Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology 9780226118758

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I m a g i nat i v e Horizons

I m a g i nat i v e Horizons       l i t e r a ry- p h i l o s o p h i ca l a n t h r o p o l o gy

Vi n c e n t C r a p a n z a n o

       

V C is distinguished professor of comparative literature and anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of numerous books, including The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry, Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation, and Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London ©  by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published  Printed in the United States of America            : --- (cloth) : --- (paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crapanzano, Vincent, – Imaginative horizons : an essay in literary-philosophical anthropology / Vincent Crapanzano. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.  --- (cloth : alk. paper) —  --- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Philosophical anthropology. . Literature and anthropology. I. Title.  .  —dc  ø The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,  .-.

              

                

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius— it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. H J, The Art of Fiction





Introduction





Imaginative Horizons



The Between



xi





Body, Pain, and Trauma







Hope



The Transgressive and the Erotic



Remembrance





World-Ending



   



 









   book, but especially in a book as wide-ranging as Imaginative Horizons, there are always far more people who have contribA uted to it, often unwittingly, in a simple aside or a casual remark they no longer remember, than can possibly be thanked individually. I acknowledge them first of all. I am particularly indebted to Karl-Heinz Kohl, the director of the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt am Main, who was kind enough to invite me to deliver the Jensen Memorial Lectures upon which this book is based. Not only did Karl-Heinz arrange for the lectures to be given at Literaturhaus, whose staff I also want to thank, but he proved to be an astute and often critical interlocutor and fine friend. I thank Burkhard Schnepel and Holgar Jebens, as well as my unreasonably faithful audience, for their provocative questions. I am deeply indebted to Gary Smith, the director of the American Academy in Berlin, and his staff for providing me with the time, as an Ellen Maria Gorrissen and Berlin Prize fellow, to turn my lectures into a book. Gary has an uncanny ability to bring together a group of diverse scholars, artists, writers, and musicians who not only broaden one another’s perspectives but actually get along. I made many friends there, including the poet Christopher Middleton, who was kind enough to provide me with a translation of any number of German Expressionist poems— among them Jakob von Hoddis’s “Weltende,” which I quote in this book— and Daniel Boyarin, who deepened my understanding of the biblical passages I discuss. I must give special thanks to Yolande Korb, who managed to find for me even the most obscure books in the Berlin libraries. I must also acknowledge the Scholar Incentive Awards I received from the City University of New York. They helped support my research and writing. My thanks also go to Ellen de Riso and Barbara Pospisil. I lectured on several of the themes in this book—most notably the

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body and pain, hope, imaginative horizons, and transgression—at a number of German universities (Heidelberg, Marburg, Bremen, Göttingen, Konstanz, Frankfurt am Oder, and the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin) as well as at the University of Montreal, University of California, Berkeley, Case Western Reserve University, and Columbia University; I benefited greatly from the comments I received. I want particularly to thank Mariella Pandolfi, who first asked me to deliver a paper on the body for her seminar at the University of Montreal and later published an Italian version of what has become chapter  in her book, Perché il corpo: Utopia, sofferenza, desiderio (Rome: Meltemi, ). Klaus-Peter Köpping and Ursula Rao arranged for the publication of yet another version of that same article in German in their collection Im Rausch des Rituals: Gestaltung und Transformation der Wirklichkeit in körperlicher Performanz (Münster: LIT Verlag, ). My chapter on hope is also based on the keynote lecture I delivered to the Swiss Anthropological Society at their annual meeting in Fribourg in the spring of . A version of that chapter appears in Cultural Anthropology (“Reflections on Hope As a Category of Social and Psychological Analysis,” vol. , no.  []). My first chapter, on imaginative horizons, is based on the keynote lecture which opened a conference on violating borders organized by the Graduiertenkollegs at Humboldt University in Berlin. I have, of course, benefited from innumerable conversations with friends and colleagues, including the participants in conferences on dreams in Bad Homburg and on cargo cults in Arrhus and, also, Fazia Aitel, Ann Anagnost, Sabine Arnaud, Talal Asad, Barbara Balaj, Timothy Beal, Jonathan Boyarin, Julia Butterfield, Thomas Csordas, Daniela Danieli, Elsa Davidson, Susan de Beer, Robert Desjarlais, Judith Feaster, David Ferris, Aris Fioretos, Steve Foster, Dilip Gaonkar, Wlad Godzich, Anja Grothe, Michael Hersch, Ellen Hertz, Trenholme Junghans, Hans-Peter Köpping, Ben Lee, Louise Lennihen, Evonne Levy, the late Tullio Maranhao, Richard Maxwell, Kelly McKinney, Carmen Medeiros, Suzana Mia, Mark Muenzel, Paul Parin, Stefania Pandolfo, Beverly and Bill Pepper, Beth Povinelli, Michael Rottenburg, Aseel Sawalha, Jane Schneider, Frieder Schnock, Kenneth Scott, Jonathan Shannon, Robin Sherif, Michael Silverstein, Jacob Stern, Renata Stih, Katie Trumpener, Greg Urban, Ana Vicentini, Bea Vidacs, Julian Vigo, and Michael Warner. I must give special thanks to Teresa Venditto, who graciously provided me with the material for the first section of chapter . I am particularly grateful to my students, who listened with critical patience as I rehearsed many of the ideas that have found their way



into this book in my seminars at the CUNY Graduate Center. I am, of course, indebted to T. David Brent, my friend and editor at the University of Chicago Press, for his encouragement and for steering my book through to publication and to Clair James for his fine, assiduous copyediting. Finally, I thank my wife, Jane, my daughter, Aleksandra (whom I still call Wicky), my son-in-law, John, and my dog, Pico, whose insistent needs gave me peripatetic occasion from which I profited greatly. Jane, of course, deserves even greater thanks than I can give her for both her patience and her impatience and most certainly her bright-red editorial crayon.

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The imagination is the first faculty that one must study in the savage because it is the one that nourishes all the others. The imagination is always the first faculty to develop in the individual; thus, the development of this faculty will be the easiest sign for recognizing the position that the individual occupies in the scale of intellectual perfection [ perfectionnement]. J-M  G, “Considération sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages” 1

  chapters that follow are based on lectures I gave in the spring of  at the invitation of the Frobenius Institute and Literaturhaus in Frankfurt am Main. The lecture series was dedicated to the German anthropologist and second director of the institute ( –), Adolph Jensen, whose work is little known in the United States.2 Jensen’s concern for cultural history, especially for the development and function of myth and ritual, had led him to the problem of cultural creativity—a problem that American anthropologists, with the possible exception of Alfred Kroeber, have tended to avoid.3 They have spoken instead, in an often deterministic fashion, of invention, adaptation, syncretism, cultural change, development, and evolution. Despite their frequent references to the imagination, today’s anthropologists have been less concerned with imaginative processes than with the product of the imagination.4 Nor have they really shown the concern for individual imagination that Joseph-Marie de Gérando advocated in the methodological treatise he wrote in  for the Société des Observateurs de l’Homme, one of the founding documents of French anthropology. The individual has always been something of an embarrassment in anthropology. I named my lectures “Toward an Anthropology of the Imagination,” a title that I have chosen not to use for this book, because, while I am con-

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cerned with the imagination, my focus here is more specific. As I explain in chapter , I have used the French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s image of the arrièrepays, the hinterland, the beyond, as a kind of governing trope, a point of dispersion and return, for this book. It has allowed me to give some unity to the book without submitting the range of my concerns to a confining order that would probably contradict my intentions. My concern is with openness and closure, with the way in which we construct, wittingly or unwittingly, horizons that determine what we experience and how we interpret what we experience (if, indeed, we can ever separate experience from interpretation). I am less interested in particular horizons—that is, with those that are expressly elaborated, as in, say, apocalyptic texts like the Book of Revelation, or in divisive political arrangements like apartheid—than in those fuzzy horizons, “auras” may be a more appropriate word, that always accompany experience and resist full articulation. For me, they are a little like the shadow in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous children’s poem “My Shadow,” a poem that both delighted and terrified me as a child. My point is that when a horizon and whatever lies beyond it are given articulate form, they freeze our view of the reality that immediately confronts us—fatally I’d say, were it not for the fact that once that beyond is articulated, a new horizon emerges and with it a new beyond. The dialectic between openness and closure is, I believe, an important dimension of human experience and certainly one worthy of anthropological consideration.5 When I was asked to give the Jensen lectures, I was finishing Serving the Word, which treated literalism as a prevailing interpretive style in America. My first thought was to base the lectures on that book, but I quickly dismissed the idea. I found it far too restricting. I had lived too long with the deadening closure of literalist thought—its fear of figuration—and what I missed was the wonder of imagination, something the Christian Fundamentalists with whom I’d been working would certainly have considered depraved and, in the extreme, as a surrendering on my part to satanic influence. I remembered Bonnefoy’s short book L’Arrière-pays, first published in  by Skira in a series called Sentiers de la Création, Paths of Creation, which I had read several years earlier with great pleasure. I sat down at my computer and in not much more than an hour wrote out what became the outline of my lectures and now of this book. I had not thought much about the imagination since I’d defended my senior college thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre ’s phenomenology of the imagination, and certainly not from any anthropological perspective. What I outlined that afternoon was, no doubt, a reaction to my research on literalism, the result of some long unconscious



unease, frustration, or percolation. I believe that what I have to say here has to be understood at an emotional and, obviously, an imaginative level, as a sort of countertext to Serving the Word. In  I began my book Tuhami with the words: “Tuhami is an experiment. Whether it is successful or not I cannot say.” The same could be said for Imaginative Horizons today, more than twenty years later. Though Tuhami and Imaginative Horizons are dissimilar in both subject and form, both books play with form and subject to create—at least ideally—disquiet and even, I hope, a kind of conceptual turbulence in the reader. In Tuhami I attempted to unmask the ways in which ethnographic writings, particularly the life history, leave their imprint on supposedly objective data. I was interested in the role of power and desire in the interlocutory dynamics of ethnographic research and their effect on the ethnographies that reported that research. In one sense, Tuhami could be seen as deconstructive. Imaginative Horizons, far more self-consciously than the lectures upon which it is based, rests on montage for what I would call its rhetorical effect. (It is because of this that I stress its relationship to Serving the Word.) I have attempted to juxtapose the unexpected—ethnographic descriptions with Romantic poems, a phrase from one of Djuna Barnes’s drunken characters with a by-now-overworked image from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (, – ); the end-of-the-world fantasies of a Bernese peasant with a New Guinea people ’s dread of apocalypse—in order to shake the reader out of conceptual complacency or, worse, conventional epistemological anxiety. My aim here, as in Tuhami and other of my writings, is embarrassingly naive: to destroy prejudices, open horizons, and promote creative thought and action. I write “embarrassingly naive” because it is a pedagogic aim to which I am committed and, at the same time, about which I am far too skeptical to assume it can ever be achieved. I live in amazement at the capacity of human beings (myself included) either to reduce the strange to the familiar, the exotic to the banal, or, in extremis, to eliminate the strange, the exotic, and the foreign by violent means. The reductions are all too often facilitated by academic disciplines that do so uncritically in the name of one science or another. Let me be clear: I am not opposed to scientific approaches to society, culture, and the psyche, provided that () they meet appropriate epistemological and methodological standards and () they acknowledge, as best they can, their moral and political implications. My concern is with those approaches to anthropology—and, for that matter, the other human sciences—that model themselves on some other science, usually a privileged

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one, whose subject matter is so radically different from that of the anthropologist (or the human scientist) as to preclude any meaningful purchase. At best, these “privileged” sciences serve a decorative function, one that might even facilitate research funding; at worst, they so narrow anthropology’s purview as to eliminate what may be its most vital significance. We have, of course, come a long way since Marvin Harris’s () vociferous reduction of Aztec sacrifice and ritual cannibalism to protein need, but it would be foolish to assume that anthropologists today are immune to the privilege of the hard sciences. More important, we have to recognize that anthropology is what used to be called a moral science; that is, it explores the ways in which people regulate and evaluate their associations with one another at both communal and intimate levels of life. The anthropologist is immediately implicated in the world in which he does his research. This has been noted time and time again and is, in fact, the concern of most ethics committees within the discipline. But preoccupation with the anthropologist’s conduct in the field, including the consequences of his or her research for those studied, however important it is (and it is of immense importance), should not blind us to our role in our own moral communities. I am not referring so much to our political engagement—our pleas on behalf of the poor, the denigrated, and nowadays the dying—as to the way in which our descriptions of the lives and cultures of those we study determine attitudes toward them and toward ourselves. We assume enormous moral and political responsibility in our constructions and representations of our subjects. If, in the name of one science or another, we dismiss most everything the people we study hold important—their religion, their values, their expressive culture, their culinary habits, their sexual practices— as epiphenomena, ultimately reducible to some ecological adaptation, evolutionary response, cognitive predisposition, or genetic makeup, we devalue those people, sully their understanding of themselves and their own world, and promote our own parochialism. I am not denying the role of evolution, ecology, neurophysiology, or genetics in human life. I am simply suggesting that we take into account their preclusions, the kind of blindness they encourage, and the rhetoric they facilitate. To my mind, it’s important that anthropology recognize its role in unsettling the moral, as well as the cultural, presumptions of those—the general readers, students, and colleagues—to whom our studies are addressed. We have yet to study such presumptions, preferring to dismiss them as inevitable consequences of some universal or even specific sociopolitical propensity to ethnocentrism. Certainly, we have a responsibility to attend to the voice of those we study



not only in terms of what they have to say about themselves but also what they have to say about us. I have subtitled this book An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology, but not because I want to establish or perpetuate yet another division in anthropology. The proliferation of subdisciplines in anthropology, particularly in the United States, demands study not simply in terms of (perceived) organizational needs, nor as justified by the ever-increasing complexity of our subject matter, but also as a reflection of the societies in which anthropology thrives. We tend to privilege expert knowledge without always appreciating the limitations of expertise: its narrow purview, its frequent failure to critically evaluate the way in which it frames and categorizes its subject matter, the blinkers it imposes.6 I relate this to what I perceive to be a marked tendency in societies like the United States to miniaturize the outlook of their citizens. How this relates to economic and political arrangements I cannot say. It does promote a complacency that arises out of what I would describe as studied ignorance or indifference. I should add that generalists are not the opposite of experts, though they are often taken to be just that. Nor do they necessarily offer an antidote to the limitations of expertise. More often than not, like the bricoleur, the handyman, made so famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss (,  – ), they simply juggle relations between domains of expertise without questioning the way in which that knowledge is framed and articulated or how they assemble it in their generalities. I use “essay” in the singular in my subtitle less to refer to a literary genre than to an attempt—an attempt at opening anthropology’s outlook to literary and philosophical considerations, themselves embedded in particular discursive practices that are at times alien to those of anthropological practice but are, I hope, nonetheless revealing of new approaches and inherent disciplinary blindnesses. Like the literary essay, it makes no claims to completion or definitiveness.7 As I have often argued, anthropology should always be pluralized—in its national trajectories and across those trajectories. The beauty of the field lies in its fluidity—its resistance to tight compartmentalization and territorialization. It is, in essence, an interstitial discipline. In this spirit I have organized these essays as a montage, and I ask that my readers read them accordingly. For the anthropologist, less so perhaps for other readers, the force—indeed, the violence—of the montage should be familiar, since it replicates in many ways field research. We are always operating in a “space” between two or more cultures, two or more ways of taking on the world. Our ethnographies are, at some level, symp-

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toms of this confrontation and can be read as such. Given our epistemological predilections, we tend to understand this “inter-space-time” (politically, I am tempted to write) as one of struggle over the dominance of one term of the montage or the other, rather than as a constitutive space-time, as I believe the Sufis do when they speak of barzakh, the betwixt and between, as where two oceans meet, or in more aesthetic terms, as the Japanese do when they arrange objects in terms of ma, the energy-space between them. It should be obvious from these observations that I refuse to delimit not only the anthropological but also the literary and the philosophical. They are as resistant to categorization as the anthropological. I do tend to stress the individual—at least the individual perspective—rather than the social and the cultural taken as such. This is more than a personal predilection. I find that the singular has often been sacrificed to the general in the human sciences and that, more often than not, this has resulted in a distorting simplification of the human condition; in a failure fully to appreciate its ambiguous nature and the ambivalence it generates; in an implicit if not explicit emphasis on determinism; in an indifference to human creativity, transgressive possibility, and imaginative play; and in a failure to address the question of human freedom, however delusional that freedom may be. These are, of course, the concerns of the literary and the philosophical. Though I have offered interpretations of behavior, action, and expression, I have tried to resist easy explanations. As I argued in Serving the Word, I mistrust, at least heuristically, most sociological and psychological explanations. As often as not, they are like just-so stories that perpetuate ideological formations by offering us solace when we are confronted with the morally confusing, the cognitively puzzling, and the seemingly unknowable. Though they cannot be justified on strict epistemological grounds, they—like myths of origin and other explanatory tales—are, from a functionalist perspective (itself questionable) no doubt necessary for the continuance of social and psychological existence. As engaged social actors, we probably can never be good epistemologists, but we are capable at times, in moments of reflection, of disengaging ourselves enough to observe our actions and expressions from a critical perspective that meets stricter epistemological standards than those of the quotidian and may even occasionally serve as a corrective to our presumptions. Such moments, however, should also be treated cautiously, with irony, indeed with a diligent skepticism. They are never as removed from our social engagements and commitments as we ’d like or pretend. I’ve come to prefer the puzzlement generated by the montage to the complacency offered by the easy explanation.

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While the chapters in Imaginative Horizons are all, in one fashion or another, concerned with the imagination and its frontiers, I do not offer a theory of the imagination (though I make reference to several), and I am specifically concerned with the determinants of what has come to be called social imaginaries. In a recent issue of Public Culture, the political philosopher Charles Taylor offers a minimalist definition of the social imaginary. It “is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society.”8 Taylor means more than the intellectual schemes and theories through which people make sense of their reality. “I am thinking,” he writes, “rather of the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (). Unlike theoretical constructs of social reality, the social imaginary is, for Taylor, “shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society,” and is carried in popular images, stories, and legends. Although he acknowledges that theories may “infiltrate” the social imaginary, he does not discuss how this infiltration works, nor does he discuss the potential contradictions, tensions, and disjunctions in it and the ways in which they are reconciled, rationalized, ignored, or played upon rhetorically, politically, self-interestedly, and even altruistically. His aim is different. He wants to demonstrate changes that occurred in the social imaginary in the “long march” from premodernity to modernity. This isn’t the place to describe in any detail Taylor’s account—some would call it a master narrative—of how a new moral order was founded, expanded, and intensified.9 He notes that in premodern times, two orders of society prevailed, the tribal and the hierarchical, and that in both of them the moral order was understood not simply as a set of norms but, in terms of a god or the cosmos, as ontically self-realizing—that is, as “identifying features of the world that make the norms realizable.” Order in this view “tends to impose itself by the course of things” and deviations from that order are thought of in terms of “injustice.” In contrast, the morality of modernity focuses on the individual and is without immediate ontic reference; the normative order it promotes is one of “mutual respect and mutual service.” The structures of society are meant to serve these ends and are judged accordingly. The ideal social order is one in which individual purposes mesh. In furthering themselves, individuals help others. Taylor relates the changing notions of moral order to the growth of three major institutions and the practices associated with them: the economy, the public

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sphere, and democratic self-rule. All three institutions promote an imaginary that governs, or at least limits, the way people understand and evaluate social reality and the possibilities it affords them. Though I do not wish to deny the role of the social in determining how we imagine the reality we call social, I do not stress these determinations in Imaginative Horizons. I am somewhat skeptical of topographic approaches to social and cultural reality. I find that through placement, summation, and inevitable simplification, they risk perpetuating, at a metalevel, conventional social portraiture, or, if you prefer, ideology.10 Even when they admit to contradiction, tension, and disjunction, they often subsume these under a single umbrella image or concept, never stopping to question the status of the subsuming image or concept. They may well be calming—detemporalizing—glosses on turbulent consociation or, in terms that will become familiar to the reader, referentially expressed metapragmatic glosses on the indexical dramas of everyday life.11 They cannot, in any event, be separated from the social, the cultural, and the psychological reality that they describe. I’ve chosen, rather, to stress process over topography, the temporal over the spatial (recognizing that we have a propensity to spatialize the temporal rather than to temporalize the spatial), and the transient over the permanent.12 My first two chapters are concerned with laying out what I mean by imaginative horizons, the beyond, and the between. Chapter  focuses on visual imagery of both a pictorial and verbal nature, while chapter  looks at discursive styles—the laconic among the Apache and the verbose in charismatic Catholic healing—and the significance of the gaps between words and, by extension, between objects generally. Here I introduce Arab and Japanese notions of the betwixt and between (barzakh and ma) and contrast them with Victor Turner’s notion of liminality. Turner does not, in my view, recognize the possibility of a radically different epistemology founded on the liminal. Chapter  looks at the way in which the body and pain serve to anchor signification in our particular take on language. It examines, among other things, the role of pain in theories of the origin of language and the etiquette of pain as it is exemplified in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, and offers a theory of trauma that stresses the way trauma converts history into repetition. In the fourth chapter, I lay out the parameters of the category of hope—which, as I note, has received little attention in the social and psychological sciences. Through a discussion of Hopi notions of hope, I offer a critique of phenomenological approaches that do not recognize the way in which their own descriptions are rooted in

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the particular language, or grammar, in which they are made. Chapter  is devoted to transgression and the erotic. I move from a case study of a man who seeks ecstatic escape from pain through self-splitting, coupled with autoerotic performances, to a critical discussion of Georges Bataille ’s notions of eroticism (erotisme) and transgression. I argue that transgression is itself a permissible social construction. In chapter , I look at remembrance as a commemorative process and at the way that process is frozen individually through trauma and collectively through monuments and memorials. I relate the homunculus that haunts psychological theories of memory to a particularity of the first-person pronoun—to the tension-filled play between its referential and indexical functions. The final chapter on world-endings moves again from a case study—this time of a Bernese peasant convinced that he and his father were responsible for the imminent end of the world— to collective notions of apocalypse among the Australian Aborigines and a Papua New Guinea people. It concludes with a discussion of Hindu apocalypse and funeral rites taken, as I do, as allegories of creativity. Each chapter section is introduced by a quotation that, I hope, will elucidate the section theme—either by bearing directly on it or through contrast. The quotations serve as a starting point for my reflections on the theme.13 The reflections themselves are often cast as thought experiments: more free-associative than those of the philosopher but less freeassociative, more restrained intellectually, by subject matter and theory, than those that occur in psychoanalysis or a spell of musing. My aim is to uncover some of the intellectual orientations, rhetorical maneuvers, and argumentative vectors that underlie the chosen theme: body, pain, hope, memory, trauma, transgression, or death. I am at once subject to these orientations and vectors and, by assuming an ethnographic stance, at a remove, though never free, from them. In writing in this fashion I run the risk of spinning out a never-ending set of associations, as mythographers like Wilhelm Mannhardt, James Frazer, Carl Gustav Jung, and (with critical self-awareness) Claude LéviStrauss have done, but unlike them I stress discontinuity and disjunction.14 Mannhardt argues that similar practices in different cultures reveal common motives despite the often dramatically different contexts in which they occur.15 Frazer’s “amassing of juxtaposed analogies,” as Andrew Von Hendy has characterized his work, rests squarely on analogy and aims toward unveiling, again in Von Hendy’s words, “a natural mystery religion” (, , , respectively). Jung and Lévi-Strauss stress, respectively, symbolic and structural continuities. Each, as Lévi-Strauss points out with regard to

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his own project and illustrates in his ever-extending mythologiques, can, like the myth itself, find no end point. Like Mannhardt, Frazer, Jung and still others, he ends up producing a sort of meta-myth. Despite my emphasis on the disjunctive, I too risk giving expression to something like a meta-myth, for the montages I produce demand justification. They may appear to be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, excessively personal, but, at a level I can never fathom, given my embeddedness in my particular culture and language, they reflect that culture, that language, however transgressive they may appear to be. There is, I believe, no escape from this predicament, if indeed it is a predicament. My aim is, of course, different from the mythographers’, though I must acknowledge a temptation to keep amassing associations. What punctuates my work cannot simply be reduced to the constraints of argument and theory. It has as well a poetic, at least an aesthetic, dimension that has all too often been ignored in our evaluation of ethnography. Why do we describe the way we do? Why do we stop a description when we do? Why do we analogize as we do? Through the seemingly transgressive montage, I want to stress not only the arbitrariness of our constructions but the process of construction itself, including its aesthetic determinants, however aesthetics is understood. Our interpretations are always a response to the challenge posed by a metonymous set of elements or events whose occurrence is not so habitual as to be ignored or easily reduced to conventionally complaisant understanding. To simplify: through a process analogous to metaphorization and translation, two or more seemingly arbitrary contiguous elements or events are linked and given, thereby, sense. We might think, I am sometimes tempted to say, that the resolution of a metonymous relationship, itself suggestive of sheer contingency, into a metaphor and the interpretation of that metaphor, is a redemptive act in which contingency—the chaos, the fatality, it suggests—is hermeneutically overcome.16 Understood this way, interpretation takes on a harrowing dimension of existential, if not religious, import that we in our determined secularism— in our insistently reasoned or rather rationalizing realism—deny. I am neither advocating an anthropological theology nor making an appeal, romantically, to the irrational. I want simply to point out how high the stakes are in any interpretation and how we, as ordinary social actors, do our best to deny those stakes. Though peoples living in different cultures at different times respond to this hermeneutic challenge with different strategies—and with seemingly different levels of anxiety (or joy)—we have to recognize how great, indeed how dangerous, that challenge can be. In one sense an-

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thropology can be taken as the study of those responses. I note here, as the United States is at war with Iraq, that one response to the challenge is the obliteration of those who pose it. Despite the talk of, indeed the reality of, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, oil interests, and paranoid personalities, the projected war is also a Kulturkrieg. I’ve always understood anthropology less as a social science than as a philosophical discipline—in the Kantian critical tradition but by no means in a Kantian way—in which the limits of human understanding, of our cultural pretense, are laid bare. It is, I believe, the exposure of pretense that justifies an exercise that might otherwise be taken as too personal a gesture. I’m committed to the position that objectivity, at least as it is assumed by the objectivist, is in its assumptions enveloped in subjective understanding. The objective, however enveloped, is always in a contestatory relationship with the subjective. This is especially significant in those descriptive sciences, like anthropology, whose findings are so dependent on the perceptual style, social engagement, and historical, indeed spatiotemporal, position of the researcher that they cannot normally be reproduced by another researcher. My position implies neither the impossibility of evaluating such findings nor does it assume that personal confession, so rhetorically significant in American society, will provide unmediated access to the researcher’s social and cultural posture and therefore facilitate such evaluation. What is demanded is self-critical reading (understood both literally and metaphorically) that resists full closure. Throughout this book I’ll be using the complex, pluralizing, and incorporative personal pronoun “we” to refer quite deliberately to the position that is implicit in my own text. Although this “we” will be read, interpreted, and classified by you, the readers, in one way (no doubt, in many ways), I as author will inevitably understand—and misunderstand—it in other ways; as, for example, the product of an overly skeptical but somehow engaged American “intellectual” who prefers to straddle positions and delights in the disquiet such straddling produces in himself and in his real and imagined interlocutors. My use of “we,” then, is a deliberate provocation, at once appealing to my readers and estranging them from my position and, hopefully, from their own. I speak, more accurately, I try to speak, from no fixed vantage point but through (among others) the often discordant authors and informants I cite. I wish there were more, particularly from other cultural traditions. Naively, no doubt, I believe that I’m simply calling attention to the presumptive authorial positions of any ethnographer, any writer perhaps, that lay buried in institutionally determined conventions of

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writing and reading—of the interpretation of voicing in any genre, including the transgressive. In the same vein I have, at times, used the word “primitive” to refer to the traditional subjects of ethnographic research—not because I in any way accept either the primitivity of the primitive or his or her inferiority. I have used the term when it reflects a category, nowadays rather more implicit than explicit, masked as it often is by one weasel word or another— “preliterates,” “people of simpler societies,” or the proper name of one or another once-denominated primitive society—which has had a governing effect on anthropological or some other thought. My use of the “primitive” should be taken as an unmasking provocation rather than a derogation. Through the encounter with the other, one comes to an acknowledgment, a recuperation, in a somewhat different register, of oneself and one ’s world. In this sense anthropology is always exploitative of the other, and in much the same way as one discovers and even cultivates aspects of oneself through one ’s lover. This recuperative relationship is, I believe, an essential dimension of any significant relationship. It is morally questionable when the relationship precludes reciprocity and particularly distasteful when that preclusion is justified on “scientific” or some other expertise, on racial, class, ethnic, gender, or cultural superiority, or on moral or spiritual authority. Full reciprocity—as every lover, however reluctantly, knows—is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, achieved.

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I m a g i nat i v e H o r i z o n s

That flowing water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it. That broad water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it. That old age water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it. N  1

  tells of a young Navajo man who looks back across the San Juan river at his homeland, the diné bikéyah. He is overcome with loneliness and homesickness and sings this poem. It begins with a greeting, Aháláane. The diné bikéyah is the object of his longing. It is, for the Navajo, the center of the universe, the point in space, Momaday tells us, from which all concepts of the cosmos proceed. What is strikingly Navajo is the image of the border—frontier here turned back on itself—as flowing water. The mind wanders across it. The mind wanders across what is in motion. There is no stasis—just movement on movement, flowing on flowing, wandering on wandering. There has been much written in academic circles in recent years about borders, boundaries and frontiers, on their enforcement, supersession, dissolution, and porosity, on crossings and recrossings, on transmigration, all supposedly affected and effected by the Web-netting, transnationalism, and globalization of our stipulated postmodernity. Though I recognize the importance of geopolitical borders, boundaries, and frontiers, the violence they inspire, the entrapment they produce, the painful displacement they cause, and the inhuman policing they effect, I do not treat them in this book. I will not be concerned with the movement—or nonmovement—of peoples across legally constituted lines or into distinctly qualified domains of

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culture, language, and polity. Rather, I am interested in frontiers as horizons that extend from the insistent reality of the here and now into that optative space or time—the space-time—of the imaginary. It is this realm that gives us an edge, at times wrenching and painful, at times relieving and pleasurable, on the here and now in all its viscous immediacy. It allows us to escape from the insistent pull of reality, as we are, for example, by odors and tastes, which are not, at least easily, distinguishable from our experience of them. Though being caught up in immediate reality has been associated with primitive cultures and Naturvölker in our altogether questionable ethnocentric mythologies, which stress the primacy of their instinctual life and the sublimation, indeed the etherealization, of our civilized condition, we have all, at one time or another, been so consumed by reality as to lose our bearings, our sense of self and boundary. We assume, quite rightly, I believe, that our defining distance arises from our ability to represent symbolically the world including ourselves. We acknowledge the alienating violence of symbolical inscription—the difference, or as Jacques Derrida would prefer, the différance, inscription demands and perpetuates.2 (Derrida’s neologism is to call attention to the temporal dimension—the deferral—of differentiating inscription.) What seems to have escaped attention in this focus on the symbolic is its relationship to imaginative possibility—to hope, to the optative, to moods, like the subjunctive, borne by our grammars. When we reckon with the effects of symbolization and representation, we consider them in terms of desire and have elaborated a crude mechanics of desire which hardly does justice to the range and complexity of human sensibility. Unlike borders, which can be crossed (unless they are closed) and boundaries, which can be transgressed, frontiers, as I am using the word, cannot be crossed. They mark a change in ontological register.3 They postulate a beyond that is, by its very nature, unreachable in fact and in representation. My concern is with the role of what lies beyond the horizon, with the possibilities it offers us, with the licit and illicit desires it triggers, the plays of power it suggests, the dread it can cause—the uncertainty, the sense of contingency, of chance—the exaltation, the thrill of the unknown, it can provoke. Imagined, dreamt, projected, calculated, prophesied—so constructed, the beyond always turns on our take on it. Our images, dreams, projections, calculations, and prophecies may give form and substance to the beyond, but, as they do, they destroy it; for, as they construct it, they assure its displacement. And that displacement rattles our assump-

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tions about the reality from which our constructions are made. However foundational, it is not immune to our images of the beyond. I am then particularly concerned with the paradoxical ways in which the irreality of the imaginary impresses the real on reality and the real of reality compels the irreality of the imaginary. These ways cannot be separated. They are in dialectical tension. They are like lovers so entangled in each other that any determination of a singular body—or soul—is almost arbitrary. Although anthropologists have treated the imagination in one manner or another in much of what they have written, they have done so largely by indirection.4 In these essays I will look at the imagination through a trope—that of the arrière-pays, the hinterland, and its correlatives: the audelà and the ailleurs, the beyond and the elsewhere. I use the French arrièrepays, ailleurs, and au-delà, not so much to suggest through foreign words an elsewhere beyond—or at least at the outer limit of—our immediate perception and understanding, but to recall the work of the French poet and art critic Yves Bonnefoy, whose little book L’Arrière-pays () is the inspiration for my reflections on an anthropology of the imagination. L’Arrière-pays evokes in a poetic manner what we can translate only poorly as the hinterland. “Hinterland” is a heavy word, one that connotes backwardness, provinciality, isolation, and may have, as it does in German, disagreeable political connotations. In French, it is lighter, less weighted with political significance, yet suggestive of backwardness. Arrière refers to the back, the rear in the ordinary and military senses of the word. Arrière means “backward” and is used to describe regions as well as people: the retarded, the feebleminded. It also means out-of-date, overdue, in arrears. Pays, country, land, or village, is a rather homey word, evocative of origin and roots, as when the French speak of their “pays”—their village of origin, that of their ancestors. Arrière-pays calls to mind others words, such as arrière-plan, background, and by extension its synonym, fond, as in the background of a painting. It suggests very concretely a land, a place, an intimate one, more primitive, simpler, out-of-date perhaps, which lies elsewhere, ailleurs, beyond where one is and yet intimately related to it. It is in an owing relation, a reciprocal one, with the here-and-now from which it is declared a hinterland. Bonnefoy takes us on a poetic voyage that can barely be contained even within his Mallarmean prose. It is a personal, romantic voyage through places (Italy, Greece, Rajasthan), through pictures (those of Piero, Poussin, Degas, and Mondrian), through narratives (a long-forgotten children’s

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story), words, and Latin syntax into that hinterland, which resists entry and requires of him, as of every voyager, return.5 Bonnefoy’s relation to the hinterland, which continually points to the irreal in our concrete certainties, appears to me to be one of temptation and seduction. The hinterland is, to use the title of arguably his best poem, dans le leurre du seuil—in the lure, the snare, the delusion even of the threshold (Bonnefoy ). He is drawn into irreality, the imaginary, only to discover its disappearance, or its banal concreteness, as it is displaced by his presence, his description, his terrestrial commitment. He often figures what he takes to be the nurturing relationship between the arrière-pays—that oneiric “plain of pride, but also dissatisfaction, hope, credulity, departure, and fever for the ever next”—and the here and now as marriage.6 He asks whether one only desires the elsewhere where the here is affirmed.7 For Bonnefoy, the hinterland evokes those dimensions of experience that lie beyond the immediate perception of an object, a landscape. These include the anxiety he feels at a crossroad: “There, two steps from the path I did not take and from which I am already distanced, yes, it’s there that a land of higher essence opens, where I could have gone to live and which I have since then lost.”8 It is a land of pure possibility, of desire, and fear. Though imagined as real, as realistically, as the earth in its full, material presence, to which Bonnefoy claims a special attachment, this other land takes violent possession of him and deprives him of the happiness the earth offers him. “For the more I am convinced that it is a phrase or rather a music—at once sign and substance—the more cruelly I feel that a key among those which allow us to hear it is missing. We are disunited in that unity, and action can neither sustain nor resolve that which presses on our intuition.”9 This is not the place to pursue Bonnefoy’s worry over the status of the word—the poetic word—which he takes to be of the material world. Nor is it the place to ask, as Bonnefoy does, why we cannot dominate what is, like the edge of a terrace. Why we can’t exist, “but differently than at the surface of things, at the bend in roads, in randomness.” He notes—to our purpose—that some works of art, such as Poussin’s Bacchanale à la joueuse de luth, give us an idea of this impossible virtuality. The blue in Poussin’s painting, he says, has “the tempestuous immediacy, the nonconceptual clairvoyance that is necessary to our consciousness as a whole.” The beyond is like shadows—the ombres to which Bonnefoy frequently refers: it cannot be contained. It slips away—to appear again just when we have thought, in relief or in despair, that we have finally done away with it.

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Bonnefoy insists that the arrière-pays is inaccessible, nonexistent—the way any object of the imagination (as Jean-Paul Sartre [] argued in his phenomenological studies of the imagination) is absent, nonexistent, a negation, nonbeing. And yet, as Bonnefoy reminds us, the hinterland can be situated up to a point, that is, if one abandons the laws of contiguity of ordinary geography and the law of the excluded middle. “In other words, the summit has a shadow, which hides it, but this shadow does not cover the entire surface of the earth,” he images.10 Perhaps. What makes the inaccessibility of the hinterland terrifying is less its inaccessibility than its determining role in our perception of that which we take naively to be accessible: that which we actually perceive, experience, touch, and feel. Imagined—or, better still, imaginable—it remains elusive. As the philosopher Edward Casey notes: “In fact, we do not, strictly speaking, observe what we imagine at all, for we are not in a position to subject imagined objects and events to the kind of scrutinizing that may be directed toward what we perceive” (, ). It is this elusiveness, this determining absence of the accessible, which is terrifying; for that which we perceive is always determined—up to a point, I’m compelled to say—by that absence, that imagined presence. It is more than contingency that frightens us. It is the artifice of factuality, of our empiricism, our realism, to which we blind ourselves—often through absurdist methodologies of truth and naively positivist philosophies. With these we are all familiar. Oddly, Bonnefoy shares the empiricist’s terror. Despite his fascination with the hinterland, he appears more comfortable in the concrete here-andnow. His ambivalence, however artfully displayed and rhetorically manipulated, runs through his text. He knows the limits of the real as he knows those of the imaginary. He knows their entanglement and the disquiet that that entanglement, its necessity, calls forth. We have, however, to ask whether there is any reason why we should be terrified by the hinterland, by the imaginative possibility it offers and denies, by (the impossibility of ) crossing over? Can we not take pleasure in its irreality, in its possibility, the play it facilitates? Are we culturally and historically bonded to fear and anxiety before imaginative possibility? Before the absence—the nonbeing— that we attribute to the imaginary? Are we victims of a puritanical epistemology of presence? Or are these fears, this anguish, an essential component of the human condition? I do not know. But I can imagine and do indeed know the pleasure that that possibility furnishes, the release, the escape it affords. What troubles me is the banality, the repetitiveness, of our articu-

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lations of the hinterland. What solace I take is in its continual displacement: the mastery it refuses.

 And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real. W S, “Holiday in Reality”11

  imaginative horizons and the hinterland beyond, I want to offer a critique of certain of the empirical presuppositions of our science. I am not dismissing empiricism per se, nor science, anthropological science, but rather a particular take on empiricism (on reality) that denies or at least ignores an important dimension of human experience—one with which we are all familiar. Though I want to affirm the romantic roots of anthropology, I am not advocating veneration of the irrational, the irreal, the imagination. My aim is much more mundane. Like William James, I want to call attention to that dimension of experience that insofar as it resists articulation, indeed disappears with articulation, has in fact been ignored. In his plea to reinstate “the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life,” James noted that “the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest parts of our minds as they actually live.” He writes:

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The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would flow. It is just the free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of when it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it,—or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. ( James ,  – )

James’s rush of metaphors is telling. The halo, the penumbra—I prefer the aura—that surrounds all experience, perception, and understanding can only be evoked. Fuzzy, shadowy, it is a necessary component, I believe, of all thought, perception, and experience. It may be conceived of as a source of creativity, as the Romantics did, and as we find in dreams and the unconscious, but I am reluctant to postulate such creativity, for we know

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only that horizons appear as an opening up, an edge, a falling out, away, through . . . I cannot find an appropriate preposition. The association of imaginative auras and horizons with creativity, however compelling it may seem to us, is historically constituted and remains, as we must acknowledge anthropologically, hypothetical. We must not forget that it is during the Enlightenment that the idea of the imagination, as we know it, was born.12 Like James, the literary critic Jean Starobinski stresses the determining role of the imagination in the perception—the constitution—of reality. “Insinuated into perception itself, mixed with the operations of memory, opening up around us a horizon of the possible, escorting the project, the hope, the fear, speculations—the imagination is much more than a faculty for evoking images which double the world of our direct perceptions: it is a distancing power thanks to which we represent to ourselves distant objects and we distance ourselves from present realities. Hence, the ambiguity that we discover everywhere: the imagination, because it anticipates and previews, serves action, draws before us the configuration of the realizable before it can be realized” (,  –). Not only does the imaginative consciousness allow us to transcend (dépasser) the immediacy of the present instant in order to grasp a future that is at first indistinct, Starobinski argues, but it enables us to project our “fables” in a direction that does not have to reckon with the “evident universe.” It permits fiction, the game, a dream, more or less voluntary error, pure fascination. It lightens our existence by transporting us into the region of the phantasm. In turn it facilitates our “practical domination over the real” or our breaking ties with it. Nothing can, of course, guarantee the success of the anticipatory imagination. It may end up producing only “an empty image of hope” (). Bonnefoy’s image of the arrière-pays stresses the spatial dimension of the beyond; Starobinski, the temporal. His primary concern is with the literary imagination. Bonnefoy does try to capture the temporality of the beyond through narrative movement and metaphors of the river and the voyage, but ultimately, given our inability to convey time as we describe it, he failed. The aura is chimerical. It is in constant, reflexive tension with the flow of articulate experience. It feeds into that experience as it is fed by it. James, who was less concerned with the reflexive relationship than I am, described it in terms of the uneven pace of consciousness. There are “resting places” and “places of flight.” The former are usually occupied by “sensorial imaginations,” which can be held in consciousness for an indefinite term without changing, while the latter “are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contem-

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plated in the periods of comparative rest.” He decries our inability to capture introspectively the “transitive” parts of consciousness. “The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks” ( James , ). The imaginative aura is anticipatory, independently so, as when one begins a thought, a sentence, a drawing, a musical composition without knowing and yet knowing, indeed with some certainty, how it will end, that it will come to some sort of fruition even if that fruition is a failure. It can be related to what the French novelist Nathalie Sarraute referred to as tropisms, those indefinable, inner movements of consciousness that appear and disappear so rapidly that we barely perceive them, despite the often intense sensations they produce in us. They have direction, like leaves of a plant turning toward light, roots toward water, and are, according to Sarraute, at the source of our gestures—our actions. They can be communicated, she insists, only through images that produce analogous effects in one ’s reader.13 But, it need not have direction. It might equally well be related to reverie, those seemingly purposeless movements of thought and image that appear to be without direction. The French philosopher of the imagination Gaston Bachelard, who insists on the unbridgeable polarity between concept and image—the first he finds masculine, the second feminine—argues that “the image can only be studied through the image, by dreaming images as they gather in reverie” (, ). Phenomenologists would relate what I am calling the imaginative horizon of perception to the periphery of consciousness, at the outer limits of our attention, as background. They would insist, though, as Husserl does, that the periphery is simply an extension of the perceived—and not the imagined—world. “Every perception has its perceptual background. The thing which is grasped in perception has an environment of things which coappear perceptually.”14 For them the world given us through perception is a “massive, all-inclusive whole” (Casey , ). Its periphery may lack clarity, that is, until attention is directed to it. Then, it becomes as clear as any perception. Psychologists too would insist on the extension of the perceptual field. They would understand its anticipatory quality, not in terms of imaginative possibility, but as prelinguistic, preverbal, precognitive, preperceptive. The “pre-” does not do away, however, with the fact that the horizon itself presupposes language, cognition, and perception. It is, in Jacques Lacan’s terms, a precipitate of the symbolic order. Despite our claims to their immediacy, the “pre-” does call attention to a deferral in our

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perception, thought, imagination, and experience—a deferral to whatever composes the hinterland. Deferral refers not only to postponement in time but also to an expression of respect. In our rush to the articulate, we have perhaps forgotten this courtesy.

 The dream is a second life. I could not penetrate without a shudder its gates of ivory or horn, which separate us from the invisible world. G  N, “Aurélia”15

 J’ metaphors, Bonnefoy’s, and my own suggest, we cannot describe the aura, the hinterland, without somehow losing it. Our conA structions of the beyond are always slippery. They are, in a sense, like a dream. We experience it, we recall it, but our telling it leaves us with a sense of betrayal, even if our telling gives us relief from the anxiety that surrounds it. It is not simply that our words do not do justice to what we dreamed; it is that they change experiential register. They create a distance between the experience of the dream and its articulation. The dream loses its immediacy, that sense of immanence, of imposition, of entrapment (so evident in nightmares) that we may perhaps liken, as an analogue, to our sense of destiny, nemesis. The distance may be understood in terms of the gap between word and thing, signifier and signified, symbol and symbolized, which has achieved such theoretical preeminence in recent years, and the metaphorizations, as wound, for example, or castration, it has provoked. Recounted, the dream is circulated and subject to all the hazards of circulation and exchange. Moroccans with whom I worked saw great and potentially dangerous power in the dream. In telling a dream for the first time, they said, the dreamer transferred its power—good or evil—to his or her audience. Bad dreams were first told to a rock to neutralize them, but how could one be sure . . . ? The circulation of dreams anticipates a moral etiquette.16 I want to stress the role of interlocution in the understanding of dreams. In its first experience, the dream, though singularly personal, is, I believe, the product of complex interlocutory forces. Indeed, I would argue that it is—by the standards of waking life—faulted communication that gives the dream-experience its particular quality. It is neither addressed to a definable interlocutor nor subject to ordinary communicative and linguistic conventions.17 It consists, as Freud among so many others, has emphasized,

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of perceptual—mainly visual—and verbal debris, the residues of the day or days that immediately preceded it, which are conjoined by a “grammar” of desire and taboo. Their organization bears only a tangential relationship to the conventions of everyday narration. (I should note that among the residues are narrative chunks that sometimes give the dream-experience, at least fragments of it, a sense of cohesion: an episodic quality.) Though we are wont to take the narrated dream as the dream itself, we have to recognize a distinction. As Lacan repeatedly pointed out, we do not interpret dreams but dream texts.18 The dynamics we attribute to its formation—in psychoanalysis, condensation and displacement—are those of language: metaphor and metonymy.19 And yet we must remember—a point missed by many dream-theorists—that the dream-text, however distorting, is itself evocative of the dream-experience, perhaps even formative of it. It is appellative. It evokes our experience of the dream, and presumably those of our interlocutors. It is what is called forth—the dream—that gives the dream recitation value. It is this appellative function of language, as we understand language, that has sparked so much epistemological trouble about the status of experience and its representations. As with the dream, so do our constructions—and our evocations—of that which lies beyond the imaginative frontier translate experience into text. (I use “text” here in a loose way—to include the oral as well as the written, however “oral” and “written” are locally understood.) Our constructions situate it within understanding. They may be interpreted, evaluated, and explained in accordance with current interpretive, evaluative, and explanatory procedures that, in circular fashion, they themselves index. Like the constructions, these procedures may also be studied ethnographically. We can look at the way in which the horizon itself is shaped in descriptions, narratives, and art and how it is manipulated rhetorically for, say, political reasons. We can examine the way in which the beyond—the hinterland—is evoked, described, symbolized, integrated into various understandings (geo-symbolic, psychological, religious, mystical, oneiric), and circulated. (The great French critic of German Romanticism Albert Béguin refers to what we are calling auras as dreams, even more mysterious than the dreams of the night, which accompany one throughout the day, “so close to the surface that they show themselves [affleurer] at the least shock” [Béguin , viii].) We can consider the appropriate languages for describing it— the poetic, for example—and the way these languages give it spatial and temporal shape. We can relate it to prevailing notions of self, innerness, outerness, otherness, and intersubjectivity and to the psychological facul-

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ties as they (as well as the notion of faculty itself ) are understood. Consider Bonnefoy’s evocation of the hinterland, as an example, his choice of “hinterland” as an appropriate figuration. Consider James’s water metaphors. Or my attempt to describe it—to separate experience from articulation. These are subject to study. Ethnographies are themselves constructions of the hinterland. There is nothing particularly innovative in what I am suggesting other than the choice of subject matter. In the chapters that follow, as I stated in the introduction, I consider various hinterlands: those of the future and the past, of hope and memory, of ecstasy and world-ending. I am particularly concerned with the way in which their articulations—even those, like the apocalyptic scenarios of Christian Fundamentalism, which press toward finality—produce still new hinterlands. We can attribute the desire for fixity to anxiety before the unknown and the uncertain, but such psychological explanations have to be weighed against the social and cultural milieu in which they are made. We have tended to give priority to anxiety in many of our psychological explanations. Think of Freud. Think of Heidegger and the existentialists. But we might as easily attribute the desire for fixity to the pleasures of invention and (illusory) domination. We have to recognize the way in which language, and our attitudes toward language and narration, facilitate fixity. There are other languages and linguistic understandings, as we shall see, like the Navajo, which would seem less conducive to such fixations. We have, though, to be as wary of language explanations as of psychological ones. Not only do these explanations arise out of particular cultural and social preoccupations but they feed back on—confirm, enrich—these preoccupations. They are conducive to complacency.20 Of course, just as we desire fixity, so we desire openness. We fear closure; we delight in possibility. Obviously each community has its own tolerance for openness and closure, fixity and looseness. But whether cultural—or individual—emphasis is given to the one or the other, the fact remains that once the hinterland, once possibility, is articulated, it is somehow fixed and constraining, determining further possibilities: the newly displaced hinterland. Our understanding of the imagination is dominated by the visual. But can we not “imagine” the beyond in musical terms? In tactile or even gustatory and olfactory ones? In propriocentric ones? In varying combinations of these—and perhaps even other—senses? The imagination may simply refer to an organizing principle or faculty: one which conjoins the logically and conventionally disparate. The linking of imagination and picture is, I believe, culturally and historically specific. It relates to the hegemony of the

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visual that has characterized our understanding at least since Plato and is subject nowadays to considerable critical debate (see Levin , particularly his introduction). To be sure, the psychological image and the picture share many features—the absence or nonexistence of their object—but they differ in significant ways. The picture is perceived, framed, perduring, subject to scrutiny from various vantage points: an object that can figure as such in conversational exchanges and be exchanged. It has economic as well as symbolic value. It is usually someone else ’s creation or, if it should happen to be one ’s own, it has independence, history, a past. One can learn from it. It has an archival existence. The psychological image is, on the other hand, imperceptible, fleeting, spontaneous, and can be viewed in only one way—the way it is presented. It changes, often dramatically, with every shift in consciousness. In itself it has no exchange value, and what symbolic value it may have is entirely personal. It suffers from what Sartre has called, an “essential poverty”: it has no relationship with the rest of the world, and the elements that compose it are few and minimally related. One can learn nothing from the psychological image that one does not already know, Sartre insists (,  –). The picture plays an important role in Bonnefoy’s evocation of the hinterland. We give it evidential priority. We understand space in its terms rather than in those of sound or touch, as is perhaps done in other societies.21 Pictures, even within a single artistic tradition like that of the West, evoke the hinterland in different ways. We may call the two most important, for lack of better terms, the vertical and the horizontal. In the vertical mode, an object—a figure in a Byzantine icon, for example—has a symbolic referent and a constellation of associations with that referent. This mode is essentially denotative and ideational. It calls forth through a conventional code, one edging on the arbitrary, a world of meaning that transcends and is independent of what is depicted. Where this mode predominates, there is often little or no background, just a figure—God, Christ, the Virgin Mary—against an empty background. The horizontal mode is connotative. It depends on background—that, at any rate, which cannot be immediately reduced to denotation. Unlike the denotative pole, whose referent, as the art critic Norman Bryson notes, is simply recognized, the connoted is broader in scope, extending beyond any single denotative meaning, ambiguous, giving often enough the illusion of reality, demanding interpretation. It creates horizons, opens up possibilities, imaginative ones, that in turn enrich the depicted reality, if not the depiction itself.22 Think of a mountain landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Often, as in

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his painting of the Riesengebirge in the Hermitage, our eyes are driven from the foreground to the horizon, in this case by the snow-capped mountains and bright, luminescent sky. Even in his more intimate mountainscapes, what we see in the foreground is perceived in terms of what lies beyond the mountains: other mountains, a valley, a village, a farmer tilling the soil, a harvest celebration, a funeral procession. We do not know. We can only imagine. When we look at the foreground of the picture, however, we do not usually imagine in any concrete way what lies beyond the mountains, but our perception is, as it were, infused by imaginative possibilities. As numerous as these possibilities appear to be, they are not infinite in number. Unless I am engaging in, say, a self-conscious postmodern parody, imagining a world of honking cars, peasants staring into computers, or factories spewing forth noxious fumes—which would preclude any appreciation of the mountainscape in its own terms—our imaginative constructs, as diffuse as they are, are limited by Friedrich’s romantic assumption, his idealization of nature, the sublime his mountains evoke. The relationship between foreground and hinterland is, however, reciprocal. Were we, in fact, to articulate the hinterland as some sort of postmodernist phantasmagoria, we would certainly see Friedrich’s landscape differently. Aside from the play between foreground and hinterland, there is also the play between the vertical and horizontal, the denotative and connotative poles of the painting that enrich its imaginative possibility. Their reciprocity is well-illustrated in Friedrich’s Cross on the Mountain. For the first time in Western art, so at least it has been maintained, the artist places a Christian altar in a mountain landscape. Here conventional and personal symbolism merge. A cathedral rising in the background gives the painting a spiritually transcendent aura. The mountain suggests, conventionally, immovable faith; the fir tree, hope; and the rays of the evening sun, according to Friedrich himself, the setting of the pre-Christian world. We are pulled at once toward a symbolically evoked transcendent world and a beyond that is simply an extension of the realistically depicted forest and mountains. Already in Cimabue we feel a similar tension, as minimal as it is, between the iconicity of the Christ figure, the one in the Louvre, for example, and his expression, revealing character, biography, a particular suffering, an understanding if not an interpretation. These features enhance its iconic force, but carried too far, they may have the opposite effect, as I believe they do in any one of Georges Rouault’s Christs. His heavy, black borders out-frame Christ. Though they may refer to Medieval stained glass windows—Rouault restored them as a young man—they end up becoming, as does his

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thick, heavy palate, the hallmark of his work. Indeed, his palate draws attention to his technique, to the paint itself. We are weighed down by its materiality, and that materiality permits only the crudest of allegorical referents: one that simply announces his particular spirituality. It precludes the delicate if conventional transcendence of a Cimabue or even a Byzantine icon. The interplay is much more subtle in Giotto, where the minimal landscape is iconic in its own right, announcing a story or at least a site that is at once this- and other-worldly—real and imaginative. The worldly horizon does not yet figure in our appreciation, however. That comes later.



When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me. . . . . . . . . . . but after I had seen That spectacle, for many days, my brain Worked with dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts There hung a darkness, call it solitude Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes Remained, no pleasant images of trees, Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty forms, that do not live Like living men, moved slowly through the mind By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. W, The Prelude23

  horizon is by no means restricted to the pictorial arts. It figures in accordance with prevailing genres of communication in T everyday discourse and in oral and written literature. It plays a particularly important rhetorical role in romanticism. In one of his earliest poems, L’Isolement, Alphonse de Lamartine describes the poet at sunset seated on a mountain in the shadow of an old oak tree.24 He looks down at a river snaking its way into the “obscure distance.” The moon—le char vaporeux

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de la reine des ombres—climbs and whitens the horizon’s edge. But the poet, lost in solitude, is indifferent to the landscape. He finds no happiness, no charm in it, expects nothing from it, is not carried away by it. He dreams of being transported beyond the limits of the earth (au delà des bornes de sa sphère) to the source he aspires to, where he will find hope and love, the ideal he desires with all his soul, which has no earthly name (qui n’a pas de nom au terrestre séjour). We need not follow Lamartine ’s melancholic reverie further. We need not consider its inspiration—the loss of someone he loved, perhaps—nor the nature of the being toward whom he is thrust—the loved one, God—in the beyond he imagines. We note simply, as abstract as they are in Lamartine ’s poetry, the collapse of spirit into nature, nature into spirit. Wordsworth too merges soul and nature. In the lines quoted above from the  version of the Prelude he suffers from “solitude” and “blank desertion.” The cause we can only surmise. A boy, he rows out into a lake at night in a little boat he discovered “tied to a willow tree within a rocky cave, its usual home.” He recognizes his act as one “of stealth and troubled pleasure.” His boat moves on, but not “without the voice of mountain echoes.” Do they echo his conscience? His fear as he rows all alone into night? Determined to move “with an unswerving line,” he fixes his view upon the summit of a craggy ridge The horizon’s utmost boundary; for above Was nothing but the stars and grey sky.

As his boat “heaves through the water like a swan,” he suddenly sees the “black and huge” peak looming up before him from behind the “craggy steep” that had been his horizon and landmark. He personifies: “upreared its head.” He attributes to it power, and willfulness. (“Instinct” means here “imbued”—imbued with “voluntary power.”) Its grim shape seems to block out any further horizon. It towers up between him and the stars (which were beyond the nearer “craggy ridge”) and seems “with purpose of its own and measured motion like a living thing” to pursue him. Trembling with fear, he rows the boat back to its mooring place and “in grave and serious mood” returns home. For many days, he is troubled by a “dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being,” thoughts hung in darkness, a “solitude of blank desertion” in which the familiar and pleasant images of nature—trees, sea, sky, green fields—give way to the ominous. “Huge and mighty forms, that do not live like living men” move slowly through his mind by day and in his dreams. Whatever guilt (if indeed it was guilt), whatever fear (if indeed it was fear) inspired his perception of the

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“huge cliff ”—it can probably be identified as Black Crag, west of Ullswater—it deprived him of a horizon, the imaginative projection that horizon afforded him, and the release it gave him from the “huge and mighty forms” that lay deep within him. Without an outer horizon and the beyond it evokes, he can only turn in on himself to the “huge and mighty forms that do not live like men” which lumber through his waking and dream life. They are the stuff of that other, internalized beyond—the unconscious— that our psychologies have so naturalized that only with difficulty can we acknowledge its romantic, its historical artifice. True to their shadowy existence, Wordsworth can only evoke them—and return them, through his word, to their “natural” environment, neither in nature nor in soul. It is through richly described landscapes that Wordsworth and Lamartine create, quite literally, horizons and a sense of the beyond. Like Friedrich, they exploit what Bryson refers to as the connotative (and I, as the horizontal) mode of representation, including (a point missed by Bryson) the connoting of symbolic significance itself, whatever that significance is. In other words, particularly in romanticism and its psychoanalytic progeny, it is often less the meaning of the symbol that counts than the intimation of symbolic significance—the demand for interpretation. In the Prelude Wordsworth teases us with symbolic significance, but that “tease” often fails, in my view, because it is reduced, often crudely, to the personal. It is in this sense that romanticism paves the way to the unconscious.

 It is almost unbelievable to those who are unacquainted with it, yet the jungle is an irrational fact, enslaving those who go into it—a whirlwind of savage passions conquering the civilized person possessed with too much self-confidence. The jungle is a degeneration of the human spirit in a swoon of improbable but real circumstances. The rational civilized man loses self-respect and respect for home. He throws his heritage into the mire from where who knows when it will be retrieved. One ’s heart becomes morbid, filling with the sentiment of savagery, insensible to the pure and great things of humanity. Even cultivated spirits, finely formed and well-educated, have succumbed. F  V, a Capuchin missionary writing in the s of the Colombian jungle25

  the hinterland in terms of the image and associate it with pictures, though this need not be so. In describing the Piro, an Amazonian people who inhabit the thick jungles along the Baja Urubamba

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River in Peru, the British anthropologist Peter Gow () stresses their workaday relationship to their environment. Their landscape is one of implication. It is mediated not by representations but by social processes. Through the cultivation of fields, for example, or the building of houses, it is experienced in terms of kinship, understood not in abstract, genealogical terms but concretely as the reiterative activity of kin. Kinship is perceived directly in the land because it is there. “It is there because kinship is created out of human landscape agency” (). The Piro’s is a deeply temporalized landscape—narrated through stories that are passed down by kshinikanu—those who remember, think about, and care—to the young who are willing to learn. It is punctuated by places of avoidance where samenchi, the souls of the dead—Gow refers to them as “images of memory”—hover, evoking “lethal nostalgia in the living, causing them to sicken and die if they succumb to it.” They disappear as their memory does. Unlike the souls of the dead, the lecherous, cannibalistic gipnachri, the bone or corpse demons, are not associated with particular dead and specific places. Their desires, Gow argues, reflect the role of human desire in the creation of kinship and the modification of landscape. They may even relate to the falling back of once-used places into the undifferentiated forest. As such, they are the “agents” of forest regeneration and are associated with plants that “do not know how to die.” Among these plants is the “corpse vine” (ayahuasca), which produces the curative hallucinations of the shaman who, in his spiritual voyages, envisages the investiture of kinship in the forest, as when he sees a forest tree as full of people. His soul travels beyond the confines of the living and the dead into the generalized and depersonalized worlds of the forest and the river, which have been created and are maintained by “owners” variously described as mothers, anacondas, and beautiful tall white foreigners. Though the owners are usually indifferent to humans, they do inflict sickness and death on those who must inevitably invade their domains to survive—to hunt, fish, and farm. It is the shaman who must intervene, paradoxically, by means of the very plant, ayahuasca, whose source of power lies with the owners. He comes to see, as the spirits do, human settlements in the depth of the river and the center of the forest. By sharing the spirits’ food and listening to their powerful songs, he mediates between them and the Piro. Whether in the depth of the forest, by shamanistic means, or at the settlement’s edge, through cultivation, the Piro’s landscape is actively mediated rather than abstractly imaged.26 Although Gow contrasts the Piro’s landscape with the way it is con-

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ceived by the representatives of the state—as a map, frozen in time—he fails to consider the effect of those state representatives, of the whites more generally, of the colonizers, however short-lived their relationship with the Piro was, on that mediation. Writing of another region of the Amazon basin, along the Putumayo river in Colombia, in another century, during the great rubber boom, the anthropologist Michael Taussig stresses the effect of the colonial encounter in all of its exploitative violence on the way that landscape was imaged by the colonizers and the effect that image had on the Indians themselves. He goes so far as to see the shaman as configured by—and mediating—that encounter. For the colonizers, the jungle was a terrifying space filled with dangerous beasts—a living hell into which they were inexorably drawn, not by any sense of adventure, as they sometimes claimed, but by sheer greed. The Colombian traveler Joachim Rocha wrote at the turn of the twentieth century of “growling tigers” (which, the Indians claimed, are particularly dangerous when they are possessed of the soul of a witch), the “swarming of infinite vipers and venomous insects,” and the “plague” of vampire bats “treacherously sucking in the hours of dreams the blood of men and animals” (Taussig ,  –). Not immune to the lurid imagery of the authors he cites, Taussig stresses the contagion of the forest (for so it was depicted), the cruelty it inspires, the “miasmic subspecies of terror” it produces, “a pressing in of somethingness in the nothingness.” The Indians— whose presence was often felt most menacingly in their absence, marked by the silent traces they left (an abandoned village, for example)—were thought of in this “murky, epistemic space” as at once innocent, perhaps not so innocent, adult children and cruel, cannibalistic savages, possessed of evil powers and uncanny access, through yagé and other hallucinogens, to unknown and therefore terrifying realities. Adrift in this insistent no-man’s land, the rubber brokers, some of them at least, treated their captive laborers with such cruelty that it puts into question our assumption of humanity itself. John Brown, a Barbadian rubber plantation worker, told Roger Casement, the famed Irish revolutionary who had visited the Putumayo on a fact-finding mission for the British government in the first decade of the nineteenth century, that he had seen hundreds of Indians killed.27 Brown had been commissioned by the plantation to capture Indian workers. Those who resisted were shot and beheaded by armed Indians, also working for the plantation. He had seen a woman, nursing a baby, decapitated and the baby killed and cut to pieces. Another witness—there were many—told Casement about a station master, Ramón

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Sanchez, who used to hunt Indians for the sake of the kill: “They were tied up and chains put around their necks,” Casement reported; “and they were hung up, and he, Sanchez, would take a ‘sword,’ or machete, and stick it through them. He saw Ramón Sanchez do this to plenty of Indians—men, not women. One day Sanchez killed twenty-five men—he shot some, others he cut their heads off—and some he hanged slowly with a chain around their necks till their tongues came out, and they died like that. Altogether he saw Sanchez kill with his own hands some thirty Indians, and this in two months.” The gratuitousness of Sanchez’s acts, and that of countless other rubber traders, compels me to ask whether the epistemic and moral certainties that civilization offers are not themselves founded on acts of extreme cruelty, torture, and sadism. Adrift, greed-driven, confronted with the opacity of the jungle, the traders projected their personal underworlds onto that jungle and the beasts and Indians that inhabited it, as, I believe, they rejected those projections as too personal and without firm foundation. Unlike the Piro, who, if we can accept Gow’s description of them, have an intimately mediated workaday relationship with the forest, the colonizers found themselves isolated in an alien danger zone that required their active mark—a negating gesture of humanity. We may speak of this mastery as negating negation. We have, at any rate, to recognize the effect of opacity on imaginative possibility—a possibility that is never immune to the intercession of the other even if that other is of a phantasmic order.

 Let me tell you . . . I’m trying to capture the fourth dimension of the nowinstant, which is so fleeting it no longer is because it has already become a new now-instant, which also is no longer. Each thing has an instant in which it is. I want to take possession of the thing’s is. Those instants that elapse in the air I breathe; in fireworks exploding silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And I want to capture the present which, by it very nature, is forbidden me: the present flees me, the moment escapes me, the present is myself forever in the now. C L, The Stream of Life28

  contrast the metaphorically borne pathetic fallacy of romanticism with, say, the dried, metonymously extended objectivism of realism or the lived or deadened allegories of an earlier period, I want to turn back to the Navajo—to their rich epic tradition.29 Here, I believe,

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we see more contained horizons but not those frozen by the opaque forest of the Amazon and the enforced limitation of human imagination. The Navajo horizons fascinate me because their containment operates from within a language that is grammatically processual and dynamic. They are characterized by movement: mythical beings, men, women, and animals are constantly in motion. The world through which the protagonists move is not the richly described landscape of the Romantics. It is minimal, displaced, situated, when it is, by the name of a place or a striking feature of the terrain. It is at once a local—provincial, I am tempted to say—space and highly abstract. The events described could occur anywhere, and yet they occur in specific places. (One wonders how this localism came about for a people who have been on the move for centuries, that is, until they were “contained” on reservations.) For the Navajo, as for so many American Indians, history is conceptually rooted in space. “For Indian men and women,” the anthropologist Keith Basso writes, “the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.”30 Gladys Reichard, one of Franz Boas’s students, who wrote on Navajo religion, noted the Navajo’s “extraordinary interest” in geography. “They love to travel, yet feel a deep attachment to their present habitat” (Reichard , ). And the linguist Harry Hoijer observed: “Even the most minute occurrences are described by the Navajos in close conjunction with their physical setting, suggesting that unless narrated events are spatially anchored their significance is somehow reduced and cannot be properly assessed” (quoted in Basso , ). As Reichard reminds us, though, place-names need not refer to the “physical” world but may also refer to the underground world from which, the Navajo myths tell us, primordial people emerged. To illustrate the importance of setting, let me cite a passage from the origin legend of the Navajo Enemy Way. It is one of their great epics. It was told to Father Berard Haile by the singer—the ceremonial director and curer—Slim Curley, in the winter of . The epic undergirds one of the Navajo’s most important curing ceremonies, Enemy Way, which is designed to cure those who suffer the ills of enemy contact. It tells of the birth and adventures of two great hero twins, Monster Slayer and Born-forWater, who rid the world of all kinds of destructive monsters. Here Monster Slayer is pursuing Tracking Bear.

              From the “rock ledge extension” out across to the “winged rock” there were quite old tracks of “tracking bear” coming from the east. A little this side again, along the west of a place called “sitting Mexican,” its tracks seemed to be not so very old. Again this way, at the lower end of “white clay ridge,” its tracks somewhat fresher, came along the east. At a place called “clay’s black crotch” recently made tracks came along. From there he went up the slope, and when he looked back, he saw it coming on a run in his rear. He went to the base of “beautiful mountain,” looked back again, and saw it running along very close by. He stood at the base of “black rock,” and again looked back. He saw it close by, just as it was about to overtake him. That must be what is called “tracking bear,” he thought. He scaled the rock. In his left hand he grabbed a slim yucca fruit, in his right he grabbed hardwood; the rattling sound of these was heard. He reached the peak of the rock. Just then it squatted on its haunches, at the base of the rock, and there he immediately shot it, killing it with the zigzag lightning arrow. He cut off its finger claws and took out its large side teeth. (Haile ,  –)

In the origin legend, text is indexically so implicated in context and context in text that the two cannot be separated from each other. The legend assumes the audience ’s familiarity with local geography. It is the placenames, often descriptive of locale—“rock ledge extension,” “white clay ridge”—that situate the events. They call forth the places, which, I suspect, are, in circular fashion, themselves evocative of the events. The reciprocal referentiality, if I may so call this circularity, creates a closed space. Internal resonance substitutes for horizons opening out. (Is this a characteristic of traditional societies?) Or, putting it another way, horizons are contained within a known, demarcated, and narrated landscape. Monster Slayer does look back from “beautiful mountain,” from “black rock.” It would seem, on first reading, that horizons, contained or not, are evoked in a denotative fashion by place-names (as well as by deictic indices—“this way,” “from there,” “this side again”—that seem to those unfamiliar with the setting to be without specific reference) rather than connotatively, but, as we shall see, this is probably to misconstrue the role of the name.31 I used “space” in this discussion with caution, for it is not clear that the Navajo share the Euro-American chronotope.32 Space and time are, I believe, differently articulated. The folklorist Barre Toelken puts it crudely, but his description at least reveals the Western response to the Navajo chronotope: “The Navajo concept of time is most similar to European concepts of space; insofar as the Navajos talk about anything like time at all, it

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is not seen as a pathway along which one moves but a context in which things come to pass. The flowering of a plant, the birth of a horse, the maturation of a tree, the building of a home, all have their own time surrounding them and are not measured off against each other on a single scale” (, ; see also ). Others, like Trudy Griffin-Pierce, stress the cyclical quality of Navajo time. She quotes Toelken’s description of a Navajo weaver who “‘instead of standing on a straight ribbon of time leading from the past to some future point, stands in the middle of a vortex of forces’ from which ‘she negotiates,’ looking ‘to the past for patterning, for advice and wisdom. . . . Time surrounds her.’”33 The linguist Rik Pinxten also notes that time, its passage at least, is not independent of the individual. He argues that time in Navajo myths is pulsating (that is, expanding and contracting), circular, and finite. He claims that the Navajo conceive of the life course in zigzag, if not linear, terms (, ). What is clear is that the traditional Navajo does not share our chronological sense of a somehow abstractable and measurable time. Time seems to be embedded in activities, which are not coordinated in a single temporal continuum. It is spatialized. Often in legend and story, the passage of time between dramatic activities is marked by people moving about. When Sol Worth and John Adair () asked Navajos to make films of whatever interested them, the Navajo filmmakers, who were not taught the standard film conventions for marking the passage of time (fade-ins and fade-outs, for example), indicated its passage through the activities they were depicting or by showing people walking. Not only do Navajo place-names refer to (if the two can be separated) real and mythical locales and the events associated with them, but they call forth a palimpsestic picture of the world. The universe is seen as an immense hogan. Indeed, each time the Navajo build a hogan, they are, in a sense, replicating the creation of the universe. Their world is bound by four sacred mountains. Below this world are, by most counts, four subterranean ones, each characterized by a particular color—red, blue, yellow, and all colors—and chaotic conditions. These underground worlds are sometimes called “first language,” “second language,” and so on (Witherspoon ,  – ). It is through these worlds that primordial people passed to emerge in the present one. There are also worlds above, sky and land-beyond-thesky, which is inhabited by powerful storm elements: Winter, Pink Thunder, Spotted Thunder, Big Winds, and Whirlwinds. The earth itself is called “our mother” (or, perhaps more accurately, “life sustainer,” so identified are mothers and the idea of sustaining life) and the sun “our father” (). In

             

certain depictions of the universe, they lie on each other as though copulating (Pinxten , ). The sacred mountains are also called mother and father. “We came from them; we depend upon them. Between the large mountains are small ones which we made ourselves,” Alexander M. Stephen was told in the first decades of the last century (quoted in Reichard , ). “Each mountain is a person. The water courses are their veins and arteries. The water in them is to their life as our blood is to our bodies” ( –). It has been frequently observed that the Navajo stress the notion of the whole, of preserving harmony within that whole. Many of their curing ceremonies, like Enemy Way, are designed to restore harmony—hózhó—that has been lost for one reason or another. The patient’s illness is a symptom of disharmony.34 The Navajo notion of the whole should not be confused, however, with our notion of totality. Their conception of the whole is founded on a different ontology. It stresses processes and events rather than things and facts. Unlike our notion of the total, their notion of the whole is founded on connection, relationship, and reciprocity. The world is divided into a male principle, associated with stasis and thought, and a female one, associated with action and speech. They are in complementary rather than oppositional relationship. We move from the part to the whole, which is the sum of its parts.35 The Navajo move, as the anthropologist Gary Witherspoon observes, from the whole to the processes and events that “compose” it.36 Theirs is a holistic conception, which focuses on synthesis; ours is an atomistic one that lends itself to dissection and analysis. Their world is always in motion. After “things” had been “placed” on the earth, First Man and First Women, those descriptively elusive first human beings, plucked a feather from a bald eagle and blew on it, saying, “From now on everything is on the move. Nothing will be still, not even the water, not even the rock” (Pinxten , ). The Navajo picture of the universe reflects, as many observers have noted, Navajo grammar.37 Unlike English, in which the noun predominates both grammatically and rhetorically, the verb is the dominant syntactical element in Navajo. Where English stresses the verb “to be,” the Navajo stress the verb “to go”—naagháii. Witherspoon has calculated that there are over , distinct conjugations of this particular verb (Witherspoon , ). Naagháii is the singular form of the third person of the continuative imperfective mode, which refers to continually going about and returning. The prefix naa- of this verb form stresses repetition, continuation, and revolution. Whether or not Witherspoon’s calculation is correct, it does point

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to the immense complexity of Navajo. The language distinguishes six modes and a number of aspects; two of these modes and two of these aspects are concerned with repetition, restoration, or continuous recurrence of an event or set of conditions, some of which imply the completion of a cycle or revolution. There are both static and active verbal forms, the majority being active. Indeed, it can be argued that the static forms indicate an object at rest, that is, not in movement. The active verbs report events—or as Harry Hoijer preferred, “eventings”—movement, or movings, and action, or actings (). These are not reported in relation to tense but in relation to mode and aspect—in terms of completion or incompletion of movement, of its continuous or discontinuous nature. Eventings are conceived very concretely in terms of the movements of corporeal bodies or of entities metaphorically attached to corporeal bodies. Let me give a concrete, though somewhat simplistic, illustration. One morning I was talking in English to a Navajo man I had just met. He asked me whether I was learning Navajo. I told him I was, but that I found it to be an extremely difficult language. He looked surprised. “It’s English that’s difficult,” he said. “Take the word for screwdriver.” (He happened to be holding a screwdriver.) “It’s—” He came to a dead halt. He could not find the Navajo equivalent to the English “screwdriver,” not because there was none, but because there was none as such. The Navajo would use one locution for a screwdriver driving in a screw, another for extracting it, and still another, no doubt, for one being held or lying in a man’s hand. The entity designated by screwdriver could not normally be abstracted from the activity in which it was engaged. At least, this is what my Navajo acquaintance and I determined after a lengthy discussion. Though the articulation of experience reflects the language of articulation, we should not overextend the influence of language on experience. There is always a gap, as I noted in the discussion of dreams, between articulation and experience. We may emphasize this gap, as our Western understanding of reference and representation does, or we may deny it. The Navajo stress the performative, the creative, indeed the compulsive, role of speech. They claim that all things have an “inner form”—biigistíín, literally, an inanimate object that lies within and is separate from outward form. Living things, and by some accounts all things insofar as they are in motion, are inspired by wind (níllchi)—in mythic terms, by Holy Wind—which is related to breath and speech. Speech is the externalization of thought. Knowledge is the inner form of thought. Thought, and thus speech, insofar as they are the internal and external dimensions of the same process, are

             

creative. The world was thought into existence, but this existence was not consummated until the Holy People—diyin dineé, the supernaturals, the gods—spoke it in prayer and sang it in chants. This thinking-speaking into creation continues today in ceremonies like Enemy Way. As Witherspoon puts it: “In the Navajo view of the world, language is not the mirror of reality; reality is the mirror of language” (, ff, ). We have to be careful, however, not to draw too radical a contrast between our ontology and that of the Navajo. We must be wary of the derivation of subjective experience from grammar, worldview, and indigenous philosophical observation. They describe experience as they cover over contradictions in its articulation. The Navajo notion of the world stresses a whole as it defies the notion of the whole. There is no word in Navajo for the totality heaven-and-earth (Pinxten , ). The Navajo fear encirclement. The “guardian circle” that encloses their sandpaintings is usually left open. Weavers, at least traditionally, believed every rug should have a flaw in it. They either ran a thread of contrasting color through the border of the rug or left a gap in it, which they called chindi bitiin, “road of bad spirits,” from which any bad condition in the weaver could escape (Toelken , ). When the Swallows and Spiders could no longer stand the trickster Coyote ’s insolence, they wove webs around him, which by enclosing his and the Spiders’ bad wishes, killed him. It is said that the circle precludes the egress of evil and the entrance of good. It certainly suggests completion, entrapment, containment, and totality. And, by that understanding, as Reichard observes, closed circles of meal or pollen sprinkled on the earth, hoops, and rings are frequently encountered in ritual. “They represent a space so narrowed down that it is under control, an area from which evil has been driven and in which power has been concentrated” (,  – ). Both in myth and fact, warriors drew lines, symbolizing zigzag lightning, flash lightning, sunstreamer, and rainbow, over which, they believed, the enemy feared to pass. During Enemy Way, things that occurred abroad were brought under control by remembrance and recapitulation ( – ). The Navajo focus on the center, according to Pinxten. Although there are words for the center in Navajo, there are none for the periphery except for binaa, “around, surrounding,” and atníí, “outer, middle, half ” (Pinxten , ). It is from the center that the pulsation of the world moves. It is in the center of a hogan—a replication, as I noted, of the Navajo cosmos— that sandpaintings, which figure in many Navajo ceremonies, are painted. They are started in the center: their designs radiate from that center. Once a sandpainting is completed, the patient is seated on it and “identifies” with

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the mythic figures it calls forth. Boundaries tend to be fuzzy, unmarked, expansive, though contained within the “world” circumscribed by the four sacred mountains. It is impossible, Pinxten maintains, to have a wholly external vantage point—to look back, as it were, from a beyond (–).



That flowing water! That flowing water! My mind wanders across it. . . .

  this perspective that the Navajo poem that serves as an epigraph to this chapter has to be understood. The poet speaks from across Ithe San Juan river. His is an external vantage point. His nostalgia, his longing, have, I believe, to be seen from within (I probably exaggerate) the terror of his position. We have to recognize that the frontiers and borders which we take so literally today are always more than the geopolitical lines that arbitrarily cut up our world.38 They are spatial and temporal, as “space” and “time” are understood. They are figured from within our ontologies and epistemologies. They reflect our desires for the familiar, the warmth it offers, a nest, a home, which some identify with the womb. They postulate a hinterland, an arrière-pays, to which we never quite arrive, for it always slips away. They resonate our fears of a beyond—of the imaginative possibilities it holds—and the hopes those possibilities inspire. We must not forget that our poet walks.

  

The Between

L: . . . My younger brother . . . L: It happened at Line Of White Rocks Extends Up And Out, at this very place! [Pause of ‒ seconds.] E: Yes. It happened at Whiteness Spreads Out Descending To Water, at this very place! [Pause of ‒ seconds.] L: Truly. It happened at Trail Extends Across A Red Ridge With Alder Trees, at this very place! [Louise laughs softly.] R: Pleasantness and goodness will be forthcoming. L: Pleasantness and goodness will be forthcoming. L: My younger brother is foolish, isn’t he, dog? K B, Wisdom Sits in Places1

  between four Western Apache adults is reported by the anthropologist Keith Basso in his marvelous essay “Speaking with T Names.” The Western Apache live in Arizona and, like the Navajo, speak a 2

southern Athabaskan language. They share many social and cultural features with the Navajo, including a respect for place. Like the Navajo, they carefully situate the events they describe geographically.3 Their constructions of space, Basso notes, “reach deeply into other cultural spheres, including conceptions of wisdom, notions of morality, politeness and tact in forms of spoken discourse, and certain conventional ways of imagining and interpreting the Apache tribal past” (, xv). They are a laconic people who prefer to be silent when they find themselves in ambiguous or unpredictable social relationships (Basso , ).

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To the non-Apache, and perhaps to some Apaches, the exchange is near-incomprehensible. On first reading, for me at least, it read like lines taken at random from a modernist play, one that gives expression to impersonal destiny, something out of J. M. Synge perhaps. The entire exchange appears to be a parenthesis in Louise ’s interrupted characterization of her younger brother. We know something happened but not what happened. We suspect it was ominous. It seems to have occurred in more than one place. Each of its announcements is punctuated by a long pause. Louise ’s laughter—amused, cynical, hysterical, we don’t know—seems to trigger oracular pronouncement: “Pleasantness and goodness will be forthcoming.” Repeated, the pronouncement ends the interruption. Louise finishes her sentence, addressed, we discover, to a dog. Are we to laugh? To take the whole exchange as a parody of portentous intimation? Of course, my reading has absolutely nothing to do with what the four Western Apaches were talking about. Basso himself was puzzled by the exchange and goes to great lengths to explain what had transpired. It was a hot, oppressive July afternoon at Lola and her husband Robert’s home. They and three guests, Emily, Louise, and Keith Basso, were sitting in the shade of a ramada. Clifford, the dog, lay in the dust. “There was little to do but gaze at the landscape that stretched out before them,” Basso observed. Louise opened a can of Pepsi-Cola and began to talk haltingly, seriously. Her younger brother had fallen ill the previous night. He suffered gnawing stomach cramps; his legs became numb; he vomited three times. In the morning he was hospitalized. Friends and family who had gathered at his home were worried. A cousin remembered that a few months earlier at a cattle round-up near a place called Trail Extends Into A Grove Of Sticklike Trees the young man had accidentally stepped on a snakeskin. Someone urged him, at the time, to consult a “snake medicine person” because any contact with a snake is always dangerous. Louise ’s younger brother smiled and said nothing would happen to him. Clearly worried, Louise paused, and after a minute or so, as she began talking again, Lola interrupted her with the words; “It happened at Line Of White Rocks Extends Up And Out, at this very place.” Even with this knowledge, we are unable to make sense of the exchange. It remains fragmented, disjointed, unmotivated. It is an example of what the Western Apache call “speaking with names” ( yalti beeízhí )—a “subtle and subterranean affair,” Basso calls it—that enables speakers to take advantage of the evocative power of place-names to comment on their own moral worth and that of others, both present and absent, and on their

 

social relationships. It is “a particular way of attending to the local landscape that is avowed to produce a beneficial form of heightened awareness.” What is accomplished through speaking-with-names is attributed, Basso says, “to unseen Apache ancestors who are prompted by the voices of conversational participants to communicate in a collective voice that no one actually hears” (, ). Lola explained the exchange to Basso: “We gave the woman [Louise] pictures to work on her mind. We didn’t speak too much to her. We didn’t hold her down. That way she could travel in her mind. She could add on to them [the pictures] easily. We gave her clear pictures with place-names. So her mind went to those places, standing in front of them as our ancestors did long ago. That way she could see what happened there long ago. She could hear stories in her mind, perhaps hear our ancestors speaking. She could recall the knowledge of our ancestors” (, – ). Through the pictures the place-names called forth, Lola, Emily, and Robert tried to make Louise “think good thoughts.” They talked around her brother’s “stupid and careless behavior” without actually saying anything critical about him. Finally, Lola was able to give Louise a funny story. “She didn’t get mad,” Lola said. “She was feeling better. She laughed. Then she had enough, I guess. She spoke to the dog about her younger brother, criticizing him, so we knew we had helped her out” (). Each of the place-names mentioned by the participants in the exchange with Louise, which are all quite accurate descriptions of the sites to which they refer, evoke a story about the naming of the place. According to Basso, the name actually gives the Apache a vantage point for viewing the site: they imagine they are standing in their ancestors’ tracks. In a state they liken to “an intense form of daydreaming” (bil onaagodah), they recall “with singular clarity and force” the events associated with the place. The evocative power of the place-name is greatest when, as the Apache say, it “stands up alone” (oáá ), that is, when it is used as a substitute for the story it anchors; for, then, speaking the name forces an interlocutor to relate the associated story directly to his or her personal concerns.4 Then you look “forward” into space, the Apache say, as you look “backward” in time. Place-naming gives perspective and demands remedial action—to recognize and act on the knowledge of the ancestors. The Apache claim they often feel better after having been spoken to with names. Their worries become less “sharp,” less “noisy”; their inner turbulence gives way to sensations of “smoothness,” “softness,” and “inner quiet.” The sequence of place-names appears to lead Louise from bad to good

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thinking. The first place named, Line Of White Rocks Extends Up And Out, recalls the story of a girl who disobeyed her grandmother by taking a snake-ridden shortcut back from collecting firewood. She was bitten by a snake. She underwent a curing ceremony and learned “to live right.” Louise knew the story. Later she explained her reaction to the name: “A bad thing happened at that place. Very bad! I saw that girl. She was impulsive. She forgot to be careful. She ceased showing respect. She was like my younger brother. She ceased thinking properly, so something bad happened to her. She became very scared but recovered from it. She almost died but held onto her life” (Basso ,  – ). Lola’s mention of Line Of White Rocks Extends Up And Out not only had its effect on Louise but also, undoubtedly, on the other participants in the exchange. She changed registers and relieved everyone of the embarrassment Louise ’s worry caused them as she gave them a way of helping Louise. Louise was less familiar with the story evoked by Emily’s naming Whiteness Spreads Out Descending To Water, but she did have an image of a pain-ridden boy struggling to stay on his horse. According to the story, he fell sick after leaving the hindquarter of a deer he had killed behind because it was difficult to retrieve. Again, after therapeutic intervention, he recovered. He reminded Louise of her brother. “It was like I could hear some old man talking. He was talking to his children. ‘I was impatient, so I left behind good meat from that deer. Then I became very sick and very scared. I failed to show respect.’” In each of these stories, as in the stories Apache attach to other named places, young people behave irresponsibly and without respect, but innocently. They fall seriously ill, then recover after a curing ceremony, having learned to act with responsibility and respect.5 In saying the last place-name, Trail Extends Across A Red Ridge With Alder Trees, Lola took a risk. She wanted to lighten Louise ’s spirits. The story attached to Trail Extends . . . is a humorous one. A young married man who insisted on making love to his wife “when her grandmother came to visit,” that is, when she was having her period, fell sick. His penis swelled; he could hardly sit down; embarrassed, he walked around clutching his crotch. Once someone had explained that he oughtn’t to make love to a woman visited by her grandmother and gave him medicine, he recovered. Louise described her reaction: “Everyone knows that story. My mind went there. It’s funny to see that boy in the story holding onto himself . . . so shy and embarrassed” (). Once Louise had laughed, Robert was able to make the place-name messages explicit: “Pleasantness and goodness will be forthcoming.” Louise responded, as Basso sees it, “by taking a deft and self-effacing step.”

 

Through a mock question to Clifford the dog, she was able to criticize her own brother. Not only did the question draw attention away from herself, but by addressing a dog, who could not respond, it informed the speakers that further place-naming was not necessary. She had given utterance, gentle to be sure, to what was on everyone ’s mind but, given Western Apache etiquette, could not be said directly.

 Winter in a solitary house in the country, without society, is tolerable, nay, even enjoyable and delightful, given certain conditions; but these are not the conditions which attach to the life of a professional man who drops down into such a place by mere accident. . . . They are the associations—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate or inanimate, within the observer’s horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street or the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lacks memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind. T H, The Woodlanders6

 W Apache ’s landscape is mnemonically saturated, narrated, moralized. Basso was surprised at the quantity of place-names T he collected. I remember the disappointment I felt when I did fieldwork in Morocco, which seemed, by contrast to the Navajo, bereft of place-names and stories. Yes, the Moroccan landscape is punctuated by saints’ sanctuaries—white, squat little buildings with cupolas, where a holy man or woman was buried and after whom it was named—but, with the exception of the most important, no story (sometimes not even a name) is attached to them. Or, more accurately, it is forgotten or only a few conventional fragments, which could have been told of any number of saints, are recalled. This is particularly surprising in a society as fond of storytelling as Morocco. The sanctuaries house the salihîn dyâl l-blâd—the protectors of the land—who give mystical and perhaps even spiritually nurturing overlay to the landscape. Markers of earlier hierophanies, as Mircea Eliade would have called

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  

them, they have for the most part lost their sacred quality, their baraka, their blessedness, to all but a few elderly women and men who visit them in hope of relief from one ailment or another (Eliade , esp. chap. ). Collectively called rodat—graves—the sanctuaries mark their relationship with death (Pandolfo , ). Like the ruins of an ancient qsar, or fortress, they serve primarily as geographical orientation points. Dilapidated and without story—made by humans though usually inspired by an galâma, a miraculous sign—the sanctuaries conjure the passage of time as ruination and a philosophy of resignation. Pandolfo likens this catastrophic sense of history to the baroque Trauerspiel, the mourning play, at least as Walter Benjamin understood it, which celebrates “the ruins, the debris, the fragments, the dust . . . of a dead world in which things are emblems and language is forever emblematic”: an allegory “fugitively constructed through a piecemeal work of recollection.”7 By contrast, despite the inevitable ravages of reservation life, the Navajo landscape seems live and rich in vital memory. Their history is not constituted on a primary catastrophe but is envisioned, as we have seen, as an emergence—a sort of socialization—through underworlds in which asocial acts were first performed and gradually abandoned. I remember the many stories Navajo friends told me as we drove across the reservation. I was surprised, for my friends were usually quite taciturn, certainly not given to storytelling, particularly in the summer when I was there, but features in the landscape, some of them named, inspired them—compelled them, it seemed at times to me—to describe what had happened there. Their stories did not impress me as being as moralistic as the Apaches’. They revealed, however, that “almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate or inanimate, within the observer’s horizon” to which Hardy refers in his depiction of Wessex country life. Sometimes a siding on the road recalled a punctured tire or a snow-bound pickup truck that had to be abandoned for the winter; at other times, a campsite reminded them of a woman who left her husband for another man; and at still other times, a wind-eroded column of rock evoked the story of one of the legendary giants that Monster-Slayer or his brother Born-forWater had slain. I was even told tales of witches, which I am certain would not have been told to me, stranger that I was, had my narrator and I been seated in his campsite.8 It seemed to me (though I cannot really substantiate this intuition, for I spent little time with the Navajo) that it was not just the narrators’ encounter with these mnemonic features that “released” their stories but their

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movement across the landscape. It was as though the narrator’s physical movement “activated” the narrative performance that in turn “activated” the narrated story. No doubt these activations were reciprocal. Or, put another way, it was as though the story could best be told from outside a fixed and distant vantage point, as an encountering. I am not saying that the Navajo can only tell stories when they are moving about. That would be nonsense. They certainly tell stories, particularly in the winter, when, like many other Native Americans, they are free to do so. The recitation of stories in the summer is interdicted. Folklorists like Barre Toelken (), who are interested in narrative performance, stress the performative quality of these recitations. They are often responsive—in the musical sense of the word. There is, if you will, and again I speculate, a parallel between the “narration in movement” I have been describing and the responsive movement of sedentary narrative performances. In describing his research on place-names, Basso notes on several occasions—but without considering the implications of his observation—that his Apache consultants wanted to visit the places that were named and then, once there, they recounted the stories associated with that place. I may well be making too much of the activation of narration through physical movement—performance—but I am convinced that it contrasts with a sort of projective imagination, far removed from the narrated site of the story, that characterizes our reading culture. We take context—landscape—as containment and lose sense of its dynamic and reciprocal engagement with what we do and say. Our sense of horizon—of imaginative possibility—is delimited, despite all the “freedom” we attribute to the imagination, by this, or any, containment.

 H: Visualize the cup [the liturgical chalice]. . . . And anything that surfaces in, y’know in relationship with your father. Okay? Put in the cup— call Little S to you first. [“Little S” is the imaginal presence of the patient as a child—the healer and her team pray aloud in tongues.] Is she coming? S: Oh yeah, right away. H: Okay. Mm, things have changed, haven’t they? [The healer laughs loudly.] You never—she never used to want to come. [Laughs again—the patient used to have difficulty visualizing herself as a child—more prayer in tongues.] Have her put things in the cup with you, anything she wants to that has to do with her father’s relationship to her. . . . Is she having a good time? [Laughs.]

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

   S: She ’s not finished. H: . . . Tell us when you think you’re finished. You’re done? Put your father in the cup. S: Ohh! H: [Laughs—continuous prayer in tongues by team.] Put your mother in the cup for the time you felt she wasn’t there to protect you [from her father]. S: Exactly. H: [Team prayer in tongue continues throughout the following.] Put your sister in the cup . . . and your niece . . . your brother-in-law. I’d like you to uh/D’you see the paten [gold liturgical plate for the Eucharist bread]? See if you can see the paten. S: Yes. H: . . . Okay? D’you see it? Okay. Place yourself. . . . T C, The Sacred Self

9

  discuss the construction of textual or communicative cohesion with particular emphasis on the gaps—the ellipses—between utIterances, so evident to us in the exchange between Louise and her friends.

Before doing so, I must first contrast that exchange with one, also involving imagining, whose cohesion, however unfamiliar its subject matter, is manifest, forced, supported by explicit reference to transcendent figures, ritual, and narrative. The exchange, quoted above, occurred sometime in the late s between an American Catholic charismatic healer—a woman of fifty-one, a teacher who had had no professional training as a therapist— and a forty-five-year-old married mother of three who had been in therapy with the healer for two years. The healer was assisted by two women who in the reported episode only pray, sometimes in tongues, and lay hands on the patient. Earlier in the session, the patient revealed that as a child she had been sexually molested by her father, an alcoholic, who let her mother support the family. She also mentioned that her brother-in-law had tried to abuse her daughter. (The patient had once suffered from what was apparently a psychotic depression with paranoid features that was linked to the death of her father and her having to give up a child born out of wedlock, from alcoholism, and from various phobias, including fear of riding in cars, of water, crowds, elevators, closed places, being alone, and being in the dark.) The patient had been active in the Charismatic Renewal for fifteen years. She first became convinced of the reality of the divine when, half asleep, she felt someone holding her hand and heard Jesus’ voice. On a similar occasion she saw Satan in the form of a huge Doberman with a collar of

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precious stones. She refused the Faustian pact he offered her. She had other spiritual experiences, including a command to stop drinking. Through “inner,” or charismatic, healing, she claims to have been cured of her phobias and to have even been able to forgive her brother-in-law. Immediately following the episode I have quoted, the healer asks her to offer the chalice, containing all her bitterness, anger, resentment, and hate, to the Lord, as she focuses on keeping herself, as adult and child, in her mind’s eye. She is embraced by Jesus and experiences her two personalities as one. “And then I saw the uh/Jesus just open his arms like this and the cup poured and then I saw His mother, the Blessed Mother; and then He said you have our hearts, you belong to me and you’ll save my people.” By contrast to Western Apache speaking-with-names, charismatic healing seems forced, manipulated, overexplicit, redundant, clogged with both biographical and religious references—without much subtlety. It is clearly centered on the patient. Louise ’s friends did not force any image on her. She was free to respond to the names or not—to find personal significance in them, to communicate, not the significance, but the fact of having found significance. No one questioned her. No one even bothered to make sure that she knew the stories evoked by the place-names. We don’t even know whether all of the participants knew them or how well. Louise had only an inkling of one of them. What they all shared, however, was the knowledge that they were speaking-with-names and that speaking-withnames was a serious affair—one that demonstrated concern—and had to be taken as such. It affected them all in their various ways. They had to follow a delicate communicative etiquette that is deeply rooted in Apache social life. Each intervention (no doubt, too strong a word) was exquisitely timed—so at least it seems to me. Louise and the other participants had time to reflect: to understand and conclude, to use Lacan’s formulation (, –): to travel to the place named, assume an ancestral position, and appreciate the wisdom conveyed through that assumption. Unlike speaking-with-names, the episode of inner healing Thomas Csordas reports is a noisy affair. The healing assistants are constantly praying aloud, often in tongues. The healer seems reluctant to give the patient time to reflect. She speaks directly, suggestively, imperatively. “Visualize the cup.” “Put your sister in the cup.” She even comments, less in this episode than in another recorded by Csordas, on the patient’s real or imaginal progress. “Mm, things have changed haven’t they.” She questions the patient. “Isn’t she having a good time?” She laughs. The patient isn’t even ready to answer. “She ’s not finished,” the patient says. (It is only at the most

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suspense-filled moment of the episode, when the healer has instructed the patient to give the cup to Jesus, that she waits, we learn in Csordas’s commentary, a “full minute” before asking if anything happened.) The healer prays. When the patient tells her that after experiencing the unity of her two selves, she felt more grown-up, the healer assures her of it. She and her assistants praise the Lord and continue to pray. Then, as though identifying with the patient’s state of mind, she adds, “It’s very lonely Lord, the healing that is taking place in her relationship [with] her father” and immediately asks the patient if she has heard the tape—one of her collection of healing tapes—on the father relationship. Aside from all the touching—laying on, holding, hands, embracing— that accompanies charismatic healing, there appears to be an empathetic bond that connects, or gives the illusion of connecting, the healer with the patient. Healers often share images with their patients or experience in images what their patients are going through. Sometimes this is felt as a shared sense of divine presence (Csordas , –). Both the healer and the patient claimed earlier in the session that they had had, in Csordas’s words, “a divine foreshadowing that the childhood abuse was about to emerge into consciousness.” H: . . . I had a feeling this would surface today, this morning I was watching a program with Jimmy Swaggart . . . and he said how half of the children today will be sexually abused, and the mark that it leaves on their lives. . . . So I had a feeling the Lord would surface for you today. S: I did too because . . . when I went in [the store] a guy came in and I went “uhhh” because he looked just like my brother-in-law. My brother-in-law got my daughter. And you know when he went in there, aught! The reaction was like bang! So I’m not surprised. H: Yes, just thank the Lord that he allowed that to surface, because the things that lie buried are harder to heal.10

It is clear that these “premonitions” are retrospective reevaluations of experiences that seem to have little on the surface to do with the revelation they purportedly foreshadow. Not only do they confirm the importance of the revelation but bind the healer and patient together in their common understanding—under God’s supervision. They thicken the relationship between what occurs in healing sessions and what preceded them. In a retrospective account of the session, the patient told Csordas that her consciousness of having been abused had begun a month earlier in a workshop on the word of knowledge when her prayer partner had an image of a beautiful bed and she could only see an ugly one.

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Many anthropologists, particularly those who have worked with shamanism in Siberia and among Amerindians, have noted that it is the shaman who voyages to the netherworld, discovers the cause of illness, and achieves “therapeutic efficacy” by taking on, in one fashion or another, that illness (Eliade ). The patient may—and often is—entirely ignorant of what the shaman learned or even chants. This paradox was highlighted by the discovery that the patients in the Cuna ceremony for easing difficult childbirth did not even understand the language of the curing chant, whose narrative progression, as Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated, mirrors the birth of the child.11 Are we simply to dismiss Lévi-Strauss’s conclusion that the shaman gives the patient a “language” that enables her not only to give expression to inexpressible psychic states but to release the necessary physiological processes for easing birth? Or are we to assume some sort of telepathic exchange between the curer and the patient? I have little sympathy for the second position but, like Freud in his discussion of telepathic dreams (), I can make no final judgment. In many therapies, even those bolstered by science, there are often, as in charismatic healing, complex imaginal sharings not only of pain and other symptoms—these may be dismissed as sympathy—but of supposedly causal factors, like trauma or the presence of deity or some more abstract curing power, which are not necessarily verbally communicated by the patient or therapist at the time of their occurrence or ever. They may be experienced as premonitions; they have frequently to do with the timing of interventions and revelations. Over the years, I have been told of them informally not only by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists but by behavioralists. Whatever the source of the experience, these experiences figure importantly in the rhetoric, if not the progression, of therapy. However the images are shared psychologically, in charismatic healings like the one we have been considering, they often serve as symbolicinterpretive elements that conjoin biographical experience with transcendent truths and narratives.12 This is illustrated in the patient’s retrospective account of the healing session. On the one hand, she relates her discovery of abuse to her experiences at a workshop a month earlier. She confuses her husband and father. “And I see my father’s face in my bed, and it was my husband,” she tells Csordas. “And I like, ‘This is getting weird. We ’re gonna have to deal with this.’”13 Such self-objectifying turns of phrase distance her from the events she remembers. On the other hand, the images, directed as they are by the healer, relate her experiences to Jesus. She recalls seeing Jesus in white. He embraces her and her child, the child inside her.

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Then Jesus and the Virgin are behind her, “enmeshed” in her, embracing her: “And I felt their heart in mine, and he said that I had the same heart they did, the same sacred heart. And I could see that in vision. I saw that in a vision . . . that’s how he speaks to me, it’s a form of prophecy. It meant I knew who I was in him. I am trying to know who I am in Christ, just like his mother always knew who she was, and who she was in God. Who I am in Christ, who I really am, without a bunch of pretend barriers that everyone puts up—when the walls are down, to really look at who I am” (Csordas , ). The images of Jesus and, particularly, the Virgin are, in Csordas’s terms, embodied. Just as the relationship between healer and patient is collapsed in healing, so is the relationship between the patient and (the images of ) Jesus and the Virgin. There is little space for (desired?) autonomy. It is negotiated, at any rate, not at the imaginal but the discursive level—in verbal exchange and retrospective account. It is captured by the phrase “who I am in Christ.” Unlike the subject(s) of speaking-with-names, the patient is pushed via the imaginal performance to the theologically and morally appropriate experience: forgiveness.

 As silent as a mirror is believed Realities plunge in silence by H C, “Legend”14

the two performances, we are immediately struck by different punctuations. Speaking-in-names is minimalist. Few Iwordstheir are spoken; long pauses occur. Inner healing is verbose; pauses seem an embarrassment, threatening perhaps. Obviously these different styles relate to different cultures of speaking as well as different attitudes toward immediacy, time, space, suggestion, figuration, and autonomy. I identify the business of charismatic healing with—I risk stereotyping—the busybody relations characteristic of working- and middle-class American women. They seem impatient. They often have so little tolerance for inaction in deed and word that they appear meddlesome and indiscreet—certainly to French women of their background. The Americans’ is a wordy aesthetic: the pause, the gap, silence are to be filled. I find it impossible to imagine them speaking-with-names. Whether my characterization of the speech aesthetic of American women of the healer’s and patient’s background is correct, there seems lit-

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tle doubt that our epistemic outlook is directed toward the word—content, substance, the thing, and, as Jacques Derrida never ceases to remind us, presence (). We are, of course, troubled by his insistence on difference, understood both spatially and as temporal deferment: différance. To the between, we prefer the elements that establish it; to the relation, we prefer its constituting terms. This is reflected in the importance we give to the word—the noun—and the referent in our (popular) understanding of language. We focus on categories and classificatory systems based on those categories rather than on systems determined by relation and syntax. We stress cohesion and underplay ellipsis, interruption, and caesura. We do not usually read in terms of silence and the unsaid. I often shock my students by asking them to imagine reading a novel like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in terms of the gaps between chapters, indeed, between paragraphs and sentences.15 I do not believe the Japanese would be as shocked by my question as my American students. Their (traditional) aesthetic, which is deeply rooted in their religious outlook, stresses the interval, the gap, silence, the between and the among. In Japanese linked verse (renga), for example, it is less the scenes depicted than the space-time between the linked verses that produces its aesthetic effect.16 “Put your mind to what is not said,” the poet Shinkei ( –) said (Komparu , ). Zeami Motokiyo ( –), the founder of Noh theater, argued that it is “the moments of no-action” (senu tokoro), which occur between (himu), that are most enjoyed in Noh (Pilgrim , ). “What [the actor] does not do is of interest” (senu tokoro ga omoshiroki) (Komparu , ). The Japanese refer to these interstitial spaces or times as ma. Ma is said to have come from the Chinese, the character for which shows the sun in the middle of an open gate. It was originally used only for space but came to refer to time as well. It may be translated as “space, spacing, interval, gap, blank, room, pause, rest, time, timing, or opening” (Komparu , ). It has both abstract and concrete connotations. A room is a ma because it is a space between walls; a rest in music is also a ma because it occurs between two notes (Pilgrim , ). Roland Barthes () has attempted—in an overly mannered and deeply French (and therefore ethnocentric) way—to figure the ma within his poststructuralist understanding of Japan. He uses expressions like “pregnant nothing,” “a dismembered, decentered, dislocated reminiscence,” an “emptied sign” left over from the “fissure of the symbolic” to evoke what he does not name. Japanese artists, scholars, and architects have argued that it resists translation. They stress its ambiguity,

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the fact that it has to be understood from within a uniquely Japanese configuration of space and time that cannot be separated from each other, and a sense of spiritual energy or power (ki or ch’i ) that resonates within the space-time between and among. It is a negative, albeit fecund, chronotope—a stillness, an emptiness—that anticipates (and is anticipated by) the “positive” space-time of action, say, in a Noh play (Komparu , xx). Ma refers at once to “something” and the experience of that something. It is neither objective nor subjective but a coalescence of the two, for, insofar as ma deconstructs all boundaries, so it has (I suppose) to eliminate those between the objective and the subjective. We might ask how my putative traditional Japanese would regard the two imaging performances. No doubt they would find charismatic healing cluttered, perhaps like a busy street in downtown Tokyo. Would they appreciate the tension in the pauses between speaking-in-names? Motokiyo notes that it is the kokoro—the underlying spiritual strength of the Noh actor—that produces the audience ’s enjoyment in “moments of no action.” The actor “does not relax the tension when the dancing or singing come to an end or at intervals between (hima) the dialogue and the different types of miming.” He maintains his “unwavering inner strength (naishin),” but he must not make it apparent, for then it would be acting and no longer noaction (Pilgrim ,  – ). I do not want to suggest that Lola and her friends maintained an inner strength in any way analogous to that of the Noh actor. They seem, though, to have had confidence in the power of speaking-with-names. Rather, I want to call attention to a quality of relationship—call it suspense or dramatic tension—that falls through conversational analysis. It depends largely on pauses and silences. They escape measurement—a point missed by those linguists who time them in their transcriptions and assume that is all that can be said about them. There are different silences—different pauses, different attitudes toward them. They have qualitative values and, as every novelist knows, they can—to a point—be described or at least evoked. Basso attributes Western Apache silence, as we have seen, to their reluctance to call attention to ambiguous social relations, but such a silence is no doubt one among many. Though we focus on words, things, and events, on the notes in music, our interpretations, whether of an actor playing Lear or a pianist performing a Haydn sonata, have necessarily to pay attention to the space—the silence—between words and notes. We have left such interpretations largely untheorized, which, in as overtheorized an age as ours, has surely to be taken as a symptom of our epistemic outlook and its effect on attention, if

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not perception. We leave that—silence—which can be of such hermeneutic importance to the art of interpretation. Of course, we recognize the importance of silence in interlocution, and we interpret it, I believe, primarily in psychological terms, and only secondarily in aesthetic ones (except, of course, when we are treating a communication marked for aesthetic appreciation). Though less self-consciously than the psychoanalyst, we note the silences, the pauses, of the people with whom we are conversing. We read them as signs of inner conditions—fear, guilt, embarrassment, shame— and often enough as unwitting revelations of that which is being concealed. Freud developed an entire psychology around inadvertent concealment— and it took. That is a social fact. We have tended, of course, at least since the beginnings of romanticism, to understand the rhetorical in terms of the psychological. With this shift came a gradual move, despite our stress on singular intention and individual autonomy, to a more passive notion of the self. I choose my words but not my silences. With his model of the psyche as split between the conscious and the unconscious, Freud has provided us with an image that manages to contain both the active and passive views of the self.17 In other more rhetorically minded ages, like those of ancient Greece and Rome, silence was recognized and cultivated as a rhetorical figure very much in the orator’s control.18

 The qi is like water, and words are like objects that float on its surface. H Y 19

 Chinese aesthetics, like the Japanese, stresses the interval, which they see as charged with energy, qi, breath, spirit—the inner dynamic of cosmic creation in which the artist, the poet, and the musician participate through their own creations.20 Etymologically, the character for qi designates the vapor that arises when rice is being cooked. Qi is invisible but its effects are manifest. Without it, the interval between forms—the gap, the ma—in paintings, poems, musical compositions, or gardens—is inert, a negative space. With qi, it is animated by a vital tension between the forms that constitute it and are constituted by it. Great art is always an energy field. This dynamic understanding of the work of art relates to the Chinese view of the universe, which, described in their earliest and most obscure treatise, The Book of Changes, is in perpetual flux. This flux results from the marriage of antithetical but complementary forces, which are a

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diversification of what the Chinese refer to as the Having. The Having is itself a product of—or at least in tension with—the wu. Though usually translated as Nothing, as Not-Having, wu is better translated, according to the sinologist Simon Leys, as Being, which can only be apprehended in a negative manner (Leys ,  –). It is, I believe, a bit like Heidegger’s understanding of Nothing but more organic: an emptiness, a nourishing space for phenomena—for the Having. Leys likens it to an intaglio in a seal whose message is conveyed through the hollow—an absence (). Order and harmony are produced through ritual and correct—ethical—behavior. Unlike the European understanding of creation, in which the creator is outside the creation, the creator is, for the traditional Chinese, always inside his creation. The artist does not strive to represent the world mimetically, as in the West, but to participate in the process of cosmic creation—to complement, indeed to complete, that creation. “The poet’s brush completes universal creation,” the poet Li He wrote (Leys , ). The Chinese painter suppresses the partition between subject and object. He identifies with his subject. A friend compliments an artist who paints bamboo: “He himself became a bamboo” (). In the artist’s creative communion with the universe, the universe itself becomes an active partner in his creation. The painting, and by extension the poem, is not a symbol of the world but the place of its “real presence,” Leys writes. Its object is not to describe appearances of the real but to manifest the truth. “The painted landscape is thus efficiently charged with all the powers of its mountains and rivers; if such a result can be achieved, it is because the creator of the painting works in union with the universal creator; he carries out his work according to the same principles and according to the same rhythms. Artistic creation and cosmic creation are parallel; they only differ in scale, not in nature” ( – ). Though the poet and the painter complement and even claim to complete the work of creation, creation itself is, from a cosmic perspective at least, never complete. Indeed, the best works of art are never fully explicit. They depend, as we have seen, on the interval. They require the reader or the viewer’s interpretive appreciation. Mimesis demands an external vantage. The work of art has always to be distinguished from its object. Both are objectified, and the relationship between them is always problematic, as our history of mimesis, representation, and reference attests. Rather than participation and communion, we stress separation, alienation, and the bar between the symbol and symbolized, the signifier and the signified. Though we do attempt to bring about symbolic coalescence through rituals like the Catholic Eucharist, in which

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wine and wafer become the blood and flesh of Christ, or by proclaiming special languages, most notably the poetic, as the Symbolist poets, particularly the Russians, did, we tend, at least today, however contrary to our desire, to dismiss such attempts as soft-edged, magical, or mystical. We may postulate other cultures, particularly the primitive, where such identifications of symbol and symbolized are thought to occur. The French philosopher of the primitive, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl understood them in terms of mystical participation, but his work has been generally and perhaps prematurely dismissed.21 The wound is for us a telling metaphor of what we take to be limitations of representation. At least since Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon, published in , pain has been associated with creativity and representation.22 The Chinese articulate their aesthetics in a way that stresses communion and participation within a world in creative flux. Their works of art resist, at least in theory, stasis and the problems that stasis poses as they exploit it. Though they figure in a conventionality that the Westerner would find constraining, the conventions allow traditional Chinese painters and poets (and no doubt musicians) a creativity that is foreign, though not altogether foreign, to the Westerner. I am thinking of the temporal play that their intertextual and interpictorial references permit. Their poetry stresses the spatial: the picture. The twelfth-century scholar Su Dongpo praised the painting and poetry of the eighth-century poet and painter Wang Wei, one of the founders of what we call today “Chinese painting,” by saying: “In each poem of Wang Wei there is a painting and in each of his paintings there is a poem.” Leys puts it this way: “The aesthetic principles and process of poetry are of a pictorial order; the aesthetic principles and process of painting are of a poetic order.” Although poetry is by nature temporal, Leys continues, the Chinese strive to organize their words in space. By this he means more than the pictorial quality of the ideograph; he refers, as well, to parallel verses in which there is both morphological and syntactical symmetry between consecutive verses, as in the following lines of Du Fu. The voices of the cicadas assembled in the old monastery The shadows of the birds pass over the cold fishpond.

The parallelism allows us to read the verses not only horizontally, one after another, but vertically, from elements in one verse to parallel ones in the other (i.e., “voices” with “shadows,” “cicadas” with “birds,” etc.). Indeed, the verses can be reversed. Painting is thought of as a form of writing. Though popularly one says “to paint a picture” (hua hua), scholars say “to

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write a picture” (xie hua). In the “highest” style of painting, xie yi, one “writes” an idea without allowing the brush to complete its course, for completion should occur not on paper but in the mind of the viewer. Appreciation includes, if it does not center on, the process of painting—on the “movement” of the brush strokes, which gives to that appreciation a temporal dimension we associate with literature and music. Paintings are, of course, viewed over time as the scrolls on which they are painted are unwound. The imbrication of poetry and painting in Chinese aesthetics can be seen as a response to the age-old problem, of singular importance to critics of the Enlightenment, like Lessing, of the relationship between time and space in art. For Lessing the distinction was significant enough for him to divide poetry and art in terms of time and space. The poet—the writer— was an interpreter of time; the artist, an interpreter of space. Today, the distinction seems simplistic—a product of a classificatory mania no longer in fashion, but the problem of temporality and spatiality in art and literature, as well as music, is still with us. It is given expression in many mixedmedia performances, like those of Laurie Anderson—incessantly on MTV. Though these performances play on multiple, often clashing media, they do not, in my view, give full recognition to the space-time, the betweenand-betwixt, the among, their multimedia productions produce. They are not restful; they do not aim at the cohesion and complementarity that Wagner sought in his Gesamtkunstwerke. They depend on the clash, the noise, the unexpected, the scandalously unanticipated, ultimately the disjunction for effect, which they understand in psychological rather than aesthetic terms. Oh, wow.



The word each blew towards him and came apart on the wind. Geryon had always had this trouble: a word like each, when he stared at it, would dissemble itself into separate letters and go. A space for its meaning remained there but blank. A C, “Each,” in Autobiography of Red 23

 spending hours with my Moroccan friend and mentor, Moulay Abedsalem, an old, illiterate shroud-maker and body-washer, Iof great spiritual wisdom, discussing what happens to the dead (Crapan-

 

zano , –). He told me that the souls of the dead go to a giant beehivelike structure called Barzakh, where they remain, each in a separate cell, until the Day of Judgment. On that day, balancing a cup in each hand, one filled with a reckoning of their good deeds, the other with their bad ones, they have to cross a narrow bridge that is suspended over the fires of Hell to where their deeds will be balanced on a scale and their fate determined. Some will go to Paradise, others to Hell. Moulay Abedsalem seemed to take pleasure in describing—several times, I recall—how thin the bridge was, “finer than a hair, sharper than a razor,” and how dangerous the crossing was. “The righteous cross the bridge like lightning,” he said. “The wicked stumble across it, losing their balance and cutting themselves.” “It’s a barzakh,” he told me when he thought I had not fully appreciated how thin the bridge was, how dangerous the crossing. I was confused. “A barzakh?” I questioned. “I thought the beehive structure was a barzakh.” “Yes, that too,” he answered, somewhat impatiently. “They are both barzakh.” I learned from Moulay Abedsalem that barzakh is what lies between things—between edges, borders, and events. He likened it to the silence between words and to dreams. “The dream is between waking life and sleep,” he said, using the expression “little death” for sleep to emphasize, I believe, the absence ( ghaib) he, like other Moroccans, associated with sleep and dreaming. (Moroccans say that when one dreams, the soul leaves the body and wanders; what it encounters is what is dreamt.) The beehive barzakh is between life and death, he explained, between this world and the one that follows, Paradise, between death and life in Paradise. The bridge is between Paradise and Hell. Barzakh is the centerpiece of the philosophy of the great Andalusian Sufi, Ibn al-gArabi ( –).24 Moulay Abedsalem had heard of him, as he had of other Arab philosophers, like al-Farabi (d. ) and Averroës (Ibn Rushd,  –), but he had no definite knowledge of his thought and certainly did not relate his understanding of barzakh to al-gArabi’s. Of all of the classical Arab philosophers, al-gArabi is perhaps the most complex, certainly one of the most prolific writers of all times. His principal work, the Futuhat al-makkiyya, or “Mecca Openings,” is projected to have more than seventeen thousand pages in its new critical edition. For al-gArabi the imagination (al-khayal ) is an intermediate term that resists definition. At times it appears to be between the spiritual and material—the sensuous—world; at others between being and nothingness, as somehow equivalent to existence. The important point is that the imagination is an intermediate “reality,”





  

inherently ambiguous, and best described as “it is neither this nor that or both this and that.” It is a barzakh, which al-gArabi describes as something that separates ( fâsil ) two other things, while never going to one side (mutatarrif ), as, for example, the line that separates shadow from sun light. God says, “He let forth the two seas that meet together, between them a barzakh they do not overpass” (Koran :); in other words one sea does not mix with the other. . . . Any two adjacent things are in need of a barzakh which is neither the one nor the other but which possesses the power (quwwa) of both. The barzakh is something that separates a known from an unknown, an existent from a non-existent, a negated from an affirmed, an intelligible from a non-intelligible. (Chittick , –)

The barzakh is in itself an intelligible term, the Sufi philosopher tells us and adds, but it is only imagination. For, when you perceive it and are intelligent, you will know that you have perceived an ontological thing (shay’ wujûdî ) upon which your eyes have fallen. But you will know for certain by proofs that there is nothing there in origin and root. So what is this thing for which you have affirmed an ontological thingness and from which you have negated that thingness in the state of your affirming it? (Chittick , )

So the paradoxes of barzakh replicate those of the imagination and vice versa. Al-gArabi insists on the transitoriness—the continual mutations— of the intermediating reality of the imagination, that is, what we take normally to be everyday reality, the world as we know it. Like Moulay Abedsalem, he considers the dream—and the vision too—to be a barzakh. The dream is the means, he argues, by which God allows everyone to witness the presence of the imagination and know there is another world similar to the sensory one (Chittick ,  –). We might ask, as we did for the Japanese, how a Moulay Abedsalem would have understood the rhythm of speaking-with-names. (He would perhaps have had less confidence in the power of the word than the Western Apache. He told me once that, with the exception of those words given directly to Mohammed by Allah, all words—and the silences between them—betray God’s creation.) I am not suggesting that the way Moroccans of his background perceive the world about them is determined by a focus on the betwixt and between. They certainly do not understand it as filled with energy, as do the Chinese and Japanese. Nor am I suggesting that they are any less anxious before nonbeing than we are. I simply do

 

not know. I do know that they often make use of metaphors of light and shadow that stress chiasma—intersections, the ever-diminishing but neverdisappearing gap between the contiguous. Si Lhassan, a Moroccan from the Valley of the Draa in the south of Morocco, told Pandolfo that the connection between the dreamer’s wandering soul (ruh) and the dreamer—his or her ruhani (that portion of the soul, of indeterminate physical and spiritual status, which remains behind when the soul wanders)—is like the contact between a satellite and ground control and then, more poetically, at least in my eyes, like a puddle of water when it is hit by sunlight. “The light hits the water, and you see a reflection on the wall,” he said. The wandering soul is in a sort of barzakh between life and death (Pandolfo , ). Ibn al-gArabi does not develop an aesthetic founded on the between the way the Japanese have. Nor did Moulay Abedsalem. What the Sufi and the shroud-maker shared was a puckish attitude toward barzakh, at once playful and immensely serious, which is altogether foreign to the Japanese take on ma. It allowed them, in their different sophistications, to call up the artifice of the world as they knew it—human presumption and, as Moulay Abedsalem saw it, the ultimate betrayal of human language. For the Sufi philosopher, barzakh, the rhetorical play it afforded him, gave him occasion to intimate another reality—other realities—to which, through mystical discipline, one had at least partial access. Moulay Abedsalem was also a man of mystical proclivities, but he achieved his ecstasy less through intellectual gymnastics than through chanting and trance-dancing. His use of the between was rather more ironic. It reflected a worldly skepticism, founded no doubt on a lifelong sense of impotence and victimization, in which he never, in my experience, indulged himself. His skepticism enhanced both his faith and resignation.

 The more we turn to what-is in our dealings the less we allow it to slip away, and the more we turn aside from Nothing. M H, “What Is Metaphysics?”25

 to some length to describe differing attitudes toward the between, for though our particular epistemic outlook tends to ignore it, it Iis in fact an “arena” of singular social, cultural, and psychological importance. We are, as the existentialists insist, anxious before any intimation of nonbeing. We may ignore it; we may eschew it; we may conceal it. We may





  

articulate it tangentially the way the Chinese oppose having and not-having (wu). We may also cast nonbeing aesthetically, as the Japanese do with ma, thereby giving it positive value. Or we may play with it rhetorically, as Ibn al-gArabi does with barzakh, to evoke the imaginary dimension—always at some level a negation—of what we take to be reality. We focus, as Heidegger insists, on what-is, overlooking the fact that Nothing is a sort of projective background for what is: “Nothing is that which makes the revelation of what-is as such possible for our human existence. Nothing not merely provides the conceptual opposite of what-is but is also an original part of its essence (Wesen)” (, ). I do not want to discuss Heidegger’s notion of Nothing here, other than to observe that suspense—to be in suspension, hang, float, hover, soar, schweben—is an essential component of that dread that reveals Nothing. “In dread, we are in ‘suspense ’ (wir schweben)” (). I want to stress the suspense—the risk—of passage so strongly evoked by Moulay Abedsalem’s description of dead souls crossing the razor-thin bridge over the fires of Hell to their final judgment. I want to suggest that in any such crossing there is always a moment, an asymptotic one, that is at once in and out of time and space as we know them ordinarily. They are fundamental to social life—to the most basic of its procedures: exchange, passage, reproduction, and transformation. I am concerned, then, with the dangers of crossing the threshold—the limen—and, to use the anthropologist Victor Turner’s words, the liminal and liminoid states that are associated with it.26 Ibn al-gArabi would call them barzakh, but he would give the barzakh an epistemic significance that Turner, given his epistemology, cannot. Turner’s model is basically that of Arnold van Gennep’s Rite de passage (). These rites are divided into three phases: separation, in which the initiate is detached from ordinary social life; margin, in which, removed from society, he lives in a sort of no-man’s land, betwixt and between; and aggregation, in which he is reincorporated into society with a new status. Gennep and others have extended the model from rites concerning individual life crises to those of society as a whole. These would include rites preparatory to war, first fruit, harvest, and rain ceremonies, which mark the passage from scarcity to plenty, and installation rituals, like coronations, which, though focused on an individual, are preeminently social in orientation and effect. Turner extends the model even further to periods of redress of social conflict, which he calls social dramas (, chap. ). His primary focus is on liminality, which he regards as an “inter-structural situation” and understands in terms of process and becoming. He finds water being heated to boiling or a pupa

 

changing from a grub to a moth to be “apt analogies” of transition and transformation. He is not particularly concerned with the punctuation of the liminal—its internal disjunctions—and how it effects and is affected by the final, defining moment of transition.27 Unlike Turner, I want to focus on ritual and other social and cultural disjunctions and the ever-shrinking but never quite disappearing moment of difference that resists articulation. They are simply performed and usually ignored, though they may be displayed in protracted and repetitive rituals, drama, literature, and music. They are the defining moments of rites of passage, healing ceremonies, sacred and secular investitures of power and authority, and ordinary transitions from one experiential register, say, waking life, to another, say, a dream, a trance, or simply falling asleep. They are risky and sometimes dangerous, though the danger and risk they entail is usually limited by convention, repetition, and sanction. They may mark a change of status in their participants; they often involve the exchange of objects, real or symbolic, which hover “possessionless” for an instant. Indeed, there is in any exchange a disjunctive moment in which the object is neither given nor received and the participants are not yet givers nor receivers (Crapanzano a). There is always the risk of default and an ensuing rupture of relationship. And there are moments, the most dramatic of all, when the participants are trapped in a between that they cannot even define—in which there is no crossing. Such moments were powerfully dramatized in the French theater director Arianne Mnouchkin’s production of the Oresteia, with which she included Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis. When the principal female characters learn the horror of their destiny—Iphigeneia, for example, when she realizes that she is to be sacrificed—they dance and fall into trance, for the horror, their realization of it, defies words. They are caught. “And the plain sight of our destiny is the cruelest thing of all” (Euripides , ). For the most part these moments that defy articulation rest on a paradox: at every crossing there is always a moment in which one is neither on one side nor on the other, neither what one was nor what one will be; for so long as they are discriminated, the contiguous never really touch. One is in suspension—hovering timelessly in between. (Perhaps that is why the Chinese and Japanese figure them as energy-filled.) Take marriage, for example. There is always that briefest of moments when one is no longer single but not yet married. A couple is before the altar, a priest is about to declare them husband and wife but has not yet done so or has only uttered the first words of the declaration, is the couple still unmarried? Married? Though





  

technically they are not yet married, we would hesitate to say that they are still single. Put more extremely, absurdly: the priest has declared them husband and wife but they (or the witnesses) have not yet heard—or grasped—his words, are they still single? Married? The change of status is instantaneous; that is, it occurs in an instant, and in that instant is always a risk. However brief, there is still the possibility that the bride or groom could flee; the priest could stop; a witness could die; one of the guests could raise an objection. This is the stuff of melodrama, but it reflects the suspense and risk in any social transition. (I have found that most people—I include myself—are not able to recall such moments.) As Turner observes, the initiates in a rite of passage—a puberty rite— are in social structural, if not physical, terms invisible (here and throughout the paragraph, V. Turner ,  – ). They are in a state of danger and may be dangerous to others. Sometimes they are sequestered in special huts or sanctuaries or forced to live in the bush for months, as in the West African Poro cult (Harley ). Frequently they are ritually purified in anticipation of the dangers to which they will be exposed or as part of their reentry into society. Most often they are surrounded by religious paraphernalia— amulets and talismans—to protect them from perilous spirits, witchcraft, sorcery, and the evil eye. Sometimes they are collectively named: “initiates,” “novices,” “neophytes.” The Ndembu of Zambia, the people Turner studied, refer to the novice in circumcision rituals, a chief undergoing installation rites, and the first wife (who has important ritual responsibilities in family life) as mwadi. During many ceremonies, as Turner notes, they are referred to impersonally by these names rather than by their own names. The naming of liminal personae can cover over their ambiguous status or, better, nonstatus. This might also be true of the symbolism with which they are associated. Turner relates the symbols of death, decomposition, and menstruation (often regarded as the loss of a fetus), which are frequently attached to the initiates, to the fact that they are no longer classified. Structurally “dead,” they may be treated like corpses, blackened, buried, made to lie motionless in the customary burial position, and forced to live “with masked and monstrous mummers representing, inter alia, the dead, or worse still, the undead” (, ). Insofar as the initiates are not yet classified, they are associated with symbols of gestation and parturition. They may be treated as embryos, neonates, or sucklings. The two sets of symbols are, I would argue, intricately implicated in each other, concealing as they reveal, revealing as they conceal, the moment of transition that resists articulation. It is,

 

paradoxically, the symbolism of birth or rebirth that most often mediates the transition and covers up the disjunction that is displayed through the imbrication of death and birth symbolism.28 Inasmuch as birth mediates the opposition between birth and death, the cards are always stacked in its favor—in the assertion of being over nonbeing, Heidegger might have argued, in the affirmation of continuity over discontinuity, I would stress.29 What is interesting about these moments of transition is that their short-lived liminality is often embedded in a protracted liminality in which the final transition is, as it were, rehearsed in a series of mini-transitions: the trials, tests, and ordeals in puberty ceremonies, for example. They are characterized by multiple repetitions in various registers. These include the evocation of mythic and historic events. The French historian Jacques Le Goff () has described how the sacres, the coronation ceremonies, at Rheims, referred back to previous events of a mythico-religious and historical nature: most notably, to the baptism of Clovis, the secular “founder” of France, by Saint Remi, its spiritual founder, in which the future saint was said to have received the chrism, or holy oils—the same used in anointing a new king—from a white dove which suddenly appeared in the presbytery at the moment of Clovis’s baptism. The name Remi is derived, it was believed, from Remus, one of the twin founders of Rome, the descendants of whose army, the Remi, settled in Rheims (then Durocortorum) in the last century before Christ. Rheims would, of course, have the same derivation. (Such redundancy is characteristic of transitional rituals.) What is extraordinary about the sacres at Rheims is that they remained unchanged from their institution in the thirteenth century to the French revolution. Le Goff describes them as a perpetuation of an almost immobile memory (). He notes the way this memory was carried not only in the coronation ceremony itself but in the buildings, for example, the cathedral of Rheims in which it was housed. They become lieux de mémoire—places of memory.30 I would stress that this perpetuation of memory in ceremony and place attests to the danger of civil strife, anarchy, and chaos in interregnum periods. The cry, “The King is dead. Long live the King,” cannot obliterate that moment. It is these extended passages that Turner has described, and though he recognized their dramatic quality, he did not, in my view, fully appreciate the way they build up to the climactic and ultimately inarticulatable moment of passage. He tended, in his generalizations of liminality, as antistructure and communitas, to flatten it. Freud would no doubt have seen these increasingly dramatic crossings as a way of mastering anxiety. LéviStrauss might see them as a way of reducing the gap between the two sides



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  

of the crossing. I want to stress the danger—the anxiety and dread—they evoke. They unwittingly call attention to the artifice of our social and cultural understanding by exposing those intractable moments which step out of—and risk destroying—that understanding and its demand for cohesion and continuity. We may describe such moments in terms of the horror vacui by which Friedrich Nietzsche characterized the Dionysian moment in Greek tragedy (Nietzsche ), to the “abyss”—l’abime—so popular in French symbolist poetry, or to nonbeing. But we have to do so with caution, for they reflect, as Derrida insists, our insistent ontology of presence—an ontology, which, despite its universalist pretension, is by no means universally shared. The liminal has often been likened to the dream—to primary process thinking. It suggests imaginative possibilities that are not necessarily available to us in everyday life. Through paradox, ambiguity, contradiction, bizarre, exaggerated, and at times grotesque symbols—masks, costumes, and figurines—and the evocation of transcendent realities, mystery, and supernatural powers, the liminal offers us a view of the world to which we are normally blinded by the usual structures of social and cultural life. Turner cites the German mystic Jakob Boehme: “In the Yea and Nay all things consist.” We might equally cite al-gArabi—or countless other mystics who call attention to the paradoxes in our understanding. Turner writes: “Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (V. Turner , ). Yes, we want to say— such is our ethos of creativity—but we have to recognize that the liminal also imposes constraints. It is not without structure, as Turner sometimes asserts, but, as he maintains at other times, it is antistructural, which I take to mean that it is always in relation to the structures of everyday life. The liminal may encourage invention but, if only through negation, it also affirms tradition. By way of conclusion, I want to call attention to a paradox in our understanding of the liminal in terms of the imagination. If we take the imagination, as Sartre and in his own way Ibn al-gArabi do, as presenting that which is absent or nonexistent, we have to conclude that it is through an activity, which rests on the nonbeing of its object—the image—that we uncover those gaps, those disjunctive moments of nonbeing, that punctuate our social and cultural life. The imagination also provides us with the glosses, the rhetorical devices, the narrative maneuvers, and the ritual

 

strategies that conceal those gaps. We uncover, as it were, nonbeing through an act that postulates nonbeing, as we conceal that nonbeing through a nonbeing we declare, in ritual at least, to have full being—plenitude. What is more “real” than the objects of ritual? Turner would call them sacerrima. Is it this paradox that leads to the continual (if repetitive) elaborations in ritual and drama, in literature and art, especially and most purely in music, of the asymptotic moment of crossing, that renders imaginative frontiers so menacing as they fascinate and enchant us? Such subterfuge, if one may call it so, is a source of our unending social and cultural creativity—or its cessation—through repetition and the declaration of that repetition as ultimate truth.



  

B o d y, Pa i n , a n d Tr a u m a

“I fall to the ground. If I am made to get up right away then I can tell you what I have seen exactly. If I am not forced to get up, but get up on my own, then I do not remember what I have seen. I am hot and breathe heavily. I feel myself throbbing. There is much itching. I am not conscious of my body. I do not know where I am. Nor do I know what time it is. My body feels like boiling water. It is frightening. I see only gAhisha [the demoness who possesses him].” “How do you feel when you hit your head?” I ask him. “It is gAhisha who makes me hit my head. I see her in front of me. She has a piece of iron. She is hitting her head. I begin to hit my head also. I am not aware of the fact that I am hitting my head. There is itching and sweating, and my whole body is hot. When gAhisha stops hitting her head, so do I. Then I continue to dance. My body and head continue to throb. I am not aware of my wounds. I am still hot. I am sweating a lot, and my breath is very fast.” L, a Moroccan friend1

   description of the experience of the frenetic phase of trance, jidba, by a Moroccan man named Labid, literally “the slave,” who was a member of a tariqa—an Islamic brotherhood—called the Hamadsha, which I studied in the late s and early s. Labid’s words serve as a medium for my reflections about the body, pain, and trauma and their role in framing and punctuating our world, particularly our remembered world. I use “medium” here as Henry James () did for those often trivial events, or perceptions, those transient aperçus, that led him to the writing of his stories and novels. The mediums often bear only a tangential relationship to the stories, here the reflections and speculations, to which they gave rise. During the ceremonies, which are at once of a spiritual and exorcistic nature, the Hamadsha fall into trance, and in that state, like Labid, they

T



   ,    ,         

sometimes mutilate themselves. The men slash their heads with knives and halberds, bang them with iron balls, drink boiling water, hold hot coals in their hands, sit on burning braziers and the like. Women—only a few did this—slash their wrists with knives. On one occasion, I saw one woman try to slash her breast. She was stopped. As Labid indicates, the Hamadsha dance, fall into trance, and mutilate themselves in order to satisfy the demon, the jinn, or more often the demoness, the jinniyya, who has taken possession of them. When the possessing spirit has been satisfied, they usually fall to the ground in a cataleptic state from which they awake, though physically exhausted, with renewed energy, freed, for the time at least, of the afflictions imposed upon them, so they believe, by the demon or demoness. I wrote extensively about the Hamadsha, and only afterward did I realize that I never used the word “masochistic” to describe their practices or their personalities. The occasion was curious—and amusing enough—to record. I was describing the Hamadsha ceremonies to an American psychoanalyst, who had fallen into the kind of musing analysts sometimes call listening with the third ear, when suddenly, coming to himself and looking at me as if I were crazy, he asked how I could possibly have talked to the Hamadsha about their experiences. I was dumbfounded. After considerable confusion and some embarrassment on the analyst’s part, it emerged that he had thought that the Hamadsha actually killed themselves in their ceremonies. “Oh, you mean they’re only masochists,” he said with relief. “No,” I answered without hesitation. “I would not call them masochists.” The Hamadsha, at least as they performed their rites, were not masochists, though had their American or European counterparts mutilated themselves, they would have been masochists in my eyes. What then was the difference? It has something to do with ritual conventions and practices, which always transcend individual psychology once begun. It has also to do with agency. It was not the Moroccan adepts who were responsible for the mutilations. I am not even sure one can say “self-mutilations.” It was—in their understanding—the possessing demons. With the demons lay their containment—and their freedom.

 To define what it means to be human in terms of needs is to begin, neither with the best, nor with the worst but only with the body and what it lacks. It is to define what we have in common, not by what we have, but by what we are missing. A language of human needs understands human beings as being nat-





   urally insufficient, incomplete, at the mercy of nature and of each other. It is an account that begins with an absence. M I, The Needs of Strangers2

  here are preliminary, and necessarily fragmented. They—the textual body that carries them—suggest the fragmented M body that silently tortures any imaginary construction of the body, the body in pain, the traumatized body, and the considerations it generates. In his origin tale of the self through an act, really an apperception, of primordial alienation, Jacques Lacan notes that the self, indeed the embodied self, emerges in that specular moment in which the enfans grasps his insufficiency through his mirror image, his semblable. This moment “is a drama the internal thrust of which rushes from insufficiency to anticipation—and for the subject, caught in the trap [but also, illusion, delusion] of spatial identification, engineers [or plots] the fantasies which follow one another from a mutilated image of the body to a form (which we call orthopedic) of its totality—and to a finally assumed armature of an alienated identity, whose entire mental development will be marked by its rigid structure.”3 This fragmented body reveals itself in dreams (when, for example, the psychoanalytic patient experiences an “aggressive disintegration” of his individuality), in the paintings of a Hieronymous Bosch, in hysteria and schizophrenia, and—I would add—in the mystical retrogressions of Tibetan Buddhism, in which the body is phantasmically dismantled, and in those intensely erotic moments, so well described by Jean Genet, in which the body parts of lovers are confused with one another as the lovers dissolve into each other in sadomasochistic play.4 The fragmented body is, for Lacan, always the temporalized Unterlage of the “orthopedic” body. From time to time, always unexpectedly, like the intrusion of the réel into the symbolically structured world of the subject, it drives through the defenses that protect the assembled, coordinated, and totalized body, perversely reminding us of that “whole” body’s artifice. Despite himself, Lacan’s is an ethic of fatalism. In his origin tale, he inserts the body in a structure of anticipation—of sufficiency, fulfillment, and plenitude—that is doomed to fail. He manages, thereby, to restore to the body the temporal dimension that is negated, or so systematized (in biodevelopmental terms, for example) as to be denied, in our constituted image of the “whole” body. His vision is special, culturally and historically specific. It grounds a melancholy we attach to realism and understand in terms of alienation (of “self ” from self, “body” from body), of a rupture between the inner and outer world, and of a primordial wound, a trauma, a cutting,

   ,    ,         

that has, in the fashion of psychoanalysis, been metaphorized as castration and its anxiety. We do not have to accept Lacan’s full vision—he is simply my chosen interlocutor for this meditation on the body and pain—to appreciate this torturing apparition, the fantasies of dismemberment and worse that lie behind the imagined body, far less unconsciously than we would want, like a dimly remembered nightmare. The body is in time—an entropic time that leads finally to its dissolution. It is a vehicle of memory within memory. It cannot be considered from outside memory. Memory, its possibility, protects us, I like to think, from the overwhelming intensity of perception. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud remarks, “Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli.”5 Were it not for memory, we would be, with respect to perception, in a position similar to that of someone in Plato’s cave confronted with the Ideas. Even before we perceive something, we “know” what we perceive will be remembered.6 We have, as it were, no need to take it in—in its full, painful, and terrifying intensity. Memory serves for us the same function as the shadow in Plato’s cave.7 We grasp our body, then, in and through—mediated and shielded by—memory. The body cannot be considered without reference to pain—the pain of perception. In its intensity, pain can obliterate memory, offer escape (the illusion of escape) from memory—and thereby inscribe itself in memory, in ancillary forgetting, perpetuating memory and body and pain itself.

 I began writing this book by trying to consider the materiality of the body only to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved me into other domains. I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought. Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies “are.” I kept losing track of the subject. I proved resistant to discipline. Inevitably, I began to consider that perhaps this resistance to fixing the subject was essential to the matter on hand. J B, Bodies That Matter 8

   body received so much theoretical attention in recent years? Does it offer—is it thought to offer—an escape from the enW trapments of poststructural thought? “Body” has given license to a change 9

in philosophical perspective.10 The body has become a site of inscription,

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indeed of dramatic inscription, when, for example, we speak of the inscription of illness and treatment, the clash between them, which, though generally ignored, is subsumed—I am tempted to write, consumed—by the uncertainty of prognosis and its inevitable scriptural effect. The body has become, insistently so, the surface, the deep surface, upon which struggles over identity, race, gender, and—with evasive pudeur—ethnicity, class, and age, are played out. It is also taken—not without contradiction—as a site of performance, at times an absent, at least unformulated, site, a mobilum which somehow performs itself into, if not existence, then identity. As such, it is a site of the age-old struggle between freedom and determinism: to become what it will versus succumbing to what it has been prefashioned to become, as when its performance is constrained by citation and reiteration.11 Under such circumstances, if we do not delude ourselves into accepting supermarket-product choice as an expression of freedom, the space of freedom is what falls out of systemic constraint or, if your prefer, tradition: sadly, the marginal, the abject, the residual. The body has heralded the experiential (though why exactly the body should be the trumpeter of experience, I do not know). As such, it has facilitated a return to— the insinuation of—the phenomenological. A phenomenological perspective, with its focus on intentional consciousness, its emphasis on “surface” phenomena, its stress of the visual—the object of the gaze—and its assumption of ego-centered experience as apodeictic, can (though it need not) lend itself to a complacent human science. The anthropologist Terence Turner suggests that the recent theoretical prominence of the body “is partly an effect and partly a cause of a general reductionist tendency to reject the abstract categories and totalizing theoretical constructs not directly accessible to individual perception, consciousness, and participation” (, ). By these categories and constructs he means “all levels of collective social and cultural reality and historical process, and all structural constraints in absentia, leaving only direct experience in praesenti as the domain of the authentic.” Although Turner radically simplifies many current theories of the body (see, for example, Pinkus ), his point is well-taken. He notes: “As the site of individual consciousness, sensation, and desires, and of some (though by no means all) social controls, as well as the focus of some (though by no means all) cultural representations of the material and social world, and as both a material object and a category of discourse, the body appears to offer itself as a basis for a new and different theorization of the social and cultural dimensions of individual existence, if at the cost of reducing most of the relevant aspects of the former to the latter” (T. Turner ,  – ).

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Turner’s own approach stresses the social character of the body, as a locus and object of productive activity (). The body’s “imbrication and participation in various social processes” suggests that “wide variation is to be expected in the degree to which, and the ways in which, bodies will be treated as bounded or complete individuals in different societies, or different contexts within the same society.” True, but, as in so much writing on the body, Turner’s is not clear about the body. Is the body he refers to a “material object”? Or a “category of discourse”? There is, at least in “Western” discourse (and metadiscourse), an imperative to confound body with “body”: to confuse the experience of the body with its expression and the descriptions—the glosses—we give it. The body is a construct of complex social, cultural, and linguistic processes that not only affect its “biological” character but its symbolism and rhetorical potential. Symbolism and rhetoric impinge upon the “biological” as the “biological” resists, in the phenomenological sense, symbolism and rhetoric. The body as such often provides a template (an effective and effectuating image) of world order, as it was for the Roman architect Vitruvius, or for the Dogon who live on the bend in the Upper Niger and have so thorough a correspondence theory of reality that even a Baudelaire would have been stultified. They view the world as a giant human organism and all of its parts as reproductions on a smaller scale of the same anthropomorphic image (Calame-Griaule , ). More often, the body configures society—the very society that “created” it—and becomes, circularly, the ground for that configuration.12 The medical anthropologist Jean Comaroff notes that “the ‘natural’ constitution of human bodily form gives it enormous potential for symbolic elaboration and representation—of structures in space, of processes in time, and, most significantly, of the interrelationship of the two” (, ). She adds, significantly, that the body is capable of generating contradictory as well as multiple perceptions. “It is hardly surprising, then, that, as biological metaphors come to represent socio-cultural realities, they signify not merely relations and categories but also contradictions in everyday experience.” As an example, she notes that sociocultural conflicts are often apprehended metaphorically in terms of physical illness. What, however, is the “natural” constitution of the body? For the Sar people of southern Chad, the body is less a template of society than, in Jacques Fédry’s words, “a sort of polyvalent tool” or “skeleton key” of their language. “The world of things (natural or artificial) is represented through a model of the human body” (, , my translation). The body permits the relational description of things. The roof of a house is called “head-house”; the interior, “stomach-house”; and the



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entrance, “mouth-house.” Body parts and attitudes serve as prepositions: “head” and “eye,” for example, for relations of interiority (as in “head field” for in the field or “eye fire” for in the fire), “to be lying down” for everything that is extended on the earth, that is, horizontal, like a snake. Body parts also articulate types of speech, space and time (which, closely linked for the Sar, are designated by the same body parts), concepts like absence, presence, exchange, conformity, and responsibility—“all of psychological life.” The Sar say “the forehead of the village” for the West, “a soft body” for timidity, modesty, and shame, “the leg of a truck” for a wheel, and “the middle of the back of the night” for the middle of the night. They make use of the body in even more complicated (metaphorical) locutions. “I extract my mouth” means “I give my solemn word of blessing” or “I give my solemn curse.” “I throw my throat” means “I promise.” We find the articulation of relations and orientations in corporeal terms in many languages. One has only to think of “handedness”—of Robert Hertz’s () pioneering study—or, as among many peoples, including the Dogon, sex and gender. I do not want to enter into the debate here on the primacy of bodily metaphors. (I think the debate itself is indicative of the way the body can be given rhetorical primacy.) It is certainly possible to consider the body among the Sar as a metaphorization of abstract relations even though there is considerable psychological and ethnographic support for granting the body metaphorical primacy—for constituting abstract relations. We must be careful, however, not to equate the Sar material body with our own—to naturalize them both as if they were immune to the effect of their rhetorical and figurative usage. We would do better to ask: What is the Sar’s experience of the body—one that serves as the “skeleton key” of their language, their model for articulating relations?13

 The body is the seat of biological exchanges and expressions of the psyche, inseparable, for the Dogon, from physiological reactions which translate them and accompany them. The body also supports the complex phenomena of speech [ parole; Dogon, sò] in which most of the organs play a role. G C-G, Ethnologie et langage: La parole chez les Dogon14

  —more, but not completely, accurately the “body”—can serve rhetorically to mediate (to give the illusion of mediating), to close (to give the illusion of closing), the split in signification between the

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signifier and the signified. It is, I believe, precisely the privileged status we grant the body as—How shall I put it?—so intimately bound to us as to be at once object and subject of our (conscious) experience that gives it this mediating role. It permits the confounding of body (as signified) and “body” (as signifier) and gives to the body a special rhetorical role, one that “anchors” signification. This mediation reflects our common understanding of language and its usage—what the anthropological linguist Michael Silverstein calls “linguistic ideology”—that asserts, at least highlights, a split in signification, the possibility of its mediation, and the impossibility (at least normally, in ordinary language) of its closure.15 This “split” facilitates its own metaphorization, so frequent today in poststructuralist thought. It is used to describe men’s and women’s putative alienation, their self-alienation, the rupture within them and between them and their surroundings. It evokes the wounds, the traumas, the castration that are thought to produce this condition. The universal pretense of our linguistic ideology (which is, in fact, far from universal) gives to this metaphorization of the split between signifiers and signifieds an inevitability. Wounds, traumas, castration, and the like are by extension rendered inevitable. Language becomes, in our secular world, a ground, if not the ground, of fatality. It is within this figuration that the body/“body” has also to be understood. The experience of the body is that which one cannot doubt. The body, that bodily experience signified by the “body,” becomes the symbol of the intransigent, the incontestable, that which, paradoxically, is outside the symbolic, outside language, because it resists splitting into symbol and symbolized, body and “body.” Yet, we can speak of the body, its experience, its divisions, its history, and, in speaking of the body, bodily experience is alienated from itself. It becomes an object of discourse: the body spoken. Incontestable as it may seem, the experience of the body is not as incontestable as one might assume. It is, despite itself, a product, at least in stubbornly Cartesian cultures like my own, of the rupture between the body and the mind which speaks of it—a rupture which is facilitated, I suggest, by the constituted split in signification. In Bodies That Matter, the philosopher Judith Butler develops a notion of materialization in order to escape the contradictions, as she sees them, in one theory of social construction or another. She is particularly concerned with how sex and body come to matter. Matter for her is not a site or surface, but “a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (, ). It renders matter matter. It is, Butler argues in Foucault’s terms, an effect of regulatory power.





  

“‘Materiality’ designates a certain effect of power or, rather is power in its formative or constituting effects” ( – ). Sex, gender, and body are “constructed” neither as a single act nor as “a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects” (). It is a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms. The reiterative process both produces and destabilizes that which is materialized. It naturalizes sex, for example, or the body, as it opens up gaps and fissures that escape or exceed the norm, permitting, thereby, the constitution of the abject, the possibility of disavowal, and, I would stress, formulations of deviancy.16 This is not the place to discuss Butler’s problematic notions of reiteration and “citability,” indeed of performance and performativity. If I may elaborate on what I take to be her position, the acts and words by which we perform or make manifest body, sex, and gender obtain their performative efficacy by referring back to, or indexing, the chain of previous performances, real or fictive, of body, sex, and gender which constitute our history, our tradition, and may be accounted for—indeed, empowered—by some originating event or origin tale. Neither sex nor body is ever immune to power and normative effect. There can be no prenormative sex or body. In Lacan’s more eloquent terms, “symbols” (we might read “values” and “norms” without excessive distortion) “in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he [!] comes into the world, those who are going to engender him by flesh and blood; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the design of his destiny; so total that they give the words [mots] which make him faithful or a renegade, the law of the acts which will follow him to the very place where he is not yet and beyond even his death; so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the Last Judgement where the Word [verbe] absolves or condemns his being—unless he attain the subjective realization of being-for-death.”17 What are we to make of Butler’s notion of matter? It certainly has rhetorical weight. She sometimes relates it to sedimentation and naturalization. I would argue that materialization as she understands it reflects, if it does not describe, the mediating status of the body/“body” in our common understanding of signification and the argumentation it engenders. This is clearly indicated by Butler’s punning on “matter” as understood both as substance (Greek, hyle; Latin, materia) and as that which has significance or value. The two aspects of matter may be seen as reflecting the split between signifier and signified. She notes: “If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of signification, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims that signs follow bodies as their necessary mir-

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rors, is not mimetic at all. On the contrary it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue, performative, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that it then claims to find prior to any and all signification” (, ). Do Butler’s notions of production, constitution, and performativity serve to repair the rupture we find in any signifying event: to deny the temporal priority we commonly give to what is signified? Butler insists that the materiality of the bodies is not simply an effect of language, for not only does it fail to recognize the materiality of the signifier but also the fact that “materiality” is “bound up with signification from the start.” By “materiality,” I presume she means materialization—the effect of power on signification. She rightly asks why and how materiality has become a sign of irreducibility—the irreducibility of sex, for example, in our understanding of body and gender ().

 Normally I don’t have big problems with my body. Just sometimes I have this stupid herpes on my lips and I really hate it. And once a month I have this horrible pain all around my stomach. I mean my breasts get bigger, my stomach gets bigger and I just feel that I am inside another body. C  S S, in Sasha Waltz’s Die Körper18

  (of ) the body is to perform the body.19 Think of a medical examination, of the formulation of distress, of a “headache” (already a formulation), into a piercing pain just behind the eyes, and the change of experience that ensues with the articulation of the distress, of even the “headache,” in these terms. To exercise the body is also to perform it: to subject it to an empowered and empowering discipline, as Foucault would have insisted (, esp. pt. , chap. ). There are many such disciplines; some, like the martial arts or hatha yoga, are self-consciously developed; others, like learning to walk, stand, or sit down correctly, are less selfconsciously cultivated in some societies, like the United States, but carefully taught in others, particularly in highly formal (court) societies like those of traditional Japan, China, and Indonesia. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu correlates bodily posture (hexis) with social and political demands (, ,  – ). Ida Rolf (), the inventor of Structural Integration, a form of deep and often painful massage, finds that fascial and muscular development reflects common social practices and tensions. Bodily manipulation may reach sadistic proportion, as did the mechanical constraints imposed on children by the nineteenth-century German educator Daniel Gottlob

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Schreber to give them a “correct” posture and encourage their powers of concentration and study.20 Dance is one such discipline. The dance critic Elizabeth Kendall suggests that modern dance quite literally danced in a new perception—a new experience—of the body. The bodies of the modern dancers “in their light draperies or strings of jewels” appealed to women at the turn of the century because of their very unrestraint. They were not painted or sculpted images; they were real and they projected an astonishing physicality. Fashionable women in the audience, notwithstanding the popularity of bicycles and the advent of physical culture in women’s schools, were securely laced into corsets that amplified their fronts, swelled their hips, and diminished them drastically in the middle. . . . This final caricature of Victoriana, however reassuring to the wearers and the viewers, had outlasted its time. It was unfit for a new century that stressed speed and thrust in mechanical matters, fluidity and undress in artistic ones. No wonder women filled the matinées to see the “classic” dancers: the mere spectacle of graceful, musical, and uncorseted motion was an impelling sight, a prophecy. (Kendall ,  – )

By contrast to the expressive fluidity of modern dance, the Argentine tango, which was invented in the brothels on the outskirts of Buenos Aires at the turn of the last century, flirts with violence. It is characterized by rigid postures; masklike facial expressions; intricate movements of the feet that seem, as the anthropologist Julie Taylor observes, almost independent of the rest of the dancer’s body; and an aggressive control on the part of the male dancer and a responsive submission on that of his female partner, which no doubt reflects the “idealized” relationship between men and women. The dancers demonstrate “their skill by performing like somber automatons.” Their dance provides them “with the psychic space to contemplate a bitter destiny that had driven themselves into themselves” ( J. Taylor ,  and passim). Critics would probably view Sasha Waltz’s recent dance performance, Körper, a sort of “visualization” of the outer and inner body, as a projection of the postmodern body. Waltz explores the construction and deconstruction of the body as it relates, sometimes in unison, sometimes in full particularity painfully, joyfully, in and out of fusion with other bodies. At times the dancers’ bodies become friezelike sculptures of extraordinary beauty; at other times they appear in naked singularity, ugly even, vulnerable in their underpants, sexed but unerotic, erotic, intensely so; and at still other times, their bodies are fragments of themselves, of composite bodies, of bodily as-

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semblages, of disciplinary movements, of chaotic moments. Waltz turns them into percussion instruments as they crash to the floor, shadows, corpses . . . She has several of them point to one bodily part as they talk about another—nipples for eyes, a toe for the forehead—creating a purposeful semantic disturbance in the spectators that reflects—and offers relief from—the bodily con-fusions in her performance. In Morocco, I was made to practice the dance steps of various religious brotherhoods like the Hamadsha in order to experience their effect on my body, breath, and mind. (Moroccans are less prone to separate the three than we are.) Their effects were, in fact, strikingly different. The dance steps were not only conducive to trance but to possession by one identifiable spirit ( jinn) or another. Many of these spirits were said to have a favored dance step. We have to acknowledge the way in which dance and other bodily disciplines define not only body image and boundary but its relationship—erotic, aggressive, possessive, submissive—to others, both male and female. We must not forget, as the Hamadsha would insist, to include the spirits. Of course, the power of dance lies not only in its performance but in the interpretive challenge it can pose, particularly when it edges on mimesis. The masked Dogon dancer says nothing; the dance is his word—the word (sò). More or less enigmatic, more or less esoteric, it is only the initiated who can understand it fully. The word is expressed through the body, and like all speech, it obtains its substance, so the Dogon claim, from four elements that make up the human being—from water and fire inasmuch as the dancer is hot and perspires, from the earth which offers him support, and from the wind as he kicks up dust. The dancer energizes his public who, through their encouragement and excitement, the pleasure they take, restore the force he has lost in dancing. There is a circuit of exchange between them that resembles, Calame-Griaule observes, the exchange of words.21 Bodies perform for and through other bodies. Bodies, for the Dogon, cannot be separated from the word (Griaule ,  – ).

 Mais moi, Narcisse aimé, je ne suis curieux Que de ma seule essence; Tout autre n’a pour moi qu’un coeur mystérieux, Tout autre n’est qu’absence. O mon bien souverain, cher corps, je n’ai que toi! P V, “Fragments du Narcisse”22

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  , in history, the body is, and performs itself, as the Dogon seem to recognize, to one or more spectators—even if the spectator is oneself, oneself before, or in, a mirror, real or imagined. Is there a body without a spectator? Insofar as one discovers oneself through one ’s mirror image, one ’s semblable, the question would have to be answered in the negative. But who is this semblable? We can designate it: the infant in the mirror. But the infant does not have the capacity to designate it, not yet. He can only evoke it, play with it, caress it when he happens to be in front of a mirror—a state of affairs he cannot control. The semblable comes and goes, like the mother’s breast. No, not like the mother’s breast, which can be called for, and the calling, however acted upon, is usually understood. Can the mirror be called for? The semblable? The primordial sense of self? Of body? Of unity? Let us not invoke, in the fashion of a Melanie Klein, hallucinations of the absent object.23 Hallucinations may ease our anxiety, but we have to show that they occur and that they ease the child’s anxiety. My point is that even if we disregard the problems ofrecognition— of the infant’s self-recognition in the semblable—which Lacan assumes, indeed through bodily (cannibalistic) metaphors of incorporation, we have to acknowledge the primordial contingency of the appearance of the semblable and by extension of the self, the body, and unity and the powerlessness that contingency must surely produce. There is, then, great power in the semblable—the power not simply to assemble and objectify but to appear and, as a result of that appearance, to assemble and objectify. The body is, if we accept these consequences of Lacan’s origin tale, constituted not simply through its insufficiency before its mirror-image, but by its inability to arouse that image of insufficiency and the (impossible) anticipation of sufficiency and unity it entails. Memory, and not the momentary hallucination, of the semblable would offer the body the continuity of which the contingent appearance of the semblable deprives it, and thus the possibility of anticipating, however delusional, unity and sufficiency. But now I am spinning off another origin tale—of memory and its embeddedness in the contingent. Ah, the power of the origin tale . . . The spectator observes another’s body and in so doing projects into that body—its unity—his own body. “The image of his body is the principle of every unity he perceives in objects,” Lacan writes. “Now he only perceives the unity of this specific image from the outside, and in an anticipated manner. Because of this double relation which he has with himself, all the objects of his world are always structured around the wandering shadow of his own ego. . . . Man’s ideal unity, which is never attained as such and es-

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capes him at every moment, is evoked at every moment in this perception” (, ). Perception cannot be divorced, it would appear, from desire. Who, then, is the spectator whose perception of the body “creates” the body. The delineation of the spectator, of the spectator’s body, their differentiation from the observed, the observed’s body, is not so clear as we might have imagined. The German surrealist painter Hans Bellmer wrote extravagantly: It is certain that until now no one has asked seriously enough to what extent the image of a desired woman is predetermined by the image of the desiring man, so, finally, by a series of projections of the phallus, which will move progressively from a detail to the whole of the woman’s body, in such a manner that her finger, her hand, her arm, her leg will be the man’s sex—that the man’s sex will be a leg sheathed in tights from which swollen thighs emerge— that it will be a couple of egg-shaped buttocks that give force [élan] to a slightly arched spinal column—that it will be her two breasts attached to a taught neck or falling freely to her chest—that it will be at last the whole woman, seated, with a hollowed back, with or without a hat, standing.24

Bellmer asks whether the inverse would not be true for women and concludes in his surreal (and revealing) délire—one which refuses to relinquish man’s sexual priority—that for the vagina to so project itself, it needs to be stimulated by the male organ. (Women have been turned away from their bodies, Hélène Cixous remarks, “made victims of the old fool’s game.” She asks, stunningly, and here to the point: “But who are the men who give women the body that women blindly yield to them?” [, ].) So entangled are the two in this dismembering coital fantasy (for Bellmer, necessity) that one can well understand why the French call an orgasm a petit mort—a little death. We should remember, however, that for Lacan, in the words of Malcolm Bowie, “the tragic story of Narcissus does not speak of delusional self-admiration alone, for the hero is held in thrall by the peculiar potency of a reflecting surface, and is infatuated with his reflected image to the point of self-destruction.”25 Escape from the narcissistic entanglements of perception, at least eroticized perception, through self-destruction or the destruction of the spectator, the other, the semblable (always a form of suicide if the semblable is indeed the perceptual matrix of the self ) would in this view be an essential (though hidden) determinant of perception of at least those others like oneself. Usually, in Hegelian fashion, we speak in complacent abstraction of the negation of the object of perception. Citing Paul Valéry’s Jeune Parque, “Je





  

me voyais, me voir” (I see myself seeing myself ), Lacan underscores the determining role of the perceived perceiving in all perception.26 Is this perception of the perceiver by the perceived, like the evil-eye, death-threatening? Petrifying, like the Medusa’s gaze? So objectifying that the perceiver absents himself from his perception and calls it (significantly) objective? Where then is the body? Perceived by necessity (for it to be a body), is it, therefore, always at death’s edge? The Dogon would, no doubt, answer in the negative. For them the moment of coital entanglement, so dear to Bellmer and Genet, is one of transformation, in which the “incomplete design” of a child dispersed throughout the body of the man assembles itself in the kidneys, mixes with semen, and becomes complete in the body of the woman. It is the moment when oil and water, essential components of the human being, fuse, as do the words—the speech—of the couple to form the image of the child that will lodge itself in the woman’s womb and eventually be born as an embodied infant (Calame-Griaule , ). Note the role of speech in—for lack of a better term—the mimetic move from a dispersed but embodied design (dessin) to an assembled image to embodied infant.

 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. R :

  can play the same mediating role between signifier and signified, word and thing, as the body—with greater success, it would P seem. Pain is said to defy words. It is there, turned on itself, opaque, monolithic, intransigent, in and out of time, at that “still point,” to use T. S. Eliot’s words, where language cannot reach and yet finds its origin (in “Burnt Norton,”, ). Wittgenstein asks: “For how can I go so far as to try to use language to get between pain and it expression?”27 Pain can serve and has served rhetorically and at times theoretically as the anchor point of and for signification. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that “physical pain is exceptional in the whole fabric of psychic, somatic, and perceptual states for being the only one that has no object” (, ). By “object,” she apparently means an object in the external world. “Hearing and touch are of objects outside the boundaries of the body, as desire is desire of x, fear of y, hunger for z; but pain is not ‘of ’ or ‘for’ anything—it is itself

   ,    ,         

alone. This objectlessness, the complete absence of referential content, almost prevents it from being rendered in language: objectless, it cannot easily be objectified in any form, material or verbal. But it is also its objectlessness that may give rise to imagining by first occasioning the process that eventually brings forth the dense sea of artifacts and symbols that we make and move about in” (– ). We can take issue with a number of Scarry’s observations. Are there not in fact other “states” that are as “objectless,” as internal, as pain? I think of certain kinds of pleasure, jouissance, and of course Angst (as opposed to fear). We could argue that a whole, moralized, and altogether problematic psychology is embedded in Scarry’s privileging pain. She seems to confuse “referential content” with the grammatical object of a nominalized verb. With the object of intentional consciousness? Is the consciousness of pain, the state of being in pain, without intention? Or is its intention drawn in unto itself? Can we not intend that which is inside us? It would seem that we are always externalizing the internal or internalizing the external. Does it follow that the “objectlessness” of a state prevents it, nearly prevents it, from being rendered in language? Were this so, we would have to deny the power of figuration. Our whole poetic tradition. Indeed—and this is my point—it is not clear whether Scarry is talking about pain or “pain,” understood, even as she understands pain, as objectless and resistant to language. Is she noting that the intensional and extensional dimensions of “pain” are so collapsed as to approach unity? Are “internal” and “external” experiential analogues of—metaphors for—intension and extension? “All other states [besides pain], precisely by taking an object, at first invite one only to enter rather than to supplement the natural world” (). Their object invites expression. Elsewhere Scarry argues “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (). Pain’s supposed resistance to language points to its attraction to language—to expression. Its destruction of (as well as its resistance to) language suggests the degree to which its “collapsing” of the intensional and extensional, the signifier and signified, succeed in anchoring signification. By “closing” the gap in signification, which produces the very possibility of signification, pain falls out of language, paradoxically, just as it grounds signification through its binding of signifier to signified, the intensional to the extensional. We have to ask why pain is taken to be the “figure” for this grounding in our linguistic, our psychological, understanding—an under-

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standing that Scarry’s argument reflects. We cannot simply proclaim pain’s uniqueness, as Scarry does, on loose phenomenological grounds. The phenomenological itself can be rhetorical and justificatory.28 When Scarry suggests that the “objectlessness” of pain brings forth “the dense sea of artifacts and symbols that we make and move about in,” when she refers to “sounds and cries” that are anterior to language, she surrenders to a founding myth of language widespread in European thought, which, I believe, reflects the peculiar figuration we give pain in our linguistic understanding. Johann Gottfried Herder opens his “Essay on the Origin of Language,” for example, with the observation that already as an animal man had language: “All violent sensations of his body, and among the violent the most violent, those which cause him pain, and all strong passions of his soul express themselves directly in screams, in sounds, in wild inarticulate tones.”29 Pain is, for Herder, at the origin of language. It demands expression, through screams, sounds, and noise. It is true that Herder speaks of other strong passions (starke Leidenschaften), but it is pain that motivates his argument. It is as though an animal or a suffering hero like Philoctetes, isolated on his island, “could sigh out part of his pain and at least draw in from the empty air space new strength of endurance as he fills the deaf winds with his groans.”30 Nature has not, however, created humans like “sculpted blocks of stone” or “egoistic monads.” Their cries are not just expressions of isolated selves, isolated bodies. Like “the most delicate chords of animal feeling,” they are directed to other creatures even if there is no awareness of their sympathy. They perform their “natural duty.” They sound. They call for “an echo from one that feels alike” (ein Gleichfühlendes Echo) even if no one is there, even if there is no hope, no expectation, of an answer. We can see a progression in Herder’s derivation of the natural language of feeling, which is condensed into a single, originating moment. An external stimulus causes pain, or some other strong passion, that is ex-pressed and directed through cries to another (even an absent other) who echoes it. Is the unity of body—sentient body—and sound, symbolized in musical terms by the plucked chord, wrenched apart through interpellation? By the demand for a sympathetic echo? A response? Herder stresses the sympathetic nature of the relationship between cry and echo. Unlike Scarry, who argues that those who hear of another’s suffering will doubt it (because, as it is so verbally elusive, they cannot confirm it), Herder observes, more romantically, that those who hear the sufferer’s cries are in harmony with his suffering. “Their nerves are tense in unison, their souls vibrate in unison, they really share with one another the mechanism of suffering.”31 The

   ,    ,         

cries, so long as they are cried in the immediate context of pain or passion, speak strongly, though they do not discriminate their different sources, the wounds of the soul or body, fear or the passions of love. They call attention to a whole picture that speaks itself. They were meant to sound, not to describe. Herder does admit, however, that were these cries torn from their living context, they would be nothing more than ciphers. The voice of nature would turn into “an arbitrarily penciled symbol”—ein gemalter, verwillkürter Buchstabe (Herder b, ; a, ). Herder identifies sound, like the body, with nature. Sound identifies itself with the object that produces it. It becomes for us as humans—who, Herder insists, are naturally endowed with the power of reflection (Besonnenheit, Reflexion)—the distinctive trait (Merkmal ) of that object. A sheep bleats, and that bleating, that sound, makes a strong impression on us—we feel it in us—and it becomes for us the sheep’s distinctive trait: its name (Herder b, ; a, ). Thus, according to Herder, is language, a language of discrimination, invented. Pain, at the origin of language, becomes a Leitmotif in the alienating trajectory from a natural language of feeling to a discriminating language of reflection, from immediate sounding, through the decontextualization and figurative displacement of that sounding, to that sounding’s written representation.

 It is Monday morning, and I am suffering. A, in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers

   been remarked that pain intensifies the experience of the body, delineating, for example, its contours, creating a sense of interior. Think of the dentist’s patient who tears at his palms with his fingernails as the dentist begins to drill in order to create a counterpain that is in his control. Of course, this intensification of the body occurs only up to a point, before feelings of annihilation set in, before the psychic structure collapses. We are taken in here by the way we construe the body. We have accepted the body as an entity separate from other entities in our experience. We have privileged it. We are perhaps subject to what the Russian literary historian Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as “a new canon of the body,” which replaced the grotesque mode of representing the body that had been dominant, at least according to Bakhtin, until about four hundred years ago in our literary and oral tradition (, ff ). Unlike the grotesque body, which was always in movement, never complete, always in a state of con-

I

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  

struction, absorbing and absorbed by the world, overcoming its own limits, ignoring its surfaces, stressing its orifices, creating a “second body”—the phallus, the stomach—that could lead an independent life even, the modern body is complete, rigorously defined, closed, exposed from the outside, individual and expressive. It suffers, I would add, in its independence. It is the site of pain. It impedes the recognition of the interpersonal dimension of pain, except as an affliction imposed upon it. Scarry observes that the feeling of pain entails a feeling of being acted upon. The sufferer “may either express this in terms of the world acting on him (‘It feels like a knife . . .’) or in terms of his body acting on him (‘It feels like the bones are cutting through . . .’)” (, ). But, despite our “modern body,” we must strive to acknowledge the interpersonal—the interlocutory—dimension of pain. We must remember that Philoctetes’ greatest punishment was not his pain but his isolation on the island of Lemnos. He says to Neoptolemus: May I hear your voice? Do not be afraid or shrink from such as I am, grown a savage. I have been alone and very wretched, Without friend or comrade, suffering a great deal. Take pity on me; speak to me; speak, speak if you come as friends. (Sophocles , lines  ‒)

And later he asks Neoptolemus to think of the useless tears and curses on myself when I saw the ships— my ships, which I had once commanded—gone all gone, and not a man left on the island, not one to help me or to lend a hand when I was seized with my sickness, not a man! In all I saw before me nothing but pain. (lines ‒ )

Pain is here truly intransigent, turned in on itself, like a black hole, for its cries have no reply other than those echoes, impersonal, inhuman, “blabbering,” that come speeding from the distance—from the Hermes mountain, from the “hollow cave,” crowded with his cries of pain, which, in apostrophe, he asks to witness his death (lines –, , –). He has no quick point of interlocution, by which his pain can become an object, even unto itself, to be articulated. “He suffered,” the Chorus says, “and there were no neighbors for

   ,    ,         

his sorrow with whom his cries could find answer, with whom he could lament the bloody plague that ate him up” (lines –). It is the word, coming from another, and not an impersonal echo, resounding in some cave or cavern, that offers the sufferer whatever relief can come from the objectification and articulation of pain—its becoming “pain” as it remains steadfastly pain. It is, paradoxically, the other’s word, his or her response to the inarticulate cries of pain, their plea, that gives the sufferer the gift of communicating that pain.32 At the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (), one of the most relentless explorations of suffering I can think of, Agnes, who is dying of cancer and cannot sleep, writes on a piece of paper, to no one in particular, “It is Monday morning, and I am suffering,” and then falls asleep. In her sleeplessness, a figure of the aloneness her suffering brings, she is as isolated as Philoctetes was on Lemnos, although one of her sisters, asleep however, sits by her. Agnes is, in fact, constantly attended by her two sisters and Anna, a maid, who are all entangled in her suffering—and by their past. Cries and Whispers is not just about Agnes’s suffering but about the transmission of that suffering to the women who surround her. However much another’s pain may resonate with us, as Herder would maintain, however much doubt we may cast on its reality, as Scarry would have it, an etiquette governs the communication of pain. Within the limits set by this etiquette, there may in fact be considerable difference in the ways in which pain is articulated, transmitted, and received. It may be taken up demonstratively, for example, or in a quiet empathetic way. It may be allowed to arouse one’s own suffering or the memories of past suffering.33 It may even become a metaphor for that suffering. The Dogon tolerate women’s and children’s cries of pain—they have a “light heart” (kíne vèy)—but they expect men to be silent and have contempt for those who are not, declaring them cowards. Boys and girls are expected not to cry during circumcision and excision ceremonies; girls must not complain when their noses, lips, and ears are pierced for rings. The mastery of pain is a move toward the mastery of the word and the self, Calame-Griaule tells us. Its recompense is social approbation (, ). Despite her self-involvement, her seeming insensitivity, and her rather common sensuality, Agnes’s younger sister, Maria, is more open, almost promiscuously, to Agnes’s pain than is her elder sister, Karin, who is cold and distressed. Maria suffers for Agnes or at least from her own suffering of her sister’s pain. She is afraid. She cries in front of Agnes. Her suffering, its display, and the effect it has on Agnes, disgust Karin, who fights any passionate sympathy in herself. Karin is the realist, the efficient caretaker. Like so many of Bergman’s characters, she suffers from an inner emptiness, a dullness of

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feeling. She is married to a nasty, tyrannical prig. In a flashback, which, revealingly, Bergman places immediately after Agnes’s death, she takes autoerotic pleasure in mutilating her genitals with the shard of a broken wine glass and then in showing her wound to her husband as she smears blood from it across her face. Anna, as befits her status, comforts Agnes physically, with hugs, kisses, and caresses, as well as with simple childlike words. She seems to nurse Agnes with her breast, as she tries in vain to carry away her charge’s pain—to take it on herself. She also seems to take pleasure in her nursing. Though it borders on the obscene, it is possible to consider pain in the between and betwixt of dialogue where its placement—Who’s got the pain?—is being negotiated.34 Pain is perhaps the most forceful creator of context we possess. Inexorably it declares a situation painful. Empowered, the sufferer defines the situation and controls it within the limits of his or her capacity and the prevailing etiquette of being in pain. Though others may know better, it is the sufferer who has the final say. When Maria begins to cry in Agnes’s presence, the context changes abruptly. Maria becomes the center of attention—and the focus of the camera. Bergman leads us to—and through—an erotics of illness and pain. Agnes herself—her suffering, her dying—is not without erotic effect. Her sisters, Anna, the doctor are all caught in a deficient sensuality that can offer them no escape from the omnipresence of suffering and death. It is as though their desire is moribund, frozen in time and place. The camera leaves the manor house where the sisters are living only at the end of the film—in a memory. Their desire furnishes them at best with lifeless replays of the past or a frequently anticipated future. They are all, even Maria in her voluptuousness, anesthetized. Entangled, torturing one another, they yet remain solitary and alone. Ironically, it is only Agnes who escapes— through death.

 Brother, it is necessary for thee to be punished in this life or in purgatory: but incomparably more severe will be the penalty of purgatory than any in this life. Behold, thy soul is in thy hands. Choose therefore for thyself whether to be sufficiently punished in this life according to canonical or authentic penances or to await purgatory. Penitential of Bartholomew Iscanus 35

   only subject to an etiquette—a discipline—but it may also as a discipline. I have known people who suffer from chronic pain Pserve

   ,    ,         

and who refer to their pain as a discipline. It gives them strength, they say. It purifies them. It elevates them to new levels of spiritual consciousness. It is a trial, like Job’s, that has meaning and consequence even though that meaning and consequence are beyond them. It is a punishment—or the means to expiation, a penance, ultimately a path to some sort of salvation. It is extraordinary how, even among the nonreligious, a theological vocabulary asserts itself, if only ironically, in the justification of pain and its conversion into a discipline. Aside from such “disciplines of necessity,” pain may be a (self-)imposed discipline. Think of the Hindu ascetics, the sadhus, who subject themselves to all sorts of mortifications, from maceration to laying on the by now proverbial bed of nails. (I should note that sadhu comes from a Sanskrit adjective meaning “straight,” “right,” or “holy,” which is derived from the Indo-Iranian sâdh, “unattested.”)36 Or think of the fasting, the flagellation, the wearing of hair-shirts that have been and are still practiced (if in secret) by Christian monks and other penitentials. Penance has always, at some level, been associated in Christianity with pain. It was only in the late Middle Ages that priests (and before them bishops) stopped imposing physically painful penances (Asad ,  – ). As in Bartholomew Iscanus’s Penitential, they were often required to threaten the sinner with greater punishment in the hereafter. Following Foucault, the anthropologist Talal Asad notes that there has always been a relationship between the Christian notion of penance, bodily pain, and the discovery of truth.37 Though the Romans used torture in the interrogation of slaves and non-Roman citizens during the Republic and even of Roman citizens during the Empire, torture was not generally used in the early Middle Ages as an inquisitorial method. The legal procedures at the time were accusatorial, appealing to the supernatural and making use of exculpatory oaths, ordeals, and duels. The use of torture in determining innocence and guilt began at the end of the eleventh century and was widespread by the end of the fourteenth.38 Asad argues that the shift from ordeal to judicial torture marked a change in both the direction of looking for the truth and the practice of reaching it. The ordeal was simply the first step toward “the public inscription of Justice.” The discovery of truth was inseparable from the decision. The judge simply announced the truth that was (painfully) marked on the body of the accused. Judicial torture produced truth in a very different way. It produced information upon which a conclusion—a judgment—was made. Confession, which was peripheral to the ordeal, was central to inquisition. Verbal discourse was the indispensable medium of the truth. Secret

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thoughts, Asad observes, “had to be made available in the form of utterances—words as inner signs brought out as meaningful sounds. The words were not identical with the truth, in the way the bodily marks of someone who had submitted to the ordeal were identical with it. For so long as the rules of the ordeal were properly followed, the marks it produced could not lie. Indeed strictly speaking the notion of a lie in this context did not arise until the system as a whole came under attack—especially in the twelfth century when ordeals were vigorously denounced as superstitions” (, ). Unlike the ordeal, there was nothing automatic about judicial interrogation. The refusal to confess could never arrest all doubt. It was often stipulated that the accused should not know the charges before being tortured, for he might then confess out of fear. Confession was intended to confirm what was already known on other evidence. “Violence done to the body was held to be a condition facilitating the emergence and capture of truth—not, as in the ordeal and the duel, the condition defining its very being” (). The infliction of pain in pursuit of truth cannot, however, be entirely separated, as Asad remarks, “from the reality of pain as a measure of justice” (). But, Elaine Scarry notes, at least for political torture, “the fact that something is asked as if the content of the answer matters does not mean that it matters” (, ). (She notes that as the interrogation is an intrinsic component of torture, it cannot be its motivation.) This is not the place to explore the complex, asymmetrical relationship between torturer and tortured nor its political uses. I want simply to emphasize, as do Scarry, Foucault, and Asad, that the display of power is, wittingly or unwittingly, the ultimate goal of torture. However couched in secrecy, torture must have a spectacular dimension to be politically effective. Its occurrence, its possibility even, must be conveyed to the population at large, even if that conveyance is silence. (Silence can at times be more eloquent than words.) Torture instills fear, pervasive fear, and terror, the object of which is more than pain and suffering, mutilation and death. It creates uncertainty and unpredictability—a sense of the fully contingent that lies neither with a god nor destiny but squarely in human hands: those of the torturer and the powers behind him (or her). As the anthropologist Linda Green wrote, after living under a regime of terror in Guatemala, “Gradually I came to realize that terror’s power, its matter-of-factness, is exactly about doubting one ’s own perceptions of reality” (, ). Fear, she notes, is an elusive concept, which you know when you are in its grips. Like pain, it “is overwhelmingly present to the person experiencing it, but it may be barely perceptible to anyone else and almost defies objectification. Subjectively, the mundane ex-

   ,    ,         

perience of chronic fear wears down one ’s sensibility to it. The routinization of fear undermines one ’s confidence in interpreting the world” (). The Guatemalan women Green worked with took refuge in their ordinary affairs, but, as was attested by their nightmares, they were never without fear, never free from terrorizing subjugation. Having revealed “what is usually private and incommunicable, contained within the boundaries of the sufferer’s body,” Scarry observes, torture “then goes on to deny, to falsify, the reality of the very thing it has itself objectified by a perceptual shift which converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power. The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that had brought it into being” (). “The translation of pain into power,” Scarry notes, “is ultimately a transformation of body into voice” (). This translation cannot, however, conceal the taint of what has been uncovered. The fact of torture, its ultimate indifference to the truth or falsity of the confession, its crude display of power, attests to the instability of the regime that orders it, the fraudulent nature of the power it proclaims, its moral and political degeneracy. One wonders how the use of pain in the determination of truth relates to the role of pain in anchoring signification. We have, minimally, to recognize, as Butler does, that the bond of signification is not immune to power—and may thoroughly depend upon it.39 We have further to note that manifestations of power, at least of torturing power, do not fully insulate their perpetrators from those over whom they wield power. We know of the bizarre sympathies torturers have for their victims—and their victims for them. Hegel would understand this in terms of a dialectic of dependence and independence that characterizes all relations of power. The empowered are always, at some level, dependent upon those over whom they exercise their power (Hegel , –).

 His flesh remembers every break, every beating, every stab of the needles, every burn from the candle. In pain he discovers his history. A M, Ingenious Pain40

 , the body is a site for memory’s inscription. Mariella observes that the women of Sannio in southern Italy perWPandolfi

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

  

ceive everyday life as “as a series of events, breaks, black holes that are directly inscribed in the body” (, ). Their memory of suffering and pain is stronger than what they themselves have experienced. Condensing the historical and the collective, it transcends the subjective. In telling of their illnesses, their symptoms, all of their suffering, Pandolfi goes on, the women of Sannio inscribe and fix the history of their country ( paese) in their bodies (). Insofar as it makes use of language, of signs, meaningful signs, “inscription” always transcends—and in a sense betrays—that fiction: the purely subjective. How often is this inscription associated in fact and figuratively with pain? We speak of the pain of memory. Inscription itself is derived from the Indo-European for a scraping, an incision. Nietzsche observed: “When man thinks it necessary to make for himself a memory, he never accomplishes it without blood, tortures, and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures (among them the sacrifice of the first born), the most loathsome mutilations (for instance, castration), the most cruel rituals of all the religious cults (for all religions are really at bottom systems of cruelty)— all these originate from that instinct which found in pain its most potent mnemonic” (, ). Moroccan men with whom I worked used to say that circumcision should be performed as early as possible so as to be as painless as possible but not so early as to be forgotten (Crapanzano a, ). We find all over the world the painful inscription of memory on the body. Circumcision, subincision, castration, clitorectomy, infibulation, the knocking out of a tooth, the cutting off of a joint of the finger, bodypiercing, scarification, tattooing, torture all play an important—a ritual or ritualized—role in the constitution of the remembered and remembering self. Think how often idiosyncratic rites, psychotic ones even, are accompanied by the infliction of pain. Think of the painful experiences you yourself have undergone. It is they that are vivid in your memory, that is, if they are not too “intense.” Then, we say they have been suppressed, repressed, or foreclosed. They become “traumas.” Freud describes as traumatic “any excitations from the outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” that, he argues, surrounds the human organism (, ). They trip up the pleasure principle. They are “bound to provoke a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy and to set in every possible defensive measure.” Among these responses would be repetitive flashbacks and dreams of the “traumatic event” ( –).41 As has often been noted, the oneiric repetitions of that “event” are insistently,

   ,    ,         

flatfootedly literal. The event and its repetitions are isolates, removed, as it were, from history, personal history, meaningful (and creative) chains of association. They resist integration, as Pierre Janet () noted more than a century ago, into a personal narrative. They simply are: intransigent givens that proclaim an event, as I see it, that does not have—and cannot have—the factual status it claims. The factuality of the replays masks the absence, the mutilation at least, of the facticity of the “originating” event. In both their physical and psychological senses, traumas straddle the body and the psyche. From an Indo-European root, ter (“to rub,” “to turn,” “twist,” “pierce”), “trauma” comes to us through the Greek for “wound.” Etymologically, it refers primarily to a bodily hurt. A surgeon’s term for physical injury, it appears to have been “psychologized” in the last decades of the nineteenth century in France, where traumatisme moral was already current when Freud arrived in  to study with Charcot.42 In recent popular discussions of trauma, its two referents are often confused. The body shapes and gives weight to the psychological. It suggests a single historically determinable, literally describable event. However specifiable physical traumas may be, psychic traumas do not, I suggest, have a specific referent, or facticity, despite the literalism of their replays.43 Lacan argues that, as traumas are painful intrusions of the réel into (the symbolic functioning of ) psychic life, they, like all encounters with the réel, fall outside signification.44 As such, they cannot have a specifiable referent, though, I would argue, their “intrusion” is so fashioned in our contemporary psychological understanding as to assume a referent. Psychologies like psychoanalysis, particularly those literalist ones that claim to liberate their patients from the effects of trauma by “leading” them back to the “real” traumatic experience—incest, child abuse, witnessing a murder—are caught within this articulatory trap and miss thereby the traumatogenic dimension of “traumatic experience”: its lack of a final referent. They demand perhaps, as Cathy Caruth argues, new ways of listening that would recognize “the truth of memories that would, under traditional criteria, be considered false.”45 Whether or not we accept Lacan’s understanding of trauma as a painful intrusion of the réel, we must acknowledge the temporal and temporizing structure into which a “traumatic event” is brought. For Lacan, so at least it seems to me, there is something fated about the intrusion of the réel. It is autonomous, a chance event; it bursts through the symbolically structured (and defended) world of the individual; it is beyond his or her control, desire, will, or comprehension. Therein lies its power—its réel-ness. Outside





  

the symbolic, the intrusion of the réel can never be fully articulated or integrated in the individual’s personality (as psychologists like to say) or historicity, as I would prefer. Caruth puts it this way: trauma “does not simply serve as a record of the past but precisely registers the force of an experience that is not yet fully owned.”46 One does not have (and structurally cannot have) access to it. Among others, Caruth stresses the belated—the nachträglich—quality of the trauma, for the “traumatic event” is itself at its time of occurrence (if there is ever such a singular moment, which I question) never fully assimilated or experienced.47 This occurs later (if it ever does, which I doubt) in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. It is this literality and its insistent return which thus constitutes trauma and points toward its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event. It is indeed this truth of traumatic experience that forms the center of its pathology or symptoms; it is not a pathology, that is, of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself. If PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] must be understood as a pathological symptom, then it is not so much a symptom of the unconscious, as it is a symptom of history. The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess. (Caruth , )

But can one ever possess a history? At times, as above, Caruth assumes that the traumatic event can be assimilated or fully experienced later—a point some clinicians would contest—and yet she recognizes the “loss” that would then occur.48 How does one relieve the traumatized of the suffering the trauma produces, she asks, “without eliminating the force and truth of the reality that trauma survivors face and quite often try to transmit to us”? For Caruth, the fact of having survived is an important dimension of a trauma’s aftermath. Caruth’s observations, and my speculations, have, of course, to be understood within the historicity, call it modernist (or even postmodernist), in which we find ourselves. It is, to simplify, one in which the repetitions (and certainties that derive therefrom) of traditional societies have given way to the belatedness, the Nachträglichkeit (and the instabilities that derive therefrom): the event, always incomplete in itself, is repeatedly “possessed”—(re-)experienced and (re-)interpreted—after the “fact.” Are then the ritual traumas—the mnemonics of which Nietzsche wrote—of traditional societies traumas in any but a physical sense? Are traumas, as we understand them, a product of

   ,    ,         

modernist historicity? It is perhaps no accident that the notion of psychic trauma was born in late nineteenth-century Paris. The “recovered” trauma, whatever its historical reality, can be likened, I believe, to a screen memory—a memory behind which lies another memory and behind that memory another and still another. Freud (who never had the courage to abandon fully his literalist faith in the possibility of determining those causal events responsible for psychological illness) believed that analysis could uncover the buried memory and “bring to light the content of those early years long buried in oblivion” (, ). It would seem that the temporality of (modernist?) psychic life precludes any final referent or referential understanding; for referenced events are always calling forth earlier ones and anticipating future ones in the continual play of displacement and condensation that characterizes that life.49 Clinicians have observed that the victims of post-traumatic stress disorder have often had a traumatic history of abuse (Van der Kolk and Fisler ). However referenced, “traumatic events” come to punctuate in their intransigent opacity the traumatic—more accurately, the traumatogenic—history of the subject: a history founded on, or articulated around, an emptiness, I believe, a hole, an absence, a manque-àêtre (to use Lacan’s expression), which can be understood only figuratively in terms, say, of a wound—a trauma.50 The “final referents,” including the traumas, uncovered by psychoanalysis and other interpretive psychologies, are so limited in number, so repetitive, and so well integrated into the explanatory tales psychologies tell that one has to suspect that it is the tales themselves, their style at least, that give the referents their finality. I am not denying that a bodily trauma can be “seized” by the psyche— to become a source of a psychic trauma. They do, but paradoxically they can also become a defense against psychic traumas or at least mitigate their “traumatic effect.” Freud noted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that a wound or injury that accompanies a potentially traumatic event, that is, one that is both frightening and surprising, may impede the development of a traumatic neurosis (, ). Does it offer a fixed—a final—referent? Does it condense all the traumas of the individual’s life into a single, well-defined, well-located one? Is it then like a sacrifice? It would be one (perhaps like all sacrifices) whose effects are illusory; for, it is founded on the “irreference” (my neologism to evoke irrelevance and irreverence as well as nonreference) of traumas we have designated as psychic. It can offer only the illusion of a fixed and final referent. It cannot fill in the lack. Nor can it stop time—even through the repetition of a painful memory really remembered.





  

Here, briefly, I want to stress that many (though by no means all) war neuroses, now understood in terms of post-traumatic stress disorders, relate to the injury or death of another, a buddy, a friend, or even a stranger, an enemy, with whom one was in life-and-death contact. Often there is a sense of guilt: “It should have been me,” which we might also want to read as “It could have been me.” Achilles grieves over the death of his friend and foster brother Patróklos: “I could not help my friend in his extremity. . . . He needed me to shield him or to parry the death stroke. Not the slightest gleam of hope did I afford Patróklos or the other men whom Hector overpowered. Here I sat, my weight a useless burden to the earth.” A Vietnam veteran, who had been hospitalized with a serious infection when a younger man in his team was killed, tortures himself: “In my heart it’s—if I were there, he wouldn’t be dead. I didn’t do my job. I didn’t bring him home. When it come the time, Doc, I didn’t take care o’ him. When he needed me, I wasn’t there. . . . I shoulda took the fuckin’ round myself.”51 Another tormented veteran recalls having to carry the dead body of a Viet Cong with half his head blown off, putrefying fluids and brain matter dripping on him, for three days to confirm the company commander’s head count. When the commander did not show up at the meeting place, the vet was ordered to dump the body in a riverbed. He cannot get rid of the taste of putrefaction in his mouth and nose (Shay , ). Obviously the effect of the trauma is increased by the meaninglessness of the war, of the occasion at least, by the sense that something fundamentally human has gone wrong. Despite his anger at having been betrayed by Agamemnon—remember, Agamemnon had taken Achilles’ rightful booty, the fair-haired Briseis, for himself— Achilles still had a sense of valor and honor that was supported by those around him, friends and enemies alike, of which the American troops in Vietnam were largely deprived. What I want to stress is not, however, the relationship between trauma and meaninglessness but the confrontation with one ’s own death, as it always has to be, through its objectification in another. Despite all our confrontations with death—and I can speak from personal experience here—they are always of our possible death. Our own death can have for us no final referent (see chap. ). Many of the Vietnam veterans who have suffered post-traumatic stress disorders refer to themselves—the numbness they feel—as “being dead.” However powerful, “dead” remains here always a metaphor—without an experienced tenor. It comes, perversely, to metaphorize the absence of a single determinable traumatic event. Both Freud and Lacan have called attention to the way in which the

   ,    ,         

traumatic event continually repeats itself in the dreams of the traumatic neurotic.52 For Freud at least, this repetition was an attempt at mastery. Mastery of what? we may ask. The fright that Freud saw as one of the two sources of trauma? Or the surprise—his second source? Freud stressed the first. Lacan, who likens any encounter with the réel, including trauma, to chance (tuché), would stress the second. It is the “irreferentiality” of the events, the chance events, at least those granted traumatic status, that is the foundation of at least our modernist historicity. However much we try to mask this irreference by the intensity and literalness of our memories or the certitude proclaimed by our foundational stories, it always leads back to that lack of being, the “presence” of which we can only assert and figure poorly. It reflects our obsessive portrayal of the body—and, indeed, the soul and spirit—as incomplete, always needful. In one fashion or another, we in the Judeo-Christian tradition understand this needfulness, its incompletion, in terms of sin. Of course, by this assertion, I have now produced my own origin tale less of memory than of history. I must remind you, however, of the first of my tales, never completed, then of memory, parasitic, a displacement of my chosen interlocutor—Lacan—for this body of words. That story pointed to the chance appearance of the semblable—the self-giving, body-giving alterity—that announces the infant’s self- and body-insufficiency, which will haunt him (or maybe her) in his dreams as it motivates his life and gives him his fractured ontology. We must not forget that the semblable is, if not a double, then the Anlage of the double, and that in Western lore and literature, a meeting with one ’s double, a trickster-figure, like death itself, announces one ’s immanent death. The body, real and reflected (for the soul, despite our mysticisms, cannot be reflected, at least in a mirror) is collusive in this intrusion of the real—a trauma, perhaps, the certainty of immanent death—into our psyche and all that that entails, including the figuration of that body, the body in or subject to pain, as society or cosmos. Pain, like the body, can never give us, however, the anchorage we desire, for were there no rupture in signification, there would—wouldn’t there?—be no desire.

  , let me return to my Moroccan friend Labid. He never knew why he had been struck and possessed by the demoness gAhisha, though he had his origin story. It was one I frequently heard from the Hamadsha. He did not seem to believe it, not really, as he told it to me. As a

I

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  

boy he had made fun of the Hamadsha and their demoness. She seized him; he fell into trance and mutilated himself. It had hurt—the only time it had ever hurt, he told me. From then on he had to dance and to fall into trance and slash his head whenever he heard his—her—favored trance-inducing melodic phrase. Sometimes he had an explanation for these later trances, but he did not put great stock in these explanations. What difference did they make? He had no choice. He had to slash his head. Had gAhisha a choice? Can I even ask such a question? His life was articulated around this experience. He could only repeat the pain, now become painless, its inauguration . . . He could memorialize it without ever “knowing,” accepting a fatality I—and I assume you—would find, if not altogether alien, then at least disquieting. Did that fatality not require the insistent referents of our own historicity? Of our own desire? Of our insistence on need and the fact of sin? We cannot separate our sense of history from desire, can we? Did Labid’s require only repetitive markings—enactment and scarification. He sometimes proudly showed me his scarred head. There is more than resignation in his stance—a resistance perhaps to explanatory fictions and the liberation we claim they offer—but there is also enslavement to bodily enactments of what I am compelled to see as fictions. Inevitable evasions, in either case.

  

Hope

All time is unredeemable. T. S. E, “Burnt Norton”1

   pages of the doctoral dissertation on sin and expiation that he managed to complete before his death in World War I, Emile Durkheim’s Istudent Robert Hertz struggled with the methodological and conceptual problems of his project. Like Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, he wanted to delineate for comparative study a set of categories that were prevalent in European thought and of universal pretension. Were these categories universal? Or were they the product of a particular level of social development? How could the two positions, both of which were, more or less, held by the Durkheimians, be reconciled? An evolutionary model, or rather orientation, offered a way out: it was, in fact, a cover story for what could not be reconciled on either conceptual or methodological grounds (Mauss ,  – , for an example). How could one study, for example, the nature of expiation in societies so different from twentieth-century France that the very category was in question? How could a primordial notion of expiation, or sin, be identified? If it were identified, would this not suggest that there were, as Kant had assumed, innate categories of the mind resistant to social or contingent determination? Or else universal features of social organization which were reflected in such categories? What would these features be? The question of definition troubled Hertz. After a long discussion of sin and expiation in Christianity in the introduction to his thesis, he noted how difficult it would be to avoid the deep penetration of these Christian notions in any comparative study of religion.2 Hertz could offer only a weak methodological exit: to examine the facts without taking a position—

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  

a parti-pris—but with method. But can one? Hertz recognized, I believe, the impossibility of the Durkheimian project. His own procedure, though not without contradiction, was rather more complex than that of his mentors—more psychological or at least more experiential. “The only means we have then is to proceed consciously as do the historians of institutions in general. . . . Take as a term of comparison the notions of sin and expiation, constructed after the givens of our actual social experience; as we are aware of the necessary subjectivity of conceptions relative to a determined state of civilization, we can try to tone down and correct them with the help of the data history provides” (Hertz , ; my translation). Hertz, in fact, proposes a sort of hermeneutical cleansing—or “bracketing,” I am tempted to say, were it not too explicitly phenomenological—of our categories. I begin with Hertz’s conceptual and methodological concerns because, though I take a different tack—one that is less dedicated to objective certainty than Hertz’s—they are mine too, as I try to give possible shape to a notion of hope as a category of both experience and analysis. My aim is not to come up with a definition of hope nor to lay bare its structure, the way, say, Jacques Lacan, attempts to lay bare the structure of desire (Lacan , esp. , , ). My aim is more modest, tentative, and ethnographically reflexive. By contrasting the assumptions we make about hope with those made in other societies I want to delineate some of the parameters of what we take to be hope and to reflect on its possible usage in ethnographic and other cultural and psychological descriptions: in other words, to look critically (insofar as that is possible) at the parameters of both the discursive and metadiscursive category of hope. As Naoki Sakai stresses in his treatise on eighteenth-century Japanese discourse, the prejudices and expectations that define, maintain, and stabilize discursive space (or, in a different idiom, common sense) not only exclude other possibilities, other worlds, but they “conceal and repress the possible shifts and changes from one [discursive] regime to another: what Jean-François Lyotard called ‘the differend,’ the possibility of actions disclosing the otherness of the Other, is banned” (, –). Among the stabilizing strategies of any discursive space is the application of the metadiscursive categories which constitute that space as “space.” Though these metadiscursive categories are, at least hypothetically, culture-bound and, therefore, problematic, they are not usually taken as such by even those of us who have been long familiar with cultures very different from our own. We tend to blind ourselves to their cultural and historical specificity and treat them as self-evident, contextually independent, and, therefore, universal. As I have argued elsewhere, power—articulatory power—oper-

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ates most forcefully through (the institutionalized authority of ) our metalanguages (Crapanzano a, particularly the introduction). Hope, as one such category, is not then without political significance, even if it is ignored. When I began research on hope, I discovered, to my surprise, that unlike desire, which has been a central focus in the social and psychological sciences, hope is rarely mentioned, certainly not in any systemic or analytic way. Robert Ranulph Marett’s Faith, Hope, and Charity in Primitive Society (), Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope (), and Henri Desroches’s The Sociology of Hope () are exceptions.3 Marett, who was the first to hold the chair of anthropology at Oxford, went so far as to claim that hope is the “mother-feeling in religion”—more basic even than fear in its foundation.4 Hope is implicit, however, in accounts of revolution and utopia and is more explicit in recent discussions of treating the dying patient.5 Hope has, of course, been of concern to theologians and philosophers. Along with faith and charity, it is a principal virtue in Christian theology. For the Catholics, it is an infused virtue, for it is said to be directly implanted in the soul by God. The Harvard theologian Paul Hanson () features hope in his idea of a community of faith. It is the centerpiece of the German Protestant Jürgen Moltmann’s theology of hope.6 Hope also figures in Jewish messianism and, more generally, in eschatological religions.7 Phenomenologists, such as Heinrich Middendorf () and Eugène Minkowski (), have taken great pains to describe what they take to be its intentional structure. We have to ask: Why has a category of experience that we value so highly—and not just in religious terms—had only an incidental role in our ethnographic explorations and social and psychological understanding? Hope is certainly no more difficult to define than desire. Is it one of the rejects of our determined secularism? Perhaps, but I am not convinced. Has it rather to do with a passivism, a resignation, inherent in the notion of hope itself? One that runs counter to today’s aggressive individualism? To a consumerism that cultivates an instant gratification that is at odds with the waiting-time of hope? Or, do we avoid it—or transform it—simply because it finally calls forth our mortality? The fact remains: hope, however understood, has been ignored.

 We need some imaginative stimulus, some not impossible ideal, such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine work which is so large a part of life. W P, Marius the Epicurean 8

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  

 W P, the Victorian aesthete, critic, and novelist, because in a few words, he gives expression to several dimensions of hope as we usually understand it: imaginative stimulus (presumably from the real world); some not impossible ideal; vague hope; effective desire; hope ’s carrying us through the “routine work” of life—curiously—“without disgust”; and its potential transformation into desire. Pater’s words are as important for what they do not include but is often associated with hope: namely, dreams, waking dreams, daydreams (remember Aristotle said that “hope is a waking dream”), and illusion; anticipation, expectation, and possibility; the future; patience and waiting; doubt, fear, and joy; revolution, utopia, and apocalypse; and a quantity of theological terms like salvation, redemption, and, of course, expiation.9 To these I would add realism and resignation.10 Hope is, Pater saw, intimately related to desire. It is desire ’s passive counterpart, though it is sometimes used as its equivalent. Desire is effective. It presupposes human agency. One acts on desire—even if that act is not to act on desire because one has judged it impossible or prefers the desire to its fulfillment.11 Except where hope is used as an equivalent to desire, hope depends upon some other agency—a god, fate, chance, an other—for its fulfillment. Its evaluation rests on the characterization of that agency. You can do all you can to realize your hopes, but ultimately they depend upon the fates—on someone else. I desire her. I hope she will desire me. I do what I can to bring about her desire, but, finally, there is a limit to what I can do. I can only hope. We might say, simplistically but revealingly, that while desire presumes a psychology, hope presupposes a metaphysics. Both require an ethics—of expectation, constraint, and resignation. And this ethics is founded on one notion or another of the real—on a realism that limits fantasy and its enactment. What Pater did not acknowledge was the temporal dimension of hope. It is rooted, in the West at least, in a temporality of meaning, one dimension of which—the dominant ideologically—is linear, teleological, and eschatological. As was made clear in my research with conservative American evangelicals, who are given to an end-of-the-world theology, time is split between the immediate this-worldly and the distant, though always imminent, Apocalypse.12 Hope figures in complex ways in this conception of time. In its worldly manifestations, it may be quite specific, edging on desire, as when a lawyer hopes to win a case or a father hopes to have a daughter. Or, it may be open-ended, lacking final definition, vague, as Pater described it, and subject to chance. In Christianity, particularly among

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evangelicals, it rests on the promise of Christ’s Second Coming. It is, in this sense, temporally bounded, though, despite endless predictions, the time of Christ’s return remains uncertain. It demands a particular take on reality. Jürgen Moltmann stresses the disjunction between hope and experience—“between the resurrection and the cross.” Doctrinal states are true, he argues, “if they can be shown to agree with the existing reality which we can all experience” but “hope ’s statements of promise must stand in contradiction to the reality which can at present be experienced. They do not result from experience, but are the condition for the possibility of new experience. They do not seek to illuminate the reality which exists, but the reality which is coming. They do not seek to make a mental picture of existing reality, but to lead existing reality toward the promised and hoped-for transformation. They do not seek to bear the train of reality, but to carry the torch before it. In so doing, they give reality a historic character” (, ; my emphasis). This is not the place to pursue Moltmann’s eschatological theology. We should note, though, that he wrote his magnum opus, The Theology of Hope, in the s. It reflects at once the revolutionary utopian spirit of the time and an essentially Calvinist worldview that decries “the infinite misery” of experiential reality and the paralytic despair of those without faith. Unlike those evangelicals who reduce their social responsibility to converting the “unborn,” Moltmann stresses the changes that hope can induce. Hope takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught. It does not take things as they happen to stand or to lie, but as progressing, moving things with possibilities of change. Only as long as the world and the people in it are in a fragmented and experimental state which is not yet resolved, is there any sense of earthly hopes. The latter anticipate what is possible to reality, historic and moving as it is, and use their influence to decide the processes of history. Thus hopes and anticipations of the future are not a transfiguring glow superimposed upon a darkened existence, but are realistic ways of perceiving the scope of our real possibilities, and as such they set everything in motion and keep it in a state of change. Hope and the kind of thinking that goes with it consequently cannot submit to the reproach of being utopian, for they do not strive after things that have “no place” but after things that have “no place as yet” but can acquire one. ()

This view of hope couples a realism, as rhetorical and Calvinist as it may be, with a sense of the future (as an advent, Zukunft, a-venir) that, whatever Moltmann’s own political and social commitment, can be coordinated with

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notions of social change, progress, and even revolution. His disparaging use of utopia refers to those utopias—Musil calls them “utopias of realism”—whose stress on “stark facts” is so great that they are ultimately incapable of recognizing the historical character of reality and become fully static. Like other Christians, evangelicals distinguish between hope for salvation, which for some of them, the Pentecostals in particular, becomes a certainty with being reborn, and the petty hopes that characterize everyday life. They frequently refer to Paul’s letter to the Romans (: –): “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” Though Paul dismisses everyday hopes, they are of concern to the evangelicals, who are, for the most part, a very practical people. Their hope for salvation puts their petty hopes in perspective by figuring them in the redemptive history. It does not infuse their petty hopes, however, as some variant of Neoplatonic theology might have it. Nor does it demand the reorientation toward reality that Moltmann’s theology proposes. It is not open, as it is for Catholics, to material things insofar as they are a means to reach the supreme end of human life. As Calvinists, evangelicals live in a world in which salvation cannot be achieved through good works. The split between worldly activities and the determination of one ’s salvation is absolute, predetermined, lying only in the hands of God. The evangelicals moralize Paul’s distinction. They distinguish between true and false hope. False hope is uncertain. It is based on what is pleasurable and desirable in human terms, on a denial of reality, on mystical or magical thinking, on an unbiblical view of prayer, or on an improper interpretation of Scripture. I am paraphrasing the writings of Wayne Mack (), who teaches biblical counseling in Los Angeles. True hope comes with salvation and requires daily renewal through prayer, Bible study, and the application of biblical precepts to daily life. It is a realistic choice—we can choose to be hopeful or without hope. The realism demanded seems at times—to the outsider—brutal. As Jay Adams, a leading biblical counselor, puts it: To tell people they are sick—Adams is speaking here of homosexuality, which he regards as sinful—is not to give them hope. To tell them that homosexuality is sinful gives them hope, for they know (if they are “Christians”) that their sins will be redeemed by Christ (Adams , ). Mack, who is gentler, quotes from the Psalms (:): “I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope”—for forgiveness,

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mercy, and plenteous redemption. True hope is not a speculative hope but a “believing” one, secured by God’s promises as they are made manifest through the correct reading of his Word. It is an assured hope: an expectation. Mack gives an example: “We say, ‘I hope my friend comes to visit tomorrow.’ But the biblical meaning of the word hope is different—it is more like ‘I know my friend is coming over tomorrow, and I can’t wait to see him.’”13 To the outsider at least, “true hope,” however urgent, however believed in, whatever succor it offers, can fuel a rhetoric of deflection that has enormous political and economic potential.

 It is hope [espoir] or despair [désespoir] that determines the action of the awakened dreamer’s—the poet’s—imagination. P E, Donner à voir14

 LIVED TIME, the psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski examines desire and hope (espoir) phenomenologically, from within the structure of temporal experience.15 His conception of time is indebted to Henri Bergson (e.g., Bergson ). Hope and desire arise out of that zone of experienced time that Minkowski calls the “mediate future.” It lies between the zone of the immediate future, characterized by expectation and activity, and the zone of the remote future, that of prayer and ethical action.16 As opposed to activity and expectation, which Minkowski associates with joy and terror, he finds desire and hope to be positive. “We are charmed by hope,” he observes, “because it opens the future broadly before us.”17 Minkowski refuses, however, to be called an optimist, for optimism and pessimism are secondary—empirical—attitudes which have to be distinguished from the general structures of time. “Pessimism and optimism always have to be substantiated with supporting proofs, while we never have to ask ourselves whether we desire or hope,” he observes. Both desire and hope have, perhaps, to be understood, as Heidegger understood them, in terms of “something still outstanding,” which he regarded as an essential characteristic of care (Sorge)—of human life.18 Desire, for Minkowski, surpasses as it contains activity. It is fuller; it looks further into the future than activity to the plus loins, the beyond. It is more intimately connected with the ego than mere activity. “In desire there is a withdrawal in relation to activity, a withdrawal to the intimate me,

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toward the interior, toward the inside of the active ego.”19 (Minkowski is referring to the phenomenological ego—and not the ego of psychoanalysis.) Unlike activity which can go only from object to object, desire enables us to settle on something. It is more episodic than activity. Hope shares the same direction as expectation (attente)—toward the future-present. It penetrates further into the future than expectation. It is more ample, more full of promise. “It separates us from immediate contact with ambient becoming; it suppresses the embrace of expectation and permits me to look freely, far into lived space which now opens up before me.” “I have an intimation of all that could be in the world beyond the immediate contact which expectation achieves between becoming and the ego.” I am put into contact with a becoming that is unfolding at a distance. (There is—in my terms—a transcending quality about hope.) Hope allows me to take refuge in myself in order to see life unfold around me.20 Minkowski puts it this way: “Desire contains activity within itself, while hope liberates us from anxious expectation. And yet, it holds us breathless. Unlike desire, which is continuous, hope assumes a moment of arrest.” For Minkowski, prayer and ethical action are, as I have said, characteristic of the zone of the remote future (,  –). Prayer is a life structure—a temporal attitude. It requires neither a man nor a god. It is both a movement inward (“a totally lived interiorization”) and an exteriorization (“a totally lived extrospection”). For, “in springing up from the depths of my being, it goes beyond the universe. . . . in prayer we lift ourselves up above ourselves and all that surrounds us and turn our eyes to the distance, toward an infinite horizon, toward a sphere beyond time and beyond space, a sphere full of grandeur and clarity but also mystery.” Minkowski adds, “we can then replace this mystery with the idea of an active divinity. But this idea is not in any way originally included in the phenomenon of prayer, which, far from affirming whatever it may be from this point of view, above all puts a problem before us.” In other words, the postulation of a god would be an “empirical question”—a culturally or historically determined symbolization for mystery.21 Is prayer—or, as I prefer, the prayerful—wholly different from hope? Can we draw a line between mediate and remote time? Or do they fade into each other? Were I to accept Minkowski’s approach, I would argue that prayer, as a life structure, is a necessary horizon for all hope. Hope, particularly in its abstract form, always invokes an ever-further horizon—a beyond of a mysterious, transcending, if not transcendental, nature. We may

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call it the divine, but, despite our yearning, we can never really know it. Prayer may be idealized, as a feature of Minkowski’s “remote future,” but all futures proclaim a horizon: a beyond, that which is not yet reachable, the unreachable, an unknown of which we have an inkling, and an unknown of which we have no inkling, only the dubious certainty of its existence. (It can be described only with an oxymoron.) We can only take a prayerful attitude toward it, but that attitude is immediately reduced, if not destroyed, the moment we pray, as inevitably we do, to someone or something—a god or a transcendent force—for something. The concreteness, the specificity, of our interlocutor or the subject of our prayers diminishes the horizon, drawing attention away from it. This “empirical reduction” of the prayerful attitude to prayer-to-and-for reveals the fragile nature of the prayerful. Despite phenomenology’s universalist claims, it is (or ought to be taken as, if only for critical heuristic reasons) a culturally specific, highly romantic idealization, whose very idealization masks its fragility, its ephemerality, or indeed its artifice. Minkowski ignores the implications of the empirical reduction of the prayerful, but they have enormous consequence for those, at any rate, who share his vision of prayer and the temporality it presupposes. In a manner not dissimilar to the play between the concrete and abstract objects of hope, the prayerful and prayer-to-and-for are implicated one with the other. It is as though the second depends on the first for its power. This is exemplified, I believe, by a shifting in the conception of God, say among Christians, from an abstract deity who resists description (or can only be not-described, as Pseudo-Dionysius and negative theology advocate, through the negation of His attributes) to a relatively anthropomorphic one.22 We may even want to relate this shifting to the trinitarian godhead, in which Christ is, at least for a time, most concrete, indeed human; God the father, less concrete but still, if only in name, anthropomorphized; and the Holy Spirit, the most abstract, though, among Charismatics and Pentecostals, the most concretely experienced. I believe we often find a similar oscillation between a concrete and an abstract conception of prayer’s object. It could be argued that the focus on the concrete object is a way of defending oneself—or taking pleasure in the beyond: the awe, the dread it may well inspire, the sublime. Though I do not want to stress such psychological-functional explanations, or their rhetorical equivalent, I must point out that, in their studies of prayer and magic, anthropologists have tended to focus on their concrete object and the

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instrumentality that arises from such a focus rather than on the metaphysics prayer and magic presuppose, the horizon they postulate, and the mystery they call forth.

 I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past into a future. B L W, “An American Indian Model of the Universe”23

’ , like that of other phenomenologists, has to be treated with caution, for it takes into consideration neither the linM guistic nor the cultural determination of the experience being described— of description itself. We have to remember that phenomenology is the product of a particular cultural era: one that gives, for example, evidential priority to the individual, inner experience, consciousness, and a particular take on language that at once recognizes and denies its formative specificity. Whatever his theoretical take on language, the phenomenologist describes experience as if the language he is using is transparent.24 He brackets, so he insists, the natural (empirical) attitude in order to attain the pure structures of consciousness, without seeming to recognize that the natural attitude— the way we discriminate and evaluate ordinary objects and events—is embedded in his language of description. His position requires that we assume that the structures and categories of language are universal—a position that can be contested, at certain levels at least, on empirical grounds— or that the structures and categories of consciousness somehow shine through the specific language in which they are described. This is equally contestable. Can we assume that the structures of time that Minkowski postulates are universal? Immune to linguistic influence? Can we assume that desire and hope, as he describes them, are translinguistic, transcultural and transhistorical?25 I am not arguing that language determines perception—it may or it may not—but rather that it affects the articulation of experience and, thereby, the theories we generate from such articulated experiences.

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How we relate the articulation of experience to subjective experience is altogether problematic. It depends, for one, on how we understand representation. Remember, representations of experience may be purely rhetorical, as they often were in Baroque literature or the writings of mystics of roughly the same period whose obsession was with ways of speaking, el modo de hablar en las cosas espirituales, as the Alumbrados of Spain put it, “the way of speaking about spiritual things.”26 They were entrapped within their own eloquence. Their aim was effectiveness, and not representational accuracy (though they sometimes exploited “representational accuracy” rhetorically). Wittgenstein’s skepticism is perhaps in order here. We must recognize in our reading and interpretation the burden of subjectivity that our romantic forebears have bequeathed us and from which we have by no means freed ourselves. We must not assume that depictions of mental life necessarily refer to conditions of mental life that resemble the depictions. But we must not forget the evocative—the creative—function of language either. Minkowski’s description of hope rests on a division of time that correlates with the tense structure of Indo-European languages, indeed, with tense structure itself. Time is conceived, as Benjamin Lee Whorf noted, “as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past.” It is onedimensional, vectorial, divisible, quantifiable, and measurable. Could a speaker of a language that had a different tense structure or no tense structure describe hope as Minkowski does? How would a Melanesian articulate (if not experience) “hope” if his language, like so many Papuan languages, has more than one future “tense,” and those are distinguished not only by temporal “distance” but by status?27 How would the Fore describe hope? They distinguish grammatically between a definite future, in which events are expected to occur, and a dubitative future, in which an event’s occurrence is in doubt. Or the Yimas? Like the Fore, they have two future tenses (one for tomorrow, one for beyond tomorrow), but their entire tense system can be detemporalized by substituting for tense- (“time-”)indicating suffixes an irrealis one. The linguist William Foley describes it this way: “The irrealis suffix indicates either that the occurrence of the event in the future cannot be fixed or that it occurred in the legendary past, so that again it is beyond real time.”28 Or speakers of Angaatha? Their verbs mark status (“real” and “unreal”) and those that mark the real also indicate past or present; the future is always expressed by the irrealis—not by tense. No doubt Whorf is the most influential proponent in anthropology of

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the role of grammar in the articulation of experience. His putative linguistic relativism continues to challenge the universalists as well as those particularists who prefer to ignore the difficulties, if not the impossibility, of “full” translation.29 In his well-known  essay, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” Whorf relates Hopi notions of “time” and “space” to their grammar.30 Here I will focus on the Hopi use of tense, recognizing, however, that, as Whorf insisted, no single set of grammatical features of a language can be taken to determine that language ’s outlook on a specific theme like time.31 Whorf notes that Hopi has no tenses—no tenses, at any rate, that resemble ours. Hopi contains “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, present, or future, or to enduring or lasting, or to motions as kinematic rather than dynamic (i.e., as a continuous translation in space and time rather than an exhibition of dynamic effort in a certain process), or that even refer to space in such a way as to exclude that element of extension or existence that we call ‘time,’ and so by implication leave a residue that could be referred to as ‘time ’” (, – ). Despite their take, or nontake, on time, Whorf insists that the Hopi are fully capable of describing and accounting for all observable phenomena in the universe. In the Whorfian spirit, we might want more accurately to say, “in their universe,” for that universe is their construction. Whorf himself would probably find this phrasing too idealist; he remained, despite himself, always an empiricist. Just as we have several equally adequate geometries for describing spatial configurations, he argues, so can we have different but equally valid descriptions of the universe: ours, say, or the Hopi’s, or that of relativity theory. As Whorf sees it, the Hopi impose on the world two “grand cosmic forms” that correlate with their grammar: the manifested (the objective) and the manifesting or the unmanifested (the subjective). The former “comprises all that is or has been accessible to the senses, the historical physical universe, in fact, with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future.” The latter includes all that we call future, which the Hopi takes to be “more or less predestined in essence if not exact form,” as well as all that we call mental, “everything that appears or exists in the mind, or, as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all forms and appearances of nature in the heart of nature, and by an implication and extension which has been felt by more than one anthropologist, yet would hardly ever be spoken of by a Hopi himself, so charged is the idea with religious and magical awesomeness, in the

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very heart of the Cosmos itself ” ( – ). The subjective realm—“intensely real and quivering with life, power, and potency”—is characterized by “the striving of purposeful desire, intelligent in character, toward manifestation—a manifestation which is much resisted and delayed, but in some form or other is inevitable.” It is the realm of expectancy, “of thought thinking itself out” from the heart into manifestation. It is dynamic, not in our sense, which always involves motion, but in an eventuating way, as evolving by degrees that which is already with us (and not coming to us out of the future) into the manifest, or objective. Included in the manifesting is that part of our present that refers to that which is beginning to be done, like falling asleep, but is not yet in full operation: the moment of inception. It is indicated by a special verb form, the expective, which correlates with another verb form, the inceptive, which refers to a starting, to the emergent edge of the manifested, when “cause”—the eventuating of the manifesting—begins to end. Were we to correlate our metaphysical terminology with that of the Hopi, Whorf notes, we could probably speak of the subjective realm as the realm of hope and hoping. The Hopi verb tunátya, usually translated as “hope” (or more adequately, as “it is in the action of hoping,” “it hopes,” “it is hoped for,” or “it thinks or is thought of with hope”) includes something of our notions of “thought,” “desire,” and “cause.” It refers to a “mentalcausal activity, which is forever pressing upon and into the manifested realm.” The Hopi see “this burgeoning activity” everywhere: “in the growing of plants, the forming of clouds and their condensation as rain, the careful planning out of the communal activities of agriculture and architecture, and in all human hoping, wishing, striving, and taking thought; and as most especially concentrated in prayer, the constant hopeful praying of the Hopi community, assisted by their exoteric communal ceremonies and their secret, esoteric rituals in the underground kivas—prayer which conducts the pressure of the collective Hopi thought and will out of the subjective into the objective” (). Whorf notes that the inceptive form of tunátya— tunátyava—does not mean “begins to hope” but “comes true, being hoped for.” The inceptive form, then, of the root verb, to hope, which best describes the subjective, ends up denoting the first appearance of the objective. One might say, Whorf concludes, with unusual flourish, that as the distinction between the two great cosmic forms—the objective and the subjective, the manifest and the manifesting—rests on an inflectional difference, they are simply two aspects of one reality.32 Must we dismiss phenomenology’s universalist claims? Must we see it

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as describing language-specific experience? As a product of a particular cultural moment? Can we correlate, in any but a trivial sense, Minkowski’s phenomenological description of hope with (Whorf ’s depiction of ) the Hopi tunátya? Is it even possible to translate tunátya into English? As hope? (In raising these questions, I am not claiming that there are no linguistic universals. There undoubtedly are, at some level, as Whorf himself recognized. But it seems to me that at more superficial levels the often dramatic differences among languages do challenge the universalist claims of phenomenological description.) We must, in any case, be careful not to dismiss Whorf ’s translation as false any more than accept it as accurate, thereby avoiding, in either case, the implications of his theory. We have to acknowledge its approximation and the possibilities it evokes. The power of translation rests not only on semantic accuracy, which our insistence on the referential priority of language leads us to, but on our recognition of its approximation, its tentativeness (some might say, its inevitable failure) and the power of that approximation, tentativeness, and failure to evoke a beyond—another understanding—that we can never fully grasp but have, as best we can, to catch and catch again and again. A translation, so long as it is known as such, resists the fixity of the original (which is itself questionable) and demands of us, more dramatically perhaps than the original, an acknowledgment of the historicity—the mutations—of meaning (and indeed of translation itself ) which we are wont to dismiss if only because of the disturbances such an acknowledgment causes us. Translation represents on a minimal stage the by no means minimal role of power in the establishment and maintenance of meaning.33 Taken as such, translation is wondrous—and dangerous.



For all those simpletons, the imperfection of man results only from flaws in society; it’s altogether natural, then, for them to place their crazy hope in a revolution. If they were to see things as they are. . . . That man is a dirty beast and that there is nothing to be done about it. . . . Every social regime is fatally condemned to reflect what is irremediably bad in human nature. . . . Then, what’s the good of running a risk of an upheaval. A, in Roger Martin du Gard’s Summer  34

  linguistic determinants, hope, like desire, is always embedded within historically and culturally specific understanding. Ernst Bloch makes this point, particularly in his discussion of hope and

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bourgeois society. (He is, however, despite his position, given to universalist, value-laden images of hope and desire, which he tends to conflate.) In his sociology, he lays emphasis on the category of the not-yet—on a forward-looking temporality. He argues that we all live in the future because we strive. Past things come only later. A “genuine present” is almost never there. The future dimension contains what is feared or hoped for; as regards human intention, that is, when it is not thwarted, it contains only what is hoped for. Function and content of hope are experienced continuously, and in times of rising societies they have been continuously activated and extended. Only in times of a declining old society, like modern Western society, does a certain partial and transitory intention run exclusively downward. Then those who cannot find their way out of the decline are confronted with fear of hope and against it. Then fear presents itself as the subjectivist, nihilism as the objectivist mask of the crisis phenomenon: which is tolerated but not seen through, which is lamented but not changed. (Bloch , )

For the bourgeois, Bloch goes on polemically, change is impossible even if it is desired. “Bourgeois interest would like to draw every other interest opposed to it into its own failure so, in order to drain the new life, it makes its own agony apparently fundamental, apparently ontological.”35 But bourgeois emptiness is as ephemeral as the class it expresses. “Hopelessness is itself, in a temporal and factual sense, the most insupportable thing, downright intolerable to human needs,” Bloch insists. I must note, contra Bloch, the extraordinary resilience humans have to the insupportable, to hopelessness and despair. Think of the hope-in-hopelessness, as magical as it appears to be, of the prisoners in Auschwitz, of the millions in Africa who are being destroyed by starvation and internecine war, and of the tribal peoples of the Amazon who face extinction because of a few thousand acres of forest.36 Of course, Bloch is not speaking of such moribund societies. From their perspective, his preoccupations seem indulgent—the product of the very class he decries. Without hope—as he sees it—the bourgeois must, nevertheless, preach hope from every pulpit. They confine it, however, to “mere inwardness,” to “empty promises of the other world.” Bloch’s selfimposed task is, I suppose, to reinstill a sense of hope—of real possibility—rather than vacuous promise. My own bourgeois cynicism tells me that, in his aspiration, Bloch is in the same position as his bourgeois preachers, holding out paradise (read, “utopia”). As reactionary and paralyzing (and as symptomatic of Bloch’s

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depiction of the bourgeois attitude toward change) as it is, Antoine Thibault’s cynicism in Roger Martin du Gard’s Summer  seems at times more appropriate, certainly more realistic, than the pacifism and revolutionary utopia that Antoine ’s brother Jacques preaches. In his novel, Martin du Gard catches the two brothers up in an endless, irresolvable debate. Both die in the Great War, under very different circumstances.37 Perhaps it is in such debate that real bourgeois paralysis lies. Hope—or should I write “hope”—is simply bandied about rhetorically. But so is it by firebrands haranguing revolution and wars of liberation. The hope they proffer, as catching as it may be, is also, inevitably perhaps, delusive. I should note an obsolete meaning of delude: “to frustrate the hopes and plans of.” However deeply we locate hope in the minds and hearts of individuals, we have to recognize its interlocutory use and the way that use can swing back with deforming force on those hearts and minds. Despite my cynicism, I have to confess to the indomitable allure of utopian, indeed revolutionary, possibility, which (like you) I am reluctant to reduce fully to one socioeconomic formation or another.



Bona denique spes cum omnium rerum desperatione confligit [Good hope finally strives with despair of all things.] C, In Catilinam38

,   expression at least, has important interlocutory dimensions and is subject to an often highly moralized, culturally determined communicative etiquette. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good and her colleagues have looked at the way oncologists at Harvard Medical School understand the role of hope in their treatment of cancer patients. Though the physicians were, for the most part, skeptical of the role of hope in actually altering the progress of the disease, they did recognize its importance for their patients. One oncologist put it this way:

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Yes, I think people eat better, work harder to live, and feel better about themselves if they are encouraged and given hope. I think I saw it more clearly when I was in training and had the opportunity to see patients of many different doctors—some of whom were pretty pessimistic. And what they thought—they were brutally honest with their patients and their patients would give up. And others who were able to let their patients know that they’d

 be with them through whatever happened, and they’d support them. Whatever happened, they didn’t have to worry about pain or discomfort. Those patients were able to go on living for whatever time they had, much better. And I think, often a bit longer for it, but it’s hard to prove. (Good et al. , )

A second said: “we sprinkle as much hope on a situation as we can.” A third referred to himself as his patients’ “cheerleader.” “I’ve got to be their cheerleader,” he said. Was he referring here simply to the needs of his patients or to his own? Can the two be separated? Certainly, many of the oncologists recognized the importance of hope—of instilling hope in their patients— for themselves. “I don’t think it [hope] makes a biological difference, but it certainly makes a difference in your outlook and the way you live the rest of your life. And . . . I think if you don’t have hope that what you’re going to do is going to make a difference then you really . . . this is probably the wrong field. . . . I just think it’s such a fundamental thing to have that I couldn’t imagine somebody not have it and being an oncologist, to tell you the truth” (). Like their patients, the oncologists avoided talk of their own mortality (and of the continual reminder that their patients’ illnesses and deaths must have produced). At least in the excerpts published by Good, they avoided all talk of despair and hopelessness. They tended to justify their position on biomedical grounds without much moral probing. Ought they to instill hope? False hope? Unrealistic hope? To what extent did their own hope—their wished-for hope—color their “realistic” evaluation of their patients and lead them to encourage a hopeful attitude in them? Where does treatment and care end and moral presumption begin? Biomedical grounds, however pressing, often seem to serve a rhetorical function, permitting a defensive evasion of troubling questions of morality and mortality. Good’s published research rests on the oncologists’ reflections on the role of hope in the treatment of their patients. One wonders how these descriptions and reflections differ from actual practice. To what extent does hope configure the relationship between doctor and patient? Care and treatment? Can we isolate the doctor-patient relationship from other medical relationships? Doctors have been known, after all, to maintain very impersonal relationships with their patients, particularly their dying patients, while not altogether unconsciously letting nurses and other caretakers instill hope. Certainly hope figures in often awkward ways in the exchanges in informed-consent interviews between medical researchers and dying patients who are asked to try experimental drugs. These interviews are subject

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to strict protocols that, as I understand them, are designed among others things to preclude the researchers’ making unrealistic promises and instilling irrational hope in the patients. The patients, however realistic, are rarely fully immune to hope. Nor is the researcher. Each patient hopes to be cured, hopes his or her cure will be medically significant, and hopes the researcher’s hopes will be fulfilled. The researcher hopes the patient will accept the treatment, hopes the treatment will be successful, hopes the patient will be cured, and hopes then to fulfill the patient’s hopes. Together, the researcher and the patient have to avoid hopelessness as they are forced to ignore, or at least, limit hope. Hope can never be fully divorced from hopelessness any more than hopelessness can be divorced from hope.

 I left South Africa because I couldn’t stand the waiting any longer for something, anything, to happen. C, a white South African, during apartheid39

 B and most theologians who discuss it stress the optimism of hope, hope can lead to paralysis. The Sufi mystics, in fact, A condemned what they called tûl al-amal (“the extension of hope”) for the passive certainty it could produce.40 One can be so caught up in one ’s hope that one does nothing to prepare for its fulfillment. As paradoxical as it sounds, paralyzing hope can occur in certain depressive conditions. One hopes—one waits—passively for hope ’s object to occur, knowing realistically that its occurrence is unlikely and even more so because one does nothing to bring it about. One may argue that there is simply nothing to be done but hope and that any activism is delusional. One may justify one ’s position through various moral-philosophical stances such as resignation, skepticism, stoicism, or cynicism. Of course, activist stances toward hope may also be justified on moral-philosophical grounds: philosophies of optimism, which stress “the power of positive thinking,” and the effectiveness of optimism itself, see hope (as Richard Snyder [], America’s latest hope guru, does) as “a way of thinking about goals in your life—believing that you can define those goals, find routes to reach them and perceive yourself as having the motivation to use those pathways.” Hope can be measured, Snyder claims; it leads to success: and, best of all, it can be taught and learned.41

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I saw waiting-induced paralysis among many white South Africans in the last years of apartheid (Crapanzano , esp. – ). Bloch would stress their bourgeois attitude. There, as “Carl” described it, many of them were simply “waiting for something, anything, to happen.” They could not think themselves out of the situation in which they found themselves. Even if they had a solution, which they had not (not one they could take seriously), they could not act on it. They simply waited. They were caught in the structure of waiting. What they hoped for was a solution—something they could not envisage. Their hope was so indefinite, they could not turn it into effective desire. Yes, of course, they wanted to survive. They wanted to preserve their wealth and the status quo ante, which they, filled with nostalgia, idealized, but they also knew that this was, in all likelihood, impossible. They were realists. They were overcome with thoughts of a coming bloodbath. They had end-of-the-world fantasies. Many attended churches that stressed the Apocalypse and personal salvation. However, even the Fundamentalists among them were, I should note, less given to discussing the details of the Apocalypse than are their American counterparts, who argue over the millennium, Christ’s return, and the time of rapture. Perhaps the elaboration of these end-of-the-world scenarios, as otherworldly as they are, resonated too closely with the troubling world they found themselves in. Their salvation was, after all, at stake.42 The whites were afraid, and clearly, their fear intensified their waiting—their ill-defined hope. (Spinoza says that “fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.”)43 The whites found refuge, I believe, in this sustained and indefinable waiting. They were removed; they were not responsible. This was important. They had given themselves up to a fate that was, so it seemed to me (perhaps like all visions of fate in situ) empty. They lived in the ethereal, as the phenomenological psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger might have characterized it. It was a world of desire, hope, longings, fantasies, and dreams. It was removed from the real, and it offered them solace, as they continued in very real and pragmatic terms to live their lives as they always did (Binswanger ,  –, – ). Their ethereal—their dreams and longings—resisted definition. Oddly, their clinging to the practicalities of everyday, material life, was more than a sign of their self-interested materialism, their brutal pragmatism, as most of their critics asserted (and as they themselves might at times have agreed, if pressed). However real, however pragmatic, that realism, that pragmatism, became a sort of magic. It enabled them, if not to overcome what they saw

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  

as inevitable—the loss of life, wealth, and well-being—then to remain in the waiting for something, anything to happen. Hope, I wrote at the time, “is the field of desire in waiting” (, ).

 It is indeed beautiful to see a person put out to sea with the fair wind of hope; one may utilize the chance to let oneself be towed away, but one ought never have it on board one ’s craft, least of all as pilot, for it is an untrustworthy shipmaster. For this reason, too, hope was one of Prometheus’s dubious gifts; instead of giving human beings the foreknowledge of the immortals, he gave them hope. S K, Either/Or 44

   are always in uneasy relationship. Bloch’s conflation of the two is by no means unusual. As I have noted, we often use hope to mean desire. We are less prone, I believe, to use desire for hope, though we sometimes do. That the social and psychological sciences have ignored “hope,” both as a descriptive and an analytic category, suggests mistrust. We find it, as Kierkegaard warns us, “an untrustworthy shipmaster.” As well as leading to inaction, as in waiting, it can lead us astray: through inaction (as it did, among those white South Africans who preferred waiting to, for better or worse, acting) and through the distortion of our sense of reality by offering us unlikely possibilities. (Kierkegaard is making reference above to Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, in which the god tells the chorus that he “caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom” by placing them “in blind hope” [Aeschylus , lines  – ].) That desire can also promote false objects suggests that our mistrust of hope is rooted less in its production of false objects than in the inaction, the resignation, and the passivity that hope can promote—among other ways—through the production of these objects. As such, hope bucks the activism—call it, “agency”—that founds our understanding of social action and that we, most blatantly in America, value. The categories of social and psychological analysis can never be fully divorced, despite the deconstructive force of the best of our ethnographies, from the structures and values of the society in which they are elaborated. Whether we give primacy to desire or hope, we have, in either case, to recognize the way their objects reflect as they precipitate a certain take on the world. Good notes, for example, that hope, as it figures among American oncologists, is grounded in popular conceptions of the relationship between mind and body and modes of disclosure—and no doubt attitudes toward

H

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treatment. It coordinates, I would add, with the status and authority of the doctor in America’s “classless” society. It can certainly be related to American notions of progress and success. The objects of hope and desire are always more than themselves. They are multiple-meaning symbols that have, in linguistic terms, enormous pragmatic force. They evoke a world, a society, a moral order, a psychology. Analysts of the Melanesian cargo cult distinguish two dimensions of the “kago” the natives long for and, without any understanding of its manufacture and distribution, attempt to manifest by magical or ritual means (Lindstrom , ff ). Cargo, we are told, refers at once to the material objects the cultists desire—say, the proverbial refrigerator—and to a new moral, social, and cultural order in which these objects figure. The analysts refer to the former as “cargo” with a small c and the latter as “Cargo” with a capital C. I will have more to say about these cults below. Here I want only to note that in such an analysis Cargo constitutes the world of its assumption, just as cargo denies its symbolic-evocative, its pragmatic, dimension by emphasizing its real, concrete quality. After all, it is not the universe that is desired: it is the object—the refrigerator. This understanding reflects, I believe, the consumer’s partial understanding of the products he desires. In consumer society, however, the object is doubly indexical. The refrigerator is not any refrigerator but a refrigerator distinguished by design, label, and cost. As such, as any but the most naive or defensive consumer knows, the refrigerator, say a Sub Zero, indexes the social and economic status of its owner. Quality, of course, justifies the choice; need, the purchase. One needs a good refrigerator—not the status it conveys. What is usually ignored is the fact that the refrigerator also indexes the consumer world, the production of desire (understood often enough as “need”), and the parameters of choice that permit, within limits, self-expression. It is the second indexical process, from which a political and economic critique might be developed, that is masked in a consumer society like ours, in which a certain, ironical or even cynical, self-understanding is de rigueur. Irony, cynicism, and reflexivity further insure the masking—the mystification.

 Typically, participants in a Cargo cult engage in a number of strange and exotic rites and ceremonies the purpose of which is, apparently, to gain possession of European manufactured goods such as axes, knives, aspirins, china plate, razor blades, coloured beads, guns, bolts of cloth, hydrogen peroxide,





   rice, tinned foods, and other goods to be found in a general department store. . . . Large decorated houses, or “aeroplanes” or “ships” made of wood, bark, and palm thatch bound together with vines, may be built to receive the goods, and participants may whirl, shake, chant, dance, foam at the mouth, or couple promiscuously in agitated attempts to obtain the cargo they want, not from a shop or trade store, but directly from the mystical source supposedly responsible for manufacture and distribution. K B, Mambu 46

 B’ description of the cargo cult is classic. Though cult activities have changed considerably since they were first deK scribed at the beginning of the last century—the term “cargo cult” was first used in print by the planter Norris Mervyn Bird in the Pacific Islands Monthly in —descriptions like Burridge ’s are grounding images of even the most historically sensitive studies.47 Description is immediately combined with a problematic set of explanatory assumptions—about desire, for example—which determine the parameters of later descriptions and interpretations. This gives the cults a kind of timelessness, perhaps of allegory. Hope has not, however, figured in any systematic way in their discussions. This is particularly surprising given the influence of Christian missionaries on their rise.48 As Burridge is one of the most sensitive observers of the moral and spiritual dilemmas in which the cultists found themselves, I shall focus on his work among the Tangu and on the island of Manam in northern New Guinea, where a cargo cult under the leadership of a man named Mambu sprang up in the late s. For Burridge, who sees them as protorevolutionary movements of positive protest and dynamic aspiration, cargo cults pose the problem of the individual in relation to society at large: “They ask, bluntly, whether man is a vote, a unit of labour, or endowed with a divine spark—worthy of playing an honourable part in association with other unique individuals. By attempting a passage through an adjustment to existing circumstances to a state of society which may be utopian—but which is, nevertheless, a creation in its own right—they show how new men may be made” (, xx). We need not accept Burridge ’s utopian allegory of regeneration to appreciate the pathos and the excitement of what he calls the “numinous translation of one order of being into another” and the metaphorical possibility it offers us. Indeed, Lamont Lindstrom would see the cults, that is our reading of them, as a product of our own desire—a long-familiar story of unrequited love told in a new idiom (Lindstrom ).

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Like most commentators on the cargo cults, Burridge sees them as a reaction to contact with European civilization—to the shock of difference, to a sense of deprivation and discrimination, and to almost total ignorance of the techniques of production and distribution. The Papuans were caught in a triangle, the points of which were their own traditions, the political and administrative demands of the colonial government, and the values and beliefs preached by the Christian missionaries, which were themselves inconsistent. Their confusion was exacerbated by changes in the colonial regime. Let me quote what a Manam villager told Burridge: “You see, we do not understand. We are just in the middle [of nowhere]. First, the Germans came—and the Australians pushed them out. Then the Japanese pushed out the Australians. Later, the Australians and the Americans forced the Japanese to go. It is beyond us. We can do nothing. When a kiap (administrative officer) tells us to carry his baggage we have to do it. When a German told us to carry his baggage we had to obey. When a Japanese told us to carry his baggage we had to do it. If we did not we might be killed. All right, there it is. Take it or leave it. Nogat tok. I didn’t say anything, that’s just how it is, that’s life.”49 But clearly, if the cargo cult reveals anything, it is that the Papuans were not always simply able to take it or leave it. The Europeans offered them the vision of something more than they had ever dreamed of, but they did not offer them the means of attaining that vision or even explain how they themselves had attained it. Cargo—the vision, the possibility—was just there: a desired opacity. And the Papuans, some of them, some of the time, sought it by whatever means they could. We might say that Papuans were not able to fulfill their desires rationally, that they refused the passivity—the resignation—that hope, however they articulated it, encourages. They wanted to shape and transform vague hope—here not so vague but quite concrete—into effective desire. To do so, they transformed the setting so that the objects of desire could be hoped for—awaited—efficaciously and not just passively. It can, of course, be argued that the Melanesians did not hope for cargo; they simply expected it. I have heard this argument on several occasions. It rests on the assumption that they had such trust in the efficacy of their rituals that they never doubted their outcome. Indeed, many Melanesianists with whom I have spoken were taken aback when I suggested they think of the cargo cults in terms of hope. They said, stereotypically, that Papuans were too pragmatic a people to be much concerned with hope! It is difficult for me to accept this. Stereotypes aside, the cults were idiosyncratic and



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  

arose in an atmosphere of overwhelming confusion, doubt, and disparagement caused by the intrusion of the Europeans, their products, and their religion. However effective the cult leaders, however strong the identification of these “new” rituals with “traditional” ones, they were, at some level, a probe, requiring evaluation and, given their ostensible “failure,” questionable. Word of failure must surely have spread. What may once have been a conviction of ritual efficacy became one of “faith” in ritual: a you’d-betterbelieve attitude. Here, as elsewhere, ritual theorists have tended to ignore ritual history.50 The originating performance becomes the performance— immutable, immune to contextual change, repeatable and repeated. . . . Be this as it may, the assumption that the Melanesians were so convinced of the efficacy of their rituals that they had no doubt and, therefore, no need to hope is, in my view, a striking example of the insidious deprecation of the “primitive” and the perpetuation of the myth of a “primitive mentality.” Time and again, the cult leaders encouraged their followers to destroy everything they had—crops, villages, houses. They then had them construct hangars for the objects they desired. They waited; they danced; they fell into trance; they copulated and fertilized the earth with their sexual juices. Mainly they waited—in vain. We can see this as simply madness, as the colonists, administrators, and missionaries did. But we can also see it as a way of changing the context in the same way those cults that became political have tried to change their circumstances. The destruction can be seen as the destruction of the old context; the building of the hangars, as a construction of a new context; the rituals, as rendering hope—now recontextualized—into efficacious desire. This would be too much of a simplification, however, because their vision was a confusion of the traditional, the new, and the hoped for. Burridge refers to this vision as a “myth-dream” by which he means “a body of notions derived from a variety of sources such as rumours, personal experiences, desires, conflicts, and ideas about the total environment which find expression in myths, dreams, popular stories, and anecdotes” (, ). They are a sort of “community day-dream” in which all people participate (). They “are not intellectually articulate, for they exist in an area of emotionalized mental activity which is not private to any particular individual but which is shared by many.” We might refer to them today as collective paradigms. (Burridge was writing in .) They provide a store of knowledge and express a set of hopes and desires. The items of knowledge become instrumental in the optative domain. They are practical, but within the “space” defined by desire and hope. Burridge himself notes: “If those involved in a myth-dream were capable of fully

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comprehending and intellectualizing its content and meaning, then ‘aspiration’ might have been a better word [for it]” (). Though sensitive to the plight of the Tangu, he does at times give way to stereotypic characterization. Their (primitive) response is emotional rather than intellectual. Though Burridge claims that myth-dreams are to be found in every society, his understanding of them is deeply colored by, indeed inseparable from, what he claims are Tangu notions of myth or, as he sometimes calls them, narratives, and dreams. Both have strong performative force. The myth-dreams provide occasions for the Tangu to extract meaning, which is not simply reflective but efficacious. This is, I believe, reflected in their conflation of the origin and theme of their truth-bearing narratives. They are about—and originate with—the puoker, self-willed divine beings who resemble men but are not subject to the rules of reciprocity that govern Tangu social life. Like the firefly, the puoker are normally invisible but make their presence known in flashes of luminosity (Burridge b, ). Myths (their truths) have, like the puoker, an independent existence. They are enigmatic: “unobliged to men in community” (). “They are essentially oblivious, oracular: it is up to men and women to extract such truths as are contained in them and to accept the consequences of doing so” (). Their truths are, if I understand Burridge correctly, imperative but mediated less through interpretation than through immediate application: “in the course of regarding their narratives in relation to their own particular circumstances and awarenesses, individuals among Tangu may either confirm, or perceive alternatives to, current beliefs and activities. And, in causing such a flux—albeit momentary—or questioning in relation to current moralities, narratives bear the same kind of relation to Tangu themselves as does the ranguma [a sorcerer or otherwise asocial person], a violent storm, or an earthquake” ( – ). The Tangu, Burridge insists, do not comprehend but apprehend their narratives, the traditional ones at least (). When they are asked to say what a tale is about, they give a précis, repeat the last few sentences, or describe the events recounted in it. Their responses do not meet Burridge ’s criteria of comprehension: interpretation, perception of inner meaning, and correlation with other experiences.51 Like myths, dreams bear truth and are performative.52 They “are not simple fantasies woven from sleep. They are a normal technique for solving a problem or finding a way out of a dilemma” (Burridge , ). They are not weak reflections of truth; they are its source. The dream, Burridge remarks, is “the chosen vehicle for expressing the desires and hopes of the cult leaders.” When hope is expressed through a dream, it “merges into

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  

positive expectancy. Any man may wish or hope for something at any time. But, when in association with a dream, the hope comes near to realization. Dreams tend to pull a future into current sensible reality; they give definity to hope, adding faith, thereby putting the dreamer in touch with a verity shortly to be manifest” (). The dreams are then instrumental, but, like hope, they cannot be forced. Once they have been dreamed, once cult leaders such as Mambu have announced their dreams, they become imperatives for action—and presumably sources of comprehension. Given the gap (the puzzlement, the challenge) that inspires and is inspired by comprehension—taken here, not in some allegory of intellectual development, but as marking a change in response to narrative—one presumes that hope is rearticulated, however painfully and with whatever uncertainty, in an expansive fashion. So-called cult activities are an attempt to act on this desire. Though the cults end in failure, at least in their preliminary occurrences—before they become political movements, if they do—the cultists seem of two minds about this failure. Some express disappointment and dismiss the cults as a silliness; others continue to find the myth-dream potent. Burridge suggests that the cult activities and the expression of symbols— Cargo as symbol—seem to be ends in themselves. He sees the cultists as proto-epistemologists (my word, not his) who are asking what the criteria of truth are. They look not to history—in Burridge ’s eyes they can’t, because they do not have history or historical consciousness—but to their myths, which are their storehouse of truth. They are caught in the structure of these truth-bearing myths, and, though challenged by empirical reality, they are ill-equipped to find truth in that new reality. The cargo cults are, for Burridge, attempts to find a new philosophy of life, to find symbols that express conflicts and offer the possibility of solutions that will be meaningful to a new generation. As such, they do not fail. We could say hope springs eternal. The question is: Whose hopes? The Papuans’ or the ethnographer’s?

 A hope beyond a shadow of a dream K, Endymion53

   beginning of Mambu—in one of the most extraordinary evocations of life in the field—Burridge evokes the contagion of A cargo expectation. A missionary-priest he met in the bush told him to 54

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write to his family because he would probably not see them again. He had seen “fiery signs” in the sky that presaged the end of the world. He was living from month to month “in a country thick with expectations of marvels to come,” becoming, Burridge observes, “a part of the atmosphere of Cargo.” A European planter told him that he was being watched by a Russian submarine. He had seen the periscope. Why would a Russian submarine be in these waters? Burridge asked him. “To make a chart, of course,” the planter snapped. “Or to land agents. Stirring up trouble. Something ought to be done.” When Burridge was strolling outside a Manam village one evening, a villager he chanced to meet suddenly announced that he understood. Burridge asked him what he understood, and the villager drew a map in the sand of the cosmos. He identified all the marks he made except for one triangle—a point he refused to name, claiming that Burridge knew its name. Though Burridge insisted that he didn’t know its name, the villager refused to tell him. Burridge was annoyed. He writes: “In Tangu a somewhat mysterious place, where all good things were, had been doubtfully identified as Sewende, the Pidgin rendering of Seventh Day Adventist. And while not wanting to put the word in my present companion’s mouth, it would have been nice had he said it. [Indeed!] Instead, as the sun was sinking into the sea, he made a decision. ‘No one,’ he said suddenly, ‘no one in the world has seen this place or knows it name.’”55 It is, I suppose, the nameless—the secret—source of what the Tangu long for, hope for, and desire. It is that point within the structure of hope— the mystery—that resists definition, when, we might say, the source and the object of hope are collapsed into one. It is, as well, the point of contestation where desire, as Hegel knew, lies in individual consciousness, and yet outside that consciousness—in the relationship that is yet to be determined, in which the attribution of desire (and I would add hope) are staked out.56 The villager knew better than to utter the name he had been given for that unnameable place by the very people who had given it mysterious prominence in the first place. That, perhaps, would have been too much. Burridge comes, at any rate, to experience the expectation that must have tempted cult leaders like Mambu to give answers. Yes, the hope and desire of the cultists cannot easily be distinguished from those of the anthropologists. They are both caught. Though we place them insistently in the individual, neither desire nor hope can be removed from social engagement and implication. We are all, I suppose, caught.

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  

T h e Tr a n s g r e s s i v e and the Erotic For different men take joy in different actions H, The Odyssey1

 I   the lectures upon which this book is based, Teresa Venditto, a student at the City University of New York, asked me A whether I would be a reader for her master’s thesis. It was to be an elabora-

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tion of a paper she had already submitted to me on a man in his fifties, whom she called Billy-George, who was crippled with polio and suffered from a rare, scabrous skin disorder. Teresa told me that she had known BillyGeorge for nearly ten years but had only recently discovered that he was a cross-dresser. He had agreed to be interviewed as his “pain slut”—his female persona—whom he calls Billy. Teresa said that she was particularly interested in the way in which his cross-dressing—the double-identity it produced, if it did—related to his painful and deformed condition and to his social marginalization. Was he able to transfer his pain to one of his personae? Teresa asked. I agreed to work with her. A few weeks later Teresa came to my office, visibly upset, and told me that the interviews—she had videotaped them—had been devastating. She had been manipulated, exposed to horrible sadistic fantasies, and accused of destroying BillyGeorge ’s female persona. Teresa’s request was one of those odd events that occur independently of you but that have immediate, crystallizing significance for you. In their inadvertence, they offer an edge, an illusion at least of an edge, a transcending position, an ecstatic one in the etymological sense of ecstasy as displacement (from the Greek existanai, to displace, to drive out of one ’s senses). We may take their inadvertence simply as chance, the why of which we can never know, and we can even luxuriate in our ignorance. Or we can at-

    

tribute their occurrence to the will, wish, or whimsy of a god or demon who may not even know what he or she is doing. (Why must we always assume that gods and demons know what they are doing?) Or we may refer such occurrences to some more abstract force—witchcraft, for example, which is said to answer the why (and not necessarily the how) of an occurrence (Evans-Pritchard , ff ). Though we tend to ignore these contingencies, peoples living in other, portent-prone cultures, like ancient Greece, seem to be more sensitive to them and may even cultivate their occurrence for prognostic or confirmatory reasons. Pater referred to them as “omens by the wayside” (henodioi symboloi ) which push “the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into weighty motives” (, :). In a divinatory practice called dia kledonon, after pressing a coin into the hand of a particular statue of Hermes and whispering his query to the god, the supplicant would block his ears so as not to hear anything. He would then attribute special significance—a key, however masked, to his query—to the first words he heard upon unblocking his ears (Danto , ). We find a similar practice in Morocco. It is called fal. Not only do Moroccans look for significance in the words they first hear upon completing prayers in a sanctuary, but they are especially attuned to the significance of words they overhear. On such occasions, they may take the fal seriously or ironically and even joke about it, but never, I believe, even on the most trivial occasions, without a trace of awe. Whether we take such words and events as good or bad omens, their effect is always violent, however gently, insofar as they come from outside us, our volition or expectation, and alter our perspective, if only for an instant, before the onset of remediation. It is with this perspective that I will be concerned—with the erotics of position and the seduction of transgressive possibility. Teresa’s encounter with Billy-George has become my fal. I shall create a second fal—a purposeful and therefore artificial one— by attaching to my account of Billy-George a discussion of the French philosophe Georges Bataille ’s writings on eroticism and transgression (Bataille ). My calling this juxtaposition a fal is a conceit—to emphasize the inadvertence that so often lurks behind even the most planned montage for both an author and his or her readers. I was immediately fascinated by Billy-George. I had written on self-characterization and on the multiple voices assumed by an individual—a nineteenth-century young French woman, Herculine Barbin, who was legally reclassified a man.2 It was less, however, the multiple selves that Billy-George assumed that caught me than his desperate, though humored, attempt to take pleasure, sexual plea-

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sure, in the inevitable failure of his play with multiple selves, male and female, in a single, maimed body. I was reminded of a friend’s announcement one day: “I have finally learned that my body is my possession, and not me, and I am free to do with it what I want to—to change it as I will.” Like BillyGeorge, she likes to play with her identity, but she does not have the irony—certainly not the distance on herself—that he does. She was, despite herself, enveloped in her possession. For me, Billy-George immediately took on allegorical status; he figured the inevitable sense of failure that accompanies modern, reflective man’s and woman’s successes and failures. Billy-George requires an innocence he cannot have and yet has in his quest for liberation, simple pleasure, and deliverance from pain. Georges Bataille shares something of this innocence. I have called him a philosophe and not a philosopher, for despite the many attempts to give his thought rigor—to declare even his lack of rigor his rigor—he has neither the rigor nor the “meta-rigor” of the philosopher. So lodged are his arguments in what one must presume to be his—perhaps the male—sense of physiological insufficiency that he appears incapable of standing outside himself and recognizing the extent of his projection. He is very much a period piece. Though he wrote Erotisme in the s, it is the product of nearobsessive reflection on sex, transgression, expenditure, sacrifice, and death, which extends back to his earliest writings in the late s and on until his last ones in  (Bataille ). His is, by today’s standards, an unapologetically male stance. He reflects what we might call the sexual-mechanistic physiology of the French male, characteristic of the interwar years (and by no means extinct today): that of the postdandy dandy whose would-be “scandalous” sensuality is tempered by an incessant intellectualism coupled with that of the sentimental tough guy exemplified by Jean Gabin and the mecs—the guys, the pimps—who starred in French filmes noires. (I find it extraordinary how often Americans fail to situate French theories of sex— those of Bataille, Lacan, and Foucault, not to mention their female counterparts, Beauvoir, Wittig, and Cixous—in France ’s particular cultural erotics.) Bataille is, of course, more of a moralist than Billy-George. I am not certain that Billy-George would ever refer to his sexual practices as transgressions. I suspect he would reject any such classification as a sign of a hypocritical or defunct morality, though he might acknowledge the source of the thrill he seeks in that morality. I do not want to make him more of a philosophe than he is. In his self-exposure to Teresa, he sacrifices his discretion as Bataille does in his writings, but unlike Bataille, he has no overriding

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image of sacrifice that gives it cause. He has simply been sacrificed and must live with it.

 “My outlook is quite fatalistic, an attitude that actually predisposes me to get all the pleasure out of life that I can, while I can.” Pleasure but not meaning? That’s even worse, to me, than the condition. But, of course, that is part of the condition. . . . For me the ultimate question is not just why did I get sick, but why am I here, and do I believe that has a relationship with the universe at large. . . . For me, my back became a physical koan—an unsolvable conundrum that becomes a vehicle towards enlightenment. B-G, quoting and responding to Robert Murphy’s The Body Silent 3

-G lives alone in a small apartment in a gentrifying slum.4 It is filled with his photographs, drawings, and a collection of Barbie dolls which he mutilates, paints, dresses in costumes he has made, and whose heads he sometimes changes. They are reminiscent of Hans Bellmer’s dolls. Some of them have names and stories, which he describes as amusing satires. The stories are violent and pornographic. His drawings, at their best reminiscent of Egon Schiele ’s, are, for the most part, sloppily executed depictions of stereotypic sadomasochistic fantasies. They too have stories, which appear to be more important to Billy-George than the drawings themselves. Billy-George ’s life seems rather more a story than a life. He is constantly deflecting whatever happens to him into a narrative—a story-life— that confounds reality and fantasy. Though he distinguishes between the two, he appears to take pleasure in confusing them and in the pain (so I presume) and irony of knowing that he is confusing them. He titillates himself with fantasies and—more important—with the recognition that the fantasies are his construction, as is their “storied” reality, and that the pleasures they give him are finally the pleasures of their failure to become reality; indeed, the failure of his authorship, his creativity. He comes to represent, naively, innocently, vulnerably, the self-torturing dimension of authorship. Insofar as the split between representation and reality is inevitable, insofar as representation comes thereby to have a fantasy-like quality and has to bear all the (negative) weight—the mistrust, for example—of fantasy, the author is caught in an impasse. The author is no magician. As the countless tales of the coming to life and return to death of statues, puppets, figures in

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paintings, and characters in novels and movies attest, authors can never realize, or bring to life, never truly, their fantasies—their representations of reality. The gap is there and can be bridged, if bridged at all, only metaphorically, as when we speak of the “real-life” quality of a painting or the “vitality” of a character. True, but stories are never just stories. They are communications and affect both their authors and those to whom they are addressed.5 This is particularly clear in oral communications, but it also occurs, at least at the level of fantasized readers and responses, in written ones, which have a wider range of authorial counterresponse. Billy-George ’s stories were addressed to Teresa and through their dramatic effect on her had a strong effect on him.6 Were the stories animated by their performance? Realized? If so, their effect would be short-lived. The “reality” of the fantasies they animate cannot be sustained, at least so long as Billy-George does not fall into the madness their realization and animation finally demands. Jean-Paul Sartre would have stressed Billy-George ’s bad faith. In his biographical study of Jean Genet, Sartre gives us a sort of existentialallegorical rendition of Genet’s becoming a writer—not an ordinary writer, to be sure, who has, at least ideally, controlling distance on what he writes, but a writer whose distance is never really distant (Sartre , ). Sartre suggests that Genet starts to write because he has lost the thrill of his own masturbatory fantasies. The spoken words with which he had nurtured these fantasies have lost their magic. He knows that what he heard is what he has spoken. He begins to write: to excite himself by writing down his fantasies, materializing them, as it were, in order to give them—in bad faith— an independent reality. When this strategy fails, he begins to “discover” them. “Scripta manent: tomorrow, in three days, when he finds the inert little sketch that confronts him with all its inertia, he will regard the phrase as an erotic and scandalous object. A drifting, authorless sentence will float toward him. He will read it for the first time.” Genet is again acting in bad faith, because he knows that he has written them. Eventually he begins to address himself through the other—his readers; for, by reading, they confer objectivity upon the word. “Thus do toilet-poets engrave their dreams upon walls; others will read them, for example that gentleman with a mustache who is hurrying to the street-urinal. Whereupon the words become huge, they scream out, swollen up with others’ indignation. Unable to read what he writes, Genet empowers the Others to carry on for him. How could it be otherwise? They were already present in the heart of the word, hearers and speakers, awaiting their turn.” But Genet never fully escapes his auto-

    

erotic involvement in his own writings. They seem directed less toward an other than toward himself as an other. They are embarrassingly intimate. That Billy-George agreed to be interviewed for a thesis, especially as Billy, has to be seen in this light. As we shall see, he wrote his stories, and the act of writing itself was part of his role-playing. By allowing Teresa to take notes, record, and videotape his story performances, he was, in a sense, widening his audience—to the readers of her thesis and by extension to you, my readers, as I describe her findings—and, thereby, enlarging the range and complexity of his possible counterresponses. He was also “materializing,” serially, his stories, through tapes and texts, giving them a reality upon which he could depend over time. For the most part, he produced and performed his story-life with no audience—or rather with a story-produced audience of self-fragments. They gave him pleasure; they took from him pleasure; finally, they afforded him the pleasure of his displeasure.

 Kids who have a great deal of anger, I mean, especially, you know, since they’ve been crippled, you know, they’re struggling to maintain their own individuality . . . will inflict pain on other people just to show that they’re strong enough to do it. B-G

-G was born in a small town in Pennsylvania. In his early teens, he contracted polio, was hospitalized, and then transferred to a children’s rehabilitation clinic, where he spent more than a year before returning home. At the height of his illness, he had lost the use of both legs and his right hand; his arms were weakened; and his back muscles were “gone.” He eventually recovered the use of one leg, partial use of the other, and his back muscles, though he developed severe scoliosis and still suffers from chronic back pain. “I’ve come to see my back,” he told Teresa, “as a dance movement that somehow became frozen in space.” He wore a leg brace and back braces for nearly three decades and still uses crutches. Billy-George stresses the violence of his illness and hospital experiences in such a way that, whatever their reality, they become the narrative ground of his story-life. They give a cohesion to that life, which we might be tempted to understand in causal-psychological terms, as at some level I am sure Billy-George does, but I do not believe that this understanding can be sustained by the information we have nor justified on theoretical

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grounds. It is convenient to discover in his illness and hospitalization the source of his present psychological condition, but it deprives him of the ever-limited privilege, but privilege nevertheless, of his self-performance. The existentialists would say “freedom.” Upon discovering that he had polio, doctors placed Billy-George in an isolation ward, where he remained for three weeks. His parents could only see him through a window. He describes the pain he felt, the regime he had to follow—no pillow, feet pressed flat against a board, shrouded in woolen blankets and a rubber sheet to keep his muscles warm—and the screams he heard from a man in an iron lung in the next room. He screamed too—for his mother. He says he was totally infantilized. “I continually pissed in the bed for three weeks. It wasn’t worth bothering about trying to maintain what I’d accumulated as an identity as a person.” He was particularly bothered by the thought that he would no longer be able to climb trees and masturbate there, as he had done in the past. At the children’s clinic, Billy-George was bullied by his five roommates, that is, until he himself became a bully. They were always fighting, especially at night when they threw urinals at each other and beat each other up with their braces, if they could get them off. He discusses the laxatives and enemas they had to have and the threat held over them of digging out impacted feces. He describes physical therapy, Teresa observed, “as if he were tortured by a beautiful woman on a daily basis.” Though he says he was uncomfortable with the way the boys talked about women, he took considerable pleasure in describing his sexual adventures at the clinic. The boys were able to blackmail an aide into letting them feel her up at night in the back of the auditorium. He likens their crawling their way to the auditorium to “a medieval passion play.”

 I torture her so I can feel my pain. B-G

 B-G was at the clinic, he used his splint bandages to cross-dress. He would makes panties from them and breasts from W rolled-up socks and masturbate. Later, back at home, he would dress up in his mother’s underwear. He still dresses up as a woman in the privacy of his home and gives himself—herself—sexual pleasure. He has no audience. He is, in fact, a secretive man, and I suspect that secrecy gives to his cross-

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sexual performances an intimate quality that he cherishes. He has referred to his practices as sacred. The few who know his secret are caught in his performance, in its “seediness,” and in his real and feigned innocence. We are put into the position of an intruder, a peeping-tom (or sally), whose knowledge is constitutively more powerful than that of the anonymous public before whom more usual transvestites parade themselves.7 When Billy-George was forty, he lived for the first time with a woman, whom I’ll call Barbara. He found sex with her boring and “unsatisfactory because she was immersed in herself.” For nearly thirty years, his sex life had been restricted to masturbation, “self-” torture, bondage, and crossdressing. When Barbara discovered this, she reluctantly agreed to dress up as a sadistic whore (as he himself did) and to whip him as he hung upside down from hooks in a doorway. It was the first time he had ever been whipped by another person. It relaxed his back, he told Teresa. Barbara found it “strange,” and, as soon as she took off her costume, he lost interest in sex. Their relationship did not last. With this one exception, it appears that Billy-George ’s sex life was always autoerotic, though I hesitate to use “autoerotic” because, as he splits himself into male and female personae—George and Billy—he (whoever he is) is not, strictly speaking, having sex with himself but as George with Billy or as Billy with George. He—Billy-George—is always there, however, at a remove. Their relationship is played out in a singularly complex fashion in both his cross-dressing performances and in his narrative accompaniments to those performances. It was in the persona of Billy that BillyGeorge was able to discuss Billy and George ’s sexual life as well as his relationship to Barbara. “She” seems to have taken sadistic delight in describing to Teresa George ’s sadistic demands. The three personae are entangled in a single body, two of whom are engaged in a sexual contest as the third—Billy-George—like a dreamer “in” a dream, disappears but continues to observe. Billy says their usual encounters go something like this. George (or is it still Billy-George?) dresses Billy up as whore and smears her with so much black and red makeup that she looks as if she has been beaten. She comes out better this way, Billy says, in the computer camera with which he sometimes photographs their performances. Usually he feels sick before a performance, but once Billy is in costume, he feels energized and is no longer in pain. Smoking marijuana, he begins to write sadomasochistic stories on his computer, eventually continuing them “in his head” in another room where there are mirrors on adjacent walls. George as Billy (or is it Billy as George?) takes rush (amyl

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nitrate) and then acts out one of his story’s two characters in one mirror or on one side of his body and the other in another mirror or on the other side of his body. The acting is often very violent. He beats Billy (or one of the characters in his story), slams her to the ground, and is beaten as, shackled, he hangs upside down from a door lintel—sublimely, we might say, remembering that “sublime” comes from the Latin for “under the lintel,” “the threshold.” He ends up having sex and falling asleep on the floor, which creates “interesting dreams.” “When you wake in the morning,” Billy tells Teresa, “you feel like a whore who’s been raped all night long and has to get home, and you look like one, and you look in the mirror and that’s like the icing on the cake, ’cause you have all this experience behind you.” In the video Billy-George lent Teresa, he spent most of the time dressed as a woman, rubbing his crotch against a sawhorse with a crude horse ’s head attached to it. Rush- (and marijuana-) induced visions, dreams, photographs, videotapes, mirror images reflecting mirror images, bodies split into two and bearing different characters, bodies hanging upside down, disoriented, reoriented, beaten until they are depersonalized and without pain, interior monologues, spoken ones, written ones, computerized ones, enacted ones, described from one point of view and then another, sometimes distinguished, sometimes coalesced, always defying pronominal, engendered use, addressed with, without, discrimination, to self, to multiple selves, fragmented ones, at interlocutors within, without, the space of interlocution, with and without character, real, fantasized, remembered, forgotten but still resonating within the performance if not the psyche, the body, of he whom we call—he calls—Billy-George . . . They would defy the richest Cubist imagination. What is, however, extraordinary, is Billy-George ’s narrative or performative control. Though he is carried away, at times, by the roles he plays, he is never so fully engrossed as to lose himself, his masculinity, his maleness, his “given” gender, in his performances.8 His voice never seems to fail him. It is always that of a man and does not change with the characters and personae he enacts. It is filled with an at times sad, occasionally despairing, at times hilarious, irony. Though his perspective shifts, often dramatically, with the roles he plays, he appears to have a relatively constant and controlling overview on his performance. Billy-George does not suffer from multiple personality. His personae are not autonomous. Nor are they ignorant of one another. Indeed, they are all implicated in a drama that depends on transparency. Billy describes George with exceptional clarity and insight. She submits to George ’s de-

    

sires as George knows (though he would probably prefer not to know) that Billy is his artifice as they are both creations of Billy-George who knows his dependency on them. In the case of multiple personality, the “controlling self ” (if there is one) is submerged, if at times only partially. No one personality takes the responsibility for the others. Most of the time, one personality does not know of the existence of the other personalities. When one of them is aware of the others (or any one of the others), it does not take responsibility for their creation, or it does so with the same haunting, ironic belle indifference with which classical hysterics “recognize” their responsibility for their symptoms. Though Billy-George ’s performances appear to defy our assumption of a single, essentially cohesive, gendered personality, they are not as strange as they may at first appear. They do not question our gender attributions, for Billy-George ’s constructions of Billy and George are, finally, stereotypic. He is not projecting a third gender—an identity that resists standard denomination—nor is he is raising the problematic of our insistently binary classification of sexual identity.9 Rather, his body becomes a violent site for dramatizing the struggle between conventionally gendered identities. His performances are, in fact, like modernist narratives in which there is a hyperreflective narrator who questions his evolving creation and his role in that creation as his narrative progresses. We might view BillyGeorge as that narrator. Billy and George would be characters within the narrative who achieve a certain life of their own and, in their independence, come to limit the control—the omniscience and omnipotence—of the narrator. Unlike multiple personality, where the singular narrator appears to have disappeared, each character becoming, as it were, an independent narrator, Billy-George assumes responsive control of his narrative, from time to time relinquishing narrative control to one or the other of his personae. Still, I would be hesitant to define Billy-George ’s position this way. What constancy occurs does so at a metalevel, from which Billy-George as a character, like Billy and George, is precluded. They cannot not have the requisite distance: that of the author to his work (even if the author—really the “author”—is a character in his work) or of the director of a play (even if the director is a character in the play). Of course, Billy-George can accept neither this distance nor the structural impossibility of being at once fully author and character. He has to confound the two positions to make his performances “work” in such a way that he can take perverted pleasure and displeasure in and through the play the two positions afford him. It is only when Billy asks to see herself in Teresa’s digital video camera that Billy-

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George falls apart. He emails Teresa after the interview: “It was horrifying. . . . Think about it. The woman sees herself as a pretty young girl. What you showed her was a grotesque old man in a wig. At that point the interview was over. You did more to destroy the woman in one moment than I’ve been able to do in forty years. Sort of like Dorothy dousing the Wicked Witch of the East. ‘I’m melting.’”

 [Still wearing his habit, Simeon, the sixth-century monk who came down from his lonely hermitage to the Syrian city of Emesa “to play the world along”] does not hesitate to raise his skirts or even to take it [sic] off in front of everyone. He gets into a women’s bath completely naked; he kisses little boys and girls in the street; he pretends to rape a married woman in her room; he accepts without protest the accusation of having seduced a maidservant. He even has his visits to the bordello, and can be seen dancing arm in arm with prostitutes, or climbing on the back of one while having himself flogged by another. He goes so far as to let himself be handled by them. . . . He tries to give the impression of being a bad Christian as well as a man with no morals. Monk though he is, he displays total disdain for the teachings of the Church. If he sets foot in a church, it can only be to disrupt the liturgy. He chooses Holy Thursday to stuff himself publicly at the pastry shop, and he “eats meat like a godless man.” E, Ecclesiastical History10

   not wrought violence on Billy-George ’s body, we might say that he has chosen to sacrifice himself before presumptions H of purity and, thereby, to reveal those presumptions—their desperation and its obscenity. He knows, of course, that these presumptions are also his, and he plays in them, as he must, in his ex-position. That the gods forced him into self-sacrifice should not detract from a certain grandeur in his gesture. He took it up. He might have done otherwise. That he chose as his vehicle Teresa, who in her innocence never saw what he had been showing her all along—the hooks under the lintels—gives to his revelation a Christiansaintly quality.11 He is the martyr, and she is the innocent to whom only he can perform his truths. That she is sophisticated, that he is too, should not detract from their innocence. That in his performance (and in her requesting it) he enacts, and she bears, the cruelty, the destruction, the discontinuity, the fragmentation of relationship, which he knows so painfully, is perhaps his most important offering. The expository performances of all

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truths, at least those that demand or are taken to demand transgressive revelation, are always back-handed. They not only represent truth but evoke what lies behind truth, at least human truth: artifice, hypocrisy, darkness, shadows, the night, that which we used to relegate to the devil and his hells and now, banally, to the id and id-like figures and their circumscription— the unconscious. Like Simeon, Billy-George wants “to play the world along,” “to overturn edification,” to disrupt self-righteousness, but his transgressions are never so forthright—never so public. He is not, I imagine, blessed with so strenuous and encompassing a morality. He is cursed with a selfconsciousness, a reflexivity, that we deny the salos—the holy fool, the sacred madman—in our constructions of him. He knows what he is doing, as Simeon may have, and he knows the consequences of what he does—to himself, to Teresa, to you and me—in a way in which Simeon could not. He does not have the sacred allure of the salos.12 Billy-George may speak of his performances as satires, but they are satires that have no constant footing. To see them as parodies of gender, sex, and deviancy is to insert them in one ready-made ideological construct or another and miss the point.13 BillyGeorge is too fine an ironist, ironizing his own irony and his failures of irony. His “satires” are more like metasatires—satires satirizing unstable satires, which are, therefore, perhaps not satires at all. They reflect his own witting or unwitting lack of firm position and constant self. His transgressive gestures end up, it would seem, as singular gestures of the moment, however repetitive they may be, which neither arise from nor reflect a total moral or social outlook. Whatever his religious beliefs, Billy-George lives in a world in which, as Nietzsche declared, God is dead. He offers no stability, no position, no limits, no Limit. But Nietzsche ’s figure has, by now, become so cliched that it is has lost not only the shock value that Nietzsche meant it to have but the figurative meaning it may once have had. It is like the other verbal icons with which we condense, broadcast, simplify, and situate our thought: “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz”; “Big government is bad”; “We are in the last phases of capitalism”; “We have a God-given right to bear arms”; “We are living in the information age”; “Abortion is murder”; “Christianity is the religion of imperialism.”14 Evacuated of meaning, however they are intended, these icons can indicate only the evacuation of meaning. Paradoxically, Nietzsche ’s figure ends up marking through its banality precisely what he wanted to figure in the first place. Billy-George ’s transgressions, if finally we can speak of his performances as transgres-

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sions, announce the failure of transgression in a world that has not only lost the “sacred,” as Bataille insisted, but the very possibility of transgression; for transgression always requires innocence. Simeon may have possessed that innocence; Billy-George knows (innocently perhaps) the artifice of his innocence. For Bataille, transgression is not the negation of a prohibition, a taboo; it goes beyond that prohibition and completes it. Indeed, he gives to transgression a defining role. “There is no prohibition that cannot be transgressed” (Bataille , ). “Thou shalt not kill” is the threshold beyond which murder and war are possible (). Prohibition and transgression form an ensemble which defines social life. But, as Bataille notes, transgressions are themselves subject to rules, that is, up to a point. Like others who have considered transgressions, among them Michel Foucault (), he is caught in the allure of transgressive possibility. He warns that a limited freedom to transgress may trigger off an unlimited impulsion to violence. The limiting rules may themselves affirm the “solidarity” necessary for unlimited transgression. “The concern for a rule is often greater in transgression, for it is more difficult to limit tumult once it has begun” (Bataille , ). Nevertheless, Bataille insists, it is possible to conceive of unlimited transgression, and despite his reservations, his theory rests fundamentally on that possibility. He fails to see that the category that he postulates may be a product of his own desire, which, like all desire, is not immune to the effects of social life. Is the conception of unlimited transgression a product of a society, so well described by Bataille himself, which has surrendered to ever-increasing and never-satisfied consumption? Were unlimited transgression in fact possible, the transgressors would, in one fashion or another, be eliminated from their society (if, of course, they did not bring down the society itself ). The French anthropologist Roger Caillois notes that there are “crimes”—he uses the word freely— that pose such a threat to the sacred, social, and cosmic order that they cannot be ritually expiated (, – ). The perpetrators can only be expelled from the community. They may be led, unarmed and without provisions, across the community’s border into savage territory, as were the “wild men” in the Middle Ages, where they had to defend themselves from enemies, beasts, and nefarious spirits who, in their imagination, took on terrifying proportion.15 Or in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries they were imprisoned on Narrenschiffe that plowed the rivers of northern Europe (Foucault ,  – ). Among seafaring folk, they were often strapped to a boat and scuttled. In ancient Rome, parricides suffered the punishment of

    

culeus. They were completely isolated, shoed in clogs, their head cloaked in a wolf hide, and wrapped in a leather sack with a snake, a rooster, and a dog, before being thrown in the sea. The animals would bear their impurity.16 Today we exile them, imprison them, incarcerate them in the back wards of mental hospitals, or execute them in such a way as to minimize any bodily contact. We are perhaps less capable of expunging them and their deeds from memory than are those who live in simpler societies and are, Caillois and Bataille would insist, in more immediate contact with the sacred. Caillois goes so far as to argue that the extreme transgressors (like, I suppose, Simeon or Sartre ’s Jean Genet) take on a sacred quality, “sacred” presumably understood in its negative mode. We classify them as criminals, savages, beasts, as deviant, insane, or evil in order to incorporate them conceptually in our social and moral understanding. Bataille ’s discussion of unlimited transgression moves from the individual to the group—to ritual. He cites Caillois’s discussion of the ritual sacrilege that followed the death of a king on Fiji and the Sandwich Islands.17 Caillois argues that when the life of society and nature are epitomized (résumée) in the sacred person of a king, the king’s death is a “critical instant” which sparks ritual license. Upon learning of the king’s death, the Sandwich Islanders commit all sorts of “criminal” acts: they burn, pillage, and kill; women prostitute themselves publicly. Such saturnalian rituals of reversal have fascinated Western observers, who find in them an exotic tableau of a freedom from constraint that they associate with the primitive—the primitive layers of their own society and psyche. These rituals become, in such an understanding, transgressions one step removed— projected and represented—and, therefore, without the immediate dangers that Bataille sees in turmoil. The license and sacrilege that follow such critical instants—they are not limited to a death of a king—are socially regenerative. As Caillois notes, they are of the social order, perpetuated at the expense of majesty, hierarchy, and power. No one takes advantage of the temporary loss of authority; no one questions that authority. Nor is there any opposition to them on the part of those who are normally in authority. “They are considered as necessary as was obedience to the late king.” These periods of ritual frenzy, like all liminal periods, are not without a framing order. Indeed, some of them may be subject to internal rules that have to be followed as strictly as those of everyday life. It is true that sometimes they fall out of their governing frames into pure chaos, but this is rare. When they do, they are followed by a seemingly endless period of violent anomie in which there often appear to be no “internal” remedial mecha-

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nisms for restoring order. Order returns, if it returns—we must not assume it will—with outside intervention, which rarely produces a lasting order, or through exhaustion (an organic metaphor of dubious value, I know). It would seem that the restoration of order always depends on some sort of metacommunicational acknowledgment. Gregory Bateson’s discussion of play immediately comes to mind.18 Two dogs play at fighting; they growl and nip at each other. Suddenly, something happens; they are no longer playing at fighting but fighting. The metacommunicational signal “This is play” has given way to “This is for real.” Or the metacommunication has broken down completely, leading, inevitably, to fighting—the default condition, perhaps. We know that once dogs have fought, they are rarely able to play with each other again.19 The moment of transition between the two states—from order to chaos—triggered off by breaking a taboo, is always opaque and out of time, as is its restoration—from chaos to order—for those, at least, who are involved. This is because they are deprived of the metacommunicational mechanisms necessary for self-reflective and self-circumstantial description and understanding. This was dramatically demonstrated to my wife, Jane, who, while interviewing a group of Moroccan Berber women, unwittingly broke a taboo by uttering an unnameable name. The women jumped up, ran out of the house in which they had been talking, wildly ululating and gesticulating—“like a bunch of maenads,” my wife said—and after circumambulating the house three times, reentered it and sat down where they had been sitting, as if nothing at all had happened. They could not discuss the event. The Moroccans might refer to such frenzied moments as fitna, an Arabic term which has been translated as “chaos,” “disorder,” “that which is out of control,” “madness,” “orgasm,” “temptation,” “trial,” or even “ordeal.”20 When one is inordinately fascinated or charmed by someone—a man by a woman, Eve by the serpent—the person is said to be in a state of fitna. For many of the Moroccans with whom I talked, history was punctuated by moments of fitna. Hadda, one of the men Stefania Pandolfo interviewed, said that fitna originates entirely with words, by which he seems to have meant a breaking out (nadt l-fitna) of a semantically created order (, ). Pandolfo refers to fitna as “semiotic disorder, a mad proliferation of signs, an infectious spreading producing a sort of entropy that fissures the community and may lead to war.” She adds that it is “an alien force, anonymous and blind, external to the will and the control of the individual subjects” (). For me, implicitly for Pandolfo, fitna figures a mode

    

of thinking in which the threat of chaos calls silent attention to contingency and the artifice of any order. Were it not for the fact that it assumes an ontology that may well be alien to the Moroccan, one could relate it to the selfnegating dimension of thought that haunts the works of Hegel, Maurice Blanchot, and, less dramatically, Bataille. Transgressions within a world modulated by such thinking are ontologically dangerous—in Hadda’s understanding, semantically so, insofar as order is constituted by words. Hadda says, “History is born of words, marriage is born of words, selling and buying originates in words, everything comes from words.” But as dangerous as they are, they are expectable. “Everybody seems to mind his own business, then, all of a sudden, Qâb qarqallâb! l-fitna breaks out” (Pandolfo , ). Hadda’s realism is at once consummate, ironic, and resigned. His concern is less with deliberate transgression or ritual license than with the sudden explosions of violence and disorder that have punctuated his world. Unlike “good words,” which restore order, fitna “blows wind between people.” We should remember that the wind is seen as a cause of illness in Morocco. How does it develop? Something like a net is woven between person and person, and people are caught in that net. It is like wires; you “throw” a word, and that word “works,” reproduces [has children], generates new words. . . . It works right away! Try! Say one thing to one person and another thing to another person: all of sudden you’ll be in the midst of electric wires, nobody controls the words anymore, everything blows up. A short circuit, you hear a blast. . . . And if you get to that point, who can control words anymore? . . . 21

Hadda goes on to associate this state of affairs with those moments when the mind starts working on its own, generating images that are independent of your control. We might say, when the imagination runs wild. We might attribute it to insatiable desire. Hadda would probably understand this. Certainly, my Moroccan friends would. They say that the imagination is stimulated by the desire for what one does not have and cannot realistically have. I am not certain, though, that they would immediately conjoin semantic understanding like Hadda’s with their take on desire and the imagination. Nor am I certain that they would describe fitna in terms of a breach of limits—at least as Bataille understands it. Hadda’s image suggests energized entanglement, as in an arabesque, and a violent break-out—a blast. Bataille ’s image of the limit is one of containment and constraint. He

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argues that no well-defined limit organizes the sacrileges that follows the death of the king. What determines their end is the decomposition of the king’s body. Limited transgressions—those so constrained as not to lead to chaos—give access to what lies beyond ordinarily observed limits. It exceeds without destroying the profane workaday world of prohibitions. It opens up the sacred—the complement of the profane. Like Caillois, Bataille accepts without question Emile Durkheim’s division of the world into the sacred and profane. And like Caillois, he stresses the contradictory nature of the sacred (which reflects, perhaps constitutively, the double meaning of sacré in French: sacred and damned, as in “damn it”).22 The sacred is that which is terrifying and repellent as it fascinates and demands devotion. The prohibited corresponds to rejection; fascination initiates transgression. “The prohibited, the taboo, are only opposed to the divine in a sense, but the divine is the fascinating aspect of the prohibited: it is the prohibited transfigured” (Bataille , ). Religion governs, then, the transgression of the prohibited (). Bataille relates the profane and the sacred to the productive and consumptive dimensions of human existence and consociation ( –). The profane is the constrained world of production; the sacred is the world that abandons itself to excess, unconstrained consumption, and ruinous prodigality. It is the world of the festival—the potlatch that haunts Bataille ’s economics of destructive consumption (see Bataille b,  –). Underlying the movement of production and consumption is a “deeper sentiment” of dizzying accord which is played out in the festival dance: in its movement of retreat and rebound, of nausea (produced by vertigo) and the overcoming of that nausea. Bataille can never resist distasteful images of filth (immondice) and horror in his theorizing and erotic writings (Bataille a). He argues that in Christianity and Buddhism spiritual life, by which he seems to mean exceptional or mystical experience, is, like the festival, a transgression and not the observation of the law: “In Christianity and Buddhism ecstasy is founded on surpassing horror. Union with an excess [l’accord avec excès] that sweeps up all things is, at times, even sharper in those religions in which fear and nausea gnaw more deeply at the heart. There is no sentiment that triggers exuberance with greater force than that of nothingness. But in no way is exuberance annihilation: it is the surpassing of this shattering attitude, it is transgression” (Bataille , ; my translation). It is possible that Simeon would have appreciated Bataille ’s argument. Certainly, Billy-George would. Hadda and my friend Moulay Abedsalem would have been offended by it. Though their practices are frowned upon,

    

if not condemned, by orthodox Muslims, Moulay Abedsalem and the other Hamadsha do not conceive of their ways of life, their religious practices, and their spiritual experiences as transgressive.23

 A recluse went to the burning ground found a woman’s naked corpse inside a tangle of worms Others blanched and turned away at the sight but that poor dead creature ’s golden breasts and unshaved cunt haunted me until I lost control and shuddered with violent urges . . . I considered the object considered the hungry ignorant acts that brought it where it lay considered the tangle of worms and corpses I stared into countless rounds of suffering stared into greed and hunger stared on vanity stared until desire blinked like a lamp and went out lust no longer assailed me I made wisdom my own then yes I accomplished what had to be done Theragatha24

 Bataille makes use of ethnographic data, he is far too embedded in his own thought to see it, self-critically, as a product of a parT ticular cultural tradition. His flirtations with relativism, if there are in fact

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any, serve as a titillating exoticism. His work is governed by the evolutionary model of his time, which so situates “lesser” cultures that they do not challenge him. His take on nature seems naive today. It is simply a given. He does not recognize the role “nature” plays rhetorically in argument—his argument; that it is a “cultural construct” which serves as a foundational limit to explanation. It provides a full-stop (“Ah, that’s in her nature; that’s the nature of women”) which has certainly been exploited in all sorts of social ways, as any feminist critic will testify (“Women are by nature weak, emotional, histrionic, in need of protection, undisciplined”), as well as economically. Think of all those “natural foods” and “natural medicines.” In fact, “nature” gives support to the most pervasive and projective of Bataille ’s themes: expenditure and exhaustion. His economics is physiological, one of production and expenditure. His theory of eroticism is also based on excess and expenditure. Haunted by excess, his erotic writings appear to be a reaction against the possibility of being finally spent, and yet exhaustion is, as it is for Billy-George, eroticized—a sort of repetitive denouement that is a prelude to sexual renewal or eroticized death.25 (I am reminded of the stories Moroccan men told me of making love so many times in an evening—twelve, fifteen—that they began to ejaculate blood and were excited by it. They took pride in having beaten the organ in their body that, as they understood it, converts blood into semen.) The only way Bataille ’s picaresque chain of ever more extravagant sexual episodes can end is with death. Like the chauffeur and the narrator, Mme Edwarda—her eyes dead—falls sexually exhausted into a deep (deathlike) sleep at the end of the story named after her. The narrator stops his story. “I’m finished,” he writes and adds that he awoke sick. “The rest is irony, a long wait for death.” Bataille never finished “The Story of the Eye,” the second of his two most famous erotic tales. There are two snuff deaths in it. He projected a conclusion in which the libertine Simone ends up in a torture camp, where “she dies as one makes love, but in the purity (chaste) and the imbecility of death: fever and the death rattle transfigure her” (Bataille , , my translation). For Bataille, as so often for the Marquis de Sade, his inspiration, women—Simone, Mme Edwarda—are the source, indeed the perpetrators, of sexual excess. And yet, he insists, symptomatically, as a reaction perhaps to the stimulus—the temptation—women offer, that women are the sacrificial victims and men the sacrificers (sacrificateurs) in erotic encounters (). Bataille ’s understanding of the erotic rests on its association with death and sacrifice. (In French, le petit mort, the little death, means an orgasm.) He

    

is careful in this respect to distinguish sexual behavior (for reproduction) from the erotic, which he defines as the “affirmation of life into death.” He divides eroticism into three complementary modes: that of the body, the heart, and the sacred (, ). For Bataille life is characterized by discontinuity; death—a dissolution of particularized being—by continuity. We are all separated by an abyss and have in common only the dizziness that results from our confrontation with this abyss (). Though we have nostalgia for a lost continuity, we also want to preserve our discontinuity—our particular identity—into death, as is attested by our particularistic images of the afterlife.26 At love ’s climax, there is an ecstatic loss of identity. “The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.”27 As such, erotic relations are always violent. Pushed to the extreme, as in de Sade, this violation leads to mutilation and death—to an annihilating ecstasy, which can never be sustained and must, therefore, be repeated over and over again. Logically, it must end in one ’s own death—in amorous frenzy. Bataille ’s obsession with death in love does not, however, lead to necrophilia, for the cadaver, an important figure in his writings—its decomposition marks the end of the transgressive saturnalia that follows the death of a king on several Pacific islands—is perhaps too strong a reminder of the inertia of death. It does not offer the reciprocity required for fusion and ecstatic loss in the other. It can only be contemplated and meditated on, like a vanitas painting. Nudity is, for Bataille, a violation of integrity and discontinuous existence: a dispossession, an equivalent to death. “It is a state of communication, which reveals the quest for the possible continuity of being beyond its folding into itself ” (, ). In the ancient world, Bataille insists, the affinity between sacrifice and sexual intercourse was recognized. As the erotic act dissolves the beings who engage in it, disclosing the continuity of being, so the sacrificial act reveals to those who witness it the continuity of being announced by the death of the victim (or the destruction of an object). They experience the sacred: for Bataille, “the continuity of being revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinuous being.”28 Bataille quotes de Sade: “There is no better means to familiarize yourself with death than to unite it with a licentious idea” (Bataille , ). He would have understood Buddha’s disciple Rajadatta, the narrator of the passage from the Theragatha I quoted at the beginning of this section. Rajadatta was a young merchant who, after squandering his fortune on a prostitute, was so moved by the words of the Buddha that he joined the monks

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and, to quell his desire for women, practiced his austerities in a charnel field. The corpse that aroused him was that of another prostitute who was killed because she had tried to rob a merchant of his ring. Rajadatta had chosen her as an object for meditating on the impermanence of all things. Horrified by his sexual excitement, he fled the graveyard “quicker than boiling rice overflows the pot,” and, finding “a safe secluded spot,” he sank so deeply into ecstasy (dhyana) that “lust no longer assailed him” and he attained insight. Unlike submergence in death, erotic dissolution is short-lived. BillyGeorge wakes, an overused whore, from his self-orgies and masturbates. The discontinuity of life does not disappear. The search for continuity, Bataille maintains, always confirms the continuity of the death of discontinuous beings. Hegel’s influence on Bataille is apparent here. More concretely, we see the struggle of the two played out in his insistence on the asymmetrical relations between men and women in love: women, insofar as they are passive, are prone to dissolution (Bataille puns on the French dissolue, “dissolved,” “dissolute”) and are sacrificed by the active male partner, who uses them to achieve his—their mutual—dissolution. Women, dissolute and dissolved, become in Bataille ’s erotic tales, as in those of de Sade and other less literary (masculine, though not necessary male) writers, objects, alluring to be sure but objects nevertheless, without personality or subjectivity. They have only a postulated lust. They are like marionettes, manipulated by the narrator, who, ironically, is as deprived of subjectivity and personality, as they are. There lurks in the eroticism of the body a “cynical egoism” (Bataille , ). In his erotic tales, Bataille is incapable of dealing with the subjective dimension of erotic—indeed, of all—interpersonal relations. The danger seems to be less the merging of bodies than the fusion of subjectivities. Bataille has no sense of the intimate. In his theorizing, however—always a bit too literary, a bit too mechanically reductive—he recognizes the violence of passion: the suffering of unfilled desire; the murderous and suicidal impulses that arise when one cannot take possession of the object of one ’s passion; and the illusory quality of possession itself, for you can never fully lose yourself in the other. You can only repeat: merge and emerge. Bataille seems incapable of arresting his thought here at this impasse of repetition. He asserts what is, no doubt, the foundational frame of the ever-repeating histoire d’amour in all its literary and lived banality: that for the lover the loved one is “the transparency of the world”—the full being who does not limit personal discontinuity. “In a word, it is the continuity of being per-

    

ceived as deliverance through the being of the beloved. There is here something absurd, a horrible mixture, suffering, the truth of a miracle. There is finally nothing illusory in the truth of love: the beloved is for the lover— doubtlessly for the lover only, but no matter—equivalent to the truth of being. Chance has it that through that being the complexity of the world disappears, and the lover perceives the depth—the simplicity—of being.”29 There is something puerile and masculine, unreflectively so, about Bataille ’s eroticism. His “scandal” is Catholic, despite his having left the church. Bataille ’s is clearly the vision of the lonely, isolated, alienated individual—we might speak of him as an exemplum of modern man—for whom the fantasy of communion and its embodiment in writing seems to substitute for active social engagement. Oh, yes, we might deny Bataille this exemplary status; we might declare his imagination prurient, his sexuality sick, his theorizing a defensive intellectualization, but that, I believe, would be too easy. Like Billy-George, he is an innocent, and in and through his innocence he uncovers a dimension of social life that we prefer to deny in our often frenzied commitment to social engagement and activism. He reminds us of the sometimes black, sometimes joyful phantasmic dimension of human engagement, which we are prone to deny in our realism or ignore in the immediacy—the fire—of our activism. Though Bataille ’s discussion of transgression in terms of the erotic reflects his particular moral culture, we have to admit that it is not only in Bataille ’s France that the erotic is couched in interdiction and transgression but throughout the world. I am referring not only to the incest taboo— which, despite its frequent breaches, is universal—but to something more delicate: a reticence before the intimate, however the intimate is understood. Whether or not we see this intimacy in terms of the loss of individuality, which we associate with death, we have, I believe, to admit that at least in some societies, perhaps in all societies, there is a tendency to violate it and to take pleasure in its violation. I would call this violation pornographic.30 It need not be, as I suggested above, a violation of erotic intimacy. Aside from its parochialism, its mechanics, the morality it presupposes and rejects, its inability to come to terms with simple pleasure (if there is such a thing), its distinctly male bias—a bias that even from the male point of view I reject—and its (male) obsession with expenditure, exhaustion, and death, Bataille ’s depiction of the erotic fails to address the constitutive presuppositions of eroticism itself. Despite Bataille ’s focus on the body—on the “animal” in us—the erotic is a symbolic activity. I would argue that it plays on the limits of sym-

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bolism—on and in the gap between symbol and symbolized, word and thing, more accurately “word” and “thing,” for they are already symbolically constituted. What is desired is not the body—the sex—of the other nor is it the “body” and the “sex” of the other but rather the body and the sex of the other as mediated by the other’s “body” and “sex.” (Strictly speaking, I should probably put the “other” in quotation marks as well.) The movement is from “body” and “sex” to body and sex as a precipitate of “body” and “sex”—as a precipitate of symbolic play. Think of flirtation. It is at once a (symbolic) act and the real thing. It is play, and like all play, its message is, as Bateson noted, paradoxical. “Not only does the playful nip not denote what would be denoted by the bite for which it stands, but, in addition, the bite itself is fictional” (, ). But—and here I depart from Bateson—the play denotes precisely what it does not denote—its possibility at least. (In this respect, human play differs from animal play, for it includes the optative, the subjunctive, the negative affirmation, and the affirmative negation.) Flirtation displays possibility; it reveals desire that isn’t (maybe it isn’t) real desire, and maybe it is. Think of the erotic body. It is almost always decorated, made-up, costumed, veiled, and masked. It conceals what it reveals as it reveals what it conceals. It may be that desire is intensified through the oscillation of revelation and concealment. It may be that the displacement from the real thing to the act, from the nude body to the costumed one, protects us from the allure of the object of our desire—its seizing us and, as Bataille would have it, dispossessing us of our identity. Freud () described the mechanism of bodily displacement in his essay on fetishism, but he reduced it to pathology and gave it an overrestricted explanation (as a substitute for the absent penis). It is not just the shoes or garter belts or leather jock straps that are fetishized but the “body” that becomes a fetish for the absent body—the body lost to symbolization. I want to argue that erotic intimacy, if not all intimacy, is characterized by this move. It is as though our desire, at least our erotic desire, can never be directly fulfilled by a symbolically unmediated object.31 Nor can it be fulfilled by a symbolic object. Its fulfillment, if indeed there is ever full fulfillment, demands subterfuge. To attain its object, it has to pass through the symbolic object to arrive at its real object, which is, by the very movement of desire and symbolization, never really real. It is perhaps the pleasure of subterfuge, as Billy-George surely knew, that satisfies desire—for the moment at least, before the demand for repetition sets in. It is, I believe, this “movement” that makes eroticism so convenient a

    

field for the delineation of transgression, for limits (of desire) are symbolically set, breached, reconstituted, and breached anew. . . . However hard we try, however we exalt simple sexual pleasure, we can never achieve what we imagine to be the full satiation of desire, for desire ’s object, and indeed desire itself (if we accept Lacan’s derivation of it), are cast within and through the symbolic order. As such, they are always one step removed from what we take to be the real object of desire, which, of course, we can never name; for named, it falls out of the real, that is, unless, we declare the real to be a fiction—a precipitate of the symbolic order—and simply accept, as does the naive empiricist, the symbolically constituted order as the real. Unfortunately, such a position is untenable on epistemological as well as experiential grounds, for that order is, as we know and our ethnographies confirm, always slippery, always flowing beyond itself toward the excluded—the absent—new (well perhaps not so new) imaginative frontiers. We are destined to repeat—and that repetition is an essential characteristic of what we hold most dearly: life.

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  

Remembrance

And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. M P, Remembrance of Things Past1

    autumn afternoon. October . The sky is darkening. walking back from the market with Pico, my dog. I think, suddenly, Iout I’m of any context, that my father would have liked Pico. He knew A Dog of

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Flanders was one of my favorite books and that my mother hated to read it to me. Like the dog of Flanders, Pico is a Bouvier des Flandres. He is named after the Renaissance humanist Pico della Mirandola. Whenever Italians hear his name, they say he must have a good memory. That bit of information must be in some Italian school book. I wonder if my father had learned it. He was Italian. Suddenly, as unexpectedly as my thoughts about my father and Pico, I realize that it is exactly a year ago that I showed the first symptoms of shingles—and then, that my father died on October  at the age I was last October. I’m overwhelmed by the recognition—exhausted and immensely relieved, as when one finishes a difficult task—and then surprised by the fact that it had taken me a full year to appreciate this strange, no doubt revealing synchronicity. I have outlived my father. I tell you this, not in a gesture of self-revelation, but as a way into the subject of this chapter.2 What marked an end, at least a moment in neverending mourning, is also the inauguration of a reflection on remembrance. It is, of course, a conceit, since I began thinking about memory long before I recognized the relationship between my case of shingles and my father’s

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death. Though I had shingles before I gave the lecture on which this chapter is based, I did not have the recognition until after I had delivered it. Can I say that my memory of my father’s death had no effect on my thinking about memory? I learned of his death late in the afternoon as it was getting dark, and I remember that moment as being very dark, though it could not have been all that dark. Does the body remember? We know that shingles is caused by the chickenpox virus that remains in the body for years, in my case over fifty years, after the illness and then suddenly attacks a particular nerve, in my case the third right costal nerve. Doctors cannot explain why it attacks a particular nerve. They relate its occurrence to a physical trauma—I had none at the time—or to stress. Most say it results from severe stress—I do not recall being particularly stressed at the time—but others say it results from a sudden diminution of chronic stress. This seems more likely in my case, that is, until I take into account my father’s death . . . Why do I relate the synchronicity of these three events—remembrance, repetition, and origin—to memory? It is psychologically and philosophically clumsy. True, it gives my life a coherence, but at what expense? I have to worry about the relationship between mind and body, indeed the distinction itself. I must ask whether memory can be reduced to a single mental, bodily, or psychosomatic function. I am troubled by its whereabouts, the metaphors we use to describe its place, its processes, its causes, its relationship to the will—we speak of voluntary and involuntary memories—to other (unconscious) sources of motivation. How does it relate to perception and imagination? To love and hate? To courage and cowardice? How accurate is it? Can we have faith in it? Is our faith a social artifice? Is memory socially determined, as the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs () would argue? Is it simply a social construction? An artifact of power? The anthropologists Paul Antze and Michael Lambek remind us that “memories are never simply records of the past, but are interpretive reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and contexts of recall and commemoration” (, vii). How is memory used rhetorically? Politically? As a figure of self-fashioning? How does it relate to our narrative conventions? Is the unremembered what is ignored by these conventions? How does memory relate to forgetting? To the forgotten? The repressed? The foreclosed? It would seem so much easier—so much more philosophically wise—simply to reduce the connection between the three events I have understood in terms of memory to mere con-

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tingency? Why not relate their conjunction to the fates, the stars, a god, or a demon?

 Memory . . . is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses [(et venio in) campos et lata praetoria memoriae, ubi sunt thesauri innumberabilium imaginum de cuiuscemodi rebus sensis invectarum]. In it are stored away all the thoughts by which we enlarge upon or diminish or modify in any way the perceptions at which we arrive through the senses, and it also contains everything else that has been entrusted to it for safe keeping, until such times as these things are swallowed up and buried in forgetfulness. S A, Confessions 3

  Confessions, Saint Augustine gives expression to one of the dominant metaphors for memory in Western thought. Memory is a “great field,” Ia “palace,” a “storehouse”—elsewhere, a “cloister,” a “cache,” a “treasure house,” and “a sort of stomach of the mind.” In all of these metaphors— and there are still others, for Augustine was not particularly embarrassed by piling up and mixing metaphors—memory is figured as a container. Plato had already used the container metaphor in the Theaetetus, his dialogue on knowledge and truth. He refers, playfully, to memory as an aviary, or birdcage. To possess knowledge (potentially to remember it) is to have a bird in the cage; to have knowledge (actually to remember it) is to have a bird in the hand. The aviary is, in fact, Plato’s second metaphor for memory. The first, and better known, is a wax tablet, a gift from the mother of the muses, Mnemosyne: “When we wish to remember anything we have seen, or heard, or thought in our own minds, we hold the wax to the perceptions and thoughts, and in that material receive the impression of them as from the seal of a ring; and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we forget or do not know” (Theaetetus , , line ). By a wax tablet, Plato meant a board coated with a thin layer of wax upon which notes and sketches could be scratched and erased. Aristotle elaborates Plato’s metaphor. Absorbed by the senses, experience leaves an “image” (eikon) in our memory “just as persons do who make a seal” (De Memoria et Reminiscentia , , line b). The impressed or inscribed icon is associated by both philosophers with the visual image and the written word. Augustine also refers to the images that are in memory. He is particu-

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larly concerned with the nature of the (remembered) referent when we speak. Memory serves for him as a repository for experiences (more accurately, images of experience) and ideas—we might say innate categories— which organize experience. He insists that when we speak of the sun we have an image of the sun that arises directly from our memory and not an image of an image of the sun. He asks, rhetorically, as he surrenders his epistemological confusion to God’s infinite wisdom, how we can recognize memory itself except in memory. “Can it be that the memory is not present to itself in its own right but only by means of an image of itself?” (, ). As the French philosopher Etienne Gilson notes, memory has, for Augustine, a broader meaning than it does for us. It refers “to everything that is present to the soul (whose presence is attested by an effective act) without being explicitly known or perceived.” Gilson likens it to our notions of the subconscious and the unconscious but embracing the presence to the soul of its own (unperceived) states. These would include “the metaphysical presence to the soul of a distinct and transcendent reality, such as God.”4 Augustine ’s questions still haunt us today, despite the changes in our psychological and linguistic understanding. Though our idiom has changed, we still configure memory metaphorically, as we do our other psychological faculties. As the Dutch historian of psychology, Douwe Draaisma, has shown, our metaphors for memory have changed many times since Plato, becoming more and more technical, but metaphors they remain, whether we speak of memory in terms of wax tablets and aviaries, archives and labyrinths, forests and mineshafts, mirrors and phosphorescence (so popular in the seventeenth century), phonographs and photographs, holograms and computers, or, Draaisma’s particular favorite, the mystic writing pad that fascinated Freud.5 They reflect the age in which they occurred and open and close perspectives on the phenomenon they figure. They are all concerned with—to use the least metaphorical terms that come to mind—entry and retention. Behind all these metaphors for memory, however masked by metaphorical artifice and epistemological pyrotechnics, lies the solitary but forceful figure of the homunculus who offers through an act of figuration illusory arrest to the continual displacement of the intending I. In psychology, a theory is said to have a homunculus problem when it explains a psychological process in terms of the process to be explained. With regard to memory, as Draaisma puts it, a theory “contains a homunculus as soon as it assumes a capacity which ‘remembers’ where material is stored or which ‘recognizes’ material,” for remembering and recognizing presuppose mem-

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ory (, ). Such petitio-principii explanations lead to an infinite regress. The homunculus offers, at best, a momentary (and perhaps even pragmatically justifiable) full-stop to the regression. Its continual metaphorical transformations and changing pictorial representations—the camera operator in the brain, for example—are symptomatic of its instability, indeed its failure to offer arrest. Insofar as its verbal and visual figurations coordinate with the dominant metaphors of the psychological process—memory as cinema— they reinforce by reduplication those metaphors.6 Draaisma argues that to date no (metaphorically based) theory of memory has been able to escape the homunculus problem (, –). Taking the metaphor of the hologram for memory as one of the many possible examples of the insidious presence of the homunculus, he notes that “something essential seems to be lacking in a theory in which images are recorded, but are not reproduced in the consciousness.” They remain unperceived, unnoticed. They are, we might say, recorded but not (capable of being) remembered. Karl Pribram, the principal proponent of the hologram model, argues that the stored images are projected out of the storage medium—the brain—and somehow absorbed into consciousness. We have to ask: How can memory perceive the projected images without duplicating the whole procedure? Once having granted a consciousness that looks at memory images like an observer at his monitor, Pribram has allowed a homunculus to slip in.7 Draaisma quotes the philosopher D. C. Dennett: “Therefore, psychology without homunculi is impossible. But psychology with homunculi is doomed to circularity or infinite regress, so psychology is impossible.”8 This is not the place to pursue the various ways in which psychologists have attempted to avoid the homunculus problem. Rather, I want to ask whether or not the homuncular dilemma can be understood in terms of grammar and figuration. Let me return to Augustine. In an extraordinary passage, which I am tempted to say carries the principal philosophical conundra that have haunted psychology to this day, the fourth-century Church Father wrote: “When I use my memory, I ask it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember. Some things it produces immediately; some are forthcoming only after a delay, as though they were being brought out of some inner hiding place; others come spilling from memory, thrusting themselves upon us when what we want is something quite different, as much as to say ‘Perhaps we are what you want to remember?’ These I brush aside from the picture which memory presents to me, allowing my mind to pick what it chooses, until finally that which I wish to see stands out clearly

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and emerges into sight from its hiding place.” Augustine ’s argument is clearly homuncular. The “I” (indicated in Latin by a verbal ending, as in vol-o, “I wish,” “I will”) is at once distinct from memory and one with it. On the one hand, the I makes use of memory (within the limits granted by memory’s seeming autonomy) according to its desire (voluntas). On the other hand, objectified as mind (animus in this section, elsewhere mens), which Augustine describes as the “the spiritual eye of the soul,” the (not necessarily conscious, intentional) “I” is one with memory.10 (Later in the chapter Augustine equates memory and mind—cum animus sit etiam memoria.)11 A container, memory is, reduplicatively, contained in mind, which yet remains distinct from—and somehow in control of—its memorystorehouse.12 Mind—animus, mens—comes to figure the “I,” giving it a referential status which belies its indexical function. It can be shown that the will—voluntas—also serves as a figure for the I in its more active mode. Let me explain. First-person personal pronouns, like second-person ones, but not third-person ones, are not anaphoric; that is, they do not refer back to some (named) antecedent the way “she” and “he” do, but they index the speaker (or the listener) of the utterance in which they occur.13 They are what the anthropological linguist Michael Silverstein calls referential indexes, that is, they have a duplex structure, they index the speech event in which they participate and they refer to a speaker or interlocutor; that is, they have both pragmatic and quasi-semantic value.14 We might say that the “I” is both in and out of the utterance in which it occurs. At a strictly grammatical level, the identity of its “referent” changes with each utterance or phrase. (“When I use my memory, I ask it to produce whatever it is that I wish to remember.”)15 By figuring, or objectifying, the I as mind, Augustine gives an essentially empty linguistic function substantive, referential value and, thereby, integrates it into a complex, linguistically facilitated set of what we would call today psychological assumptions. Mind—memory— comes, as it were, to function like the third-person pronoun. Once the indexical “I,” which is by its nature without a permanent referent, is objectified, it is subject to continual metaphorization, as we have seen for memory, but could argue for mind as well, which masks the “transience and emptiness” of its “pure” indexical usage.16 Mind, memory, consciousness, and will are themselves homuncular. They give substantive, perduring value to that which, at least at a linguistic level, has neither substance nor perdurance. We ask: Insofar as they substantiate an indexical function, do they carry, at least rhetorically, the in-and-out quality of their indexical referent? The conceptual disquiet produced by the equation of mind, memory,

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and the I is reflected in Augustine ’s choice of metaphor. As I noted in chapter , the body serves an annealing function within our understanding of signification. The body, its parts, and its processes are given priority, fundamentality, in our implicit if not explicit hierarchy of symbolic evaluation. This is beautifully exemplified in psychoanalysis, where the reduction of a symbol to a corporeal referent is prized. Victor Turner notes the bipolarity of ritual symbols. They have an ideological pole which stands for components of the social and moral world, its norms and values, and a sensory pole, which relates to physiological processes—mother’s milk, blood, semen, feces—and is the source of desire and feelings. It is the congealing of the two poles, according to Turner, that gives the symbols their efficacy (, ). Despite Augustine ’s identification of mind and memory, he recognizes a difference between them—one that echoes his famous discussion of the pleasure he took in tragedy, in the suffering and sorrow he saw depicted on stage in Carthage (,  – ). How, he asks, can I be “glad to remember sorrow that is past—that is, when there is joy in my mind and sadness in my memory” (). “No one could pretend that the memory does not belong to the mind,” he goes on, adding one of the most extraordinary metaphors for memory ever produced, certainly one of his most physical. “We might say that the memory is a sort of stomach for the mind, and that joy or sadness are like sweet or bitter food. When this food is committed to the memory, it is as though it had passed into the stomach where it can remain but also loses its taste.” Though Augustine recognizes the absurdity of his rumination metaphor, he cannot resist pursuing it: “Perhaps these emotions are brought forward from the memory by the act of remembering in the same way as cattle bring up food from the stomach when they chew the cud. But if this is so, when a man discusses them—that is, when he recalls them to mind—why does he not experience the pleasure of joy or pain of sorrow in his mind, just as the animal tastes the food in its mouth?” He notes that were we to experience the remembered emotions, suffering again the sorrow or fear, we would not talk about them. “Yet we could not speak of them at all unless we could find in the memory not only the sounds of their names, which we retain as images imprinted on the memory by the senses of the body, but also the ideas of the emotions themselves.”17 Images of ingestion, regurgitation, rumination, and swallowing anew— these anatomical and physiological images are not only symptomatic of conceptual anguish, as I have been arguing, but they call attention to memory’s importance in self-definition. “Perhaps we are what you want to remember?” Augustine asks. Who is the “you”? Is a dialogical model of the

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functioning of memory not hidden in Augustine ’s rhetoric? Does this model give disturbance to the individual’s sense of continuity, cohesion, and unity?18 Memory, mind, and the I are, if not one, essential to unity—a unity that is, in Augustine ’s case at least, subject to the ruptures of interlocution that occur between the I and memory as the I culls up memories and resists, as best it can and according to its desire, memory’s own resistance and seemingly oblivious spillings-out. For Augustine, at least the Augustine of De Trinitate, it is love—ultimately love of God—that binds them, I would argue, as it binds both the members of the Trinity and its paradigmatic images. Gilson delineates one—the most relevant for us: memory or the presence of thought to itself, knowledge of self that memory expresses, and the love which unites them, all of which are contained in a single “substance.”19 Can we argue that this dialogical model calls attention to the artifice of a linguistic understanding that appears reluctant to separate reference from memory? Experience from remembered image? Ultimately image from imaged? Is it also possible that the dialogical model calls attention to the artifice of glossing referentially, substantively, an indexical function? To the split between the referential and indexical function of these pronouns? There is, of course, a second, less sensual, certainly far more widespread image for memory and its processes than the stomach and its regurgitations, one that calls forth another (model of ) linguistic understanding, one which has traditionally focused on reference, cohesion, and permanence and has served, reduplicatively, as a model for memory: namely, writing and its inscription. Plato—we must remember—likened memory to the wax tablet upon which we stamp our perceptions or ideas, “as if we were making marks with signet-rings”—a signature, a name, marking, with enormous legal weight, an identity enduring over time.

 When the blackbird flew out of sight It marked the edge Of one of many circles. W S, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”20

  memory is conceived in metaphorical terms, it is immediately integrated with the cultural presumptions borne by the metaphors— Itechnically, the metaphorical vehicles—themselves (Richards ). In

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any interactive understanding of the metaphor, the topic term—memory—is not only figured by the vehicular term—a wax tablet, a photographic plate, or a computer—but the vehicles are in turn figured by the topic. They are both subjected to the tenor of the metaphor: the relationship (classically, of similarity) between the two terms, which may itself be understood in metaphorical terms. In other words, topic and vehicle are recontextualized by their juxtaposition, and this recontextualization demands interpretation and integration into broader understanding. This understanding may stress the figurative effect of one or the other of the two poles of the metaphor. In the case of memory, as of other psychological processes—which we take to be fluid, indeed describable only by metaphor— we tend to give priority to the formulating effect of the vehicle (particularly if it is “hard,” literally definable, technical) on the topic.21 However reluctantly, we have also to recognize the way in which the topic—our (metaphorized) understanding of memory—affects our understanding of the vehicle: wax tablets, photographic plates, and computers. The circularity, indeed, the double circularity, is characteristic of any interactional understanding of the metaphor and is ultimately subject to the play of power that supports one hegemonic understanding or another. The circularity is, in fact, even more vicious, suggesting that cultural understanding, at least common cultural understanding, is closed-ended and self-refracting, some might say, an ideology. However metaphorized, memory itself may serve, in its turn, as a metaphor for social and cultural processes. We speak, most notably, of collective memories. Are we not metaphorizing whatever it is that we mean by collective memories? Are they not subject to the metaphors that figure memory? What we mean by “collective memories” is certainly not clear. At times writers, particularly when referring to preliterate societies, refer to collective memories as that which is experienced by the group but carried in individual memories. They often articulate these collective memories in terms of the processes attributed to individual memory. They speak of remembrance, commemoration, forgetting, suppression, repression, condensation, displacement, censorship, and distortion. (These processes are themselves metaphorized.) The individual memory is then a container for learned traditions. These may be texts or bodily orientations and practices. But how do these collective memories differ from anything else learned? Is it that they refer to the past? To the group’s past? Sometimes collective memory refers to the nonpsychological medium in which the “memories” are borne. We speak, then, metaphorically of books, libraries, archives, recordings, icons, and monu-

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ments—precisely the metaphors that are used to figure memory. The circle spins around yet again. We figure memory as, for example, a book; our understanding of the book is, in turn, subject to our figuration of the memory as the book; the book is then figured as (a container for) collective memory, which is itself configured by individual memory metaphorized as the book . . . I stress the artifice of metaphor and the circularity it produces, at least in the case of memory, because, as in Draaisma and among the metaphorswe-live-by school, there is a tendency to evaluate the metaphor at face value and to integrate it as such into prevailing cultural understandings.22 Such a picture, as neat as it is, and no doubt as revealing as it sometimes is, fails to account for the essential instability of the metaphor: its artifice, the tension between its topic and vehicle, the interpretive challenge its tenor proposes, the power of that interpretation, the way interpretation anneals tenor and vehicle, eases “integration” with facilitating cultural presuppositions and values, and ultimately masks instability, tension, and rupture. I can do no more here than call attention to metaphorical instability. Its effect has to be worked out (insofar as that is possible) in individual cases. I ask—rhetorically—What would a theory of metaphor look like were we to start with the between, the barzakh, that metaphor supposes? Indeed, what would a theory of memory look like that started neither with the remembered event nor with the remembrance but with the gap between them?

 Memory is always memorializing—however fleetingly, inconsistently, or inadequately on a given occasion. To remember is to commemorate the past. It is to redeem the perishing of particulars in a selfsameness that conspires in the present to persist into the future. E C, Remembering 23

   of memory theorists, among them the phenomenologist Edward Casey (), have called attention to our neglect of A memory, I find that there has, in fact, been very considerable interest in memory—and forgetting—in the social sciences, psychology, history, and philosophy. I should note that discussions of memory in these fields have ignored one area of popular concern, indeed of fear, which has been the subject of important research: namely, the loss of memory with aging. So complex is the field of memory today that I cannot even begin to touch on

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many of its dimensions that are of relevance to memory horizons—to the beyond of memory. Though we tend to think of the beyond in time in terms of the future, we have to recognize its role in the articulation and experience of the past. It too provides us with a horizon, one that seems to recede further and further from us into a mysterious abyss, a black hole, in which memory, succumbing to forgetting, can only give way to imagination and speculation. We speak of the archeology of memory; we develop methodologies for reconstructing the past; we devise retrieval techniques, those of psychoanalysis, for example, or scientology;24 we fantasize ways of increasing our memory, envying those, like Pico della Mirandola and Leonhard Euler, the great eighteenth-century mathematician, who possess prodigious memories. Recognizing our mnemonic deficiencies, we justify on often crude psychoeconomic grounds the importance of forgetting and externalize memory—our memorial capacity—literally metaphorizing it, carrying it across, to books, libraries, archives, and computer banks with which we have already figured it. Books, archives, libraries, and computers come to symbolize our technological prowess: the overcoming of our psychophysiological limitations, memory’s conquest of forgetting. In Greek mythology, Lesmosyne, the goddess of forgetting, though paired with her equal, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was always Mnemosyne ’s subordinate.25 I have chosen quite arbitrarily to focus on one dimension of memory: that process by which, through the act of remembrance, we give stature to that which we have remembered. I stress, in other words, the performative nature of memory.26 I call this process memorialization when it refers to individual recollection and commemoration when it is collective.27 Though the prefix “com-” accentuates the social nature of commemoration, we must not ignore the interlocutory structure of memorialization and the way it reflects current social and cultural values and discriminations. I am not particularly concerned with the motivations that lie behind memorials. The attribution of motivation is always problematic, embedded, as it is, in the (micro)politics of interlocution and relationship. I will not worry, therefore, over distinctions between voluntary and involuntary and conscious and unconscious memory and the psychological mechanisms—suppression, repression, censorship, energy thresholds—which are held responsible for these distinctive modes of remembrance. Though memorialization and commemoration resemble each other in many ways, they are quite distinct. Their distinction is, in fact, blurred at both conceptual and processual levels by their mutual metaphorization, which is sustained through their grounding in “memory” and its constitutive and constituting metaphors.

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As I stated, memorialization and commemoration give stature to the remembered. I use “stature” to suggest not only abstract value but a certain concrete quality they lend to the remembered. “Stature” is derived from the Latin, sta¯re, “to stand,” and is related to status (the past participle of sta¯re) and the many derivatives of statuere, “to set up,” “erect,” including “stance,” “statue,” “statute,” “rest,” “arrest,” “stay,” “constant,” “contrast,” “constitute,” “institute,” “restitute,” “substitute,” and “substance.” Etymologically, then, we can say that memorialization and commemoration institute—by contrast and through arrest, resting, staying—a constant, constitutive or restitutive stance, like that of a statute, or substance, like that of a statue, to a substitute. I should note one further derivative of sta¯re: “cost.” Memorialization and commemoration are in differing ways not without cost, for in giving stature to a past event they privilege the remembered, the past, over the present—or, more accurately, they grant it a certain governance over the present and the future. We might call this governance pragmatic in the linguistic sense of calling a context. Obviously the significance, weight, and intensity of memorialized or commemorated events varies enormously with memory type. Though most memories have little lasting influence on us—they are, for the most part, instrumental—there are some that do have a significant, lasting effect. They have symbolic significance and transformative power; we recognize their “hold” over us even when we are not mindful of them. Nowadays, we speak of them as having an unconscious effect. Indeed, we go so far as to refer to some of them, those difficult or impossible to recall, with an oxymoron: unconscious memories. Whatever their status, I want to argue that all memories have a memorializing effect, even if it is trivial. One important characteristic of both memorialization and commemoration is the perdurance of their objects—of the determinative, if not constitutive, effect of those objects. What we memorialize or commemorate extends through time, suggesting a certain permanence, a continuing significance, despite changes in context and often long periods in which it is out of consciousness but, somehow, we feel, when we bring it back to consciousness, that its influence has always been with us. Casey considers perdurance to be an essential characteristic of memorialization.28 He regards it as the principal temporal mode of ritual. It has been ignored, he argues, by Western philosophy, which has focused on time and eternity. Perdurance is the via media between eternity and time: “Between the fixity, the sheer everthe-sameness of eternity, and the ceaseless flux of transient temporality (wherein all is ever-the-other), there is the perduring, providing sameness and difference, motion and rest, at the same time and not just in succession” (). All perduring events share, then, “a combination of sameness or per-

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manence over time with a capacity to modify or evolve.” As Casey sees it, perdurance is an “enduring through” an encounter—an engagement— with one ’s cultural and, I would add, personal tradition; an encounter that involves a coming toward on both sides. In commemorative rituals, “the past to which tribute is being paid is allowed to perdure—to last as a coming toward us—through the present of the commemorative act and onward into the future.” Not only does the commemorative act point to the future but, in Casey’s terms, it is exhortatory; in mine, appellative. “It calls to us from a certain indefinite future as if to say: ‘I will be constant in my own permanency; will you, in ritualistic recognition of this, be constant in your commemoration of what I honor.’” Put in other terms—those I prefer— commemorative rituals have pragmatic force. They determine a future stance toward whatever is being commemorated and all it stands for—social and political order, for example, or a sense of personal continuity. Underlying Casey’s discussion of perdurance, commemoration, and memorialization is a set of assumptions about time, continuity, identity, and the self that seem, from an ethnographic perspective, to be culture-bound. Commemoration, Casey argues symptomatically (in the epigraph to this section), “is to redeem the perishing of particulars in a selfsameness that conspires in the present to persist into the future.” Though his construction of perdurance takes into account both permanence and succession, it is weighted, at least in memorialization, on the side of permanence. I want to ask: Is this permanence illusory? Is the sameness of the memorial an artifice of memory? Does the perduring stature of memory conceal its instability? The instability of its content? Its “irreferentiality,” as I called it in my discussion of pain and trauma in chapter ? Does our focus on memory content mask the contextualizing force of the memory? Whatever the reality of the remembered event, it serves in its recall to recontextualize the present, often in dramatic ways, particularly, I would suggest, when such memories crop up involuntarily. They challenge our complacency and demand, if not interpretation, then integration into prevailing understanding. We insist, at times uncritically, on their veracity. The more powerful they are, the more convinced we are of their truth. Of course, our memories are partial, schematic, at times frozen, at times firing elaboration and association. They are, I would say, iconic, indexically so. They stand for a complex reality, one that we can never fully grasp but have incorporated into our life trajectory and rendered worthy of recall. Our recollection memorializes that significance as, inevitably, that significance is modified by our present recollection. How can a memory both hold and change at the same time? To refer to

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its perdurance, as Casey does, begs the question. To find its roots in ritual, as he does, sidesteps the issue. The problem of permanence versus transience is as old as philosophy. It is the problem that Heraclitus and Parmenides posed and Plato attempted to resolve by postulating the realm of ideas. I suggest that, so long as memories are taken as isolated but recurring events, the problem cannot be fully resolved without either asserting uncritically memory’s (potential) veracity or by declaring all memories transient constructs that have more to do with desire than with the way the remembered was in fact. One has to recognize the social nature of both individual or collective memories. They are—to use Roland Barthes’s by now hackneyed expression—occasions for interpretation. At least, they have become so in our contradicted world. For the most part, particularly with respect to instrumental memories—like remembering (when asked) the date Columbus discovered America or how to spell “surprise”—memories are easily integrated into one ’s everyday understanding.29 Those memories that challenge us—we understand the challenge psychologically as anxietyprovoking—demand interpretation and integration. How they are framed, interpreted, and integrated has to be seen, pace psychologists and philosophers, in terms of the power of hegemonic understandings, individual desire, and the resistance of the originating event. Rituals, among other social institutions including language and education, enforce one or another understanding, formulate desire, distribute “power,” and provide the criteria for reality—realism. They also conduce psychological and philosophical understandings that isolate memory from its political underpinnings and promote its rhetorical possibility. We know, for example, how distorting memory can be (as psychologists have demonstrated time and again), and yet we insist on using memory reports in determining the guilt or innocence—the life—of the accused in our court systems. Yes, memory is a social and political construct,one of those you’ve-got-to-believe-it-despitethe-evidence phenomena that are apparently necessary to social life.

 What is a ruin but Time easing itself of endurance. D B, Nightwood 30

 I have referred to both memorialization and commemoration in the previous section, I have given greater weight to memorialization. I want now to stress commemoration. I must acknowledge, however, that memorialization, understood psychologically, is the dominant figure

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for commemoration. In Euro-American culture, the mental—backed by an evidential epistemology of individual experience, as tortured as it is by our ambivalent evaluation of the subjective and by the institutions of psychology—has enormous rhetorical force and renders compelling any mentalistic figure or metaphor, including memory itself. One characteristic granted individual memory that plays an important role in its figuration of the collective is its tendency to self-externalization. This is usually understood in two rhetorically intertwined ways. On the one hand, the object of memory is always other than the memory itself; that which is memorialized is always other than its memorialization. On the other hand, memory lends itself to external props. Whatever the “medium” of subjective memory is, memory exploits all sorts of objective media, media that serve, as we have seen, to figure memory. Mnemonics, reminders—they are often taken for the memory itself. They are to memory as memory is to the remembered. Scratches in the sand produced by Australian Aborigines; physical locations, such as those named by the Apache; foods (the proverbial madeleine); odors (perfumes, the bouquet of a fine wine, the smell of sex); texts; music (the Vinteuil melody that enchanted Proust); witting and unwitting bodily inscriptions (tattoos, scars, illness traces); statues; paintings; photographs; movies; holographs; tape recordings; and ritual and other repetitive events, such as spirit possession (which may have historical as well as biographical referents) and ever-repeating wars, feuds, and murders, as in the Balkans, among Afghan mountaineers, and in just about any city slum around the world—material, monumental, these mnemonics give stature and perdurance to memory but not without cost. In the name of permanence, they subject the remembered to their material requirements, their cultural evaluation, and the interpretive conventions that surround them.31 They deny, as they proclaim, the passage of time—their historicity. They are, if not public, then potentially so. I visit my father’s grave. I read his name on a gray granite tombstone. I remember him, myriad personal experiences I attach to him, some shared with other people—my mother, my grandparents, a gardener, a nanny—but now entirely mine, and others (they are without number) that I do not remember but know somehow, like Augustine, that they are there and perhaps retrievable. My communion is entirely private. But is it? I see a family mourning at another grave site. I catch the curious eye of a little girl who stands apart from her mother. I hear a car pass. I imagine the passengers looking at me. I become an object to myself—jerked from the privacy of my memories. I imagine others who have visited the cemetery—some of them strangers who never knew my father;

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others who may have known him; and still others who may have heard of him. He was not unknown. He lived in a community. . . . The tombstone publicizes him, his death, his life, his sinking into forgetfulness. What remains, then, is a slab of granite, gray in color, grass-stained at the base, chipped at one corner, with a name and a life span inscribed on it, already wind-worn, attesting less to the man, now remembered by so few, than to the fact of death and commemoration, so long, that is, as our death customs do not themselves fall out of memory, so long as tombstones are recognized as ruins. What is a ruin? I ask, repeating, as a question, Djuna Barnes’s assertion, “but Time easing itself of endurance.” Mnemosyne is in perpetual struggle with Lesmosyne. Memory with forgetting. We have come slowly—“since Nietzsche,” we declare fashionably—to recognize the importance of forgetting. I have written: Mnemonics are to memory as memory is to the remembered. Though formative, mnemonics—monuments and memorials—are twice removed from the events they commemorate. They call forth memories, themselves memorializations, of events that achieve their eventfulness, their possibility of being remembered, through, we like to say nowadays, their being represented. “Whatever one represents, one inscribes in memory,” the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard asserts (, ). He insists that built into representation is a forgetting that can neither be forgotten nor recalled. This unforgettable forgotten is, he assures us, the obsessive subject of literature. Writing testifies “to the fact that the real objective of literature . . . has always been to reveal, represent in words, what every representation misses, what is forgotten there: this ‘presence,’ whatever name it is given by one author or another, which persists not so much at the limits but rather at the heart of representation; this unnameable in the secret of names, a forgotten that is not the result of the forgetting of a reality—nothing having been stored in memory—and which one can only remember as forgotten ‘before ’ memory and forgetting, and by repeating it” (). In other words, literature “does not say the unsayable but says that it cannot say it” (). Though we might think of representation as a bulwark against forgetting, it is, according to Lyotard, a prerequisite to forgetting. It is what is not inscribed, because it is uninscribable, which cannot be forgotten. It lacks the necessary surface for inscription, the possibility of being situated, synthesized (in the philosophical sense of the word)—articulated, I would say. It is “an affection that one cannot even qualify, like a state of death in the life of the spirit.” Lyotard is thinking here of what he understands Freud to mean by primary repression: Urverdrängung—those “shocks” to “the system of forces that are constituted by the psychic apparatus” which, though unreg-

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istered and thus beyond forgetting, nevertheless affect the system.32 Our intimation of this unrecallable yet unforgettable (and therefore highly effective) forgotten is so terrifying that, always with failed artifice, we attempt to exterminate it—its possibility. This is, at any rate, how Lyotard accounts for the stance toward, not the Jews, the Jewish people, but what he calls “the jews”—a nonobject of dismissal. This is not the place to discuss Lyotard’s notion of the position of “the jews” in Western thought. Personally, I find it sophistic and evasive: constructed on an unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable assertion that “the jews” are—for the lack of a better term—an “empty stand-in” for the unforgettable forgotten. One might as easily argue the opposite. Nor is this the place to expand on Lyotard’s understanding of primary and secondary repression. Rather, I want to suggest, as I did in my discussion of pain and trauma in chapter , that there is always a temporal gap between what philosophers used to call sensation and perception. Put another way, all perception is belated—nachträglich—for it refers back to an antecedent condition, which Freud would call excitation, that at once resists perceptual articulation as it demands it.33 Such articulation is always after-the-fact, the way the child’s early Oedipal crisis is effectuated in adolescence. Perception and representation in its turn are always one step removed, like an echo, perhaps a mirroring, that can never overcome the gap demanded by repetition. But in the case of perception, that which is echoed or mirrored has to await its echo or its mirroring “to discover itself.” This deferment from sensation to perception, from perception to representation, from representation to recollection, however minimal it is, suggests, at least, in our understanding, a loss which may be figured in terms of a forgetting and is conducive to an elegiac realism.34 We need not, of course, describe the gap as a loss. We may, for example, as I believe the Sufis would, see it simply as a barzakh, a between, that affords the puckishly serious play of reality. We employ a cultural idiom that, unlike Augustine ’s, separates representation from memory and, though we benefit analytically, scientifically, from this separation, we also suffer its consequences. In Time Regained, Proust argues that the loss of associations impoverishes our take on reality. He notes that there are those, the mystery-loving, who would believe that objects retain something “from the eyes that have looked at them, that old buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally were but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the centuries by the love and contemplation of millions of admirers” (, :). He dismisses this as an

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illusion—perhaps too rapidly, if one takes it less literally as the acknowledgment, by no means inherent in the object, of the history of its viewing. It is only true, he argues, if it is considered from the point of view of the individual. “In that sense and in that sense alone (but it is a far more important one than the other), a thing which we have looked at in the past brings back to us, if we see it again, not only the eyes with which we looked at it but all the images with which at the time those eyes were filled.” As soon as we have seen them, things—a book with a red cover, for example— are transformed within us into something immaterial, of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with which, indissolubly, they blend. . . . And this is why the kind of literature which contents itself with “describing things,” with giving of them merely a miserable abstract of lines and surfaces, is in fact, though it calls itself realist, the furthest removed from reality and has more than any other the effect of saddening and impoverishing us, since it abruptly severs all communication of our present self both with the past, the essence of which is preserved in things, and with the future, in which things incite us to enjoy the essence of the past a second time.35

Proust is talking about literature, idealizing a particular literary stance, but what he has to say applies as well to the realism that our science imposes. His observations certainly apply to our responses to monuments and memorials. It is less what they are purported to stand for that catches us up than the particular associations and memories they evoke in us. Of course, our response is subject to a double regime: that imposed by general conventions of commemoration and that demanded by a particular memorial. A literalist regime, say, that of a Fundamentalist, would no doubt devalue associations that a promiscuously poetic one, so characteristic of the megeneration, would encourage. Memorials cannot be separated from prevailing notions of memory and history.

 Memory is life, always carried by living groups and, as such, it finds itself in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembrance [souvenir] and forgetting [amnésie], unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to all sorts of uses and manipulations, susceptible to long periods of latency and sudden revitalizations. P N, Les lieux de mémoire36

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   to his famous collection of essays on French history, Les lieux de mémoire (), the French historian Pierre Nora distinguishes between memory and history. His image of memory—collective memory—bears the marks of its mentalist metaphorization. Memory is always actual, a living bond with the eternal present, and because it is emotional and magical, it adopts only details that give it solace. It nourishes itself with fleeting memories, telescopic, global or floating, particular or symbolic, sensible to all transferences, screens, censures, and projections. It installs remembrance in the sacred. Citing Halbwachs (), Nora maintains that there are as many memories as there are groups. By nature it is collective, plural, and individualized. It roots itself in the concrete, in space, gesture, image, and object. It is absolute. It is, of course, characteristic, at least stereotypically, of primitive, traditional, and peasant societies. History is memory’s opposite. It reflects the ever-increasing speed of change in the modern world and the alienation and sense of temporal fragility that comes with that acceleration. It is always a problematic and incomplete reconstruction of what is no longer. It is a representation of the past. It is analytic and critical. It desacralizes and renders its subject prosaic. It belongs to all and no one and is, therefore, universalist. It attaches itself only to temporal continuities, to evolutionary processes, and relations between things. It is suspicious—destructively critical—of memory. Its true mission is to destroy and repress memory—to delegitimate the lived past. At the horizon of societies of history, at the limits of a completely historicized world, there is, for Nora, final and definitive desacralization. “The movement of history, the historian’s ambition [ambition historienne] is not the exultation of that which really happened but its annihilation” (xx). Memory-places, les lieux de mémoires, are remains: the extreme form where commemorative consciousness subsists in a history that it calls forth because it is ignorant of it. The notion of memory-place results, according to Nora, from our deritualization of the world. Museums, archives, cemeteries, collections, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, procès-verbales, monuments, sanctuaries, and associations are the witnesses of another age, illusions of eternity. They simulate nostalgia. They are the rituals of a society without ritual; the transiently sacralized of a desacralizing society; particular fidelities in a society that devalues particularism; differentiations of fact in a society that levels on principle; signs of recognition and belonging to a group in a society that only recognizes equal and identical individuals. “Memory-places are born and live from the feeling that there is no spontaneous memory, that it is necessary to create archives, to maintain anniver-

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saries, to organize celebrations, give funeral orations, notarize acts, because these operations are not natural” (xxiv). In Nora’s understanding—his romanticism is apparent—these memory-places compensate for the loss of memory: the warmth and security afforded, as he describes it, by a society of memory. The milieux of memory becomes the lieux of memory. They demand commemoration. I should note that Nora’s contrast, though rhetorically potent, is too simple both historically and ethnographically. It is, in many ways, a recast in memory terms of Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft or Durkheim’s between mechanical and organic solidarity.37 There have been significant changes in the French attitude toward memory that predate Nora’s proclaimed transformation. Richard Terdiman relates what he calls the modern crisis in memory—among other things, a loss of confidence in the past, accompanied by nostalgia, and a fear of forgetting—to the disjunctions produced by the French Revolution and to the rapid development of capitalism and commodity fetishism.38 Responses to the “crisis” changed over time with changes in prevailing theories of culture. There are, as well, important differences in the conceptualization and evaluation of memory and history in Europe and the rest of the world. In apartheid South Africans, I found, for example, that Afrikaners tended to embed themselves in their history—Nora might still call it memory, as the Afrikaners did—personalizing and sentimentalizing it, giving it epic proportion, finding their identity, indeed their cultural survival, in it (Crapanzano , ff and passim). They covered their landscape with monuments and memorials that commemorated their conquests, their losses, their explorations, even their language. Their visits to these memory sites had the regenerative value of a pilgrimage. Though not altogether immune to the Afrikaners’ attitude toward white South Africa’s past, the English-speaking white South Africans took a less celebratory stance. They looked askance at the Afrikaners’ memorialization of “their” landscape. Theirs was a more distanced, more ironical, though not unprideful, view of history. They looked to it neither for identity nor for survival. After all, their identity, as the Afrikaners never ceased to remind them, lay elsewhere—in England. It would seem that commemoration in the “historical world” would be different from that in the “memory world.” The memorials—monuments or events—that sustain the commemoration do not seem to flow from the events they commemorate; they are distinct and at a distance. They seem out of place in the contemporary world. They are either so realistic as to be

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banal or their symbolism is so idiosyncratic that they require extensive explanation. The art historian Rosalind Krauss goes so far as to declare monuments of the modernist period to be entirely self-referential (, ). They are an artifice: a construction whose instrumental—political or economic—value is understood, except perhaps in the height of celebration. If they are judged, they are judged much the way political speeches are judged today, not in terms of content but of performance. They repeat; they exhaust; but they do not perdure, not usually, and, if so, often negatively. They do not have the stature they may once have had. They are more tentative, requiring ever-greater ritualization, orchestration, and choreography. We must not forget the theatrics that even the Fascists found necessary in the s to move their audiences. We have to recognize how lame are our attempts to render the Fourth of July a national holiday. Even France ’s Bastille Day, which became a national holiday only in , just over a century after the storming of the great prison, has lost much of the resonance it may once have had. Those who attend the celebration are more interested in the military display, as anachronistic as they recognize their interest to be, than in the affirmations of the glory and continuity of the French Republic, which they treat, in my experience, with considerable—though not unambivalent—cynicism.39 Paul Connerton observes that in the modern world the celebration of recurrence can only be a compensatory strategy “because the very principle of modernity denies the idea of a life as a structure of celebrated recurrence.”40 Capitalism leads, so the argument goes, to insistent innovation and instant obsolescence. The temporality imposed by the market and the circulation of commodities renders each moment unique, denying, thereby, the possibility of recurrence.

 The choice of a monument to commemorate Auschwitz has not been an easy task. Essentially, what has been attempted has been the creation—or, in the case of the jury, the choice—of a monument to crime and ugliness, to murder and horror. The crime was of such stupendous proportion that any work of art must be on an appropriate scale. But, apart from this, is it in fact possible to create a work of art that can express the emotions engendered by Auschwitz? H M, “The Auschwitz Competition”41

  changes in our experience of time and history, including our insistence on these changes, commemorative events and monuments G are not only compensatory but require ever-greater compensatory support

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in order to achieve their commemorative ends. As in the past, an event may be commemorated through ritual or by monument or in some combination of the two, as in the ritual construction of an effigy of remembrance or in the ceremonial inauguration of a monument, but its commemoration now takes place, as Nora puts it, in a world in which the dynamic of our relations with the past resides “in the subtle play of the uncrossable and the abolished” (ce jeu subtil de l’infranchissable et de l’aboli [, xxxii]). I want to stress one dimension of this commemoration: the aesthetic. I leave the aesthetic undefined, however, noting simply a popular though unwitting Kantianism in which the aesthetically pleasing is thought to be universal and of long duration, if not timeless. Though there is probably an aesthetic dimension to all commemorative activities, the role it plays will vary from culture to culture, if only because the “aesthetic” is not necessarily a distinct, rhetorically potent, category of appreciation in every society. What we would call beauty may be so embedded in the object or ritual, so naturalized, that it is simply taken for granted. Or it may be understood in some other fashion: in terms of sacral quality or ritual efficacy. I will restrict my discussion to the aesthetic dimension of recent commemorative monuments. I want to draw attention to the contradiction between the aesthetic and the historical. The perduring claims of the aesthetic give (the illusion of ) immutability to the monumentalized event, as well as to the monument itself, releasing them, as it were, from their inexorable historical reconfigurations. With the aesthetic reduction of the historical, the monumentalized event suffers a loss of representational immediacy—of stature. The originating event, its first significance, is doubly displaced—from event to monument, from the historical to the aesthetic realm. The aesthetic sides with Mnemosyne in her struggle not only with Lesmosyne but with her daughter Clio—the muse of history—but not without cost. Monuments, like other commemorations, are, in the name of history, in fact antihistorical insofar as they strive to fix the events they commemorate forever. They are an evocation that refuses to recognize that it is the product of a historically determined interpretation of that event and that with time that interpretation, and therefore that evocation, will inevitably change. Cast in stone, they petrify their historical referents. They congeal a particular version of the past, impede its reevaluation, and close memory to its beyond. The historical referent becomes an immutable figure of rhetoric and political manipulation, perpetuating, for example, nationalist mythology and social organization. Not only did the monuments with which the Afrikaners peppered their landscape glorify their destiny but, in

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marking that destiny they affirmed the apartheid social arrangements they had created. But monuments do have histories, and their histories remind us of the “mutability” of the events they commemorate. They are sites of continual reinterpretation. Monuments in the American South, like Liberty Monument in New Orleans and the Memorial to the Confederate Dead in Austin, Texas, which were designed to commemorate the heroism of Confederate soldiers, are now an embarrassment and for many an outrage.42 The sculptures with which John Ahearn memorialized the inhabitants of a Bronx slum were locally so controversial that they were immediately moved to a museum in Queens (Kramer ). The stone tablets at the Birkenau memorial, announcing in twenty different languages that Nazis had murdered  million people there, were effaced after a change in the Polish regime twenty-three years after their installation, not only because the figure was incorrect—probably . million had been killed—but to wipe away the Soviet occupiers’ attempt to turn the dead into socialist martyrs.43 We live in an age of negative monuments—those that focus on loss, death, war, and holocaust—rather than positive ones, commemorating victory, success, and heroism, which fail to move us the way the monuments of loss do. We find the positive ones anachronistic. We recognize their artifice and are suspicious of the values they proclaim. Unlike the negative ones, they are not sustained by an aesthetics of loss, whose effectiveness is derived from a mourning that so easily bleeds into our own terrors that it blinds us, momentarily at least, to artifice and suspicion. Were it possible in our fractured age, in which symbols have been so manipulated as to have lost their resonance, their enchantment, their communal attraction, these monuments would figure loss in terms of sacrifice and martyrdom and offer expiation, exculpation, and redemption. Though we complain about the loss of values, we have found no way to reinstill those values, for in our acknowledgment of their loss, regaining them requires their instrumentalization and, in consequence, the perpetuation of their loss. (This is the paradox that religious revivalism tries to overcome. Despite the effervescence of the spiritual states it induces, it ends up enslaving its converts—in the name of faith—in empty literalism and mechanical legalism.) Within this modern, or, if you prefer, postmodern context, negative monuments at least end up memorializing not only the losses they seek to commemorate but their inability to do so. In this respect, they become self-referential. They mourn themselves—in a manner that some, for example, those who have been victims of the monumentalized event, find obscene. Victims want unmediated

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recall in which commemoration and commemorated collapse in timeless immediacy. Lucian Lévy-Bruhl would have called it participation.44 For many of the victims, at least the artistically naive, the closest they can get to this immediacy is through a figurative or documentary art, in which the aesthetic—its artifice—is effaced (Young , – and elsewhere). James Young, who has written with great sensitivity about memory and the Holocaust, notes that the monument designers are caught between being true to their art and public taste. He stresses the resistance that the public, particularly the historically engaged public, has to abstraction. Nathan Rapoport, the sculptor of the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, once asked, “Could I have made a rock with a hole in it and said, ‘Voila! The heroism of the Jewish people’?”45 Rapoport opted for a realism that verged on the social, and though his monument has been criticized on both aesthetic and political grounds, it has, in fact, served as a rallying point for freedom fighters, including, ironically, the P.L.O. Young argues that abstraction frustrates “the memorial’s capacity as locus for shared self-image and commonly held ideals.” It “encourages private visions in viewers, which would defeat the communal and collective aims of public memorials.” It may be, however, that the commemorative power of a monument comes not through immediate communion but through the absence of communion—through singularity, loneliness, and an overwrought sense of one’s personal response that defies, as it participates in, the collective. One certainly feels this lonelinessin-the-collective at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. Of course, the collective, still split in its attitudes toward the war, is held together, insofar as it is held together, by the presence of death and the mourning, the etiquette of mourning, that death demands. Pierre Nora stresses the atomization and privatization of generalized memory that has come with its relatively recent psychologization.46 It was found in the s that the English response to the two-minute silence that commemorated each year the signing of the Armistice that ended World War One was entirely personal. The English did not think of Empire but of the fallen whom they had known.47 Today, visitors to the Vietnam Memorial leave all sorts of personal memorials—letters, teddy bears, old hats, photographs—which, collected, become part of the memorial.48 They attest to intimate remembrance in the enormity and impersonality of communal memory. Not only do monuments and memorials inspire memory, but they influence the way memories are recalled and recounted. However personal, they are framed by the monumentalized event—the version of that event the monument proclaims. Whether viewers accept or reject that version, they

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respond to it, inevitably. They enter into a “dialogue” with it, which is constrained by prevailing conventions of viewing a monument—conventions that are borne by the monumentality of the monument—as well as by the “appropriate” genres of recall. The monument has, in other words, enormous pragmatic force. One may feel its sanctity or be reminded of that sanctity by signs asking visitors to be silent and respectful of others. As at the Afrikaans Language Monument in Paarl, there are often information booths, guidebooks, and histories of the monument and what it represents. Afrikaner families I observed there told their children the set-story of the birth of Afrikaans, which they personalized, when they could, by referring to relatives who had been active in its development and spread. Or they told their children about their first visit to the monument. Often they described, stereotypically, a grandfather or great-grandfather who had refused to let his family read the Afrikaans translation of the Bible until he had checked it word for word against the old family Bible in Dutch. At other monuments, commemorating Pearl Harbor for example, there are films and speeches by survivors, who, as the anthropologist Geoffrey White has noted, are filled with deeply personal reminiscences, bringing tears to both the speaker and his audience, who are conjoined by an intense though short-lived sense of communal identity.49 No doubt these responses reflect American personalism and the confessional and cathartic styles of behavior associated with it. (They would be thought entirely inappropriate in other, more “restrained” societies like France.) That they promote a “shared self-image and commonly held ideals” is open to question. Like any public representation of the past, monuments and memorials are, as White observes, “sites of interaction,” in which each interaction “yields distinct interpretations that emerge in the dialogic interplay among diverse forms of knowledge, textual genres, voices, and interests” (, ). To this list, I would add desire, including the ambivalent desire to be distinct or to submerge in the collectivity and assume its ordained definitions. We might say that sites of commemorative interaction are, in fact, sites in which individuals must come to terms not only with a prêt-à-porter past but with their relationship to the collectivity in which they find themselves. We must be careful, however, not to reduce commemorative effect to idealized moments of deep, shared silence or, as Victor Turner would have it, communitas (Turner and Turner ,  – ). These moments are always unstable, certainly ephemeral, however great their hold on us. They too become memories—to be recalled and recounted—and in our recollection and retelling, we take partial hold of them, subject them to our de-

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sires and aspirations, situating them in our self-understandings, freeing ourselves from and/or surrendering ourselves to, as we will, the monument’s message. History, T. S. Eliot wrote in “Little Gidding,” may be servitude or freedom (, “Little Gidding,” pt. , p. ). Can we say that it is the and/or—the conjunction/disjunction—of freedom and servitude, our ambivalence, their inseparable separableness, that leads to the neverending repetition of commemoration? Of memorialization? Attitudes toward commemorative style are, of course, culturally and historically specific. Societies, particularly those like the Islamic which condemn representational art, would find figurative memorials distasteful. They might find the shock of the “real” so overwhelming as to diminish remembrance and imaginative re-creation. The ancient Greek tragedians did not represent violence on stage. It is certainly the case that today’s Holocaust monuments are more abstract than many of the earlier ones. Given their proliferation, they tend, in either case, to lose much of their effect, offering consolation and expiation instead of stimulating confrontation (Langer , ). Countermonuments that German artists like Jochen and Esther Gerz, Horst Hoheisel, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock have created question the very possibility of commemoration. The Gerzes’ Monument against Fascism in a working-class suburb of Hamburg, is a twelve-meter-high pillar that slowly sinks into the ground as, ideally, it is covered with its viewers’ signatures (in fact, with graffiti). It flouts memorial conventions by provoking its own violation and ultimate disappearance, leaving behind only our memory of it—of our inability, as Henry Moore might have put it, “to express the emotions engendered by Auschwitz.” Hoheisel rebuilt a fountain in Kassel, which had been destroyed by the Nazis because it had been given to the city by a Jewish family, and then buried it upside down (Young , – ). By focusing on the impossibility of commemoration, these and other countermonument designers end up calling attention to their own creations—to their artistic and epistemological anguish—rather than to events they declare to be beyond any monumentalizing capacity. Stih and Schnock attempt, on the other hand, to disperse memory. For Berlin’s Holocaust Monument, they proposed an open-air bus terminal where buses would leave on schedule for the various concentration camps. The bus rides would be a sort of memory-trip. The project, though very popular, was rejected because it was said to decentralize memory (Young , –). These countermonuments are a response to what many Germans refer to as their obsession with the Holocaust. The Germans are, as Jane Kramer





  

puts it, bent on resolving “a duty to remember and a longing to forget, as if duty and desire were the thesis and antithesis of a dialectic of destiny” (, ). They are caught between bureaucratic attempts to manage the past, or, as they say, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and the magic of Wiedergutmachen—of making everything good again. They worry not only about the loss of memory but its commercialization—about what they sometimes call the Shoah business. One of the women Kramer interviewed for her article on the controversies surrounding the Berlin Holocaust monument worried that it would become an Ereignißstrucktur—“a kind of ‘happening place,’” as Kramer paraphrases her, “where people would be walked through the experience of victimhood and then go shopping, or go home to a nice lunch.” Jens Reich, a biologist who led the citizens’ movement in East Berlin when the wall was coming down, told Kramer that “the more we commemorate, the more we dilute the seriousness of commemoration; the better we describe, the less we mean” (). Or, as the French historian Jacques Le Goff remarked in another context, “Memory has become a bestseller in consumer society.”50 The danger is less forgetting than how we remember in a world in which news is reduced to entertainment and history to the theme park. Perhaps Andy Warhol understood this best. His portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy casts her mourning into an art work—a commodity whose value lies less in its subject matter (or even in its craft) than in the price it will fetch among collectors and museums anxious to have “a Warhol.” Jackie ’s repetitive image suggests the inexorable loss of aura of the original that comes with reproduction whether of the artwork or of memory. Reproduction replaces repetition; art, the historical event.51

 How can you get deep enough in your memories so that you won’t need to remember anything more? P N, A Book of Memories 52

  puzzling over Péter Nádas’s words these last few days as I have tried unsuccessfully to bring this chapter to a conclusion—the conclusion I planned to write before beginning my revisions of my Frankfurt lectures. It would have focused on expiation understood as Robert Hertz understood it, at least according to Marcel Mauss, as an attempt to revoke history.53 We are haunted by what we ought to have done, and though we

I

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forget and revise, we know somehow that we have forgotten and revised even if we do not know what we have forgotten or how we have revised. We suffer, in other words, Augustine ’s conundrum. If I have truly forgotten something, how can I know that I have forgotten it? If I am convinced of the truth of my memories, how can I know that there is an original that escapes me? We recognize the negative surround of our memories and the “events” to which they refer. We postulate a psychology that explains forgetting and revision in terms of an unconscious: a cauldron of intolerable desires, guilt, regret, and shame, which escape consciousness through the very processes we are trying to explain: forgetting and revision. We repeat in revised form what we have forgotten and so, in a sense, we remember what we have forgotten. We go so far, as Freud (read by Lacan and Lyotard) does, as to postulate the effect—a remembrance, I would insist—of precisely that which we can never recall because it could never be forgotten because it was never given fully articulate form in the first place. We are trapped within the play of a puckish homunculus, which we sometimes call consciousness, sometimes conscience, and understand in terms of will, motivation, and perhaps even inspiration. Conceptually they are facilitated by the inevitable “detachment” of the indexical pronoun from the utterances they situate. I try to understand memorialization and commemoration in terms of this play of revision and forgetting. In celebrating the memorial event, they define and externalize it, disjoining it from the “flow” of events we understand in terms of time and history, creating thereby its past and future. The memorial event can then serve as a bulwark against the beyond of memory, which, as I now see, has less to do with fact than unattended possibilities and unwalked paths. In a night terror, weighing what he never did, never even dreamed—his cadaver, as he calls it—the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa writes, “O que falhei deveras nào tem sperança nenhuma em sistema metafisica nenhum”—“There ’s no hope at all for what I didn’t do, in any metaphysical system.”54 And T. S. Eliot, a great admirer of Pessoa, wrote in “Burnt Norton,” What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation.

But, his time-theology apart—what has been and might have been pointing to single, always present end—Eliot, the poet, is compelled to give his speculation concrete expression.

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

   Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

His words, the poet recognizes, echo in his reader’s mind, “disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves,” but to what purpose he does not know. Beckoned by other echoes—“the deception of the thrush”—he invites the reader to follow him into the garden where, after a visionary play of sunlight and silent echoes, which anticipate the poem’s imaging of redemptive time, the illusionist thrush tells him to go: “human kind cannot bear very much reality” (Eliot , –). By giving stress and stature to the fact, memorialization and commemoration attempt to mask other possibilities, other paths. Were they to succeed, they would still fail to memorialize, for memorialization and commemoration require the acknowledgment of a choice having been made— for better or worse. How then does expiation fit into memorialization and commemoration? Through insight and confession, I am tempted to answer, through the recognition of choice and responsibility. By taking up the burden of what we have done, however, we do not change what we have done but rather offer it up for private or public reevaluation—praise or excoriation. Is expiation, then, simply an illusion—a Wiedergutmachen that makes us feel better? Perhaps, but that would be a simplification, which in the name of realism denies a significant component of the real. We do long for expiation—for undoing what we have done—and act accordingly, if magically. That is a driving social and psychological fact. Though we insist that what we want to undo is what we have done, we only know what we have done through remembrance. Expiation can never, then, be simply a revocation of history, if history is taken naively as a sequences of events. Is expiation rather a undoing of memory? A calling attention to memory’s artifice? An exploitation of the loss it announces? As Lawrence Langer writes, “we can remember in order to protect continuity or to verify disruption, to conceal or to flay” (, ). We know the tricks memory can play and the tricks we can play with memory. But all that is recalled is not subject to the trickery of memory, as the recognition of trickery itself announces. There can be no memory without resistance to its tricks. Though phenomenologists have defined the real in terms of resistance, I want to ask whether that resistance lies in the real or with a witness: a public, an internalized other, an epistemological superego, conscience, a spirit, or

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a god. It would seem that all expiation lies on the assumption of another who has the power to authorize memorial revision and forgetting, but, as we know, that power confronts precisely that which it is designed to overcome—the insistent real. We know our own—homuncular—subterfuges. This is why I find Nádas’s question so captivating. It is not the impossibility of his quest—to enter so deeply into memory that there is no longer a need to remember—but rather his use of the “you” that intrigues me: How can you [valaki, “someone”] get deep enough in your memories so that you won’t need to remember anything more? 55 My concern is not trivial. Nádas’s words call attention to the inexorable detachment of self from self that is demanded by memory, memorialization, and commemoration. There is always some fly-away component of our self that resists subsumption in our totalizing notion, an ethics really, of the “self,” which divides us from our memories and memorial activities. Though we may find our failure to participate fully in our memories disquieting, we know the release detachment affords us: the possibility of revision and reevaluation, the illusion of expiation and exculpation, ultimately the eschewing of responsibility or its (tortured) assumption. It is neither forgetting nor remembering that Nádas seeks. It is cessation—not, finally, of the questioning I, but of the you in all its ambiguity, as at once both ego and alter and neither the one nor the other. It is there in the space-time of interlocution that remembrance, another homuncular clone, plays, however joyfully, in mourning, for remembrance always memorializes the loss of a presence that was never quite as we remember it.

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  

Wo r l d - E n d i n g

The bourgeois’ hat flies off his pointy head. A screaming—and the air is filled with it. Roofers tumble to the ground and split. Sea-levels on the rise have been reported. The gale hits and savage oceans hop Ashore to shatter all the dams to smidges Most people have a nasty nasal drop. Railroad lines are slithering off the bridges. J  H, “Die Weltende”1

   to conclude this book with the consideration of millennial and end-of-the-world scenarios. Though they exercise our Iimagination, they are beyond our imaginative capacity. Though we describe



and recount them, they are beyond our descriptive and narrative powers. Our accounts portray a beyond that we cannot know and know that we cannot know and know even that the admission of our incapacity to know figures in their construction and persuasiveness. These scenarios have been called fictions, but are they fictions in the usual sense of the word? Some no doubt are, but others, the apocalyptic tales, for example, recounted in sacred books, like the biblical Revelation, ask more of us than suspended disbelief. They demand stubborn, adhesive, uncritical belief. They are propositional declarations of an incontestable state of affairs to come. They presuppose a particular temporal orientation: an insistent advent that facilitates their reckoning. Cast, as they usually are, in highly symbolic language, they require an interpretive commitment that threatens the distance we might normally take from them. Psychoanalysts might say that their symbolism resonates with our deepest unconscious concerns and desires. Existentialists would relate them to the

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structure of our life-world: to our being-for-death. I would argue that their symbolic obscurity echoes their mystery—the fact that we cannot know them—as it challenges us to engage with them so as to do away, if not with their mystery, then with the impossibility of not knowing. We are, ideally, seized by them, ergriffen, as the anthropologist Leo Frobenius might have described our capture—fascinated, enchanted, creatively engulfed.2 Interpretation becomes redemptive. It edges, of course, on speculation, and speculation risks undermining interpretation and consequent veracity. The line between the two is blurred, as it is in all figurative understanding. An etiquette of interpretation is required, and that etiquette varies, as we know, not only with historical and cultural circumstances, but within any single culture or historical period, with genre and subject matter. As the millennium approached, we were bombarded with all sorts of end-of-the-world scenarios in literature, film, preaching, and more or less sophisticated discussions of technological failure and economic collapse, and though the millennium has passed with seemingly little trouble, we continue to be haunted by the possibility that disaster is imminent. (I am writing this, I should note, just after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.) In differing ways, all of these scenarios were— and continue to be—moral tales, allegories really, of the struggle between good and evil. Good guys are pitted against bad guys the way Christ is pitted against the anti-Christ. First, there are those tales that depict the end of the world as we know it, followed by the birth of a new world, a New Heaven New Earth into which at least some of us in some form or another—the chosen, the saved—will have entry. Second, there are those that describe the end of the world tout court. They simply announce a final catastrophe: a meltdown, complete extinction. Usually, they are not as endof-the-world as they claim to be, for some hero, of mythic stature, most often along with a single woman or small group, manages to escape or somehow save the world. It is as though we cannot let go.3 In both scenarios destruction and regeneration are described in considerable detail, though, where a new world is postulated, it seems to resist imaginative elaboration. It is characterized either in the abstract, statically, as, for example, the eternal glorification of God, or concretely, though mechanically, in terms of our most banal social and political arrangements. Often, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the architectonics of the world to come is stressed, as it is, in Revelation, where it is modeled on a Jewish Temple, or in early and late Medieval pictures of heaven as a garden or a city.4 Depictions of hell are usually more dynamically elaborated, as is attested by the

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  

paintings of Hieronymous Bosch or Dante’s Inferno, but Revelation (:) simply states that Satan was “cast alive into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophets are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.”5 These two pictures of the millennium reflect two contradictory tendencies in Jewish and Christian eschatology. Gershom Scholem calls these tendencies the catastrophic, which dominates apocalyptic thought, and the utopian and relates them to a splitting of the figure of the Messiah: the Messiah of the House of Joseph, who is associated with destruction, and the Messiah of the House of David, who initiates a new, utopian world (, esp. –). The one is “the dying Messiah who perishes in the Messianic catastrophe.” Gathered in him are the features of the catastrophe. “He fights and loses—but he does not suffer. . . . He is a redeemer who redeems nothing, in whom only the final battle with the powers of the world is crystallized. His destruction coincides with the destruction of history.” The second figure of the Messiah—of the House of David—is the one who “once and for all defeats the antichrist” and thus brings about what is new and positive. We must remember that for the Jews, at least traditionally, redemption brought about by the Messiah is a public event in which the law (halakhah) is finally fulfilled in its plenitude (whereas for Christians it involves a personal transformation of one ’s inner condition). For the Lurian Kabbalists—those who follow the teachings of the sixteenth century Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkanazi—redemption takes on cosmic proportion, for they conceive of it as a reparation of the disjunctions and displacements (the exile, the Galut, symbolically understood) that followed from creation— from God’s own self-limitation through His externalization in creation (Scholem ,  – ). Redemption becomes emendation—the inevitable perfection of the world. The Messiah does not bring redemption but symbolizes its advent. As Scholem notes, there is in the Jewish conception of redemption an “anarchic breeze,” for if the redeemed world is perfectly aligned with the law, then the law changes radically and need not be constraining.6 The split between the historical world and the world-to-follow is absolute. Catastrophic images mark the transition, as they often do in rituals of passage in which the symbolic death of the initiate is followed by his or her “rebirth” into a new status.7 Though such transitions are always reducible to an indescribable asymptotic moment—a caesura—they seem to inspire, as in Revelation, highly symbolic, repetitive narratives, which cover over that moment’s resistance to description. We depend on the authority of sacred texts for descriptions of the world or nonworld to come.

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While some of these descriptions are impersonal declarations, in which authorship is no more in question than in most myths, others are personal and depend on the author’s particular status (e.g., Christ’s in Matthew ). In the case of many apocalyptic texts, like the Book of Daniel and Revelation, the authors do not describe direct but only visionary experiences of what is to come. The “vision” provides them with an authoritative position, but, despite its generic authority—its stability, the trust we have in it—it is, I believe, always in doubt. How can we be sure? How indeed can the visionary be sure? This doubt is beautifully reflected in the opening verses of chapter  of the Book of Daniel, in which Daniel seems to be searching for a way to establish his position: “In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel, after that which appeared unto me at the first. And I saw in a vision; and it came to pass, when I saw, that I was at Sushan in the palace, which is in the province of Elam; and I saw in a vision, and I was by the river Ulai. Then I lifted up mine eyes, and saw, and, behold, there stood before me. . . .” Aside from Daniel’s repetition, both in the active and passive voice, that he saw in a vision (hazon), he has to confirm his own identity both by repeating the “I” and by identifying that “I”—an instant of discourse—with his name (“even unto me Daniel”) which transcends that instant. He has further to establish when and where he had this vision (“in the third year of the reign of Belshazzar” and, ambiguously, at least in the English translation, his extra- or intravisionary whereabouts—in the palace of Sushan in the province of Elam by the river Ulai). Note the appellative “Behold,” which pulls his interlocutors into his visionary position. As in all end-of-the-world scenarios, we are forced into peeping out at what is or will be no more, or is or will be so radically different as to be inaccessible to us. As with Daniel, if my reading is correct, we cannot fully identify with the narrative voice or voices we project.8 Nor can we surrender ourselves to the fate of those characters who occur in our scenarios. We are caught in our own authorial position—in its seductive perturbations. This entrapment takes on harrowing proportion, as we shall see below, in those idiosyncratic end-of-the-world experiences of schizophrenics and other psychotics who can find no solace in a shared apocalypse and the redemption it might offer them.

 No tree was ever adored for itself only, but always for what was revealed through it, for what it implied and signified. M E, Patterns in Comparative Religion9

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  

  two Swiss psychiatrists, Alfred Storch and Casper Kulenkampff, published a case study of the Weltuntergang, or end-of-the-world, experiences of a twenty-three-year-old Bernese peasant of feeble intelligence whom they diagnosed as a catatonic schizophrenic.10 They described him as having a slow, shuffling gait, a bent-over posture, a small, expressionless face, curly dark blond hair, and deep-seated conciliatory eyes which seemed to gaze fixedly through things. He said little. His broken, hesitant, monotonous speech seemed to mirror the self-sameness of his mood and emotions, indeed his spare and awkward movements. You could not decide, Storch and Kulenkampff observed, whether his fixity of expression concealed anxiety or a sense of the uncanny (Unheimlichkeitstimmung). According to his father, the patient had been an awkward, accident-prone youth—the butt of his schoolmates’ humor—who was held back twice in his nine years of schooling. He had no friends and felt particularly close to nature. His father, a small, inaccessible man in his seventies, had married late in life. His mother, in her late forties, was an alcoholic who slept around and used to beat her son. The patient seemed to get along with his parents, though he did say his mother was “no longer of any use” (daß sie zu nichts mehr zu gebrauchen sei ). The patient, who had already been hospitalized twice before the two psychiatrists saw him in , was convinced that the world was coming to an end. The crash of a Swiss military plane triggered his second breakdown. He bore the burden of the crash but held lilac bushes, hazel and beech trees, oaks, and firs—shrubs and trees generally—responsible for the imminent world-ending. He spoke of a sun clock and a schoolhouse that had burned down. As a result, the sun could no longer shine correctly. Treated with insulin and electroshock therapy, he was released only to be hospitalized again a year later. He and his father were now responsible for the end of the world. His father caused changes in the world by having dug up some bushes the previous year and—most important—by cutting down a big oak tree against the patient’s will. Water flowed from the hole left by the uprooted tree. There were other causes for the world’s ending too: his father’s moving the entrance to his house and changing the shape of the door so the sun could no longer pass through. The sun is no longer right. It always stays in the same place. There are no longer any seas. The waters have run together. The rhythm of day and night has changed. In the evening the sun does not want to set correctly. The Swiss mountains—they were once shot by fliers—are no longer there. The earth has become flatter. The globe smaller. There are no longer any airplanes that can take off to make the air. (The patient was convinced that airplanes made the air.) The

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air is thinner and smells bad. One can’t live for long in it. Growth and man’s creation have stopped. All buildings have changed. “The world is wider but with almost no houses.” The earth has become hollow; the ground eroded. Searching for a firm foothold, men have buried themselves under the earth where the dead and pieces of clothes are to be found. The water that came out of the hole where the oak tree was has flooded this subterranean space. One can drown there and must swim. As animals have gone underground, men on the surface of the earth are hungry. (The patient distinguished between the living—a minority—who, like him, live on firm ground and the majority, who live underground, as well as a small group who were raised from the dead. He refers to the underground people as the “others” or “foreign folk.”)11 The patient receives news from the subterranean space—from an indescribable evil power—that the world is going under. He is in contact with the people driven under the earth. Through a transmitter, they hear what he says, and he what they say to him. They are not nice to him, because they want to return home to fetch their things and can’t. When he was asked what he meant by “going under,” he answered, “when men are no longer in the right place”—but not just men but trees, houses, everything. A change has taken place. The beautiful world can no longer be correctly restored. People, things, houses, paths are no longer in the same place. “I am also not in the right place.” People no longer know where borders are. Things will improve when everything is back in place, when everything is in order. When asked what the right place is, the patient said, “where man is at home.” Asked when the underground people would be ready, the patient answered, “when I’m back home again.” His home has moved. “You can’t see it. It is far away. I don’t know where.” He has lost contact with his relatives and neighbors. “They don’t want to see me any more. They have persecuted me. . . . My father did not believe me about the world-ending. . . . They have sent me away. They have not been nice to me lately. I won’t see them either.” The patient tries at times to stop some of the changes. He turns off a “switch” to stop the underground flooding. He is able to rescue some of the underground people because he has a relatively firm footing, but has finally to give up because he finds himself on “false ground.” He carried out his rescue mission by means of a magnetic force centered in his larynx. He had, however, trouble swallowing potatoes and vegetables because he had eaten an apple stem and had damaged his larynx. His laryngeal magnetism has put him in contact with people. Fliers had said they could no longer fly because they were pulled down by his magnetism. The patient did nothing about changes in the air. . . . He goes on repetitively:

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

   “They want to be on firm ground, the proper men who belong on firm ground. Those who are not born there are under ground. They are under and were already unconscious. Because the oak—and the bushes—are no longer standing.” “But some are on firm ground?” “The living, because of the rescue. I’ve rescued them. But because I was no longer at home, it was no longer the same, and my father had not obeyed and grubbed up the oak. I told him before that he ought to leave the oak standing. Because he sawed it down, people and things have come down. Because there are no longer any bushes, there is no longer any firm ground. The people have slid down there, and the water has run together. It is no longer in the same place it was before. The proper men, the living, were also under before.” “Were you also under?” “I was always above, never under, but not on firm ground.” “How was that?” “An earthquake. The living stuff knocked itself under. I saw it.”12

After two months of insulin and electroshock therapy, Storch and Kulenkampff report that the patient was once again “the primitive, somewhat weak-minded peasant youth he had been before.” The only traces of his third breakdown were emotional flattening and increased reserve. The patient knew nothing more about the world-ending but resisted any correction of his experience. Everything was now in order, and he was happy, as the psychiatrists concluded, to be going home to plant potatoes. As existential psychiatrists, Storch and Kulenkampff were primarily interested in delineating the life structure of the patient’s Weltuntergang experiences and not in explaining, in the manner of psychoanalysis, what caused them. For them, the patient’s experience was not a random set of fantasies and hallucinations but an image of the alterations in his existential situation, which began with the onset of the schizophrenic process (, ). They stressed changes in the patient’s experience of space: the loss of borders and orientation and the disorder that followed. He straddled the ordinary world and the world of his delirium—a static world in which there was no longer any possibility of becoming, fertility, and growth. He found himself alone, in a desolate world, with only mediated contact, “through the receiver” or by way of his laryngeal magnetism, with others—those who had taken refuge underground. He was truly homeless, the psychiatrists observed, without the freedom to act, confronted with nothingness, with a dark abyss, ultimately, with evil. Unlike those of us who come at times to doubt our world, they argued, the patient—and others like him—were not just de-

-

prived of home and communication but, ontologically, of the very possibility of being at home and in communication with others.13 Curiously, Storch and Kulenkampff do not give us any real sense of the patient’s response to his world-ending experiences.14 Was he terrified? Was he removed from them? His mood seems to have changed dramatically, if I may read between the lines, over the period in which he was under their treatment. We should differentiate between the world’s collapse, which the patient experienced, and the end of the world, which he thought imminent.15 The one was a sign of the second. The patient seems to have straddled several worlds, most notably the “real” world and the world—in fact, the worlds—of his delirium.16 As Storch and Kulenkampff observe, he was always partially in our world. He ate, dressed, and communicated at some level with others. Within his delirium, he found himself without firm footing, but with some footing all the same. He was never sucked into the abyss. “I was always above, never under, but not on firm ground.” Nor was he ever fully homeless even if home was reduced to the loss of home. (Here I differ with Storch and Kulenkampff, for though the patient may have lost the ontological possibility of being at home, he was still capable of acknowledging his loss and could, therefore, orient himself in terms of that loss.) He had, of course, to struggle not to go under—not to seek false refuge in an underworld he associated with endless swimming, drowning, and death. His attempt to rescue the subterranean “others” was no doubt also an attempt to save himself from their fate—to restore orderliness to the world. He had, however, to confront their otherness, their foreignness, their anger and envy, ultimately their inability to understand the way, I imagine, he had had to confront his schoolmates’—his own—inability to understand. Despite his magnetism, he was destined to fail. Yet he did not see his attempted rescue as an attempt to prevent the end of the world and his failure to do so as bringing about the world’s end. Unlike many schizophrenics who have world-ending fantasies, the patient does not identify himself with the world in its totality—the All—and his death with the end of the world. He is no all-powerful savior. He only assumes partial responsibility for the fate of the world.17 He may have thought himself answerable for the crash of the Swiss army plane, but it was trees and bushes that were bringing about the end of the world. Though he assumed responsibility for felling the oak tree, it was, in fact, his father who, refusing to listen to him, cut it down He lurks at the edge of engaged responsibility. What is most striking about the patient’s fantasies is the role of trees and bushes, especially the oak tree, in bringing about the end of the world.





  

In his second crisis, it is trees and bushes generally that are held responsible; in his third, it is a specific oak tree, though he does refer to the effect of other trees and bushes. Trees, especially the oak tree, figure importantly in world, and particularly in German, myth and ritual.18 Wilhelm Mannhardt, the nineteenth-century comparative mythologist, stresses the widespread belief in the tree-soul in the Indo-Germanic world. Not only were these treesouls related to the spirits of the dead, but they had to be propitiated before the trees that housed them were chopped down. The trees were often said to bleed when they were injured.19 The historian of religion Mircea Eliade argues that the tree represents the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself, the center of the universe, “life-undying” (, ). It has power. It is an arbor mundi—an image of the universe. Rising from under the earth toward the sky, it unites the subterranean with the terrestrial and the celestial realms. We do not know how Storch and Kulenkampff ’s patient was affected by European tree mythology. Nor, for that matter, by its Nazi symbolism. We do know that the uprooting of the oak affects all three levels of his universe: flooding the underground, drowning the underground people; destabilizing and leveling the surface of the earth, diminishing its size, killing plants and animals, disordering human life; thinning and changing the composition of the air, disturbing the course of the sun. His fantasies included other mythic motifs: distortions in the sun’s path, flooding, underearth people, the living-dead, indeed, the end of the world itself. I do not want to suggest that they are mutilated manifestations of the archetypes of the patient’s collective unconscious, as Jung would argue, nor that they are prevailing though deeply rooted cultural archetypes, as Eliade might. Nor do I want to explain their occurrences in terms of some universally perceived set of characteristics that prime inevitable symbolic associations and metaphorical usages. I am not denying these possibilities, but I am critical of the way in which the evidence upon which they are based is amassed and the manner in which their universalizing presumption simplifies far more complex cultural and psychological processes.20 The presence of “mythic themes” does not necessarily indicate mythic significance. Their immediate referents are not inevitably endowed with sacred or exceptional power, nor are they necessarily integrated into some shared religious belief. The motifs themselves may simply be shards from some former—most often putative—myth and ritual complex. They may, of course, simply be products of a single individual’s imagination. As Eliade reminds us, “No tree was ever adored for itself only, but always for what was revealed through it, for what it implied and signified.” Whatever mythic value the oak tree may have had for the Bernese peasants in the

-

s, its value for Storch and Kulenkampff ’s patient was idiosyncratic. It was simply the oak tree. It had neither symbolic nor transcendental significance for him. Like the dream symbols Freud wrote about in The Interpretation of Dreams, it does not generate a chain of personal associations (, ff ). Its felling and uprooting just trigger a chain of events that follow one another mechanically. “Inexorably” would be too strong a word. The patient can do nothing about them. Though subject to their consequences, he always seems removed from them—indifferent, the way the hysteric is, despite the “gravity” of his symptoms. The patient is canny. In its pure facticity, as a simple existent, unencumbered by personal associations, the oak supports the world order, the feeling of being zu Hause where everything is in its rightful place.21 Chopped down, it can no longer give support. Everything is disjointed, fragmented, moribund, including any mythic cohesion that may have existed in the peasant’s world. It is not only the world that is out of joint but also the language, the symbolic language, by which it is described and ordered. The myths themselves, as incoherent as they may already have been in this twentieth-century peasant’s life, are now only disjunctive traces, debris really, that can no longer be conjoined in a meaningful way. He is a bricoleur who has no structure in which to arrange the elements, mythic or otherwise, in an orderly fashion. He is left with ever-changing, contradictory, idiosyncratic constructions that offer him no solace, no sense of stability. His megalomaniac self-referentiality is inevitable. There is no one, nothing else, no extranarrative footing. The patient lacks what the Italian philosopher-anthropologist, Ernesto De Martino, calls trascendimento, the capacity to remove oneself from one ’s situation, to have an edge on it, to take—I would add—an ironic stance.22 For De Martino, a human being—Dasein, esserci—lives in a world whose horizons, including the spatial and temporal, but not limited to these, are not fixed, as they were for Heidegger, but historically determined. Included among these horizons, as a basic structure of Dasein, is the possibility of world-ending and the terror it produces. Living under such conditions we are always threatened by contingency and risk. There is, there can be, no final order. Indeed, it seems as if the semblance of order is itself an artifice. When a person’s existence is threatened by the accidental—an illness, the death of friend, a war, an earthquake, and, I am compelled to add, an act of terrorism—that person suffers from what De Martino calls a crisi della presenza, a crisis of presence. His or her world comes apart. He or she is overwhelmed by its contingency, its menacing nature, the fact of its assumption, the absence of any escape, any redemption. Rituals, particularly magical and curing ones, De Martino argues in a functionalist manner, defend us



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  

against such crises and offer remediation and redemption by reaffirming the world as we have known it and our place in it. De Martino was careful to distinguish between the end-of-the-world fantasies of the ancient world and other vibrant cultures and those of the insane.23 As his editor, Clara Gallini, puts it with regard to the case we have been discussing, the apocalyptic delirium of the Bernese peasant was—for the Italian philosopher—emblematic of a fall without redemption, while the ancient end-of-the-world fantasies, as terrifying as they may have been, were coupled with notions of the periodic rebirth of the world and the enlargement of its horizons (Gallini , introduction). Deprived of a transcending position, the patient could have no edge on his world. He was simply caught in his authorship—one he could only partially acknowledge. He did not have the intersubjective support, as De Martino might have put it, that could release him from his authorship. He was without dialogical possibility. He could give his world no figurative shape. He could only rehearse it in fragmented, at times incoherent, monologue. In the extreme he abandoned himself to a deadening silence. Though Storch and Kulenkampff ’s patient tries to save the underworld people, he has no expectations, no prospects, no hope.24 Events simply follow one another mechanically—without transcending meaning—in a curiously dislocated time which hovers between that of everyday life and that of his delirium. Though he repeats himself in his fantasies and in their account (if the two can be separated), we do not know whether he is aware of his repetitions. His accounts lack narrative cohesion and constancy of voice. The patient is lost, less in time, than out of time, and can have then no real eschatology—no sense of tragedy or even catastrophe.

 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. . . . The thing that hath been is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us. E : –

’  to suggest that a cohesive sense of time leads inevitably to eschatology. It has often been argued that “primitive” societies have no end-of-the-world concerns, though they often have elaborate origin-of-

I

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the-world myths. Their social and cultural life, so the argument goes, is one of endless repetition. The contingencies of everyday life—historical events, as we might put it—are subordinated either to constituent mythic paradigms, as Eliade asserts, or to classificatory systems, as Lévi-Strauss maintains, which immediately incorporate the event in a perduring structure.25 The procedure, the French anthropologist argues, does not deny the historical process but admits it as “form without content.” There is, it follows, no sense that the future will bring something new. It will be as the past was and the present is.26 It is very much the view that was expressed by the writer of Ecclesiastes, but, of course, he was giving expression to a pessimistic and deeply philosophic view of the world that bears little resemblance to the putative world of the “primitive.”27 It is, in any case, constituted from within a messianic view of history, which is by no means universal. What such idealized and romanticized pictures of the primitive fail to account for is the unexpected, by which I mean more than the contingent. We expect droughts and famines, hurricanes and earthquakes, illness, plagues, and death. We may not know when they will occur, but when they do, we incorporate them into our world-understanding. We have developed various techniques, many of them of a ritual or quasi-ritual nature, to deal with them when they occur and even to fend them off, if only by magic, before they occur. So too is it with the putative primitive. They have techniques for dealing with these crisi della presenza: curing practices, funeral ceremonies, rain dances, and the like. When they fail, so it is argued, they are protected by time-tested rationalizations and corrective rituals. The ritual or ceremony was not appropriate; it was performed incorrectly; its officiants were corrupted. Some societies, like the Navajo, have even developed a metaritual, a form of insurance, that, performed during any ceremony or ritual, corrects—or at least protects the participants from—procedural fault.28 Unlike the contingent, the unexpected falls out of our ken. It defies our cognitive and imaginative capacities. It resists specification. We can neither long for it nor dread it. We may have a category for it—“the unexpected”—but it is an empty one. For the philosophically minded, it may serve as a reminder of the limits of our understanding. We may relate it to the uncanny, the miraculous, the wholly other and incorporate it in a cognitive ethics of humility or extravagant possibility. But such a category does not shield us, any more than it does the primitive, from the turmoil, the confusion, the helplessness, the sense of inferiority, and the despair, but also, the wonderment, the thrill, that comes with being overwhelmed by the

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  

wholly new. I certainly do not want to deny the primitive the experience of the sublime. Nor do I want to reduce the sublime to the awe—the mysterium tremendum, das schauervolle Geheimnis—Rudolph Otto associates with the holy.29 The holy may be regarded as a domestication of the sublime. When we speak of repetition, we often assume an all-encompassing sense of temporal and historical continuity, but I doubt that there is any society in the world that has or ever had such an all-encompassing view. As anthropologists have shown, people around the world live in and conceptualize time in several, often contradictory fashions.30 This is not to deny that a single conceptualization or experience of time may be generally dominant or dominant in a particular domain, say, the ceremonial or the agricultural.31 What I want to stress is that repetition may occur in disjunctive or quasidisjunctive time. This would be particularly true in those worlds, like Homeric Greece, in which miracles or miracle-like events, sudden interventions of the gods, or puckish plays of fate are acknowledged. The experience of the unexpected would, I surmise, be different in such societies from those in which such supernatural interventions are denied. The historian Norman Cohn argues that, unlike the beginning of the world, the end of the world did not seem to engage “anyone” until sometime after  .., when the Iranian prophet Zarathustra told of the coming of a perfect world that would replace the present, imperfect one (, ). Cohn argues that Zarathustra’s apocalyptic concerns were stimulated by radical changes brought about by new methods of warfare, including the use of the chariot, introduced by invaders from the south to Central Asia, where Zarathustra is thought to have lived. Cohn is, of course, basing his argument on written sources, but anthropologists have long argued (imperially, one might say) that thoughts of the end of the world among primitive peoples coincided with the arrival of the Westerner, the disruptions they caused, and the teleological sense of time they ultimately introduced. They denied the primitive the capacity to entertain thoughts of world-ending before the unexpected arrival of the European or some other technologically advanced people. As we saw with the cargo cults, these “simple folk” may have acted in what Western observers took to be irrational, magical ways (see chap. ). The Westerners failed to see the logic of the natives’ response—their practical sense. Apparently we do not easily acknowledge the creative challenge that the unexpected and the wholly new bring. Either we dismiss the natives’ response, as the colonialists did, as acts of savagery, or we view it through romantic eyes. We stress the Melanesians’ despair at discovering the vulnerability of their world, its technical inferiority, and its

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likely end, and perpetuate, thereby, our construction of the primitive and the sadness we feel for his or her loss. Our romanticism becomes elegiac. Among the societies that have been said to have no concern for the end of the world before the arrival of the Europeans—and even then—were the Australian Aborigines. R. M. Berndt, an anthropologist, wrote in  that the Aborigines “may become emotionally upset owing to physical circumstances, and see their culture toppling around them; but as far as we know they cannot really envisage complete destruction, the cessation of the ‘eternal dream time ’ stream, and the life they know even under the most intensive and disastrous form of contact.”32 Berndt has been rightly criticized for assuming that the Aborigines “cannot really envisage” an end to their world. No doubt we are all constrained by our worldview, by the way it frames reality, but it is difficult to imagine that the grasp of any worldview would be so comprehensive as to preclude thoughts of world-ending. Like so many observers of the primitive, Berndt refuses to grant them the possibility of full imaginative play—of creatively struggling with their own cultural entrapment. While acknowledging the “in-built determinism” of the Aborigines’ religious outlook, and its tendency toward the timeless and the immutable, the Heidelberg anthropologist Klaus-Peter Koepping argues that that outlook did not preclude a creative response to the challenges posed by the European presence (Koepping , ). Aboriginal religion is centered on what has come to be called The Dreaming: a primordial time that extends dynamically into the present in which gods, spirits, and heroes created and continue to create the world as we know it today.33 The Dreaming is, as W. E. H. Stanner put it, “everywhen.” Though some human beings—“Aboriginal doctors”—have a special relationship with The Dreaming and attain considerable power through that relationship, all human beings can participate in it through ritual actions and in ordinary dreams, ensuring, thereby, their fertility and that of the environment. As the heroes of The Dreaming shaped the world by externalizing their own dreaming, so individuals and groups now internalize the externalized spiritual world and its powers in the same “totemic places” where the heroes had (Koepping , ). It can be argued that this view of the world as a perpetuation of The Dreaming, coupled with the apparent absence of any belief in heaven, hell, salvation, or apocalypse or in human perfectibility, promotes a static view of the world. As Koepping demonstrates, however, the Aborigines did respond, at times by intensifying their traditions, to the European threat to their worldview.34

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  

Is it in fact possible Aborigines had no thoughts of world-ending when they saw their populations demolished in a few short years and their lands taken from them? Speaking in  of the natives of New South Wales, David Collins wrote: In the year  they were visited by a disorder which raged among them with all the appearance and virulence of the smallpox. The number that it swept off, by their own accounts, was incredible. At the time a native was living with us and on our taking him down to the harbour to look for his former companions those who witnessed his expression of agony can never forget either. He looked anxiously around him in the different caves we visited: not a vestige on the sand was to be found of human foot; the excavations in the rocks were filled with the putrid bodies of those who had fallen victims to the disorder; not a living person was anywhere to be met with. It seemed as if, flying from the contagion, they had left the dead to bury the dead. He lifted up his hands and eyes in silent agony for some time: at last he exclaimed “All dead! All dead!!”35

By , a little more than a half-century after the events Collins described, only ten thousand, or  percent of the  population, had survived (Swain , ). There is nothing particularly unusual about Collins’s report. Not only were Aboriginal populations devastated by disease and bloodshed brought by the Europeans, but so were countless other peoples around the world. What is extraordinary is the way the Aborigines first conceived of the Europeans. In a song which is said to be a response to their first sighting of the HMS Endeavour on Sunday, May , , the Dulingbara people thought the crew was burying itself. These strangers, where are they going? Where are they trying to steer? They must be in that place Thoorvour, it is true. See the smoke coming in from the sea. These men must be burying themselves like the sand crabs. They disappeared like the smoke. (Swain , )

The image is particularly striking for a people who buried their own dead in the sand. Tony Swain, from whose work I am quoting, notes, chillingly, that the sighting may have been interpreted as a portent! Later the whites were identified with ancestral ghosts or spirits, but, as Swain notes, this identification should be understood not as a mere error in classification but as a

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“mechanism for expanding the preexistent cosmologically and morally established social order to accommodate an alien people. . . . While a ‘malevolent spirit’ category would have an inherent logical attraction, it would place White Australians outside the domain of sanctioned human relationships. The generosity and genius of equating invaders with the departed relatives was that it invited them to modify their behavior and (re)establish morally acceptable interactions with their former kin” (). Of course, the whites’ definition of the Aborigines was neither so generous nor so inviting. Metaphorized as an ancestral spirit or not, they refused to occupy an appropriate place in the Aboriginal landscape. Swain suggests that massive depopulation and dislocation did not, however, deal a death blow to Aborigines’ spiritual life, as has often been claimed, but forced upon them a radical reformulation of their cosmology, which, though partaking of Christian elements, could not be reduced to simple Christianization.36 He notes the coexistence of two spatial orientations that began with the coming of the European: the traditional “locative” cosmology, which emphasized the relationship between particular geographical sites and creative powers and “human spiritual essences,” and a “utopian” one in which human and ancestral sprits end up in a sky realm far removed from worldly affairs.37 Ubiety, in this understanding, gives way to ubiquity. The sacred realm now stands “in a single, ubiquitous relationship with all people.” The spirits of the dead do not return to the earth, as they did in the traditional view, but remain in a celestial paradise. A supreme deity (no doubt alien to traditional pluralistic belief ) is afforded conceptual space. This All-Father is, according to Swain, “a dislocated utopian innovation developed in response to the destruction of the relationship between people and their countries.” Conceptually the All-Father introduces a new pan-Aboriginal social base quite distinct from the site-specific spiritual centers of the traditional pluralistic view. In this view, specific people had to conform spiritual, social, and environmental elements to the Law; that is, they had to keep these elements in regenerative balance. As such, traditional understanding differed radically from the new utopian one, which assumed that the world could not maintain itself but depended on the otiose sky domain. Confirmed by their relations with the whites, this view led, according to Swain, to the development of a notion of evil as intrinsic corruption altogether alien to the traditional worldview, which only recognized nonintrinsic notions of “wrong” and “bad.” Evil became a fundamental feature of the cosmos attributable to both native and European populations (Swain , ).

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  

Given the disruptive changes in their worldview, including the possibility that in certain domains, most notably those concerning the Europeans, they could no longer maintain regenerative balance, the Aborigines directed their attention to the future in a way they had never done before. On the one hand, they had millennial dreams in which the whites would be destroyed, and, on the other, they were concerned with the threat of their own demise. During the nineteenth century, antiwhite sentiment was often given ritual, if not theatrical, expression. In one such performance attended by over five hundred Aborigines at Surat, a group of men danced as if they were cattle. “Hunters” arrived, stalked the cattle, and “speared” two of them. A party of “whites” on horseback suddenly appeared and tried to drive the hunters off. A battle ensued. One European observer described it this way: “The native spectators groaned whenever a blackfellow fell, but cheered lustily when a white bit the dust; and at length, after the ground had been fought over and over again, the whites were ignominiously driven from the field, amidst the delight of the natives” (Swain , ). Swain maintains that though such antiwhite rituals may have offered the Aborigines an at times redemptive picture of a world without whites, they were, in fact, alien to Aboriginal thought. He argues that “the dominant and persistent Aboriginal orientation was not to overthrow earth with heaven or Whites with Aborigines but, rather, to restructure their relationship to produce a Lawful, balanced, and equal dualism that could thus endure” (–). It is the realistic threat of extinction of Aboriginal life, Swain insists, that is the dominant eschaton. It was the Aborigines’ inability to regenerate the Law, as well as the presence of lawless beings, namely whites, that threatened the cosmos. They were deprived, in other words, of their worldmaintaining responsibility or capacity. In one apocalyptic vision, heaven and earth were on the verge of merging into a formless flooded mass unless tomahawks were sent to the Old Man at the end of the earth who tended the pillars that propped up the skies. The pillars were rotting, and tomahawks were needed to cut new ones (Howitt , ). If the tomahawks did not arrive in a timely fashion, the heavens would fall, the sea would burst, a flood would ensue, and everyone would be drowned. So dire was the threat, so severe the worry that the tomahawk—or in other versions, axes, saws, ropes, tiers of dray wheels (all objects of European origin)—would not arrive in time, the Aborigines began to calculate which mountains were high enough to offer them refuge. Swain suggests that traditional initiatory rituals (bora) were modified with the menacing arrival of the Europeans in order to preserve the regenerative Law. European goods were not sought for

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their own material benefits but for their soteriological value. But apocalyptic thought, no doubt realistically, came to dominate. The All-Father depicted in these ceremonies begets world-ending. He is depicted in ritual sculpture as sleeping, and it is said that once, when he woke up and turned on his side, the ocean flooded the earth. It is supposed that when he wakes again, the world will be flooded anew (Swain , ). The image is telling. It is now a singular deity (identified at times with the Old Man at the end of the world who props up the heavens) who is responsible, passively so, perhaps even unwittingly, for the end of the world. No more otiose act could be imagined. Humans can do nothing, so it appears, to prevent his lumbering awakening but, like Sisyphus, and countless other mythic heroes who continue to struggle against all odds, the Aborigines go on struggling to preserve the Law and regenerate the cosmos. There is, in my view at least, something ennobling about this—far grander than the promise of personal salvation that the Christianity they were being offered proclaimed. Swain puts it this way: “Whereas in colonial Christian thought the world required the scouring intervention of the second coming, Aboriginal people trusted, as they still trust, in the powers of regeneration” ().

 All Baptists pray for this [that the Gulf War will not escalate], but the Catholics pray that the war will get bigger. Someone will be putting the triple six on people and taking over the world. The Book of Revelation says that in  . . .  Catholics from Australia will come to Papua New Guinea and ask if you are a Christian. If you say “no,” they will give you the triple six. If you say “yes,” you will die instantly. They give you the triple six by stapling it on you. You will want to get it off, you will try, but you won’t be able to. A U , speaking in 38

   seen in our discussion of cargo cults, though the desire for European goods was their manifest goal, cargo itself, even among the A most materialistic and practical-minded of peoples, is always more than itself. It has symbolic value. It evokes the world, the moral order, society, now ruptured, twisted, and maimed. It divides that world between those who possess (however possession is understood) and those who do not possess cargo.39 It creates an image of the past, perhaps even a new way of conceptualizing that past as “past,” subjecting it to a critique, if only by

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comparison, and producing a knot of emotions—nostalgia, regret, sadness, embarrassment, excitement, and wonderment—that cannot be easily unraveled. It fills the present with longing, desire, and hope. It projects a world of possibility that, at least in detail but also in scope and intensity, had never before been experienced. It creates, in other words, an image of the future, perhaps, as with the past, even a new way of conceiving of the future as “future.” It gives to that future a proto-apocalyptic tone, which, with contact with evangelical missionaries, risks becoming fully apocalyptic. I am not denying the possibility that the Melanesians may have had end-ofthe-world concerns before the arrival of the Europeans—they may well have—but I am insisting that whatever those concerns may have been, they would, of necessity, particularly after evangelization, be of a different nature. What must be stressed is the different ways in which the apocalypse comes to be understood, how it integrates with at least those elements of traditional culture that are resistant to change or retain their reformulative capacity, and how it ends up as a figure of rhetorical and political potency. The Urapmin, who number , live in the highlands of the West Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. They are not cargoists, though there is a cargo-dimension to their Christianity. They first came under government administration in , but their homeland was so isolated that they had little contact with the outside world until the s. It is true that some of them began working as laborers on coastal plantations in the s and sent their children to mission schools in neighboring villages, but, though laborers brought back stories and strange goods from the coast and children talked of the tabalasep, the white ’s religion, the “whites’ world” remained for them, as for so many rural Melanesians at the time, a shadowy world, without any immediate reference or even relevance, hovering on myth, dream, and, as the French anthropologist Marc Augé () would insist, fiction. Joel Robbins, who studied the Urapmin, observes: “their intense interest in the white world, combined with the difficulty they had in engaging meaningfully with that world, produced a restless, agitated longing for the kind of redemptive ‘development’ that would make them legitimate players on the same global stage trodden by the whites they had come to know or imagine.”40 The Urapmin world remained much as it had always been until , when they, like their neighbors, were caught up in a charismatic Christian revival that swept the area. The entire community converted and “with the help of the Holy Spirit,” who led them through dreams, visions, and possession, they changed their lives dramatically. They abandoned their ances-

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tors, the men’s house, food and other taboos, initiation and fertility rites, and a host of minor rituals they used to cure the sick and eliminate anger and other harmful emotions. (The Urapmin believe that anger is mystically dangerous.) They attended long church services nearly every day but especially on Sundays. “Spirit women,” who were possessed by the Holy Spirit, became healers. Special “Christian” rituals were designed to insure success in hunting, gardening, and soccer matches and to redeem the hearts of those now known to be filled with sin. Most important, the Urapmin claimed to take responsibility for their own lives and not wait passively for the whites to change it. They are, according to Robbins, now fully committed to the white world. Christianity is, for them, the way to participate in that “globalized” world.41 Like many Melanesians, the Urapmin suffer a sense of inferiority with respect to the whites.42 They refer to Christianity as a white religion both because they take Jesus to have been white and because it is practiced by white people. As Robbins argues, through Christian practice, particularly the Sunday services, which they know to be occurring around the white world, they come to participate in that world as potential equals. At church they spend considerable time castigating themselves for their pettiness, anger, and jealousy, which, as they see it, keeps them apart from God and the whites. They blame themselves for not having the benefits of the whites. Though their experience with whites does not live up to their apparent idealization, they do recognize in Jesus the one white with whom they can have an intimate, though—as with the whites they come in contact with—subordinate, relationship. The Urapmin are particularly concerned with salvation and damnation. They will be judged as a group and ascend to Heaven together. There they will be integrated as a community into the white world in a way they had hoped would occur in this world. They do not seek, then, individual but communal worldly success or salvation. As with the Aborigines discussed by Swain, the Urapmin appear to understand salvation not in individual but in collective terms. Is it that the understanding of self and community of these two people, and no doubt scores of others, is resistant to the individualistic orientation of evangelical Christianity?43 Is it that they cannot conceive of a heaven separate from their own people? Even among American evangelicals, who focus on individual salvation, there is, I found, an implicit assumption that they will be with their families, friends, and other church members—at least with the chosen who share their most fundamental values. Their heaven is a homey, friendly place. They frown on the cold formality of the Catholics and “lib-

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eral” Protestants like the Episcopalians and Lutherans. Jesus is their friend, as he is the friend of the Urapmin, and though they recognize his authority, they do not share the Urapmin’s icon of that authority. They do not liken Him to their white bosses. Robbins notes that the coming Apocalypse was a continual subject of conversation during his fieldwork (Robbins , ). Although their were periods of especially intense apocalyptic concern, in which everyday life appeared to crumble in the face of Jesus’ imminent return and preachers had to admonish their flocks to attend to “the things of the ground” in case Jesus did not come, most of the time the Urapmin lived normal everyday lives as they discussed and looked for signs of the Apocalypse (Robbins , ). Robbins relates what he calls “everyday millenarianism” to the intertwining of two temporal modes—the disjunctive and the linear—that are expressed in, if not precipitated by, Urapmin narrative structure. The several genres of Urapmin story share a particular narrative structure, which, according to Robbins, relates to their construction of time. It is marked by secrecy and the narrative discontinuities secrecy produces. Not only are some stories secret, revealed only to initiates, who learned them bit by bit—a first-learned bit may even be falsified by a later one—but the narratives are marked by internal secrecy. Information crucial to understanding the meaning of an episode may be left out or the relationship between episodes left obscure. The effect of narrative secrecy is to produce hermeneutic skepticism. The Urapmin are never sure they have sufficient information to comprehend the stories they have been told. They are always ready, indeed they expect, to revise their understanding of a story as future episodes and connections are revealed. They are also careful not to make claims about things they are not sure of, most particularly about the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, which lie hidden inside the human heart.44 Both their story and everyday worlds are filled with gaps upon which they dwell. “Like the world of mythology, the present state of social life is always for the Urapmin indeterminate, and they find it difficult to work from what they know about it to predict what is likely to happen in the future” (). And yet the likelihood of future revelations gives a forward thrust to their thought. Citing Frank Kermode ’s work on secrecy, Robbins argues that narrative secrets “are at odds with sequence.”45 They “make a mess of the continuous time that Western narratives labor to construct.” The gaps they create point to later fulfillments. The present is always unstable—always “a way station on a road that leads to fuller sense.” The experience of repeated revelation alters radically one ’s sense of the future ’s determinacy.

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“Since the past and the present may not be what they seem, there are no grounds for assuming that one knows what the future will bring. Unconstrained by the past or present, the future remains radically open. Even the complete, untoward transformation wrought by an apocalyptic event cannot be ruled out” (Robbins , ). In fact, the Urapmin had an indigenous notion of a coming apocalypse. They believed the surface of the earth was merely a crust over a churning ball of water which would eventually destroy that crust and bring the world to an end. Robbins suggests that the discontinuous temporality produced by these narrative structures of secrecy is complemented by linear narratives of everyday life. These linear narratives are, as I understand Robbins, based on the metanarrational assumption that the narratives are not just incomplete but subject to at least partial fulfillment over time as the secrets they contain are revealed. Initiates, whose initiations lasted for years, soon learned that what they had been told at one stage of initiation would be complemented, elaborated, or even falsified at a later one. They had, however, to act, pragmatically we might say, at each stage, as if they had the full story. More important, Robbins writes, is the fact that the Urapmin construct “satisfying narratives of continuous social life” by stringing together goal-oriented ritual actions in predictable sequences. Thus, in recounting a conflict between two neighbors over a pig that had broken into a garden, the Urapmin narrator does not discuss the neighbors’ intentions but lists the ritual acts performed: cursing the pig, appealing to the village court, exchanging equivalent goods, praying, and confessing. Such narratives give continuity to Urapmin social life, Robbins argues somewhat mechanically. Embedded in nonlinear, future-oriented, disjunctive time, they allow the Urapmin “to plan for a future that in at least a minimally reliable way will issue predictably from the present while at the same time remaining prepared to receive a revelation that will jar the future loose from the causal thrust of the present” (, ). According to Robbins, the traditional Urapmin conception of time was not adverse to that of the missionaries who converted them. The Christians, he argues, straddle “narratives that make up a sacred history and those that have already been foretold as structuring the future” (). They live, as it were, in a parenthesis within the sweeping biblical narrative that begins with creation and ends with the Apocalypse. I am not convinced, for it seems to me that in attempting to render their lives as biblical as possible, the evangelicals strive to transform the messiness of everyday time into the structured time of the Bible. Unlike the Urapmin, whose future orientation was traditionally disjunctive and open-ended, the evangelicals’ time is stub-

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  

bornly linear and closed. Yes, both are concerned with the coming apocalypse, but, the Urapmin were not as concerned with when it would occur as the evangelicals are. This changed, of course, with the Urapmin’s conversion. Nor was the Urapmin’s apocalypse as elaborated as the Christians’. Indeed, I would argue that in their literalist take on Revelation and other apocalyptic texts, the evangelicals are forcing an absolute—and, I believe, impossible—closure to their narrative. They want a definitive ending, where, given their narrative conventions, such an ending is impossible: for, as we have seen, it has always to be witnessed to be definitively assured. By insisting on a literalist interpretation of what they understand to be a Godinspired text, they sidestep the problem, as they do in constituting an ending that is no ending, for they will “live on” eternally in another, distinctly different plane, glorifying God or roasting in the fires of Hell—in either case beyond history.46 Whether or not they will recall the world-ending, they do not say. Robbins’s argument is, nevertheless, ingenious, though I am not certain it holds for other peoples who manage to lead normal lives in the face of world-ending. During my stay in South Africa, the whites in the community in which I was working were also swept up by a Pentecostalism that focused on Christ’s Second Coming and the Apocalypse.47 Though people continued to lead normal lives, they were, as I have noted, much concerned with world-ending, which was, I should add, not without cause. They understood, however reluctantly, that the world as they knew it and the privileges it afforded them could not last. They spoke of the coming bloodbath and the risk to their lives and livelihood it would bring. For the most part, they came from what I called the middling middle classes: people who had neither the financial resources nor the international connections to be able to leave South Africa while maintaining their standard of living. Even when they could, they did not, for the most part, prepare themselves for change. Overwhelmed by the certainty of change, they did their best to deny it— and to obliterate any contradiction they may have seen between their denial and their certainty. They could find no solace in irony. The salvation the Pentecostals offered them gave them escape. It provided them with a transcending scenario that resonated at once with the reality in which they found themselves and the hope—the desire—that reality inspired. Though the preachers who came to the village several times a week spoke of the Apocalypse, they did not emphasize the destruction of the world—the bloodbath—or the fires of hell, the way a Cotton Mather or a Jonathan Edwards might have. Rather, they stressed the rapture, which would lift the born-again from the world of tribulation, which, as the preachers saw it,

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would precede Christ’s thousand-year rule. The symbolism is evident, though the Pentecostals with whom I spoke dismissed my insistent analogy, not without reason, I suppose, as a failure—the failure of the unsaved—to appreciate the providential nature of the Apocalypse. Though their eschatology might well resonate with their situation, it was God-given and quite independent of personal desire. One could make a case, as Robbins does, that the conception of worldly history as a parenthesis between eternity past and eternity future, as American Fundamentalists would put it, is analogous to the way many of the white South Africans saw what they thought of as—or hoped would be— a temporary crisis. They were living in what Frank Kermode, borrowing from Sir Philip Sidney, calls the “middest”: the span between birth and death—the beginning and the end.48 But to stress the otherworldliness of the whites’ apocalyptic concerns would not do justice to their essentially this-worldly, pragmatic orientation. They were, as I have said, interested in the rapture, which would offer them escape from a period of troubles. They found solace in the fact that it would only last seven literal years and would be followed by the near-paradise of Christ’s millennium, which they understood as a continuation of the world now perfected and in which they would have all the benefits of privilege without the worries with which they were inundated. A psychoanalyst would view their world-ending scenario as a simple projection or as a given affording them a structure, a screen, upon which to project their fears and desires. However they are taken, such scenarios are, no doubt, subject to prevailing narrative conventions. Whether or not they configure the narrative time of everyday life is an open question. I note simply that there are many ways in which narratives relate to one another, subsumption being only one.

 What chance do we have, when our beginnings and endings are so freakish? Birth and death—what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it’s freakish, let’s face it. B, in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance49

  Frank Kermode, Saint Augustine says that the terror of world-ending is a substitute for the terror of dying. Kermode himself A argues that the End, whether in life or story, is a figure for death (, ). It is certainly true that death lurks in all apocalyptic thought. But might we not

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reverse Augustine ’s formula and say that the terror of death is a substitute for the terror of world-ending? Is it less our own dissolution than that of the world—our intimate and perduring connection with it—that terrifies us? The most frightening of nightmares is to be absolutely alone—deprived of all context, human or material. In Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, the drunken doctor, Matthew Dante O’Connor, says, “But death is intimacy walking backward.” For me, at least, this is as striking an image as Walter Benjamin’s angel of history looking backward at the debris of history that “propels him into the future to which his back is turned.”50 As the angel of history, powerless to “awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed,” faces the inexorably destructive rush of progress, so a faceless intimacy, unconcerned with history and progress, identified with death, simply withdraws. Suffering from logorrhea and alcoholism, the good doctor, a fallen Catholic, can only surmise a wordy redemption. From what? With what emotion? Sadness, resignation, relief, or joy? When we speak of death, we tend so to naturalize it that we forget that however real our extinction, our death is always embedded in a cultural tradition that moulds it and governs its figurative and rhetorical possibility. To die in America today is not the same as dying in India today or New Caledonia a century ago or in Ancient Greece or Gilgamesh’s Uruk. Though we give “death” a fundamental role in the construction of life, meaning, and value, it is by no means clear that all other peoples do so. In many societies, death is mutely accepted. Among many Amerindian people of the Amazon, the dying are simply left behind as their families move through the forest (see, for example, Holmberg , ). Our usual explanation is a practical one. The burden of carrying and caring for the dying would be too great. On what evidence is this argument made? Do the people themselves make it? And even if they do, can we really believe them? Can we be satisfied with such an argument? Do we not want to invent something more: a respect for the dying, recognition that they want to be left alone, knowing the burden they would otherwise be or wishing their death to be unseen? We, and so must we believe they, cannot simply accept death without somehow formulating it. Is this the mark of our humanity? The French missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt wrote of suicide among the native peoples of New Caledonia (,  – ). He describes a woman who, on discovering her husband’s infidelity, hanged herself in her most splendid finery. As Leenhardt came to understand it, she killed herself in order to enter “an incorporeal life” where she would have the gift of ubiquity and, so freed of earthly limitations, would be able to torment her husband. She became “one of the Furies.” Suicide was for the

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Canaque a method of passing from the state of living to that of bao—of bodily release and invisibility. Death was, and perhaps still is, a perpetuation of being in another mode, that of invisibility, and not a passing into nothingness. It might even have provided them with a more effective way to perpetuate their social role, as it presumably did for the betrayed wife. These “visible” and “invisible” aspects of existence do not correspond, Leenhardt insists, to what we normally call life and death but to states of “incarnate” and “transcendent” life, which are not in opposition to each other but participate in the same reality. With mordant irony, Leenhardt likens the possibility that death offers the Canaque to the possibility proffered them by colonialism. In fact, colonization offers resources which render the tragic escape into death unnecessary. Entering the society of the white man is enough. For the Canaque, this passage participates in a mystery of the great beyond, the sea. The sea constitutes another world. To seek refuge there is to cut the moorings which connect him with tribal life. When things don’t work out for him the native flees to the European center and offers his services. There he escapes tribal law; on occasion, he may even instruct the white men’s chief in the secrets of the clan, proclaim—and satisfy—by bits of well-placed slander, his desire for vengeance, of which the white man, through his decisions or judgements, may be the unwitting executor. ()

He becomes a foreigner to his own people. Noting that colonization brings about the disintegration of society and a sense of discouragement, which, he claims, the Canaques had never before experienced, Leenhardt asks whether they would now discover a suicide inspired by grief. He goes on to describe the suicide of the chief of a native village, which a European had seized and evacuated for his own uses. The European had to bury the chief on his own land. The natives say that he is still there. Leenhardt asks whether he will wreak vengeance on the usurper. Yes, death or rather “death” can have great rhetorical force but, we must note, at the price of illusion.

 He who dies cannot tarry. The deceased, it is said, is no longer of this world; he has left it behind. But behind there is, precisely, this cadaver, which is not of the world either, even though it is here. Rather it is behind the world. It is that which the living person (and not the deceased) left behind him and which now affirms, from here, the possibility of a world behind the world, of a regression,

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   an indefinite subsistence, undetermined and indifferent, about which we only know that human reality, upon finishing, reconstitutes its presence and its proximity. This is an impression which could be said to be common. He who just died is at first extremely close to the condition of a thing—a familiar thing, which we approach and handle, which does not hold us at a distance and whose manageable passivity betrays only sad impotence. M B, The Space of Literature51

   humanity, like our sense of body and soul, varies from culture to culture. For the Hindus, body and soul are apparently not as radically independent of each other as they are in Western thought.52 In Christianity, the anthropologist Ralph Nicholas observes, it is only a soul set free from the body that can experience the afterlife. By contrast, in Hinduism, “even the utterly subtle (sûksma) vehicle of the self (âtma) that escapes from the dead body is itself a body (sarîra) bearing the distinguishing feature (linga) that marks its individual personality.”53 In their distinctive ways, both body and soul mirror, in a sort participatory or engaged (and not merely mimetic) way, the cosmos.54 Brenda Beck refers to the relationship as a “secret sympathy.”55 She notes that in Hindu ritual the individual joins with and even becomes identical with the cosmos itself. Both body and cosmos are subject to the same laws and composed of the same five elements (ether, air, fire, water, and earth).56 What exists in the one must exist in the other. All the gods and the whole of space are present in the human body.57 Death (dehânt, “the end of the body”) comes, therefore, to figure the end of the world as the end of the world figures death. It is understood as a transcendence of worldly existence to a more fundamental or higher level of existence—that of Being, which has received different formulations at different times in Hindu thought (Brahman, Atma, Purusha, the One, the All, the Absolute [Zaehner , ]). It is identified with the soul, and the soul with it. For the Hindus, the reality of the world is, as the individual perceives it, an illusion or veil (mâyâ), which is embedded in time and tends toward the chaotic. It is like a dream that is discovered to be a dream only when one awakes. Death is, in this respect, a form, an awakening in which one discovers the illusory nature of worldly existence as one experiences ultimate reality. As Meena Kaushik puts it: “death invites one to conceptualize ‘non-being’ and ‘non-meaning’—a terrible contrary to the world of being and meaning since it draws attention to the very contingent character of the world of meaning within which human existence is located” (, ). It reminds the survivors, Kaushik argues, of the illusory nature of the world we know. This insistent, terrifying contingency is, however, restricted to

O

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the transient world of everyday experience. What death reveals is an eternal or absolute reality, which we are destined to understand dimly, in terms, say, of nonbeing; for our language is itself of the phenomenal world. Rituals, like those concerning the dead, are worldly attempts to give order and locate the individual within a reality that is itself a transient irreality. Not only is the individual identified with the cosmos, the body modeling it and modeled by it, the soul participating in its Absolute manifestation, but the individual (and therefore soul and body) are caught within karmic existence: the inexorable chain of determinations that extend from a beginning that, in some accounts, has no beginning, to an end that has no ending. The only release from karma and the cycle of rebirths comes, if it ever comes, from total detachment from its “fruits.”58 The soul is thought to be immortal, not in the sense of a prolongation of human life, but insofar as the soul’s true being is thought to be outside time and space, that is, outside phenomenal life, participating in the Absolute. Immortality seems then to mean, as the Indologist Robert Charles Zaehner puts it, “an unconditioned and absolutely static condition which knows nothing of time and space and upon which death has no hold” (, ). It is life-in-death. It has the immobility of death but the consciousness, pure Being, and bliss of life. It is analogous, but only analogous, to deep, dreamless sleep. Given the complexity and at times seemingly contradictory nature of Hindu thought, death itself is conceived of not only in abstract mystical terms but quite concretely as a dissolution of life.59 The soul becomes a ghost ( preta) and, through a complex sequence of rituals, is converted into an ancestor ( pitr). The ancestor can then make the arduous journey across the Vaitarnî river, which flows with blood, excrement, and other foul substances, to yamlok—the land of the dead. There, according to its merits, the ancestor awaits its next incarnation in hellish torment or heavenly and often sensuous bliss.60 The Hindus distinguish between good and bad deaths. A good death is one in which the individual voluntarily submits to fate. Ideally, he forgoes all food and consumes only the water of the Ganges, into some of which the image of a god as been dissolved, in order to weaken his body so that his “vital breath” ( prâna) will leave more easily. Before dying, he gathers his sons about him and then, through willed concentration, gives up his life, or, as it is said, “relinquishes his body.”61 The best death occurs in Benares or, if that is not possible, at another place of pilgrimage. It should occur, in any event, in the open air in a purified place while the names of the gods are chanted; for one ’s dying thoughts help determine one ’s future life. A bad death—through violence or by accident—is one in which

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the deceased has not had the opportunity to prepare himself. Unless the appropriate propitiatory rites are performed, his ghost will afflict those who survive him. A full life is said to end at  years. That few attain this age is seen as a consequence of sinning in this and in former lives. Unless one achieves liberation (moksha) from worldly existence through various mystical practices, the soul is caught in a never-ending chain of transmigrations.62 In this sense, eternal life becomes, as Zaehner interprets the Upanishads, “a crushing burden in its endless, pointless, senseless repetitiveness” (, ff ). As the notions of karma and transmigration (samsâra) were elaborated, “the revulsion against never-ending life through never-ending death in a manifestly imperfect world became more and more extreme,” Zaehner continues. For the Hindus, the world was not created once and for all nor will it ever end. It has simply been re-creating itself and dissolving back into an “unformed and ‘unmanifest’ condition.” This is not the place to discuss in any detail the Hindu notion of cyclical time. Octavio Paz puts it this way: “the vision of cyclical time encompasses historical becoming as a secondary strophe of a circular poem which is the cosmos.”63 Suffice it to say that it is a highly moralized one, in which each cosmic era is associated with the moral condition of the universe and, in complex ways, with levels of possible deliverance.64 The periods of creation and dissolution are called the days and nights of Brahmâ, each of which is equivalent to one thousand years of the gods. As each year of the gods is equivalent to twelve thousand “human” years, then each day and night of Brahma lasts twelve million years. Each year of the gods is divided into four periods, or yugas, the last of which, the shortest, the age of Kali, the most corrupt, is the one in which we are living.65 Like human beings, the gods are subject to karma. They too are destined to repeat the cycles of eternity. During the nights of Brahmâ, God (who in later Hinduism became a dominant figure) lies inactive in a dreamless sleep. He has reabsorbed the world. As the day of Brahmâ dawns, he wakes up and begins the re-creation of the world.66 No man has seen the dissolution and regeneration of the world except the great seer Mârkandeya, who, born again in another age, was able to tell of it.67 He is, in my terms, the impossible witness of that which, though possibly observed, can never be reported and is, nevertheless, reported.68 As the age of Kali advances, evil proliferates and dharma—the law, the form of things and the power that preserves that form, those forms—approaches extinction. The world gives way to vice and luxury; the rules of caste are no longer respected; Brahmins no longer perform their sacrifices; women lose

-

all modesty and conjoin with men of lower caste or even out of caste; life becomes brutish and short. “People are short-lived, enfeebled, of little vigor and valor, weak-bodied, short on substance, and rarely speaking the truth” (Mahâbhârata , ). “Cows will yield little milk and trees teeming with crows will yield few flowers and fruits” (). Seven scorching suns appear and drink up the water of the earth, turning plants into ashes, rendering the world desolate. Thousands upon thousands die. An enormous conflagration breaks out, consuming the denizens of hell and the heavenly regions, including the gods. The universe crumbles as huge clouds form in the sky and storm. Rain falls for twelve long years until the great fire is extinguished. Oceans overflow, mountains fall, and the earth sinks into the boundless deep. Mârkandeya wanders alone and stricken in that great sea bereft of all life. “Long did I flounder in the waters of the One Ocean—tirelessly though tired, finding no refuge anywhere. And then somewhere in the massy expanse of water did I descry a mighty fig-tree, broad and huge; and on its bough I beheld a cradle laid, bespread with coverlets celestial, and lying therein I saw a little child whose face was like a drop of water on the petal of a lotus and whose eyes were wide-expanded as the full-blown lotusflower.”69 Mârkandeya is struck with wonderment at how the child could have lain there through such a mighty maelstrom. “Then did the radiant child whose eyes were like unto two lotuses speak these words to me, delightful to the ear. ‘I know thee, Mârkandeya, and thy weariness and how thou fain wouldst rest. Pray sit thee down here for as long as thou wilt. Enter into my body and sit thee there, for there there is a dwelling prepared for thee; this favour have I granted thee.’” Exhausted and helpless, Mârkandeya succumbs to Fate and enters the child’s—the Lord’s—belly, and there he espies the entire universe, devoid of all evil, alive with trees, flowers, and animals, all people living according to the rules of caste. And he sees the gradual decline of that world as appropriate sacrifices are no longer made and dharma is ignored—and the fall of the universe and its regeneration yet again. In Hindu thought—I continue to generalize, no doubt promiscuously—birth and death and by extension the (re-)creation and dissolution of the cosmos, are associated with each other. Bodies are, for example, taken head first to the cremation grounds, it is said, because that is the way a baby is born.70 Kashi, the Hindu name for Benares, on the sacred Ganges river, is popularly said to be the site where Shiva and his beautiful consort Parvati created the universe at the beginning of time and where the corpse

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of the universe will burn at the end of time ( pralaya).71 Only Kashi will survive. It is there that thousands come each year to die, for it is believed that by the grace of Shiva—for many, the paramount lord—those who die there will automatically attain liberation (moksha or mukti) from samsaric existence.72 The anthropologist Jonathan Parry, who studied the burning ghats of Kashi, argues that cosmic beginnings and endings, especially those concerned with the special place of Kashi in popular Hindu thought, belong to an “eternal present” and are perpetually reactualized in cremation and funeral rites.73 Noting the homology between body and cosmos, Parry equates cremation, which destroys the microcosm of the physical body, with the great conflagration that consumes the macrocosm at the end of the universe.74 As the end marks a new beginning, so cremation marks not just destruction but also creation. Cremation is understood as a sacrifice, and sacrifice among the Hindus is taken to be a cosmogonic act (see also Das , ). Parry cites as a prototypic sacrificial event the act by which Prajâpati, the Lord of Generation, created the universe by dismembering himself or by exhausting his generative heat, or tapas.75 Like Prajâpati, so the argument goes, the sacrificer replays the cosmic drama of disintegration and reintegration. Burning at the pyre, the deceased, symbolically equivalent to the sacrificer, revitalizes the heat by which the Lord of Regeneration created the universe. As the funeral pyres burn without cessation, continually re-creating the universe, Kashi falls out of the cyclical time of creation and destruction, for it is always at the beginning of time.76 Is it not possible to view cremation and the mortuary and funeral rites attached to it here, perhaps like all rituals of death, as an attempt, futile at one level, efficacious at another, to convert death into “death”? Death— now “death”—comes to have such vast metaphorical possibilities that it can figure the end of the world. I write “figure the end of the world” in full recognition of its ambiguity. It may be read in several ways: as a figure of world-ending, as we tend to do in our mimesis-dominated understanding of figuration and representation, or as a figure in world-ending, as I take it to be in Hinduism, where death is somehow engaged in world-ending and regeneration. Cremation and the rites associated with it and in its own way the theory behind it, can be read, I believe, as actualizing allegories of world creation. One might rather say, in no particular literary sense, fictionalization. Behind this creative process, as Parry among others has noted, is sacrifice: the corpse is a sacrificer, as is the chief mourner, as is Prajâpati the world creator, as is—I speculate—any cultural artificer.

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We could invoke here the role Freud gives to castration in the constitution of cultural possibility, but, lest we rest contented with such a formulation, however compelling we might find it, I want to hold it in suspension and pursue the ontological implications of the Hindu outlook itself. Hinduism takes the phenomenal world, or, as we might say, the be-worded world, as an illusion, as maya, and postulates another world, fully resistant to verbal description, as ultimate, absolute reality, to which the living have but partial access, insofar as bodies and souls participate in it, and to which the dead have enfolding access. There is here a paradox. Though the word—language—cannot describe ultimate reality, it precipitates that reality. Can we argue, then, that the noumenal depends upon the phenomenal—on the illusory? Is it too an illusion? The mystic might relish this paradox. The everyday Hindu might cling stubbornly to the fact that all is as it is said to be: the phenomenal depends upon the noumenal insofar as it participates in that reality. We, as outsiders, have to recognize the limits of our epistemologically endowed understanding. For us, for me, and no doubt for the Hindus, the corpse remains, as Maurice Blanchot would have it, a thing that is prone to be—or, perhaps more accurately, is proned to be—more than a thing. It comes, as Blanchot insists, to resemble itself: an “unsustainable image”— “a figure of the unique before whatever.”77 We do not resemble ourselves in life, Blanchot tells us, but only in death as a corpse transformed and yet—I would stress—always a corpse, a thing, resistant to categorization. In a way that is not perhaps so far from Blanchot’s, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote toward the end of his Tractatus: “If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language” (, sec. ., pp.  – ).

 As in death, too, the world does not change, but ceases. Death is not an event of life [Ereignis des Lebens]. Death is not lived through [erlebt]. L W, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus78

  cannot experience death so, I would argue, we cannot experience the end of the world. Just as death is not an event in life, so A the end of the world is not an event in the world. It would follow—in the spirit of Wittgenstein—that of death and world-ending we must be silent. Yes, it would follow, but, in fact, we do speak, effusively, at times obses-

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  

sively, certainly with conviction, noisily, of that which we cannot speak. This—the mystical, Wittgenstein would call it—is a social fact. We must reckon with it. Is the silence of which Wittgenstein speaks an impossible silence, for it is so ensconced in the stream of meaning we call the world, our world, that it has meaning despite itself, despite ourselves? Is it that we must speak and act, even when silence and inactivity seem in order, to perpetuate the world, to create and re-create it again and again, the way the Aborigines do in their rituals and the Hindus in their mortuary sacrifices? Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imaginary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?



 . Gérando , , my translation. . In his preface to the American edition of Myth and Cult among Primitive Peoples (), one of his only works translated into English, Adolf Jensen noted that “there has been little contact or collaboration between the anthropologists of the United States and Germany.” He attributed the lack of “sympathetic understanding” in America of German anthropology to its philosophical orientation and its connection to the Kulturkreislehre, in particular to the writings of Father W. P. Schmidt. Though both American and German anthropology have changed dramatically since then, the lack of vital contact between German and American anthropologists is still true, though Germans now read American anthropologists. The reasons for the lack of contact are, in fact, far more complicated than Jensen assumed. They range from the history of German anthropology in the twentieth century, its intimate relationship with National Socialism, which today’s German anthropologists have been exploring with very considerable courage and objectivity, to the parochialism of American anthropology, which, despite its commitment to the study of the other, seems to ignore other anthropological traditions (Hauschild ). (The French and British are partial exceptions.) It is, I believe, the particular historical orientation of German anthropological thought, rather more than its philosophical orientation, which the Americans find alien. If one compares Jensen’s cultural history with the cultural evolution popular in American anthropology when he was writing, one immediately sees the difference. American cultural evolution was mechanical—a model—rather than a depiction of culturalhistorical reality, in which—how should I put it?—the meaning of life and reality is in question. Moreover, Germans try to situate their work, at times critically, within the history of their discipline. They are not as caught in the allure of the new as are their American colleagues, who tend to use the work of earlier anthropologists rhetorically, as anchorage for their theoretical elaborations. Until recently, when they fell under the sway of American anthropology, Germans were far more dedicated to particularistic ethnographic description (with scant appreciation, I should add, of the epiphanous powers of the fertile fact or artifact). Despite their alleged philosophical concerns, they tended to ignore theoretical works outside their discipline. One finds little mention of Heidegger, the phenomenologists, Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas, and the Frankfurt school, and, with the exception of the ethnopsychoanalysts, inspired by Paul Parin and his school in Zurich, Freud (see, for example, Parin, Morgenthaler, and Parin-Matthèy , ; Parin ; Erdheim ; Nadig ; Reichmayer ). During the political turbulence of the s and s, frequent reference was made to Marx, particularly in self-critical works, but

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            ‒  today, popular Marxism has lost favor. Like their American colleagues, Germans are now engaged in sterile debates between interpretivists, many of whom are concerned with theatrical models for the study of ritual and other social practices, and empiricists, who work in cognitive science. Finally and sadly, I should note that the ignorance of German anthropology in the United States results from the fact that there are few American anthropologists who read German. . See Jensen , including his bibliography; also see Kroeber , , , and ; contrast Sapir . . See, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff  as well as innumerable—I am tempted to write “promiscuous”—references to Anderson’s () Imagined Communities. Gaonkar and Lee ’s () guest-edited issue of Public Culture, entitled New Imaginaries, is an exception. . For the notion of closure, see Castoriades a, b. Castoriades fails to see that the openness that he declares began at the end of the Middle Ages is itself a form of closure. . See MacIntyre ,  – , for a discussion of managerial expertise and the effect of the play between its neutral stance and its manipulative power. See also Mitchell  for a critical study of expertise and techno-politics in the modernization of Egypt. . For further discussion of the essay, see Crapanzano a, – . . C. Taylor , . Taylor acknowledges the influence of Anderson . See Poovey ,  – , for a critical summation of Taylor’s notion of the social imaginary. See Silverstein  for a critical discussion of Anderson’s Imagined Communities. . The following abbreviated account is taken from C. Taylor ,  –; ff. . See my discussion of Kenelm Burridge’s notion of the myth-dream in chap. . . See Crapanzano a, esp. the introduction and chap. , for a discussion of referentially expressed metapragmatic glosses of indexical dramas. . I should note that even though my governing trope, the arrière-pays, is spatial, it is, as I discuss in chap. , always in tension with the temporal, both for myself and Bonnefoy. . I have been fascinated by the montage and the disquiet it seems to produce in some anthropologists ever since I was criticized by one of “our” most quoted anthropologists (who is himself given to a rhetoric of quotation, almost always by American or British authors) for having drawn a parallel in a footnote between Tuhami and the French poet Gérard de Nerval. This—how shall I put it?—fear of disciplinary contamination and the xenophobic territorialism that lies behind it was carried even further by an American reviewer of Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire who found fault with my having used French, German, and “even” Latin expressions. Fortunately, but embarrassingly for him, that reviewer wrote for a German anthropological review—that is, for a review in a country which is not dedicated to America’s insistent monolingualism. I mention these two reviewers not only to thank them for inspiring my present work, in which I cite from several different literatures and make use of expressions from several different languages, but to call attention to the possibility that some anthropologists have taken up the discipline out of fear of cultural difference. For them anthropology in its most reductive mode would appear to be a way of conquering cultural difference. It is a pity that most of them justify on “scientific grounds” their psychologically potent reductionism. . Mannhardt , ; Frazer ; Jung ; Lévi-Strauss , inter alia. See Von Hendy , – ,  – , for discussions of Frazer and Lévi-Strauss, respectively. I should note, as Von Hendy does (), a disjunction in Frazer’s work. He asserts at once continuity and discontinuity between the savage and the civilized. . Mannhardt , . See also his extensive discussion of methodology, in which he offers a critique of previous studies of mythology and relates these studies somewhat ambivalently to German nationalism (Mannhardt , v–xl). His comparative method is designed to uncover, if

             ‒   not universal, then common mythic and ritual themes which will enrich the understanding of the German mythological tradition. He seems in his discussion to be more conscious of context than he is in practice, though see Müllenhoff , x–xi. . See Taussig (, , ff ) for a discussion of the montage. Though Taussig makes use of the montage in his own depiction of the Putumayo region, he focuses on the montage in yagé and other ceremonies. He offers, thereby, a needed corrective to Victor Turner’s () stress on the sense of communitas produced by ritual. Taussig stresses the violence of the montage—its “cracks, displacements, and swerves”—but he does not fully appreciate the way in which the violent disjunction of the montage can lead to what might well be called redemptive resolution or, perhaps more accurately, an illusion of redemptive resolution. He does recognize, however, the “ordered disorder” and the “continuous discontinuity”—the healing—shamanistic rituals produce. I suggest, but cannot elaborate here, that the reconciliation of the images of the montage, the containment of their violent juxtapositions, proceeds through something like metaphorization. The juxtaposition of images is assumed to be meaningful. The images are taken to be members of a single class. They are, so to speak, domesticated. Their classification, their meaning, is redemptive. Of course, it is possible, as Taussig implies for the yagé ceremonies, that there is no possibility of unifying—metaphorical—meaning, no conjunctive classification. Ultimately, no redemptive possibility. See Crapanzano  for an elaboration of this argument, with particular regard to interpretive anxiety and contextualization. I discuss the pragmatic and metapragmatic dimensions of the interpretation of metaphor—the translation of metonym into metaphor.   . Translated by Washington Matthews and quoted in the writer Scott Momaday’s () foreword to Trudy Griffin-Pierce ’s book on Navajo sandpaintings. . Derrida ,  –. See Grosz  for a discussion of violence in Derrida’s thought. . See Hirsch , , for a somewhat similar, though more physically grounded, notion of “background potentiality” as opposed to “foreground actuality.” Speaking of landscapes, Hirsch associates the former with space, outside, and representation, and the latter with place, inside, and image. Backgrounds, as Hirsch understands them, are “imagined as standing apart, as relatively separate, and detached though never completely disconnected” from foreground. They are ephemeral and embody ideals or potentials: “the way we could be.” Hirsch notes that the “purest form of potentiality is emptiness itself,” but, instead of appreciating the ontological implications of this observation, he takes a more mundane, literal stance: he notes that “sacred sites and places are sometimes physically empty or largely uninhabited and situated at some distance from the populations for which they have significance.” It is precisely the ontological dimension of absence and emptiness that I want to stress in this work. . Marc Augé’s La Guerre des Rêves () is perhaps an exception. Though frequent reference is made to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (), little attention has been given to the nature of the imagination operative in imaging community. . Zweig () insists upon the return of the adventurer for the adventure to become an adventure. Then the adventurer sees his experiences as an adventure. . “L’aire de l’arrière-pays, c’est l’orgeuil, mais aussi l’insatisfaction, l’espoir, la crédulité, le départ, la fièvre toujours prochaine” (Bonnefoy , ). See Naughton ,  – , for a discussion of the relationship between the arrière-pays and the here and now, the earth. . “Est-il vrai que l’on ne désire l’ailleurs que là où l’ici s’affirme” (Bonnefoy , ).





             ‒   . “Là, à deux pas sur la voie que je n’ai pas prise et dont déjà je m’éloigne, oui, c’est là que s’ouvrait un pays d’essence plus haute, où j’aurais pu aller vivre et que désormais j’ai perdu” (Bonnefoy , ). . “Car plus je suis convaincu qu’elle est une phrase ou plutôt une musique—à la fois signe et substance—et plus cruellement je ressens qu’une clef manque, parmi celles qui permettraient de l’entendre. Nous sommes désunis, dans cette unité, et ce que pressent l’intuition, l’action ne peut s’y porter ou s’y résoudre” (Bonnefoy ,  –). . “En d’autres mots, la cime a une ombre, où elle est cachée, mais cette ombre ne couvre pas toute l’étendue de la terre” (Bonnefoy , ). . Stevens , –. . Engell ,  and passim; see also Kearney , esp. his chapter on Kant. . Sarraute ; ,  – . Despite her being associated with the phenomenologically oriented, objectivist school of the “nouvel roman,” Sarraute ’s position is not without its romanticism. She finds in the tropism the “secret source of our existence.” . Quoted in Casey ,  n. , from Husserl’s Ideas, sec. . . Nerval , , my translation. . See Crapanzano a for a discussion of dream etiquette. . In technical terms I have used elsewhere, the function of the Third (the guarantor of communicative and linguistic convention) is faulted. See Crapanzano a, and esp. . . I have come to prefer dream account to dream text, for an account calls attention to its performance as well as its textuality (Crapanzano a). . Lacan , ff; , ff. See also Benveniste , ff; Crapanzano . See Strathern  for the power of image in Melanesia. . I stress this point in Serving the Word (Crapanzano b). . See Feld  for a study of the culture of sound among the Kaluli people of New Guinea. Although Feld does not explore the role of sound in the Kaluli’s articulation of space, he does call attention to the complex metaphorization of sound with birds who are themselves reflections of the dead. Space becomes in such societies rather more symbolically complicated than our purified geometric space. . The reader will recognize my debt to Bryson . . Wordsworth , . I am quoting lines –  and –  of book  of the  edition of The Prelude. . Lamartine , . The poem was written in  and published in  in Méditations poétiques. . Quoted in Taussig , , from the “Introdución” to Indios amazónicos, Francisco de Iqualada, Colección Misiones Capuchinas, vol.  (Barcelona: Imprenta Myria, ). . Gow () contrasts this lived relationship to the environment with a land title and map that the Piro have in their possession. The map is abstract, distanced, viewed from apart, and of portentous effect, given the struggle the Piro, like other indigenous people, may one day have to keep their lands. . Taussig ,  – , quoting here and below from Roger Casement’s report on the “Treatment of British Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in the Putumayo District” to the House of Commons in  and . . Lispector ,  – . . Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am constructing a worldview or cultural portrait of a people that is inevitably distorted, insofar as it is removed from the exchanges upon which it was based. It is an idealized form, somewhat romantic, fed perhaps by nostalgia, and quite removed

             ‒   from the everyday life of today’s Navajos but with affective resonance in that life. We have, in any case, no right to deprive the people we describe of the possibility of idealizing their traditions. We have, of course, to recognize the limits of our idealizations—of our appropriations— but they have also to be seen, if we are sincere in our intention, as a gift with which the people we describe have to reckon as we with their gifts. See Crapanzano a for a picture of everyday life on the Navajo reservation some thirty years ago. . Basso , . See chap.  for a discussion of Apache landscape. . I am referring to the English deictics to make my point. A careful study of deixis in Navajo is required to substantiate my claims. Compare the Australian Walbiri men’s stories, which, unlike the stories women tell, are rooted in the landscape—a landscape that is dynamically connected with the movement of ancestors in the “dream-time” (Munn ,  – ). In these stories, place-names play an important role, as they do for the Navajo, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, for the Apache, but, from what I can tell from Munn’s descriptions and transcriptions, deixis often seems to be enacted among the Walbiri. As the men talk, they make conventional signs in the sand. One would hesitate to call these maps, for as their narratives progress, the narrators rub out signs to make room for others, much, I suppose, as a teacher rubs out a sketch on a blackboard to replace it with another. . I use “chronotope” in Bakhtin’s sense: “as the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationship that are artistically expressed in literature” (, ). I note, however, that the notions of space and time, their universality, have to be questioned, written under erasure. They might not be operative categories in certain languages. Toelken (, ) notes that there is no word for time as we know it in Navajo. . Toelken , , quoted in Griffin-Pierce , . . Hózhó is a key concept in Navajo thought. It is usually translated as “beauty,” but it suggests goodness, perfection, pleasantness, and health. . Pinxten (, ) found it difficult to elicit a part/whole distinction from his Navajo informants. . Witherspoon and Peterson , , ; Witherspoon . . Reichard ; Hoijer ; Witherspoon . . See Zanini  for a discussion of the history the concept of borders.   . Basso , ; formatting changed and Western Apache original deleted. . Unless otherwise indicated, my discussion of Western Apache place-names is taken from “Speaking with Names,” chap.  of Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places (). I give page references only to direct quotations. . Basso , . Basso cites a personal communication from Harry Hoijer: “Even the most minute occurrences are described by Navajos in close conjunction with their physical settings, suggesting that unless narrated events are spatially anchored, their significance is somehow reduced and cannot be properly assessed.” In his discussion of Canaque narratives, Maurice Leenhardt (, ) notes that the New Caledonian will refuse to continue his narrative if he has forgotten the place-names in his story. . Basso (, ) notes that when place-names are used in speaking-with-names, they are not abbreviated, as they ordinarily are in common everyday usage. An emphatic deictic suffix meaning “right here” or “at this very place” is frequently added. . Basso (, ) notes that the stories associated with named places are generally about





             ‒   the disturbances in everyday life brought about by someone ’s disrespectful behavior. They end with that person’s anguish and regret. . Hardy , . Compare Williams’s () distinction between the insider who lives the landscape and the outsider who objectifies it. . Pandolfo ,  –; Benjamin . See also Buci-Glucksmann  for a discussion of the baroque and the fabric of Moroccan social and cultural life. . Kluckhohn (, ) observed that hitchhikers talked about witchcraft with an ease that those who were closer to him did not. . Csordas , . . Csordas , . The reference to the Protestant televangelist Jimmy Swaggart should be of no surprise because, especially in the Midwest, the Catholic charismatics are quite ecumenical (Csordas , vii). The patient in the case in point had been active in the Episcopalian charismatic movement before joining the Catholic one. . Lévi-Strauss ; see also Severi , particularly the introduction. . See Crapanzano , , for a discussion of symbolic-interpretive images. . I should note that the patient refers to the resemblance between her husband and her father at the beginning of the session I have excerpted. . Crane , . . I refer to Chopin’s novel, rather than a War and Peace or a Brideshead Revisited, because in that novel what we find most important—inner understanding and motivation—remains largely unexpressed. It is, as is revealed by its ending, very much a novel of silence and the unsaid. It is this silence that holds us. In Contre Saint-Beuve, Proust stresses the importance of the blanks in Flaubert (cited in Leys ,  n. ; see also n. ). . Ebersole , ; quoted in Pilgrim , , . . We can carry this argument still further. Freud’s various attempts to describe the psyche—in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness; consciousness, the preconscious, and the unconscious; the ego and the id; and the ego, the id, and the superego—can all be seen as a struggle to reconcile active and passive models of the self. No doubt Marxists, particularly of the Frankfurt School, would want to relate this struggle to capitalist formations which at once demand individual conformity and initiative. . Silence, secrecy, and dissimulation are, for example, to be cultivated by the hero—the ruler—in the baroque age. See Gracian . . Quoted in Leys , . . I have relied heavily in this section on Chinese aesthetics on Leys , – . . Lévy-Bruhl ; Cazeneuve ; and Przyluski  (for a rather uncritical elaboration of the notion of participation). See Hallpike  for a Piagetian approach to “primitive thought.” . Lessing ; see particularly the opening discussion on the Laokoon itself. . Carson , . . Chittick ; Corbin . See Schimmel ,  –, for a brief introduction to Ibn al-gArabi’s thought. I am indebted to Stefania Pandolfo for first calling my attention to the importance of barzakh in Moroccan thought. . Heidegger , . . V. Turner, esp. , but also  and . . See Crapanzano a,  – , for a discussion of inter- and extraritual disjunction. See also Taussig , ff. . See chap.  for a discussion of the relationship between birth and death symbolism.

             ‒   . Contrast with Bataille ’s usage, discussed in chap. . . See chap.  for a discussion of Pierre Nora’s Les lieux de mémoire.   . Crapanzano , . . Ignatieff , . . Lacan , , my translation: “est un drame dont la poussée interne se précipite de l’insuffisance à l’anticipation—et qui pour le sujet, pris au leurre de l’identification spatiale, machine les fantasmes qui se succèdent d’une image morcelée du corps à une forme que nous appellerons orthopédique de sa totalité—et à l’armure enfin assumée d’une identitè aliénante, qui va marquer de sa structure rigide tout son développement mental.” . Genet , – . For Tibetan Buddhist meditations, see Sierksma , . . Freud , . See Leys , –, for a discussion of defenses against external stimuli in Freud’s theorizing, particularly in the s. . I am suggesting in another—related—Freudian idiom that all perception is, as it were, nachträglich. (Nachträglichkeit is usually translated as “deferred action.”) There is always a gap—a deferment—between the moment of sensation (Freud would say, excitation) and the moment of perception (awareness, articulation, representation). Perception is always at a step removed. It is already remembered—distanced, removed—a shadow of the “reality” it purports to perceive. See Lyotard ,  –; Leys ,  –,  –; and Caruth , , for discussions of Nachträglichkeit. Neither Lyotard nor Freud acknowledge, to my knowledge, the after-the-factness of perception. . Caruth makes a similar (though less “functional”) argument about trauma (and not all perception) when she writes that trauma is an event that “is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (, ). Elsewhere, she writes that trauma is experienced through its initial forgetting (). I want to call attention to the role of memory in perception—as a defense against the pain of perception, its intensity, its traumatic potential. I hesitate to use “trauma” because of its negative connotations. The extreme pleasure, or jouissance, of perception can have a similar effect. See Leys ,  – , for a critique of Caruth’s theory of trauma. . Butler , ix. . See, for anthropology, Lock . . I am ignoring those scientific approaches to the body that take it simply as an object of study. . See my discussion below of Butler  and . . See Solà-Morales  for a discussion of Vitruvius’s notion of the body and order. The bodily figuration of social geography may be covert rather than overt. Think, for example, of the split between the north and the south in Europe. The north is associated and associates itself stereotypically with intellectual functions, moral discipline, and a strict sexual regimen, while the associations with the south are to emotion and passion, moral looseness, and sexual license. Think of the prudent Gustav Aschenbach’s response to the south in Thomas Mann’s () Death in Venice. Aschenbach’s vision in the cemetery of a lush tropical swampland that makes his heart knock “with fear and with puzzling desires” is the emotional ground for the Italy he will visit. Does a body lie behind these associations: the head and upper body to the north and the lower body to the south?





             ‒   . For an even more extensive discussion of the body as a template for both the organic and inorganic, the animate and inanimate world, see Calame-Griaule , –  and passim. . Calame-Griaule , , my translation. . Silverstein ; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity . Whether or not this split is a universal assumption of all linguistic ideologies has yet to be determined. As an artifact of the conceptual tools with which we understand language ideologically, an “empirical” determination would in a sense beg the question. I use “signifier” and “signified,” “word” and “thing,” “intensional” and “extensional,” “symbol” and “symbolized” loosely as figures for this split—to emphasize how widespread it is in our thinking. . Butler defines the abject as “those ‘unlivable ’ and ‘uninhabitable ’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable ’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which—and by virtue of which—the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside ’ the subject as its own founding repudiation” (, ). Compare Kristeva . . Lacan , , my translation. Lacan is not, of course, explicitly concerned here with the effects of power. . Serpa Soares is one of the dancers in Sasha Waltz’s dance Die Körper, which was first performed in Berlin at the Schaubühne am Lehninerplatz on January , . Serpa Soares recited the quoted words in the performance. . As with the emotions (Crapanzano a,  – ; ), the performativity of the linguistic expression of the body depends on the blurring of experience, expression, and description. I cannot enter into detail here. It would require the analysis of specific utterances in which “body” figured. It would be necessary to distinguish between those “ritual” performatives (of the sort that Austin first distinguished) whose effects, once the performative is performed, are indelible (unless some equally ritualized remedial performative, like divorce or excommunication, is performed) and those more ordinary performatives (of the sort Butler seems to be referring to when she speaks of citation and reiteration) whose effect is never so indelible. The two may be distinguished by their (formal) institutional support—their ritualization. We must recognize that there is often an implicit reference in the ordinary performatives to some original event which gives authority to the reiterative process. . See Niederland , ff for a bibliography and discussion of Daniel G. M. Schreber’s educational theories. . Calame-Griaule , ; see Griaule ,  – , for more details. . Valéry , . I offer this rough translation: But me—Narcissus loved—I am only curious about my own essence: For me everything else has only a mysterious heart, Everything else is only absence Oh my dear sovereign body—I have only you!

. Klein , among many of her articles; see also Klein . . Bellmer ,  – , my translation. “Il est certain qu’on ne se demandait pas assez sérieusement jusqu’à present, dans quelle mesure l’image de la femme désirée serait prédéter-

             ‒   minée par l’image de l’homme qui desire, donc en dernier lieu par une série de projections du phallus, qui iraient progressivement du détail de la femme vers son ensemble de façon que le doigt de la femme, la main, le bras, la jambe soient le sexe de l’homme,—que le sexe de l’homme soit la jambe gantée du bas collant, d’où sort gonflée la cuisse—qu’il soit le couple des fesses ovoïdes qui donnent l’élan à l’épine dorsale, légèrement recourbée—qu’il soit le sein double attaché au cou tendu ou librement suspendu au tronc—qu’il soit enfin la femme entière, assise, le dos creux, avec ou sans chapeau ou debout.” . Lacan , ; Bowie , . . Lacan , . . Wittgenstein ,  (pt. , par. ): “Wie kann ich denn mit der Sprache noch zwischen die Schmertzäusserung und den Schmertz treten wollen?” See also Wittgenstein , –  (par.  – ). . Crapanzano a,  – ; ; see chap.  below. . Herder b, ; a, . All references in this section are from the first section of his essay (b, –; a,  –). . “Es ist, als ob einen Teil seines Schmerzes verseufzte und aus dem leeren Luftraum wenigstens neue Kräfte zum Verschmerzen in sich zöge, indem es tauben Winde zum Achzen füllet” (Herder a, ). Adam Smith (), whose approach to pain is closer to Scarry’s than Herder’s, argues that it is not the pain that gives rise to our sympathy in Philoctetes but some other circumstance: “It is not the sore foot, but the solitude, of Philoctetes which affects us, and diffuses over that charming tragedy, that romantic wildness, which is so agreeable to the imagination” (). . Scarry , ; Herder b, ; a, . Like Scarry, Adam Smith argues that pain “never calls forth any lively sympathy unless it is accompanied by danger” (, ). We can, however, sympathize with fear, Smith argues, because it is a passion derived from the imagination. Like Scarry he notes that we are apt to have more sympathy for pain that comes from an external source than an internal one (like gout). He suggests that the lack of sympathy we have for bodily pain is “the foundation of the propriety of constancy and patience in enduring it.” At times, Smith seems to differentiate implicitly between our reaction to pain and to suffering—suffering producing sympathy. . But see Rousseau (), who argues that it is only through the words of the sufferer that we can appreciate his suffering: “Supposez une situation de douleur parfaitement connue, en voyant la personne affligée vous serez difficilement ému jusqu’à pleurer; mais laissez-lui le temps de vous dire tout se qu’il sent, et bientôt vous allez fondre en larmes. Ce n’est qu’ainsi que les scènes de tragédie font leur effet. La seule pantomime sans discours vous laissera presque tranquille; le discours sans geste vous arrachera des pleurs” (). Rousseau distinguishes between gestures and speech ( parole). The former arise out of need and preserve an external relationship between the subject who has needs and the objects of his needs; the latter arises out of passion and fosters an internal relationship between the subject and the object of his passions. It is fear rather than pain that plays an exemplary role for Rousseau in the development of language. . See Pandolfi . See also Jackson  for a discussion of the way patients in pain manipulate the interview situation in order to configure their future experiences. Jackson does not, however, discuss the emotional transfer—the transfer of pain—in the interview situations. . Compare with Wittgenstein (, , par. ) who, in discussing personal identity, questions the notion of “my pain.” He writes: “In so far as it makes sense to say that my pain is the same as his, it also possible for us to have the same pain. (And it would also be imaginable for two people to feel pain in the same—not just the corresponding place. This might be the case with

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             ‒   Siamese twins, for example.)” See Das ,  –. Wittgenstein ignores the politics of conversation—of the appropriation of pain—which I am stressing. His emphasis on pain and identity reflects the pragmatic role of pain in constituting context—identity, my identity. . Quoted in Asad , , from J. T. McNeill and H. M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia University Press, ),  – . . See Parry ; Dumont ; Tambiah . . Foucault ; Asad , . . Asad , , citing A. Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure (London: John Murray, ), . . See Crapanzano b, –, for a discussion of the not-unrelated moralization of signification. . Miller , . . M. J. Horowitz stresses the oscillation between “intrusive thinking” and its denial (quoted in Bracken, Giller, and Summerfield , ). . Kenny ; Hacking , ; Young , esp.  – ; Leys , . The role of trauma in psychopathology has been subject to considerable debate. The anthropologist Allan Young () argues that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is, in fact, a sociocultural construction that finds its origin in the last half of the nineteenth century and becomes an authoritative diagnostic category with its inclusion in  in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III). Summerfield, among others, stresses the cultural specificity of PTSD and the way it articulates and evaluates trauma (Bracken, Giller, and Summerfield ; Summerfield ). Though, like Young, I recognize the painful reality of those who suffer from PTSD, my concern here is with the construction of trauma and its role in our psychoanalytically inspired understanding of pain and memory. I take this understanding to be embedded in a specific cultural moment. . In support of this position, we note: Many abused patients do not initially recall their abuse or report periods in their life when they had no recall of it. Roe et al. (quoted in Rogers ) found that  percent of a sample of hospitalized women they studied had first suspected abuse before having an actual memory of it. Their first memories were usually of only a part of the first abuse episode. Memories became more vivid over time. In retrospective accounts, approximately . years elapsed from the time of first suspicion to that of certain conviction that they had been abused. See Rogers , esp.  – , for discussion and references. We have to recognize, as I will argue in chap. , that we normally conceive of memory as detemporalized, when, in fact, it is emergent and thus has too its own history. . Lacan ,  – . Like the imaginary and the symbolic, the réel is one of Lacan’s most elusive terms, and, as with so many of them, his understanding changes over the years. For our purposes, we might say, following J. S. Lee, that the réel, for which there is no metalanguage, “stands ‘behind’ the reality constituted in and by our use of language and only hints at its operative presence in the variety of failures or ruptures or inconsistencies that mark this symbolic reality” (, ). . Caruth , viii. For Caruth, “It is the plea by an other who is asking to be seen and heard [like Clorinda by Tancredo in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, or the burning child by his father in Freud’s famous dream, “A Child is Burning”], this call by which the other commands us to awaken (to awaken, indeed, to a burning) that resonates in different ways in the texts . . . and constitutes a new mode of reading and listening that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demands” (, ). I am not certain why such a mode of reading has to be founded on pain and trauma, and not on joy and

             ‒   pleasure. Compare my observations in Crapanzano , where I argue that we—in the West— equate the reality of personal history with the truth of autobiography: “The former rests on the presumption of a correspondence between a text, or structure of words, and a body of human actions; the latter resides within the text itself without regard to any external criteria save, perhaps, the I of the narrator” (). Our empirical presumption has impeded our recognition of the fact that reality, that is, what we index as real, can be a metaphor for a truth that is not “grounded” in that reality. See also Crapanzano b. . Caruth , . See Leys , chap. , for a critique of Caruth’s postulation of the “unnamed, unlocatable event” as well as her understanding of Nachträglichkeit. . Caruth , . I would argue that the “literality” of the event and its repetitions is itself a symptom of trauma, for it covers over its instability. Young (, ff ) stresses the bidirectionality of the temporality of trauma. The shape and significance given to trauma is, he argues quite reasonably, at least partly determined by the situation in which the “traumatized” finds him- or herself. Young’s approach is, as it were, less fatalistic than that of Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists. . Caruth , vii. See Van der Kolk and Fisler , –, for a discussion of integration into personal narratives. Among others, they note Piaget’s observation that when memories cannot be integrated on a semantic/linguistic level, they are manifested as visual images or somatic sensations. We have, in any case, to ask exactly what a personal narrative is, since there are various levels of cognitive and emotional as well as organizational integration. . This would be particularly true were we to accept the timelessness of the unconscious postulated by Freud (for example, , ). . This manque-à-être is simply a given of our Dasein—one that can be allied, in my view, to the referential insufficiency of language. I am not speaking only of the intrusion of the réel or the break in signification, which are so dear to Lacan, but also of the impossibility of a referential locution to describe immediately the immediacy it pragmatically precipitates. Of course, my insistence on a primordial lack is symptomatic of my own cultural assumption. . Shay , . Shay draws an analogy with Achilles. He quotes from Fitzgerald’s translation (Homer , , ff ). . Freud , ; Lacan , .   . Eliot , . . Hertz ,  –; see Crapanzano a for a critical discussion of Hertz’s project. . Since writing this chapter, I have come across the work of Hirokazu Miyazaki who, in his studies of exchange (in Christian church rituals in Fiji, in gift exchange, and more recently in complex financial markets), employs a notion of hope. Hope must, at some level, be related to, among other things, faith, trust, risk, and expectation; each requires explication. Certainly, even in the most secular exchanges, an element of trust is required if there is any expectation that the exchange will be fulfilled. Given the limits of trust, not to mention the contingencies of everyday reality, risk is an omnipresent factor. It may be mastered up to a point by various technical means (as in the mathematical models of market performance), or through various coverings (as in the derivative market or through reinsurance), or, in simpler exchanges between individuals or small groups, through reference to—faith in—some higher power who gives one hope. In the latter situation, as Miyazaki a shows, one may place one ’s agency in abeyance. In these simpler cases, relations of exchanges are, as I have shown for Moroccan Berber marriages, multiplied and

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             ‒    diminished in importance (Crapanzano a). The successful completion of each minor exchange serves as a (psychological) guarantor for the more important exchanges that will follow. At the same time, they magnify the importance of the most important exchanges and the suspense that accompanies their anticipation. No doubt it is necessary as well to distinguish here between those exchanges that are sanctioned by some supernatural authority and those that are subject to legal or customary sanction. Miyazaki’s work stresses the “not yet” dimension of social life that has been elaborated by Ernst Bloch (). See below and Miyazaki a, b, , and in press. . Marett , , . Marett’s approach to religion was, as he put it, social psychological. He stressed our basic optimism and saw fear as providing a “needful caution” to extravagant hope. See also Marett ,  –. . Good ; Good et al. . . Moltmann , ; Herzog . . Jonathan Boyarin informs me that he is not certain whether hope figures in Jewish messianism. He writes in a personal communication: “Tikva, the Hebrew word generally translated as ‘hope,’ doesn’t seem to me offhand to be very prominent in the liturgy. Rather we say at least once each Sabbath, ‘When will You reign in Zion . . . for we are waiting for You.’ So I would say, very provisionally, that ‘waiting,’ sometimes patient, sometimes impatient, sometimes despairing and sometimes enthusiastic, characterizes the temporal stance of Jewishness. Hence, Gershom Scholem’s classic reference to Jewish lives as ‘lives lived in deferment.’ In any case, I think it’s consistent with the point of your essay to open up, rather than foreclose this question.” Later in his letter, commenting on prayer in Orthodox Judaism, Boyarin does recall a prayer in which tikva occurs: “And may the informers have no hope . . .” He comments, “so, intriguingly enough, the one expression of ‘hope ’ I can think of offhand in the Jewish liturgy expresses a desire to deny it to evildoers!” . Pater , :. . It was Diogenes Laertius who attributed the definition of hope as a waking dream to Aristotle. Bossuet mentions it in his Discourse on Universal History. “What is hope? The dream of an awakened dream,” is how he puts it (see Desroches ,  and n. ). . Is hope an emotion, as Ernest Bloch thought it to be? He referred to it as an “expectant emotion” (, ). Or is it better described, as I think it is, as an emotionally and morally toned descriptor of an existential stance or attitude? (Wittgenstein [, , par. ] remarks, “When someone says, ‘I hope he ’ll come ’ is this a report [Bericht] or a manifestation [Ausserung] of his hope? I can, for example, say it to myself ”; see also Wittgenstein , , par. .) Is it—in linguistic terminology—a stative or a performative? If it—“I hope”—is a performative, as is “I promise,” it is very weak. If it is a stative, it postulates a mental condition that is rather elusive. It is transitive insofar as “one hopes for . . .” or “one hopes that . . .” That is, one speaks of the object of hope the way one speaks of the object of desire. Its object may be concrete, as in “I hope that I will find gold,” or abstract, as in “I hope it will all work out in the end.” As a noun, “hope” tends to be abstract or, as Pater would say, “vague.” It may even appear to be without an object. There are, I believe, in American English at least two distinct uses of “hope” and “to hope”: one in which the object of hope is specific and concrete, the other in which it is vague and abstract. I suggest that the rhetorical force of “hope” rests largely on the play between its concrete and abstract objects. When its object is concrete, hope resembles—in usage at least—desire and may be confused with it. When its object is abstract, it suggests a philosophical perspective on life, a sort of positive resignation, for example. Such a perspective is often masked by hope ’s concrete object, which “transforms” resigned hope into active desire. This conversion activates,

              ‒    as it were, our more abstract hopes and conceals the resignation that lies, inevitably, behind them. . See Girard  for a discussion of desire for desire in literature. . Crapanzano b,  – ; see also chap. . . Mack , . Though Mack does not make explicit reference to the theological implications of his example, it is suggestive of Christ’s Second Coming. . Eluard , , my translation. . The following discussion is taken from Minkowski , –. See Mahieu n.d. as well as Nancy Metzel’s introduction to the English translation (Minkowski ) for a biographical discussion of Minkowski’s work. . Minkowski also divides the past into three periods: the remote past, or zone of the obsolete (dépassé ); the mediate past, or zone of the regretted; and the immediate past, or zone of remorse. . “On trouve surtout du charme à l’espérance, parce qu’elle ouvre largement l’avenir devant nous” (Minkowski , , citing Henri Bergson). Note that the word for “future,” avenir, “a coming to,” suggests an advent. . Heidegger wrote: “in Dasein there is always something still outstanding, which, as a potentiality-for-Being for Dasein itself, has not yet become ‘actual’. It is essential to the basic constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something still to be settled. . . . Such a lack of totality signifies that there is something still outstanding in one ’s potentiality-for-Being” (, ). The German reads: “im Dasein immer noch etwas aussteht, was als Seinkönnen seiner selbst noch nicht ‘wirklich’ geworden ist. Im Wesen der Grundverfassung des Daseins liegt demnach eine ständige Unabgeschloßenheit. Die Unganzheit bedeutet einen Ausstand an Seinkönnen” (, ). . “Il y a dans le désir comme un recul par rapport à l’activité, recul allant vers le moi intime, allan vers l’intérieur, vers le ‘dedans’ du moi actif ” (Minkowski , ). . See Middendorf , ff, for a discussion of openness, as well as the closure, brought about by hope. . Middendorf (,  – ) discusses hope in terms of requesting (Bitten) and praying (Beten), which have, for him, finally the same effect. He does not view prayer in as abstractly transcendental a fashion as Minkowski does, but rather as directed toward an other—God. Accordingly, he recognizes the articulatory function of prayer and the way it clarifies, develops, and even transforms hope. Minkowski’s approach does not account for the communicative dimension of hope and its potential collectivization. We do speak of a people ’s hope. . See Caputo , – ,  –,  – , for a discussion of negative theology and Derrida’s notion of différance. . Whorf , . . I should make it clear that I do not mean that phenomenologists are not sensitive to the language of their descriptions; they certainly are, as any of Heidegger’s (a and b) essays on language make amply clear. But they do not take into account, heuristically even, the language- or language-family-boundedness of their descriptions. Heidegger is, of course, very sensitive to ancient Greek, but, with the exception of his “Dialogue on Language”—presumably a confabulated exchange between a European and a Japanese philosopher—he does not consider the effect of non-Indo-European languages on thought (Heidegger a, – ). Indeed, his “Dialogue” assumes, if not ultimate translatability, then an understanding that shines through linguistic difference. . My very questions are indicative of the problem I am raising. They reflect my language,

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              ‒    the attitude I take toward language, the way I regard reference, the priority I (refuse to) give to the object of reference. They also reflect an epistemological anxiety characteristic of the age in which I live. . For baroque literature, see, for example, Buci-Glucksmann , . For the mystics, Certeau , . See also pp.  –, where Certeau argues that the “other that organizes the text is not outside of the text. It is not the (imaginary) object that one might distinguish from the movement by which it (Es) is sketched. To locate it apart, to isolate it from the texts that exhaust themselves trying to express it, would be tantamount to exorcising it by providing it with its own place and name, to identifying it with a remnant not assimilated to constituted rationalities, or to transforming the question that appears in the guise of a limit into a particular religious representation (in turn excluded from the scientific fields and fetishized as the substitute for what is lacking). It is to postulate behind the documents, a something or other, a malleable ineffable that could be fashioned to fit any end, a ‘night in which all cows are black.’” . The examples that follow are all taken from Foley ,  – . . I should note that the Yimas system is in fact far more complicated, since Yimas also has a series of status markers (real, likely, potential but unlikely, and unreal) that are independent of tense. . As Lucy (, ) among others has pointed out, Whorf ’s position is, in fact, rather more complicated. Though he has usually been taken as a relativist, he does not assume that grammatical categories are simply language specific. He (Whorf , ) argues that comparisons between languages are possible but require a frame of reference that is independent of any given language. His notions of overt and covert categories can be considered, I suppose, as examples of such independent frames of comparison. One has, I would insist, to be skeptical of ever achieving a single language-independent language for comparative linguistic study. This does not mean that it is not possible to develop categories that are less immediately languagespecific than, say, those of the traditional grammars of European languages. . Whorf , – . All references hereafter are to this essay. . I will limit my discussion to this essay because, aside from its obvious relevance, it is concerned with the effect of grammar on Hopi thinking—their metaphysics—rather than with its effect on perception and cognition. Whorf ’s use of “thinking” is not unambiguous, however; it signifies a mode of philosophical thought rather than a psychological process. Lucy (, ) refers to “thought” as “conceptual content.” Nor will I be able to develop in the scope of this chapter Whorf ’s own grammatical derivation of time in European languages. See Whorf ,  – ; Lucy , – ; Silverstein , . . Whorf ’s conclusion is in fact unclear. This may be the result of a misprint in which he glosses tunátya rather than its inceptive form, tunátyava, as “coming true.” One wonders how Whorf would derive the expective of this word. . See Crapanzano b for further discussion on the role of power in translation. There, I note the way in which a translation “feeds back” on the original. It is a way of dominating the original, as it is dominated by it. . Martin du Gard , , my translation. . Bloch , . Moltmann (), who frequently quotes Bloch, would perhaps argue that the “utopias of realism,” as static as they are, are characteristic of a bourgeois realism that adheres to the stark facts and the mechanical formulation of “objective laws.” . Adorno puts it this way: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (, ). Of course, “redemption” casts the most mundane of

              ‒    hopes—that is, to survive—within a philosophical perspective that must seem to those in despair, trying to survive, to fall away from immediacy, urgency. . Antoine, a doctor, is not without hope. He restricts it to helping others—his patients— and to personal ambition within his set world. It is Jacques’s hope that proves ineffectual. . Cicero ,  – , my translation. . Quoted in Crapanzano , . . Schimmel , . According to Schimmel (, ), the Sufis stress achieving a balance between fear and hope (rajâ). They are particularly conscious of ruses (makr) with which God could snare them. gAbduhl Qâdir Gîlânî (d. ) thought that by not answering every prayer God preserved the piety of the person praying. For Gîlânî, piety hovers between fear and hope. . Quoted in William Raspberry, “The Engine of Achievement Is Hope, Not Intelligence,” International Herald Tribune, May , . . See chap.  for an elaboration of white South African eschatology. . Spinoza ,  (Ethics III, prop. , schol). The Sufi Abu Nasr as-Sarrâj (d. ) noted that “fear and hope are the two wings of action, without which flying is impossible” (Schimmel , ). . Kierkegaard , – . . Good ; Good et al. . . Burridge , xv– xvi. . Lindstrom , generally and  – , for a discussion of Bird’s first use of “cargo.” I will not enter into a discussion of the political, ethical, and epistemological legitimacy of the use of “cargo” and “cargo cults,” which have been amply discussed in recent work on cargo cults ( Jebens, in press), other than to observe, as Hermann (in press) does, that they should be written under erasure, for they reflect European philosophical presuppositions that are not necessarily shared by the “cargoists” themselves. (At this point in history, as “cargo” and “cargo cult” have been so incorporated into Melanesian discourse, we might also reverse the argument, noting that they reflect Melanesian presuppositions not shared by the Europeans!) . Robbins () has noted, however, the rearticulation of desire that followed from the Christianization of the Urapmin people of the western Sepik. See my discussion of Robbins’s work in chap. . . Burridge , ; see also Burridge b, , for a slightly different version. . See, for example, any of Eliade ’s works in the list of references. . Burridge notes that, though traditional narratives, or myths, refer to the past in the present tense (beginning with arin, “once upon a time”), new narratives, those dealing with cargo, refer to the future in the present tense. (According to Burridge, the language of the Tangu, an Austronesian one, in fact a member of the Sepik-Ramu family, has no past tense.) “When Tangu say that the newer tales are ‘more true ’ than the traditional narratives,” Burridge observes, “they seem to intimate that realization of being in the terms of these stories is more possible or relevant or desirable than realization of being in terms of the traditional narratives. Since that which is past is now irrevocably past, the alternative is to fill out the future” (b, ). It is only the “new” narratives about cargo and the European challenge that are comprehended. Burridge is never clear whether they demand comprehension—interpretation—or are simply comprehended. We should stress the apparently dramatic change in the Tangu sense of time (history?) that comes with cargoism and “comprehension” and ask how this affects their experience of hope. See Kempf  for an interesting discussion of the tension that developed among the Sibog

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              ‒    (one of the people who followed the cargo-prophet Yali) between their traditional, episodic notion of time and change and a continuous one characteristic of Christianity. Kempf, like many other Melanesianists, follows Errington’s () depiction of traditional Papuan notions of history as episodic, or discontinuous. The (in my view oversimplified) distinction between episodic and evolutionary notions of history is Ernest Gellner’s. . See Crapanzano a for a discussion of various attributes of dreams, including the performative. . Keats n.d.,  (Endymion, line ). . Burridge ,  –,  – ; see also Burridge b,  – , for a slightly different version. . Burridge , . In New Heaven, New Earth (a), written nine years later, Burridge refers to the nameless place as the ultimum bonum. Here, the villager is quoted as describing it as “far away and beyond the seas where everything could be learned and the good things of this world obtained” (). . Hegel , ff. See Kojève  for a (mis)reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic that gives prominence to desire.   . Homer ,  (book , line ). . Crapanzano b; Barbin ; see also Butler ,  –. . Billy-George is responding to Robert Murphy’s The Body Silent (), from which he is quoting. Teresa had given it to him to read. He commented, “there is something off-putting that I find in Murphy’s attitude which . . . makes me want to say, ‘yes, but . . .’ First, let me say I fully understand that Murphy probably had to write about his situation in order to try to make some kind of structure around it. But in the end, the structure he imposes is a rational academic one that offers others little support or meaning. ‘Why me?’ because it assumes some cosmic sense of purpose and direction in the universe that simply does not exist. . . .” He goes on quoting Murphy at the beginning of the excerpt cited above. . All quotations and other material from Billy-George are taken from Venditto . I am grateful to her for her comments and observations and for encouraging me to make use of her work. She brought to many of my speculations a level-headed caution. . See Crapanzano  for a discussion of the transfer of emotions between speakers. . Given the splitting of narrators, as we shall see, the relationship between author and audience is more complicated. . See Sarduy  for a discussion of the way in which transvestites publically simulate their chosen identity. They perform that identity as they diffuse it. See also his  novel Cobra. . Stromberg  contrasts being engrossed and enraptured. See Crapanzano  for discussion. . Compare with Certeau’s () discussion of fourth- to sixth-century transvestitism. He cites an aphorism from the Gospel of Saint Thomas: “That the male may not be male, the female female” (). . Quoted in Certeau ,  – . . Teresa says that she prefers to see what I am calling her “innocence” as an “open receptivity.” She notes that Billy-George did not usually have pictures of himself as Billy hanging on the wall. He put them up on the day Teresa interviewed him as Billy. . The Muslims stress the uncanny allure—the attraction—of their equivalent to the salos:

              ‒    the majdhûb. Majdhûb is related to the Sufi term for ecstatic union, jadhba, “attraction,” “love” (hubb). Schimmel describes these holy fools as “people who were mentally deranged and who were, in a sense, thrown out of the way of normal behavior by the overwhelming shock of an ‘unveiling’” (, ). She goes on to note that the Sufi “sources” stress their awe-inspiring eyes. Tamî (d. ) describes their eyes as “like two cups filled with blood.” The Moroccan mejdub (majdhûb) I saw were treated ambivalently as awesome and insane (hmaq). I was told they were in permanent jidba ( jadhba). Their eyes were often exophthalmic. . A number of feminist theorists, most notably Judith Butler (, ff ), consider drag and cross-dressing as parodies of gender identity. This may well be the case in many, even most, circumstances, particularly public ones, but we should not read all such performances as parodies. Our readings may be more symptomatic of ourselves than of the performances. In BillyGeorge ’s case, he would, if I understand him correctly, recognize at times that he is parodying gender and at times (if not always) that he is parodying parody and the categorical status of the categories it uses. I am not suggesting that he would explain what he is doing this way, but it follows from his double ironic stance—his irony turned on itself. . See Crapanzano b,  – . “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz” is a simplification of what Adorno actually said. In Prisms, he wrote: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (, ). In Negative Dialectics, Adorno modified his position: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living” (, – ). Nevertheless, the formulation “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz” is the current cliché. I have heard it changed to “There can be no history after Auschwitz.” The formula has been given. I have heard similar formulations of /. . Bartra ; see also Bernheimer . . Caillois , . Agamben (, ) stresses the fact that the poena cullei, despite its name, was more of a purification than a punishment by death in the modern sense of the word. . Bataille ,  –; see also Caillois , – , upon which I base my discussion. . Bateson , – . Bateson uses the example of monkeys playing. . I have suggested that in those societies in which the pragmatic or rhetorical function (Einstellung) of language dominates, there is a marked tendency for order—the political order—to give way in moments of crisis to such chaotic conditions that order is only—or, more accurately, appears only to be—restorable through one form of absolute rule or another (Crapanzano b). See also my discussion of Hamlet’s Elsinore in the final chapter of Crapanzano a. . Aside from Pandolfo , see also Khatibi’s novel, Amour bilingue (), and BuciGlucksmann’s commentary () as well as Vigo . Vigo uses the concept of fitna as a device for reading Maghrebian literature that puts into question the binarism of Euro-American sex and gender attribution. She has one of the most extensive discussions of the subject, including a bibliography. . Pandolfo , ; Arabic deleted from Pandolfo’s quote. See my discussion of Elsinore in Crapanzano a,  – . . See Durkheim , ff, for a discussion of the bipolar nature of the sacred. Agamben (,  – ) considers the bipolarity of the sacred and the profane to be a “mythologeme” that developed at the end of the nineteenth century. Mythologeme or not, the ambivalence associated with the sacred—with what we call the sacred—is, in fact, widespread.

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              ‒    . Even the members of antinomian brotherhoods, like the Heddawa in Morocco, who have chosen to live abjectly, outside the norms of everyday life and religion, consider themselves to be good Muslims. See Crapanzano ,  –, for orthodox evaluations of the Hamadsha; see Brunel  for a description of the Heddawa. . Quoted in Aitken ,  –. The Theragatha was written between the fifth and first centuries .. . See Bataille a. Roudinesco (, – ) describes Bataille ’s excesses and flirtations with death. The association of eroticism and death is even clearer in Bataille ’s story “Le Mort,” which opens with the death of Marie ’s lover and ends the next morning, after a night of debauchery, with her own death. There is a striking correspondence between Bataille ’s erotic narratives and the act of writing itself at both the literal (ink being spent) and narrated (episodes ending) levels. At the end of “Mme Edwarda,” before he announces that he has fallen sick, he inserts a parenthesis in which he discusses the futility of continuing to write. His “J’ai fini” has then to be understood both in terms of his writing and his sexual expenditure. Of course, such a trite device, like so much of his erotic philosophizing, has to be seen as a justification for his writing pornography or as a defense against his erotic writings being taken simply as pornography. . Bataille , ; see chap.  below. . Bataille , . The French reads: “Toute la mise en oeuvre érotique a pour principe une destruction de la structure de l’être fermé qu’est à l’état normal [d’] un partenaire du jeu” (, ). . Bataille , , my translation. The English translation (, ) is faulty. . Bataille , , my translation. Compare Bataille , . The French reads: “C’est, en un mot, la continuité de l’être aperçue comme une déliverance à partir de l’être de l’amant. Il y a une absurdité, un horrible mélange, la souffrance, une vérité de miracle. Rien au fond n’est illusoire dans la vérité de l’amour: l’être aimé équivaut pour l’amant, pour l’amant seul sans doute, mais n’importe, à la vérité de l’être. Le hasard veut qu’à travers lui, la complexité du monde ayant disparu, l’amant aperçoive le fond de l’être, la simplicité de l’être.” . Gombrowicz describes this violation exquisitely in his novel La Pornographie (). . My debt to Lacan  should be apparent to the reader of these speculations. See chap. .   . Proust , :– . “Il en est ainsi de nôtre passé. C’est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l’évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles. Il est caché hors de son domaine et da sa portée, en quelque objet matériel (en la sensation que nous donnerait cet objet matériel) que nous ne soupçonnons pas. Cet objet, il dépend du hasard que nous le recontrions avant de mourir, ou que nous ne le recontrions pas” (Proust , ). . Compare Halbwachs ,  – . Both of us—for whatever reasons—relate the elaboration of memory to a father’s death. . Augustine , ; , . I quote from Pine-Coffin’s English translation, published by Penguin, but refer to the Latin text in the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press. . Gilson ,  n. . Gilson is referring specifically to Augustine ’s De Trinitate :ff (Augustine ). See Gilson , , for a discussion of the role of love in the unification of the soul’s parts and its relationship to God. . Draaisma ; Freud .

              ‒    . Note that the word “reduplication” is itself reduplicative. Often changes in media— from the verbal to the visual, for example—or genre, from philosophical speculation to mythic narration, as in Plato, are unwitting attempts to mask flaws in argument, paradoxes, and contradictions. Sometimes, as in Augustine ’s discussion of memory, the paradoxes and contradictions become figures in an overriding argument: man’s incapacity, in the case in point, to comprehend God’s creation. . Draaisma , , . Draaisma cites M. A. Arbib’s criticism (The Metaphorical Brain [New York: Wiley, ], ). . Draaisma , , quoting D. C. Dennett’s Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery, Vt.: Bradford Books, ). . Augustine , ; , . “Ibi quando sum, posco, ut poferatur quidquid volo, et quaedam statim podeunt, quaedam requiruntur diutius et tamquam de abstrusioribus quibusdam receptaculis eruuntur, quaedam catervatim se proruunt et, dum aliud petitur et quaeritur, prosiliunt in medium quasi dicentia: ‘ne forte nos sumus?’ et abigo ea manu cordis a facie recordationis meae, donec enubiletur quod volo atque in conspectum prodeat ex abdtis.” . Gilson (, ) uses the expression “oeil spirituel de l’ame” as a paraphrase of Augustine, De Trinitate : and . . Augustine , ; , . “We even call the memory the mind, for when we tell another person to remember something, we say ‘See that you bear this in mind’ [vide, ut illud in animo habeas], and when we forget something, we say ‘It was not in my mind’ [non fuit in animo] or ‘It slipped out of my mind’ [elapsum est animo].” . Augustine , . The difference between mind and memory is borne grammatically while their equation is propositional. And yet Augustine the rhetorician recognizes the limitations of his propositional equation of the two. . Unlike the third person, “I” and “you” share a reciprocal personhood; that is, the “I” that addresses a “you” is itself a potential “you” as the “you” is a potential “I.” The “I” and “you” differ, as Benveniste (, ff ) has shown, in terms of “subjectivity.” Insofar as the “I” indexes the speaker whose utterance contains its token (“I”), it is internal to the act of speaking. The “you” is, in these terms, external to the utterance. In other words, first- and second-person pronouns differ from third-person pronouns in terms of personhood and from each other in terms of subjectivity. See Lee , . As Lee (, ), referring to Silverstein’s notion of metapragmatic transparency, notes, the “I” form is maximally transparent; that is, its very utterance assures the existence of whoever uttered it. The “I” is then presupposed in any metapragmatic description of it. See Anscombe  for a somewhat meandering but insightful discussion of the problems of giving the “I” referential status, for example, as a name. Anscombe recognizes something like the indexical function of the “I” but insofar as she identifies it with deictics, like “this” and “that,” which have an object, she fails to follow through on the indexical particularity of the “I.” Her final observation, that insofar as we do not have “unmediated agent-orpatient conceptions of actions, happenings, and states,” we suffer “the (deeply rooted) grammatical illusions of the subject,” seems a bit rhetorical. Are there such languages? The example she gives, ambulo (Latin, “I walk”), hardly suffices, since its ending (“o”) indicates a subject. Ego can easily be added to the sentence without requiring a change in the verbal form. . Silverstein . Compare Jakobson (), who refers to such referential indexes as shifters. They operate simultaneously at the level of code and message. Lee (, ) describes the referential indexicality of the “I” “as presupposing the existence of the person who utters a token of it but which, in referring to the speaker, also creates him as the topic of discourse at the moment.”

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              ‒    . I am referring to a grammatical function, borne in Latin in the verb, but not, therefore, dissimilar to pronominal use in English. My argument is clearer in the English translation of the Latin, “Ibi quando sum, posco, ut proferatur quidquid volo.” (My translation here: “When I am there, it is enough that I ask it whatever I want it to draw out.”) . We see this same objectification of the indexical first-person pronoun in Descartes’s Discourse on Method (), where, at the extreme moment of his methodological doubt, he recognizes, nevertheless, that he has substance. He writes, “En sorte que ce moi, c’est-à-dire l’âme, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis . . .” (). In other words, he first articulates his existence as “substance” and then specifies it as “soul” with a rhetorical equivalence, “c’est-à-dire l’âme,” the psychotheological assumption of which defeats his doubt. (I restrict my remarks here to the Discourse—and not to the Meditations, which, written in Latin, may have a different import.) In fact, the objectification of the I is considerably more complicated (see Lee ,  – , including a critique of Zeno Vendler’s Res Cogitans: An Essay in Rational Psychology [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ]; and Agamben ,  –, whose argument is similar to mine, relying as it does on Beneveniste). Though I cannot pursue the argument here, I suggest that the objectification of the “I” is facilitated by the (if not explicit, then implicit) anaphoric potential of the second “I” in “I think, therefore, I am.” This might be read as “I think, therefore, ‘I’ am,” in which the second “I” refers back to the first “I” (that of “I think”) and attains a referentiality that is not altogether distinct from the second “I”—that is, the “I” in the subordinate clause—in indirect discourse, as, for example, “I said that I was going to the circus.” What would have to be worked out here is the grammar of “therefore,” which may be equivalent to an elliptical parenthesis and serve, thereby, an analogous role to the “I said” or “I say” of indirect discourse. One difference between the two, however, might be that in Descartes’s proposition the first “I”—the “I” of “I think”—might be read cataphorically in a way in which the “I” in “I said” cannot be so read. See Urban . See Crapanzano a and  for an elaboration of the premises of this argument. . Augustine , . These incorporative images parallel their being “swallowed up” in forgetfulness. . Though it might be argued that cohesion, continuity, and unity are not as valued in some societies as in others, as, for example, among the New Caledonian natives described by Maurice Leenhardt (), there seems little question, as attested by the Confessions, that they are important values for Augustine. . Augustine , book n, chap. ; see also book , chap. . Gilson ,  – . He writes: “car ces trois sont un et ne forment qu’une substance, puisque la pensée se connaît autant qu’elle est, et qu’elle s’aime autant qu’elle est et se connaît.” Gilson’s equation of the three elements is, of course, not perfect. In the case of the Trinity (and in my triad of memory, mind, and I), love would be a fourth, unifying term, while in his triad of memory, knowledge of self, and love, love is one of the terms. I do not want to make too much of this equation, but it does suggest the importance of the affective bond—call it love or trust—in any dialogical encounter. . Stevens , . . Draaisma , , insists that there are metaphors that have, that can have, no literally understood topic. See Berger and Luckmann , , for the assumption that psychologies, including presumably their metaphors, realize themselves in the reality they interpret. . Examples of the metaphors-we-live-by school are Becker ; Lakoff ; and Lakoff and Johnson . . Casey , . . For scientology, see Whitehead .

              ‒    . Kerenyi ,  – , quoted in Casey ,  n. . . Antze and Lambek , xxiv– xxv. See also Küchler and Melion  for a dynamic approach to memory that understands the role of image making as constitutive of memory rather than as a product of memory and integrates the transmission of image into the memory process itself. Their understanding of visual transmission can be extended to other media, including the verbal and the monumental. As should become apparent in my discussion of the monument at the end of this chapter, I share their stress on the historical nature of modes of recollection and forgetting. . Though Casey makes use of both terms, he does so in a very different way. Though I am indebted to him for many of the observations I make in this chapter, I differ with him significantly. My usage of “memorialization” and “commemoration” should not, at any rate, be confused with his. See also my critique of phenomenology in chap. . . The following discussion of perdurance is from Casey ,  – . . Connerton (, ) would refer to them as “cognitive memories.” . Barnes , . . For a discussion of the historical referents of spirit possession, see, for example, Dayan ,  –; Lambek ,  – . . Lyotard , , referring to Freud’s essay “Repression” (Standard Edition, : – ). . See Laplanche and Pontalis ,  – , for a discussion of Nachträglichkeit, après-coup. . See Pontalis ,  – , for a beautiful discussion of loss, melancholy, and language; see also Kristeva . . Proust , : –; , . “Oui, en ce sens-là, en ce sens-là seulement (mais il est bien plus grand), une chose que nous avons regardée autrefois, si nous la revoyons, nous rapporte avec le regard que nous avons posé, toutes les images qui le remplissaient alors. C’est que les choses—un livre sous sa couverture rouge commes les autres—, sitôt qu’elles sont perçues par nous, deviennent en nous quelque chose d’immatériel, de même nature que toutes nos préoccupations ou nos sensations de ce temps-là, et se mêlent indissolublement à elle . . . De sorte que la littérature qui se contente de ‘décrire les choses,’ d’en donner seulement un misérable relevé de lignes et de surfaces, est celle qui, tout en s’appelant réaliste, est la plus éloigné de la réalité, celle qui nous appauvrit et nous attriste le plus, car elle coupe brusquement toute communication de notre moi présent avec le passé, dont les choses gardaient l’essence, et l’avenir où elles nous incitent à la goûter de nouveau.” . Nora , xix. This and the following translations of Nora’s essay are mine. . Tönnies ; Durkheim . . Terdiman , passim but esp. chap. . Terdiman sees reification as understood by Lukács as a “memory disturbance.” “The enigma of the commodity is a memory disorder”—a forgetting of the commodity process itself (). . See Amalvi  for a history of the Bastille celebrations and the different political and ceremonial uses it has been made to have over the years. I have attended the Paris ceremony dozens of times since the late s and have noted a significant change in its reception. It has certainly changed since the Algerian war and de Gaulle. Its nationalism has at once been diluted and reinforced with France ’s ever-increasing participation in the European community. . Connerton , ; see also Mumford , . . Quoted in Young , , from an unpaginated booklet published in  by the State Museum of Auschwitz. . See Levinson  for a discussion of the political history of monument, especially of the American South.

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              ‒    . Young , . See Glazer  for a conservative, ultimately antimodernist, critique of contemporary art-centered appreciation and construction of monuments. . See, among other of his works, Lévy-Bruhl . . Quoted in Young , ; see also  –  for a detailed discussion of Rapoport’s monument. . Nora , xxx. But as Alf Lüdtke () writes, the private is, at least in Germany, infused with the political, which is itself public. . Winter , , quoting Adrien Gregory’s The Silence of Memory (Leamington Spa: Berg Press, ), . . Senle . When I last visited the memorial, I watched a man try to attach a brooch to the stone on which the name of whomever he was mourning was inscribed. He could not and had eventually to leave the brooch on the ground. His wife, who clearly could not bear to watch him fumble, looked away. I and several other visitors were caught in his mourning. We could not turn away. We were simply frozen in our collective, voyeuristic embarrassment. . White ; see Crapanzano b for comments. . Quoted in Abramson , , from Le Goff ’s History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, ), xi. . Warhol in fact anticipates the fate of so many monuments. With time, if they have any artistic value whatsoever, they end up in museums, appreciated for their aesthetic rather than their historical value. Those “without aesthetic value” end up as artifacts in back rooms of a historical museum to be appreciated by a handful of researchers or to bore a busload of schoolchildren. It is interesting to note that some scholars, such as the Yale historian Robin Wink, suggest that controversial monuments should be placed in museums rather than being destroyed (Levinson , ). . Nádas , . “Miként juthat valaki úgy az emlékezni mélyére, hogy ne kelljen többé emlékenznie” (Nádas , ) A more literal translation would be: “How can someone reach so far into the depths of [his] memories that he doesn’t have to remember any more.” . Hertz , . See chap.  above. . Pessoa, writing in the persona of Alvaro da Campo (Na noite terrível . . . , ,  –). . I relate my observations to the English translation of Nádas’s novel because I read it in English. In Hungarian what is translated as “you” in the first instance and suggests interlocution is valaki (“someone”), a third-person pronoun. The second “you” is contained in the verb (as, in Latin) and indicates the third person. “Your” (or “his” or “her”) is not required in Hungarian. Even given the differences between the English and the Hungarian, my argument still holds: the self is still detached from self, not as a you, as in the English, but as a someone. I thank Bea Vidacs for explaining Hungarian usage here.   . Hoddis , . Jakob von Hoddis was the pen name of Hans Davidsohn. His poem, written in , was an enormous success in Germany at the time of its publication and became a landmark in expressionist poetry. Hoddis wrote few other poems, was interned most of his life in a mental hospital, and was killed by the Nazis at Sobibor. I am grateful to Christopher Middletown for this translation. The original reads: Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut, In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei. Dachdecker stürzen ab and gehn entzwei, Und an den Küsten—liest man—steigt die Flut.

              ‒    Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken. Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen. Die Eisenbahnenen fallen von den Brücken.

. Frobenius’s notion of Ergiffenheit, the state of being seized by reality, is scattered throughout his writings. Basically it refers to those moments in which reality seems to impress itself on the individual. Engulfed, he is at the same time lifted out of the ordinary, and, as Adolf Jensen (, ) notes, it is an inspired and highly creative moment. Frobenius claims that when one is seized, one sees the essence of things. See Frobenius  –, , and selections of his work in English in . . The impossibility of the last is given mordant expression in James Joyce ’s Ulysses. Attending Patrick Dignam’s funeral, Mr. Bloom reflects: “Now who is that lanky looking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he ’d have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No, ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it” (, ). Of course, we may take the “galoot” as a figure of death—death itself. Can “galoot” be related to the Hebrew galut for “exile”? . McDannell and Lang , – , for Revelation, and ,  – . . KJV; see also Revelation :. . Scholem , . He quotes Sabbatai Levi’s motto: “The completion of the Torah is its transgression.” See Agamben , . . I have stressed the paradoxical nature of many rites of passage (Crapanzano a,  – ; see also Taussig ). They often declare a passage when, in fact, it is only the illusion of passage or an anticipation of transition, for the initiate is returned to the world from which he or she came. . I have checked my reading with Daniel Boyarin, who found it not incompatible with the Hebrew. He stressed that “behold” (hinneh) loses some of its appellative force by being commonly used. He notes that “came to pass” might better be translated as “it was in my seeing.” I myself know no Hebrew. . Eliade , . . Storch and Kulenkampff . I first came across this case in De Martino ,  –. . Italics in this and the next paragraph indicate my near paraphrase of Storch and Kulenkampff’s paraphrase of what the patient said to them. . This is the only extended conversation provided by Storch and Kulenkampff. . Storch and Kulenkampff describe the structure of the patient’s experience in the existential-phenomenological terms of Heidegger and Binswanger. As they are not directly relevant to my aim in this chapter, I have chosen not to discuss the experience in these terms. . Wetzel (, ), among others, notes that a patient’s response to the world-ending may be either euphoric or dysphoric or oscillate between the two. . According to Wetzel ,  –, schizophrenic patients may experience a worldending as a complete annihilation or as an annihilation followed by a new world. The parallel with Judeo-Christian apocalyptic thought is clear. . See Jaspers , , and Crapanzano  for discussions of the straddling of worlds and multiple perspectives in schizophrenia. . See Jaspers ,  – ; Crapanzano ; Schreber . . See Mannhardt . De Martino (,  –) relates the oak tree in the patient’s fan-





              ‒    tasies to mythology. He in fact drafted a letter to the two psychiatrists to ask what knowledge of tree mythology the patient and those in his surroundings may have had. We do not know whether he sent the letter or, if he did, whether he ever received an answer. See Detering  for the role of the oak tree in German mythology and folklore. He notes the belief in its healing capacity, its symbolism as a tree of life, its association with death, and its symbolic importance in Nazism, where it figured in emblems of Germany’s rebirth. Detering’s scholarship is tedious, uncritical of sources, and above all marred by his clear Nazi sympathy. He refers to the oak tree as the “Nationalbaum der Gegenwart.” That the oak played so important a symbolic role for the Nazi’s is noteworthy. Detering writes symptomatically: “Auf Grund dieser Bedeutung der Eiche im Glaubensleben unserer Altvorderen verstehen wir erst den tieferen Sinn der Eiche im Brauchtum der Gegenwart, besonders des Eichenkranzes im Hoheitszeichen des Dritten Reiches.” I should add that Eliade cites this work uncritically, without referring to the author’s evident Nazi sympathies. The symbolic significance of the oak tree is by no means dead in Germany today. In an interview with Richard Demarco in , the German artist Joseph Beuys said, “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the Druids, who are called after the oak. Druid means oak. They used their oaks to define their holy places. I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind with the social body of the future” (Kuoni , ). Beuys planted seven thousand oak trees at the Dokumenta exhibit in Kassel. . Mannhardt , –; see  – ,  –  for the wounding of trees. . I believe that, given our present state of knowledge, our derivation of symbolic meaning and significance should be restricted to the specific occurrence of symbols in context and structure—without, however, denying the possibility that their symbolic and figurative potential is enriched by the “history” of their occurrence. . The oak serves, I would argue in another idiom, as a Third, the authoritative function that guarantees conventions of communication and world-construction (Crapanzano a, esp. introduction and chaps.  and ). In discussing the Schreber memoirs, I argue that in schizophrenia there is a mutilated Third that precludes appropriate distance and self-distance (Crapanzano ). . These concepts are scattered through De Martino’s extensive writings but especially in Morte e Pianto Rituale (, – ) and in his unfinished treatise on the end of the world, La Fine del Mondo (, esp.  – ). He discussed the mythic elements in this case in De Martino ,  –. See Gallini  and Saunders  for a general introduction to his work. . De Martino ,  and passim;  – with respect to the Bernese peasant. . No doubt our view of the patient’s mutilated experience of time is in part the result of the way in which Storch and Kulenkampff present their case material. They cite only a few paragraphs of conversation. They are content to paraphrase the patient’s fantasies in what linguists call Erlebte Rede—a style that tends through the subjectification of discourse to disengage it from the objective world. . Eliade ; Lévi-Strauss ,  – . . For an extreme view, see Lommel , . Lommel argues that the Aborigines had no concept of the future: “There was only an eternal dream time uniting the beginning of the world and the present.” See Berndt  for a critique of Lommel. See also Koepping ; Streck . . See the introduction for my use of “primitive.”

              ‒    . See Reichard , , for a discussion of the ritual prophylaxis of Blessing Way. Other peoples (the Jain, for example, at least in their pujo rites) appear not to be particularly concerned about ritual fault (Humphrey and Laidlaw , –). By focusing on a rite that has no single culturally announced goal, Humphrey and Laidlaw do not, in my view, give adequate attention to the way a goal—curing the sick, for example—is so orchestrated as to be shared by all the ritual participants. . Otto . See chap.  for a discussion of the relationship between the holy and the sublime. Otto recognizes the affinity between the two but struggles to keep them separate. It is ultimately a question of priority. See Agamben , , for a critique of Otto’s psychologizing the religious experience; and Wach ,  –, for a personal, less critical evaluation. . See, for example, Jones  for examples discussed from within the frame of worldendings; see Hoskins  for an extended example of multiple time conceptions. . See Crapanzano b, esp. chap. , for a discussion of time and history in Fundamentalist Christianity; see chap.  of this book for a discussion of Whorf and temporality. . Berndt , , quoted in Swain , . Berndt wrote this in response to an article by the German anthropologist Andreas Lommel (), who found that the Aborigines in the Kimberley Division of northwestern Australia were preoccupied with the end of the world when he did research among them in . As I noted above, Lommel argued that the Aborigines did not have any sense of the future, so ensconced were they in the “dream-time,” until contact with the Europeans—an altogether problematic assumption. He found that their sense of the future (after contact) was “extremely dark” and that they suffered “deep melancholy and apathy” (, ). . Koepping , ; Stanner ; Crapanzano a, . Munn () describes this “ancestral period” (djugurba) for the Walbiri people in Alfred Schutz’s terms, as the “pure world of predecessors” (). Djugurba also means “dream” or “story.” Insofar as dreams are externalized in story and signs ( guruwari ), as they are for the Walbiri, the movement from externalization to internalization to externalization is continuous and dynamic (Munn ,  – , ,  – , ). . Koepping bases his argument primarily on the research of Lommel and Helmut Petri. . Collins , ; quoted in Swain , . . Though Swain focuses on the Aborigines of southeast Australia, many of his observations can be generalized to other Aboriginal groups. . Swain borrows the terminology “locative” and “utopian” from Smith , . . Robbins , . . I use “cargo” here globally, as it has been used in the literature and was perhaps used by the cultists, recognizing, however, that at least after the initial shock of discovering all those never-dreamed-of goods the Europeans brought with them, the goods were differentiated and valued accordingly. . Robbins ,  –. Robbins’s use of “global” seems anachronistic, for surely at this stage of contact, the Urapmin had no sense of the global. . This summary is taken from Robbins  and other of his works cited in the references. . Robbins , ; see, among others, Lattas  and Trompf  for a more general discussion of the association between skin color and inferiority. . See Hermann , among others, for a discussion of self-definition and the collectivity in a New Guinea population. . Robbins , . Robbins characterizes the Urapmin as “epistemologically scrupulous.”





              ‒    . Robbins , ; see Kermode . . See Crapanzano b, f, for a discussion of the Fundamentalists’ attitude toward Scripture. . Crapanzano ,  –;  – ; see also chap.  above. . Kermode , , . Kermode ’s reference is to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: “a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all.” Kermode insists that “to make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations” (). . Mistry , . . Benjamin , ff; see Scholem  for a biographically informed discussion of the angel in Benjamin’s work. . Blanchot (, ; , ). “Demeurer n’est pas accessible à celui qui meurt. Le défunt, dit-on, n’est plus de ce monde, il l’a laissé derrière lui, mais derrière est justement ce cadavre qui n’est pas davantage de ce monde, bien qu’il soit ici, qui est plutôt derrière le monde, ce que le vivant (et non pas le défunt) a laissé derrière soi et qui maintenant affirme, à partir d’ici, la possibilité d’un arrière monde, d’un retour en arrière, d’une subsistence indéfinie, indéterminée, indifférente, dont on sait seulement que la réalité humaine, lorsqu’elle finit, reconstitue la présence et la proximité. C’est une impression qu’on peut dire commune: celui qui vient de mourir est d’abord au plus près de la condition de chose—une chose familière, qu’on manie et qu’on approche, qui ne vous tient pas à distance et dont la passivité malléable ne dénounce pas la triste impuissance.” . The following description of Hinduism is of necessity a synthetic simplification, subject, no doubt, to serious critique. My aim is not to enter into detail here but to give a picture, hopefully accurate in outline, of the Hindu approach to death and world-ending. . Nicholas , . See also Parry (,  – ), who is critical of Nicholas’s stress on Hindu monism. It is said that initially the deceased continues to exist “in the invisible form of a ‘microscopic’ (suksam) or ‘airy’ (vâyumay, vâvavya) body the size of a thumb, which is often represented as being a precise miniature replica of the ‘gross’ body it has left behind.” . Goudriaan (, – ) refers specifically to Tantric thought in which the yogin is said to be able through “pervasion of mystic identity” (vyâpti) to “create” the universe out of his heart locus. See also Parry . . Beck , . Beck is writing of the Hindu in Tamil Nadu. . Parry , . Parry cites Goudriaan , , as well as the Garuda-Purâna—an important eschatological text that was much quoted by his informants in Benares. He notes that there is also a homology between the body/cosmos and the architecture of the Hindu temple. See Beck , – ; and Zaehner ,  – , for the elements. . See also Abegg’s  translation of the Garuda-Purâna ( –). . See Zaehner , ff, for a discussion of karma. Women are unable to achieve deliverance. They join their husbands in death (Biardeau , ). . The following description of good and bad deaths is taken from Parry , ff. . Parry (, ) stresses the birth symbolism of this journey. The deceased is reborn twice, he notes, first out of fire and then again in ritual. Parry (, ) also notes that during the funeral ceremonies the religious specialist is identified with the soul of the deceased. See also Nicholas ,  –. Agamben (,  –) argues that the menacing spirits of the dead (the Roman larva, the

              ‒    Greek eidolon—all images of the dead) are unstable signifiers, hovering between the diachronicsynchronic play of life and the determined synchrony of death. Through various rites, these “unstable signifiers” are transformed into “stable signifiers” (the Roman lares, for example, images of friendly and powerful ancestors) in the systemic synchrony of death. . The soul is released midway through the cremation, when the chief mourner cracks open the deceased’s skull with a stave. . Milner () speculates that transmigration of souls and the eschatological terms associated with it, samsâra, karma, and mocksa, are structural reversals of the caste system. . Paz , . Paz understands the cyclical time of the East, of India specifically, as a compromise between the “atemporality of the primitive” and the insistent historical linearity of the West—an altogether problematic distinction. . Biardeau ,  – ; see also Eliade , . . Zaehner , ; see also Hopkins , , whose calculations of the length of the ages differs somewhat from Zaehner’s. . See Biardeau , , . Creation is associated at times with the individuation of Brahmâ—through desire. It may be figured in language terms as the utterance of “I” and “mine” (aham and mama). More concretely, it is expressed, as we shall see, in terms of sacrifice. See Hopkins  for other versions of the creation, most notably those concerning Vishnu ( – ). As Hindu gods all participate in the same absolute reality, their identities appear, at least to the outsider, to be slippery. Emphasis depends upon the historical period in which sacred texts were written, on particular cult formations, and on regional and class (caste) differences. . The description that follows is taken from Zaehner (, – ), who retells the story as it is told in the Mahâbhârata (, ff ). I have added a few direct quotations from the Mahâbhârata. . Though the cyclic nature of Indian time better lends itself to the possibility of reportage, Mârkandeya, a seer, is exceptional. It would be of interest to determine exactly how he casts his report in the Mahâbhârata, the great Indian epic, which describes his vision. . I cite Zaehner’s more readable paraphrase here rather than van Buitenen’s no doubt more accurate, though less poetic, translation. See Mahâbhârata , . . Parry , . Death may also be associated with marriage and sexual intercourse. The funeral procession of an old person, which is sometimes called a marriage party, is accompanied by erotic dancing. A couple who have died within a few hours of each other are placed on the funeral pyre as if they were copulating (Parry , ). . Though it is generally accepted that the cosmos has no beginning and no end, many Hindus speak of a first creation and a final ending. It is often not clear whether they are referring to the beginning and end of a kalpa, an eon, or a “first” beginning and a “final” ending. See Parry ,  – , for a fuller version of the legend of Kashi. . Kashi is also an important pilgrimage center. See Parry  for a discussion of the meaning of liberation at Kashi. Shiva, considered by many to be the paramount lord, is one of the most complex gods in India. He is a restorer and destroyer, an ascetic and a sensualist, often depicted with an erect phallus, a kind herdsman of souls and an angry avenger. He is said to have saved humankind by having held in his throat a poison that was churned up from the cosmic ocean and threatened human life. He is clearly associated not only with world beginnings and endings but with fertility, death, and survival. See O’Flaherty  for details. . Parry ,  – ; ,  –. . Kashi itself is also symbolically identified with the human body—by some, with the

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              ‒    body of Shiva (Parry , – ). See also Abegg ,  –, in which the body is said to incorporate the gods as well as the world. . Parry , ; citing Eliade , . See also Hopkins (, – ), who stresses Prajâpati’s loss of tapas. Prajâpati is identified in the Rig Veda and the Shatapatha Brâhmana with the fire god Agni. . Manikarnikâ, the site of the most important of the two cremation grounds, in Benares, is thought to be the center of creation. Just as India is said to be the navel of the universe, and Kashi the navel of India, so Manikarnikâ is the navel of Kashi (Parry , ). . Blanchot , ; , , my translation. . Wittgenstein ,  –  (.– .).

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Abedsalem, Moulay,  – ,  –  abject, n.  Aborigines, worldview of, –  Adair, John,  Adams, Jay,  Adorno, Theodor, n.  aesthetics: in China,  – ; and history,  –,  ailleurs,  alienation, and fragmented body, ,  anthropology: and empiricism,  –; and the individual, ; as interdisciplinary,  – , n. ; and objectivity, ; as science,  – ; in United States compared to Germany, –n.  Antze, Paul,  Apache: place names of, – ; speaking style of,  – ,  apartheid, – apocalypse: in Christianity,  – , ,  –; Zarathustra on,  – . See also end of the world al-gArabi, Ibn, – arrière-pays, ,  –, , , n.  Asad, Talal, –  au-delà,  Augé, Marc,  Augustine, Saint, – , – authorship, and fantasy, – Bachelard, Gaston,  Bakhtin, Mikhail,  Barbin, Herculine, 

Barnes, Djuna, , ,  Barthes, Roland, ,  barzakh, , ,  – , ,  Basso, Keith, ,  –  Bastille Day,  Bataille, Georges, ; on eroticism, –; on transgression,  –, ,  –  Bateson, Gregory, ,  Beck, Brenda,  Béguin, Albert,  Bellmer, Hans, ,  Benjamin, Walter, , ,  Bergman, Ingmar,  Bergson, Henri,  Berndt, R. M.,  betweenness: as barzakh,  – ; and memory, ; as nothing, ; in ritual, – ; as threshold,  –  Beuys, Joseph, – n.  Billy-George: cross-dressing of, ; illness of,  – ; personae of, –; as research subject, , ; sexuality of, – , ; stories of, –,  Binswanger, Ludwig,  Bird, Norris Mervyn,  Blanchot, Maurice, ,  Bloch, Ernst, ,  – Boas, Franz,  body: cultural specificity of, ; in dance,  –; discipline of,  –,  – ; and eroticism,  – ; and geography, n. ; in Hinduism, –, – ; image of, –, ; inscription of,  – ;





 body (continued ) materiality of,  –; and memory, ; in pain, ,  – ,  –; and perception, ; and signification, –, n. ; as symbol, , ; theories of,  –; and trauma,  –,  Boehme, Jakob,  Bonnefoy, Yves, L’Arrière-pays, ,  –,  – Bourdieu, Pierre,  Bowie, Malcolm,  Boyarin, Jonathan, n.  Burridge, Kenelm,  – Butler, Judith,  – Caillois, Roger,  –  cargo cults: and hope, –, –, – ; and individuality, ; and mythdreams, –; and objects, ; and temporality, –n. ; as term, n.  Caruth, Cathy, – Casement, Roger,  –  Casey, Edward, , ,  –  charismatic healing,  – ; and speaking style,  –  Chinese aesthetics,  –  Chopin, Kate,  Christianity: of Aborigines, ; God in, ; hope in, , – ; and millennialism,  – ; sin in, – ; of Urapmin,  – Cixous, Hélène,  Cohn, Norman,  Collins, David,  colonialism: in Amazon basin,  – ; in Australia, –; and death, ; and temporality,  – Comaroff, Jean,  commemoration, – ; and aesthetics,  –. See also monuments Connerton, Paul,  consciousness, and the body,  creation, in art,  –  Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, ),  –  cross-dressing, n. 

Csordas, Thomas, – Curley, Slim,  dance, and the body,  – death: cultural specificity of, – ; and end of the world, –; epistemology of,  –; and eroticism,  – , n. ; in Hinduism,  –; and hope, ; and psychic trauma, –; and symbolism, –n.  De Martino, Ernesto, –  Dennett, D. C.,  Derrida, Jacques, , ,  de Sade, Marquis, –  desire,  – ; and hope, ,  – , ; and memory, –. See also eroticism Desroches, Henri,  discipline, of the body,  –,  –  Dogon, , ,  Draaisma, Douwe, –  dreams, and interlocution, – Du Fu,  Durkheim, Emile, , ,  Eliade, Mircea, , ,  Eliot, T. S., , ,  – empiricism, in anthropology,  – end of the world: in Aboriginal culture, – , n. ; in apocalyptic texts,  – ; in Christianity,  –, ,  –; as concept, ; cultural specificity of, ; and death, – ,  –; in Hinduism,  –; and imagination, –; narratives of,  –, ; and schizophrenia, – ; and temporality, – ; and tree mythology, ; in Urapmin culture,  – epistemology: of death,  –; of memory, – eroticism: and the body,  – ; and death, –, n. ; and sacrifice, –; and subjectivity, – eschatology. See end of the world ethnography: and objectivity, ; and poetics,  expiation: and memory,  –; and sin, – 

 fal,  fantasy, and authorship, – Fédry, Jacques,  fitna, – , n.  Foley, William,  Foucault, Michel,  Frazer, James,  freedom, and the body,  frenzy, and transgression, –  Freud, Sigmund, , , , , , , ,  – Friedrich, Caspar David, – Frobenius, Leo,  frontier, as trope,  –,  Gallini, Clara,  gender, as performative, – Genet, Jean, , – Gennep, Arnold van,  Gérando, Joseph-Marie de,  Germany, anthropology in, –n.  Gerz, Esther,  Gerz, Jochen,  Gilson, Etienne, ,  God: in Christianity, ; in Hinduism,  Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio, – Gow, Peter,  Green, Linda, – Griffin-Pierce, Trudy,  Haile, Bernard,  Halbwachs, Maurice, ,  Hamadsha,  –, ,  Hanson, Paul,  Harris, Marvin,  Heidegger, Martin, , ,  Herder, Johann Gottfried, –  Hertz, Robert, , – ,  Hinduism, death in, –  history: and aesthetics,  –; and end of the world, ; and memory,  – . See also temporality Hoddis, Jakob von, –n.  Hoheisel, Herst,  Hoijer, Harry, ,  Holocaust: and memory, ; and monuments, –

homunculus, in psychology, –  hope: in bourgeois society, –, ; and cancer patients, –,  –; and cargo cults,  –, – ; as category, ; in Christianity, –; cultural specificity of,  –; definitions of, , –n. ; and desire, , ; and exchange, –n. ; phenomenology of, ; and temporality,  –; and waiting,  – Hopi, language of, –  Husserl, Edmund,  imagination: al-gArabi on, – ; as aura, , ; and constitution of reality, ,  – ; and creativity, , ; and desire, ; and end of the world, –; as hinterland, –, , ; and image, – ; and landscape, –; and liminality,  – ; metaphors for, , ; and perception,  –; and social order, ; and the unexpected,  – indexicality, , , , , , , , , , , –n.  individual: in anthropology, ; and cargo cults,  Iscanus, Bartholomew, Penitential,  James, Henry,  James, William,  – Janet, Pierre,  Jensen, Adolph, , n.  Joyce, James, Ulysses, n.  Jung, Carl Gustav, ,  Kabbala,  Kant, Immanuel,  Kaushik, Meena,  Kendall, Elizabeth,  Kennedy, Jacqueline,  Kermode, Frank, , – Kierkegaard, Sören,  kinship,  Klein, Melanie,  Koepping, Klaus-Peter,  Kramer, Jane, – Krauss, Rosalind, 





 Kroeber, Alfred,  Kulenkampff, Casper, – Lacan, Jacques, , , , , , , , ,  Lamartine, Alphonse de,  – Lambek, Michael,  landscape: and background, n. ; and imagination, –; and kinship,  Langer, Lawrence,  language: and the body in pain, –, ; of Hopi, –; as inscription on the body,  – ; and memory, ; of Navajo, ; and order, n. ; and personhood, n. , n. ; and phenomenology,  –, , n. ; and temporality,  – Leenhardt, Maurice, –  Le Goff, Jacques, ,  Lessing, Georg,  Lévi-Strauss, Claude, ,  –, , ,  Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, ,  Leys, Simon,  Li He,  liminality, ; and mysticism, ; in ritual,  – ; and transgression, , – ; and transition, –  Lindstrom, Lamont,  literalism,  literature, and memory,  –  Lyotard, Jean-François, ,  –  ma, , , –,  –  Mack, Wayne,  Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, n.  Mannhardt, Wilhelm,  Marett, Robert Ranulph,  Martin du Gard, Roger, Summer ,  masochism,  materiality, of the body,  – Mauss, Marcel, ,  medium, as event,  memorialization, as process,  –,  – . See also memory memory, ; Augustine on,  – ; and betweenness, ; and the body, ; as collective, , , , ; and desire,

–; epistemology of, – , n. ; and expiation,  –; and forgetting,  –, ; and history,  – ; and the Holocaust, ; and homunculus, – , ; and the “I,” , , ; and identity, ; as inscription,  –,  –; loss of, with aging, ; metaphors for, – , –; and monuments,  –; and place,  – ; Plato on, ; as process,  – ,  – ; and ritual,  –,  – ; and temporality, ,  – ; and trauma,  –, nn. –  Messiah, in millennial scenarios,  metaphor: and the body, , ; and death, ; for memory,  –, –  metapragmatics, , n. , n.  metonymy, , , , n.  Middendorf, Heinrich,  millennialism. See end of the world mimesis,  Minkowski, Eugène, ,  – ,  Miyazaki, Hirokazu, –n.  mnemonics,  Mnouchkin, Arianne,  Moltmann, Jürgen, , – montage, n.  monuments: aesthetics of,  –, , n. ; and consumerism, –; and history,  – ; as negative,  –; and personal memory, –; reinterpretation of,  Moore, Henry,  Murphy, Robert, n.  myth, and end of the world,  –  Nádas, Péter, ,  Navajo: language of, ; origin legend of, – ; and spatiality, , –; and temporality, –; worldview of, – n.  Nicholas, Ralph,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, , ,  Noh drama,  Nora, Pierre,  – ,  nudity, and death, 

 objectivity: and anthropology, ; and ethnography,  omens,  otherness: and eroticism, – ; and hope, ; and pain, –n. ; and text, n.  Otto, Rudolph,  pain: and the body, ,  – ; as inscription,  –; and language, ; and the other, –n. ; and penance, – ; and power, ; and sympathy, n.  Pandolfi, Mariella,  – Pandolfo, Stefania,  Parry, Jonathan,  Pater, Walter, ,  Paz, Octavio,  perception, n.  performance: and the body, ; and gender, –; and memory, ; and storytelling,  Pessoa, Fernando,  phenomenology, , ; and hope, , , ; and language, , n. ; and memory, –; and universalism, – philosophy, and memory,  Pinxten, Rik, ,  Piro (Amazonian people), – place names: of Apache, – ; in Morocco,  –; of Walbiri, n.  Plato, Theaetetus, ,  power: and pain, ; and torture, –  pragmatics, , – , ,  – , – ,  –n. , n. , n.  prayer: object of, – , n. ; and temporality,  –  Pribram, Karl,  Proust, Marcel,  –  Pseudo-Dionysius,  psychology: homunculus problem in, – ; and psyche, n.  qi, ,  –  Rapoport, Nathan,  réel, , – , , n. , n. 

Reich, Jens,  Reichard, Gladys,  ritual: of Aborigines, ; and betweenness, – ; in Hinduism, – , ; liminality in, – ; of memorialization,  – ; and trauma, –; and the unexpected,  –  Robbins, Joel,  – Rocha, Joachim,  Rolf, Ida,  Romanticism,  Rouault, Georges,  – Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, n.  sacred, the: definitions of, n. ; and millennialism,  –; and transgression, – ,  –  sacrifice: and eroticism, – ; in Hinduism,  Sakai, Naoki,  Sar (African people), – Sarraute, Nathalie,  Sartre, Jean-Paul, , ,  Scarry, Elaine,  – , – schizophrenia, – Schnock, Frieder,  Scholem, Gershom,  Schraber, Daniel Gottlob,  – self: and crisis of presence, –; in language, n. ; and memory, , , , ; as multiple,  –; and trauma,  –  semblable, , –,  sex, as performative, – sexuality, theories of, . See also eroticism shamanism,  Silverstein, Michael,  Smith, Adam, nn.  –  Snyder, Richard,  Sophocles, Philoctetes, – South Africa: apartheid in,  –; monuments in, – ,  space: and Apache place names, – ; in Chinese art, – ; and ma, – ; and memory,  – ; as metadiscursive,  – ; in Morocco,  – ; in Navajo cul-





 space (continued) ture, – , – ; and qi,  – ; and silence,  speaking style: of Apache,  – , ; and charismatic healing,  – ; pauses in, –  Spinoza, Baruch,  spirit possession,  –  Stanner, W. E. H.,  Starobinski, Jean,  Stephen, Alexander M.,  Stevenson, Robert Louis,  Stih, Renata,  Storch, Alfred, – storytelling, as performative,  Su Dongpo,  Sufism, , –n.  Swain, Tony, –  symbolism, and the body,  Tangu, cargo cults of,  – Taussig, Michael,  Taylor, Charles,  Taylor, Julie,  telepathy,  temporality: in Aboriginal culture, – ; and cargo cults,  –n. ; and chronotope, n. ; and end of the world, –; and hope,  –; and language,  –; and memory,  –; and prayer,  –; social context of,  –; in Urapmin culture,  – Terdiman, Richard,  Third, the, n. , n.  Toelken, Barre, ,  Tönnies, Ferdinand,  torture, and power, – trance, of Hamadsha,  – 

transgression: and the erotic, ; and frenzy, – ; and prohibition, ; and ritual, – ; and the sacred, – ,  –  trauma: and the body,  – ,  – ; and crisis of presence, – ; and memory,  – , nn. –, n. ; and perception, n. ; as psychic event, – trees, in mythology,  – , – n.  tunátya,  – Turner, Victor, , ,  – , , ,  unexpected, and ritual,  – Urapmin, worldview of,  – Valéry, Paul, Jeune Parque,  –  Venditto, Teresa,  Vietnam War Memorial,  Von Hendy, Andrew,  Waltz, Sasha,  – Wang Wei,  war, and trauma, –  Warhol, Andy,  White, Geoffrey,  Whorf, Benjamin Lee, – Witherspoon, Gary,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ,  –, – n.  Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, – Worth, Sol,  wu, ,  Young, Allan, n.  Young, James,  Zaehner, Robert Charles,  – Zarathustra,  – 