Chapter 6:
On the very idea of a confessional scheme
Laura Pozzo[1]: “There is a beautiful sentence by Kafka that says something like ‘Confession and lie are the same thing. We cannot communicate what we are because we are it. We can communicate only what we are not: that is, only the lie.’ We cannot communicate what we are exactly because truth and sincerity are not the same thing. So you can tell the truth without being sincere.”
James Hillman: “Truth is revealed. It can never be told. We cannot tell the truth. It has to appear inside the telling or through the telling….”
(Hillman, 1983, p. 6)
Section I: Introduction: Biography and Confession - the one who “can’t go on”
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Saint Augustine (354-430) both wrote a certain kind of literature that was entirely different from previous expressions of written form. Previous genera had attempted to speak poetically from myths or dreams that remained “collective” in their ideal or demonic representations (heroes, villains, lovers); even science itself, governed by “reason,” presents the purest and most transcendent form of the myth of the heroic observer. However Rousseau and Augustine differed in terms of their subject matter in that their “subject matter” was the story of their own lives - the authors themselves; their form was called “the confession.” It concedes that the even the most heroic of all living heroes is actually a human being riddled with foible and even great fault and inner conflict. This gave rise to a sense in literature that human beings were in a sense individuals, whose human foibles particularly were the relevant subject matter of the confession. Never before had human shortcomings been the subject of so much attention. Moreover, in a sense these shortcomings were in fact raised to being a “path” and an “example” of being able to move from a life of sin to a life of grace. This is particularly the case with Saint Augustine who literally viewed his “confession” as something that would allow him to communicate to the fallen people of his land and convert them to the Christian faith. Thirteen hundred years later Jean-Jacques Rousseau undertook an exposition of his faults, calumnies and triumphs. However this time there was no longer the barely hidden agenda of “conversion” and indoctrination that besets Augustine’s work. Jean-Jacques wanted to explore his human self as a kind of pure artistic presentation or portrait of his life. In a sense this too was Jean-Jacques’ exploration between “sin” and “redemption,” to see if he could turn some rather embarrassing moments of his personal existence into the secular “grace” of what we call a work of art.
What manner of confessions is written today? In what way do I write confessions in the reveries at the end of this dissertation, or do I write something other than “the very idea of a confessional scheme?” Like Jean Jacques Rousseau, I sought “grace” in “reflection as a work of art.” Somehow I have believed that in studying my own neuroses and broken or mistaken sense of self I might be able to accomplish creating a work of literary art. The result is of course mixed and at times a complete failure. But I have yet two other recourses in mind when I begin to compare my own and these other forms of “confessions:” first, that a work of art is not really entirely intended in my writing, after all I do not know if there is any real grace in all this introspective “art;”[2] and second, what I have written belongs to the domain of “research,” which is not art, but a genera of a weird kind of social science I seem to be re-inventing.[3] I am researching the domain of dissertation research from the standpoint of a personal confession. I am showing: this is what a research investigator goes through when confronting their own condition. And it is hoped that such an investigation of investigation, or research of research is not merely fruitless naval gazing, but an attempt to grasp some of the real suffering and despair that I have read in other efforts at transparent, scientific social science and research.
In preparing for this essay I have come to see my own work as being neither biographical nor autobiographical. First of all I do not regard “life” (which in this sense is not Zoe, which is completely un-circumscribe-able, but closer to Dasein, a life that may be ) as a chronological sequence of events which biography seems to rely heavily upon (this man at age 12, 15, 20, 30, 60 and so forth). I am looking at life by means of the intensity and intimacy with which it can draw on a certain symbol.[4] The more conscious we are of the symbol, which is out of the chronic recording of timeThe discussion of “my life,” or my “father’s life” (or its development) is part of something else that I am attempting to get at, which is the strange contour of the “present” occurring in dreams, memories and reflection. The biography of the “hero” diminishes in the light of the “present,” as the ego is diminished in the light of the “self.”[5] The symbol of the present, if I dare call it that, means to let go of all past heroes and remain in one’s own uncanny horror, the heroic act itself of remaining in the present. These moments of experience of the uncanny are not redemption, but serve to mark the limits of our capacity to express and conceive of perplexity, which spills over, and only can be contained in the bare capacity for life. As Samuel Beckett writes:
“Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” (The Unnamable, 1959, p. 418)
This phrase, “the very idea of a confessional scheme” first occurred in a seminar on contemporary philosophy lead by Professor Harvey Rabbin (at the Colorado College, Colorado Springs) in the late 1980’s. It came from the title of an essay by Donald Davidson (1974), “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.” However, at least for me the sense of “confession” is more vehement toward the living. “Concepts” (Begriffen – “en-graspings”) merely grasp at living things and consume them. But the “confession” is offered on bended knee, often in confusion and humiliation[6]; it is a far better if much less certain state of affairs. Nonetheless I truly liked and appropriated the turn of phrase of this philosopher, “on the very idea of….” The title seems to convey a kind of sticky limit, where one is forced to face something compelling and repulsive, in its essence prejudicial, “the very idea of…” which is somehow compromising to one’s “scheme.” It is as though from such a title one is waving a huge dead insect in the air saying, “’the very idea of …’ this happening is offensive to me!” Donald Davidson is more or less an analytical philosopher; he had a widely published discussion or debate with Richard Rorty about the concept of “truth”[7] in contemporary philosophy. Should we do without the “truth?” Is the “truth” really best told in fiction?
Section 2: How is the Archetype of the Hero related to the confessional scheme?
Is the “confessional scheme” an expression of the heroic journey toward consciousness? To what extent were Augustine and Rousseau attempting to become “heroes” through their confessions? Do they fight for “presence” in its awkward vulnerability, or do they constantly look backwards to a history they claim to overcome, but which actually overcomes them? What is the meaning of being a “hero?” Does my emphasis on the “symbol of the present” differ from the struggle of heroic consciousness to obtain the present, the immanence of the divine in the present?
I pause to consider whether this “symbol of the present” could be interpreted in a Freudian or Jungian sense may be part of the “Mother” symbol or archetype. (It doesn’t matter to me that this is a reductive psychoanalytic interpretation, there is something to it that I just like.) “The Goddess-Mother” is “divine immanent.” To say it is a “Goddess” hearkens to my own puer-like predisposition as an author: to be in love with the mother, to be at war with the father, to repudiate His transcendence and accomplishment as a “lie”. (The “father’s accomplishments” may or may not be a “lie,” I am pointing to my own limitations here.)
One of the most “storied” heroes is Hera-kles (Hercules, the one who “honors,” “kleos” the mother goddess “Hera”). Is this “Hero” who honors the mother the one who honors the present (“divine immanence”), the “symbol of the present?” Hercules’ story begins with his own horrid act of murder of his wife and children. Such an act impels one to remain at the very bottom of the well of grief. Apparently Hera drives him mad… -Out of jealousy? -Out of retribution? Are his twelve redemptive labors, at the bottom of the well, actually an attempt to regain “the present?” [8] Does Hercules fight for “divine presence” beyond all past heroes, who have become the lamias, specters, the nightmares of regressive unconscious stagnation? Is a hero one who is in “defense of consciousness” - consciousness of the present moment? -It is a defense of the present against ignorance; ignorance of looking back into the past, or forward into the future and saying it means just one thing (a confirmation of one’s current ideology). (“The defense of consciousness[9] against ignorance” would apply to the story of the Buddha as well, as another kind of “hero” who struggled for the sake of this moment. Similarly the image of Christ is sacrificed on the cross and is reborn in the faith and action of the living Church.)
Much of what I have yet to say repudiates the base level of the “Heroic myth,” where the victory of “good and light” over “darkness and evil” is uncertain because we cannot be sure if what is good is good. Many times what is said to be good is really an overblown pretension, full of false pride and arrogance. Heroic biographies if they are too simplistic present transcendent ideals, which are highly irritating because they negate the “bloody mess” (the confused web of good and evil) of our current predicament. Have they come to terms with the fact that the “hero” (Herakles) first murders his wife and children, the nadir of incomprehensible grief?
The transcending, heroic ideals relegate the “bloody mess,” the confusion and nakedness of our condition to a means by which heroic sacrifice is accomplished and redeems the entire thing. This redemption would “transcend” the endless meaningless bloody struggle of the world/mother. “God, the Father” is the “Divine transcendent.” This transcendence decries the world of “sin” (confusion, and lost-ness) as “illusion.” I want to write without redemption, but I do not know if it is possible because I still keep trying to make sense. At least I can try to write with extreme caution toward redemption. “Redemption” that can be written is not “real” or the truth. If we follow Hillman’s sense of what the truth might be (in the passage from Inter-views at top), then redemption might be seen “inside or through” the telling. It is impossible to say exactly because this telling has not yet stopped.
Here is the warning for me as I write this paper: there is another sense in which the term “the symbol of the present” is not filled with enough ambiguity and possible relation to the present to convey my meaning here. The heroic consciousness must realize it is wedded into an impossible condition in which it “can’t go on,” before it can begin to relate.
Section 3: Bestandsaufnahme and the Confessional Scheme
This chapter will deal with the autobiographical essays of Rousseau and St. Augustine called “Confessions.” But are these men really heroes or are they otherwise? These confessions attempt to reveal the human form who is caught up in their history, growth and development. They begin with a past, childhood, they move through their development to their current views on life and what they expect. The plan is simple enough: past, present, and future.
What if this form of confession, neatly ordered for the reader, did not exist? What if one had to face the intense jumble of the present, its chaotic non-historical, non-self-legitimation?
The part we will glean from St. Augustine and Rousseau is the intimacy of their confession. The part we will move away from is their historicizing of personal process. History, a very simple and innocuous narrative structure: past, present, and future still priveleges the “ego” over the “self,” which is all potential relations.
But in discussing the issue of the heroic “defense of consciousness,” I will say at the beginning that I am advocating another turning beyond the biographical history of the hero toward the “heroic” defense of the “present.” I use the term Bestandsaufnahme to convey a sense of what is beyond traditional biographical form in a confession: beyond the traditional ordering and historicizing of a life that comprises biography is the predicament of the present. In attending to the predicament (Predicament, “pre-dicare” “to say before?”) of the present, the emphasis on intimate personal process, the bare and abject nakedness of the Bestandsaufnahme, may be maternal.
Personal history is a means of seeing through to the “bloody mess” of “the present” moment of research. I wrote in the introductory essay here that “research is a double take of searching and searching again. Why? Because what one has discovered has confounded one so much that one is forced to repeat the experience in perplexity. We are in a sense circling round the present moment as a symbol, and it is the intensity of “the living symbol”[10] of the present that we are looking for. The present in its symbolic truth is non-historical[11], we meander and circumambulate about the symbol because its very life essence holds us to it. But this life essence is bloody, it involves elements, strands, and rhizomes of personal existence, vignettes of one’s life and the life of the collective as well. Only, perhaps, in one’s last breath[12] may one fully understand the meaning of one’s life, a meaning which for the living must remain necessarily obscure. C.G. Jung himself writes in the last pages of his own autobiography, “I have become a stranger to myself.” Such a statement is disconcerting because there is no comfort of readily available “meaning” offered by old age, only a deeper stance to one’s own being a “stranger” to oneself. Yet the disconcerting part of this statement of the “stranger” is a challenge to remain in a kind of wisdom echoed in Samuel Beckett’s phrase, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” “Meaning” is there, but all the more difficult and threatening to encounter.
Section 4: Augustine’s confessions: Appetites and Ladders
St. Augustine! Well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
(Longfellow, “The ladder of Saint Augustine”)
The Augustine that Longfellow eulogizes climbs toward spirit upon a ladder of sins and sufferings, I believe, at the calamitous cost of his soul.[13] However, at least there are still sufferings and they are recorded in some way that contests all his desire to convert and reject his life. On the contrary side of St. Augustine of Hippo are the words of Walt Whitman of New York. In Whitman’s words I want to affirm the perilous flavor of the “appetites” or “vices,” whose embrace, rather than rejection, may allow for the possibility of an even deeper spiritual life than Augustine professed. The ultimate loss of the chance to bring soul together with spiritual life is the calamity of the Augustinian “confessional scheme.”
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag
of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch
or am touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
(Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 24, web source: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm)
In Whitman’s poem is a contradiction to the soul broken and suffering in Saint Augustine’s Confessions. And yet it leads to the same spiritual yearning in “Christian life”[14] that opposes itself to the “soul.”[15] Perhaps in Whitman’s writing we (as a collective) had learned something in over a thousand years since Augustine’s death. Whitman works in embracing the senses, a reprobate fool, and Augustine is about rejecting them for the sake of some higher spiritual “truth.” I take Whitman’s poetry as being one of the fullest human expressions, queer, naked and vulnerable to the terrible generativity of life as a good way to begin an exploration of Augustine. Whitman had to be mentioned in any sense as one of the naked poets of this dissertation, even if he opposes Augustine with every word and breath. I acknowledge both Whitman and Augustine in their confession of conscious struggle through an unseemly blind and furious mess of one’s conscious circumstance. Where Whitman acknowledges “sweat,” Augustine will acknowledge “prayer,” but what for?
Augustine does have this capacity to “look back”[16] in his confessions, and the capacity to grieve, which is the beginning of relationship.[17] Perhaps what we begin to mean by relationship is part of what was held in Augustine’s aspirations to the Catholic Church. Even if he denies his former life of sin and perdition it seems that somehow Augustine acknowledges it by the great groan of writing that it does exist, confuting the outcome of his apparent “spiritual victory.”
There was something queer as well in Saint Augustine. Something about his life and the intensity of his friendship with a fellow in Thagaste which reminds one that it could possibly be a little more intense and Whitman-esque than he wrote. The only thing that Augustine is clear about.
But why speak I of these things? For ‘tis no time to ask questions, but to confess unto thee. Wretched I was; and wretched is every soul that is bound fast in the friendship of mortal things; who becomes all to pieces when he forgoes them, and then first he becomes sensible of his misery, by which he is already miserable even before he foregoes them. (Augustine, 1996, Book 4, Chap. 6, p, 165)
It strikes me that the “truth” that Augustine is struggling for is the truth of spiritual relationship. He describes himself in his youth as selfish and seducing, beholden only to his senses and the immediacy of desire and intellectual acuity. Perhaps what he is fighting for in the “conversion” is the possibility of charity through relationships rather than the selfish immediacy of desire.
So was Saint Augustine was a kind of “hero?” Did Saint augustine achieve a heroic rise from the illusion, sin and perdition of his youth, selfishness? To do so this “hero” relied on the constant aid and prayer of his mother, Monica. As opposed to the selfishness of his youth Saint Monica seemed to hold the possibility of relationship and charity toward his fellow soul. He tells the story as vehemently as possible that he has in some manner overcome the sins of his youth and obtained a righteous and godly way. And yet he tells also at length of sin and lost-ness.
By comparison we return to Walt Whitman, who rejoiced in his senses once again over a thousand years later. Could Whitman be accused at moments of falling too easily into the selfishness of his senses, and abandoning the possibility of relationship, or does he embrace in an even deeper relationship the possibility of the senses too being holy? What does it mean, “to be holy?” –I do not know, but something flares up as a consuming flame where desire or affinity seeks its own overcoming, overturning, or simply turning aside….
Augustine in the passage above refutes the possibility of asking any more questions. His questions were motivated in grief at the loss of his dear friend. He questions the universe and God of the rightness of things. He has said that questions will not be enough, and they will not be enough precisely because they will accuse the Maker, and hold on to the resentment that the world is not his way[18]. Augustine says that the only thing left to do is confess. And this “confession” I would add is the intensity of his soul-grief and longing to exist. When I say “soul” I hope not to be speaking of an “immortal soul” in any literal sense, but soul which comes from the “shared-ness” of one’s experience: “confession.” All Augustine may offer to us and to the Universe or God is his cry of grief, it may be all he has.[19] Through that grief comes the possibility of relationship with the world, if he has truly suffered.
Section 5: Saint Augustine and Doctor Faustus
Did Dr. Faustus deny the possibility of relation to the world? -The answer is “no,” but only through the negative, through his mother and through his very own shadow. His mother will be discussed in terms of her “dream” below, but his shadow, which I will discuss here, can be spoke of as “Doctor Faustus” himself.
Dr. Faustus was a Manichee, a member of one of the most syncretic of world religions or beliefs. Manichees seemed to be more on the side of drawing relationship into the world in the ocean of spiritual experience, even though, or perhaps because they saw the profound conflict of light and dark (their experience may not have been as unbalanced as the Roman Catholic point of view). I have pondered Augustine’s refutations of Dr. Faustus both in the Confessions and in a text Augustine wrote completely devoted to the refutation of Faustus. The only crime that I could see Faustus commit was that he thought differently from Augustine. Augustine makes a lot of intellectual points. He makes himself to be an enormous “talker,” but little more.
It may be that this Faustus of Augustine’s time is the one who later became mythologized in medieval and modern Europe as the one who made the deal with the Devil. The modern figure seems however to be largely related to a Johan Georg Faust (1480-1540) from Germany. Christopher Marlowe wrote various versions of the drama between 1604 and 1616, which were rudimentary descriptions of a fellow making a deal with the Devil for love and power and summarily being sent to hell. J.G. Goethe’s version (1808) works with profoundly deeper aspects of conscious introspection and life through the myth of Faust. Goethe’s “Faust” committed the folly and sin of yearning too much for life and conscious relationship, and in a sense for Goethe this ultimately becomes his redemption. (Goethe’s Faust was received with greatest interest and admiration by C.G. Jung, who wrote about it in Memories, Dreams and Reflections as an encounter with a real question to his Lutheran upbringing.)
There is however one other piece of literature that may relate more poignantly to the intellectual denial of “relation to world”[20] in the writings of Thomas Mann (1948), his version of Doctor Faustus. Mann’s version of Faustus portrays a great fictive composer Adrian Leverkuhn[21] who really does give his soul in the sacrifice of a young boy to a fever that in a sense does permit him to create his greatest work of music. In Mann’s Doctor Faustus there is very little hope for redemption, the boyish innocence is completely sacrificed, and the innate possibility of relating to the world is lost forever.
Section 6: Saint Augustine’s Mother’s Dream: Planks and Ladders
Saint Augustine’s mother wanted Augustine to join with the Roman Catholic church as a matter of “relationship in the Life of Christ,” but also it is a matter of “conversion” and conformity to institutional rule. The church ostensibly offers the image of Christ/Dionysus as the symbol of greatest empathy and suffering, but then magically removes it by pointing to the hierarchy of power and “authority,” which corrupts the Church. The Church of Saint Monica, the Roman Catholic Church, both asks one to go to Christ and the Devil.
Saint Monica is the mother of Saint Augustine. It is through her he has some relation to womb and to world and to the earth rather than the infernal trappings of intellectual power in the Church (which is to say that Augustine was another version of the man he repudiated: Augustine was Doctor Faustus). What is her dream?
For what other source was there for that dream by which thou didst console her, so that she permitted me to live with her, to have my meals in the same house at the table which she had begun to avoid, even while she hated and detested the blasphemies of my error? In her dream she saw herself standing on a sort of wooden rule, and saw a bright youth approaching her, joyous and smiling at her, while she was grieving and bowed down with sorrow. But when he inquired of her the cause of her sorrow and daily weeping (not to learn from her, but to teach her, as is customary in visions), and when she answered that it was my soul's doom she was lamenting, he bade her rest content and told her to look and see that where she was there I was also. And when she looked she saw me standing near her on the same rule. (Source: online Augustine Confessions: http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html)
I am not certain what that “rule” is (the Latin is “regula lignea” which means “ruler or plank). Was it a Rule standing in outer space, under the stars? Did they have a huge wooden ruler back then? Were they “walking the plank” at the mercy of notorious North African pirates (probably many centuries later)? What are they doing on a plank? It is not a safe place. Maybe it is a balancing plank and dear Saint Monica is trying to balance her weight with that of the golden youth who comes to console her. I like that she is, in a sense, never satisfied with her son just as he is but needs to “convert him,” it hearkens back to the more primitive form of the crone, the “rejecting one,” maybe even to Hecate herself! On the other hand she is still “walking the plank” with her son. What if the image of the Godhead, the Orderer (Regulus) of the universe, had become this stiff rule (regula), and they were standing upon this stiff wooden rule/ruler? Wood is “ok” in some of its aspects, even while it is stiff it can be smoothed and become beautiful and show its true deep grain. Maybe this “wood” is a stiff phallus! Saint Monica and her son Saint Augustine stand near to each other on a huge wooden penis floating in outer space! (Chanting, undoubtedly, “Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!”) She is confronted by this beautiful lad who may be her “animus projection.”[22] Her animus stands in distinction and opposition to her son who is fully living in and enjoying the shadow, and together all three hang in the balance. Where is this wooden ruler/penis/space-ship going? There is no movement that is indicated. Everything hangs in balance, and the place of the rule remains uncertain in the shrouds of time.
The issue of “Conversion” is a sticky one. Many times religious “conversion” is an act of violence or brain-washing that transforms one state of consciousness to another. Moving into “group-think” of the Roman Catholic Church just proves one is capable of being a conformer to the “wooden rule” (spank across the knuckles or buttocks: can bring excessive humiliation). An effigy made of wood still lacks “numen” (nodding). It is not a golden wooden phallus carved with love and real desire, but a simple plank. The wooden plank in this dream may be something base and material, just enough to get across the mud and mire of the unconscious. We may be dealing with a base plank for a muddy school-yard, at best a meager bridge without getting one’s feet too dirty. Psychologically speaking, “Conversion” on a “ruler” (which Monica’s desire prefigures) is the shuttling “to and fro” of opposites in an attempt at a real transformation, which would be a third new element. In the dream Monica is at first between herself as “Mater Dolorosa” (she is weeping, weeping, and this too is a profound state of consciousness) and the golden boy, but this is not enough! The third that is borne of the discourse between herself and this lovely idealized figure is Augustine himself.
In the story of Iron John by the Brothers Grimm there is a singular moment where the boy is about to let the “wild man” out of the cage and asks the wild man where the key to his cage is hidden. The “wild man” responds: “Under your mother’s pillow!” The boy has to then steal the key from under the pillow and with the wild man is set free. The point is that the mother dreams of the son, albeit incestuous and taboo, from upon and under her pillow. The pillow is the place of dreams: “My son the Doctor” (and, “my son the Doctor Faustus!”). “My son the doctor (Faustus)…” indicates the mothers hidden and unconscious needs for the son to go to the devil, to become the devil, and to integrate him in some subtle or profound way. Many times he will fail. Many times he will simply go to the devil and that is all that will become of him. If he fails she can begin the hideous condescension of her lament: “We have tried to give him everything we can….”
Still the negative provides a coda: there is still work to do. Augustine becomes the Faustus, and then denies and disparages him, but this gets him no further than his own blindness, stuck on his mother’s “plank.” The rugged cross is the conjunction of two such wooden planks. Saint Monica has only one, still lain flat, she has no strength in her dream’s lament to erect the vertical tower for her own son to hang upon. Augustine has to do that himself, he has to ascend the vertical axis, which his mother cannot erect. And it is in his own Confessions that he attempts a poetry of the vertical line:
We ascend thy ladder which is in our heart, and we sing a canticle of degrees we glow inwardly with thy fire--with thy good fire--and we go forward because we go up to the peace of Jerusalem; for I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go into the house of the Lord." There thy good pleasure will settle us so that we will desire nothing more than to dwell there forever. (source: Augustine’s Confessions, Book 13, Chapter 9, http://www.ccel.org/ )
The “Canticle of degrees” refers to Psalms 119-133, which were regarded as a progression toward spiritual perfection. The ladder image is reminiscent both of “Jacob’s ladder”[23], and in a curious way is similar to Dante’s ascension in the later stages of Paradiso. All the images point to the erection and ascent upon a vertical axis, the axis of the “self,” that was actually missing in St. Monica’s dream. This vertical ascent is known of in alchemy as the “sublimatio” (discussed in Edward Edinger’s, 1996, Anatomy of the Psyche). The erection is a failure because there is only ascent, it lacks a meaningful way of descending once again toward dark psychic matter (“sin” or “appetite”) in a way that is conscious and wise. Descent for Augustine would mean complete reversal of his development, so he eludes descent, but at the cost of wholeness, and, in truth, holiness.
Maybe it is the Faustus of centuries later who actually redeems him. The shadow might be capable of redemption because Augustine has rejected the shadow of his appetites; that part of him that rejects actually gets damned to his own Christian hell. Faust sets to work in blindness, digging downward a water works, blinded by Care herself, he sets out that there is still work to do both in ascent and descent:
Faust (erblindet):
Die Nacht sheint tiefer tief hiereinzudringen,
Allein im Innern leuchted helles Licht;
Was Ich gedacht, ich eil es zu vollbringen;
Das Herren Wort, es gibt allein Gewicht.
Vom Lager auf, ihr Knechte! Mann für Mann!
Laßt glücklich shauen, was ich kühn ersann,
Ergrieft das Werkzeug, Schaufel rührt und Spaten![24]
Das Abgesteckte muß sogleich geraten.
Auf strenges Ordnen, raschen Fleiß
Erfolgt der allerschönste Preis;
Daß sich das größste Werk vollende,
Genugt ein Geist für tausend Hände.[25]
(Goethe, 1963, Faust, Kaufman Translation, p. 463)
In the End Faust may be bumbling and blinded, and his “work” utterly doomed (what he eventually thinks is his work is only the digging of his own grave) but his spirit is in a sense ascending as the work descends. There yet remains for Dr. Faustus, in the shadow of Augustine, the trembling and fallible, impossible redemption.
Section 7: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Persecutors
Another tangent on the path to “the very idea of a confessional scheme” lies in Rousseau’s Confessions. Completed in 1770, eight years before his death and nearly fourteen centuries after Augustine wrote his own work (397 CE), the Confessions ply a more sophisticated air of Enlightenment France, seething with the possibility of atheism and revolution. And yet these Confessions dare to speak of a similar scheme of baring oneself and one’s soul to the world for all to see – and we may say in the light that Faust was blind: at last to see. What we actually see at last however in this intimate study is the overwhelming possibility of the terror of personal existence (not only to speak of France’s post-revolutionary “Terror”), the monument of persecution and persecutors.
Rousseau’s Confessions contains at least one double text (there may be many)[26]: on the one hand Rousseau presents with open and magnanimous tone his reveries for us to see. This space is smooth and unruffled. Even though Rousseau offers us “confessions” of acts that might be deeply controversial and troubling for the reader (He uses the term “confession” as a “confession-of-sin”[27] –or at least confession of a “compromising” moral action) it is always with a clear and equanimous tone. On the other hand Rousseau offers us a strange and utterly contemporary text, held together with a paranoia and a sense of persecution that will not be echoed until the nightmarish genius of Franz Kafka opens up the possibility of the Bestandsaufnahme[28] a hundred-and-fifty years later.
I HAVE begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.
I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.
I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, "Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man."
(Online resource: http://www.swan.ac.uk/poli/texts/rousseau/confa.htm)
Rousseau writes “without precedent.” What more could be said? He wants to present us with an image, a “man in all the truth of nature.” He wants as much as is conceivable to reproduce a “man” through writing. Nowhere does he have a credible source for the “complete” memories (and forgettings) of any one man other than from himself. He wants to translate his life into language. This is yet another example of a kind of “creation myth.”
What are the myths of creation of a “man” – by a “man?” Rousseau’s efforts are reminiscent of earlier attempts to create a “Golem” in Kabbalistic literature, or a “Homunculus” in alchemical lore. Those attempts were shrouded in obscurity: did people literally try to do this? Later literature would present the same dilemma of creation of a man, but more purely as a literary phenomenon, an allegory of hubris, in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and in Jorge-Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins.” In the literary formulations of this myth is a strange and haunting warning against the hubris of attempting to become like the Divine in duplicating His creation. Rousseau touches on the possibility of hubris, but remains grounded in his faults and foibles enough to simply relate his tale in earnest.
Why the fourteen-hundred years between Augustine and Rousseau? Had nobody else published a book or text revealing their hidden sins? Had we given up all our sins before this perfectly to our Christian “Father-Confessor,” and because of the Church “confessional” we no longer had any need to state them publicly, before the rabble and its insatiable greed.[29] Perhaps Augustine and Rousseau in this respect are bookends on the long dilemma of the “personal confessor” in Western Literature. The rupture of the personal container of the Roman Catholic Church was finally becoming complete. Had Augustine confessed as a “rule”[30] and a model[31] (the “model of confession,” exemplum, from the “model confessor”) for how confession should be done, and had this confession been enough for every human in the western world for fourteen-hundred years? [32] With Rousseau was the container broken? Did once more a seemingly innocent man have to expose himself to scandal in the outraged public?
Rousseau still speaks to some sort of “God,” a “Power Eternal,” so for him in a sense this god is not dead, but rises above the contest of “the innumerable throng of my fellow mortals.” God is not dead, but it is a strange and unseemly listener, perhaps the originator of the paranoid sense of persecution in the sordid affair of Rousseau’s Confessions.
Countless times, during my apprenticeship and since, I have gone out with the idea of buying some dainty. As I come to the pastry-cook’s I catch sight of the women behind the counter and can already imagine them laughing amongst themselves and making fun of the greedy youngster. Then I pass the fruiterer’s and look at the ripe pears out of the corner of my eye; the scent of them tempts me. But two or three young people over there are looking at me; a man I know is standing in front of the shop; I can see a girl coming from the distance. Is she not our maidservant? My short sight is constantly deceiving me. I take everyone who passes for someone I know. I am frightened by everything and discover obstacles everywhere. As my discomfort grows my desire increases. But in the end I go home like an idiot, consumed by my longing and with money enough in my pocket to satisfy it, but not having dared to buy anything. (Cohen, 1953, p.45)
This is good because while Rousseau wants to blithely accept his fate as a hungry young man going to buy some fruit, he realizes he “can’t go on” to the stall to actually buy it. He is stalled before the stall. While this for Rousseau appears as the confession of a mere idiosyncrasy, for the reader it may be extended to a complete metaphysics contending with the rationalist and romantic schemes of his time. The importance of this subtle ailment, Rousseau’s myopia, coupled with the sense that at any moment he could be taken unawares, reported upon as a spendthrift or a wastrel, heightens the sense that there is something integral that he does not see. The hidden taboo is more potent than the stated one. The facile semblance of desire and (capitalist) consumption is somehow hidden and rarefied in the simple political act of buying a pear or a pastry. The act becomes intolerable, on a paranoid level rending the fabric and stability of the universe that holds to its creeds of tact and immunity from blame. While my interpretation here is hyperbole and an exaggeration, it is only through this exaggeration that we see a possible re-coupling that moves from frank admission to reading a barely concealed “scream” held in Rousseau’s text. The “scream” is at the same time a song and a parable: a parable of the senseless of continuing to do anything, which in fact one must simply continue to do.
“Confession” for Rousseau seems to be marked as a “confession of sin.” At the same time the guilt of the sin lies parallel with a sense of persecution that may precipitate the sin. Toward the end of book three of the Confessions, Rousseau (Cohen, 1953) exclaims concerning his abandonment of M. Le Maitre in the midst of a fit (of epilepsy?), “Heaven be praised that I have finished this third disgraceful confession!” (p.128). Such a confession would evidently have the potential compromise the opinion of his personality in his readers’ eyes. Note also that Rousseau’s sin is “abandonment,” as he will eventually abandon his own children later in his life. It seems that Rousseau seems to be unable to hold the duress of fathering the sick and the young very well any more than he could handle the wanton eros of the Moor in the seminary for converts (Cohen, 1953, p71), which he thought also to be at first a fit of “epilepsy.” These “fits” generally impinge so deeply upon Rousseau that he cannot seem to do anything but run. They are pretty terrifying non-ego states, and yet he does not escape them without mention, which leads to some sense of conscience remaining in his guilt, conscience about what remains unconscious. Rousseau felt persecuted by the moor’s sense of sexuality, as indeed he may have felt persecuted by M. Le Maitre’s slovenly drunkenness, which continually attended his character as well. Rousseau may have felt indeed even persecuted by his own children, and gave them up to the world or to death[33] in the same manner.
Section 8: Does Jean Jacques Rousseau Dream? (Memories, Dreams and Ridicule)
The answer seems to be “no,” he does not dream in the way C.G. Jung for instance documented his dreaming in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. This does not mean that Jean-Jacques has no relation to the unconscious. He seems to attain some relation to the unconscious through his intrigues with women or men, particularly through scandal and ridicule.[34]
Rousseau constantly plays in his Confessions with the delectation of scandal. The word “scandal” comes from the Greek skandalon, which means in the earliest a “trap set for one’s enemies,” and later, in Christian times becomes known of as “a stumbling block.” “Ridicule” and “ridiculous” come from ridere, which means to laugh, and it may be akin to the Sanskrit word vridate, meaning “he is ashamed.” The element of Christian shame (with its concomitant splitting into an impossible ideal of “Christian” life which abuses people to this day in its extreme denial of darkness) seems to play into our fascination with the spectacle of having committed the shameful act. This may even be compared to Dante’s late Medieval Christian epic poems on the wages of sin and suffering: the Inferno and the Purgatorio. We seem compelled to look again at what exactly might happen in the after-world, the horrors of sin become a topography of fire and ice torment in the underworld, or unbearable burden in Purgatory. We want to know the place and the topography of sin. It is no mean coincidence that Slattery (1999) connects the construction of the Paris sewer system as a topos of excrement to Rousseau’s writing of the Confessions. Nor is it a coincidence that Dorothy Sayers compares Dante’s Inferno to the sewers of a great city. But the place of rot and refuse is the natural result of the development of the intense structuration and complexity both of the personal ego and of the collective city-state. The ego (as it develops and creates more and more waste) will always feel a sense of loss and nostalgia for what it has “refused.”
Scandal[35] tinged with severe paranoia (the knowledge that Rousseau may be a completely mad, and that these are the ravings of a madman) is what keeps the reader on the edge. Did the severely deluded Rousseau invent the incident where he threw his own children into an orphanage, as some have lead us to suspect?[36] In this dark labyrinth of scandal and persecution, the sense of any transparent transmission of the events of his life takes on a wonderously opaque turn. One is not certain of the truth of one’s conditions, whether Rousseau or the reader is completely mad in the pursuit of reading/writing the Confessions.
Scandal is the discourse of the dark feminine agents, the “furies.” The inner aspect of scandal is “intrigue,” but scandal made public, and therefore “political” is nothing less than revolutionary. This speaks to Rousseau’s lust for the politicization of human life and the desire he has for revolution, overturning the powers that be, on the reverse of his own paranoid lunacy. It is the site of a bitchy and petty drama where the ad hominem controversy rages between his scrupulous honesty and his unscrupulous actions. It is not at all fair, but it is the revenge of a counter discourse, perhaps even feminine discourse (gossip) against the scruples of an altogether too reasonable man. Here Rousseau attempts to bring together this possibly feminine discourse of gossip and scandal against his own hardened rational discussion of politics, liberty and human freedom.
Section 9, Conclusion: Violence, the doctor, and failure of the “Confessional Scheme”
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
(Bob Dylan, 1965, “Love minus zero no limit”)
Failure is a tricky thing. If one can just fail enough, but not fail too much, there is some possibility of success. Failure happens on the institutional level, therefore there is failure in the writings of Augustine and Rousseau on the level of the institution. Augustine’s writing failed insofar as it succeeded in becoming the model of a millennium of confessions that came after him. He was an institutional success, he succeeded in defeating the spirit of the Manichees whose best point was heresy in the face of the institutional church of Rome. At the same time the chief fault of the Manichees was in their own institutional success, they were lead by a “doctor,” Doctor Faustus himself.
The failing point here is that the doctor assumes a dangerous hubris: he pretends to know some part of the universe outside himself, and this he claims it as his own, he then dictates to kings and poor men alike what their actions should be based upon his knowing, the authority of his knowledge as an expert. The “doctor” steals power from the violence of the monarch, king or despot in the name of “universal knowledge.” This is not in itself bad until one discovers that the “doctor” has along with the power subsumed some of the despot’s violence as well. It may be that violence is not altogether a bad thing either, if one is capable of holding the violence with consciousness of one’s sin in doing so.[37] However it is not clear that Augustine was capable of accepting the sin of his own violence. For him all violence had been washed away in the blood of the Lamb, which gave for him carte blanche for the violence to continue in an even more pernicious way.
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
(Bob Dylan, 1965, “Love minus zero no limit”)
It may be possible for Bob Dylan’s love to speak without ideals or violence that plague the element of “doctoring” throughout (it seems) all time, but it is not entirely possible for the doctor himself to do so, even if he loves this woman, this anima so much. The doctor casts the shadow of “ideals and violence” that is rife in the writings of Saint Augustine. What is this “doctor” anyway? –A doctor is one who “teaches” (Latin: docere), but in the farthest root of the word we see the stem dek, which from Sanskrit means “to take.” Who are these “doctors” then, these “takers” of wisdom (“my love,” “Sophia”), who assume worldly power, “ideals and violence,” under her name? In the Roman Catholic Church the “doctor” became an “eminent theologian.” Once again this is nothing more than the co-opting of power and violence, the subsumption of the “confessional scheme” into the “institutional scheme.”[38]
On the other hand Rousseau writes his confessions with the singular consolation that he is mad, utterly insane, a paranoid lunatic. He rambles through endless details of his existence, toying with his mistress, who is not the literal Therese but “Scandal” herself. Rousseau’s mistress, psyche, the cold draft of the maw of the gates of hell, for his crimes, real or imagined, are not the crimes of passion but the cold seeds of betrayal.
Rousseau speaks of his betrayal of his own children, real or imagined. He speaks of the seeds of dissent sewn by those he once thought were friends but are now his enemies. There is no humor in this work, a humor or grace that would seem to say that after all they are “just friends,” and nothing more could be asked of them. Did he make himself sick by wandering into the nether regions of “object constancy?”[39]
Rousseau contributes the literature of “betrayal and scandal” to the modern conception of humanity in the negative light of Reason. Already central to his beliefs was the semi-psychological statement, “man is born free, but everywhere is in chains,” positing a “state of nature” (pre-figuring “developmental psychology” in Emile, for example, a work that forced his exile) that is absolutely, radically free. This “state of nature” is in fact a double statement: “you are free to live and thrive, under our protection,” and “you are free to die, abandoned.” The infant is free but helpless, always brought up in the company and care of others who take care or her/him at the expense of her/his freedom. It is small wonder then that Rousseau struggled under the yoke of religious dogma in countries that allowed him to survive so long as he did not “cross” them.[40] When he actually did so, he was abandoned, principally a figure of European intellectual greatness who belonged nowhere in Europe and would sink into oblivion outside of Europe if he chose to leave. He did not leave the European arena however, but moved furtively at the edge of European whim with his longing for freedom, his paranoia, and his will to survive.
His work would inspire imitators of no less greatness (Goethe, Tolstoy, Mill, Gide, Proust…), who would gamble at the gates of their own hell of abandonment and persecution. Proust seems to be the most radically “interior” writer of the whole bunch, our image of a man confined to his bed and to utter reclusiveness. He doesn’t want to overturn anything in a political revolution the way Rousseau does and the way it haunts Rousseau’s writings, especially Rousseau’s Confessions. Goethe on the other hand seems to extend somehow beyond (if there is a “beyond,” or maybe just “on the side,” or “between the cracks”) the discourse of politics and the interior altogether in his writing Dichtung und Wahrheit, (Poetry and Truth).
What Rousseau and Augustine have contributed, both in success and failure, is an important discussion of what it means when the author, the “researcher,” takes on the task of taking stock of their own life in the “research” project. The results lead to conundrums round the issue of either alienating or perpetuating masculine authority itself in the person of “the Church.” Augustine uses his biography to perpetuate and glorify the “body of the Church,” and Rousseau discovers to his chagrin (but possible saint-hood) what happens when you do not.
These writers both contributed to a sense of the autobiographical subject, both in the sense of subjectivity, the “I” or “ego,” and in the sense that the “subject-matter” of one’s personal experience is a “thing” or “topos” that should be talked about. They both saw their lives as a chronological and developmental series of steps leading to some inevitable “truth” or “reality.” Augustine saw his life as leading up to an ultimate conversion experience into the hallowed “authority” of the Church, and Rousseau saw his life leading up to the hounded “authority” of none other than his paranoid isolation and “individualism.”
Part of the error of these projects was to conceive of there being “one life” which had its concrete development and realization in the ego and its personal history. However their writings prefigure later works by Kafka and Kleist, even Joyce. Later fiction and literature will conceive of the ego as being nightmarishly imposed upon or removed from consciousness: one wakes up one day and finds they do not know who or what they are, or a fate has been imposed which they find impossible yet necessary to relate. And to some extent Augustine and Rousseau achieve this through their fumbling assimilation or excommunication from the essentially alien, horrifying structure of the Church and its “authority” in their works. In this sense they embody the words of Samuel Beckett when he writes, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
[1] The name “Laura Pozzo” is evidently a pseudonym according to the page on publishing information in James Hillman’s (1983) Inter-Views. That her name itself is a fiction leads one to all kinds of ironic speculation, including that the interviewer may as well be James Hillman, and that he is interviewing himself!
[2] Unfortunately crimes may be committed in the name of “art” just as easily as they are in the name of “religion” or “politics.” If there is redemption or “grace” it happens as a condition living in the present and cannot be contained in any text, writing or “work of art.”
[3] I use the term “a weird kind of social science I seem to be re-inventing” due to the marginal nature of my writing of my own person, in the hopes that this intense particularity will shed greater light in the domain of research. I may however be only “re-inventing” a topic that has existed in many works and autobiographical reflections extant in this culture already.
[4] Interestingly this is the case of pre-Renaissance, pre-perspectival painting, particularly the construction of Icons in the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Figures are “larger” not because they are nearer in some kind of space per-se, but because they have so much more intensity and proximity to the believer’s “soul.” Icons construe size on the basis of imaginal intensity, an element that would be really developed in Europe only in certain figures from Impressionism onward.
[5] C.G. Jung’s (1971) (from Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) term for “self” is part of what is implied here, “a psychic totality and at the same time a center, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it, just as a larger circle encloses a smaller one” (p.142). The use of the term “totality” is problematic because what is being described “beyond” the ego appears to be “infinite,” therefore irreducible to being “one” totality. This is a Levinasian (1969) interjection from his work Totality and Infinity.
[6] Reference can be made to the Western canonical version of the Bible (“King James,” 1611) at this point. Luke 12:8 uses the term “confession” as an “open profession of faith.” Whereas the other versions refer to confession as a kind of admission of sin to God (Lev. 16:21; Ezra 9:5-15; Dan. 9:3-12), and to a neighbour whom we have wronged (James 5:16; Matt. 18:15). The sense here is that confession is a religious act that is irrational or beyond reason, whose very potency resides in these strata of consciousness that resist the rational point of view. The attempt to be “reasonable” about this approach to research would leave one miles away
[7] Truth comes from the word “troth” which is a marriage proposal. The notion of marriage to the mother becomes part of the heroic defense of consciousness from the incest of the mother of the past and marriage to the mother of immanence, the present.
[8] This gives new emphasis on the notion of the heroic sacrifice as not looking back in to the incestuous embrace of the mother. At the same time it serves the mother who must always exist in the present moment. This passage by Jung (1990) in his text Symbols of Transformation (also discussed in my text on Robert Musil’s work) relates to the issue of “looking back” or not “looking back” in sacrifice and the “creation of the world as we know it today”:
To the extent that the world and everything in it is a product of thought, the sacrifice of the libido that strives back to the past necessarily results in the creation of the world. For him who looks backwards, the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides, and from the renunciation of this image, and of the longing for it, arises the picture of the world as we know it today. This simple thought is what constitutes the meaning of the cosmic sacrifice, a good example being the slaying of Tiamat, the Babylonian mother-dragon, from whose body heaven and earth were made. (pp. 415-416)
[9] I borrow the term “defense of consciousness against ignorance” from a brief fragment of a musical work on compact disk called Sri Durga (1999) by Cheb I Sabbah. The term is decidedly East Indian in its flavor or intention.
[10] This notion comes from Gerhard Adler’s (1961) book The Living Symbol, which is a case study of a woman’s process of individuation and coming to relationship with her own unconscious life.
[11] The makers of history presume some kind of telos, even if it is merely “natural selection” (Darwin). The point here is to not see the history of things as some kind of legitimation of the state, but in a sense to do away with history for the sake of a symbol that involves a participation in lived memory. The symbol lives and is living. Where history bends toward a rational goal, even if it is the notion of “development,” (infancy, childhood, youth, adulthood and maturity, and old age in that order) and it tends to be about an author (Rousseau, Augustine, or even a modern nation-state), the symbol rambles. The symbol may begin with a personal history, but may really be using that personal history to speak of a non-personal event. It contradicts itself of necessity. The symbol draws on its own “bloody mess” not to affirm certainty, but the profound intensity of its uncertainty. This “uncertainty” may become a Dionysian intoxicant, a reverie, an ecstasy, but it may just as easily remain nothing at all, endless, hellish waiting. Its momentary flashes of great insight cannot be reconciled without necessarily destroying them, and therefore it must leave them as certain phrases held in the tension and “polemos” of dispute.
[12] Here I am considering Franz Kafka’s parable on “Poseidon”:
He was in the habit of saying that what he was waiting for was the fall of the world; then, probably, a quiet moment would yet be granted in which, just before the end and after having checked the last row of figures, he would be able to make a quick little tour. (online web source: http://zork.net/~patty/kposeidon.html)
[13] Interestingly enough, Jung (1971)names Augustine as one of the precursors of his conception of the “archetype,” in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:
The term “archetype” is not found in St. Augustine, but the idea of it is. Thus in De diversis questionibus LXXXIII he speaks of “ideae principales,” “which themselves are not formed… but are contained in the divine understanding.” (p.4)
The “archetype” is the most spiritualized form of an energy that first appears as “instinct.” Augustine wants to spiritualize everything and forget its instinctual counterpart as the element that brings forth real compassion. It is thus a detraction to the very notion of the “archetype” itself that it becomes associated with such an unfortunate thinker as Augustine. In any sense, the “fixed” or “universal” quality of the archetype is highly debatable, and considered antiquated in the light of post-modern philosophy. It may be argued that post-modern philosophy itself is too beholden to the puer complex, in its avoidance of fixity, its insistence on “difference,” (Derrida, 1968, Writing and Difference), “errance,” (Heidegger’s concept of “dwelling”), and “singularity” (Deleuze and Guattari, . Yet the call of all this “difference” comes from the collapse and rupture of moral law in the face of the Holocaust, where moral argument to create “Universals” fails utterly and completely. It is a major theological turn when the God of universals (archetypes) abandons humanity.
[14] Jung’s (1970) Comment from Symbols of Transformation on the terrifying relationship between sentimentality and brutality in early Christian history should not be lost here:
The head of Ostia, supposed by Cumont to be that of Mithras Tauroctonos, certainly wears an expression which we know all too well from our patients as one of sentimental resignation. It is worth noting that the spiritual transformation which took place in the first centuries of Christianity was accompanied by an extraordinary release of feeling, which expressed itself not only in the lofty form of charity and love of God, but in sentimentality and infantilism. The lamb allegories of early Christian art fall in this category.
Since sentimentality is the sister to brutality, and the two are never very far apart, they must somehow be typical of the period between the first and third centuries of our era. The morbid facial expression points to the disunity and split-mindedness of the sacrificer: he wants to and yet doesn't want to. This conflict tells us that the hero is both the sacrificer and the sacrificed. Nevertheless, it is only his animal nature that Mithras sacrifices, his instinctuality, always in close analogy to the course of the sun. (p.428)
[15] Hillman (1979), The Dream and the Underworld: “Christianism in a two-sided masterstroke, both did away with the underworld and horrified it as the perpetual alternative to the Christian path. Christianism or the underworld: one had to choose, and who would choose the horror?” (p.88)
[16] Hearkening once again to Jung’s (1970) comment from Symbols of Transformation on “Sacrifice” (pp. 415-416) and the dangers of looking back and being caught in the mothers incestuous embrace, or of not looking back so that one might create a world. This passage is cited in greater depth in my essay on Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities. The implication here in this form of confession, as in Rousseau’s confessions as well, that the confessor, in looking back is actually not making the sacrifice, and is somehow caught in the mother’s incestuous embrace.
[17] What is “relationship?” I am trying to think through the early established version of Roman Catholicism that was just taking hold, less as an object of power (which is never naïve) than as an overwhelming epiphany of the spirit of “brotherly love” or “familial love” focused on the terrible yet sentimental image of Christ as the “Lamb of God.”
[18] In a similar manner does Walter Benjamin write about Kafka and the notion of “Original Sin.” Benjamin says that for Kafka the “sin” is the resentment of the son toward the “Father” for having made him. (Walter Benjamin, 1968, Illuminations, p. 114)
[19] Rilke (2004) writes:
It's possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don't have much knowledge yet in grief --
so this massive darkness makes me small.
_You_ be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
- Ranier Rilke, trans. Rbt Bly (online source: http://home.earthlink.net/~mdmeighan/solidrock.txt )
[20] The difference between “human relationship” and “relation to world” is profound and important here. It draws from the phenomenological texts of Martin Heidegger concerning the relation of Dasein to “World.” (Being and Time) While world for Heidegger is the product of a Dasein that is capable of “world-building,” the conception of Dasein does not get stuck in the reified notion of “humanity.” The relation of Dasein that is capable of having a “World” does not in this sense privilege human beings or human consciousness over the rocks, trees, rivers, and buildings round which one dwells. To say “human” in this sense is in error because it lacks any manner of suggesting that human beings are conscious because of the stones, and that they are equally becoming stones, rivers, the sky and the ocean, all of which co-create consciousness. In a sense the error of Doctor Faustus is the error of a man believing he can get into a space capsule and be complete without the Earth, which also is his consciousness and in a sense to which his consciousness belongs. The re-discovery of Faustus, however is the possibility of having a world however at any distance from the ground.
[21] The composer’s fictive biography is based loosely on the lives of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arnold Schoenberg. Scheoenberg’s life is obviously implicated as a 20th century composer of 12-tone music. But Friedrich Nietzsche
[22] Psycho-babble here, no doubt, but amusing and relevant nonetheless.
[23] Genesis 28:12: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” (King James Bible)
[24] The presentation of tools, “shovel and spade” indicates the Heideggerian “zuhande” is doomed in a sense to failure.
[25] This is Doctor Faustus’s folly as an Architect (see my comments on “architects” in my essay on Dante below). In this instance Faust literally wants to engineer some system of drainage to remove the water from some swamps to make an area inhabitable, but it applies to all builders of conceptual systems alike:
Faust (Blinded):
Deep night now seems to fall more deeply still,
Yet inside me there shines a brilliant light;
What I have thought I hasten to fulfill;
The master’s word alone has real might.
Up from your straw, my servants! Every man!
Let happy eyes behold my daring plan.
Take up your tools, stir now shovel and spade!
What has been staked out must at once be made.
Precise design, swift exercise
Will always win the fairest prize;
To make the grandest dream come true,
One mind for a thousand hands will do (Kaufmann, 1963, p.463)
[26] Another bifurcation is the political writings whose purpose is to create political freedom, the radical opposite of “natural freedom” (the scheme: natural animal - corruption – social contract). The other fork being the “corrupt man” meditates on the potentiality of his “natural freedom” looking back on his “natural freedom…..” This ammounts to what Hegel called “zerissenist Bewustsein” “Unhappy consciousness.” This split-ness does not “get it together” any more, this division between political and natural man. The romantic model of “return to nature” presents a dangerous kind of incestuous relation to the mother “looking back.” Marx resolves this but at the expense of interior life. Nietzsche resolves this in madness in Ecce Homo, whereas Kafka resolves this in the interior nightmare of the imagination but only at the expense of complete intransigence with the outer world. The weight of the imagination makes it impossible to move even to “the next village,” but the resolving horror is that one never wanted to go to the next village in the first place, but rather to live in the experience of the “symbol of the present….”
[27] In his essay on Rousseau in The Wounded Body, Slattery points out a singular weird relation of the writing of Rousseau’s Confessions to the construction of the Paris sewer system. Both seem to have had an attraction at that time and ever after, such that people feel compelled to visit and tour the Paris sewers, and perhaps in the same light people feel compelled to peruse Rousseau’s Confessions. Something uncanny and numinous resides in the stench of odorous filth or sin (or “refuse,” that which we refuse from our bodies) that points to a way of dealing with the unconscious altogether in its dark labyrinthine passage away from the clean, well-lit constructions for the ego. In this manner Rousseau succedes in relating to the unconscious through his sin. The problem with the Confessions as with the “sewer system” is that there is always more difficult and undeniable quantities of shit to deal with.
[28] One possible advent of the “Bestandsaufnahme” lies in the break Kafka made in his second engagement with Feliz Bauer in 1917. Here lies the impossibility for Kafka of finding an engagement to woman and life (c.f. my citations on Thomas Bernhardt’s Concrete in my reveries of August 2004), which at the same time indicates a movement toward the position of Beckett: “I can’t go on; I’ll go on.” Note also that the Bestandsaufnahme relegates the notion of autobiography of a “subject” or “individual” to the dustbin of architectural thought. There is no “individual” that contains the events of one’s life, personal events become woven into a disconcerted fabric of unrest leading to singular moments of poesis and poetic imagination.
[29] This is where one may discuss once again Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, to see where “public confession” played a role in the drama of justice and punishment as a display of power.
[30] Was Saint Augustine an Architect? The answer seems to be “yes,” if we apply the conception of “architects” (Discussed at length in my essay on Dante later) to Saint Augustine’s mother’s dream, we see that she dreams her son as an “architect.” Saint Augustine’s mother dreams her son upon a rule, which is a ruler for architects to draw up their plan. Moreover the confessions themselves act as a kind of architectural plan or rubric, a ruler for the design and execution of all further confession thereafter.
[31] Saint Teresa of Avila (16th Cent. CE) also wrote A Life of herself in a similar manner to Augustine’s “example.” This however indicates that by the time of the renaissance the architectural plan of the “Confession” was somehow waning in its power to hold and circumscribe experience. Femininity is the first to “break out” of the rubrick and therefore the first to need to be bolstered through Saint Teresa’s form of “Confessions.”
[32] Later (Freud and Jung) this model would be “privatized” in the development of psychoanalysis as a capitalist “model” of consumer “confession.” But this model in a sense lacks the fragmentation of the “ich” or “ego,” which Freud himself over-privileged in his attempts at constructing a psychological model of “health.”
[33] Once again (as I have mentioned previously) this alludes to the passage from the Upanishads (Mascuro translation, 1984), the Katha Upanishad, where the father gives his son to death (p.55).
[34] It is worth mentioning on this point the passable film entitled Ridicule (Directed by Patrice Leconte, 1996), set in late 18th century France (1783, which would make it only four years after Rousseau’s death) in the high court of Louis XVI. Ridicule emphasized that mastery of wit and derision could mean the difference of life or death at that time. Rousseau by all accounts did not have a mind that worked with the quick viciousness (and superficiality) to flatter his patrons and destroy his enemies with a turn of a word. Rousseau however did argue a great deal, which served to alienate his benefactors. Interestingly, the plot of Ridicule revolves around a man attempting to obtain aid from Louis XVI in the construction of a drainage system in his homeland. This drainage system parallels both Goethe’s Faust II, the fallacy of constructing a drainage system for a swamp near his estate, and the relation of Rousseau’s Confessions to the construction of the Paris Sewers.
[35] One of the greatest late expressions of scandal in a pure literary form is read in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. The perverse, schizotypal main character of L’Etranger, named Mersault, who murders an Arab man out of pure obscene existential whim (set in French colonial Algiers, a post-colonial critique may be necessary) prays only to met in the hour of his execution with “howls of execration.” This ultimate expression of “scandal” may lead us to wondering whether the researcher ultimately turns to various forms of homicide or suicide in his “acts of research.” It may be further discussed at a later point the essence of Camus’ question in The Myth of Sysiphus over whether one honestly ought to or ought not to commit suicide.
[36] The article on Rousseau in the 1950 edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia (pp. 1709-1710) even goes so far as to suggest that Rousseau never even had children, that his children themselves were simply confabulations of his deluded mind. This would be entirely to his credit because while exonerating him from the literal crime, he would be permitted to achieve it as a phantasm of his own twisted consciousness, a strange artistic monument to terror and guilt.
[37] Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”
[38] An interesting parallel here is to Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s discussion of the co-opting of the nomadic “war machine” into the “state apparatus” in their essay on “Nomadology: the War Machine.” Here the “confessional scheme” is related to the nomadic, poetic breaking with the “state,” much as the “confessions” by virtue of their being written, come to “police” (control and regulate) the most intimate flows and concretize them in the “individual” (who is rendered discrete, and therefore controllable by the state).
[39] A term borrowed from “object relations” or “self psychology” (Margaret Mahler, 1979, Selected Papers) psychotherapy that indicates the capacity of a person to hold both “good” and “bad” objects of affection as being part of the same person, for example “the loving mother,” and “the killing mother.” This may be the reason why in fairy tales (I am thinking of “Hansel and Gretel,” which is a tale of horrendous abandonment and betrayal not unlike Rousseau’s case) the loving parents are separated from the witch, because childish consciousness cannot tolerate the paradox that the loving and the killing world/mother are one and the same. But “object constancy” denotes that the child has a sense of the “mother’s” presence whether she is in the room or has left for a moment, the child can feel the “mother’s” presence constantly whether she is literally present or not.
[40] It was Emile that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and got Rousseau banished. I am thinking of the passages in Book 4 of Emile, which he wrote in the name of “Reason:”
[1076:] "Our Catholics talk loudly of the authority of the Church; but what is the use of it all, if they also need just as great an array of proofs to establish that authority as the other seeks to establish their doctrine? The Church decides that the Church has a right to decide. What a well-founded authority! Go beyond it, and you are back again in our discussions.
This clearly rebels against the authority of the church, whose part is given voice in the name of “inspiration.” The question remains whether he could overcome his dispute with the patristic “authority” through his love of the feminine voice that is the source of all “inspiration” in the first place….
