What does the apocalypse sound like? So many cultural explorations of the apocalypse are gauged to images, visions, events, “content,” and to stuff. We find the apocalypse as a what: as this or that prophecy of catastrophe, as this or that cosmic courtroom of judgment, and so forth. Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida’s wry commentary on the “apocalyptic tone,” however, this group gathered to read and discuss the apocalypse as voice and tone: as a how rather than a what and as the voice that can (or cannot?) be teased out from the prophecies and judgments days it may describe.
Once we pose the question of apocalyptic voice, what other questions can we now ask? Following Derrida’s lead again, we might wonder whether we would like to cultivate an apocalyptic tone in our own writing and thinking or whether we’d rather exorcise the apocalypse from our voice (even if such a task is impossible, per Derrida). Once disconnected from, say, a particular vision of catastrophic finality, does the apocalypse—as tone, as voice—open up new methods? Does apocalypse as voice open new ways to think through relationships between temporality, subjectivity, and language?
As we quickly learned, however, there is not a single apocalyptic voice. An unsurprising revelation, perhaps, but one that nevertheless altered (as an après-coup perhaps) how we understood our research together. We began to tease out particular types of apocalyptic voices, sorting the varieties of apocalyptic voice based primarily on how temporality and language intersected. Typologies are never as precise as they seem, but a typology can be a critical first step for it allows us to understand the stakes of our inquiry. For instance, does the apocalyptic voice speak within or outside of history? As our work suggests, it depends on which apocalyptic voice—but we can then trace the implications for a host of other themes (such as subjectivity, scripture vs. orality, and so forth) by appealing to our typology. The remainder of this short report, therefore, is an introduction to the apocalyptic voices we identified over the course of a semester: the prophetic, the messianic, the apostolic, the mystic, the mystagogic, and the psychoanalytic.
And the end? The end of this experiment gives up the illusion of a coherent, authoritative voice and devolves into the (hopefully not cacophonous) chorus that participated in this research endeavor. There is no single conclusion, just as the voice—whatever it might be—cannot be reduced to the message it conveyed. And, indeed, if we were to attempt the impossible by offering a single conclusion about the apocalyptic voice, it would be a self-denying, apophatic conclusion: the apocalyptic voice is one that ruptures meaning and sense through the way it forces time upon us through tone, style, and repetition.
So, did you hear about the apocalypse? And, if so, from whom…?
The Prophet
Apocalypse and Prophecy are historically intertwined figures, and therefore can barely be discussed separately. Nevertheless, when thinking about words and speech, and different modes of orienting (in) time and addressing others, some authors try to distinguish their voice and tonality. For example, in his short essay Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour from 1954, Martin Buber contrasts prophecy and apocalypse as two different attitudes towards history, specifically in a situation of crisis. He highlights their essential difference in terms of their implied temporality and their existential mode. This oppositional relation of prophetic and apocalyptic is also persistently present in François Hartog’s recent study Chronos from 2022, which deals with the genealogy of Western temporalities.
For Buber, prophecy and apocalypse are historical manifestations of humanity’s relationship with transcendence: Prophecy originates from the moment of highest potency and productivity; Apocalypse, on the other hand, arises in the time of the disintegration of culture and religion. The main difference of both figures lies in how exactly they relate present and future. Prophecy is not so much about foretelling the future course of events, but confronting the contemporaries with an alternative that demands a decision. Even if prophecy predicts future events, it does not predetermine a fixed outcome. Instead, it presents an open future that must be shaped by human freedom.
Thus, the voice of the prophet addresses, gathers, and creates an audience that is affected by their prophecy. Buber argues that even if they write something, their words are always addressed to a specific audience as if they would be listening their voice. His guiding principle is the principle of conversion, which should not be interpreted as a historical return but as a spiritual transformation. In aiming at conversion, the prophetic voice accentuates the initial moment of action. It is an appeal to the freedom to begin to act.
The Apocalypse, then, is described with the opposite features. It concerns a future that is not in time anymore, it is not about a future in historical time. And the moments of decision, action, and intervention in progressing time are devalued: “The apocalyptic writer has no audience turned towards him; he speaks into his notebook. He does not really speak, he only writes; he does not write down the speech, he just writes his thoughts, he writes a book” (Buber 1957, 200). So, here, confronted with those two voices, we are also dealing with the difference of speaking and writing, speech and scripture. In emphasizing the position of prophecy, Buber then concludes: “the depths of history, which are continually at work to rejuvenate creation, are in league with the prophets” (207).
The Messianic
Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains puts forward a particular form of temporality that he draws from the apostle Paul, and which he calls messianic time.
To explain messianic time, he compares two diagrams. The first offers a more conventional chronology where A marks creation, or the beginning of time, B marks the messianic event (the crucifixion of Christ), and C marks the end of time, that B signals will occur. Agamben rejects that representation of messianic time and instead proposes the above diagram, where ‘B’ – messianic time – does not sit in the middle of a chronology between A and C, but rather is an infolding event that emerges around C. He defines this type of time as “the time that time takes to come to an end” (2005, 67). Messianic time, therefore, is a time of process, perhaps becoming, where people live with the possibility of the end of time as part of their present.
He ties messianic time with various speaking actors. The voice of messianic time is that of the apostle, who replaces the prophet, and is distinguished from apocalyptic voice. The prophet is concerned with the future – predicting what will occur. The apocalyptic, by contrast, describes the last day. The apostle does neither of these things. Rather the apostle speaks of the Messiah’s return, after the event has occurred. It is a speaking of the present, of the ‘time that remains’ and which sits within chronology but refuses a standard temporality.
To explain messianic time, Agamben draws on the idea of the linguist Gustave Guillame, and especially his concept of ‘operational time,’ which seeks to engage with how humans process time through language. Guillame suggested that when we represent something in language we create a ‘time-image,’ a positioning of what is described in time and space. Operational time is the time that it takes for us to create a time-image. For Agamben, messianic time speaks to a similar moment of potential and formation, a speaking of.
The time-image made in messianic time relies on a dialectic. Operational time is not a place where past shines light on present, or present on past, but rather where both “comes together in a flash with the now” to produce the “historical” image that is recognisable in the “now” (2005, 141). In order to be messianic, the image that is the result of the process of operational time must be dialectic, collapsing temporalities to produce a “now.” As a result, every text contains a “historical index,” that situates it in both its own epoch and its moment of “coming forth to full legibility,” which is the “now” (2005, 145).
Thus, as is suggested by many of these other accounts of time and voice explored here, meaning can only emerge from and through the messianic moment, a moment we might also wish to consider as ‘apocalyptic’ by a more encompassing definition.
The Apostle
The apostle speaks “according to the unveiling [apocalypse] of the mysterythat was kept secret long ages is now disclosed.” So Jean Vioulac cites Romans 16:25-26 in introducing the voice of the apostle as an apocalyptic voice. Engaging in a series of “Heideggerian meditations” on the concept of apocalypse, Vioulac (much like Agamben’s Time that Remains) hews closely to Paul’s epistles in order to excavate concept of contemporary philosophical resonance. For Vioulac, the apostle’s voice speaks a concept of apocalypse, language, and truth which serves as an earthquake to “dislocate the onto-logical totality” (Vioulac 2021, 59). The apocalyptic earthquake of the apostle’s voice imagines the apocalyptic unveiling of mystery as something that happens within the world. Echoing Paul again: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”
Vioulac’s exploration is dense and deeply entangled with Martin Heidegger’s own wrestling with the Greek ontological tradition. To tease out a description of “the apostle’s voice” without an extended detour through Heidegger and Jean-Luc Marion (and without a working knowledge of Koine Greek) is to risk missing the horizon against which Vioulac’s argument gains its purchase. Nevertheless, Vioulac’s suggestions are compelling to our project.
In his version of an apocalyptic Paul, the apostle’s voice is the voice of excess, of a voice from beyond “onto-logical totality” but not parallel to it—of a voice that should be impossible and yet exists. Vioulac’s Paul understands himself within the Greek philosophical tradition, and yet Vioulac’s Paul understands that the “onto-logical totality” of Greek aletheia-as-truth is just one particular domain of phenomenality and one particular domain of “existance.” The Greek philosophical system fails by equating Being and logos—and apocalypse names the revelation in which this system is shown to be incomplete. There is a truth beyond the metaphysical and ontological tradition. More important than the content of that excess truth is its sheer, brute presence as excess: a truth of other truths. The apocalypse is thus an apocalypse of the apocalypse: the revelation that there are other revelations beyond what we had assumed to be the limits of our ontological, phenomenological, and epistemological domain.
As we see in Vioulac’s attention upon Paul’s attention on God’s preference “for what is low and despised in the world,” a key component of the apostle’s voice is that it speaks to—and from—the particularity of this world of flesh and dust. The apostle’s voice is a reminder that there is always something within the world and history that eludes our totalizing efforts: the mystery of infinity is thus an apocalyptic mystery within the inexhaustible specificity of being. While Vioulac’s analysis of Paul would—naturally—focus upon the figure of Christ as the principle example of the apocalypse of truth via the flesh, Vioulac’s larger Heideggerian inheritance hints that the apocalyptic crack-up of our totalizing ontologies need not happen through Christ alone: love, death, anxiety, boredom, and so forth, are all examples of an apocalyptic voice that speaks and calls attention to the failure to contain infinity within our philosophies. The unity of one onto-logical systems fragments with the apocalypse, but there is always the potential that what’s next (the post-apocalpytic?) will calcify into another ill-founded presumption of totality.
The Mystic
For Michel de Certeau, the mystic is not a person who could have a particular type of voice but is, rather, a relationship to language: a way of using language (and being used by language) that de Certeau calls la mystique. The mystic is voice rather than speaker. For the sake of this report, however, we’ll continue to reference “the mystic’s voice.” What kind of voice is the mystic’s voice? De Certeau answers this question through a series of close readings of early modern “mystics” such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. De Certeau’s own answers to the question move from the relatively pragmatic (e.g. it is a voice that creates deliberate ambiguity of speaker-and-listener by playing with pronouns) to the philosophical (e.g. it is a voice that punches a hole through language and allows a new subjectivity to emerge) and even quasi-mystical and paradoxical (e.g. it is the voice of impossibility).
De Certeau’s history is elliptical and wandering, but we can gesture at a number of key characteristics of the mystic’s voice. For de Certeau, the mystic voice is animated by a crisis (of modernity?): there is a gap between the world and word. In previous cosmologies, the world had been spoken into existence. As this imagination of creation and language fractured, however, de Certeau claims that “[Language] has become opacified, objectified, and detached from its supposed speaker” (de Certeau 1992, 188). Two responses emerged in the face of this crisis. Some people considered the worlds as full of objects “to be appraised and ordered according to internal truth criteria” (Ibid.). The mystics, on the other hand, “focused on the speech act itself, which made itself heard by faith: I speak, says God, and there is no one but me” (Ibid).
The mystic’s voice is thus one that does not attempt to “say something.” It is impossible to say anything—to say anything real, anyway—because the mystic’s voice begins with the “diabolical” premise that all language is a lie. Whatever we can say of truth, of God, and of the real is always already a deteriorated, ruined husk of a thing. Thus, rather than attempting to “say something,” the mystic’s voice is a pure, ecstatic utterance of volo: of an “I wish” or “I will” or “I want.” A pattern emerges: the mystic’s voice speaks from desire and that speech is then denounced as a lie. Back and forth, affirmation and immediate negation, forward-slash back-space. The mystic’s voice is thus one of constant new beginnings. Continuity, history, and tradition lose all significance as the mystic’s voice speaks within an “ecstatic temporality.” With this ecstatic dance of desire and denial, de Certeau suggests that the mystic’s voice “punches a hole through language” where God (or what?) can be heard. It is by hearing rather than speaking that the mystic’s voice enables a new subjectivity.
Is this apocalyptic? Certainly, those whom de Certeau studies believe so. Though apocalypse is not a critical theme in de Certeau’s analysis, the figures he reads believed that “the mystic’s voice” was the one speaking at the end of the world.
The Mystagogue
In Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy from 1984, Derrida discusses Kant’s critique of what he refers to as the mystagogues, who are opposed to the Enlightenment philosophers. This opposition, Derrida highlights, is mainly based on a tone. Derrida interprets Kant’s text as the attempt to distinguish two different voices of the other in us: the voice of reason and the voice of the oracle. He directs our attention to the voice or a certain tonality in discourse.
Ultimately, Derrida shows that Enlightenment philosophy is unable to fully separate itself from the mystagogues, unable to set a “neutral tone”. The features of the mystagogue inevitably reappear in the language of the Enlightenment philosopher, precisely in his critique of his mystagogue rival. Due to the critical act of demystification (regarding the apocalypse), it becomes itself part of the apocalyptic discourse. That means, it is also driven by the desire of revealing the truth of something: Truth itself is apocalyptic. For Derrida, the apocalyptic thus becomes the transcendental structure of discourse, of every possible mission and destiny. Following Derrida, the question then seems to be: What would be a thinking of truth without the orientation towards an end? This requires, Derrida seems to suggest, a different thinking of temporality and the “eventness” of the event (“Come”) (see Derrida 1984, pp. 31-35).
In some way, the mystagogue as a separate figure is a creation based on the perspective of critique. Its characterization is then, of course, mainly intended as criticism. And, in reverse, inscribed in this criticism is the self-portrait of (the philosophy of) critique.
The philosopher accuses the mystagogue of replacing (mediate) knowledge of the supersensible (through concepts) with (immediate) intellectual intuition. His or her voice is the voice of Enthusiasm. The mystagogue’s language is based on metaphors and is highly rhetorical, stylized, or poetic. It appeals mainly to emotion. With his or her voice, the mystagogue introduces or initiates others into the mystery (of the supersensible). Finally, the practice is not so much about speaking with a separate voice but about blending two voices (as two voices of the other) within us: reason and oracle. But this practice, Derrida suggests, may also have a subversive potential (against state censorship, undermining an organized discourse).
The mystagogues voice entails thepromise to be able step out of time, to immediately touch the supersensible. Thus, the accusation would be, that it de-temporalizes time. It is ultimately an a-historic voice, a voice from everywhere and nowhere. As a result, it violates the linear progression of knowledge; it bypasses the time of the disciplined work of critique. Its Enthusiasm might stimulate and mobilize its addressees or accelerate their intellect but, ultimately, it will detour it or lead it astray. We could say, it’s the time of drift and wander. So, its temporality might be simultaneously acceleration and delay.
The Psychoanalyst
In his book A voice and nothing more, Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Mladen Dolar discusses various dimensions of the voice. He contends that voice is that which stands in opposition to meaning. This can be illustrated by the example of someone stating with a trembling voice: “I’m not scared.” Within this model however, voice and meaning together form a communicative entity. Focusing on the voice and putting meaning aside allows for exploring the how of a statement as well as processual elements of dialogue.
In terms of the ways of speaking and listening that constitute a psychoanalysis (in a clinical sense), Dolar points to the fact that the psychoanalyst, who, as a subject supposed to know in Lacanian terms, does not “live up” to that prescribed role, can enable a patient (or, analysant, in Lacanian terms) to listen to his own voice and sense-less meaning production in a unique manner: A patient talking in psychoanalysis is confronted with a silent psychoanalyst. His or her voice thus comes back as an echo, revealing the non-sense of his or her utterings; thereby facilitates exploring his or her subjectivity.
This is provided by the psychoanalysts’ silent way of listening or by what Lacan (and Dolar with him) calls “Lèquivoque,” a tonal/verbal response that highlights sound over meaning, thus pointing at something in the patient’s speech acts.
Regarding the psychoanalytic process (itself a talking, or even: a listening cure) one can think of this as follows: Before entering psychoanalysis a patient suffers in one way or another from some sort of blockage towards the future, due to anxiety. This is connected to particular ways the past and present have an impact on one another. This results in viewing the future in a certain light, e.g. expecting negative events to lie ahead.
In a psychoanalytic process a patient talks, that is, he or she vocates, verbally addressing the psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst listens and at times he or she responds, thus allowing the patient to continuously finds his or her voice (which is more along the lines of allowing his desire to emerge than along the lines of laying bare latent meaning).
As such, in a patient’s subjective time there can be a multitude of futures. This means that he or she (re-) gains access to some sort of openness towards what’s to come, including crises. Yet, nonetheless past and present continually impact each other in different ways than before which allows for expecting future events in a more “prismatic” way.
Conclusion: The Scholar
KB: The (humanities) scholar works with a sense of the end, such that, because they seek to transform/reveal/disrupt the status quo, their work always has an apocalyptic tone. That this is the case, however, does not necessarily mean that they somehow sit outside of the production of power. Rather we might ask whether an apocalyptic tone necessitates change or just operates to reveal what is then reinforced.
TS: Exploring apocalyptic voices led us to think about how the apocalypse does away with meaning and is confined to revelations not of meaning but rather of the revelation itself. Put in tonal terms, the apocalyptic revelation reveals that there is a revelation. Something is about to appear and this disrupts everything we can think or feel about past, present, and future. For the apocalyptic scholar, this means reflecting the methodological reverberations of the subject matter in question.
WS: The apocalypse is a fragment of uncontrollability jammed into our systems of knowledge, being, and control. We can measure, count, digitize, serialize, prolong, and extend—but some abyss of infinity and death reveals our efforts at knowledge and control to always be finite, limited, and contingent. That relation—the presence of absence, the truth of a truth that slips our control—is the apocalypse. The apocalypse is the breakdown of representation and sense, especially when we attempt to represent it or make sense of it. As tone and voice, we can not pin it down or summarize it. We can let it reverberate in us as we become hollow ourselves, but it is not our voice to speak.
MQ: The apocalyptic voice is an elusive force that is always accompanied by closely related but antagonistic figurations. It appears as the Other of the voice itself, becoming tangible only in relation to another voice. In a field of forces the apocalyptic voice strangely oscillates, wherein it is itself characterized with opposite features and approached from both affirmative and critical perspectives. It is a voice that one wants to adopt or ward off. Or, alternatively, it is a voice that, in its absence, is ever-present, a voice impossible either to grasp or to exclude. In all that, the apocalyptic voice is reproached for being deceptive and misguiding but also regarded as a force that is able to call for, emphasize, and "reveal" the Real that evades identification, recognition, and conceptual discourse.
Questions to take forward
What values does apocalyptic voice bring to our scholarship?
What other voices might we add to this typology? One suggestion has been the poet’s voice, and Paul Ricoeur’s Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation would be a place to begin that exploration. What else?
Are there features of apocalyptic voice that are more important/effective/valuable than others? (What is the goal?)
What would applying an apocalyptic tone involve in our own work? How do we operationalise the features of voice as method?
Conversely, can re-reading our works/sources/areas of study as examples of apocalyptic voice open up new readings/new effects?
How does the tone of your project reflect its subject matter?
Reading list Agamben, Giorgio. The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2005. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Apocalypse Is Disappointing.” In: Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1964] 1997, pp. 101-108. Buber, Martin. “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour.” In: Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, trans. Maurice Friedman, New York: Harper & Brothers, [1954] 1957, pp. 192-207. De Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1982] 1992. De Certeau, Michael. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, [1975] 1992. Derrida, Jacques. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.” Translated by John P. Leavey, in: Oxford Literary Review 6, no. 2 (1984): 3-37. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2006. Hartog, Francois. Chronos: The West ConfrontsTime. Translated by S. R. Gilbert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Hartog, François. “Chronos, Kairos, Krisis: The Genesis of Western Time.” HistoryandTheory 60, no. 3 (September 2021): 425–39. Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso 2005. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Vioulac, Jean. Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations. Translated by Matthew J. Peterson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Zupančič, Alenka. “The Apocalypse Is (Still) Disappointing.” In S: Journal for the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique 10/11 (2017/18): 16-30.
Apocalyptic Voice Reading Notes
As a record of our conversations together, we’re including our notes. It also reveals how this group was shaped by readings that did not explicitly make it into our musings above (such as those by Kermode and Blanchot).
1. Possibilities: Hartog, Jameson, Kermode, Dolar (October 23rd)
2. A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar (October 30th)
Timo’s Notes
The general lines of the discussion were as follows:
Dolar writes about three gestures: fantasy, desire, and voice. These can be discussed in relation to temporality. In the beginning, it is about the sound when hearing the parental couples’ intercourse – this sets into motion fantasy work. Fantasy stands inbetween sound and understanding. A full understanding in a semantic sense would mean the end of the world or civilization and possibly lead to a psychosis.
In the process of analysis, the analyst is initially addressed as the subject that is supposed to know. Yet, it turns out that he functions as object petit a, as the object cause of desire. As such, he cannot be reached or arrived at (other examples of object petit a are voice and gaze). He is encircled, as described in the circular path of the drive: The drive tries to reach its goal, the objet petit a, starting from the barred subject, but it circles around it and returns to itself, thus fulfilling its aim. Dolar describes something similar for the voice: it is sent out but finds merely a void, in the silence of the analyst. In this way, the analysand's lalangue becomes evident to himself, the nonsense or jouissance in playing with meaning (jouis-sense).
What is the role of psychoanalysis? To identify who or what is disturbed? To reveal a hidden level? To move from an impasse to a passe, an opening up? Problematic is not the loop but the stasis.
Also, the question of performance in the creation of meaning is touched upon. On the other hand, language and law are always already there, prior.
How can we work with the idea of echo? Something is sent out, but no response from an other can be received. It would be psychotic to think that someone in the stones or the canyon is speaking to us when we hear an echo. So, what comes back is what we have sent out. We are set back onto ourselves, not in the form of meaningful answers to our questions, but as a non-meaning, the pure resonance of our own voice. This means that we do not get an answer in a semantic sense, but rather emotion and fear.
(By the way: LACANyon...)
3. The Time That Remains, by Giorgio Agamben (November 8th)
Note Keeping for CAPAS Working Group (Will’s Notes)
Wednesday, November 7th, 9:00-10:30am
Present: Katie Barclay, Timo Storck, Robert Fogler, Will Sherman
Before all else, I want to register some caution in my own note-taking. Against Agamben’s efforts to theorize and articulate a concept of messianic time that can not be pinned down to simple actions and events within our chronological experience of time, I found myself reaching for “pragmatic” examples often throughout our discussion. Such pragmatic examples can be useful in illustrating some points, but, more often than not, they probably snuff out the messianic temporality that Agamben is suggesting.
Our discussion opened with some reflection on the very project of The Time That Remains: to claim that Paul’s letters (especially Romans) is “the fundamental messianic text for the Western tradition” (p.1) and, through it, we may “interpret messianic time as a paradigm of historical time” (p. 3). More generally, we might say tahat Agamben is using just ten words from the opening of Paul’s Letter to the Romans as a means of opening up a larger exploration of time and the different possibilities of temporal experience—and this, consequently, offers a chance for us to reexamine our relationship to law, sovereignty, poetry, etc. and how they are reliant upon an assumption of time as chronos. The contrast between the scale of the method (an interpretation of ten words!) and the scale of the implications is suggestive in its own right.
We then moved into a discussion of chronological time and messianic time, mostly focusing upon “The Fourth Day.” While it is easy to slip into some dichotomous frameworks (i.e., chronological time vs. messianic time), it was pointed out that we’re dealing with something more complicated. Messianic time is a like a texture, tone, or quality to time. It’s definitely not a “chapter” in a simple “sequence of events” but is an experience of time in which our representations of time are no longer as removed from our experiences of time. In this messianic time, temporality is no longer the “background” or the time in which I live my life (as a subject distinct from the “setting” of time). Rather, it is “the time that we are.”
We may now propose our first definition of messianic time: messianic time is the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time. This is not the line of chronological time (which was representable but unthinkable), nor the instant of its end (which was just as unthinkable); nor is it a segment cut from chronological time; rather, it is operational time pressing within the chronological time, working and transforming it from within; it is the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us [il tempo che ci resta]. Whereas our representation of chronological time, as the time in which we are, separates us from ourselves and transforms us into impotent spectators of ourselves—spectators who look at the time that flies without any time left, continually missing themselves—messianic time, an operational time in which we take hold of and achieve our representations of time, is the time that we ourselves are, and for this very reason, is the only real time, the only time we have. (67-68)
What does that mean, though? And if we accept this definition, then what? As a group, we began to discuss the differences between eschatological time and messianic time. It was suggested (by me—Will—for disclosure’s sake) that the clear delineation that Agamben draws between messianic time and eschatological/apocalyptic time does not seem to match the imaginations of apocalyptic time that characterize much of the Islamic apocalyptic texts that I’ve read. If messianic time is a time in which we are caught between an already and a not yet—and if messianic time is a time in which the ultimate contingency of all laws and institutions is experienced and in which there is a surplus of potentiality—then I think that apocalyptic temporalities can also sustain that type of messianic experience of time. In any case, Agamben attempts to clarify messianic time by distinguishing it from certain conceptions of the apocalypse/eschaton as an event that will occur within the unfolding of our typical, linear, calendrical experience of time. Messianic time is not that.
We then discussed a few peculiarities… Why, in the schematics of time that we find on pages 63 and 64, does messianic time occur after the eschaton? And if we’re assuming that Agamben is excavating this notion of Pauline messianic time with an eye toward making sense of contemporary experiences of time (that might not be restricted to those with a “belief” in Jesus), then what is the messianic event? Though we didn’t discuss the conclusion much, we noted that Agamben invokes Walter Benjamin’s notion of “weak messianism” which, in part, is a type of relationship that is struck up with the past. An object, a text, a memory, an image, etc. can spark a type of relationship with the past in all its potentiality that reveals to us the limits and utter contingency of our current ways. In other words, if we follow this a bit further, we might be able to say something like: the experience of messianic time is what constitutes/creates the messianic event. Or is that going too far?
We then spent some time kicking around the possibility of a psychoanalytic reading of messianic time in which childhood trauma (or at least an experience of being overwhelmed and impressed upon) comes to serve as the messianic event of sorts. Rather than any firm conclusions, we were primarily interested in how certain conceptions of an already and a not yet can saturate our present experiences of time with potential, with a search for the “signs,” and so forth.
We ended our discussion by returning to “The First Day” and discussing the hos me/as not of the Pauline epistles. Some passages discussed:
That which, according to the law, made one man a Jew and the other a goy, one a slave and another a free man, is now annulled by the vocation. Why remain in this nothing? Once again, menetō (“remaining”) does not convey indifference, it signifies the immobile anaphoric gesture of the messianic calling, its being essentially and foremost a calling of the calling. For this reason, it may apply to any condition; but for this same reason, it revokes a condition and radically puts it into question in the very act of adhering to it. (23)
The apostle does not say: “weeping as rejoicing” nor “weeping as [meaning=] not weeping,” but “weeping as not weeping.” (24)
To be messianic, to live in the Messiah, signifies the expropriation of each and every judicial-factical property (circumcised/not, free/slave, man/woman) under the form of as not. This expropriation does not, however, found a new identity; the “new creature” is none other than the use and messianic vocation of the old. (26)
Here and in other works, Agamben is clearly attempting to find our way out of the broken, oppressive institutions that have condemned so many to suffering, injustice, violence, etc. But it seems equally true, here, that Agamben is not talking about “breaking the law.” Rather, the law is nullified by its fulfillment. The “weeping” does not cease but the weeping is no longer a marker of identity and possession. It is still used but ceases to have dominion.
As we attempted to make sense of this, Katie suggested that we might see some parallels in the trajectory of gay marriage. Whereas certain forms of sexuality and love had seemingly vibrated with all types of radical potentiality, the legalization of gay marriage “domesticated” much of this radicalness. Instead of suspending the divisions of legal division (i.e., the division between who can and cannot marry), the legal divisions were simply changed. We made new divisions rather than annulling the division.
Personally writing, I find one of the obstacles of this text to lie in my need to “concretize” some of Agamben’s provocations in a way that does not just render it a matter of subjective, personal experience. We can perhaps understand on a personal level the intensity of temporal experience that Agamben is describing when we have those moments that are charged by a simultaneous repetition and anticipation (when we live, in a sense, a life of rhyme that matches the final stanza of the sestina quoted on pages 85-87). But how do we move beyond this personal experience? It seems that so many efforts to draw a political “lesson” from Agamben’s text end up stalling the potentiality of the messianic temporality that interests Agamben. In an effort to “apply” Agamben, we risk tethering our politics yet again to a linear chronos.
4. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy” by Jacques Derrida (November 13th)
Note Keeping for CAPAS Working Group, Marcus’s Notes
Monday, November 13th, 12 - 2 pm
Present: Katie Barclay, Timo Storck, Robert Fogler, Will Sherman, Marcus Quent
Derrida’s text “Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy” is based on a lecture he delivered in August 1980 as part of a conference organized in honor of his work. The text got published in 1981, and a second version in 1983. In large parts, it is a reading of Kant’s 1796 text “Von einem neuerdings erhobenem vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie” (translated as “On a recently prominent tone of superiority in philosophy”), or Kant’s general critique of what he calls the mystagogues. The text is interesting for Derrida, because Kant’s opposition is based on a tone; it directs the attention to a certain voice or tonality in discourse. It is ultimately the attempt to distinguish two different voices of the other in us: the voice of reason and the voice of the oracle.
For Kant, the mystagogues replace (mediate) knowledge through concepts with (immediate) intellectual intuition. They declare the influence of a higher feeling in their intuition of the supersensible/supernatural and thus claim to have special access to it. Mystagogues claim that they have a direct and intuitive connection to the mystery, and that they can introduce and initiate others into the mystery. Ultimately, for Kant, they lapse into enthusiasm (Schwärmerei). Enthusiasm, Derrida claims, has an affinity to the apocalyptic. Their use of metaphors, their appeal to emotion, their rhetoric etc. indicates the “death of all philosophy.” However, the true “mystery” of reason, for Kant, is the sublimity of the law and the moral voice. The mystagogues blend this voice of reason and the voice of the oracle, two voices of the other, within us.
„The overlordly tone dominates and is dominated by the oracular voice that covers over the voice of reason, rather parasitises it, causes it to derail or become delirious. To raise the tone, in this case, is to make it jump, make the inner voice delirious, the inner voice that is the voice of the other in us.” (11)
But for Kant, the dispute between the mystagogues and the critical philosophers, however, is “much ado about nothing”, ultimately a “disunion through misunderstanding” (Kant, 444). He states that both are concerned with the same good intention: to make people wise and righteous. Therefore, Kant states, there is no need for “reconciliation,” only “explanation on either side”: “The veiled goddess, before whom we both bow the knee, is the moral law within us in its inviolable majesty.” (Kant, 444) The scene of this “explanation on either side,” then is truth (of morality). And to speak the truth in this scene means, Derrida argues, “to speak the truth, to reveal without emasculating the logos” (19). So, both sides accuse the other of emasculating reason and speaking the truth is founded in “an excluded middle”, it supposes “some inadmissible” (19). Derrida says that all participants in such a contract of reason are subjects of eschatological discourses. And the critique of the metaphysics just inaugaurates another kind of eschatological discourses:
“Kant speaks of modernity, and of the mystagogues of his time, but you will have quickly perceived in passing, without my even having to designate explicitly, name, or pull out all the threads, how many transpositions we could indulge in on the side of our so-called modernity. I will not say that today everyone would recognize him or herself on this or that side, purely and simply, but I am sure it could be demonstrated that today every slightly organized discourse is found or claims to be found on both sides, alternately or simultaneously, even if this emplacement exhausts nothing, does not go round the turn or the contour [ne fait pas le tour ou le contour] of the place and the discourse held. And this inadequation, always limited itself, no doubt indicates the densest difficulty. Each of us is the mystagogue and the Aufklärer of an other.” (18)
A general characterization of Derrida’s gesture maybe could be, that he traces how Kant in his own critique of the mystagogues, falls back into what he wants to exclude. Important aspects Derrida discusses in this context are theveil and thecastration, the threat of “emasculating” reason. He shows that the distinction of “would-be philosophers behave in a superior fashion,” that is the mystagogues, and the critical philosophers, that is the enlightened, is a fragile one; that enlightenment philosophy is unable to fully separate itself from the mystagogues, unable to set a ‘neutral tone’. What is characterized as features of the mystagogues reappears in the critical discourse, in the language of the enlightenment. Because it also relies on rhetoric, voice, and tonality.
But this fragility or porosity of the delineation is by no means an argument in favor of erasing the distinction, it is rather a complication of its structure. It seems as if Derrida is saying something like that both positions are unavoidable, and we always already are participating in both.
“We cannot and we must not — this is a law and a destiny — forgo the Aufklärung, in other words, what imposes itself as the enigmatic desire for vigilance, for the lucid vigil [veille], for elucidation, for critique and truth, but for a truth that at the same time keeps within itself some apocalyptic desire, this time as desire for clarity and revelation, in order to demystify or, if you prefer, to deconstruct apocalyptic discourse itself and with it everything that speculates on vision, the imminence of the end, theophany, parousia, the last judgment.” (22)
After he extensively talked about Kant’s text and after arriving at the concept of truth, the concept of apocalypse comes to the fore of his text. Apocalyptic eschatology’s are always proclaimed in the name of light and vision, and of the light of light. But just as one must ask the question about the effects that a discourse of the end wants to produce (for what purpose is an end proclaimed), the demystification of such discourses is also part of the apocalyptic discourse. For him, the unity of apocalyptic discourses and tonalities is the revelation of truth:
„Truth itself is the end, the destination, and that truth unveils itself is the advent of the end. Truth is the end and the instance of the last judgment. The structure of truth here would be apocalyptic. And that is why there would not be any truth of the apocalypse that is not the truth of truth.“ (24)
In these dense (and sometimes cryptic pages) he is also relying heavily on the concepts of „emission,” the entanglement of voices as structural feature of apocalyptic discourse. When in the last third of the lecture, Derrida’s is asking then if there is something like a fundamental scene, a unified paradigm of apocalyptic discourse, he suggests: Wouldn't that rather be the effect of a generalized derailment, a distortion, i.e. différance?
“This is one of the suggestions I wanted to submit for your discussion: wouldn't the apocalyptic be a transcendental condition of all discourse, of all experience even, of every mark or every trace? And the genre of writings called ‘apocalyptic’ in the strict sense, then, would be only an example, an exemplary revelation of this transcendental structure. In that case, if the apocalypse reveals, it is first of all the revelation of the apocalypse, the self-presentation of the apocalyptic structure of language, of writing, of the experience of presence, in other words of the text or of the mark in general: that is, of the divisible dispatch for which there is no self-presentation nor assured destination.” (27-28)
Of course, the whole piece in its approach is also another presentation of what deconstruction means – best concentrated probably in phrases like the “disorder or the delirium of destination (Bestimmung)” as at the same time “the possibility of all emission” (24), or in the opening remark that “some slackness was necessary in the relation of sign to thing in order to contrive the space for a rerouting of sense or the grip for a perversion” (8).
And of course, it is also about deconstruction in that sense, that a lot of the criticism Derrida has himself received usually relates to his writing being too poetic, pure rhetoric, too stylized and so on. So, the passages on the rivalry of poetic/literature and philosophy, metaphor and concept must also be read in relation to the critique deconstruction itself has received (think of Habermas). (Note the sentences on the subversive potential of the apocalyptic tone: the subversion of censorship of state power or institutions by means of the confusion of destinations; anything that undermines, confuses the organized discourse always runs the risk of being considered apocalyptic or accused of being mystagogical, 29-30)
The last most complicated pages are about the “Come” as the event ‘before the event,’ and concluding with the description of “our apocalypse” as the “apocalypse without apocalypse” (34-35).
“Our apocalypse now: there would be no more chance, save chance itself, for a thought of good and evil whose announcement would come to gather itself in order to be with itself in a revelatory speaking […]” (35)
“The without marks an internal and external catastrophe of the apocalypse, an overturning of sense [sens] that does not merge with the catastrophe announced or described in the apocalyptic writings without however being foreign to them. Here the catastrophe would perhaps be of the apocalypse itself, its fold and its end, a closure without end, an end without end.” (35)
5. Blanchot - Apocalypse is Disappointing/ Zupancic - The Apocalypse is Still Disappointing
21/11/23
Present: Katie Barclay, Timo Storck, Robert Fogler, Will Sherman, Marcus Quent
We began with a discussion of ‘echo’ - how Blanchot manifested in/for Zupancic, in what is a pretty close reading of the text. What changed/evolved/was enabled in a new context?
We considered the ways that a ‘discourse of normalisation’ seemed more possible in the present, e.g. the threat seemed more routine, less pressing. The nuclear bomb is no longer exciting, but really this is true for climate change and what appear as more ‘contemporary’ threats.
This continued to a discussion of what does fear of X distract us from? How does it allow space for other ‘wrongs’ - e.g. when we consider climate change do we ignore the threat of AI; how does fear direct attention and what are the implications?
Jasper is interested in what is needed to transform but the figuring of this as an individual transformation (not collective) acts as a return to a reason that precedes. ‘Humanity’ as a collective is lost. Fear of X enables us to identify the unit that is ‘humanity’ but current apocalyptic conditions have not allowed for the formation of a ‘humanity’ that can respond to the threat. (Where is collective/political consciousness? How is it collected/formed)
We discussed at length how a collective can form. Is it just about individuals following in the same direction (escaping prisoners)? Or something bigger and if so what? Can you have an apocalypse without humanity (by which we mean a ‘collective’ versus the individual, but i think also opened up a possibility to discuss the post human). This discussion might lead us to think about messianic time or millenarianism.
We then moved to consider issues of mastery/slave (versus the neutral man of liberalism) and we wondered if the ‘master’ really means structure then who is the neutral man of liberalism? And if not structure, who stands for the master/for the slave? Is it just death - we can’t choose immortality so choose various forms of living? Is it openness to risk? (I thought this was quite a gendered idea and might be interrogated a little more). A key issue in Blanchot is that humanity fails to coalesce in part because there is no single master/slave amongst the inhabitants of the current planet. How does community form? What about the ‘provincial’ here - who can be part of community, where are its boundaries, how is that negotiated to form humanity?
Blanchot and Zupancic both put pressure on ‘fear’ as an opportunity for the creation of humanity, or at least recognition of the threat that creates humanity, and which is lost in Jaspars by his attention to reason. This is not a refusal of the value or reason or indeed a whole-hearted embrace of fear. Rather it is a consideration of how urgency/political community is enabled and what is lost when we remove urgency from a politics of apocalypse.
This becomes more critical if there can be no humanity without fear. Fear is individualised in both Blanchot and Zupancic so there is a question here as to how it comes to enable collective identity (again the prisoner’s dilemma - are we just travelling together or working together). Is this a bourgeois subjectivity? What is a collective subjectivity?
What is the relationship between fear and reason? Fear can occlude rational action/reason but without it we lose the urgency to act. Reason needs struggle to emerge but struggle can ‘explode’ and so end the possibility of humanity. Fear can’t be debilitating.
Jaspers highlights the law but is that normalised through academic discourses, reason? How do we manage the relative urgency of causes/?
To return to tone - fear, pessimism, disappointment are all ‘negative’ emotions but also point to this as an issue of rhetoric, and the possibility of a particular space of emotion as necessary to revolution, placing weight on tone and form. Normalisation is produced when we lose a sense of urgency (fear) and so reason cannot be left to enable change alone. (So we may want to ask what emotional repertoire/tone supports change and also why everyone has abandoned hope!)
6. Monday, November 27: Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, Vol. 1, pages 1-26 and 157-200.
Present: Will, Robert, Timo, Marcus
As with many of our meetings, we entered the room grasping to make sense of our reading and left the room with many of the same questions and bewilderments—but perhaps a bit closer to something. The reading today was Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable, Volume 1. Originally published in French in 1982—and originally written as the first half of a two-volume series that was only completed after de Certeau’s death in 1986—the work represents a culmination of many of de Certeau’s interests: historiography, psychoanalysis, eroticism, linguistics, deconstruction, and deeply human concern for the small stories of the mad and the infirm at the margins. It is also worth noting that de Certeau was a Jesuit, and perhaps that goes part way in explaining why his interests (which might “expected” of any French theorist writing in the 1970s and 1980s) still somehow cut against the grain of many of his contemporaries.
The book, as de Certeau’s introduction suggests, has an impossible topic, and it thus circles its subject in much the way that the subjects of the book circle their impossible subject: mystical discourse. The book “stands exiled from its subject matter. … What should be there is missing.” De Certeau thus presents his book as a history of how a certain type of discourse emerged as la mystique due to a process of displacement and fragmentation: a certain type of “direct” participation in language as co-extensive with God’s creation became a mystical discourse that operated in relationship to an absence. This mystical discourse—unlike whatever came “before” it—was part “fable”: it did not have the same authoritative truth claim in the realm of the real as did a new enlightened, scientific, secularized, clericalized discourse of early modernity. And yet, even as la mystique was displaced in the fabulous, de Certeau suggests that it might have “a brush with the real” (as Robert put it) because of the way it ground itself in the desire for uniting with the impossible other.
(And to return to history for a moment: even as de Certeau suggests that some kind of late antique/early medieval religious fragmented in the early modern period where la mystique emerged as a refuge to gather the interiorized fragments of an always-absent divine language…that absence is not complete. La mystique is a co-constitutive and necessary compliment to the “scientific”; the volo pairs the cogito; and it continues to be part of modernity through its exclusions and displacements. Mystics are not relics of antiquity. There is something profoundly modern and even futuristic about the way that their discourses anticipate later relationships to language and subjectivity.)
For much of the book, as we explored as best as we could, de Certeau’s goal is to explore and explicate how la mystique is a type of performative language whose “goal” (as it were) is not to say something but rather enact the type of relationship that constitutes a subject seeking the impossible other. The inherent language of the Other/God comes to serve as the premise for the volo by which the subject emerges. Language, subject, language, denial of subject, language, etc. A constant movement ensues by which a speaker/writer attempts to “forget” or annihilate his/her subject even as the language continues to renew and create that subject. The consequence is that language matters in and of itself (as a lie!) rather than for what it say. The point is that language says rather than what language says. El que habla. (And thus la mystique is a tone, modality, or set of rhetorical gestures rather than a particular set of experiences or doctrines.)
Marcus and Timo helpfully linked this work back to Derrida’s piece on Kant’s critique of mystagogues. Even in Kant, there is the need to have the intimate voice of reason speak as a way to authorize the “scientific understanding” her pursues, and so Derrida suggests (in our Certeauian reading) that la mystique is part of the discourse that Kant establishes through an attempt to exclude la mystique. (Or something like that!)
While none of us is particularly committed to taxonomies and categorizing schemes, it is a useful question to ask sometimes how the mystics differ from the apocalyptics, the prophets from the messiahs from the chiliasts and so forth. We didn’t reach a conclusion in this regard, but we did begin to wonder about the ecstatic temporality of the mystics and how that might differ from an apocalyptic temporality.
Even while de Certeau is difficult to pin down (as he is performing the same type of dance with an ineffable subject as his subjects are), there is also a deeply pragmatic side to the book: a description of common techniques in mystical discourse. We can trace some instructions for “how to write like a mystic” in this book: the establishment of the discursive space with the volo (and its cousins), the use of rotating pronouns, the erection and then collapse of oppositional dichotomies, the dialogical rather than propositional quality of mystical speech, and so forth.How many of these apply to the apocalyptic?
I’ll end by directing us back to some passages that were particularly generative for our conversation.
On the differences between historians and mystics (p. 11)
Of course, there is an obvious continuity from religion (or mystics) to historiography, since both have taken in hand the relationship that a society maintains with its dead… but the historian “calms” the dead and struggles against violence by producing a reason for thing (an “explanation”) that overcomes their disorder and assures permanence; the mystic does it by founding existence on his very relationship with what escapes him.
Displaced to fable (p. 13)
[Mystics] formed a solidarity with all the tongues that continued speaking [rather than writing, the new triumph for enlightened thought], marked in their discourse by the assimilation to the child, the woman, the illiterate, madness, angels, or the body.
Ruins (p. 25)
They were equally deteriorated by time. They obscured the spoken Word, the presence of which they were to have prolonged…. They still showed the spots in which one was now to await the birth of God who had to be distinguished from all of his signs—which were destined to deteriorate—and who could not be harmed by time’s attrition because he was dead. Birth and death, such were then the two poles of evangelical meditation.
Anti-Babel (p.157)
Mystics is the anti-Babel, the quest for a common speech after its breakdown, the invention of a language “of God” or “of the angels” that would compensate for the dispersal of human languages.
Performative language and ecstasy? (p.174)
It is operative in the sense that it transforms the speaker into the subject of volition. … It is still a performative, but of an odd variety, one that eschews all contracts unless it be that immediate one of self with self, in terms of the indeterminate… That position of the subject can also be designated, as Suso does, by the act of “forgetting oneself.” … In this “I,” we may already recognize the hole that volition makes in language as it passes through. It is a linguistic effect of this passage, just as much as it is the opening (entrance and exit) giving this passerby, the subject that wills, the form of his linguistic “appearance.” From this point of view, the “I” is language’s other. … From the start, the “I” has the formal structure of ecstasy.
All language is lies (p. 176)
Instead of supposing that there are lies somewhere, and that by tracking them down and dislodging them a truth (and an innocence?) of language can be restored, the mystic preliminary posits an act that leads to the use of all language as fallacious. Taking the volo as one’s point of departure, all statements “lie” in relation to what is being said. … being language’s other.
Science vs Mystics (p. 188)
To the extent that the world is no longer perceived as spoken by God, that is has become opacified, objectified, and detached from its supposed speaker, two orientations organize the ways of treating this new linguistic situation. One takes up the states disorbed from the system that gave them the value of “spoken words” (paroles), isolated from their Enunciator by history, to consider them as statements to be appraised and ordered according to internal truth criteria. The other focuses on the speech act itself, which made itself heard by faith: I speak, says God, and there is no one but me.
7. “Apocalypse of Truth” by Jean Vioulac (December 4th)
Note Keeping for CAPAS Working Group, Marcus’s Notes
Monday, December 4th, 12 - 2 pm
Present: Timo Storck, Robert Fogler, Will Sherman, Marcus Quent
In Vioulac’s approach, the eschatological point of judgement becomes something like a split or rupture in a certain regime of truth or a general mode of thinking. This regime or mode of thinking relates to the Greek metaphysic tradition that is contrasted with the idea of a new epoch - that’s why it is an “end of the world”. A changing of epoch needs apocalypse to be identified and closed. What apocalypse reveals, are then first and foremost the limitations of knowledge and wisdom. This process of revelation is not to be understood as a form of manifestation; it is a crisis of truth, on the ground of an exceeding moment, that causes a breakdown, a rupture of what Vioulac calls the “philosophical tradition of onto-logy”, which he presents as a tautological thinking. What he is attacking is (standard Heidegger) in some sense the Greek identification of logos and being.
Truth is no longer thought within the self-evident, self-transparent regime of clairvoyance; it is essentially a mystery, within the process of the Incarnation of truth in the flesh (Christian idea), highlighting finitude, body, and materiality.
How is this epoch, or this temporality or historicity constructed? In a certain sense, within the framework of the “history of being” as oblivion of being (“Seinsvergessenheit” in Heidegger’s terminology), apocalypse is “unveiling” what was already a mistake, an errancy from the beginning. Introducing a new epoch in that sense means also repeating another beginning in thinking. Here, the apocalyptic spotting of a sign makes possible a judgement that acknowledges this totality (epoch) for the first time. So, the apocalyptic moment is not so much concerned with a linear history, a coming future event, but with the creation or presentation of a whole or totality (of history).
We were discussing the question if there are any (specific) historical developments in this big picture of the “history of being”, or if in material history of social struggles and so on we are dealing with a mere unfolding of the ever-same errancy.
We were highlighting that in some sense truth is rather important as a process not as a specific content or reference here. But then, the question was, what is called “apocalypse of truth” here, is that something that happens all the time, in every moment - so is the “eventality” that is introduced here, so extended or extensive, that it becomes almost emptied out or banal? Furthermore, we were asking whether Vioulac’s work - concerned with the “unmasking of the difference beyng and beings” (Marion’s foreword) - is a mere reframing or even repetition of the Heideggerian approach. So, in what respect does he go beyond the Heideggerian conceptual framework? During our discussion, Will was referring to Jean-Luc Marion foreword and to his famous essay “The Idle and the Icon”; and Timo was mentioning the psychoanalytic concept of “false self”.
8. Preliminary Character Sketches (January 8th, 2024)
Instructions: At our Wednesday meeting (January 10), we will plan our presentation and "final product" for our working group. In advance of that working group, we are each going to write up some notes/thoughts/bullet-points about a specific "character voice" and sketch a diagram that maps out the character's conception of chronos, apocalypse, and whatever might be beyond chronos. In terms of the "character voices" we've adopted:
Will selected the mystic with a bit of time on Vioulac's apostle (de Certeau and Vioulac)
Timo will consider the pyschoanalyst (Dolar)
Marcus is doing both the mystagogue and the prophet (Derrida and Buber)
Katie will consider themessiah (Agamben)
And if Robert is willing and has the time, he'll consider the storyteller (Kermode) and/or the utopian (Jameson)
All of these "characters" implicate the figure of the apocalyptic as well, and, of course, we—as the scholars or critics—are bound up in this. Anyway... the task for each of us is to:
Make a diagram of time/apocalypse in the style of Agamben's messiah. (e.g., I'll attempt to sketch "the mystic's time" in the same way that Agamben sketched messianic time.)
We'll each draft some notes on these various characters relate to the major themes of temporality, crisis, voice, addressee/community, praxis, and free-will/determinism. (e.g., I'll attempt to understand what kind of addressee is imagined by the mystic's voice, what kind of "tone" or register characterizes the mystic's voice, and so forth).
We will post our initial thoughts/notes on these "character sketches" to Pubpub by Monday, January 8th so that we can use our time well on January 10th.
The Mystic (completed by Will)
Following de Certeau, the mystic is fundamentally defined by his or her relationship to a particular modality of speech. Indeed, de Certeau’s interest is not in “mystics” (as a group of people) but in la mystique: a way of speaking and relating to language. In other words, whatever the tone or voice of the mystic is, that is itself the quintessence of the mystic: pure tone, pure voice.
What can we say of the mystic’s voice?
It is a voice that speaks from an absence caught between this world and transcendence.
It is a voice that joins the child, the woman, the illiterate, the mad, the angels, and the body.
It is a voice that presumes the deterioration of the written word. The scriptures are ruins.
This is an anti-Babel common speech that is both before and after the breakdown of language.
It is a voice that treats all language as a lie. All language lies in relationship to “language’s other” (which is the “I,” as we will see).
It is a voice that emerges from the volo.
From the volo come a number of other specific techniques: the use of rotating pronouns, the erection and then collapse of oppositional dichotomies, the dialogical rather than propositional quality of mystical speech, and so forth.
The temporality of the mystic’s voice is thus one of ecstasy.
Time erupts and transforms.
It seizes the mystic.
The endlessness of beginnings in la mystique creates a historicity in which continuity loses importance.
As we discussed, the linguistic-temporality of the mystic is not some fragment of premodernity. As de Certeau suggests, there is something hyper-modern about the the mystic’s embrace of language as “diabolical”: as always-already a lie.
The voice is the praxis:
The mystic’s practice is one of enacting a relationship rather than saying something.
The brute fact that language speaks is the concern of the mystic and not what the mystic speaks.
It is language and its denial brought to the emergence of the subject (or the annihilation of the subject).
The volo punches a hole through language.
That hole is the place of the subject.
“I” has the formal structure of ecstasy.
What is the crisis?
The mystic responds to a rupture between world and word. With the emergence of early modern epistemological systems, the world was no longer understood as spoken by God. As de Certeau writes, “[Language] has become opacified, objectified, and detached from its supposed speaker.” Two responses emerged in the face of this crisis. Some people considered the worlds as full of objects “to be appraised and ordered according to internal truth criteria.” The mystics, on the other hand, “focused on the speech act itself, which made itself heard by faith: I speak, says God, and there is no one but me.”
How might we “draw” this voice and its temporality?
I have two sketches.
One attempts to show the “hardening” of the various threads of la mystique into the more rigid frame of the contemporary era.
The next sketch shows the “location” of the subject that emerges in the absence left by the ecstatic counter-movements of the volo and the subsequent rejection of all language as a lie.
The Mystagogue (Marcus)
Derrida discusses Kant’s critique of what he calls the mystagogues, as opposed to the Enlightenment philosopher. This opposition is mainly based on a tone. Derrida interprets Kant’s text as the attempt to distinguish two different voices of the other in us: the voice of reason and the voice of the oracle. He directs our attention to the voice or a certain tonality in discourse. Ultimately Derrida shows, that Enlightenment philosophy is unable to fully separate itself from the mystagogues, unable to set a “neutral tone”. The features of the mystagogue inevitably reappear in the language of the Enlightenment philosopher, precisely in his critique of his mystagogue rival. Due to the critical act of demystification (of the apocalypse) is itself part of the apocalyptic discourse - it is also driven by the desire of revealing the truth of something. Truth itself is apocalyptic. For Derrida, the apocalyptic thus becomes the transcendental structure of discourse, of every possible mission and destiny. The question then seems to be: But what would be a thinking of truth without the orientation towards an end / end? This requires, Derrida seems to suggest, a different thinking of temporality and the “eventness” of the event (“Come”).
(In some way, the mystagogue as a figure is a creation in the perspective of critique. Its characterization is, of course, mainly critical. And, inscribed in it is the self-portrait of critique. We could ask ourselves, could it be contrasted by an affirmative characterization?)
1) What can we say of the mystagogue’s voice? - It replaces (mediate) knowledge of the supersensible (through concepts) with (immediate) intellectual intuition. - It uses metaphors; it is highly rhetorical, stylized, or poetic. - It appeals to emotion. - It is the voice of the oracle (as opposed to the voice of reason). - It is the voice of enthusiasm.
2) What is the practice of the mystagogue? - He/she introduces or initiates others into the mystery (of the supersensible). - He/she is not really speaking with a separate voice but blends those two voices (as two voices of the other) within us. - His/Her practice may have a subversive potential (against state censorship; undermining an organized discourse).
3) What is the crisis – conditioning the (impossible) opposition of mystagogue and Enlightenment? - A generalized derailment, a distortion within the regime of meaning. - A loosening of the bond between signifier and signified (“some slackness […] in the relation of sign to thing in order to contrive the space for a rerouting of sense or the grip for a perversion”). - The “disorder or the delirium of destination (Bestimmung)” which is at the same time “the possibility of all emission” (so, it is not really / not just "a crisis").
Thinking through this crisis and the (inevitable?) participation in the apocalyptic discourse, we might ask: - What would be a truth / (thinking of) the truth that is not conceived as an end / the end? - Derrida’s hint: “apocalypse without apocalypse”, highlighting the structure of this “without”.
4) What about the temporality of the mystic’s voice (here pictured by his critique)?I am improvising here: - It promises us to be able step out of time, to immediately touch the supersensible. - So, the accusation would be, that it de-temporalizes time; it is ultimately an a-historic voice, a voice from everywhere and nowhere. - It violates the linear progression of knowledge. - It bypasses the time of the disciplined work of critique. - Its Enthusiasm might stir up and mobilize its addressees. - It might accelerate our intellect, but ultimately it will detour it, lead it astray. - It’s the time of drift and wander. - So, its temporality might be both at the same time: acceleration and delay.
The Messianic
By Katie
Giorgio Agamben’s The End of Time puts forward a particular form of temporality that he draws from the apostle Paul, and which he calls messianic time.
To explain messianic time, he compares two diagrams. The first offers a more conventional chronology where A marks creation, or the beginning of time, B marks the messianic event (the crucifixion of Christ), and C marks the end of time, that B signals will occur. Agamben rejects that representation of messianic time and instead proposes the above diagram, where ‘B’ – messianic time – does not sit in the middle of a chronology between A and C, but rather is an infolding event that emerges around C. He defines this type of time as ‘the time that time takes to come to an end’. Messianic time, therefore, is a time of process, perhaps becoming, where people live with the possibility of the end of time as part of their present.
He ties messianic time with various speaking actors. The voice of messianic time is that of the apostle, who replaces the prophet, and is distinguished from apocalyptic voice.
The prophet is concerned with the future – predicting what will occur. Once the messianic event occurs, there is no more need for the prophet as the prophecy (the return of the messiah) is fulfilled. The apocalyptic by contrast describes the last day; apocalyptic voice offers a description of the events of the end. The apostle does neither of these things. Rather the apostle speaks of the Messiah’s return, after the event has occurred. It is a speaking of the present, of the ‘time that remains’ and which sits within chronology but refuses a standard temporality.
It’s worth noting here that while Agamben distinguishes between messianic and apocalyptic voices, that his account of messianic time/voice is closer to how many of the other theorists we discuss here describe apocalyptic time, in the sense of drawing attention to a space where worlds are remade in the knowledge of the end, but not at the end itself.
To explain messianic time, Agamben draws on the idea of the linguist Gustave Guillame, and especially his concept of ‘operational time’, which seeks to engage with how humans process time through language. Guillame suggested that when we represent something in language we create a ‘time-image’, a positioning of what is described in time and space. Operational time is the time that it takes for us to create a time-image, that space where potential is in the process of formation, and ultimately constructed. For Agamben, messianic time speaks to a similar moment of potential and formation, where we less live as potential than perform it. We might here consider similar theories in relation to performativity, which point to the action of becoming.
The performance that occurs in operational time is the production of an image that relies on a dialectic. Here Agamben turns to Paul’s phrase “weeping is not weeping”, where the “not” here does not imply an end to the weeping but that both are collapsed. Turning this analogy to time, as Walter Benjamin does, operational time is not a place where past shines light on present, or present on past, but rather where both “comes together in a flash with the now” to produce the “historical” image that is recognisable in the “now”. In order to be messianic, the image that is the result of the process of operational time must be dialectic, collapsing temporalities to produce a “now”.
As Agamben explores, Benjamin takes this further to consider a key problem of the age, wherein texts seem to have endless meanings, separated as they are from their authors in postmodern thought. Instead, he suggests that the every text contains a ‘historical index’, that situates it in both in its own epoch and its moment of ‘coming forth to full legibility’, which is the ‘now’ above.
From this, we can highlight a number of features of messianic voice:
1. Messianic voice talks neither of the end or the future but a temporal position of becoming that occurs once the end is known;
2. The Messianic voice – like all speech – produces a time-image, that of the now;
3. That now is a product of the dialectic relationship between temporalities that come to produce it;
4. That all texts carry this ‘historical index’, which is central to their legibility (truth?);
5. And finally, that temporal resonance is also a reflection of crisis, perhaps potential or ambiguity, that only comes to be realised through operational time.
Thus, as is suggested by many of these other accounts of time and voice explored in this talk, meaning can only emerge from and through the messianic moment, a moment we might also wish to consider as ‘apocalyptic’ by a more encompassing definition.
The Psychoanalyst (by Timo)
1. Two major themes regarding psychoanalysis and the voice (in Dolar):
voice stands in opposition to meaning (“I am fine”, uttered with trembling voice…), conveys what cannot be out into words (and what at the same time cannot be left out)
the voice reveals something (i: …is directed at something to be revealed, addresses that which is to be revealed; ii: …is itself a revelation)
“talking cure” and catharsis
2. Temporality and mental health problems:
(subjective “reading” of one’s own) past with a huge (unconscious) impact on the mind/present -> effect of the present onto the past determines the past’s effect in the present
Impact of the future/expectations on the present mainly driven by anxiety
3. Psychoanalytic process as “exchange of words”:
Interpretation (as part of treatment technique) as deconstruction of meaning
Not memories from childhood but memories of childhood (not reconstructive/archeological)
Consequences regarding the “revelatory” effect of psychoanalytic interpretation
aims: capacity to address an other (talk of/about oneself to an other), recover one’s voice, establish subjective time… - yet, given the fact that by means of his voice, the other is in the position of objet petit a, this culminates in coming into contact with one’s desire
In psychoanalysis, a patient’s voice might be silent, blocked, stuttering etc.
Analyst’s listening capacity <-> interpretation as a means to foster an analytic process
Interpretation not aiming at (recovering) meaning but “intending to make waves” (Lacan); scansion
Analyst’s revelations: provide open spaces!
Not conveying meaning
Not intending to reveal meaning
Rather: reveal a patient’s voice (reveal processes instead of something static)
Reverse thinking: How should the analyst’s voice sound like for it to have the effects in the patient (and his subjective time) that it should have? Which is the relation between sound and meaning (enable to the patient to live “according” to his desire”)?
Lacan: l’equivoque
The more a patient finds their voice the less the analyst talks
Also: silence as something that implements the objet petit a in the analytic encounter – drive/desire/pulsion
4. Establishing subjective time by means of the analyst’s voice:
“mental health” as not to be measured in terms of linear thinking (in time)!
Openness to “futures” despite anxiety (uncertainty, finitude)
It probably is the capacity to come to terms with certain constraints that allows for different “variations” of what is to come
Different views regarding the future impact how a person “narrates” their own past and thus the way the past effects the present and, thus, expectations
“double-reverberation” in time
5. Other important points raised by Dolar:
Because of the gap/lag between listening and understanding/comprehending there even is such thing as fantasy/phantasmatic thinking (“knowing” that the sounds one hears from the parental bedroom would extinct the mental and thus be “the end of civilization”)
Role of the silent analyst (as opposed to the subject which is supposed to know
echo-like effect: patient “hears” himself on all the non-sense of his utterings (finding voice not meaning!)
The Apostle (by Will, riffing on Vioulac)
I won’t repeat Marcus’s helpful summary of Vioulac’s argument and our discussion on it, but I’ll try to quickly reframe some of Marcus’s insights (and my memory of our discussion) into the framework of our character sketches.
On thevoice of the apostle:
Importantly, the apostle (aka Paul) is not speaking parallel to Greek metaphysical traditions of ontic-logos. The apostle’s voice is one that speaks within and beyond this regime of knowing/clearing.
The metaphysical traditions of the Greeks represents one particular domain of phenomenality in which one particular configuration of existance is opened for us to “take hold of our being.” The particularity, however, is masked by the “Greek” consideration of aletheia-truth as totality.
The apostle’s voice is thus one of excess. It is the rip in the totalizing truth claims of the ontic-logos configuration.
By being a “truth” that comes from beyond TRUTH (which “should” be an impossibility), the apostle’s revelation demands that we recognize TRUTH as error or lie.
Thus, the apostle’s voice is the truth of other truth.
In particular, it is a voice that speaks for truth via the flesh. Instead of an idealized TRUTH, the apostle’s voice speaks to the truth of particular instantiations and of the body. The logos has become the flesh.
…and thus the “crisis” is the crisis of truth. That’s what the APOCALYPSE is.
…but another crisis is our denial of the abyss of infinity:
Per Vioulac, the apocalypse of the apostle is one that fragments our claims to a totality. There is always an excess.
This puts the entire project—metaphysics, luminosity, being, etc.—into motion and time.
But “we” in the modern West neither worship the infinite abyss nor poetically engage the excess. We deny it exists in a futile (contraphobic) pursuit of ever-extending our instrumental control over the world.
And temporality?
Time is always that which cracks open the calcified and totalizing systems of previous clearings and regimes of TRUTH.
Time as death (and anxiety) is one of the ways that we come to question and renounce “evidence” as self-evident.
A sketch:
Once again, I did two sketches. The top one shows the “TRUTH” as totality claim that Vioulac is saying is ruptured by the apocalyptic truth. (Also, I tried to convey the sense that the “we” is prior to the “I.”
The second one show the crisis brought by the apostle’s revelation, death, love, anxiety, boredom, the flesh, etc. that fragments a “straight line” into something else.
The Prophet (vs. the Apocalyptic) (Marcus)
In his text “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour” from 1954, Martin Buber distinguishes prophecy and apocalypse as two different attitudes towards history, specifically in a situation of crisis. He highlights their essential difference in terms of their implied temporality and their existential mode. He concludes: “the depths of history, which are continually at work to rejuvenate creation, are in league with the prophets.”
1) What can we say of the prophet’s voice?
- His voice addresses, gathers, or creates an audience that is affected by his prophecy.
- Even if he writes, he always addresses a specific audience as if they would be listening his voice.
- The prophetic breath of the spirit.
2) What is the practice of the prophet?
- He is guided by a mission, with divine intention and purpose
- He appeals to the freedom to begin to act.
- The prophetic principle of conversion (not as historical return, but as spiritual transformation).
- Lively historical dialog between man and God.
- He is not foretelling a future event, but confronting people with an alternative that demands their decision (the potential to change the situation).
3) What is the crisis? - Prophecy and apocalypse are historical manifestations of humanities relationship with transcendence
- Prophecy originates from the moment of highest potency and productivity
- Apocalypse arises in the time of the disintegration of culture and religion
- Buber’s diagnosis of the times (1954): apocalypse without salvation, an aged present without a coming kingdom, secularized permanent apocalypse, irony
4) What about the temporality of the prophet’s voice? - The future is not fixed; it is open and can be shaped based on human freedom.
- Prophecy accentuates the initial moment of an action.
- Historical waiting for the fulfillment of the purpose of creation by man.
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