No actual court, however, would admit such a fatuous argument. No piece of writing can spell out all of its conceivable implications. You might just as well claim that Shylock’s bond makes no reference to the use of a knife either, or to whether Shylock’s hair should be tied back in a rather fetching pony-tail at the moment of incision. Portia’s reading of the bond is false because too faithful: it is a fundamentalist reading, sticking pedantically to the letter of the text and thus flagrantly falsifying its meaning. To be exact, interpretation must be creative. It must draw upon tacit understandings of how life and language work, practical know-how which can never be precisely formulated, which is just what Portia refuses to do. If we want to be as clear as possible, a certain roughness is unavoidable.
Fundamentalists want a strong foundation to the world, which in their case is usually a sacred text. We have seen already that a text is the worst possible stuff for this purpose. The idea of an inflexible text is as odd as the idea of an inflexible piece of string. We can contrast fundamentalism in this respect with the heterodox Jewish tradition of interpretation known as Kabbalah, which takes apparently scandalous liberties with sacred texts, reading them against the grain, treating them as cryptograms and conjuring from them the most esoteric meanings. For some Kabbalists, there is a missing letter in the scriptures, which once restored will make them read quite differently. For others, the spaces between the words of scripture are themselves missing letters, which God will one day teach us how to interpret.
There are no missing letters for the fundamentalist. He wants to support life with death – to prop up the living with a dead letter. Once the letters of the Bible or Koran begin to stir, the foundations begin to shake. Matthew’s gospel, in a moment of carelessness, presents Jesus as riding into Jerusalem on both a colt and an ass – in which case the Son of God must have had one leg over each. The letter must be rigidly embalmed, if it is to endow life with the certitude and finality of death. Meaning must be watertight and copper-bottomed. Once acknowledge that the word ‘bank’ has more than one meaning, and before you know where you are it can mean anything from ‘proleptic’ to ‘staphylococcus’.
There is a paradox here, however. Fundamentalism is a kind of necrophilia, in love with the dead letter of a text. It treats words as though they were things, as weighty and undentable as a brass candlestick. Yet it does this because it wants to freeze certain meanings for all eternity – and meaning itself is not material. The ideal situation for the fundamentalist would thus be to have meanings but not written language – for writing is perishable, corporeal and easily contaminated. It is a lowly vehicle for such hallowed truths. There is a connection between fundamentalism’s contempt for the material body of the word, which is precious only because of the imperishable truth it incarnates, and its callous way with human life. It is ready to destroy the whole of creation to preserve the purity of an idea. And this is certainly a form of madness. The desire for purity is a desire for non-being. It is to this subject that we can now turn.
8
Death, Evil and Non-being
Fundamentalists are basically fetishists. For Sigmund Freud, a fetish is whatever you use to plug some ominous gap; and the unnerving vacancy which fundamentalists hasten to fill is simply the fuzzy, rough-textured, open-ended nature of human existence. It is non-being which fundamentalists fear most. And what they plug it with is dogma.
This is a labour of Sisyphus, since non-being is what we are made of. ‘We Irishmen,’ observed the Irish philosopher George Berkeley, ‘are apt to think something and nothing to be near neighbours.’ Human consciousness is not a thing in itself, but is definable only in terms of what it looks at or thinks about. In itself, it is entirely empty. David Hume, perhaps the greatest of British philosophers, confessed that when he looked into his mind he could find nothing that was purely himself, as opposed to a perception or sensation of something else. Besides, because we are historical animals we are always in the process of becoming, perpetually out ahead of ourselves. Because our life is a project rather than a series of present moments, we can never achieve the stable identity of a mosquito or a pitchfork.
Exhortations to seize the day, make hay while the sun shines, live like there’s no tomorrow, gather rosebuds and eat, drink and be merry are thus bound to have something of a callow ring to them. It is the very fact that we cannot live in the present – that the present for us is always part of an unfinished project – which converts our lives from chronicles to narratives. There is nothing particularly precious in living like a goldfish. We cannot choose to live non-historically: history is quite as much our destiny as death.
It is true that in a society which actually trades in futures, the lilies of the field may well be worth imitating, even though it is hard to know just what it would feel like to live like a lily. If we were able to live on the spot, our existence would no doubt be a good deal less agitated than it is. But to bite the present moment to the core, in the words of the poet Edward Thomas, would be to experience a kind of eternity. As Wittgenstein saw, eternity, if it is anywhere, must be here and now. And eternity is not for us. With humans, there is always more being where that came from. We are a not-yet rather than a now. Our life is one of desire, which hollows our existence to the core. If freedom is of our essence, then we are bound to give the slip to any exhaustive definition of ourselves. And if we are also self-contradictory beasts, suspended between earth and sky, the animal and the angelic, we are even more resistant to being defined or represented.
Human beings are the joker in the pack, the dark stain at the centre of the landscape, the glory, jest and riddle of the world. For Pascal, humanity is a freak, ‘a monster that passes all understanding’. We are prodigious, chaotic and paradoxical: ‘feeble earthworm, repository of truth… glory and refuse of the universe!’1 Man, Pascal concludes, ‘transcends Man’. Violating or transgressing our nature is what comes naturally to us. In Hegel’s eyes, pure being is utterly indeterminate, and so indistinguishable from nothingness. For Schopenhauer, the self is a ‘bottomless void’. For the anarchist Max Stirner, humanity is a kind of ‘creative nothing’. For Martin Heidegger, to live authentically is to embrace our own nothingness, accepting the fact that our existence is contingent, ungrounded and unchosen. For Sigmund Freud, the negativity of the unconscious infiltrates our every word and deed.
Ideology is around to make us feel necessary; philosophy is on hand to remind us that we are not. To see the world aright is to see it in the light of its contingency. And this means seeing it in the shadow of its own potential non-being. ‘Whatever is,’ writes Theodor Adorno, ‘is experienced in relation to its possible non-being. This alone makes it fully a possession…’2 To see something for real is to celebrate the felicitous accident of its existence. The modernist work of art, existing in an epoch without foundations, has somehow to manifest the truth that it might just as well never have existed, simply to be authentic. Treating itself provisionally is the nearest it can come to truth. This is one reason why irony is such a favoured modernist figure.
Human beings, too, have to live ironically. To accept the unfoundedness of our own existence is among other things to live in the shadow of death. Nothing more graphically illustrates how unnecessary we are than our mortality. To accept death would be to live more abundantly. By acknowledging that our lives are provisional, we can slacken our neurotic grip on them and thus come to relish them all the more. Embracing death is in this sense the opposite of taking a morbid fancy to it. Besides, if we really could keep death in mind, we would almost certainly behave a good deal more virtuously than we do. If we lived permanently at the point of death, it would presumably be easier to forgive our enemies, repair our relationships, abandon as not worth the trouble our latest campaign to buy up Bayswater and evict every last one of its tenants. It is partly the illusion that we will live for ever which prevents us from doing these things. Immortality and immorality are closely allied.
Death is both al
ien and intimate to us, neither wholly strange nor purely one’s own. To this extent, one’s relationship to it resembles one’s relationship to other people, who are likewise both fellows and strangers. Death may not be exactly a friend, but neither is it entirely an enemy. Like a friend, it can enlighten me about myself, though like an enemy it does so in ways I would on the whole rather not hear. It can remind me of my creatureliness and finitude, of the fragile, ephemeral nature of my existence, of my own neediness and the vulnerability of others. By learning from this, we can turn facts into values. By being woven into our lives in this way, death can become less daunting, less of a baleful force which is simply out to tear us apart. It is indeed out to tear us apart; but in the process it can intimate to us something of how to live. And this is the kind of behaviour appropriate to a friend.
But it is not just that death can give us some friendly advice. It is also that friends can rescue us from death, or at least help to disarm its terrors. The absolute self-abandonment which death demands of us is only tolerable if we have rehearsed for it somewhat in life. The self-giving of friendship is a kind of petit tnort, an act with the inner structure of dying. This, no doubt, is one meaning of St Paul’s dictum that we die every moment. In this sense, death is one of the inner structures of social existence itself. The ancient world believed its social order had to be cemented by sacrifice, and it was perfectly correct. It was just that it tended to see such sacrifice in terms of libations and slaughtered goats rather than as a structure of mutual self-giving. Once social institutions are so ordered that such self-giving is reciprocal and all-round, sacrifice in the odious sense of some people having to relinquish their happiness for the sake of others would be less necessary.
A society which is shy of death is also likely to be rattled by foreigners. Both mark out the limits of our own lives, relativizing them in unpalatable ways. But in one sense all others are foreigners. My identity lies in the keeping of others, and this – because they perceive me through the thick mesh of their own interests and desires – can never be an entirely safe keeping. The self I receive back from others is always rather shopsoiled. It is mauled by their own desires – which is not to say their desire for me. But it remains the case that I can know who I am or what I am feeling only by belonging to a language which is never my personal possession. It is others who are the custodians of my selfhood. ‘I borrow myself from others,’ as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks.3 It is only in the speech I share with them that I can come to mean anything at all.
This meaning is not one I can ever fully possess, since neither can those who fashion it. This is because it is not simply a matter of their opinions of me. If this were so, why not just ask them? It is a matter of the way in which my existence figures within their own lives in ways of which neither I nor they can ever be fully conscious. To trace the rippling effects on others of the most trifling of my actions, or just of my brute presence in the world, I would need to deploy a whole army of researchers. This is not only a modern insight; it is also part of the teaching of the great Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna, for whom the self has no essence because it is bound up with the lives of countless others, the product of their choices and conduct. It cannot be lifted clear of this web of meanings. Besides, our lives take on part of their meaning posthumously: the future will always rewrite us, perhaps plucking comedy from what was tragedy at the time, or vice versa. This is another sense in which the meaning of your life is bound to elude you while you are living it. What you are does not end with your death.
Death shows us the ultimate unmasterability of our lives, and therefore something of the bogusness of trying to master the lives of others. If I am intractable to myself, I can hardly demand instant pliability from others. Only by not mistreating oneself -by accepting that you can have no final dominion over yourself, that you are a stranger to yourself – can your dealings with yourself be a model for your dealings with others. One would not wish to be treated by some other people in the way they treat themselves. And this means renouncing the death-dealing ideology of the will.
This is just what the fundamentalist is unable to do. He cannot accept contingency. His life anticipates death, but in all the wrong ways. Far from the reality of death loosening his neurotic grip on life, it tightens it to a white-knuckled intensity. The fundamentalist tries to outwit death by the crafty strategy of projecting its absolutism on to life, thus making life itself eternal and imperishable. But is it then life the fundamentalist is in love with, or death? We have to find a way of living with non-being without being in love with it, since being in love with it is the duplicitous work of the death drive. It is the death drive which cajoles us into tearing ourselves apart in order to achieve the absolute security of nothingness. Non-being is the ultimate purity. It has the unblemishedness of all negation, the perfection of a blank page.
There is, then, a profound paradox to fundamentalism. On the one hand it is terrified of non-being, of the sheer sprawling gratuitousness of the material world, and wants to seal the fissures in this ramshackle structure with a stuffing of first principles, fixed meanings and self-evident truths. The world’s contingency, its improvised air, reminds it intolerably of the fact that it could easily not exist. Fundamentalism is fearful of nihilism, having failed to notice that nihilism is simply the mirror-image of its own absolutism. The nihilist is almost always a disenchanted absolutist, the rebellious Oedipal child of the metaphysical father. Like his father, he believes that if values are not absolute, there are no values at all. If father was wrong, then nobody else can be right.
There is, however, a deeper affinity between nihilism and fundamentalism. If fundamentalism detests non-being, it also is allured by the prospect of it, since nothing could be less open to misinterpretation. Non-being is the enemy of instability and ambiguity. You cannot argue over its content, since it has no content at all. It is as absolute and unmistakable as the moral law, as unequivocal as a cypher. The fundamentalist is an ascetic, who wants to purge the world of surplus matter. In doing so, he can cleanse it of its sickening arbitrariness and reduce it to strict necessity. The ascetic is revolted by the monstrous fecundity of matter, and is thus a prey to nothingness. For him, there is simply too much being around the place, not least – from the viewpoint of the Islamic fundamentalist – in the West.
The ascetic can find nothing around him but an obscene excess of matter, gorging upon itself in an orgy of consumerism. (US fundamentalists are somewhat less troubled by this excess of matter, some of which they are rather keen on eating.) Like some ghastly ectoplasm, this obese stuff oozes over the edge of every space and crams itself into every crevice. Its infinity is a grisly parody of immortality, and its dynamism only serves to conceal its deathliness. Death reduces us to sheer meaningless stuff, a condition which the commodity prefigures. For all its flashy eroticism, the commodity is an allegory of death.
If all this proliferating stuff is contingent – if there is no reason for its existence in the first place – then there seems nothing to stop you from blowing a big hole in it. This is the project of the first suicide bomber in English literature, the crazed anarchist professor of Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. It is the obscenity of purposeless matter which the professor is out to destroy. Perhaps the first, catastrophic emergence of matter was itself the Fall. Perhaps the Fall and Creation coincide, so that only the violent obliteration of what exists will redeem us. The professor is an exterminating angel who is in love with annihilation for its own sake. His destruction is thus a mirror-image of the Creation, which is equally an end in itself.
The death drive is not a purposeful narrative, but the ruin of all narrative. It destroys simply for the obscene pleasure of it. The perfect terrorist is a kind of Dadaist, striking not at this or that bit of meaning but at meaning as such. It is non-sense, he believes, which society cannot stomach – events so extravagantly motiveless that they liquidate meaning by beggaring speech. Or they are acts whose meaning cou
ld be understood only on the other side of an inconceivable transformation of everything we do – one so absolute that it would be an image of death itself.
It is possible to see this simultaneous love and hatred of non-being in the narrative of Nazism. On the one hand, the Nazis were in love with death and non-being, gripped by a frenzy of destruction and dissolution. They destroyed Jews just for the hell of it, not for any overriding military or political purpose. On the other hand, they murdered them because they seemed to embody a frightful non-being which they feared and detested. They feared it because it signified a dreadful non-being inside themselves. If Nazism was stuffed full of swollen rhetoric and extravagant idealism, it was also nauseously empty.
It thus presented what might be called the two faces of evil. The fact that the word ‘evil’ has become popular in the White House as a way of shutting down analysis should not deter us from taking it seriously. Liberals tend to underplay evil, whereas conservatives tend to overestimate it. Some postmodernists, on the other hand, know of it mainly from horror movies. The conservatives are surely right to resist the liberal rationalists and sentimental humanists who seek to underrate the reality of evil. They point to its terrifying, obscene, traumatic nature, its implacable malice, its nihilistic mockery, its cynical resistance to being cajoled or persuaded. For their part, the liberals are surely right to claim that there is nothing necessarily transcendent going on here. Nothing could be more mundane than evil, which is not to say more common. Even a mild deprivation of parental love can be enough to turn us into monsters.
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