Comments on: Secular brooding, literary brooding http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/22/secular-brooding-literary-brooding/ Secularism, religion, and the public sphere Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:32:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Bruce Robbins http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/06/22/secular-brooding-literary-brooding/#comment-2885 Bruce Robbins Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:33:46 +0000 http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/?p=268#comment-2885 I don't recognize myself in Colin Jager's portrait of the secular intellectual as forever guarding frantically against the temptation toward heteronomy. On reflection, I think this is because I don't associate secularism, my own or the sorts I see around me, with the clearly unattainable goal of absolute autonomy. As I see it, recognizing that one can never separate oneself entirely or absolutely from what one criticizes---that is, one can never be autonomous---is the widely shared assumption of diverse secular critics these days. It's what it means to live in history, no? One could read this off the commitment to dialectical thinking in Hegel and Marx, and it's even more explicitly the moral of deconstruction---and the reason Derrida could describe deconstruction as Hegelian dialectic without the closure. I teach "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" to a wide variety of undergraduates as an attempt to define a new common sense: grossly speaking, there is no such thing as clean-handed critique. It usually seems pretty plausible to them. And they tend to take Derrida's hint that this can be a joyful rather than a melancholic wisdom. If I understand him correctly, Jager wants to identify this common sense, which merely acknowledges the impossibility of complete autonomy from the concepts one critiques (that is, self-rule), with Christianity's enthusiastic and principled embrace of heteronomy (rule by another). The example of the latter I imagine---Jager is free to correct me, of course, by explaining why this would be a bad example---is the willing and theologically necessary submission to God. It's as if submission to God could properly become the functional equivalent of criticism's central premise, which is that no one gets to play God, including the secular critic. I don't think we want to let this equation stand. One point of Jager's exercise, or so I speculate, would seem to be cementing an alliance between literary criticism's ordinary assumptions, on the one hand, and formal religious belief, on the other. The two would become joined in a common antagonism to the Enlightenment, conceived as the childish craving for absolute autonomy. This is not the place to argue in detail that this conception caricatures the Enlightenment. But perhaps it is the place to propose that the latter might be more faithfully represented by those of its (critical) heirs who acknowledge their implication in the authorities they try to refuse but do not for that reason stop trying to refuse them. I don’t recognize myself in Colin Jager’s portrait of the secular intellectual as forever guarding frantically against the temptation toward heteronomy. On reflection, I think this is because I don’t associate secularism, my own or the sorts I see around me, with the clearly unattainable goal of absolute autonomy. As I see it, recognizing that one can never separate oneself entirely or absolutely from what one criticizes—that is, one can never be autonomous—is the widely shared assumption of diverse secular critics these days. It’s what it means to live in history, no? One could read this off the commitment to dialectical thinking in Hegel and Marx, and it’s even more explicitly the moral of deconstruction—and the reason Derrida could describe deconstruction as Hegelian dialectic without the closure. I teach “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” to a wide variety of undergraduates as an attempt to define a new common sense: grossly speaking, there is no such thing as clean-handed critique. It usually seems pretty plausible to them. And they tend to take Derrida’s hint that this can be a joyful rather than a melancholic wisdom.

If I understand him correctly, Jager wants to identify this common sense, which merely acknowledges the impossibility of complete autonomy from the concepts one critiques (that is, self-rule), with Christianity’s enthusiastic and principled embrace of heteronomy (rule by another). The example of the latter I imagine—Jager is free to correct me, of course, by explaining why this would be a bad example—is the willing and theologically necessary submission to God. It’s as if submission to God could properly become the functional equivalent of criticism’s central premise, which is that no one gets to play God, including the secular critic. I don’t think we want to let this equation stand.

One point of Jager’s exercise, or so I speculate, would seem to be cementing an alliance between literary criticism’s ordinary assumptions, on the one hand, and formal religious belief, on the other. The two would become joined in a common antagonism to the Enlightenment, conceived as the childish craving for absolute autonomy. This is not the place to argue in detail that this conception caricatures the Enlightenment. But perhaps it is the place to propose that the latter might be more faithfully represented by those of its (critical) heirs who acknowledge their implication in the authorities they try to refuse but do not for that reason stop trying to refuse them.

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