where both sides start talking to one another.