Spanos - On The Ethical Imperatives of The Interrgnum

Pivotal Studies in the Global
American Literary Imagination
Series Editors
Daniel T. O’Hara
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Donald E. Pease
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
This series will present new critical perspectives on the histories and legacies
shaping the divergent visions of America in the world within literary texts.
Texts that re-envision America and its relationship to the larger world, in
ways other than exceptionalist, will provide a point of critical focus for these
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antebellum period to the present. As “transnational” approaches to scholarly
production have become mainstream, Pivotal Studies in the Global American
Literary Imagination considers the complexities of such an appropriation
and, instead, develop alternative global perspectives. All American genealo-
gies from the New England preeminence through the mid-century modern
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tional turns (and counter-turns) would be tapped and the word “American”
in the title will include all of North America. All critical perspectives would
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imagination. Finally, the authors will demonstrate how to read their chosen
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William V. Spanos
On the Ethical
Imperatives
of the Interregnum
Essays in Loving Strife from Soren Kierkegaard
to Cornel West
William V. Spanos
English Department
Binghamton University
Binghamton, New York, USA
Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination

ISBN 978-3-319-47870-8 ISBN 978-3-319-47871-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5
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To the coming community
‘In Loving Strife, Spanos writes something like an intellectual autobiography in a series
of essays, each of which revisits predecessors and contemporaries whose work has
mattered in his life and career. All the more remarkable for the circumstances of their
composition, these essays align an important intellectual’s sense of his engaged and
creative inheritance with the modern minds that mattered most to his life and work.’
—Paul A. Bové, Distinguished Professor, University of Pittsburgh, USA
‘The history of ideas is sometimes viewed as an infinite conversation. In this book,
William V. Spanos discloses the ways in which his own thinking has emerged from
spirited conversations with others via a process he calls “a loving strife.” Reflecting on
his encounters with ten ‘inaugural’ figures-from Søren Kierkegaard to Hannah Arendt,
Edward Said, and Cornel West–Spanos provides a genealogy both of his own critical
theory and the postnational world in which we live.’
—Robert T. Tally Jr., Associate Professor of English, Texas State University, USA
PREFACE
This volume of meditations on thinkers and poets whose works have, from
the beginning of my career, influenced my criticism in a fundamental way
had its origin in my dear friend Daniel O’Hara’s invitation to contribute
an autobiographical essay on Søren Kierkegaard for the series he is editing
in behalf of the journal Symploké on earlier voices that instigated the
revolutionary postmodern cultural initiative. The revelatory pleasure I
experienced in the process of this welcomed genealogical endeavor was
so great that I decided to extend the project to include nine other thinkers
and poets who were crucial to the formation of my intellectual vocation:
Martin Heidegger, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Hannah Arendt,
Edward Said, Robert Kroetsch, John Gardner, Robert Creeley, and Cornel
West. In each case, the genealogical effort of retrieval (Wiederholung,
“repetition,” in Heidegger’s terminology) reminded me not only of much
about those inaugural origins that I had forgotten or come to take for
granted over time. Far more important, it disclosed aspects of the meaning
I had attributed to these enabling figures’ influence that, unrecognized then,
pointed proleptically to the theoretical local/global perspective I developed
in my intellectual maturity, particularly during the tumultuous period
between the Vietnam War and September 11th, 2001. This will become
clear to anyone who is even minimally familiar with my criticism. Here in
these brief prefatorial remarks I will simply point to a few of these proleptic
insights into the interregnum, the liminal in-between world we inhabit, by
which I mean specifically the waning of authority of the nation-state and the
birth of a globally oriented coming community.
ix
x PREFACE
In the case of Søren Kierkegaard, what compelled my profound interest

was his revolutionary rejection of the transcendentalism of the traditional
Christian Church—the panoptic perspective that rendered its “faithful”
subjects servants of a Higher Cause—in favor of a vocation that assigned
the individual to his/her existential, that is, radically finite self. Equally
important, it was the recognition that such an existential perspective was
dependent on the need for a constant awareness of that easier transcen-
dental domain that one had to give up to accept such an agonizing
assignment to oneself.
In the case of Martin Heidegger, who, not incidentally, was a sympa-
thetic reader of Kierkegaard, it was the revolutionary insight of this politi-
cally “conservative” thinker into the vocational imperatives of the modern
Western version of democracy—the humanist secularism that was in fact a
naturalized supernaturalism—that drew my explorative interest. To me,
Heidegger’s Being and Time, as the binary of the title itself suggests,
showed that since the Romans’ colonization of the errancy of Greek
thinking, particularly in the last, anthropological (modern) phase of this
“Roman” hegemony, thinking (and poiesis) has been a metaphysical think-
ing that sees time panoptically, from after or above (meta) things as they are
(physis). That is, it is a perspective that spatializes or structures temporality
and the differences it disseminates for the purpose of rendering their
errancy stable, a condition that would enable modern man to reduce
them to standing or disposable reserve—including himself, paradoxically.
In this, I discovered, Heidegger anticipated the now pervasive contempor-
ary theoretical insight that reads the modern world as one that has reduced
politics to biopolitics and, in so doing, threatens to reduce human life to
bare life, life, as Giorgio Agamben has more recently put it, that can be
killed with impunity in the name of national security.
As for the poet, T.S. Eliot, another “conservative,” it was, like
Kierkegaard’s thought, the dialogue between the transcendental and the
finite domains, a dialogue that rendered these traditionally binary terms
productively inoperative, that drew my attention to his writing. Eliot,
I found, was not the Eliot of the New Critics, who read his poetry as the
epitome of the worldless autotelism they espoused against the banality of
modernity, but an Eliot who put his Christianity in an Auseinandersetzung,
a loving strife, with the finite world that renders the prior binaries inop-
erative. That is to say, he was a writer whose poetry needs to be retrieved
from the oblivion to which it has been relegated by the demise of the
worldless New Criticism.
PREFACE xi
Similarly, I found in W. B. Yeats, another modern poet celebrated by the

New Critics as an exponent of the worldless autotelic poem, a profound
commitment to this finite world—and to the related cause of Irish inde-
pendence from British colonial rule. This was not only the case with Yeats’s
late poems, where the celebration of the profane world is more apparent
than in the earlier poetry; it is also the case with the poems emanating from
his “System,” the Phases of the Moon, which, in reading them contra-
puntally—in terms of what they apparently suppressed—I found to be a
device intended paradoxically to undermine the Modernist obsession with
myth by rendering its violence against time inoperative. That is to say, Yeats
invoked myth to celebrate humanity’s irreparable finite life. This, I found
by way of a closer reading than the close reading of the New Critics, was
even true of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the alleged autotelic poem par
excellence, where the poet, in the very act of begging to be taken into the
“artifice of eternity,” celebrates the dying body to which he is inexorably
attached.
The next chapter constitutes the curious but decisive genealogy of my
affiliation with the thought of Hannah Arendt. It traces the origins of that
affiliation back to the early 1980s, when, having given a series of lectures at
some German universities on Heidegger arranged by the Nietszchean/
Heideggerian philosopher David Farrell Krell, we had driven down to
Todtnauberg in the Black Forest to visit the cabin where Heidegger did
his late writing. There, as we talked about the play of shadow and light of
the forest path so crucial to Heidegger’s understanding of truth as a-letheia
(unconcealment), Krell informed me of Heidegger’s love affair with his
young Jewish student Hannah Arendt, and that he had been allowed by
Heidegger’s wife to read the letters between the two that had been seques-
tered for a several generations. On that basis, David told me, in confidenti-
ality, that the Heidegger who emerged in that longtime exchange would be
other than the anti-Semitic Nazi he was then being portrayed to be. The
knowledge of this intimate paradoxical relationship between a Jew and an
alleged German Nazi instigated a powerful desire to know more about this
Jewish woman. On returning to the US, therefore, I plunged into her
writing and that of the scholars who were then analyzing it. By that time,
Arendt had become an international figure thanks to some American
scholars who, under the influence of Jȕrgen Habermas, were reading her
as a universal political philosopher who focused on the Habermasian ques-
tion of the polis as a matter of rational communicability. In reading these
analytical accounts of Arendt’s writing, I found, to my dismay, little
xii PREFACE
reference to her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany nor to her
relationship to her mentor; this, despite the fact that she wrote a lot about
the plight of the Jews, the question of their post-war status (Palestine), the
bankruptcy of the Western nation-state system, and, not least, as exempli-
fied by her controversial book on the trial of the Nazi functionary, Adolph
Eichmann, in Jerusalem, the “banality of evil” that has come increasingly to
characterize the thinking and language of Western modernity and its
nation-state system. It was this scholarly suppression of Arendt’s fraught
personal life, including her paradoxical affiliation with an ostensible Nazi,
as this chapter points out, that instigated my will to put back into play—
contrapuntally, as it were—these suppressed aspects of the life and works of
Hannah Arendt.
I came to know the grace-filled work of Edward W. Said long before I
came to know Hannah Arendt’s. It was in the early 1970s, when, following
Robert Kroetsch’s and my founding of boundary 2, I invited him to con-
tribute an essay to the first issue of the journal on the question of the
postmodern. In the process, he informed me that he was a Palestinian student
at Mount Hermon Preparatory School in Northfield, Massachusetts during
the time, from 1951 to 1953, when I was teaching there; that though he had
not taken a course with me, he, an alien Arab in a New England Puritan
environment, admired me, a Greek-American, for my reputation among
students as a rebel against the Mount Hermon Puritan work ethic. After
that conversation, we became friends, a turn that led me to read his work
avidly. What I found profoundly attractive about Said’s sensibility was the
centrality of the exilic consciousness and the contrapuntal critical perspective
that in-betweenness enabled: the impulse to put back into play the story—the
Palestinians’, for example—that the dominant Western truth discourse
repressed in order to articulate its own commanding narrative. Said’s exilic
contrapuntal criticism, so much like that of Hannah Arendt’s “conscious
pariahdom,” had a powerful and lasting effect on me. By way of its disclosive
power I eventually became more a disciple of Said than of the Heidegger with
whom I have been identified.
Unlike the preceding chapters, the next three constitute efforts to think
the influence that two North American postmodern poets and a postmo-
dern novelist had on my intellectual vocation: the late Robert Creeley; the
late Robert Kroetsch, my coeditor of boundary 2; and John Gardner. It was
Creeley, the quintessentially American poet, who introduced me to the
term “occasion.” Though he was not conversant with the etymology
(ultimately from cadere: to die), he deliberately used the word in the
PREFACE xiii
dislocating sense that Wallace Stevens used it in the resonant line “Poetry is
the cry of its occasion”: “Poetry,” he wrote, “is the measure of its occa-
sion,” a poetry that emanates, not from above, but from below, from
humanity’s existential encounter with the profane phenomena of the finite
world. Only later, when I suddenly became conscious of the fact that I was
using this resonant word consistently both in my teaching and writing, did
I undertake a search into its etymological history. What I found, to my
delight, was that “occidere,” the setting of the sun, an extension of cadere, is
the Latin word from which the English word “Occident” (German
“Abendland,” evening land) derives. Henceforth, this resonant ancient
word became an indispensable term of my critical and theoretical vocabu-
lary because it expresses so succinctly and resonantly the onto-political
ground—the essence—of Western civilization, not least, its Orientalism,
from its origins: when, that is, the West identified itself in a binary opposi-
tion to the Orient.
As for Bob Kroetsch, my Canadian SUNY-Binghamton colleague since
1967 and co-founding editor of boundary 2, the first journal to use the word
postmodern in its title, he was my antithesis. He became a postmodern poet
and novelist under my tutelage; I was a postmodern theoretician. He was
responsive to the imperative of unending play inhering in an ontology
grounded in the nothingness of being, or to put it alternatively, to the
primacy of potential over the Act. I, despite my theoretical commitment to
errancy, tended at the time to minimize that play in favor of conveying an
urgent message. His poetry and fiction minimized the political implications
of the postmodern or post-metaphysical turn. I overdetermined the political.
In the process of our coeditorship of boundary 2, however, and in keeping
with the genealogical meaning of “occasion” and the liminal interregnum in
which we lived, we developed a unique form of dialogue. It was, again, a
loving strife—Auseinandersetzung, in Heidegger’s vocabulary—in which
the traditional meanings of the opposing binarist identitarian terms lost
their dominance (the imperative of war to the end) and were transformed
into an intimate relationality—“affiliation,” in Said’s language—that
enhanced rather than effaced their now identityless identities. This loving
strife, I would like to think, became the hallmark of the journal we founded
and co-edited until Kroetsch repatriated to Alberta, the prairie homeland
from which he had departed a decade or so before.
The next to the last chapter attempts to provide some semblance of my
complex and often volatile relation to the great American novelist John
Gardner, who became my Binghamton English Department colleague for
xiv PREFACE
two all too brief years between 1980 and 1982. At first John and I kept our
distance. This was because I had found his criticism of American postmodern
fiction in On Moral Fiction perverse—Apollonian, I called it—and he had
found my commitment to postmodernism equally perverse. But because our
young wives, Liz Rosenberg and Susan Strehle, became close friends, we
were thrown together whether we liked it or not. This took the form of
weekend visits to their haunted farmhouse in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania,
immediately south of the New York State border. It was during those visits
that the initial distance between us collapsed into a close friendship, one
characterized by a loving strife in which the previous binarist labels—
Apollo/Dionysus, Modernist/Postmodernist—no longer applied. What
was especially revelatory to me was, in fact, how deep I found that ambi-
guity—that spectral haunting by the Dionysian element of his Apollonian
bent—to lie in John’s very being. It came as a pleasant surprise to find, on
reading Mickelsson’s Ghosts after his horrific death in a motorcycle accident
between Susquehanna and Binghamton, that this Dionysian haunting of the
Apollonian, epitomized by the transition from the enlightenment world of
Binghamton University to the dark and foreboding world of Susquehanna,
had become the supreme theme of that last, and to me greatest, of his novels.
Last but not least, I write about my long-standing friendship with the
great Black American philosopher activist, Cornel West, whom I met at a
conference on the “hermeneutic crisis” he organized in 1979 when he was
teaching at Union Theological Seminary. That occasion—particularly our
discussion about the viability of a relationship between Union’s revolu-
tionary “liberation theology” and the postmodernist editorial policy of
boundary 2—led to my inviting Cornel to join the editorial board of the
journal, which, in turn, provided us relatively frequent opportunities to
continue the dialogue that began at that conference. What I found deeply
attractive about Cornel West was his deliberate rejection of the neutral
academic persona in favor of an engaged —interested—writing and teach-
ing that emanated from his Black American heart and the abhorrent con-
ditions the people he represented suffered. His insistent refusal to separate
America’s war in Vietnam and the plight of Black Americans was, for
example, to me, always a reenergizing reminder of my own commitment
to the idea that the being of Being (Sein) constituted a continuum from the
ontological to the more worldly cultural and political sites: a commitment
I often forgot in overdetermining the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics
in my discussion of the contemporary occasion. I also loved Cornel’s appeal
to popular Black American culture, particularly to Jazz and Soul. These
PREFACE xv
were not appendages; they were integrally related to his sense of human
being. Indeed, this last chapter focuses on an occasion in which I and a few
other boundary 2 editors bore rapt—to me, epiphanic—witness to “Brother
Corn’s” singing along with Marvin Gaye’s unforgettable song about the
Black-Americans’ response to the Vietnam War. It was that occasion, as
I say in this opening concluding chapter, that compelled me to think that
he, unlike so many American intellectuals and artists, was gifted with grace.
All these inaugural figures, with the exception of Cornel West, are now
dead. But my purpose in the following genealogical meditations, as I
think it will be realized, has not been to monumentalize them. Such a
fixing of their being would indeed be the kiss of death. Rather, it is to
remind the world that the revolutionary kind of thinking and poiesis in
which these inaugural thinkers and literary artists were engaged was,
insofar as it was “grounded” in the nothingness of being—and the
beginning which had no end—always already new. In other words, my
purpose is to remind the reader that these intellectuals and artists inau-
gurated an indissoluble relay of de-structuring gestures epitomized by
the five key phrases that, not accidentally, have emerged incrementally
but in a decisive way in the process of these errant meditations as the
harbingers of an urgently needed new language to replace that modern
positivist language that ends in the “banality of evil”: (1) the occasion
that (2) renders the measure of the binary logic of the Occidental tradi-
tion inoperative, and thus (3) calls for a comportment to the secular
world that revokes every vocation to a Transcendental Cause; and (4) a
dialogic affiliation between all humans, now acknowledged as identity-
less identities (non-human humans), who dwell on this irreparable earth
in loving strife, and, as such, (5) exist as the ontological precursors—the
“ground zero”—of the “coming polis” that will replace the war to the end
intrinsic to the Western nation-state.
Coda: A Note on the Genealogy of My Style:

The complexity of my writing style has often been noted by commentators
on my scholarly and critical work. That “complexity” is no accident. It has
been fundamental to my way of thinking from the beginning of my career. It
had its origins, as I suggest in this book, when I was an undergraduate, in my
encounter with Martin Heidegger’s inaugural destructive hermeneutics
(Destruktion) in Being and Time, which revealed the hegemonic truth dis-
course of the Western (ontotheological) tradition, particularly of its modern
anthropological phase, to be a lie. I mean, to put it positively, his dis-closure
xvi PREFACE
of a different and more original understanding of truth from that which, in

privileging the Answer over the question, the Act over potential, renders
thinking “thinking about,” that is, calculative: an apparatus of capture that
coerces the complex differential phenomena of temporal being into simple
usable structures and ultimately into standing or disposable reserve.
Still dislocated by the horrific Allied firebombing of Dresden I experienced a
few years earlier as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, my first encounter with
Heidegger’s Being and Time was a shock of recognition. I realized that the
Truth I was being inscribed by in my schooling was an end-oriented mode of
thinking, the imperative of simplicity of which was utterly inadequate to the
worldly conditions of the interregnum: that post-war liminal occasion that had
disclosed the violence endemic to the “benign” disinterested logic of the
West. Heidegger called the alternative truth he was intuiting by way of
retrieving temporality from the oblivion to which the dominant spatializing
mode had relegated it the truth of “dis-closure” (Greek a-letheia) and the
mode of thinking/language that was its imperative “destructive-projective.”
At first, I referred to my verbal enactment of this alternative destructive-
projective complex as “poetic.” But it was not long before I realized that
even Western poetry had been infected by the virus of closure. As a result—
and to underscore the revolutionary character of the rupture (Nietzsche called
it doing philosophy with a hammer)—I came eventually—and increasingly—
as it will be observed in the chapters that follow, to call it “errancy”: an
explorative, de-structive-projective mode of thinking and saying that released
potentiality from its centuries-old bondage to the Act, the question to the
Answer, beginning to End, time to Space.
All of which, to repeat, is to say that the errancy of my writing style is no
accident, the consequence of indifference. (I am aware of the paradox of this
assertion.) It is, at its best, the linguistic imperative of a deliberate way of
thinking that had its origins in the liminal ashes of Dresden—“the Florence
of the Elbe”—and its articulation of its potential in the interrogation of the
discourse of Western modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche and Heidegger
and Arendt and by the post-modernist theoreticians who radicalized their
revolutionary retrieval of the forgotten question of the being of Being.
The difference between the writing in this latest book and that of my
earlier ones is a matter of the degree of my consciousness of the complex
ethical and linguistic imperatives of my destructive hermeneutics. In the
earlier works I took the complexity of my writing for granted. Here, at
the terminal point of my intellectual life, I have, in the spirit of the late
Edward W. Said’s last writings, honed it into my late style.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Daniel O’Hara and Donald Pease for encouraging me to

undertake this small book on ten thinkers, poets, and novelists who
contributed to the making of my intellectual vocation. Their invitation
not only enabled me at this late date in my life to return to my beginning,
but also, in T.S. Eliot’s resonant words, “to know it for the first time.”
I hope my genealogical explorations contribute in a significant way to the
pivotal series they are editing for Palgrave Macmillan.
On a more personal register, I wish once again to express my abiding
gratitude to Susan Strehle for her inexhaustible care at a time when I need
it most; to our son Adam, who has constantly reminded me of what I have
forgotten in the pursuit of a dimming past; and to my other three children
from a previous marriage, Maria, Stephania, and Aristides, for their abid-
ing presence in my life. Not least, I want to thank my recent students, Guy
Risko, Mahmoud Zidan, James Fitz Gerald, and Robert Wilson, who have
labored in my behalf above and beyond the call of duty. They are the
precursors of the coming community that the following erratic meditation
struggles to imagine.
xvii
CONTENTS
1 Retrieving Kierkegaard for the Post-9/11 Occasion 1
2 Heidegger and Das Nichts 17
3 The Enigma of T.S. Eliot 29
4 On the Place on Excrement 41
5 Hannah Arendt, Non-Jewish Jew 53
6 Edward W. Said and William V. Spanos 65
7 Robert Kroetsch, Play, and the Specter 77
8 A “Mad Generosity” 93
9 Robert Creeley, Quintessential Postmodern

American Poet 107
10 Cornel West 119
xix
xx CONTENTS
References 133
Index 135
CHAPTER 1
Retrieving Kierkegaard for the Post-9/11

Occasion
A Late Meditation on the Secular
Abstract In the case of Søren Kierkegaard, what compelled my profound

interest was his revolutionary rejection of the panoptic perspective of the
Christian Church that rendered its “faithful” subjects servants of a Higher
Cause in favor of a vocation that assigned the individual to his/her
radically finite self. Equally important, it was the recognition that such
an existential perspective was dependent on the need for a constant
awareness of that easier transcendental domain that one had to give up
to accept such an agonizing assignment to oneself.
Keywords Recollection Repetition Dread (angest) Interest (interesse)

Mastered irony Christian existentialism Revocation
Reflection is the possibility of relationship. This can be stated thus:

Reflection is disinterested. Consciousness is relationship, and it brings
with it interest or concern; a quality which is perfectly expressed with
pregnant double meaning by the word “interest” (Latin interesse,
meaning (i) “to be between,” (ii) “to be a matter of concern”).
Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus or
De Omnibus Dubitandum Est
© The Author(s) 2016 1

W.V. Spanos, On the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum,
Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_1
2 ON THE ETHICAL IMPERATIVES OF THE INTERREGNUM
As anyone familiar with my scholarship and criticism is aware, the idea

of the secular has been, increasingly, its supreme theme from virtually
the beginning of my intellectual life. The questions my work have
insistently posed and struggled to articulate have invariably been as
follows: (1) What does being a secular intellectual entail for his/her
interpretation of being? (2) What does being secular imply about his/
her subjectivity? And, not least, (3) what does it demand about his/her
interpretation of and cultural, social, economic, and political comport-
ment toward the world? In this, I have been in solidarity with the
“worldly” initiative inaugurated by Edward W. Said’s uncompromising
commitment to the secular world and to the “worldly criticism” that
commitment entails. As a consequence, no doubt, of “time’s winged
chariot” and the imperatives of this lateness to resist all transcendental
props, however, I have come, at this late point of my intellectual life, to
realize—with Said, if not his “worldly” followers—that commitment to
the “secular” or “worldly” as such is inadequate to our liminal occasion
(what I have been calling the “interregnum”) insofar as the real mean-
ing of the secular depends on the transcendental (the paradisiacal) it
opposes; that, in other words, in this world, eternity and time belong
together in unending strife. The secular as such, devoid of its antithesis,
tends, in its appeal to the laws of nature, to reproduce the world in the
teleological image of the orderly Creation: the world in this secular
dispensation, as Max Weber made decisively clear, becomes the object
of mastery, and the calling of human beings—their vocation—the
rationalization of the earth according to the imperial dictates of the
“capitalist spirit.” The “worldliness” of these late worldly intellectuals—
their human condition, which calls for unending engagement with the
transience of time—becomes an unworldly worldliness. My late realiza-
tion of the inadequacy of the term “secular” to characterize the limin-
ality of the interregnum has precipitated a retrieval (Wiederholung, in
Heidegger’s term) of a major early influence in my intellectual life that,
in the process of my intellectual career, I had virtually forgotten, but
which has haunted my thinking about the secular from the beginning.
I am referring to the great Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard,
whose works I began reading as an undergraduate at Wesleyan
University in 1948, soon after returning to “the world” from dislocat-
ing captivity in Germany during World War II.
1 RETRIEVING KIERKEGAARD FOR THE POST-9/11 OCCASION 3
1
Opened by my degrading experience as a prisoner of war and, not least,
by bearing witness to the horrendous Allied fire-bombing of Dresden,
which killed over a hundred thousand civilians in one night and day
raid, to this first self-de-struction of modern Western civilization, I was
deeply receptive to its severe criticism by the humanist existentialists
such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and others, who attributed its ultimate justification of
violence to the metaphysical principle that “essence precedes [is onto-
logically prior to] existence.” And in the throes of that trauma, I read
these radically revisiononist thinkers, particularly Sartre’s novels, avidly.
And, in the process, I, as a student, disrupted many of the highly
popular classes in the humanities I took at Wesleyan, which at that
time were being taught by and large under the aegis of the traditional
humanism, on the one hand, and the (antihumanist) New Criticism, on
the other. But it was not until my sophomore year that I was enabled to
feel/think the full impact of this intellectual retrieval of existence from
the dominance of essence: temporality from its dependence on univers-
ality, be-ing on Being. That was, paradoxically, when, out of the clear
blue, a fellow maverick student friend from Missouri, David Mize,
attuned to my fraught intellectual confusions, offered me his copy of
The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, a selection edited by Alexander Dru
published by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the
Christian novelist/editor, Charles Williams, in 1939, the first transla-
tion of the Danish thinker’s works into English.
As I recall, I was profoundly struck by the first words of these journal
entries: something like, “We think backwards, but live forward,” an exis-
tential assertion pointing in a shockingly irreversible way to the Western
separation of mind and body, essence and existence—and the urgent need
to reunify this debilitating separation by way of understanding human life
as a form of being that is simultaneously outside (a limited consciousness)
and inside nature—an ex-sistent in-sistent being unlike stones and animals.
In another even more startling formulation of this same memorable
insight, I encountered the following statement (quoted as the epigraph
for this chapter) in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous novel Johannes Climacus,
or De Omnibus Dubitanduim Est shortly after my introduction to The
Journals. It was a statement categorically rejecting disinterested inquiry

and its (objective) Truth as a lie:
This can also be stated thus: Reflection is disinterested. Consciousness

[“human life”] is relationship, and it brings with it interest or concern; a
duality which is perfectly expressed with pregnant double meaning by the
word “interest” (Latin interesse, meaning (i) “to be between,” (ii) “to be a
matter of concern.”) (Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, [Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press,] pp. 151–152)
As I noted a long time ago, “interest” is the difference that being-in-the midst-
of-time makes and the differences it always already disseminates. It was only
when I encountered this Kierkegaardian Christian existentialist characteriza-
tion of the human condition that I realized the full scope and depth—the
ontological and political meaning—of Heidegger’s central but undeveloped
assertion that care (Sorge) is the foundational element of Dasein, human being
as being-in-the-world. It did not simply mean a burdened sense of responsi-
bility for the rest of the being of being, one devoid of transcendental guidance.
It also meant the dread incumbent on this fundamental condition—the
absence of a God on which to rely for difficult decisions about being in the
world. It meant freedom in the radical sense of word, as in Sartre’s memorable
Kierkegaardian phrase “Man is condemned to be free.” This paradoxical
meaning of Kierkegaard’s “interest” took on seismic proportions when, in
the process of reading the Journals, I came across the entry recalling a day in
his early life in the company of his aging father. They are walking in the
overcast mountainous moors of Denmark toward some unknown destination,
the father, silent, dour, self-absorbed, leading the way, and the boy struggling
to keep up with him. Suddenly, the father halts, looks up, and, in an astonish-
ing gesture of defiance, raises his clenched fist and shakes it against the skies.
Kierkegaard, as I recall, does not say anything more about this apocalyptic
moment, but clearly it was life-transforming for the young boy. On this
occasion, his familiar, everyday world is suddenly shattered, and he is prema-
turely unhomed, as it were—thrown into the realm of the in-between. And, to
me, his experience was something analogous to the night and day in Dresden
when, as a young prisoner of war, I experienced an event that shattered
whatever previous certainties about life I had derived from above, as it were.
In that brief but terrible moment of unimaginable violence I was plunged, like
it or not, into what I then identified as the zero zone—and later, because of its
historically resonant etymology, as my “occasion”: from the Latin cadere, “to
die,” “to perish,” from which occidere: “to go down, to set,” as in the “setting
of the sun,” derives, to become the origin of the word “Occident” (German
Abendland, “evening land”) that the West coined to distinguish it from the
Orient (from oriens, participle of oriri; “rising,” “rising sun,” “east”). By this
term I meant pretty much what Kierkegaard, no doubt recalling that time
with his father in the Danish moors, by “interesse,” the realm of the in-
between, where all the reference points fell away and he, having previously
taken his vocation from the dictates of a Higher Cause, was henceforth
“assigned to himself.” To put this apocalyptic beginning alternatively, that
intense moment in the moors with his father initiated Søren to the dread
(Danish, angest) that, as he put it in The Concept of Dread, “reveals the
nothing” that is ontologically prior to Being.
It was, above all, this Jobian occasion—this sudden disclosure of the
belongingness in strife of heaven and earth—in the process of my encounter
with Kierkegaard as an undergraduate at Wesleyan and as a graduate student
at Columbia, that suddenly and irrevocably infused my memory of the
Allied firebombing of Dresden with the affective—and political—resonance
that I was to bring to my reading of Heidegger’s more abstract ontological
appropriation of Kierkegaard’s concept of dread. (It was no accident that
throughout the years between 1958, when I began writing my Ph. D.
dissertation, The Christian Tradition Modern British Verse Drama: The
Poetics of Sacramental Time, to 1993, when I published Heidegger and
Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction, I was always
uneasy about having to use the far less affective English translation of the
German word Angst—“anxiety” rather than “dread,” which the English
translators of Kierkegaard invariably use to render his Danish angest).
But the immediacy with Kierkegaard to which David Mize introduced me
at Wesleyan did not terminate at that point. After a year of graduate study at
Columbia, I took a teaching position at Mount Hermon, a college prepara-
tory school in Northfield, Massachusetts, founded by prominent Protestant
evangelists in the nineteenth century, with close ties to Union Theological
Seminary, where under the influence of the Christian existentialist move-
ment, particularly the German expatriate from Nazi Germany Paul Tillich
and the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Kierkegaard’s thought had
become central to a curriculum that was oriented by the radical anti-author-
itative political initiatives of that time, not least the civil rights movements. It
was not long after arriving at Mount Hermon that I met three recent
graduates of Union, David Jewell, John Angevin, and the school’s chaplain
James Whyte, all of whom in some degree or another were deeply influenced
by Kierkegaard’s existentialist thought, not least, that engagement in the

world that was the difficult imperative of being assigned to oneself.
As I have recalled elsewhere, I, like Edward Said, who was a student at
Mount Hermon during my two-year stay there, found the school’s insti-
tutionalization of the Protestant work ethic difficult to tolerate. But unlike
Said, my two years were redeemed by friendship with the extraordinary
Union seminarians. And that was precisely because they were extending
Kierkegaardian Christian existentialism into the sites of the ethical and the
political, an extension that in the next decade was to render their unique
kind of passive active Christian existentialism one of the primary agents of
resisting America’s paranoid intervention in Vietnam in the name of its
exceptionalist—God’s or History’s ordained—“errand.”
This Kierkegaardian phase of my early intellectual life—this intense sense
of having been assigned irrevocably to myself to confront the either/or of
the in-between in the wake of the firebombing of Dresden—continued
beyond my two years at Mount Hermon, when I was a graduate student at
the University of Wisconsin. There, under the influence of Kierkegaard, I
became profoundly interested in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly its patent
indebtedness to the so-called “Metaphysical Poets,” John Donne and
Andrew Marvell, who, in their agonized obsession with the paradoxical
tension between the transcendental and the finite—I think of Donne’s
meditation on lying in a coffin—struck me as being remarkably proleptic
of Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism. My initial proposal to my academic
advisor, Paul Wiley, was to write a dissertation on Eliot’s poetry from this
Kierkegaardian perspective. But Professor Wiley, a scholar of modern Irish
literature with little knowledge of the emergent existentialist initiative and
resistant to another dissertation on T.S. Eliot and the Metaphysical poets,
strongly advised me against pursuing that overdone project. So, in the end,
following my abiding interest in Kierkegaard, I decided, as the next best
option, to write on the modern British Christian verse drama, focusing,
against the prevailing New Critical/Modernist approach, primarily on the
Kierkegaardian existential element (inflected by Erich Auerbach’s parallel
emphasis on the earthly perspective of early Christianity: the figural or
typological (as opposed to allegorical) interpretation of history) of these
remarkably earth-oriented, if not political, Christian verse plays. The result
was a book, mainly on the plays of T.S. Eliot, that, in taking its interpretive
directives from Kierkegaard’s radical reorientation of the Christian perspec-
tive from the transcendental to earthly temporality, reversed the New Critical
perspective that represented Eliot’s poetry and verse drama as unworldly
formal constructs. The dissertation, to my surprise, was eventually published

as The Christian Tradition in Modern British Verse Drama: The Poetics of
Sacramental Time and was awarded a prize as the best book on Christian
literature of that year for its radical worlding of the Christian world.
In the meantime, and by way of both Christian and humanist existenti-
alism, I had embarked on my life-long reading of Heidegger. What was
distinctive—and paradoxical—about that initiative from the prevailing inter-
pretations of Heidegger is that it was my Kierkegaardian existentialist per-
spective that, from the beginning, enabled me to radicalize Heidegger’s
overdetermination of the ontological site on the continuum of being at the
expense of the more political sites—to perceive the indissolubly related
connection between his destruction of the Western ontotheological tradi-
tion—his disclosure of the will to power intrinsic to the metaphysical think-
ing privileged by the West—and the possible de-struction (Destruktion) of
the hierarchical binarist logic of belonging of the modern Western nation-
state system and its imperial imperatives.
2
For a long time after this turn to Heidegger’s de-struction of the Western
philosophical tradition—from the Romans’ reduction of the Greek a-lethéia
(truth as unconcealment) to adequaetio intellecttus et rei (the adequation on
mind and thing, i.e. truth as correctness) to the triumph of empiricism in
modernity—and pursuing its worldly political implications, I felt that I had
achieved a comportment toward being that satisfied the imperatives of
being-in-the-world. It was during the early stages of this Heideggerian
period that I discovered what seemed to me the parallel work of Michel
Foucault and of Edward W. Said, particularly the latter’s insistent commit-
ment to the secular. Along the way, however, I began to feel uneasy about
the way the secular was being represented by all too many of those “worldly”
critics whom Said influenced. More specifically, I was troubled by the bland
abstractness of their “worldly” criticism. It seemed to me that this word
(and, not incidentally, its correlate, “humanism”), which Said had deliber-
ately chosen because of it subjective and historical resonance—its affiliation
with its transcendental antithesis—had become routinized. It was, that is,
lacking in the very existential force that led Said to adopt the term against the
systematization intrinsic to “religious” criticism in the first place. Indeed,
one got the impression from its usage by these worldly critics that the
word had been divested of its original intensive belongingness with the
transcendental, and in the process, as Said warned against in Orientalism,

was rendered as “naturalized supernaturalism.” In order to forestall this
possible reading of the secular, in fact, Aamir Mufti, one of Said’s most
able and articulate students, points out the recuperative theological implica-
tions of the normal reduction:
Secular criticism in Said’s reckoning is, first of all, a practice of unbelief; it is

directed, however, not simply at the objects of religious piety but at secular
“beliefs” as well, and, at its most ambitious, at all those moments at which
thought and culture become frozen, congealed, thing-like, and self-enclosed—
hence the significance for him of Lukács’s notion of reification. At no point
is secular used in his work in simple opposition to the religious per se. Above
all, his concern has been with domination through the classification and
management of cultures, and of human collectivities, into mutually distinct
and immutable entities, be they nations, properly speaking, or civilizations or
ethnicities. To the great modern system for the classification of cultures Said
gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of this system as
marking the presence of a “reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized
supernaturalism.”
Committed to maintaining its affective force, Mufti then pointedly goes

on to modify his mentor’s normal usage, “secular criticism,” by way of
substituting the catachrestic phrase “critical secularism:”
Secular criticism thus struggles above all with the imposition of national (or
civilizational) molds over social and cultural life, against all unmediated and
absolute claims of membership in a national (or civilizational) community.
This catachrestic use of the term secular carries the implication that the
energies of nationalism in its very broadest sense are thoroughly religious in
nature, in a sense that has nothing whatever to do with whether or not an
organized religion or a certain canonized popular religious life plays any
role, symbolic or organizing, in this or that nationalism.
In other words, according to Mufti, the catachresis renders the traditional

(Enlightenment) meaning of “secular criticism,” which invariably natur-
alized the supernatural, questionable. Said’s secularism, he writes, “is a
critical secularism . . . a constant unsettling and an ongoing and never-
ending effort at critique, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration of the
overcoming of the religious, theological, or transcendental impulse. It
implies a critical engagement with secularism itself, a scrupulous effort at
recognizing the reemergence of that impulse in the midst of secular

culture. To be critically secular is also to take on board an understanding
of the tainted history of secularism and Enlightenment as icons of the
superiority of the West and thus of the legitimacy of its civilizing mission.”
(Mufti 2004: 2–3; emphasis in the original). In a more current theoretical
language, to which I will return, the implicit binary opposition between
“secular” and “religious” becomes “inoperative.” The terms remain, but
the war to the end of the traditional binary transmutes into a loving strife
in which each pole is enriched rather than one diminishing the other.
The uneasiness I felt about the term “secular” was exacerbated when, in
the late 1980s, I began to work on American literature and to think the
ontological, cultural, and political implications of its foundational and deter-
mining secular perspective, the American exceptionalist ethos. It was at this
stage, beginning with my first book on Herman Melville, The Errant Art of
Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American
Literature (1993), when I was struggling with these ambiguities of the
secular as a teacher and scholar, that the thinking of the contemporary
Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, began to impact on my comportment
toward the question of the being of being. Because he was an avowed
“Heideggerian,” who had studied with Heidegger, I had read and admired
his radicalized version of Heidegger’s de-struction of the ontotheological
tradition and his representation of humanity as the primordial condition of
thrownness (Geworfenheit) in such works as The Coming Community and
Homo Sacer. But the particular character of this radicalization—and its effect
on my Saidian version of the secular—did not register until I read the essays
collected in Profanations (2007), particularly the piece provocatively entitled
“In Praise of Profanation,” where I came across the following reference to the
all too common word “secular” of those who, after Said, called themselves
“worldly critics”: “Play as an organ of profanation is in decline everywhere.
[T]hey [modern media] secularize an unconsciously religious intention. To
return to play its profane vocation is a political task. In this sense, we must
distinguish between secularization and profanation. Secularization is a form
of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them
from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theological
concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power)
does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly
monarchy, leaving its power intact.” (Agamben 2007, p. 76–77) For
Agamben, however, profanation is more radical. “[It] neutralizes what
it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate
loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the
first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred
model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to
common use the spaces that power had seized.” (Profanations, p. 77)
In its emphasis on the distinction between the unending play of the
profane and the end-oriented imperative of the secular, this passage not only
went far to corroborate my growing dissatisfaction with the word “secu-
lar”—its radicalization by the substitution of the word “profane”—which
implies a sense of a softening of the abyssal earthly life to which it referred:
the Being assigned to the irreparable be-ing of being. Its counter-emphasis
on unending play also pointed me to a key term of Agamben’s onto-
political discourse that I had hitherto overlooked, even though it resonated
with a meaning that was remarkably similar to that intrinsic to the Puritan
calling, the concept that, as I was then discovering by way of Louis
Althusser’s critique of interpellation, constitutes the genealogical origins
of the American exceptionalist ethos and the comportment toward tem-
poral being that was its “ethical” imperative. I am referring to the word
“vocation,” which, as Agamben pointedly notes in The Coming
Community, implies an unerring servitude to a Higher (Sacred) Cause:
“The fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on
ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no
biological destiny that humans must enact or realize. This is the only reason
why something like an ethics can exist, because it is clear that if humans
were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical
experience would be possible—there would be only tasks to be done.”
(Agamben 1993, p. 43)
But it was not until reading Agamben’s radicalizing commentary on
Saint Paul’s “Letter to the Romans,” in The Time that Remains (2000), in
which, following the directives of Walter Benjamin’s “messianic commun-
ism”—and, no doubt, Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism—he refers to
the messianic calling (klesis) of this (alleged) founder of Christianity on the
road to Damascus, that the full impact—the ontological and political
polyvalency—of the word “vocation” seized my thinking about the
thrownness of the human condition in a decisive way. That Agambenian
commentary is, in essence, an interpretation of the following passage from
Paul’s “Letter the Corinthians” (I. 7, 29–32):
But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord called every one, so let
him walk. And so ordain I in all communities [ekklēsias, another word from
the same family as kaleō]. Is any man called being circumcised [Jew]? let him
not remove the mark of circumcision. Is any called with a foreskin [Greek]? let
him not be circumcised! Circumcision is nothing, and the foreskin is noth-
ing. . . . Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art
thou called being a slave? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use
it rather. For he that is called in the Lord, being a slave, is the Lord’s freeman:
likewise also he that is called, being free, is slave of the Messiah.
In Agamben’s commentary on the “Letter to the Romans,” it is Paul’s

revolutionary—and proleptic—indifference to the identitarian terms
that determined the idea of belongingness in that age—Jew/Greek,
the Law/Philosophical Wisdom—that he overdetermines. From Paul’s
inclusive perspective, according to Agamben, the binarist (Friend/foe)
identitarian logic of belonging is rendered inoperative (“inoperatisa,”
the Italian translation of Paul’s ubiquitous kataergo). I will quote
Agamben at length to underscore not simply the ontological but also
political revolution (a non-identitarian communism) that Paul is
envisioning:
According to the apostle, this movement is, above all, a nullification:

“Circumcision is nothing, and the foreskin is nothing.” That which, accord-
ing 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.
This is what Paul says just a bit further on, in a remarkable passage that
may be his most rigorous definition of messianic life (I Cor. 7:29–32): “But
this I say, brethren, time contracted itself, the rest is, that even those having
wives may be as not [hōs mē] having, and those weeping as not weeping, and
those rejoicing as not rejoicing, and those buying as not possessing, and
those using the world as not using it up. For passing away is the figure of this
world. But I wish you to be without care.” Hōs mē, “as not”: this is the
formula concerning messianic life and is the ultimate meaning of klēsis.
Vocation calls for nothing and to no place. For this reason it may coincide
with the factical condition in which each person finds himself called, but for
this very reason, it also revokes the condition from top to bottom. The
messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation. (Agamben 2000, p. 23)
On encountering Agamben’s interpretation of the messianic calling as this

“revocation of every vocation,” it suddenly struck me, as something like a
flash of recognition, that I had encountered this resonantly estranging
phrase or its equivalent long before. And, after thinking about its prove-
nance, I remembered that it was when, under the influence of Kierkegaard’s
enabling distinction between recollection and repetition—thinking back-
ward and living forward—I was attempting to fathom the meaning of
Heidegger’s de-struction of the ontotheological tradition. Returning to
the chapter of Heidegger and Criticism entitled “Heidegger, Kierkegaard,
and the Hermeneutic Circle,” I found that it was, indeed, Kierkegaard (in
his appropriately named Concluding Unscientific Postscript) who first used
the term to demonstrate that the recollective vocation—thinking aeterno
modo (disinterestedly) in his language—whether institutional Christian,
Hegelian, or empirically scientific, was a calling that produced subjected
subjects. It was, that is, an apparatus of capture and thus in need of being
de-structured in the name of radical human freedom (of being irrevocably
“assigned to one’s self”):
The creative process in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts [in radical oppo-

sition to the inclusive—and “hovering”—irony that prevailed under the
aegis of New Critical aestheticism] is energized by a “mastered irony” that
masters irony. It takes the anti-Hegelian form of a “dialectic of revocation.”
In the Heideggerian terms of this essay, it becomes an icon-oclastic, a de-
structive act, in which an existential movement collides irreconcilably with
the aesthetic frame of the book. This collision “ruptures the referential
surface” [Heidegger] of the “spatial form” recollected from the super-visory
perspective of aesthetic vision; that is, it destructures its “objective” and
inclusive/conclusive (ironic) structure. (Spanos 1993, p. 72)
Thus, according to Agamben’s revolutionary rereading of Paul’s “Epistle

to the Romans,” the temporal imperative of the “revocation of every
vocation” is to abandon reliance on the received teleological concept of
time in favor of acknowledging the profane “time of the now” (ho nyn
kairos, in Pauline Greek) and its interested, that is, care-ful, existential
imperative. This, it occurred to me, was clearly an alternative formulation
of Kierkegaard’s account of his estrangement from the transcendental as
being “assigned to one’s self” in the realm of interesse.
But what was especially provocative to me was that Agamben’s Pauline
imperative to immerse oneself into the destructive time of the now did not
mean simply the adoption of an existential subjectivity. As his overdetermina-

tion of the political site in the apostle’s opposition between Jew and Greek
(the Law and Philosophy), or, rather, his rendering of this political opposi-
tion inoperative, suggests, the more important worldly imperative of the
paradoxically profane time of the now—this differential in-between time
that makes a difference in the world—has also to do with the coming
community. For, in thus rendering inoperative the identitarian logic of
belonging that produced the nation-state system and assigning us to our-
selves, this retrieval of the profane time of the now also enables envisioning a
polis in which the original deadly operations of the Friend/foe logic are
rendered inoperative: “Jew is nothing. Greek is nothing.” Indeed, that
hierarchized binary logic is transformed, as in the metaphor of the Möbius
strip or Klein bottle, into one in which the old rigid boundaries of the binary
logic of belonging “in-determine each other.” That is to say, they are
transfigured into a never-ending play or, better, a loving strife
(Auseinandersetzung) that enriches rather than, as in the old nation-state
dispensation, degrades each pole of the binary. In the chapter entitled
“Beyond Human Rights” of Means without End, Agamben, like Hannah
Arendt and Edward Said, invokes the fraught contemporary example of
Palestine to think the question of this coming community. “One of the
options taken into consideration for solving the problem of Jerusalem,” he
writes,
is that it become—simultaneously and without territorial partition—the

capital of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal
extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that would thus be implied
could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of
two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it
might be possible to imagine two political communities insisting on the
same region and in a condition of exodus from each other—communities
that would articulate each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities
in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the
citizen but rather the refugium (refuge) of the singular. (Agamben 2000,
p. 24.4)
Having been led to render the boundaries of the old nation-state system
inoperative by way of the liminal example of Palestine, Agamben goes
on to suggest the applicability of this disoperating initiative to the
world at large:
In an analogous way, we could conceive of Europe not as an impossible

“Europe of the nations,” whose catastrophe one can already foresee in the
short run, but rather as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the
(citizen and noncitizen) residents of the European states would be in a
position of exodus or refuge; the status of European would then mean the
being-in-exodus of the citizen. . . . European space would thus mark an
irreducible difference between birth [nascita] and nation in which the old
concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again
find a political meaning, thus decidedly opposing itself to the concept of
nation (which has so far unduly usurped it).
This space would coincide neither with any of the homogenous national
territories nor with their topographical sum, but would rather act on them by
articulating and perforating them topologically as in the Klein bottle or in the
Möbius strip, where exterior and interior in-determine each other. In this
new space, European cities would rediscover their ancient vocation of cities
of the world by entering into a relation of reciprocal exraterritoriality.
(Agamben, Means without End, p. 24–5)
3
The foregoing is the paradoxical genealogy of my late turn to a more radical
version of worldly criticism than that sponsored by the worldly critics who
have followed Edward Said’s urgent call for the retrieval of the secular.
Without the example of Kierkegaard’s agonized Christian existentialism—
his insistence on the interestedness of, that is, that belongs to, its opposite—
it is unlikely that I could have eventually achieved, at this late occasion of my
intellectual life, such a profane, ek-sistent in-sistent onto-political perspective
on the catastrophic post-9/11 globalized world that has been the legacy of
the Western vocation. But the enabling experience I have retrieved from my
past is, I think, neither accidental nor unique. As the influential example of
Agamben’s turn to the profane suggests, this awareness of the urgent need to
radicalize one’s ontological comportment toward the secular world is a
growing tendency of leftist thinking in the post-9/11 era. Besides
Agamben, there is also the influential example of the radical post-poststruc-
turalist Marxist philosopher Alain Badiou, who, in a quite similar way,
appeals to Saint Paul’s epistles (in Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Universalism [2003]) to underscore both the profaneness of the coming
community and its non-identitarian communal essence he envisages. In that
text, I cannot help but realize the abiding presence in the post-9/11 era of, if
not Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism as such, then of the belongingness
of the transcendental and the irreparable finite that radically distinguished

Kierkegaard’s existential thought from the dialectical essentialism of Hegel
and the exceptionalist Western tradition he brought to fulfillment; or, in the
equivalent language Heidegger uses to refer to the interested thrownness—
the ontological not-at-homeness (the exilic nature)—of the human condi-
tion, the inescapable relationship of ek-sistence and in-sistence. I mean
especially the Western recollective thought, aeterno modo, which Hegel and
his followers pursued in theory to its liminal—self-de-structive—point, and
which, in the name of its exceptionalist vocation, the political class of the
United States, heedless of the catastrophic consequences of nation-state
history from World War I and World War II, has repeated in practice in the
wake of 9/11 by way of announcing its paranoid “War on [Islamic] Terror.”
We “worldly” critics on the Left will not bring this urgent global change into
being as long as we fail to attend to the inordinate power of the ontological
Truth of Western civilization and the indissolubly related role this hegemo-
nic lie has perennially played in forwarding the West’s global imperial
project. Let us, like Kierkegaard in his fraught Hegelian age, courageously
call the things of this administered world by their right name. That revolu-
tionary imperative, at least, is what I learned in returning in the end to my
beginning.
CHAPTER 2
Heidegger and Das Nichts

An Autobiographical Meditation
on the Question of the Nothing
Abstract In the case of Martin Heidegger, it was the insight of this politically
“conservative” thinker into the vocational imperatives of modern Western
humanist secularism, which was in fact a naturalized supernaturalism, that
drew my interest. His Being and Time showed that, since the Romans’
colonization of the errancy of the Greek of concept truth (a-letheia), thinking
has been a metaphysical thinking that sees time from after or above (meta)
things as they are (physis). It is a panoptic perspective that structures tempor-
ality for the purpose of rendering its errancy stable, a condition that would
enable modern man to reduce its phenomena (including himself) to dispo-
sable reserve. Heidegger thus anticipated the pervasive insight that reads the
modern world as one that has reduced politics to a biopolitics that threatens to
reduce human life to bare life.
Keywords Anxiety (Angst) Repetition Destruction Disclosure

(a-letheia) Truth (veritas: adequation of mind and thing) Letting be
(Gelassenheit) Care (Sorge)
What about this nothing?

Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”
Suddenly, without premeditation, I picked the dead girl up in my arms
in a wild protective gesture, and then, awakened by the utter futility of
my impulsive act, felt at a loss about what to do with my lifeless burden.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_2
I looked around at my comrades, at our guards, at the smoldering waste

of the city in a state of turbulent confusion. Then I looked at the girl’s
face. Its features—fair, delicate, oval shaped, high cheek bones, catlike
eyes, and petite—bore an uncanny resemblance to Kathryn. For an
instance all the borders that separated and distinguished “Us” from
“them” were down. It seemed like the end of something, the reduction of
Everything to nothing, the All to a “zero zone,” but also, in a way—it
was so faint an impulse—that I could not fathom then, a beginning.
And without warning I began to sob uncontrollably as I rocked the dead
girl cradled in my arms in the midst of those ruins.
William V. Spanos, In the Neighborhood of Zero
I have been called more or less universally a “Heideggerian critic” from

the beginning of my career, when I wrote the essay on Heidegger’s
meditation on the hermeneutic circle in the early 1970s, to the present
moment. Thus, for example, the Wikipedia entry reads:
Spanos is a distinguished professor of literature and comparative literature at

Binghamton University, New York; he is the founder and editor of the
journal boundary 2. His work draws heavily on the philosophical legacy of
Martin Heidegger and while it does show the influence of the deconstruc-
tion of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Spanos’s vocabulary and concepts
remain closer to Heidegger’s Destruktion (destruction) of metaphysics than
to its philosophical successor.
While there is some truth to this assertion, it is essentially misleading in its

adjectival form. It implies a relation of servitude to a Master and a
ventriloquized discourse. On the contrary, my work from the beginning
has constituted a dialogue with Heidegger or, in his appropriate language,
an Auseinandersetzung—a loving strife that could be called, in Edward
Said’s later vocabulary, a contrapuntal gesture that brings to light that
which the author has had to suppress in order to fulfill the narrative
imperatives of his/her structure of feeling.
And this is because, prior to encountering Heidegger’s work as an
undergraduate at Wesleyan University, I, as a prisoner of war in Nazi
Germany, had undergone a mind-shattering experience: the allied fire-
bombing of Dresden in February 1945, which killed approximately
100,000 civilians in a one-night-and-day air raid. It was, to me, in
Alain Badiou’s term, an “event” that disintegrated the Truth as I had
2 HEIDEGGER AND DAS NICHTS 19
learned it and disclosed the zero that precedes this Truth’s affirmations.
That is to say, I came to Heidegger’s austere philosophical discourse
fraught with the existential question provoked by the reduction of a
venerable Western city—“the Florence of the Elbe”—to nothing by
democratic Western nation-states, the very reduction and disclosure
that, according to Heidegger, was a central practical effect of the
Western (onto-theo-logical) tradition. It was an experience the effort
to fathom which became, with the help of Heidegger, the supreme
theme of my thinking in its aftermath.
Three indissolubly related aspects of Heidegger’s thought, not especially
prominent in the discourse on Heidegger in the late 1940s, were especially
attractive to my utterly alienated condition from the beginning: (1) his de-
struction of the metaphysical thinking of the Western tradition, which, in
thinking meta ta physika—from after or above the phenomena of being
(panoptically), spatializes (reifies) their radical—errant—temporality; (2) his
retrieval of the question of the being of being (ontology) understood as an
indissoluble continuum ranging from being as such to the other more
worldly sites: the subject, language, gender, race, culture, economics, and
politics; and, above all, (3) his revolutionary retrieval of the specter of the
nothing (das Nichts) from its suppression by the discourse of the West,
especially in the modern (anthropological) era, which has had as its funda-
mental purpose the reduction of the phenomena of being to quantifiable
things. My concern in this autobiographical meditation is primarily with
Heidegger’s revolutionary treatment of the nothing that has perennially
haunted Western civilization. But to suggest how important this retrieved
category of being has been for my radicalization of Heidegger, it will be
necessary to comment briefly on the other two indissolubly related motifs.
1
As I have observed, (Western) metaphysical thinking, particularly in its
modern allotrope, has had as its fundamental purpose the spatialization—
enframing, Heidegger appropriately calls it in “The Question Concerning
Technology”—of the errant temporality of finite being, that is, its meta-
physical reduction of the be-ing of being to a totalized and thus manip-
ulatable object. The purpose of this reduction has been to transform the
recalcitrant, indeed, menacing, uselessness, its errancy, as it were, to a
manageable and useful entity, the be-ing of being to a totalized Being.
After Being and Time, Heidegger radicalized the phenomenon of
temporality to das Nichts—the nothing—to underscore the paranoid

obsession of Western modernity to negate the nothingness of the noth-
ing—a revolutionary revisionary import of this retrieval. In the essay
“What Is Metaphysics?,” where the critique of modernity is stronger
than in Being and Time, he writes:
The nothing is rejected precisely by science [modernity], given up as a

nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way do we not concede
it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But
perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over
words. Against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of
mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing—what
else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right,
then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing.
Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We
know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it.
Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain
that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing
for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs
reveals itself here? (Heidegger 1993, pp. 95–96)
I will return to Heidegger’s retrieval of the nothing later. Here, for the
sake of demonstrating the indissoluble relationality of the three ontologi-
cal categories I introduced earlier, and also to suggest Heidegger’s positive
perspective on the nothing—the be-ing of being—as an indissoluble con-
tinuum from being as such to the more obviously worldly sites in its
continuum, I turn to the question, as Heidegger provocatively observed
at the beginning of Being and Time, modernity has forgotten. Though the
interpretive gesture that revealed ontology and politics as a continuum is
minimized by Heidegger, it is articulated in Parmenides, a genealogical
series of lectures delivered during World War II and pointing to the
indissoluble affiliation between being and time that modernity had for-
gotten with a force that struck me as eminently worth pursuing for its
implications for, if not for its vision of, a coming polity consonant with my
epiphany amidst the ashes of Dresden (Not incidentally, Eliane Escoubar
refers to the lectures as the “texte charnière” of Heidegger’s “explication
avec”—his “reciprocal rejoinder to”—German National Socialism). I
quote at length, despite Heidegger’s refusal to think its positive political
implications, to demonstrate the revolutionary persuasiveness for me of
this provocative genealogical equation of ontology and politics:
The domination of the Romans [in the history of Western civilization] and
their transformation of Hellenism are in no way limited . . . to individual
institutions of the Greek world or to single attitudes and “modes of expres-
sion” of Greek humanity. Nor does the Latinization of the Greek world by
the Romans amount simply to the sum of everything they have appro-
priated. What is decisive is that the Latinization occurs as a transformation
of the essence of truth and Being [translation modified] within the essence
of the Greco-Roman domain of history. This transformation is distinctive in
that it remains concealed but nevertheless determines everything in advance.
This transformation of the essence of truth and Being is the genuine event of
history. The imperial as the mode of Being of a historical humanity is
nevertheless not the basis of the essential transformation of aletheia [uncon-
cealment] into veritas [the adequation of mind and thing; i.e. correctness],
as rectitudo, but is its consequence, and as this consequence it is in turn a
possible cause and occasion for the development of the true in the sense of
the correct. To speak of the “transformation of the essence of truth” is
admittedly only an expedient; for it is still to speak of truth in an objectifying
way over and against the way it itself comes to presence and history “is.” The
transformation of the essence of truth likewise supports that domain in
which the historically observable nexuses of Western history are grounded.
(Heidegger 1992, p. 42)
Following this startling genealogy of Western modernity, which locates its

origins in Rome, not Greece—in the Roman reduction of aletheia to
veritas, truth as disclosure to the adequation of mind and thing—
Heidegger goes on, however tentatively, to point to the implication of
this genealogy that engaged me most: the indissoluble relation between
the Roman concept of truth and imperial politics:
That is why the historical state of the world we call the modern age, following
historiographical chronology, is also founded on the event of the Romanizing
of Greece. [Note Heidegger’s Badiou-like use of the word “event.”] The
“Renaissance” of the ancient world accompanying the outset of the modern
period is unequivocal proof of this. A more remote, but by no means indiffer-
ent, consequence of the Romanizing of Greece and of the Roman rebirth of
antiquity is the fact that we today still see the Greek world with Roman eyes—
and indeed not solely within historiographical research into ancient Greece but
also, and this is the only decisive thing, within the historical metaphysical
dialogue of the modern world with that of the ancients. . . .
Similarly, we still think the Greek polis and the “political” in a totally
un-Greek fashion. We think the “political” as Romans, i.e., imperially. The
essence of the Greek polis will never be grasped within the horizon of the political
as understood in the Roman way. As soon as we consider the simple unavoid-
able essential domains, which are for a historiographer naturally of no
consequence, since they are inconspicuous and noiseless, then, but only
then, do we see that our usual basic ideas, i.e., Roman, Christian, modern
ones, miserably fail to grasp the primordial essence of ancient Greece.
(Parmenides, p. 43; my emphasis)
Though Heidegger drew back from it, the implication, for me, of this geneal-
ogy of modernity was that the errant Greek polis, grounded as it was in the
truth as aletheia, was also “grounded” in the nothing that is prior to the truth
of veritas, the adequation of mind and thing. This is why, despite Heidegger’s
reluctance to pursue the matter, the relatively unknown Parmenides lectures
assumed a very great importance for me, as my repeated references to them
over the years testify. They compelled me to think Heidegger’s version of the
nothing contrapuntally, that is, to think what Heidegger had left unsaid. Thus,
after encountering the Parmenides lectures, particularly Heidegger’s drawing
of his listeners’ attention to the indissoluble relationship between the nothing-
ness of being and the human city, I was forced to return to his account of the
nothing in “What Is Metaphysics?” particularly to his famous, though still to
be understood, phenomenological analysis of the unhoming mood of anxiety
(Angst), which, unlike fear, he pointedly observes, has no thing as its object:
“In anxiety,” he writes,
we say, “one feels ill at ease [es ist einem unheimlich].” What is “it” that
makes “one” feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels
ill at ease. As a whole it is so for one. All things and we ourselves sink into
indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather,
in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a
whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on
things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes
over us and remains.
And in a separate paragraph he adds, “Anxiety reveals the nothing.”

(Heidegger 1993, p. 101)
Retrospectively, it was, in part, this anxiety in the face of the nothing—
this “no hold on things”—that I felt as I searched for bodies in the midst
of the smoldering ashes of Dresden. After experiencing the uncanny
resemblance between Heidegger’s revolutionary phenomenological
account of the nothingness of being and my emptied state of mind in
the wake of the firebombing of the “Florence of the Elbe,” as Dresden was
called, I was now prepared to go beyond the critique of modernity’s
paranoia concerning the nothing, where Heidegger restricted his thinking,
to the positive potential inhering in its openness.
2
Heidegger, to be sure, refused to pursue the question of the nothing
precipitated by his phenomenological retrieval of the mood of anxiety
from fear (Furcht). This is probably because, as in the case of his withdrawal
from the political implications intrinsic to his theoretical articulation of the
indissoluble continuum of being, he was a theoretician to the core. Be that
as it may, he did, by way of the extraordinary force of his analysis of the
nothing, prepare the way for this radical development for those thinkers
who refused to succumb to his categorical vilification by the liberal (and
humanist) exponents of a self-destructured modernity and the binary logic
of its identitarian nation-state system. Henceforth, the exploration of the
relationship between the nothingness of being (or its radical temporality)
and the worldly sites on the continuum of being became the supreme theme
of my intellectual life.
This is not to say that the anti-vocational vocational itinerary I adopted was
a solitary enterprise. On the contrary, its uncertainty—the ontological primacy
of the question over the privileged answer—eventually led me into a commu-
nal alliance with a loose contingency of contemporary theoreticians, often
referred to as “left Heideggerians”—Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj
Žižek, Jacques Rancière, Etienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Edward Said, among
others—whom I came to call post-poststructuralists to distinguish their over-
determination of the political site on the continuum of being from the
pronounced disabling tendency, rightly pointed out by Edward Said, of
their poststructuralist predecessors to avoid the worldliness of the textuality
they grossly emphasized.
Like Heidegger, these revolutionary theoreticians perceive the nothing
as an indissoluble, however historically uneven, continuum and the diverse
entities marginalized by the dominant culture—specifically, the nation-
state system—as nothings or nobodies on the analogy of the ontological
continuum of the nothing. Heidegger’s most telling example of this
reductive momentum of modern life under the aegis of technology occurs
in “The Question Concerning Technology.” In this essay, Heidegger, in
a remarkably proleptic way, diagnoses modernity under the aegis of the
enframing of technology as an irresistible momentum that, in reducing the

temporal phenomena of being to things, also reduces them—including,
paradoxically, man, their “master”—to “disposable reserve” (Bestand:
translation modified):
Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme

danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is
unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as
standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but
the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a
precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to
be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so
threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the
illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar
as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it
seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.
Heisenberg has with complete correctness pointed out that the actual
must present itself to contemporary man in this way. In truth, however,
precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence.
Man stands so decisively in subservience to on the challenging-forth of
enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see
himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what
respect he ek-sists, in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed,
so that he can never encounter only himself. (Heidegger 1993, p. 332)
Following Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben radicalizes his mentor’s diagno-

sis of modernity as the domain of disposable reserve by way of Hannah
Arendt’s and particularly Michel Foucault’s appropriation of biopolitics,
the apparatus of capture endemic to modernity. Deriving his evidence
from the similarities between the Nazi death camps and so much of the
organization of modern life (e.g., the medical profession, including its
ubiquitous but hidden “rehabilitation” facilities), Agamben diagnoses the
late (liminal) post-World War II occasion to conclude that the essential
momentum of modernity involves the reduction of human life (bios) to
“bare life,” life that can be killed without its being called murder, a
“biopolitics” to a “thanatopolitics.” “Along with the emergence of bio-
politics,” he writes,
we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of

the decision on bare life, in the state of exception, in which sovereignty
consisted. If there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which
the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn
into thanatopolitics, this line no longer appears today as a stable border
dividing two clearly distinct zones. This line is now in motion and gradually
moving into areas other than that of political life, areas in which the
sovereign is entering into an ever more intimate symbiosis not only with
the jurist but also with the doctor, the scientist, the expert, and the priest.
What follows in Agamben’s persuasive genealogical study of homo sacer is

intended to show
that certain events that are fundamental for the political history of modernity
(such as the declaration of rights), as well as others that seem instead to
represent an incomprehensible intrusion of biologico-scientific principles
into the political order (such as National Socialist eugenics and its elimina-
tion of “life that is unworthy of being lived,” or the contemporary debate on
the normative determination of death criteria), acquire their true sense only
if they are brought back to the common biopolitical (or thanatopolitical)
context to which they belong.
Understood in this biopolitical context, Agamben concludes, “the

camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (inso-
far as it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as
the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose
metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.”
(Agamben 1993, pp. 122–123)
Similarly, for example, Jacques Rancière calls the nobodies of Western
modernity “the part of no part” (Rancière 1990, p. 36); Alain Badiou,
“the inexistent” or, better, “the separating name”:
The state can virtually be defined as an institution with the means for
imposing norms on a whole population that prescribe what pertains to this
state, the duties it imposes and the rights it confers. In the context of this
definition the state fictionalizes an identitarian object (for example, the
“French person”) that individuals and groups have a duty to resemble as
closely as possible, if they are to merit positive attention from the state.
Anyone declared unduly dissimilar from the identitarian object will also be
entitled to the attention of the state, but in a negative sense (suspicion,
police checks, internment, expulsion, and so on). A separating name refers
to a particular way of not resembling the fictive identitarian object. It enables
the state to separate certain groups from the collectivity, who therefore call
for particular repressive measures. These can range from “immigrant,”
“Islamist,” “Muslim” and “Roma” to “youth from the banlieues.”
(Badiou 2012, p. 92)
And, perhaps most tellingly, Judith Butler calls the alienated human
beings “the ungrievable”:
Such frames [note the spatializing image—and the parallel with Heidegger’s
“enframing”] are operative in imprisonment and torture, but also in the pol-
itics of immigration, according to which certain lives are perceived as lives
while others, though apparently living, fail to assume perceptual form as
such. Forms of racism instituted and active at the level of perception tend to
produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and
others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable. The differential
distribution of grievability across populations has implications for why and
when we feel politically consequential affective dispositions such as horror,
guilt, righteous sadism, loss, and indifference. Why, in particular, has there
been within the US a righteous response to certain forms of violence
inflicted at the same time that violence suffered by the US is either loudly
mourned (the iconography of the dead from 9/11) or considered inassimil-
able (the assertion of masculine impermeability within state rhetoric)? If we
take the precariousness of life as a point of departure, then there is no life
without the need for shelter and food, no life without dependency on wider
networks of sociality and labor, no life that transcends injurability and
mortality. We might then analyze some of the cultural tributaries of military
power during these times as attempting to maximize precariousness for
others while minimizing precariousness for the power in question. This
differential distribution of precarity is at once a material and a perceptual
issue, since those whose lives are not “regarded” as potentially grievable, and
hence valuable, are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemploy-
ment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and
death. (Butler 2009, pp. 24–25)
But this revolutionary insight into the dehumanizing functioning of the

spectral nothing vis á vis human life (bios) under the aegis of technological
enframing is not the end of this post-postructuralist contrapuntal initiative.
Unlike Heidegger, these contemporary theorists go on, each in his/her way,
to think the positive (communal) political possibilities Heidegger avoided
precisely in terms of the negative to which the spectacular positivist language
of the modern Western nation-state has consigned them. They are paradoxical
possibilities, not incidentally, that are uncannily analogous to my epiphanic

naming of the dead and living denizens of Dresden, the utterly devastated
world far below the Allied bombers, a “neighborhood of zero.”
Though this contrapuntal extension of the nothing to include the political
realm could be articulated way beyond the few words I devote to it, for the
sake of economy—and the imperatives of this brief autobiographical essay—I
will restrict my commentary by quoting two resonant passages, both from
Giorgio Agamben, who, perhaps more than any other theorists I have
invoked, has pursued this worldly potential of the nothing the farthest thus
far. The first, from the aptly entitled The Coming Community, touches reso-
nantly on the identitilessness of the members of the coming community:
The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indifference with
respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being
French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus
freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the
ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal. The intel-
ligible, according to a beautiful expression of Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides),
is neither a universal nor an individual included in a series, but rather “singu-
larity insofar as it is whatever singularity.” In this conception, such-and-such
being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as
belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the
Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic
absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. Thus
being-such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging
(“there is an x such that it belongs to y”) and which is in no way a real predicate,
comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is whatever you want, that
is, lovable. (Agamben 1993, pp. 1–2)
The second quotation from Agamben is from an essay on the relevance of

Guy Debord’s devastating critique of the spectacle that has triumphed in
capitalist modernity—its annulment of the play of language—for the con-
temporary post-nation state (including the orthodox Marxist version of the
communist state). It hints, in a language adequate to the Bartlebyan impera-
tives of the nothing, at the revolutionary communal essence of a polis
composed precisely of the nobodies Agamben calls “whatever beings”:
How can thought collect Debord’s inheritance today, in the age of the com-
plete triumph of the spectacle [the complete spatialization of time]? It is
evident, after all, that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity
and linguistic being of humans. This means that an integrated Marxian

analysis should take into consideration the fact that capitalism (or whatever
other name we might want to give to the process dominating world history
today) not only aimed at the expropriation of productive activity, but also,
and above all, at the alienation of language itself, of the linguistic and
communicative nature of human beings, of that logos in which Heraclitus
identifies the Common. The extreme form of the expropriation of the
Common is the spectacle, in other words, the politics in which we live.
But this also means that what we encounter in the spectacle is our very lin-
guistic nature inverted. For this reason (precisely because what is being
expropriated is the possibility itself of a common good), the spectacle’s
violence is so destructive; but, for the same reason, the spectacle still contains
something like a positive possibility—and it is our task to use this possibility
against it. (Agamben 2000, p. 82–83)
In referring to the paradoxical political potential inhering in the spectacle,

Agamben, not accidentally, returns us to the late modern occasion—that
liminal point in the development of the binary identitarian logic of the modern
nation-state, where the nothing and its positive political potential manifest
themselves for positive thought. It is in this sense that I eventually came to
consciously identify our liminal occasion with the neighborhood of zero I bore
witness to in the rubble of Dresden as a prisoner of war.
CODA
In sum, it turns out, it was the radically dislocating firebombing of
Dresden—that event I bore existential witness to that rendered me an
exile in the world—that was secretively operative in the process of my early
quest for an intellectual vocation. It was also this alienating “event”—this
utter de-struction of all the props I had inherited from the ontotheological
tradition—that both led me inexorably to Heidegger and away from him
to a more existential and political comportment towards the question of
being. What strikes me as I reexamine my work from the late 1960s, when
I was beginning to read Heidegger seriously (Being and Time), to the
liminal post-9/11 occasion, is how manifestly present that neighborhood
of zero—that strange and estranging community of nobodies—was in the
founding of my intellectual vocation: both my profound attraction to
Heidegger’s de-structive thinking and my will to go where he refused to
go: to willingly enter the zero zone, where, as Jean Paul Sartre put it after
reading Heidegger, we are “condemned to be free.”
CHAPTER 3
The Enigma of T.S. Eliot

An Autobiographical Essay on the Contradiction
Between His Prose and His Poetry
Abstract As for the poet, T.S. Eliot, another “conservative,” it was, like
Kierkegaard’s thought, the dialogue between the transcendental and the
finite domains, a dialogue that rendered these traditionally binary terms
productively inoperative, that drew my attention to his writing. Eliot,
I found, was not the Eliot of the New Critics, who read his poetry as the
epitome of the worldless autotelism they espoused against the banality of
modernity, but an Eliot who put his Christianity in an Auseinandersetzung, a
loving strife, with the finite world that renders the prior binaries inoperative.
Keywords Tradition Christian existentialism Conservative radicalism

Exploration Counterpoint Beginning-end Kierkegaard
What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together) . . .
T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_3
I have often been accused by liberal intellectuals that the primary sources
of my literary criticism have been political conservatives: Martin
Heidegger, William Butler Yeats, and, not least, T.S. Eliot. I cannot, of
course, dispute this accusation. But what needs to be said by way of
clarification is that, though I have also been called a political radical, my
work from the beginning has been informed by an onto-political perspec-
tive that has avoided conventional, that is, modern Western political labels
such as liberal, conservative, moderate, etc. Indeed, it has existed, in part,
to de-structure them in the name of a groundless ontology—an ontology
of the nothing—and an analogous identityless politics. More specifically,
I have found these particular conservatives suggestive because, whatever
their positive politics, the critical perspective of their conservatism exposes
the dehumanizing ontological basis—the concept of identity (naming)
and its indissolubly related worldly manifestations (particularly the
nation-state system)—of the liberal democracies that have prevailed
throughout modernity.
The particular case of T.S. Eliot, I came eventually to find, represents a
complex version of this contrapuntal gesture. What I found especially
unique about Eliot’s conservatism—political, social, linguistic, cultural—
is, in fact, its remarkable resemblance to that gesture in Martin
Heidegger’s discourse he called Auseinandersetzung, a loving dialogical
strife between Eliot’s prose, where his conservatism is apparently extreme,
and his poetry, where his openness to potential is marked, that renders the
inaugural positions of the protagonists (in Giorgio Agamben’s term)
“inoperative,” that is, enables the identityless identities that will produce
the coming polis.
1
I began reading T.S. Eliot’s poetry in high school during the early stages
of World War II. (It was his early poetry prior to his conversion to Anglo-
Catholicism). In part, my interest in Eliot was a matter of fashion. Like so
many other young men at that fraught time, I found such dark lines as the
following appealing to my adolescent jadedness: “This is the way the
world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world
ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” (T.S. Eliot 1958, p. 59). Or,
Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
3 THE ENIGMA OF T.S. ELIOT 31
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
(Eliot 1958, p. 3)
Or,
April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dry tubers.
(Eliot 1958, p. 37)
But even then I felt way down deep, despite his Anglo-American heritage,
that Eliot’s critique of Western modernity, particularly its liberal capitalist
ethos, which was given existential force by his self-imposed exile from
America, spoke in some mysterious way to my alienation from a homeland.
Later, as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, when I began
“studying” Eliot, I was compelled to read his prose and to confront the
“Christian” poetry. I was, to put it mildly, dismayed by the seemingly
systematic conservatism of his pronouncements on the Western “tradi-
tion” (religion, culture, language, poetry, politics, international affairs),
pronouncements epitomized by his highly publicized statement: “[My]
general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in
politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (T.S. Eliot 1932, p. 289). Indeed,
I thought that his exemplary celebration of Virgil over Homer and the
Greeks of antiquity in “What Is a Classic?” was perverse:
I should like first to rehearse the characteristics which I have already attrib-
uted to the classic, with special application to Virgil, to his language, his
civilization, and the particular moment in the history of that language and
civilization at which he arrived. Maturity of mind: this needs history, and the
consciousness of history. Consciousness of history cannot be fully awake,
except where there is other history than the history of the poet’s own
people: we need this in order to see our own place in history. There must
be the knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilized people,
and of a people whose civilization is sufficiently cognate to have influenced
and entered into our own. This is a consciousness which the Romans had,
and which the Greeks, however much more highly we may estimate their
achievement—and indeed, we may respect it all the more on this account—
could not possess. It was a consciousness, certainly, which Virgil himself did
much to develop. From the beginning, Virgil, like his contemporaries and
immediate predecessors, was constantly adapting and using the discoveries,
traditions and inventions of Greek poetry. . . . It is this development of one
literature, or one civilization, in relation to another, which gives a peculiar
significance to the subject of Virgil’s epic. In Homer, the conflict between
the Greeks and the Trojans is hardly larger in scope than a feud between one
Greek city-state and a coalition of other city-states: behind the story of
Aeneas is the consciousness of a more radical distinction, a distinction,
which is at the same time a statement of relatedness, between two great
cultures, and, finally, of their reconciliation under an all-embracing destiny.
(T.S. Eliot 1957, pp. 61–62)
Going against the grain of a literary modernism that prevailed at that time,
I found it difficult to understand how a poet with such striking “individual
talent”—capable of infusing such suggestive uniqueness and originality
into a scene and the rhythms from modern life—could, despite the pre-
vailing romanticism that T.E. Hulme rightly referred to as “circumambi-
ent gas,” proselytize so insistently for the recuperation of the “tradition”
and re-collectivization of modern humanity. This, enhanced by the patent
humility of Eliot’s poetic voice, was the question I confronted all through
the years when the meaning of Eliot’s poetry was being determined by the
worldless New Critics and their concept of the autotelic poem—the poem
that was defused of temporality, history, and place and transformed by the
panoptic eye of the New Critic into an object of distanced contemplation:
“the poem must not mean but be.”
This dilemma was further compounded by Eliot’s turn to Christian
poetry, a turn that culminated in his “masterpiece,” Four Quartets, written
during and in response to the turbulent and liminal years of World War II.
My immediate reaction, against a visceral admiration, on sampling this
Christian poetry was to conclude that Eliot had abandoned poetry for
religious propaganda. Then, at the same time that I was discovering
Martin Heidegger, I was alerted to the Journals of Søren Kierkegaard,
the Christian existentialist thinker Martin Heidegger introduced to a
European audience, not incidentally, by my friend and fellow classmate,
David Mize.
This was a revelation: a different, far more tolerable, though more diffi-
cult, Christianity than I had ever encountered, one that, paradoxically,
retrieved and put back into play in human affairs temporality and choice—
the existential element—from its degradation by the transcendental impera-
tives of traditional Christianity. “We think backward and live forward,” I
read in the opening page of his journals, and later, Kierkegaard’s distinction
between a new (we might say postmodern) understanding of temporality
from the traditional mode associated with memory, which Kierkegaard tell-
ingly calls “recollection” to indicate its function as a means of recuperating
the errancy, the scatter, of the finite world into a Whole.
“The dialectic of repetition is easy,” he writes in Repetition,
for what is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but
precisely the fact that it has been gives to repetition the character of novelty
[my emphasis]. When the Greeks [the reference is to Plato] said that all
knowledge is recollection they affirmed that all that is has been; when one
says that life is a repetition one affirms that existence which has been now
becomes. When one does not possess the categories of recollection or of
repetition the whole of life is resolved into a void and empty noise.
Recollection is the pagan [Platonic/Hegelian] life-view, repetition is the
modern life-view; repetition is the interest of metaphysics, and at the same
time the interest upon which metaphysics founders; repetition is the solu-
tion contained in every ethical view, repetition is a conditio sine qua non of
every dogmatic problem. (Kierkegaard 1964, pp. 53–54)
Recollection calls the human being to his/her duty to a transcendental

caller, whether God or a secular version such as the Modernism espoused
by the New Critics. Against the essential servitude of this sense of voca-
tion, repetition, on the other hand, assigns the individual to him/her self.
He/she is compelled not only to choose but also to rely on an imperfect—
errant—language as the fundamental way of historical life. For
Kierkegaard, as I understood him, even Christ, who had been appro-
priated by the Church, was a (difficult) choice.
In reading Kierkegaard, it struck me with a shock of recognition that this

inverted vocation—this call to retrieve the open-endedness of language—
the revocation of the Western vocation, in Giorgio Agamben’s provocative
phrase—conveyed, in fact, the essential import of Eliot’s Christian poetry,
above all, that of the Four Quartets. I heard this compelling humility in
Eliot’s repeated meditations on language, particularly in “East Coker”:
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
....
Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
(Eliot 1958, p. 125)
2
I have been obsessed by Eliot’s Four Quartets since the mid-1950s when
I read it in a graduate class with the Americanist, Professor Fred Hoffman
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. At that time (the mid-1950s)
the study of American literature, it is worth mentioning, was ostracized
by the Wisconsin English Department mainstream. Rumor had it that

the main exponent of American studies used a separate stairwell to get to
his class on nineteenth-century American literature. My intention was, in
fact, to write a dissertation on Eliot’s poetry from the perspective of his
alienation from “America.” But my advisor, Paul Wiley, an expert in Irish
literature with a New Critical bias, would not permit me to undertake
that project because he felt that there were too many dissertations being
written on Eliot’s poetry in the American academy. Instead, he sug-
gested, in keeping with my interest, that I write about his English-
oriented verse plays. In the end, I decided, with Kierkegaard’s
Christian existentialism in mind, to work on the modern Christian
British verse drama associated with the Canterbury Festival, which
Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral had largely instigated.
This project enabled me not only to read Kierkegaard in depth, but also
continental thinkers like Heidegger and the humanist existentialists he
influenced—Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Bouvoir, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, among others. One of the most lasting impressions this
reading made on me was the intensity of the Christian existentialist writers’
sense of their relationship to the finite world they chose to dwell in, an
intensity far greater than that of most secular humanists. And that, I even-
tually realized, was because the transcendental they had chosen to give up
was always a spectral presence, a haunting absence in the world in which they
lived. That absence that haunted the finite presence and charged even its
least significant worldly facet and his sense of the larger world is what I
invariably found in Eliot’s paradoxical “Christian” poetry.
In the early 1960s, while teaching at Knox College in Galesburg,
Illinois, I was given the opportunity to articulate my radical interpretation
of Four Quartets when Joe Riddel, my graduate school classmate at
Wisconsin, invited me to contribute an essay on a “modern” poem from
what was then coming to be called a “postmodern” perspective. I obliged
but, paradoxically, in keeping with my Kierkegaardian perspective. This
essay, “Hermeneutics and Memory: Destroying T.S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets,” was a major gesture in my effort to contribute to an inaugural
literary critical initiative that was intended to overthrow the stultifying—
worldless—world of the American New Criticism in favor of a poetry that,
in the language of a still infant existentialism, was “engaged,” which is to
say, tethered to this world, in which the question is ontologically prior to
the answer. This, I tried to show in that essay against the American New
Critical ironists, was, despite the Christian context of the poem,
fundamentally what Four Quartets was about: a series of unresolved med-

itations on the question of the relationship between the transcendent and
the finite, in the process of which the terms at stake—Transcendent/finite;
End/beginning; Directionality/errancy; One/many, etc.—lose their
initial (traditional) meaning to become something hitherto unthought.
As Eliot puts this dislocating paradox at the disclosing close of Four
Quartets, “We shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our
exploring / Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the
first time.” (Eliot 1958, p. 145)
My essay on Four Quartets did not receive much attention, as is the fate
of most journal essays, though a few friends (mostly on the boundary 2
editorial board) responded positively to its suggestive paradox. As a result I
decided to collect a number of my essays on Eliot—on “The Waste Land,”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Wanna Go Home, Baby?” (the
verse play), and Four Quartets—into a book format. On the advice of my
boundary 2 colleague, Dan O’Hara, I sent the manuscript to the Wisconsin
University Press, where, at the time, Frank Lentricchia, Dan’s friend, was on
the masthead, and which was publishing some important ground-breaking
books on American literature (such as Sacvan Bercovitch’s American
Jeremiad). About six months later, the editor returned the rejected manu-
script with a copy of the reader’s report by the popular traditionalist critic
William H. Pritchard, who flatly rejected the manuscript, calling it (parti-
cularly the chapters on “Prufrock” and the Four Quartets) “the ravings of a
madman.” Needless to say, I was appalled by the reviewer’s reactionary
crudeness, though I realized that my radical revision of the New Critics’
Eliot was ahead of its time. That manuscript, alas, was never published.
When in the early 1990s I tried again (at Cambridge University Press), an
unidentified reviewer wrote, strangely, that my postmodern Eliot was by
then a commonplace, when, in fact, he was, along with the New Critics who
sponsored him, more or less forgotten.
It was not until 1994 that I returned to Eliot’s Four Quartets. This was
when I read Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and came across the not
quite tangential brief but immensely suggestive passage, which, invoking a
line from Four Quartets, displaces by violence Eliot from his Modernist/
New Critical homeland on the basis of his appeal to counterpoint. I quote
Said’s diagnosis of the post-war occasion (the liminal stage of Western
modernity), in which the reference to Eliot’s poem (quoted as the epigraph
of this chapter) is imbedded, at some length to point to both the strange
paradox of an exiled anti-imperialist Palestinian invoking an alleged
imperialist to suggest the structureless structure of the revolutionary coming

community in the wake of the imminent self-destruction of Western mod-
ernity and to prepare for my commentary on the paradoxical relationship
between Eliot’s conservative prose and his open-ended poetry:
[I]t is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born

in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperi-
alism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated
dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, ener-
gies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that
of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains,
between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspec-
tive then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this
perspective also, one can see “the complete consort dancing together” contra-
puntally. (Said 1994, p. 332; my emphasis)
Said, unfortunately, did not expand on this brief but highly suggestive
equation of Eliot’s appeal in Four Quartets to the language of musical
counterpoint and the radical coming community—the “‘complete concert
dancing together’ contrapuntally.” But what he does say in this complex
paradoxical locution is remarkably similar to, indeed, I suggest, proleptic
of, the speculations of the most recent radical theoreticians—Alain
Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and, above all perhaps, Giorgio
Agamben—who are attempting to think the liminality of contemporary
modernity in terms of a coming global community, which, unlike the
bankrupt modern (Western) nation-state, consists of identityless identities
existing together in a contrapuntal relationship:
The coming being is whatever being.. . . . The Whatever in question here

relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property
(to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only
in its being such as it is. Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that
obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the
intelligibility of the universal. The intelligible, according to a beautiful expres-
sion of Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides), is neither a universal nor an individual
included in a series, but rather “singularity insofar as it is whatever singular-
ity.” In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this
or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or
that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for
another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its
being -such, which remains constantly hidden in the condition of belonging

(“there is an x such that it belongs to y”) and which is in no way a real
predicate, comes to light itself: The singularity exposed as such is whatever
you want, that is, lovable. (Agamben 1993b, pp. 1–2)
To put it all too briefly, the old binary identities become, in Agamben’s apt
term, “inoperative”: they, like the identities of Eliot’s “complete consort,”
remain but under the new global dispensation they “dance together con-
trapuntally”: in a loving strife that, instead of promoting the violence
endemic to the binary logic of the nation-state system, enhances the lives
of both by giving them back the language that modernity, in the form of
the triumphant spectacle (the complete spatialization of time and the
totalization of the disciplinary panoptic perspective), has denied them. I
quote from Agamben’s—essay meditating on the legacy of Guy Debord’s
diagnosis of the liminal condition of modernity as “the society of the
spectacle”—the complete spatialization of time and its bereavement of
humanity’s linguistic essence—to point to the remarkable similarity
between Eliot’s projected community in Four Quartets and this contem-
porary worldly onto-political initiative of the theorists that, to emphasize
their worldly de-structuring project, I have called “post-poststructuralists.”
In the liminal age of the spectacle, Agamben writes:
[L]anguage (the linguistic nature of human beings) remains once again hidden
and separated. Language thus acquires, for the last time, the unspoken power to
claim a historical age and a state for itself: the age of the spectacle, or the state of
fully realized nihilism. This is why today power founded on a presupposed
foundation is vacillating all around the planet: the kingdoms of the Earth are
setting out, one after the other, for the spectacular-democratic regime that
constitutes the completion of state-form. Even more than economic necessities
and technological development, what drives the nations of the Earth toward a
single common destiny is the alienation of linguistic being, the uprooting of all
peoples from their vital dwelling in language. But exactly for this reason, the age
in which we live is also that in which for the first time it becomes possible for
human beings to experience their own linguistic essence—to experience, that is,
not some language content or some true proposition, but language itself, as well
as the very fact of speaking. Contemporary politics is precisely this devastating
experimentum linguae that disarticulates and empties, all over the planet, tradi-
tions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.
Only those who will be able to carry it to completion—without allowing
that which reveals to be veiled in the nothingness it reveals, but bringing
language itself to language—will become the first citizens of a community

with neither presuppositions nor a state. (Agamben 2000a, pp. 84–85)
3
To return, finally, to the contradictory tension between Eliot’s conserva-
tive prose and his errant poetry, I was now able to understand, after
having realized how fundamental the open-ended contrapuntal impulse
was in his unconventional psyche from the beginning, that they, in fact,
existed in a disoperating counterpoint—a loving strife, in which the
original terms of the binary, though they remained names, no longer
had the authoritative meaning—and the justification for violence—they
had under the aegis of modernity and its nation-state system. In Eliot’s
paradoxical practice, the poetry disclosed, contrapuntally, what his con-
servative prose necessarily concealed in order to produce its narrative, and
the conservative prose reminded me that its binary opposite—liberalism—
had been responsible for the annulment of the play of human language
and the consequent catastrophic condition of the modern (World War II)
world in which Eliot was writing. In so doing, this proleptic contrapuntal
practice—this loving strife (Auseinandersetzung, in Heidegger’s appro-
priate term)—also projected, as Edward Said was the first to observe, the
coming polis: “‘the complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally.”
It is no accident, I came to realize in the long process of coming to terms
with the “contradiction” between the prose and the poetry, that Eliot,
from the beginning of his life as a poet, militantly modeled his poems
on the disoperating phrase, “discordia concors,” which Samuel Johnson,
the eighteenth-century exponent of modernist rationality, invoked to
condemn the disconcerting paradoxical poetic practice—“the yoking
[of extremes] by violence”—of John Donne and the mislabeled
“Metaphysical Poets,” and that the New Critics, in the name of
T.S. Eliot’s authority, misread a century later as a historical call for a
poetic vocation that, in the name of irony—“unmastered irony”
Kierkegaard would call it—unworlded the world. As I. A. Richards
famously put this worldless form of ironic contemplation:
There are two ways in which impulses may be organized: by exclusion and
by inclusion, by synthesis and by elimination. Although every coherent
state of mind depends on both, it is permissible to contrast experiences
which win stability and order through a narrowing of response with those
which widen it. [ . . . ] The structures of these two kinds of experiences are
different, and the difference is not one of subject but of the relations inter
se of the several impulses active in the experience. A poem of the first group
is built out of sets of impulses which run parallel, which have the same
direction. In a poem of the second group the most obvious feature is the
extraordinary heterogeneity of the distinguishable impulses. But they are
more than heterogeneous, they are opposed. They are such that in ordin-
ary, non-poetic, non-imaginative experience, one or other set would be
suppressed to give as it might appear freer development to the others.
The difference comes out clearly if we consider how comparatively
unstable poems of the first kind are. They will not bear an ironical con-
templation. (I. A. Richards 1924, pp. 249–250)
This, at any rate, is the un-concluding conclusion I reached in the decades-long

process of addressing the question, mooted by the Anglo-American New
Critics, Who is T.S. Eliot? Read in this contrapuntal way, he thus, as Edward
Said intuited two decades ago, speaks suggestively to our benighted—and
liminal (post-modern, post-9/11)—occasion.
CHAPTER 4
On the Place on Excrement

My Relationship to the Poetry
of William Butler Yeats
Abstract Similarly I found W. B. Yeats, another modern poet celebrated

by the New Critics as an exponent of the worldless autotelic poem, to be
profoundly committed to this finite world—and to the related cause of
Irish independence from British colonial rule. This was not only the case
with Yeats’s late poems, where it is apparent; it is also the case with the
poems emanating from his “Phases of the Moon,” system, which, in
reading them contrapuntally, I found to be a device intended paradoxically
to undermine the Modernist obsession with myth by rendering it inop-
erative. A closer reading than that of the New Critics was even true of
“Sailing to Byzantium,” the “autotelic poem” par excellence, where the
poet, in the very act of begging to be taken into the “artifice of eternity,”
celebrates the dying body to which he is inexorably attached.
Keywords Profane Postcolonialism Demythologizing Conservative

radicalism Anti-systemic system Temporality Human body
Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement.

W. B. Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”
As in the cases of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and T.S. Eliot,

I began reading William Butler Yeats’s poetry in high school under the

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_4
influence of my equally alienated buddy, the very Irish Bill (“Kike”) Kennedy.
Even though it was unlikely that Bill had delved deeply into Yeats’s poetry, he
took great pride in his Irish heritage, which in New England at that time was
represented by the Anglos as a travesty of the Anglo-Saxon race, indeed, as
barbaric as that of the southern Greeks.
His parents, like most immigrants, worked in the Dorr’s Woolen Mill in
Guild, New Hampshire, on the outskirts of Newport, our hometown.
Unlike most of the Irish in New Hampshire, indeed, in New England
(especially the mill town, Manchester, N.H.), where the Irish and Greek
emigrants, succumbing to the divide-and-conquer strategy of the mill
owners, were constantly at war with each other, the Kennedys saw through
that ploy and befriended my family, particularly my mother, Marigoula. As
a result of this unusual parental care, Bill, my classmate from the first grade
on, developed a ferocious pride in his Irishness, and one of the justifica-
tions for Bill’s pride was the hard to believe fact that the modern Irish poet
W. B. Yeats was being taught in our Towle High School.
At that time, it was the early poetry of Yeats, which celebrated the very
rich Gaelic culture and its mythic heroes, that I read and responded posi-
tively to—Cuchulain, Conchubar, Fergus, Aengus, and so on. Unlike my
Anglo-American classmates, I, like Bill, saw these Gaelic-oriented poems,
from my perspective as an alien in my homeland, as, in Edward Said’s
appropriate later term, a contrapuntal gesture that retrieved the rich and
immensely complex Irish heritage that the British colonial narrative effaced.
To me, a Greek-American with a vague awareness of the glories of ancient
Greek mythology, these amazing tales of the lives of mythical Irish heroes
were, however unjustified, indeed, more interesting than the mythic heroes
of the English tradition—the authors of Magna Carta, King Arthur, Sir
Lancelot, Sir Gawain, the Knights of the Round Table—if only because they
spoke more immediately in their brazen assertion of their highly sophisti-
cated and complex cultural heritage and, implicitly, to the burning issue of
Irish independence from British imperial rule:
While day its burden on to the evening bore,

With head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed;
Then Conchubar sent that sweet-throated maid,
And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed;
In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast.
Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men,
Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten,
4 ON THE PLACE ON EXCREMENT 43
Spake thus: “Cuchulain will dwell there and brood

For three days more in dreadful quietude,
And then arise, and raving slay us all.
Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.”
The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
(W.B. Yeats 1956, pp. 35–36)
Later, however, after the war, when I was in college, I had the opportunity
of reading Yeats’s late, more contemporary and this-worldly poetry.
At that time, I was engaged in coming to terms with my having borne
witness to the horrific firebombing of Dresden and, as a consequence, my
having been stripped of the last vestiges of faith in the order of the modern
Western world. I had been “thrown into the world” (Geworfenheit) in
Heidegger’s apt word, or, to invoke the phrase that I couldn’t shake, into
the “zero zone,” where, like it or not, I was compelled to attend to its
irreparable finite imperatives.
In Yeats’s post-Gaelic poetry, I not only found a more complex and
immediate encounter with the Irish struggle for independence from colo-
nial rule. It was, as in the case of “September 1913,” one that was more
satisfying than his earlier mythic version in that it was direct and also
critical of the actual, contemporary Irish revolutionaries who led the revolt
in terms of an adherence to the traditional nation-state binaries, that is, of
an Irish leadership that, whatever its appeal to Gaelic myth, in fact
restricted its revolutionary project to the site of politics as usual:
Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
(Yeats 1956, p. 106)
What, under the influence of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, I found deeply

attractive in Yeats’s turn to contemporary Irish life was his perception of
being as an indissolubly related continuum that included ontology, culture,
and politics: the imperative to overthrow not simply the traditional—
Western/British—political system, but also the realization that there could
be no revolution without also a revolution against thinking meta ta physika.
Most critics and commentators of Yeats’s poetry interpreted (and con-
tinue to interpret) his notorious mythical system, “The Phases of the
Moon,” as his appeal to myth—an overarching and transcendent (panoptic)
system, replacing the outmoded Christian and secularized Christian myths,
that would enable him to write poetry in a shattered age. Under the influence
of the de-mythologizing initiative of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, I, on the
other hand, focused on Yeats’s overdetermination of the temporal world in
the amazing poetry emanating from this “System.” I read this poetic initia-
tive early on, however tentatively, as a subversive one intended to mock the
Modernist nostalgia for a mythology—the spatializing impulse, that, as of
old, would recuperate the ground for a viable modern poiesis.
In the more recent language of the post-poststructuralists, above all
that of Giorgio Agamben—whose thinking, we must not forget, exists to
radicalize Heidegger, his mentor—Yeats’s intent was to render the highly
prized mythology of the Modernists inoperative. I quote from Leland de
Durantaye’s excellent study of Agamben’s thought for the sake of brevity
and convenience:
Agamben’s own “inoperativeness” or désoeuvrement . . . refers not only to a

refusal to do the work of a coercive society, but also to something quite
different—an ontological reflection on the modalities of being. In Homo
Sacer Agamben writes that “the only coherent way to understand inopera-
tiveness is to think of it as a generic mode of potentiality that is not
exhausted . . . in a transitus de potentia ad actum.” Inoperativeness thus
represents something not exhausted but inexhaustible—because it does
not pass from the possible to the actual…. This is an idea Agamben is
intrigued to find in Bataille but that he traces farther back—and to an
unexpected place. Agamben claims that Bataille’s désoeuvrement as well as
those of other, similar figures . . . were elements of “a post historic figure
corresponding to an absence of a truly human work” . . . In so doing he
traces the idea back to Aristotle’s considerations of happiness and of man-
kind’s collective vocation.
What the term inoperative stresses is the other side of potentiality: the
possibility that a thing might not come to pass. For Agamben, as for
Aristotle, potentiality conceived of as merely the potential-to-be is but half

the story. An idea of potentiality worthy of the name must also include a
potentiality that does not pass into act, that is truly potential in the sense
that it contains the possibility of not actualizing itself. . . . For this reason
Agamben finds that “politics is that which corresponds to the essential
inoperatveness of mankind…” (Durantaye 2009, pp. 19–20)
In short, inoperativeness means leaving the old binaries—Act/potential,

Answer/question, Us/them—of the logic of belonging intact, but strip-
ping them of their violent end-oriented vocational imperatives in the name
of potentiality as such—and of the common for use.
In the poetry of the System, that is, Yeats employs the myth of the
Phases of the Moon (which, according to him, was at the time of writing in
its last phase, the dark of the moon) to celebrate the earth’s and humanity’s
radical finiteness—and the errant poetry that is its imperative. A passage
such as the following from the poetry of “the System,” “A Dialogue of Self
and Soul,” goes far to verify this intuition:
I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blessed by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
(Yeats 1956, p. 232)
Yeats’s acknowledgement in the late years of his life of this inescapable

aspect of the human condition found its, in my mind, most articulate and
final expression in his great poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,”
particularly in the last unforgettable anti-Platonic stanza:
These masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
(Yeats 1956, p. 336)
However, it was not until I was in graduate school at Cornell, after taking my
Master’s degree from Columbia and teaching for two years at Mount
Herman Prep School (Edward Said’s alma mater, not incidentally, and the
residence of three brilliant Union Theological Seminary graduates who were
committed Kierkegaardians), that the impact of this intuition about the
intensity of Yeats’s revolutionary anti-Modernist commitment to this finite
world made its final evolved mark. It was in a graduate class on Modernist
poetry taught by Arthur Mizener, the very popular biographer of F. Scott
Fitzgerald. In that seminar of around 15 students, Professor Mizener, to
cover all the facets of Yeats’s poetry, asked us to choose the phase of his
poetry we, as individuals, were most attracted by to report on. I chose Yeats’s
late poetry—the so-called “Crazy Jane Poems,” which I had not read but
which the word “crazy” in the title attracted me. Reading these late poems
with Kierkegaard and Heidegger in mind, was, for me, a transformative
experience. They were what many years later, under the influence of
Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the conventional term “secular,” I came to
call “profane,” a verification in modern poetry of the necessity of “ground-
ing” the coming revolution in the nothingness of being. Agamben distin-
guishes between the secular and the profane. Secularization, he writes,
is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving
them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theologi-
cal concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power)
does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy,
leaving its power intact.
Profanation, according to Agamben, is radically different:
[It] neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable
and separate loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political
operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back

to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and
returns to common use the spaces that power had seized. (Agamben
2007, p. 77)
With this profane perspective in mind, I quote two of the most powerful of
these late “lyrical” poems to underscore the inordinate intensity not only
of Yeats’s defiance of the Church and its vocational imperatives that
rendered the hailed individual, not least the female, the servile adherent
of a sovereign Higher Cause, but also the earthly (ontological and linguis-
tic) profanations that Yeats, I inferred, felt were crucial to the political
revolution the Irish were waging against British colonial rule and in behalf
of the formation of the coming community:
“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
“Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.”
“Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,” I cried.
“My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily loneliness
And in the heart’s pride.
“A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.”
(Yeats 1956, pp. 254–255)
“Crazy Jane and the Bishop”

Bring me to the blasted oak
That I, midnight upon the stroke,
(All find safety in the tomb.)
May call down curses on his head

Because of my dear Jack that’s dead.
Coxcomb was the least he said:
The solid man and the coxcomb.
Nor was he Bishop when his ban

Banished Jack the Journeyman,
Nor so much as parish priest,
Yet he, an old book in his fist,
Cried that we lived like beast and beast:
The Bishop has a skin, God knows,

Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,
Nor can he hide in holy black
The heron’s hunch upon his back,
But a birch-tree stood my Jack:
Jack had my virginity,

And bids me to the oak, for he
Wanders out into the night
And there is shelter under it,
But should that other come, I spit:
(Yeats 1956, pp. 251–252)
That turn to the simple but aggressively forceful earth-bound language of

Irish villagers like “Crazy Jane,” who had no patience with the inflated
rotundity of the language of the Church, was not only characteristic of the
“Crazy Jane” poems; it turned out to be fundamental to virtually all of
Yeats’s late poetry. Indeed, it could be now said in an illuminating way
that all of Yeats’s late poems were written in what Edward Said, following
Theodor Adorno, called the “late style,” a style that, as in the case of
“An Acre of Grass,” rejects the conventional representations of old age as a
time of reconciliation with the powers that be and the repose that recon-
ciling peace brings, in favor of calling the things of the earth by their right
name:
Picture and book remain,

An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, an old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.
My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.
Grant me an old man’s frenzy,

Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;
A mind Michael Angelo knew

That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man’s eagle mind.
(Yeats 1956, p. 299)
The report on the “Crazy Jane” poems I prepared for this graduate class
attempted to underscore these profanations. Despite my awareness that
Professor Mizener and most of the graduate students in the seminar were
Modernists, which is to say, ephebes of the worldlessness of the New Critics,
I wrote enthusiastically in praise of these late poems not only for celebrating
the profane finite life of man, but also for their implications for the polyvalent
Irish revolutionary cause. And to emphasize these implications, I entitled my
report “Yeats on the Place of Excrement.” Prior to the beginning of the class,
I proudly showed my title to my friend Larry Dembo (the future founding
editor of the prestigious journal at the University of Wisconsin,
Contemporary Literature), who, on reading it, burst out laughing and said
in a whisper, “Bill, do you realize what you’re saying?” I looked again at the
title I was so proud of, using the word “on” in the scholarly sense—as in “On
the Sublime” (Peri Hupsous) or, in Jacques Derrida’s version, “Of
Grammatology”—and I was embarrassed for missing that obvious second
meaning. To my everlasting shame I crossed out the title and wrote instead
simply, “W. B. Yeats’s Late Poems.” Only much later, when I adopted a “late
style,” did I realize that the original title was exactly the right one in its
mockery of the “august authority” with which the New Critics had endowed
Yeats’s poetry, though, like Larry Dembo and the graduate students he
represented, it would, indeed, have been interpreted as the profanation of
one of modernity’s greatest poets.
As in the cases of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Eliot, what I found
profoundly attractive in Yeats’s late poetry, including that of “the System,”
was his rendering inoperative of the traditional onto-political terms by
which he was represented and assessed by the Modernist critics. This latter
initiative, as in the case of Eliot, resulted in the unworlding of Yeats’s
poetry in the name of the Modernist autotelic paradigm, a representation
that entirely overlooked the onto-politics of Yeats’s poetry and its poten-
tial for the coming community in a volatile but still traditional (Catholic)
Ireland.
In the fall of 1977 or 1978, my former student, Paul Bové, who was
then teaching at Columbia, invited me to drive down to New York from
Binghamton to give a talk to his class on what I was currently thinking
about modern and postmodern literature. That semester I was teaching a
course on Modernist poetry from a postmodern perspective, and it was
Yeats who was on our agenda at the time. I was not at first certain as to
what aspect of Yeats’s poetry I would talk about. But on the drive down,
responding to the destructive impulse that had become, however tenta-
tive, fundamental to my teaching, I decided to risk the viability of this
perspective, which, in opposition to the deconstruction of the poststruc-
turalist critics, was oriented toward the poem’s worldliness, by choosing to
talk about a not very promising “Sailing to Byzantium,” the poem that,
more than any other, the New Critics invoked as the epitome of the
worldless world of the autotelic poem.
I cannot remember the exact words I used to articulate this heretical
reading of “Sailing to Byzantium” on that memorable occasion (it was,
I always remember, an early manifestation of what Edward Said called his
“late style”), but the gist of it was as follows: Even Yeats’s signature poem
from his mature period—and for the New Critics, the epitome of the
Modernist autotelic poem—was susceptible to a reading that makes the

mythic terms he invokes apparently to live by in old age to mean the antithesis
of what they normally meant in commentaries on the poem. You will realize
this, I’m pretty sure, when you attend to the intensity of the poet’s love of—
not the contempt for, as the New Critics invariably put it—the finite human
world he has reluctantly to give up. This paradox, when Yeats’s underscoring
of the glorious finitude of “The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the
trees / —Those dying generations—at their song” is registered, becomes
especially evident in the third stanza, where the poet, so deeply attached to his
decaying body, has to resort to praying to the saints depicted in Byzantine
icons above him to come down to where he stands and drag him “Into the
artifice of eternity”:
O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
(Yeats 1956, p. 191)
If it is remembered that it was in the decade of the 1970s that deconstruc-

tion, a continental philosophical/critical initiative that was anathema to a
still dominant American New Criticism, was beginning to penetrate
America’s cultural borders, it will be understood when I say that my talk
generated a vociferous controversy among the students of Paul’s class.
Most of them, despite Paul’s tutelage, thought my reading of Yeats’s
“Sailing to Byzantium” was perverse, even though I reminded them that
my reading was a more “close reading” than the highly touted close
readings of the New Critics. A few students in the class, obviously engaged
by my interpretation, were thrown into a healthy uncertainty. A couple
became “Spanosians,” as Paul put it later when he told me that they were
his best students. I was immensely gratified by the class’s response, not
because it verified my reading but because it opened up a question where
there wasn’t one before.
A few years later, around 1980, after I had begun to read the “worldly”
criticism of Edward Said—Paul’s Columbia colleague and friend—under the
inescapable influence of the Dresden fire-bombing I had borne witness to as a

prisoner of war, and of my epiphany that transformed the devastated beautiful
city into “a neighborhood of zero”—I realized retrospectively that what I did
in that memorable classroom occasion at Columbia was precisely what had
become Said’s fundamental critical perspective. I am referring to the “contra-
puntal” perspective he applied decisively and memorably to Joseph Conrad
(Heart of Darkness), Jane Austen (Mansfield Park), Rudyard Kipling (Kim),
and other “classics” of the Western novelistic tradition. To put it more
specifically, I am referring to that dis-orienting perspective, the subversive
function of which, like musical counterpoint in its atonal mode, was to retrieve
and put back into dialogic play the contradictory narrative that the traditional
narrative must leave unsaid or repress in order to achieve its totalized structure.
In a language I believe the thinkers I have called post-poststructuralist—the
reader will, I hope forgive this abstract locution if he/she attends to the
spatializing metaphor buried in the term—whether consciously or not,
would use, Said’s resonant musical term is uncannily applicable not only to
the mounting liminal post-9/11 momentum and the declining of the nation-
state, but also to the coming community understood as a Commons where
the hierarchical binary identities of the old nationalist system are rendered
inoperative, or in Said’s proleptic language, where “the complete consort
danc[es] together’ contrapuntally.” I italicize Said’s dis-concerting addition
to underscore this paradoxical dis-operating operation.
Yeats, as I have implied, obviously overdetermined the nothingness of
the ontological site of the continuum of being he intuited from the begin-
ning of his career as a poet, probably because his “modernist” age was so
deeply inscribed by a banalizing secular theology. Nevertheless, as I have
tried to show in retrieving this genealogy of my origins as a literary critic,
one hears undeveloped but suggestive echoes in his poetry and his prose—
even in his politically conservative pronouncements (his attraction to Benito
Mussolini, for example)—of the indissoluble relationship between his pro-
found ontological commitment to this finite world—“the frog-spawn of a
blind man’s ditch”—and that “coming community” of identityless identi-
ties. Or so I have come to think in the long wake of my witness to the fire-
bombing of Dresden, when, as I write in The Neighborhood of Zero, the
poetry of W.B. Yeats was a haunting presence as I, a bewildered young man,
was trying desperately to fathom that abyssal “zero zone” to which I bore
unforgettable witness; or, to put it in the resonant language that emerged
from this agonizing effort, that liminal occasion when the Occident
destroyed itself.
CHAPTER 5
Hannah Arendt, Non-Jewish Jew

Our Contemporary
Abstract This chapter traces the origins of my affiliation with Arendt’s

work that traces back to the early 1980s, when the Nietszchean/
Heideggerian philosopher David Farrell Krell and I, having driven down
to Todtnauberg in the Black Forest to visit the cabin where Heidegger did
his late writing, informed me of Heidegger’s love affair with his young
Jewish student Hannah Arendt. On returning to the United States,
I plunged into her writing and that of the scholars who had represented
Arendt as a political scientist engaged in the Habermasian question of the
polis. In reading these accounts of Arendt’s thought, I found little refer-
ence to her life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany nor to her abiding
interest in the question of Palestine, which she had written a lot about. It
was this scholarly suppression of Arendt’s fraught personal life that insti-
gated my will to put back into play—contrapuntally—these suppressed
aspects of her life and works.
Keywords Banality of evil Conscious pariah Metabolism with nature

Homo laborans Speech act Refugee
History has forced the status of outlaws upon . . . pariahs and parvenus
alike. The latter have not yet accepted the great wisdom of Balzac’s “On
ne parvient pas deux fois”; thus they don’t understand the wild dreams
of the former and feel humiliated in sharing their fate. Those few

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_5
refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,”
get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is
no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of
Gentiles. . . . Refugees driven from country to country represent the
vanguard of their peoples—if they keep their identity. For the first time
Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of all other nations. The
comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its
weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.
Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees”
I first came across the name Hannah Arendt in the early 1960s. I knew that
she was a German Jewish refugee who, after a brief period of internment in
Petain’s France and of work in behalf of Jewish refugees seeking shelter in
Palestine, eventually sought and received asylum in the United States from
Nazism in the early 1940s. I also knew that she had written a controversial
series of reports from Jerusalem in the 1960s on the trial of Adolph
Eichmann, the Nazi official who had been responsible for transporting
Jews from all over Europe to the gas chambers. Since I was preoccupied
at that time with the escalation of the United States’ intervention in
Vietnam, I didn’t pay much attention to her writing, an indifference that
was exacerbated by my awareness that, at that early stage of her career as a
public intellectual, she was associated with a group of liberal New York
intellectuals—Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, among
others—a number of whom had become anti-communist Cold War
warriors.
To my chagrin, It was thus not until 1982, several years after her
untimely death in 1975, that Hannah Arendt became a living and abiding
presence for me. But to explain that crucial turn in my intellectual devel-
opment it will be necessary to undertake a detour.
1
By that time Robert Kroetsch and I had founded boundary 2, and I had
completed my radically revisionary book on the post-modern thought of
Martin Heidegger. In an effort to enlist progressive young scholars to the
journal’s postmodern initiative, I invited the Heideggerian/Nietszchean
scholar, David Farrell Krell, who had recently relocated from DePaul
University to Frankfort University in Germany, to join our editorial board.
David was not only an admirer of Heidegger’s thought; he was also in the
5 HANNAH ARENDT, NON-JEWISH JEW 55
forefront of those few scholars who were intent on complicating Heidegger’s

notorious affiliation with German National Socialism, if not to minimize it. In
the process of our exchanges in 1981, David, in turn, invited me to give talks
on my work on Heidegger at Frankfort University, Heidelberg University,
Mannheim University, and Freiburg University in the following year, and
I accepted enthusiastically because it would give me the opportunity to
test my radical reading of Heidegger’s thought where it was most likely to
matter.
On arriving in Frankfort, and to prepare me, David warned that German
academics were not as enthusiastic about Heidegger as the French were, and
this, he informed me, was no doubt primarily because they were still intent
on avoiding the stigma of anti-Semitic Nazism in a Germany that had
become “Americanized.” I also remember his adding enigmatically that it
would not be too long before this negative attitude toward Heidegger
would be modified, if not entirely annulled. I didn’t attend to this curious
addendum at the time of its annunciation, probably because of the anxiety
his warning had instigated. But it was to surface once again at the end of our
excursion south from Frankfort through Heidelberg, to Mannheim,
Freiburg, and Todtnauberg in The Black Forest.
David’s prognosis of German academia’s reception of my radicalized
Heidegger turned out to be quite accurate. My commentaries on his
revolutionary critique of the Western philosophical tradition—the metaphy-
sical thinking of what he called the “onto-theo-logical tradition” to under-
score the indissoluble continuity of its apparent diversity—were received
politely. But my bold extension of this ontological assertion to include the
site of politics was received with serious reservations. My audiences couldn’t
understand how I got from Heidegger’s destruction of the ontotheological
tradition to my representation of his work as the harbinger of a coming polis
that transcended the violence of the modern Western nation-state. After all,
they reiterated in different ways in all four of the universities, Heidegger was
a member of the Nazi party, which had brought into being one of the most
vicious political regimes in the history of the West. I had to acknowledge that
consistent rejoinder. In response, I tried to suggest that Heidegger’s onto-
logical destruction of Western metaphysics made it impossible to read his
adherence to German National Socialism as an endorsement of Nazism, that
he meant something quite different from what Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann,
Himmler, Speers, Goering, Eichmann, meant by this term. But, to be
candid, I didn’t have the language at that time to articulate what, despite
my reservations about Heidegger’s practical politics, I had come to believe.
2
After my talk at Freiburg, the last stop of our itinerary, David drove me south
to Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. It was here in a small wooden cabin at
the summit of a mountain, he informed me, that Heidegger did his writing
during his late years. I remember vividly the dark forest trail, illuminated
erratically by the light of the sun, we walked through to get to our destina-
tion. Those trails, and the tension between darkness and light they
made, made it impossible not to notice, David said, what Heidegger was
referring to when he wrote, so often, about the Holzwegen that became the
primary metaphor for the erratic operations of aletheia—unconcealment—
the ancient Greek concept of the truth that Heidegger affirmed against the
Roman veritas (the adequation of mind and thing) that came, disastrously,
to prevail in the Western world.
On arriving at the cabin, which was closed to visitors, David led me to
the other side to show me a trough at the head of which was a carved
head of a bear or wolf (I can’t remember which) through whose open
mouth the fresh spring water constantly poured. As we were standing
there drinking that refreshing cold spring water, David suddenly, in what
I first thought was a non sequitur, but which turned out to be a summary
response to the German audiences of my talks, informed me of a book,
For the Love of the World, published earlier that year by Elizabeth Young-
Bruehl on the life of Hannah Arendt. It was, he said, a brilliant intellec-
tual biography that made public the love affair between Hannah Arendt
and her mentor, Martin Heidegger, when she was a student at Marburg
University in the 1920s. It was the first time I had heard of this strange
love liaison, and it baffled me: a young Jewish girl and a married German
professor who apparently was an anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer. David
then informed me that Arendt’s biographer was aware of the life-long
correspondence of the two, but that, because Heidegger’s wife and son
had put the correspondence off limits to the present generation, she had
not been allowed to examine these letters. At which point, in a disclosure
that explained his earlier enigmatic prophecy that time would resolve the
question of Heidegger’s alleged Nazism in his favor, he told me in
confidence that Heidegger’s wife had allowed him to read the cor-
respondence, and on that basis he had concluded that these letters
would at least greatly complicate the issue, if not resolve it entirely in
Heidegger’s favor.
David’s prediction, of course, did not entirely come true. But, as I said in
the “Acknowledgments” of my book Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and
Edward W. Said in Counterpoint, “his summary of the life-long relationship
between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger—one, he underscored, that
was maintained primarily by Hannah’s initiative—in the context of a com-
plex human history that had been reduced to ‘Jew’ and ‘German anti-
Semitic Gentile’ made her seem to me an extraordinarily attractive figure”
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012, p. x).
As a result of this, to me, revelatory information, when I returned to
the United States I immersed myself massively in Hannah Arendt’s work,
not only her political writing but also her writing on the Jewish question,
which had been entirely neglected by her Habermasian commentators.
These included, on the one hand, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),
The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), Eichmann in
Jerusalem (1963), On Violence (1970), and her, in my mind, master-
piece, the posthumously published unfinished Life of the Mind (1978),
and, on the other hand, her Jewish writings (Arendt 1978). Along with
these texts, not incidentally, I also read her correspondence with Karl
Jaspers, the German existentialist philosopher, who been a close friend of
Heidegger, and a considerable amount of the writing of Walter
Benjamin, whom Hannah Arendt had befriended when she was still
living in Germany.
3
By this time in the early 1980s Arendt had become a visible presence in the
American intellectual world, primarily by way of her ground-breaking
book The Human Condition (1958). But this visibility came from an
overdetermined focus on her political scientific writing by a number of
American political scientists influenced by the liberalism of Jürgen
Habermas’s theory of communicative rationality.
For these commentators Arendt’s fraught history as a Jewish refugee—
and her extensive writing on the post-war Jewish refugee problem, includ-
ing the indissolubly related question of Palestine—seemed to be irrelevant,
as was this Jewish woman’s personal and intellectual relation to Martin
Heidegger. Not least, they seemed oblivious to what should be obvious to
anyone aware of her intimate relationship with her mentor: that The
Human Condition constitutes an intimate dialogue with Heidegger’s
thinking, in which, as her appropriation of his privileging of the ontolo-

gical errancy of the ancient Greeks’ aletheia over the Romans’ veritas in
behalf of a coming polis bears witness, she pursues his ontological disclo-
sures into the political realm where he refused to go.
On the basis of my reading of Arendt’s work from David Farrell Krell’s
and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biographical perspective, I began teaching a
series of graduate courses in which Arendt’s exilic status as a Jewish refugee
and her intellectual affiliation with Heidegger figured prominently. These
included a course in the fall of 1997 on Heidegger and Arendt, in which we
explored “the relationship between Heidegger’s ontological inquiry into the
question of being and Arendt’s inquiry into the question of the polis in the
light of the mounting representation of Heidegger’s philosophical writing
(by important thinkers like Jürgen Habermas) as complicitous with Nazism
and anti-Semitism”; a course on Michel Foucault and Edward Said, in which
Arendt figured prominently, in the fall of 1999; and a course on Hannah
Arendt alone in the spring of 2000 intended to show that “a too exclusive
focus on Arendt’s ‘Habermasian’ affinities deflects attention away from the
train of thought from which her thinking derives: that which proceeds from
Nietzsche through Heidegger and culminates in poststructuralist theory.”
Following two more graduate courses—on Foucault and Said, and on
Foucault, Said, and Globalization (Fall 2004 and Spring 2007), in which
Arendt’s exilic thought was always a presence—the errant itinerary that
began in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest in 1982, when David Krell
informed me about Hannah Arendt’s relationship with Martin
Heidegger and of the letters between them spanning their lifetime,
culminated in the publication of my book Exiles in the City: Hannah
Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint. In that book I not only
showed the abiding presence of Heidegger in her thinking but also that
that dialogue, instigated by Arendt, between a Jew and a German, led her
paradoxically but inexorably to a vision of the coming polis remarkably
similar to that revolutionary contrapuntal city envisaged by the
Palestinian refugee, Edward Said, that would replace the self- destroyed
Western nation-state.
What I learned about Arendt’s perspective along the way of my errant
itinerary was, as I have been suggesting, above all, that it constituted, in
Heidegger’s still to be understood term, an Auseinandersetzung, a loving
strife, intrinsic to the de-struction of the essentialism of Western meta-
physical thinking that rendered the identitarian binary logic of traditional
controversy irrelevant. From this, it followed that Arendt understood her
subjective self as a “non-Jewish Jew,” a historically formed Jew whose

identity is always subject to transformation.
This Heideggerian de-structuration of the structuring imperatives of
Western metaphysical (panoptic) thinking led Arendt inexorably into the
indissolubly related domain of the political, where her mentor, despite
tentative gestures such as those in the Parmenides lectures of 1941,
refused to go. More specifically, this destructuration plunged her, as her
chapter on “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of
Man” in the second volume of The Origins of Totalitarianism brilliantly
and proleptically testifies, into the question of the nation-state, its totaliz-
ing logic of belonging, the biopolitics intrinsic to this binarist identitarian
logic, and the inevitable establishment of the concentration camp as the
ultimate paradigm of that national structure:
In comparison with the insane end-result—concentration-camp society—the

process by which men are prepared for this end, and the methods by which
individuals are adapted to these conditions, are transparent and logical. The
insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically and politi-
cally intelligible preparation of living corpses. The impetus and what is
more important, the silent consent to such unprecedented conditions are the
products of those events which in a period of political disintegration suddenly
and unexpectedly made hundreds of thousands of human beings homeless,
stateless, outlawed and unwanted, while millions of human beings were
made economically superfluous and socially burdensome by unemployment.
This in turn could only happen because the Rights of Man, which had never
been philosophically established but merely formulated, which have never
been politically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in their traditional
form, lost all validity.
The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the
juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain
categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the
same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian
world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by placing
the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its
inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a definite crime
entails a predictable penalty.. . . . Under all circumstances totalitarian dom-
ination sees to it that the categories gathered in the camps—Jews, carriers of
diseases, representatives of dying classes—have already lost their capacity for
both normal or criminal action. Propagandistically this means that the
“protective custody” is handled as a “preventative police measure,” that is,
a measure that deprives people of the ability to act. (Arendt 1976, p. 447)
4
To her dismay, Arendt discovered this totalizing biopolitical nation-state
logic in the figure of Adolf Eichmann as she observed his behavior at his
trial in Jerusalem. And her witness—and the courage of her conviction in
the face of a hostile Zionist judiciary that insisted on representing
Eichmann as the epitome of the categorically unique Nazi evil that
unleashed the Holocaust—became for me one of the most revelatory
insights into Western modernity and its nation-state system I have ever
encountered. Eichmann, she showed by way of attending carefully to his
language, was not an evil man in the traditional Western sense of the word
“evil.” He was, rather, the logical precipitate of the binarist biopolitical
logic of belonging of the Western nation-state system. His “evil,” that is,
was “banal,” as she put it tellingly in the subtitle of her book.
That Arendt was thinking of the Western nation-state system in general
instead of a unique event was verified for me not only by my recollection of
her diagnosis of modernity as an age that had come to privilege homo
faber, man the maker, who was in the process of reverting to the utterly
depoliticized animal laborans, the creature whose life is nothing more
than a metabolism with nature. More forcefully, it was when I read the
preface to her posthumously published last book, the appropriately titled
The Life of the Mind. There she wrote, in defiance of the vast majority
of Jews:
The immediate impulse [for my present preoccupation with mental activity

in The Life if the Mind] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in
Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind that
phrase, I held no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact
that it went counter to our tradition of thought—literary, theological, or
philosophic—about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have learned, is
something demonic. . . . However, what I was confronted with was utterly
different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness
in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his
deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous,
but the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic
nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions
or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could
detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial . . . was
something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.
(Arendt 1978, pp. 3–4)
5
In this identification of the banality of evil as the ultimate precipitate of the
logic of belonging of the Western nation-state, I came eventually to realize,
Hannah Arendt’s Heidegger-inspired thinking about the post-World War
II occasion was uncannily proleptic of the contemporary radical left’s even-
tal diagnosis of the post-9/11/01 occasion as a liminal time that disclosed
the logic of belonging of the nation-state to be one the fulfillment of which
led inevitably to the biopoliticization of the body politic and the concentra-
tion camp as the paradigm of the democratic nation-state’s structure.
Having followed this Arendtian itinerary from Heidegger’s ontology to
politics, it came later as a pleasant shock of recognition to read the Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, his diagnosis, profoundly
influenced by Arendt (as well as Michel Foucault), of the contemporary
Western occasion. I am referring to his disturbing characterization of the
modern Western nation-state as the normalization of state of exception, the
fulfillment of its identitarian binary logic of belonging in the biopoliticiza-
tion of the “people”—and the establishment of the camp, where human life
(bios) is reduced to “bare life” (zoé), life that can be killed without the killing
being called murder. Not incidentally, I found it no accident, though this
has gone unnoticed by both Arendtian scholars and exponents of
Agamben’s revolutionary diagnosis of the contemporary human condition,
that Agamben was a student of Heidegger, and that virtually everything he
has written constitutes, like Hannah Arendt’s life-long project, a loving
strife with his mentor:
Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and

gradual expansion beyond the limits of the decision on bare life, in the state
of exception, in which sovereignty consisted. If there is a line in every
modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a
decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, this line no
longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones.
This line is now in motion and gradually moving into areas other than that
of political life, areas in which the sovereign is entering into an ever more
intimate symbiosis not only with the jurist but also with the doctor, the
scientist, the expert, and the priest. . . . From this perspective, the camp—as
the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded
solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the
political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will
have to learn to recognize. (Agamben 1993a, pp. 122–123)
6
But it was not only Hannah Arendt’s anticipatory annunciation of the decline
of the nation-state that I found virtually at one with my diagnosis of moder-
nity, particularly after the United States’ declaration of its unending “war on
terror” and its establishment of the state of exception as the global norm. It
was also her tentative gestures toward articulating the structureless structure of
the coming polis that would replace the nation-state system. Taking her lead
from the exilic condition that rendered her a non-Jewish Jew, she addressed
the fraught question of Palestine, which, as her critique of the nation-state
testifies, from a perspective that was antithetical to that essentialist one of the
Zionists, who would establish a Jewish State in Palestine on a binarist logic of
belonging that, to her, would render the native Arab population an irremedi-
able “them,” that is, that replicated the very identitarian logic of belonging
that had rendered the Jews the disposable “other”—the “bare life”—of the
Nazi regime. More specifically, she called, like her non-Palestinian Palestinian
counterpart, Edward Said, a generation later, for a bi-national state in which
non-Jewish Jews and non-Palestinian Palestinians could, in Said’s resonant
phrase, dance together “contrapuntally.”
Again, it was with a shock of recognition that years later, as I noted in
the chapter on Kierkegaard, I came across Giorgio Agamben’s extension
of Hannah Arendt’s proleptic representation of the coming Palestinian
community—the logic of belonging that rendered the Us/them binary
inoperative—as the paradigm of the coming global community. I requote
Agamben in this present context to suggest the uncanny contemporaneity
of Hannah Arendt’s writing on the Jewish question, based as it is on the
alienated and nomadic condition of the ubiquitous refugee, once its
biographical provenance is retrieved from the oblivion to which the
Habermasian school of political scientists has relegated it:
The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better yet,

aterritoriality) that would thus be implied [by the de-centering of
Jerusalem—making it the capital of two states] could be generalized as a
model of new international relations. Instead of two national states sepa-
rated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, it might be possible to
imagine two political communities insisting on the same region and in a
condition of exodus from each other—communities that would articulate
each other via a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities in which the guiding
concept would no longer be the ius (right) of the citizen but rather the
refugium (refuge) of the singular.
In an analogous way, we could conceive of Europe not as an impossible

“Europe of the nations,” whose catastrophe one can already foresee in the
short run, but rather as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the
(citizen and noncitizen) residents of the European states would be in a
position of exodus or refuge; the status of European would then mean the
being-in-exodus of the citizen (a condition that obviously could also be one
of immobility). European space would thus mark an irreducible difference
between birth [nascita] and nation in which the old concept of people [as
opposed to “the People”] (which, as is well known, is always a minority)
could again find a political meaning, thus decidedly opposing itself to the
concept of nation (which has so far unduly usurped it). (Agamben 2000a,
pp. 24–25)
What, in short, I learned in the years following David Krell’s introduction

to me of the figure of Hannah Arendt in the midst of the erratic darkness
and light of the Holzwegen of Todtnauberg in which Heidegger’s study
was located is this: she, as a “conscious pariah” or “non-Jewish Jew,” is
uncannily a contemporary of our benighted post-9/11 occasion, in which,
as we in the West are inescapably reminded on a daily basis, the figure of
the alien refugee haunts its waning sovereign nation-state structure and
calls for a radically different coming polis, in which, like atonal musical
counterpoint, the two (or more) voices co-exist in loving strife.
CHAPTER 6
Edward W. Said and William V. Spanos

A Contrapuntal Affiliation
Abstract I came to know the work of Edward Said in the early 1970s,
when I invited him to contribute an essay to the first issue boundary 2 on
the question of the postmodern. He informed me that he was a Palestinian
student at Mount Hermon Preparatory School during the time between
1951 and 1953 when I was teaching there, and that he, an alien Arab in a
New England Puritan environment, admired me, a Greek-American, for
my reputation as a rebel against the Mount Hermon Puritan work ethic.
After that inaugural conversation, we became friends, a turn that led me to
read his work avidly. It was the centrality of the exilic consciousness
and the contrapuntal critical perspective that in-betweenness enabled
that I found profoundly attractive: the impulse to put back into play the
stories—the Palestinians’, for example—that the dominant Western truth
discourse must repress to articulate its own commanding narrative.
Keywords Counterpoint Non-humanist humanism Exilic

consciousness Secular Palestine
And insofar as these people [the vast population of refugees and migrants
precipitated by the depredations of Western imperialism] exist between the
old and the new, between the old empire and the new state, their condition
articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping
territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_6
Though I have written extensively on Edward Said, including my personal

relationship with him, I think there is an urgent need to retrieve the main
thrust of my academic and personal commentaries on him at this particular
late occasion. And that’s not only because, since his untimely death in 2003,
time, aided and abetted by a legion of vocal detractors, has dimmed the
memory of his visionary revolutionary work. It’s also because the global
migration problem he made one of the supreme themes of his last years has
been, as we now bear painful daily witness, exacerbated enormously in the
decade since his death, particularly in the wake of 9/11/01. This tumul-
tuous global migratory momentum, as Said unremittingly reminded us in
the West, is not an accident of time or the consequence of Oriental
immaturity, but rather the necessary consequence of the West’s age-old
Orientalism: its founding ethos, the binarist etymology of “Occident”
(Abendland, “evening land,” in German), “the setting of the sun,” which,
as Hegel assumed, derives its meaning of civilizational maturity from its
opposite, the immature Orient (“the rising of the sun.”). It was an ethos,
that is, which justified the perennial imperialist intervention in the Orient in
the name of the West’s benign “burden.” In the following passage from
Culture and Imperialism commenting on Marlow’s famous distinction
between Roman and British imperialism in Heart of Darkness, Said is
referring to the West’s “mission civilasatrice” in Africa, but it is equally
pertinent to its perennial mission in the Orient:
Thus Conrad encapsulates two quite different but intimately related aspects
of imperialism: the idea that is based on the power to take over territory, an
idea utterly clear in its force and unmistakable consequences; and the practice
that essentially disguises or obscures this by developing a justificatory regime
[of truth] of self-aggrandizing, self-originating authority interposed between
the victim of imperialism and its perpetrator. Edward W. Said, Culture and
Imperialism. (New York: Vintage,1994, p. 69)
1
I first came across the name Edward Said in the late 1960s when my
former graduate school classmate, Richard Wasson, who was teaching at
Rutgers and was publishing articles on postmodernism in Raritan, the
journal edited by Richard Poirier, told me about this brilliant Neo-Marxist
Palestinian critic at Columbia University who was publishing essays in that
journal that were destined to transform American literary criticism. At that
6 EDWARD W. SAID AND WILLIAM V. SPANOS 67
time, I had begun to read such “neo-Marxists” as Louis Althusser and

Michel Foucault in an effort to transcend the limiting ontological perspec-
tive of Martin Heidegger. Wasson’s recommendation was, therefore, one
that I welcomed. I thus read some of Said’s essays and his book on Joseph
Conrad and found them exhilarating. From that time I became an avid
reader of virtually everything Said wrote.
But it was not until a few years later, in 1970, that my relation to Said
became personal. In that year, Robert Kroetsch, the Canadian expatriate
novelist and poet, and I founded boundary 2 and decided to inaugurate our
postmodern publishing project by scheduling two inaugural numbers of our
journal on the then new, controversial question of the postmodern. Edward
Said was one of the first critics I wrote to asking for a contribution to the
first of these. He responded immediately, saying he would be happy to
contribute an essay a propos of the topic and suggested two options. The
first was an essay on “strong” and “weak” languages, and the second was on
the significance of a then new voice that was stirring the root of the question
of modernity: Michel Foucault. Because, frankly, I did not understand what
was at stake for Said in the first project, and because I had read and
responded positively to some of Foucault’s early work, I chose the second,
an essay that appeared in the first issue of boundary 2 (1972) under the title
“Michel Foucault as an Intellectual Imagination, ”and became part of Said’s
book Beginnings. Little did I know then that this first option was the origin
of Said’s evental Orientalism.
Not too long after this exchange of letters, Said called me one evening to
ask me for my candid opinion of my student Paul Bové, who was unrealis-
tically applying for a position in the English Department at Columbia. I told
him that Bové was an extraordinary student and that his dissertation,
Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry, which I had
supervised, was a ground breaking study of American poets from the
unprecedented point of view of continental theory, most notably that of
Martin Heidegger, and, I predicted, would have a major impact on
American literary criticism. (Paul was hired by the Columbia English
Department, and his dissertation was published by Columbia University
Press—both, no doubt, on the recommendation of Edward Said.)
In the process of this telephone conversation, Said suddenly switched
from his role as spokesperson for the Columbia University English
Department to a more personal approach. He informed me, to my surprise
and delight, that although I did not know him, he knew me quite well. And
this was because he was a student at Mount Herman Prep School at the
time (1951–1953) I was teaching there after taking my MA at Columbia.

He said that, though he hadn’t taken a course with me, he knew me and
my colleague and friend, Bill Burney, as did most the students, as maver-
icks who were committed to subverting the Mount Herman Protestant
ethic, an enterprise with which foreign students like him were totally
sympathetic. (The section of his aptly name memoir, Out of Place, mov-
ingly expresses the exilic consciousness of the young Palestinian boy
deposited in an alien New England environment.) On the basis of that
switch from formality to a kind of intimacy, I called him “Ed,” a name to
which he responded by letting me know in no uncertain words that he
detested for its uncalled for intimacy. I apologized and, ironically, from
that moment we became friends.
2
However, it was not until a few years later, when, after immersing
myself in Michel Foucault’s writing, particularly Discipline and
Punish, or, as I prefer, Surveiller et punir (to me, one of the seminal
books of the twentieth century), I read Orientalism, that my intellec-
tual bond with Edward was sealed. I read him as a more radical expo-
nent, like myself, of the poststructuralist revolution, particularly that
worldly aspect of its de-structuration of the structuring imperatives of
Western modernity, that was manifest in the provocative genealogical
thinking of Louis Alhusser, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guatarri.
In Orientalism, I found, despite the lack of reference, a surprising
affiliative relationship with Heidegger’s ontological critique of the panop-
tic thinking of Western modernity, particularly in Said’s pervasive use of
the binary High/low, Space/time, Structuring/de-structuring, Theater/
life metaphorics indissolubly associated with metaphysical thinking. I also
found a historical genealogy of the West that had its origins in antiquity,
when it defined itself (the Occident) in a hierarchical binary opposition to
the Orient, though Said attributes these origins to Greece, whereas, I,
following Heidegger’s lead, attribute them to the Romans’ reduction of
the Greek understanding of truth (aletheia: unconcealment) to veritas
(the adequation of mind and thing: correctness).
But it was not only an intellectual bond that I felt. It was also a kinship
of sensibilities, above all, the sense of alienation, of being between homes,
and a passionate commitment to the amelioration of the plight of the
multitude that the Western imperial project has dispossessed. On reading

Orientalism, I was immediately struck by the obvious fact that its author,
despite his position in a prestigious American university, was no ordinary
academic. As an uprooted Palestinian who could not go home again, he
felt his intellectual vocation to be one of speaking the truth to power,
which I read as the de-structuration of the “Truth” of Western civilization
to disclose it as a lie in the name of which it was historically enabled to
plunder the spaces beyond its borders, and to establish the groundless
ground of the coming post-modern polis.
This is not to say that I agreed entirely with what Edward wrote. On the
contrary, there were significant differences (as in the case of the question of
the origins of the idea of the West). Two were especially important. Despite
the analogous echoes in Orientalism with Heidegger’s destruction of the
metaphysical foundations of the Western tradition, Edward had no sympathy
with Heidegger’s thinking. Although he never said so, this was probably
because he identified him in some sense with Nazism. But this difference
between us was not a matter of antagonism. I remember, for example, a
conversation we had many years ago—I think it was at an English Institute
conference at Harvard—in which the issue of Heidegger’s contemporary
influence came up. Edward said to me on that occasion, “Bill, you’re such a
good critic. Why do you contaminate your writing with Heidegger? In
always invoking him, you deflect attention from the worldly issues that
matter.” I was not taken aback by this criticism. In fact, I anticipated it.
Instead, I responded, playfully: “Edward, I think you too are a great critic,
but why don’t you invoke Heidegger, who has so much to say about the
West/East divide that is consonant with your critique of Orientalism?” We
laughed and let it go at that. But it was no accident that on later occasions of
our meeting that initial conversation was repeated.
I eventually came to call these exchanges, ironically appealing to
Heidegger, Auseinandersetzungen, dialogues involving a loving strife
that rendered the prior antagonistic identitarian terms inoperative—
identityless identities. That is, like Said’s “non-humanist humanism,”
they, on the basis of their groundless ground, let these identities be by
rendering them open to transformation and enrichment. Or, to invoke
Edward’s own language (to which I will return), they were contrapuntal:
they brought to the fore what the other voice, in order to fulfill its
narrative, had to leave unsaid.
The same can be said about the difference between our responses to
postructuralist theory. Said, as is well known, was very critical of
poststructuralism, particularly in its deconstructive mode, primarily

because, in overdetermining textuality, it rendered itself worldless.
I agreed with Edward’s critique, but I felt that insofar as the poststructur-
alist initiative was calling into question the very ontological foundations of
the West (including its Orientalism), it had the potential of becoming
worldly. I certainly learned a lot about the limitations of poststructuralist
theory from these Auseinandersetszungen with Edward. Above all, they
led me to refocus my reading of the continuum of being to emphasize
the more worldly sites that I had hitherto neglected, particularly the
cultural. But I would like to think that he learned something from these
Auseinandersetzungen about the de-structuring imperatives of this, in
my mind, revolutionary post-structuralist mode of inquiry as well.
3
However important Orientalism was in the development of my revok-
ing intellectual vocation, it was Said’s Culture and Imperialism that
made the greatest impact on my critical sensibility and my sense of the
alternative polis it opened up. Two indissolubly related aspects of Said’s
revisionism were especially important to me. The first was his shifting of
critical emphasis from the traditional economic site to the cultural.
I interpreted that shift as his perception of being as a continuum,
however uneven its historical manifestations, from the ontological and
subjective and linguistic sites through the sexual and racial, to the
economic, cultural, and political. It was a shift, not incidentally, influ-
enced by Antonio Gramsci’s and the poststructuralist Neo-Marxist
Louis Althusser’s destructuring of the orthodox Marxist base/super-
structure model that had rendered the site of cultural production more
or less irrelevant.
That shift of critical emphasis which retrieved and put back into play the
massive cultural site points to the second, indissolubly related aspect of
Said’s revisionary project in Culture and Imperialism that profoundly
influenced my critical thinking: his introduction of contrapuntal reading.
I mean specifically a reading of literature modeled on the atonal counter-
point of contemporary musical composers such as Arnold Schoenberg,
Anton Webern, and Alban Berg.
There were two related aspects of Said’s innovative introduction of
musical counterpoint to the study of modern culture that made a deep
and abiding impact on my literary criticism, indeed, on my world view.
One emphasized its critical potential; the other, its positive political
potential. I will return to the latter later. Here, I will focus briefly on the
former: the contrapuntal reading of literature, or, at any rate, my under-
standing of this unmethodical Saidian method of reading literary texts.
The traditional way of reading literary texts, one based on the age-old
Western beginning-middle-end model (the Aristotelian plot), attends only
to what is written in the text. Its purpose is to provide a rational summary
account of the text’s narrative. In so doing, this traditional method of read-
ing remains indifferent to the world that the narrator has had to suppress in
choosing to tell his version of the story—a world that, precisely because it is
suppressed, always haunts the suppressing voice. Said, on the other hand,
profoundly conscious of the Western provenance of this method of writing
and reading, insisted not only on retrieving that spectral suppressed content
but on putting it back into play with the suppressing narrative: contrapun-
tally, as it were. By so doing, Said’s counterpoint, I came to realize with a
shock of recognition, was remarkably similar to my interpretation of
Heidegger’s Auseinandersetzung that renders the hitherto binary opposites
fundamental to the traditional narrative—and its “natural” right of repres-
sion—inoperative. By this I mean, after the post-poststructuralist Giorgio
Agamben, a transformation of the original binary logic (which justifies
suppression) into a loving strife of non-identical identities that enriches
both rather than aggrandizing one at the expense of the “inferior” other.
This, I found, was the essence of Said’s magnificent contrapuntal reading of
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which he retrieves and puts back into
dialogical play the hitherto unnoticed slave plantation in the West Indies
on which the very luxurious existence of Mansfield Park depends, and of
Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which retrieves the imperial depredations com-
mitted by the British from the oblivion to which Kipling consigns them in
the name of his British story. After encountering Said’s innovative reading of
Austen’s novel, I also came to understand what I had earlier found troubling
in his celebration of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: that it is essentially a
contrapuntal novel that puts Conrad’s British imperialist perspective in
dialogical play with narratives of its Black African victims.
The second aspect of Culture and Imperialism—indissolubly related to
the first, which I was deeply and increasingly affected by—was Said’s
proto-postcolonial diagnosis of the post-World War II world as an in-
between time—an interregnum—that had transformed the demographics
of the traditional (Western) nation-state system into one that rendered the
migrant—the hitherto invisible other of the West—eminently visible,
indeed, as in the case of Hannah Arendt in the post-war period, the

primary figure of this in-between globalized world, the spectral figure
that not only haunted (visited) the waning Western nation-state system
(the visitor) but demanded a different polis. This, I felt, was a manifesta-
tion of the contrapuntal process instigated by history. I quote at some
length not only to demonstrate the power of Said’s eloquent diagnosis—a
visitation by the visited to the visitor, as it were—written from his exilic
condition, but also to prepare for my articulation of the second aspect of
Culture and Imperialism that became a dimension of the supreme theme
of my late work: the question of the coming polis that would replace the
city of the bankrupted nation-state:
We can perceive this truth [the globally pervasive “nomadic practice whose
power . . . is not aggressive but transgressive”] on the political map of the
contemporary world. For surely it is one of the unhappiest characteristics
of the age to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons,
and exiles than ever before in history, most of them as an accompaniment
to and, ironically enough, as afterthoughts of great post-colonial and
imperial conflicts. As the struggle for independence produced new states
and new boundaries, it also produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and
vagrants, unassimilated to the emergent structures of institutional power,
rejected by the established order for their intransigence and obdurate
rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the old and the
new, between the old empire and the new state, their condition articulates
the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories
shown on the cultural map of imperialism.
There is a great difference, however, between the optimistic mobility,
the intellectual liveliness, and “the logic of daring” described by the
various theoreticians on whose work I have drawn [the poststructuralists
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri and Paul Verilio], and the massive
dislocations, waste, misery, and horrors endured in our century’s migra-
tions and mutilated lives. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as
an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the con-
finements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled,
established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decen-
tered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant,
and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the
political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and
between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed coun-
ter, original, spare, strange.
(Said 1994, p. 332)
What Said meant by the liberating imperatives of this exilic intellectual/

artistic perspective (it needs to be added to show his commitment to the
continuum of being that had drawn us into an affiliative relationship) was
in keeping with his definition of counterpoint as a play of two or more
voices that rendered their former violence inoperative, transformed it into
a positive productive force. It was what followed Edward’s diagnosis of the
demographics of the post-World War II occasion that, for me, sealed our
affiliative relationship. What I found in the paragraph that followed was, to
my delight, an articulation of a revolutionary mode of resistance that was
entirely consonant with the one I was tentatively working out at that time
by way of my engagement with the subversive, anti-American exception-
alist fiction of Herman Melville, more specifically, with his great short
story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. In that great anti-story, it will be recalled,
Bartleby refuses to answer the call of his Wall Street boss (“I would prefer
not to”) and, in so rejecting the vocation of servitude to a Higher Cause—
a vocation that, not incidentally, had its origins in the Puritan calling—
undermines the latter’s sovereign authority (and that of Puritan capitalist
system he represents).
Said does not invoke Bartleby; rather, his source is Theodor Adorno.
But what he says is absolutely at one with Melville’s enigmatic and
provocative figure:
“The past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled,” says Adorno in Minima
Moralia, subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life. . . . Why? “Because
anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and measured, ceases to
exist” or, as he says later, is consigned to mere “background.”[…] Adorno’s
general pattern [that dominant hegemonic discourse] is what in another
place he calls the “administered” world or, insofar as the irresistible domi-
nants in culture are concerned, “the consciousness industry.” There is then
not just the negative advantage of refuge in the emigré’s eccentricity; there is
also the positive benefit of challenging the system, describing it in language
unavailable to those it has already subdued:
In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly makes everyone answer-

able, unanswerability alone can call the hierarchy directly by its name.
The circulation sphere, whose stigmata are borne by intellectual out-
siders, opens a last refuge to the mind that it barters away, at the very
moment when refuge no longer exists. He who offers for sale some-
thing unique that no one wants to buy, represents, even against his
will, freedom from exchange. (Said 1994, p. 333)
But it was not only a revolutionary mode of resistance similar to the

one I was working out that I found in this last chapter of Culture and
Imperialism. It was also, however maddeningly brief and tentative its
articulation, a provocative anticipation of a coming non-identitarian
polis that would replace the identitarian nation-state, the authority of
which was beginning to wane in the wake of its theoretical self-
destruction between the two world wars. At the end of the paragraph
diagnosing the post-imperial global demographics that precipitated the
spectral figure of the emigre as the incarnation of the majority of the
world’s population, and of a revolutionary mode of resistance, Said wrote
enigmatically, “From this [in-between] perspective also, one can see ‘the
complete consort dancing together’ contrapuntally” (Said 1994 p. 332).
For years after reading this baffling but somehow familiar sentence,
I spent an inordinate amount of my time trying to understand Said’s
apparently contradictory juxtaposition of a line from T.S. Eliot’s
Christian poem Four Quartets with his atonal anti-theological under-
standing of counterpoint. Only recently, after immersing myself in the
thinking of those worldly theoreticians I have called post-poststructuralists,
especially the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, did I come to
perceive a satisfying resolution of this otherwise inexplicable contradic-
tory locution, a resolution, not incidentally, which, in identifying Said
with these recent revisionary post-poststructuralists, seems to have been
anathema to most American Saidians. Following the directives of
Agamben’s meditations on the coming community, which, like Said’s,
not incidentally, appeal in a fundamental way to Melville’s Bartleby,
I came to perceive this juxtaposition as a contrapuntal gesture, implicit
in Eliot’s own discordia concors, that rendered the theological prove-
nance of the passage inoperative. That is to say, Said interpreted Eliot’s
phrase as a tentative perception of a coming community in which the
diverse inhabitants, like the voices of counterpoint, lost their original
binarist aggressiveness in favor of the enriching unending play of
counterpoint.
4
In 2001, in an extraordinarily generous gesture, the Mount Hermon
administration invited Edward to deliver the address to the graduating
class of students. Despite his deteriorating health, he accepted the invita-
tion, and, knowing my history at the school, immediately called me to ask
if I would like to attend the ceremony. Despite the fact that my health was
not all that good either, I enthusiastically accepted his invitation. What an
opportunity, I thought, not only to reminisce about our mutual begin-
nings, but to contine our personal Auseinandersetzung, which had lapsed
in recent years.
There was so much about our mutual late itineraries I wanted to talk
about—the ambiguities of his coming polis, of his understanding of coun-
terpoint, and not least of his discussion of humanism in his Columbia
lectures (published posthumously as Humanism and Democratic Crit
icism). But, alas, that greatly anticipated meeting didn’t happen. Shortly
before the assigned date, Edward wrote me an e-mail message saying that
his health was deteriorating and that he would be going to a hospital for
intense treatment. He said that he was sending his son, Wadie, to deliver
the graduation address he had written. He also sent me a copy, which I
read avidly. A short time after, Paul Bové called me one night—it was
September 25, 2003—to tell me that our mutual beloved friend, Edward
Said, had died of complications resulting from his long-standing affliction
with leukemia. I end this reminiscent meditation with a passage from the
Mount Hermon graduation address he was unable to deliver to suggest that
to the very end it was, increasingly, as his “late style” also testifies, the
revolutionary socio-political imperatives of beginnings that preoccupied his
unaging mind—the beginnings freed from the End—that began his lifelong
exilic vocation of speaking the truth to power in the name of a coming
community in which, everyone having been admitted, “‘the complete con-
sort danc[es] together’ contrapuntally.” It is not an accident, I thought in
reading these moving sentences, that Edward, in the end, gives the words
dearest to his heart to another to speak:
Human history is not a competition to dominate and be what is frequently

called the best. It is rather a vast interweaving of human lives, interacting in
all sorts of unforeseen and unseen ways, which it is our destiny to understand
and cherish since America is the best vantage point to actually see history
being made. Too often in America we use the word “history” as a synonym
for oblivion, as in the dismissive phrase “you’re history.” Just the opposite,
I’d say:
awareness of history assures us of our humanity, guarantees our life as a
republic, ensures our identity not as a combative “us” ready for war against
an equally combative “them,” but as an essential part of the human march
toward emancipation and enlightenment. We still have a long way to go.
Let me close by quoting some marvelous lines about the high drama of
what is before us as makers of the human narrative, lines written by the
great twentieth-century Caribbean-French poet Aimé Césaire:
But the work of man is only beginning
and it remains to man to conquer all
the violence entrenched in the recesses of his passion
and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of force, and there
is a place for all at the rendezvous
of victory
CHAPTER 7
Robert Kroetsch, Play, and the Specter

A Meditation on a Friendship
Abstract As for Bob Kroetsch, my Canadian SUNY-Binghamton colleague

since 1967 and co-founding editor of boundary 2, he was my antithesis. He
was responsive to the imperative of unending play inhering in an ontology
grounded in the nothingness of being. I, despite my theoretical commitment
to errancy, tended to minimize that play in favor of conveying an urgent
political message. In the process, however—and in keeping with the liminal
interregnum in which we lived—we developed a unique form of dialogue. It
was a loving strife—Auseinandersetzung, in Heidegger’s vocabulary—in
which the traditional warring meanings of the binarist identitarian terms
lost their dominance and were transformed into an intimate relationality that
enhanced rather their now identityless identities.
Keywords Play Open prairie Postmodernism Exile Errancy Canada
Well, I think Bill named for me what I was haunted by in my

playfulness…. I thought of Chaucer as a better writer than Shakespeare,
so to speak. Shakespeare also has a great sense about play and of play, but
Chaucer had spoken to me and I knew that behind my sense of playfulness
was something unnamed. And I had by in my playfulness, and you are
quite right, I had been teaching modern American poetry for about five
years before Bill came to Binghamton, and I was talking about my
responses to these texts by Stevens and Williams, Olson, even Pound, but

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_7
Bill said, well, there is an explanation, there is a theory behind this, and so
he foregrounded it for me and I realized I was haunted by this, these
theoretical texts that I didn’t know existed. That’s a beautiful thing—to
realize you are haunted by a text you have never seen.
“Bill Spanos in Conversation” (with Robert Kroetsch
and Dawne McCance), Mosaic
I first met Robert Kroetsch when I relocated from Knox College to

SUNY-Binghamton (now, against my life-long commitment to public
education, renamed Binghamton University) in the summer of 1967,
when the original Harpur, a liberal arts college, was being transformed
into a university. A Canadian expatriate novelist who had grown up in
Alberta, in the prairie heartlands of the Canadian Midwest, he had done
his undergraduate work at the University of Alberta and taken a graduate
creative writing degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in the United
States. He had been at SUNY-Binghamton since around 1962, a few years
before my arrival, and by that time had already become a very valued
colleague of the quite traditionalist English Department faculty. And that
was essentially because he was affable and easy to get along with.
My immediate impression of Bob Kroetsch was, therefore, a mixed one.
I was taken by his openness to new ideas about the writing of fiction and
poetry and about literary criticism, something that, I found all too soon,
most of our English Department colleagues were not. In 1967, long after
the New Criticism had come to prevail in the American academy, our
department, under the chairmanship of the well-known Medievalist
Bernard Huppé, remained traditional, a community of conservative pre-
modernist scholars. (Only one faculty member, the irascible John
Hagopian, was a New Critic.) Most of them were the remnants of
Harpur College, which, on the mandate of the state under the governor-
ship of Nelson Rockefeller, who was trying to emulate the University of
California system, was being transformed into a state university similar to
Buffalo, Stony Brook, and Albany. I often wondered why this highly
traditional department hired me, given the fact that my avowed intent
was to teach and write about the subversive existential literature that was
beginning to manifest itself in the American academy. I got a sense of the
reason when, in a conversation I had with Professor Huppé in his office, he
expressed his impatience with the study of the modern literature that was
being mandated by the transformation of Harpur College into a graduate
school. “Anybody can teach contemporary literature,” he told me. “It’s
7 ROBERT KROETSCH, PLAY, AND THE SPECTER 79
the literature of the tradition, which is imbedded in a long history, that is

difficult and requires the erudition that comes only with years of historical
scholarship.” I was appalled by this amazingly reductive and fundamen-
tally insulting statement. But I was new and he was the chair, so I said
nothing.
In Bob Kroetsch I found, not exactly a kindred spirit, but one who
was open to my radically postmodern ideas about literature. When
I read his first couple of novels, whose titles I found promising—But
We Are Exiles and The Words of My Roaring (both published in 1966),
I was disappointed. Despite the suggestive contemporary tenor of the
titles, which reflected a connection between exile and the non-conven-
tional anti-structure they implied, and an often engaging distinctively
“low” prose style, I found these first novels disappointing in their
conventional narrative plots. They were, I thought, typical of the
Iowa Workshop well-made plot or, in my emergent de-structive critical
vocabulary, of narrative structure that reduced the time of finite exis-
tence into a spatial form.
At first, I was reluctant to express my disappointment to Bob. But
eventually, after getting to know him over the drinks we imbibed at a bar
and restaurant near the university on Friday afternoons after the end of an
exhausting week of teaching, and sensing his unusual receptivity to new
ideas, I risked my opinion. To my pleasant surprise, he confessed feeling
something similar on the basis of his recent reading of the poetry of Charles
Olson, an initiative instigated by the fact that Olson’s most enthusiastic
admirers were West Coast Canadian poets and literary critics—Robin
Blazer, Warren Tallman, George Bowering, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt,
and others. From that time on we became good friends who were able to
talk frankly about each other’s work. This dialogue—it would be more
accurate to call it, as in the case of my relationship to Robert Creeley, a
sustained Auseinandersetzung—was especially productive for both of us in
that I informed him of what I was learning from reading the works of
postmodern philosophers such as Martin Heidegger (and later Jacques
Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Luc Nancy, Phillippe Lacoue Labarthes,
Jean François Lyotard, and other postmodern continental thinkers), and
he informed me of what he was learning from reading American postmo-
dern novelists and poets such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barthes, Robert
Coover, on the one hand, and Canadian postmodernists such as Michael
Ondaatje, Robin Blazer (an American expatriate), and Fred Bowering on
the other. In the process of this continuing dialogue, Kroetsch became the
actual exile that the title of his first novel only hinted at, the emigré, as
Edward Said put this defining ubiquitous postcolonial figure much later,
“between domains, between forms, between homes, and between
languages.”
In this dislocated state, Bob was especially responsive to my intermin-
able discussions of Heidegger’s critique of the (Western) onto-theo-logi-
cal tradition, particularly his destruction of the metaphysical thinking it
privileged. I mean that thinking meta ta physika (above or after things as
they are in the finite world) that established the plot—the beginning-
middle-end form that structured the finite temporal lives of human
beings—as the privileged form of poiesis in the West. In the process, he
became acutely aware of the fact that it was this falsifying end-oriented
structuration that he had learned about writing fiction at Iowa University.
I remember with amusement the invariable pattern of our frequent Friday
afternoon conversations over beer and spiedies at Sharky’s and other bar-
and-grills on Clinton Street, where we would adjourn to after an intense
day at the university. Bob would ask me a question about what I meant in
adopting a term from Heidegger’s discourse—say, “hermeneutics,” “repe-
tition,” “enframement,” or “a-letheia.” And, as I tried to explain to him
what the word meant to me and its significance for poiesis, he would pick
up any piece of paper at hand—a napkin, a discarded matchbook, a scrap
of waste paper, or, when nothing to write on was available, a piece of toilet
paper he, excusing himself, went to the bathroom to fetch—to scribble his
notes on. I was not only amused by Bob’s enthusiastic idiosyncrasy; I was
also extremely grateful to him for it. After all, at that early stage in my
career, I could get hardly anyone to think philosophy and poetry as
indissolubly related activities of the mind, to say nothing about herme-
neutics. “Herman who?” was the usual response to my use of the word.
1
In the fall of 1969, I applied for and was granted a Fulbright Grant to
teach at the University of Athens in Greece the following year. The time
had come to let Bob know that I was thinking about the possibility of
founding a literary journal that would be the first in the nation to address
the issues he and I had been talking about with such enthusiasm over the
last couple of years. My wife, Peggy, and I invited Bob and his wife, Jane,
for dinner on a Saturday night, and during the course of the evening I
broached the idea to him, asking him if he would be willing to serve as a
coeditor should my wish come true. Our perspectival differences, both

geographical and ideological, I told him, constituted the perfect combina-
tion for the explorative discourse our journal was intended to contain and
foster. He was enthusiastic about the idea, and agreed to participate in the
venture. In the following discussion about the viability of such a project,
I reminded him of the department’s resistance to its very essence. I told
him that, while I was abroad, we were going to have to rely for its
materialization on the respect he commanded in the department and
with the university administration. He was not as sure as I was that my
assessment of his status was very accurate, but he said he would do what he
could to persuade our resistant colleagues of the benefits of such a journal.
In the remaining time prior to my departure for Greece, we talked
incessantly about the editorial policy of the journal, including its name.
We decided that, should we be able to persuade the department and the
administration, we would, in keeping with our commitment to a subver-
sive cause, avoid the objective format of most American literary journals. It
would, instead, be engaged in nothing less than changing the world by
way of publishing criticism, poetry, and fiction that in one way or another
reflected the postmodern ethos. As for the title, our first choice, modeled
on the prestigious Parisian journal, transition, edited by Emil Jolas, which
was publishing the prose and poetry of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound, and other Modernists, was to call it transition 2 to reflect our
belief that Modernism had run its course. But on going to the library to
look at a copy of this journal, we found it to be richly endowed. And that
discovery, in the light of the poverty of the financial resources we were
likely to receive from the university, if any, steered us away from that title.
As it happened, I was at that precise time reading the German existentialist
Karl Jaspers’s The Way to Wisdom, where I came across the following
highly appropriate passage:
And now let us look at our human state. We are always in situations.
Situations change, opportunities arise. If they are missed they never return.
I myself can work to change the situation. But there are situations which
remain essentially the same even if their momentary aspect changes and their
shattering force is obscured: I must die, I must suffer, I must struggle, I am
subject to chance, I involve myself inexorably in guilt. We call these funda-
mental situations of our existence ultimate situations [Grenzsituationen:
“boundary situations”]. That is to say, they are situations which we cannot
evade or change. Along with wonder and doubt, awareness of these ultimate
situations is the most profound source of philosophy. In our day-to-day lives

we often evade them, by closing our eyes and living as if they did not exist.
We forget that we must die, forget our guilt, and forget that we are at the
mercy of chance. We face only concrete situations and master them to our
profit, we react to them by planning and acting in the world, under the
impulsion of our practical interests. But to ultimate situations we react either
by obfuscation or, if we really apprehend them, by despair and rebirth: we
become ourselves by a change in our consciousness of being. (Karl Jaspers,
The Way to Wisdom 1954, p. 19–20)
In keeping with Jasper’s Grenzsituation (boundary situation), we thus

decided to name the journal boundary 2: a journal of postmodern litera-
ture. It captured in a precise descriptive and affective way the liminal—in
between—world, both its darkness and its potential—that we were living
in in the late 1960s. Not long after, I wrote the following provocative
paragraph that would introduce our new journal, should it reach the light
of day, to the world of traditional literary criticism:
The essential subject matter of our journal will be what is now called
“postmodern” literature. Though we are uncertain about the direction
this literature is taking, we are inclined to see the age of Mallarmé, Eliot,
Yeats, Pound, etc., as having run its course. We believe that since World War
II a new imagination has been struggling to be born and that these last 20
years (like the 30 years or so before World War I) represent another period
of transition. The function of boundary 2 will be to play midwife to this new
postmodern imagination by publishing poetry, fiction, and drama that
explore its possibilities and literary criticism and scholarship that attempt
to clarify its direction.
When I returned from Greece after a harrowing year bearing witness to the
United States’ support of a ruthless military junta—a witness that intensi-
fied my sense of the urgent need for precisely the kind of journal Bob and I
had in mind—I was surprised but immensely pleased to find that Bob had
accomplished his task of persuasion. He had gotten the department chair
to assign us two graduate students, a course load reduction, and an office
to carry on the editorial work of the journal. But that wasn’t the end of his
accomplishment. Bob had spoken to the new university president, Peter
McGrath (1972–1974), an ambitious and intelligent man who was com-
mitted to making the Binghamton unit of the SUNY system its jewel,
about the journal we wished to found, and the welcomed result, a year or
two after, was the purchase of a small eight signature printing press
(housed in the underground floor of the Administration Building) for
the purpose of publishing the journal on campus.
The first three issues of boundary 2—the first two devoted to essays
introducing the topic of postmodernism (1971) to the American literary
world (it was the first journal to use the word in its title), and the third
(1972) devoted to the resistant literature of Greece under the oppressive
military junta (edited by my Cypriot friend, Nick Germanacos)—were
prepared manually by our two amateur graduate students, Canadians
studying under Bob Kroetsch, and then sent off to a small private press
in Deposit, Pennsylvania. The end product was thus not very professional
in appearance (italics and emphases, for example, were registered by
underlining), but we were elated: we had, thanks to Bob’s labor—and
charm—and the unusual foresight of Peter McGrath, accomplished what a
short year before seemed impossible.
These inaugural issues of boundary 2 were then followed by a special
issue on contemporary Canadian literature (1977) edited by Bob and
produced by the university staff that President McGrath had assigned to
the new university press. What was unique about this issue, besides the
pleasing professionalism of its physical appearance, was its editorial empha-
sis on the poetry and fiction of the Canadian mid-West—an emphasis
captured by the playfully suggestive cover illustration of an old-fashioned
bi-plane crashed, nose in the ground, in a vast, empty mid-Western
Canadian prairie landscape—and the Pacific Coast in what I took to be
an opposition to the hegemonic literature of the Canadian East. I mean a
postmodern literature, epitomized by the avant garde American Black
Mountain poets, adapted to the specific conditions of the contemporary
Canadian occasion.
This deliberately provocative Canadian issue of boundary 2, edited by
Bob Kroetsch, consonant with its provocative purpose, produced a visible
controversy in Canada by focusing on a literary scene dominated not by
the traditionalist establishment but by the maverick mid- and far-West.
Outraged, one significant advocate of the Eastern establishment called for
the boycotting of this pretentious American journal. But, as far as
Kroetsch and I were concerned, the journal was fulfilling its provocative
purpose. Poiesis, hitherto an unthought appendage of the U.S., had
become an issue in Canada.
But this sense of accomplishment did not come without a price, at least
not for me. The controversy, at least as I read it, activated Bob’s latent exilic
consciousness and a strong desire to return to his mid-Western Canadian
homeland. By this time, Kroetsch had achieved the reputation of being one
of Canada’s most important novelists. This was the result, above all, of The
Studhorse Man (1969), which won him the prestigious Governor General’s
Award, Gone Indian (1973), Bad Lands (1975), and What the Crow Said
(1978), all wonderfully juxtaposing the provocatively playful postmodern-
ism he had learned from our conversations over the years with an unpromis-
ing mid-West Canadian setting. Equally to the point, Bob had begun to
write the postmodern poetry that, in my mind, surpassed, in the imaginative
play of the postmodern and the timeless time of the prairie, the raw beauty
and estranging force of his off-beat fiction: The Ledger (1975), The Stone
Hammer Poems (1976), and Seed Catalogue (1977). To demonstrate their
paradoxical earth-bound mid-Western Canadian aura and postmodern
errancy, and to suggest why I eventually came to prize his poetry over his
fiction, I quote two passages from this unique poetry. The first passage is
from “How I Joined the Seal Herd” (from Seed Catalogue):
I swear it was not the hearing

itself I first refused
it was the sight of my ears
in the mirror: the sight

of my ears was the first
clue: my head did not please me
the seals so loud I could hardly
accept the message: she wanted
no other going/than to be gone the
neat bed itself strange in the
mirror, she kneeling across the bed
to close the window: maybe
I have this wrong: but only then

I saw my ears/the difference
she wanted to go I heard
a loud snort a throaty grunt:
it was the breeding season the tide
low, the wind still: they’d be wary
I knew, the seals lying together

in the hot sun maybe 300 seals
I counted slipping off my shoes
the effect was immediate I learned
to let my body give it was not I
who controlled the rocks I learned
curling my stockinged toes to the

granite cracks and edges: maybe
I have this wrong but I knew
in the first instant of my courage
I must undo my very standing/crawl
on the wet rocks, the sand not
standing ease down on my belly:

it was strange at first looking up
at the world: but I arched my back
I turned my head and paused what
was I doing there on the beach/ wait
the luminous eyes of a young seal cow:
I, the lone bull seal bravely
guarding the rookery alone
holding together a going world/ but
frankly, I wanted to get laid she was

maybe five feet tall (long) the cow:
I could see she didn’t like my clothes/. . . .
(Kroetsch 2000, pp. 47–48)
The second is Poem 12 of the “Old Man Stories” (from The Stone
Hammer Poems):
Old Man shaped a woman and her child,

a son, out of clay. “You must be
people,” he said. And buried the clay.
On the first morning a gopher popped out
of a hole. On the second a crow flew over.
On the third, at dawn, an owl caught a mouse.
On the fourth morning Old Man unearthed

the shapes and told them to stand up and walk.
They walked to the river with Old Man.
The woman was pleased with living.
“How is it?” she said. “Will there be
no end? Will we always have life?”
“I didn’t think of that,” Old Man said.

He picked up a buffalo chip. “Let me
throw this buffalo chip in the river.
“If it floats, people when they die
will be dead for four days.
If it sinks they die forever.”
“No,” said the woman. She was pleased

with living. She picked up stone.
“Let me throw this stone in the river.
“If it sinks we must die forever, so that
we will always be sorry for each other.
If it floats, we live forever.”
Old Man put down the buffalo chip.
“Throw the stone,” he told the woman.
(Kroetsch 1976, p. 23.)
2
Thus, in 1976, in the wake of the controversy his Canadian issue of
boundary 2 had instigated—after his divorce from Jane and his marriage
to his brilliant student, Smaro Kamboureli, a Greek expatriate who had
come to study at Binghamton—Bob, to my deep regret, returned to his
“homeland” by way of an appointment to the English Department of the
University of Manitoba. He agreed to stay on as coeditor of boundary 2
(his contribution was to read the multitudinous fiction and poetry sub-
missions and to solicit them from writers he knew or had read). And he
served in that capacity until, with Bob’s approval, I gave up the editorship
of the journal to my former student Paul Bové and its publication to Duke
University Press. This was in 1988, after a new Binghamton administra-
tion, against the policy of Peter McGrath, who had relocated to the
University of Minnesota, opened the press to numerous other
publications, many of them non-academic, a change of policy that made

the production of three issues of boundary 2 in one year virtually
impossible.
Although we continued to correspond on a relatively regular basis (the
correspondence is housed in the University of Calgary archive), I met with
him only three more times before his dreadful accidental death in 2011:
the first and second in his own milieu (1990? and 1997) and the third in
Binghamton (February 2001). The first was a personal visit to Bob in
Winnipeg, who was then teaching at the University of Manitoba and living
part of the year in British Columbia, where his wife, Smaro, was then
teaching at the University of Victoria. I vividly remember the drive from
the airport to his home in Winnipeg: the various immigrant ghettos—
Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Philippine. It was my
first intimation of the globalization of the reluctant Western world and the
impending urgent need to interrogate the hegemony of the nation-state
system in the name of a radically different understanding of the human
polis. I mentioned this plural world of the nobodies endemic to the
Western nation-states to Bob, and in response he said this was what his
Canada, particularly the Canadian Midwest, was all about.
During that visit I met a number of Bob’s friends, all younger collea-
gues and most of them novelists and poets, including Dennis Cooley and
David Aronson, who worshipped him. What I distinctly remember about
the several evenings we went out for drinks was the enthusiasm with which
these young Canadians responded to the political turn my work was taking
at that time. When Kroetsch and I were editing the journal in the 1970s,
our focus had been largely restricted to the indissoluble relationship
between ontology (the question of being as such), the human subject,
and poiesis. In the wake of the United States’ exceptionalist intervention in
Vietnam and its brutal “war of attrition,” it had become decisively clear to
me that the political was an equally if not more important site on this
continuum of being. And, as a result, I told my new Canadian friends,
referring to Bob’s and my drive through the Winnipeg ghettos, that I had
reoriented the journal to reflect that larger global insight. They, including
Bob, acknowledged the limitations of our earlier editorial perspective and
agreed about the need to consider the role of the political site, not,
however, without pointing rightly to the danger of overdetermining the
political at the expense of the play of the poetical.
My second visit with Bob Kroetsch occurred in 1997 (June 12–14). It
was the result of an invitation to give a talk at a symposium at the
University of Waterloo in Ontario celebrating Bob’s 70th birthday,

delightfully entitled “A Likely Story: The Writing of Robert Kroetsch.”
Those two days were very intense. They featured speakers who represented
a cross-section of the Canadian art world and who, despite the controversy
between East and West, spoke of Bob’s innovative work with the highest
of praise, this time, however, with an equal if not greater emphasis on the
wonderfully playful errancy of the poetry he was then writing. As an
American foreigner in that milieu, I couldn’t help but register the differ-
ence between Kroetsch’s remarkably enthusiastic reception by his
Canadian audience and his virtual invisibility in the United States. I was
also struck by the amazing fact that, thanks to my relationship with
Kroetsch, my criticism was a presence in Canada. These, at any rate,
were intuitions about the relationship between the national and global
that were eventually to grow into a presiding obsession. In keeping with
my distrust of the monumentalizing Memory, I entitled my contribution
“Retrieving Bob Kroetsch” to remind my Canadian audience that the
writer they were celebrating was an exile who could never come home
again, that celebration, particularly of an aging man, lent itself to the
reduction of a living being to a permanent dead object: a monument.
The third and last meeting with Bob was in 2001, when he and his
partner Dawne McCance, the brilliant editor of Mosaic, whom I had
invited to give a talk on Jacques Derrida to the English Department,
came to visit me in Binghamton. This was the most redemptive of these
visits, not only because it enabled Bob and me to reminisce about our
tumultuous years at Binghamton, above all, about our errant but extra-
ordinarily productive collaborative effort to found a journal that by the
time of this visit had achieved the reputation of being one of the most
important literary journals in the world. During this visit, Dawne and
Bob conducted an interview with me on our effort to retrieve the
spectral nothing that the Western tradition would have nothing to do
with, an interview that ranged from the early days of the journal, when
our effort to retrieve and think the spectral nothing that the empirical
discourse of the West would have nothing to do with was restricted to
the relation between ontology and language, to that present moment
when the site of the global political was added to the equation. It was,
along with the one I did with Robert Creeley in 1967, one of the most
satisfying interviews I had ever done. And this was not only because it
allowed Bob and me to think aloud the specter that haunts the banal
discourse of Western modernity. It was also because the visit provided
us with the opportunity to talk at length about the present post-9/11

state of poiesis in the world from the vantage point of our first
stumbling efforts, 30 years before, to found a journal that would
speak to the ominous conditions that had instigated those inaugural
efforts. I quote an exemplary passage from the interview that should
suggest why that last meeting with Bob Kroetsch was the most mem-
orable, that is, as an anti-monumental monument to our collaborative
effort to revoke the modern Western vocation. At the risk of deflecting
attention from my relationship with Bob, I quote Dawne’s last question
and my answer at some length to suggest the paradoxical nature of this
turn to the political, both to its departure from our past perspective and
to its continuity with it. It is a paradox, I suggest, that is explained by the
phrase “the play of language” that resonates like a leit motif throughout
the interview, as it did throughout the history of Kroetsch’s and my
dialogic relationship:
DM: Let’s close by taking the interdisciplinary into the classroom. Tell us,
Bill, about your teaching of the seminar course on globalization.
I wonder about a couple of things, I guess. One is the sense in
which your teaching is interdisciplinary, in all the potential you
would give to that word. And then, in the same vein, I wonder
whether there’s a specter in your classroom.
WS: Well, one of the reasons why I decided to teach this course is precisely
because the concept of globalization is being determined by the
discourse of America, the discourse of liberal democratic capitalism,
the discourse of the free market, and so forth. That’s the discourse
that controls what globalization means, and of course that’s very
scary. Heidegger wrote many years ago about the Americanization
of the planet . . . Let me hasten to say that the process of globalization
is irreversible. There is no going back. My course is about this. The
imperative is to provide a different understanding of globalization
than is understood by the CEOs of corporate capitalism when they
use the word. It has to be a globalism that will not only counter the
horrific negative effects of homogenization and reduction of being,
but turn them into creative forces. Which is to say that the directive
of the course must be drawn from the specter that haunts the global
hegemony of late capitalism, or as my Cypriot friend Nick
Germanacos puts it, of “America.com.”
RK: That’s good.
WS: Yeah, a wonderful phrase. As far as my relationship to the students in
that class is concerned, students who are getting cultural criticism
from other professors and who are moving into the question of
globalism, I want to protect them from falling into an easy complicity
with the global momentum as it’s understood by late capital, and this
is why I begin the course with—and this is fundamental—a discussion
of Heidegger’s concept of enframement (Ge-stell): the reduction of
being to standing reserve (Bestand), stockpile, what I prefer to call
disposable reserve. The great danger facing the planet today is the
globalization of this machinery of enframement. My fundamental
purpose is to put back into play the very question of thinking that
cultural criticism, in addressing the question of globalization (when it
does), has annulled because it sees the question as an impediment to
cultural and political criticism. That’s my fundamental purpose.
And to come back to the point that I made at the very beginning:
the problem we face, that humankind faces, is fundamentally a pro-
blem of the devastation of language, the devastation of thinking. If we
do not address this nihilistic momentum, we can talk about NAFTA, of
GATT, of WTO, we can talk about the deadly consequences of
“America.com” all we want, but we’re not going to solve the problem,
avoid the danger that “America.com” is, the danger that threatens the
world, that threatens humankind, that threatens Being. (Kroetsch and
McCance 2001, pp. 18–19)
3
My dear friend Robert Kroetsch died in 2011 in an automobile accident
while being driven back from Canmore in the Canadian Rockies to Calgary
by one of the young participants of a gathering of students intended not
only to honor his work but to retrieve it from the oblivion—or from the
monumental status—it was falling into. Until that moment I had come in
recent years to take his pleasant presence in my consciousness for granted.
His unexpected death suddenly instigated a “repetition” of that time, so
long ago, when everything for us was new, spare, and strange. I mourned
his loss, but as compensation I took and continue to take great delight in
recalling that his fiction and poetry is now as new, spare, and strange as it
was when he first published it. And this was underscored this last year by the
visit of one of those young students, David Eso, who had invited Bob to the
gathering in Canmore intended to retrieve his work. Dave wrote to me not
only to inform me of the specific circumstances of Bob Kroetsch’s terrible
death, but also to ask if he could interview me about our collaboration as
founding editors of boundary 2 in preparation for an M.A. dissertation on
the role Bob played in the founding and elaboration of the editorial policy
of the journal. Despite the fact that I was more or less incapacitated by a
kidney disease, I agreed whole-heartedly to the interview. That conversation
is now on record in the library of Calgary University, where Dave did his
M.A. work. Here, in these opening “closing” remarks, I want simply to
underscore this representative young Canadian poet’s enthusiasm not for
Bob Kroetsch’s fiction and poetry as such, but more specifically, as he put it
to me over and over again in the interview, for the play of his language, that
youthful errancy, that sense of beginnings, of a potential untethered to the
Act, that, in privileging the question over the deadly answer, makes poiesis
always new.
That Bob Kroetsch’s last encounter with an audience was with one of
engaged beginners bears witness to this paradox. I quote from the obit-
uary from David Eso, one of the student poets who participated in that last
celebration before Bob’s untimely death:
I’ve got to put all this down before the world slips any farther away.
Robert’s gone and I saw him the second to the last night he was alive.
And how alive! He closed the festival with a great reading of poems from
his last book: Too Bad: Towards a Self-Portrait at Canmore Miners’ Union
Hall, receiving a standing ovation, and then it was off to the pub with fellow
writers Laurie Fuhr, Bob Sanford, Sid Marty, Tim Murphy, and myself
where he joked, laughed, ate, and charmed the young ladies at the table:
“I’m still available,” he winked.
Robert Kroetsch is dead, but his poetry and fiction, Canadian to the core,
though also attuned to the global, precisely because of the errancy of its
play, will always be recalcitrantly new, at least for those who refuse to be
reduced to disposable reserve by the banal hegemonic language that, with
a (telling) paranoid zeal, affirms the very “no thing”—the groundless
ground of play—it will have nothing to do with.
CHAPTER 8
A “Mad Generosity”
Retrieving John Gardner
Abstract The great American novelist John Gardner became my

Binghamton colleague for two years between 1980 and 1982. At first,
he and I kept our distance because I had found his criticism of the
American postmodern novel perverse, and he, my commitment to post-
modernism equally perverse. But because our young partners became
close friends, we were reluctantly thrown together. This took the form
of frequent weekend visits to their farmhouse in Susquehanna,
Pennsylvania, immediately south of the New York State border. During
those visits the initial distance between us collapsed into a close friendship,
one characterized by a loving strife in which the previous binarist labels—
Apollo/Dionysus, Modernist/Postmodernist—no longer applied. What
was especially revelatory was how deep I found that ambiguity to lie in
John’s very being when I read Mickelsson’s Ghosts after his horrific death in
a motorcycle accident between Susquehanna and Binghamton.
Keywords Betweenness Apollo/Dionysus Modernism/postmodernism

Generous madness Moral fiction
It is Apollo who tranquilizes the individual by drawing boundary lines,

and who, by enjoining again and again the practice of self-knowledge,
reminds him of the holy, universal norms. But lest the Apollonian
tendency freeze all form into Egyptian rigidity, and in attempting to

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_8
prescribe its orbit to each particular wave inhibit the movement of the
lake, the Dionysiac flood tide periodically destroys all the little circles in
which the Apollonian will would confine Hellenism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
In a mad world, choose a generous madness.

John Gardner, Mickelsson’s Ghosts
John Gardner and his beautiful young wife, Liz Rosenberg, joined the
English Department of SUNY Binghamton in 1980, after he survived
colon cancer. By this time, John was not only a well-known American
author of several prestigious novels, including (in my mind) one of his two
masterpieces, Grendel (1971), which tells the story of Beowulf from the
perspective of the medieval monster, Grendel. He was also the author of
the notorious On Moral Fiction (1978), a critical book-length essay
written in what can now be called, after Edward Said, the late style,
vilifying the emergent “postmodern” American fiction of such novelists
as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Robert Coover.
By the time John and Liz joined the Binghamton English Department, I,
with the novelist Robert Kroetsch, had not only founded boundary 2, a
journal of postmodern literature, as the subtitle put it; I had also achieved a
certain visibility in the American academy by way of literary critical essays
oriented from an anti-metaphysical Heideggerian perspective, proselytizing
in behalf of this postmodern turn in American writing—essays such as “The
Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary
Imagination,” “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” and “Heidegger,
Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle.” Given these opposing circum-
stances, it was inevitable that John Gardner and I would view each other’s
positions on the question of American literature with serious reservations.
As a result, we deliberately avoided each other during the first few months
after his arrival. In the meantime, John not only taught a graduate creative
writing course but also a huge and very popular undergraduate course on
the masterpieces of early Western literature, for which our young colleague,
Susan Strehle, who had become my partner after my divorce, was assigned
to teach a discussion section. In this way, Susan came to know John and Liz.
In fact, for reasons that, I think, had to do with the parallel between the sub-
stantial age difference characterizing John’s and Liz’s marriage and my and
8 A “MAD GENEROSITY” 95
Susan’s partnership (about 20 years), Susan, a brilliant young literary critic

whose expertise was the American novel, and Liz, a very promising young
poet, became very close friends. As a result of both her association with John
and particularly Liz, much of the conversation she and I had in the evenings
after dinner on the balcony of her apartment in Indian Ridge overlooking
the city of Binghamton had to do with her new, quite bizarre friends.
Though Susan, too, had reservations about John’s On Moral Fiction, she
felt that he was deliberately exaggerating to make a point about a certain
tendency in postmodern American fiction that, indeed, preened self-reflex-
ively on its clever worldless textuality. More important, she insisted, in her
characteristically tolerant way, on my burying the reservations I had about
John’s apparent self-righteousness and address him as a human being.
“You’ve got to learn to live with your new colleague because I don’t intend
to sacrifice my friendship with Liz on account of your intellectual commit-
ments. Besides,” she added, “don’t you profess openness as a fundamental
principle of your postmodernism?” Thus it was that, like it or not, John and
I were thrust together by our two partners.
At that time, John and Liz were living in a farmhouse on the outskirts of
Susquehanna, an old town just across the border between New York and
Pennsylvania, that had once been a major railroad hub for freight traffic
between East and West, but now something of a ghost town (as John’s last
neglected, but in my mind, best novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts hauntingly puts it).
John and Liz would occasionally visit us at Susan’s Indian Ridge apartment,
but more often than not, probably because of the dramatic transformation of
cultural auras from a university city to a ghost town, we would visit them in
Susquehanna, on weekends, often staying overnight after a Saturday evening
during which John and I drank a lot of wine as we talked.
At first, thinking from a distance that we knew each other’s intellectual
commitments, John and I had very little to say to one another. But with
the help of Liz and Susan’s larger frame of reference we got to really know
each other as persons rather than as an intellectual and novelist. Gradually,
no doubt also facilitated by the wine, we came to enjoy the conversations
we had been compelled into by our partners. At first these were, thanks to
the multiplicity of the intellectual concerns of the four of us, wide ranging
in subject matter and historical time: the ambiguous status of the univer-
sity, the question of gender in a predominantly male department, the
respective literatures we taught, and so on. In these we often just touched
on the difference between my theoretical orientation and Susan’s literary
critical, and Liz’s and John’s creative writing, perspectives. Eventually,
however, this difference began to surface. But what was surprising to all of
us was the openness with which the difference was expressed. I must admit
that these conversations often came to focus on John and me to the
exclusion of Susan and Liz. But, to me, whether justified or not, this
exclusion was redeemed by my pleasant realization that sometime along
the way these conversations, which had begun in suspicion, had become
Auseinandersetzungen, dialogues characterized by the loving strife that,
under the spell of the wonder-provoking errancy of Heidegger’s projective
effort to think the be-ing of being, was coming to inform my intellectual
life. I didn’t use this pedantic word in talking with John, but it was
precisely this paradoxical loving strife that, in rendering the antagonistic
logic of my former perspective inoperative, also rendered us abiding
friends—and prepared the way for a richer sense of my intellectual voca-
tion. I don’t know what conclusions John drew from this gradual trans-
formation, but I would like to think, on the basis of the engaged part he
played in these conversations, that he came to feel the same way.
1
As I said earlier, the conversations John, Liz, Susan, and I had on those
Saturday nights in Susquehanna were wide-ranging in time and subject mat-
ter, though increasingly, as John and I got to know each other, tethered to the
question of the postmodern: from Ancient Greek philosophy and literature to
contemporary philosophy and literature; from the pre-Socratics, Plato, and
Aristotle, on the one hand, and Homer and the Greek tragedians, on the
other, to Nietzsche and Heidegger, on the one hand, to Tolstoy, Pynchon,
Barth, and Gardner, on the other. It is impossible, therefore, to convey the
richness of these conversations, to say nothing about their intensity, which,
I must confess, occasionally drove Liz and Susan into another room. I will,
therefore, resort to one exemplary conversation that I vividly remember
because of its future consequences. It occurred sometime during the summer
of 1981, shortly after Susan and I, having been invited by my Cypriot friend,
Nikos Germanacos, to teach courses in Ithaki, the school for American high
school students on the island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese he supervised,
had decided to spend the spring semester of our sabbatical year in Greece.
It was one of the first conversations in which I addressed the issue of
John’s novels in relation to his blustering pronouncements in On Moral
Fiction condemning the emergent postmodernism in American fiction.
“John,” I told him playfully, “you are, whether you know or it not, as
postmodern as the Pynchon, the Barth, the Coover you vilify in the
diatribe you call, rather pretentiously—to give it the aura of scholarly
authority—On Moral Fiction. Take Grendel, for example, which decon-
structs the age-old Western binary between the Normal and the mon-
strous by way of allowing the ‘monster,’ Grendel, to tell his own story, the
version that the original author had to suppress in order to be able to relate
his British narrative. That novel, my friend, is as postmodern as the ones
you condemn. I will agree that many American novels in the so called
postmodern mode are empty of the ‘moral’ and ‘worldly’ content you
expect from a serious novelist insofar as they indulge in the self-reflexive
play of textuality. But to attribute this to postmodernists like Pynchon,
Barth, and Coover, is, in fact, to indict much of your own fiction. Even in
some of your more traditionally plotted novels—Sunlight Dialogues and
especially October Light, for example—there is something Dionysian in
them that calls into question the Apollonian moral structure you seem to
be intending. To me, those aspects of the American postmodern sensi-
bility you wish to parody—the Pynchonesque novel that Sally is reading
in October Light, for example—are so strong that they destructure the
very narrative that you’re pitting against the postmodern anti-narrative.
It’s as if there is something in the deepest recesses of your wonderful
imagination that will not allow you finally to bring the version of moral
fiction you assert in On Moral Fiction into being. In short, John, you’re
more postmodern than your traditionalist logocentrism has led you to
believe.”
John, clenching his ubiquitous tobacco pipe between his teeth, listened
patiently with tolerance and with amusement to my diatribe. After I had
finished, he remained silent for a long minute or so, as if he were meditat-
ing on his fiction, the fiction he had written but the truth of which I had
represented to him. Then, dryly but succinctly, he replied, in a manner
mimicking my academic disquisition, “Bill, you make a strong case for
your point about my fiction. But by the same token, I will say to you, that
everything you have said tonight goes far to verify my visceral response on
reading your criticism, particularly what you say about Heidegger:
whether you know it or not, you are as traditional—logocentric, in your
barbarous hyper-civilized language—as you say I am postmodern.” Our
young listeners, Liz and Susan, shaking their bewildered heads, laughed.
And after a last glass of wine we adjourned to our respective bedrooms
with the issue, which John and I thought had been resolved, still hanging
in mid-air, waiting for a more decisive closure.
2
In the spring semester of 1980, Susan and I left the United States for
the island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese to take up our duties as
visiting teachers at Germanacos’s Ithaki, and to pursue our most recent
scholarly projects, she to work on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow and I to begin a book on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
attempting to show that its disclosive erratic structure was proleptic
of the postmodern novel. (It was eventually published, in 1995, as The
Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for
American Studies.)
During that unforgettable semester, much of which was spent teach-
ing texts like Homer’s Odyssey and Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek at
ancient and modern sites that offered the young American students a
wonderful sense of the mis en scène of the Greek texts they were reading,
Susan and I corresponded frequently with John and Liz; we, to let them
know, despite the cold and rainy weather we had not anticipated, how
rich this on-site teaching was; they, to inform us of the progress of their
work, Liz’s a book of poems, John’s a novel set between Binghamton
and Susquehanna.
One day, as Susan and I were sitting on a wharf during a warm sunny
morning watching the ubiquitous and colorful kaikis chugging in and
out of the Kalymnos harbor, Susan announced to me that she was
pregnant. We had talked previously about such an eventuation, she
with very positive expectations, I, having two adolescent children still
living with me and conscious of my advanced age, with great reserva-
tions. But on hearing this sudden news, I acknowledged the inevitable
and joined her in celebrating the coming of the new infant. We informed
Liz and John, who wrote back immediately to congratulate us and wish
us well.
Not long after, Susan received news from her mother that her grand-
mother had died and a request that she return to the United States to
attend the funeral. Susan, who was deeply attached to her grandmother—
Meem, she called her—having spent her early years living in her house-
hold, agreed to return to California to bid her last respects to her departed
beloved grandmother. Two weeks later Susan returned to the island of
Cos, where Nikos’s school was temporarily located. She was now visibly
pregnant, a reality that turned our conversations, which hitherto were by
and large intellectual, toward the issues endemic to parenthood, the most
prominent of which was the name of our forthcoming offspring. We tried

a variety of options, mostly ancient Greek names: Antigone, Elektra,
Iphigenia, Media, if the child was a girl; Jason, Aristotle, Achilles,
Orestes, if the infant was a boy. But none of these was finalized.
3
Later that spring, after the Ithaki semester was over, Susan and I decided
to take a ferry boat to the Greek mainland for the purpose of renting a car
and driving up to Kalambaka and Kastraki, the villages in Thessaly at the
foothills of the Pindus Mountains in northern Greece where my mother
and father were born. Besides showing her my family’s origins, I wanted
Susan to experience the awesome pleasure of seeing the Meteora (meaning
“suspended, like meteors, in the sky”), the spectacular series of huge pillar-
like rock formations that rise precipitously and soaringly out of the
Thessalian plain. This was where Hesychast monks (literary “seekers of
peace and quiet” who could thus devote their lives to worshipping their
God) began to dwell in caves dug into the rocks beginning in the fifth
century A.D., and at the top of several of which later Greek Orthodox
Hesychasts built six monasteries from around the eleventh to the thir-
teenth centuries.
On finally arriving in Kalambaka in the early evening, after a long and
exhausting five or six hour drive through often mountainous and poorly
maintained roads, we found a modest hotel and an adjacent taverna,
which, to my delight, served koukouretsi. This was a succulent Greek
peasant meal my father would prepare on special occasions such as Greek
Easter or Saint Basil’s (Agios Vassilios) Day as a treat for the family,
consisting of pieces of lamb’s meat wrapped with the lamb’s intestines
and cooked slowly on a constantly turning spit over an open wood-fired
grill. Susan, repelled by the intestinal wrapping, turned that offering down
for a more conventional Greek entree: moussaka. I indulged my appetite
with two servings of this koukouretsi, all the while reminding Susan of what
she was missing.
After this, to me, exquisite dinner, accompanied by a couple glasses of
retsina wine, we retired to our room in the hotel to rest in preparation for a
long and strenuous next day climbing the steps, chiseled for tourists, into
the virtually horizontal faces of the rocks on the tops of which these
awesome monasteries were built. (For centuries, until quite recently, the
monks who resided in the monasteries never descended to the village
below, relying on a basket attached to a pulley system for the supplies they
needed to survive.) The next morning we began our excursion to the
monasteries, which, for some unfathomable reason, had intrigued me
when I and my first family visited a couple of them in 1970 during my
year as a Fulbright professor at the University of Athens. Our first destina-
tion was Varlaam, the presiding monastery of the six extant ones. High
above, overlooking the village of Kalambaka, the winding Pineios River in
the distance, and beyond the river to the East the unending plains of
Thessaly, and to the West the ominous Pindus Mountains, this first visit
was breathtaking. But because it was the focal point of the tourist trade—
souvenir shops and food vendors in a large parking lot adjacent to the
monastery—the monastery itself was not all that impressive. We visited
one more monastery that first day, again in awe of the panoramic view and
of the strange ancient builders of these monasteries, detached from the
earth and things earthly, that seemed to hang precipitously at the edge of
perpendicular rock formations. But, as in the case of our visit to Varlaam, it
did not quite meet our expectations because the easy access to it made it a
tourist attraction that minimized the mysterious aura associated with its
divinely inspired origins. The next day, however, was remarkably different
and unforgettable. It entailed a visit to the smallest and least popular
monastery of the six extant ones, Saint Nicholas (Aghios Nikolaos). On
arriving at the base of this Meteoron, we were informed by a resident that,
since this monastery was a working one, Susan would have to don a dress
that concealed her bodily outline. We then began the long and arduous
climb up the stone stairs leading to the entrance of the small but very
beautifully erected basilica. On arriving at the summit, Susan, exhausted
by the climb, decided to rest for a while and suggested that I go into the
basilica by myself. I opened the door that opened into the narthex (the
room that, in turn, led into the space of worship). What I saw was a room
the walls of which were, from bottom to ceiling, decorated by a series of
dazzling multicolored frescoes designed in the traditional Christian pre-
figurative manner that presents a scene from the Old Testament at the
bottom and, above it, a scene depicting its fulfillment from the New
Testament. On closer scrutiny, once my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I
saw immediately before my eyes a stunning fresco of the Old Testament
Adam, armed with the Word—the Logos—bestowed on him by the
Archangel Gabriel, naming and taming the beasts that were passing before
him in the Garden of Eden. He was, more specifically, sitting naked on a
rock above, the index finger of his outstretched right arm pointing at a
host of beasts below—natural (lions, tigers, dogs, etc.) and mythical

(gryphons, dragons, etc.) that were passing by to receive their names.
Not incidentally, the first beast in line to receive Adam’s name was the
serpent. This scene, so fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to
which I had borne witness was to me an epiphany. I called Susan to come
into the narthex, and, pointing to the fresco, said to her, “Susan, if our
child is a boy we will name him Adam.” Having seen the stunning fresco,
she concurred, not, however, without realizing the complex irony—or
ambiguity—that my decision entailed.
As we were leaving the Saint Nicholas basilica, we came across a table in
a hallway to one side on which postcards and icon replicas, mounted on
wood, of various scenes from the frescos were displayed. Dropping some
coins into the jar intended for contributions, I picked two postcards and
one icon replica that reproduced the scene of Adam naming the beasts.
When we got back to our hotel, I immediately sat down and wrote a note
on the back of one of those postcards to John Gardner. “John,” I wrote,
“you were right about me. I am more logocentric than I make myself out
to be.” I did not tell him, however, that the first beast in line to receive its
name was the serpent. I sent him the card the next morning.
The offspring born to us on November 13, 1982 was, indeed, a boy,
and we named him Adam, with the epithet “beast-namer” as a silent
appendage.
4
For reasons Susan and I couldn’t fathom, John and Liz divorced that same
year, she to take up with David Bosnick, a childhood sweetheart, and
John, with Susan Thornton, one of his graduate students. Liz moved into
the city of Binghamton, and John remained in the house in Susqehanna,
where he completed his last novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts.
On September 14, 1982, I was giving a lecture on another monster in
the American literary tradition, Herman Melville, to the Comparative
Literature faculty in the conference room on the 15th floor of the
Library Tower. In the midst of my talk, the chair of the English
Department, Bernard Rosenthal, knocked at the door and, apologizing
for the interruption, called me out into the hall and informed me in a
trembling voice that John Gardner was killed while driving his motorcycle
from Susquehanna to Binghamton. I was appalled, though down deep,
knowing John’s penchant for risk-taking—a foreboding exacerbated by
my own sense of the ominous tension he felt between the Binghamton

university world of light and the Susquehanna world of shadows—I had
the intuition that that fate was inevitable.
Susan and I drove to Batavia, New York to his funeral, where we bid a
last farewell. But in his typical way John was not ready to receive final
farewells. In 1982, just before his terrible untimely death (he was 49 years
old), his novel, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, was published. To me that final novel
epitomized the postmodern impulse that I had insisted on in those many
conversations we had in Susquehanna. From the beginning, John uneasily
inhabited two distinctly antithetical worlds: the “enlightened”
Apollonian world of the university where he taught—and espouses in
On Moral Fiction—in which, like Adam’s Garden of Eden, everything
had its proper place in a larger whole, and the shadowy indistinct and
ambiguous Dionysian world across the Pennsylvania border in which he
lived, where everything didn’t fit into a neat pattern, where, in reality,
there were specters that haunted the northern university world of light.
Analogously, Mickelsson, the novel’s erratic—“generously mad”—pro-
tagonist, who, paradoxically, teaches philosophy at the state university in
Binghamton, also inhabits the shadowy Dionysian Susquehanna world,
which the novel quite pointedly refers to as “the endless mountains,”
across the border between New York and Pennsylvania. When the numer-
ous descriptions of that ambiguous spectral in-between world Mickelsson
can’t inhabit are registered, as, for example, the mysterious trucks laden
with an unspecified cargo that at night silently traverse the road between
the two antithetical sites, it becomes impossible not to conclude that that
unresolved Nietzschean tension (that between the Apollonian and the
Dionysian of my first epigraph) is intended by the author to deconstruct the
binary rational and spectral worlds of the novel, or, to use the more recent
critical vocabulary of Giorgio Agamben, to render their binary logic inop-
erative. I mean a Nietszchean gesture in which each term of the binary—
Apollo and Dionysus—unlike the resolving Hegelian dialectic, no longer
authorized by a transcendental principle—a Logos, as it were—enters into
and transforms the other into an open-ended and enriching loving strife.
I would like to think that what redeems John’s horrific death on that
winding road between Susquehanna and Binghamton is precisely its
uncanny replication of the ambiguity between Apollo and Dionysus,
light and dark, angel and ghost, rationality and irrationality, the transcen-
dental and the profane, logos and logoi (the Word and words), that per-
vades the in-between worlds of the university and the endless mountains
of his last novel. It was, at any rate, this suggestive unresolved ambiguity—
this anti-Hegelian dialectic that, to me, rendered his writing from the
beginning to the end a modern/postmodernism, just as that same ambi-
guity rendered me a postmodern modernist—that animated the both of us
two mortals engaged in loving strife in an irreparably profane world.
Shortly after John’s untimely tragic death the university administration
convened a gathering in the university theater of those who knew him best
to pay tribute to its deceased errant monster. I was one of those who were
invited. At first, I wasn’t quite sure of what I wanted to say about my errant
friend. I thought about the possibility of his love/hate relation to Nietzsche—
the Apollo and Dionysus tension at the basis of his being. But when I
considered the diversity of my audience, I decided against that. Instead,
I chose to rely on the enigmatic character of another American monster
author: the protagonist of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Bulkington, a
figure who, amazingly, appears only once, and briefly, in the novel. I no
longer have the original script of what I said on that sad occasion in the fall of
1982. But its gist has been recorded in an interview—one of the most
satisfying of the many I did with representatives of journal editors who invited
me—I had in April 1990 with Bob Mooney and Jeff Ford, John’s students,
who edited a complete last issue of MSS, the literary journal John had
founded, devoted to the memory of their beloved mentor. I will quote at
some length to make it as clear as possible what I thought it was about the
Melvillean figure that reminded me of John Gardner:
Mooney: Didn’t you say something like this at the memorial service in the
theatre at Binghamton shortly after John’s death?
Spanos: Yeah, I quoted the passage from Melville’s Moby-Dick on the
ineffable Bulkington—the “six inch chapter” which is his “stone-
less grave”—you know, where Ishmael memorializes this landless
American sailor for having lived in the destructive element.
Ford: Yeah, that’s definitely a fundamental side of Gardner’s sensibility.
Spanos: And Bulkington’s living in the destructive element in what pre-
cipitates the incredible awe and wonder and love for this character
who really is not in the novel, you know. In a way, Bulkington is
the central figure in Moby-Dick, because unlike the landsmen who
have referents—and know where they’re going every step of their
domesticated lives, who risk nothing. . . .
Ford: . . . Their logocentricity, yeah. . . .
Spanos: . . . who, you know live, like Blake says in his great poem
“London,” in the charted world, Bulkington enters and lives in
the destructive element where there are no reference points, where

the pursuit of knowledge is always a risk taking, a matter of life and
death.
Mooney: . . . . where he embraces his shadow. . . . or spectre. . . .
Spanos: . . . . Yes. . . . not an academic exercise conducted in the library, but
always “at sea,” so to speak.. . . . So that is what activates a kind of
force and power—in the best sense of the word “power”—that, you
know, makes Bulkington the “demigod”—the “absent real”—that
presides over Moby-Dick, in fact, the symbol of the “America” that
never became because that decentered Bulkingtonian impulse was
replaced by an Ahabian will to power over the ineffable being of
being. . . . by a monomania to search and destroy. I don’t remember
whether I put it exactly that way, but that’s what I meant: that was
John, his tragedy and his greatness. And that, I think and feel, is
the essence of his fiction. He lived and wrote in the destructive
element. . . . That phrase, you know, comes from Joseph Conrad’s
Lord Jim, where Stein, the guy who collects butterflies, advises a
reluctant Jim to live in the destructive element. But in my mind,
of course, the destructive element has Heideggerian resonances.
Because Heidegger’s hermeneutics—his way of inquiry into
being—has its point of departure in destruction: de-struction.
And destruction means for Heidegger not annihilation; it
means paradoxically. . . .
Mooney: . . . . creation. . . .
Spanos: . . . . Exactly! It means being-in-the-world in such a way that it
de-structures, it destroys—in order to disclose—to open up, to
liberate—that which structure closes off or colonizes and puts to
death.
(“Remembering John Gardner: A Conversation with William V. Spanos”

1995, pp. 297–319)
5
After John’s death, Liz, emptying the haunted house in Susquehanna,
bequeathed to me a portrait he had painted of her in a clearly primitive
style while he was recuperating from colon cancer surgery in Baltimore.
She is standing in front of a door on a small balcony, surrounded by an
iron fence, of a red brick apartment building. She, in all her youthful
beauty, is looking out over the city (not shown) in deep and intense
contemplation. I prized this gift not only because I loved Liz for the
beauty of both her mind and body. I also prized it because, whenever I
looked at it—and it was frequently—I couldn’t help but think that the
artist, having just survived a likely death, was profoundly conscious, as he
lovingly painted this beautiful young woman—body and soul—of the
seeming multiple Dionysian contradictions that lay not too far below his
Apollonian self. It was, at any rate, that John Gardner, the “generous
madman” submerged in the destructive element, I wanted to remember in
the time to come.
CHAPTER 9
Robert Creeley, Quintessential Postmodern

American Poet
A Dialogue with a Departed Friend
Abstract It was Creeley, the quintessentially American poet, who intro-

duced me to the term “occasion.” Though he was not conversant with
the etymology, he deliberately used the word in the dislocating sense
that Wallace Stevens used it in the resonant line “Poetry is the cry of its
occasion”: a poetry that emanates, not from above, but from humanity’s
existential encounter with the profane phenomena of the finite world.
Only later, when I became conscious that I was using this word con-
sistently, did I undertake a search into its etymological history. What I
found was that “occidere,” the setting of the sun, an extension of cadere
(to die) is the Latin word from which the English word “Occident”
derives. Henceforth, this resonant word became an indispensable term
of my critical and theoretical vocabulary because it expresses so reso-
nantly the onto-political essence of Western civilization, not least, its
Orientalism.
Keywords Occasion Given to write Hearing Seeing Improvisation

Charles Olson Errancy
Poetry is the measure of its occasion.

Robert Creeley

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_9
I first came to an awareness of the existence of the quintessential contem-

porary American poet, Robert Creeley, when, after two years teaching at the
University of Kentucky, I relocated to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in
1960. Knox was a small but prestigious liberal arts college in the group of
midwestern colleges consisting of Grinnell, Saint Olaf, Macalester, Carleton,
among others, that appealed primarily to the children of well off residents of
the Chicago suburbs. Creeley was invited to the Knox campus by my English
Department colleague, the poet Sam Moon, who was writing good post-
modern poetry—much better than his lack of a readership implied—under
the influence of the Black Mountain School, founded by the great poet
Charles Olson, which included Larry Eigner, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan,
Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Joel Oppenheimer, Denise
Levertov, and Robert Creeley, among others. Sam was intent on making the
revolutionary Black Mountain poets, particularly Olson and Creeley, known
to the Knox faculty and student body. I remember the night of Creeley’s talk
very vividly. The auditorium was packed, a symptom of a faculty and student
body eager to learn what was courant in the domain of the liberal arts in the
United States. When he appeared on the stage, I was, like most of the
expectant audience, taken by his appearance. He was tall, wore a skull cap
and blue jeans and a striped button-down shirt—his signature clothing for
readings, it turned out—and a black patch over his eyeless left eye: the
epitome, most of us in the audience felt, of the contemporary American
poet. We were expecting to hear Creeley speak about, maybe even read,
some of his poems. But to our surprise he spent the whole allotted time
talking about—meditating on would be more accurate—the poetry of his
mentor, Charles Olson, particularly The Maximus Poems, and his relationship
to him. At first I thought that was odd and I was disappointed. But as he
went on I realized that Creeley’s purpose was not, as it was for most of
the American poets I had heard, to aggrandize his own reputation. On the
contrary, his purpose, as his seemingly casual critical references to the United
States’ “New Frontier” policy in Southeast Asia under the presidency
of John F. Kennedy testified, was to speak of the larger issue of the state of
poetry—which is to say, if poetry is the most accurate symptom of the state
of a country’s language—in the United States. And there was no better way
of doing that than to talk about his relationship to Olson and the poetry of
the Black Mountain School Olson founded, if only because this new poetic
initiative was forcefully committed to renewing the banalized “dialect of
the tribe.” This choice, I felt, was not only a generous gesture, but also one
9 ROBERT CREELEY, QUINTESSENTIAL POSTMODERN AMERICAN POET 109
that revealed an American poet who, deeply affected by the United States’
intervention in Vietnam in the name of what is now called the American
exceptionalist ethos, understood his poetic vocation as one committed to the
revitalization of the American language, which, as he noted more than once,
had become banalized under the aegis of an imperial capitalism, and, in the
domain of poetry, the utterly worldless New Criticism. Later that evening
after the talk, a few of us adjourned to the home of Sam Moon—or was it of
the Lincoln scholar, Doug Wilson?—to talk informally with Creeley over
drinks. That occasion was equally memorable in that it corroborated my
sense that this poet was one whose mission had to do with the role of
American poetry in the United States. Although he mentioned in passing
British, French, Latin American, and Soviet Union poetry, there was no
question in my mind that Creeley privileged American poetry—or, more to
the point, the anti-teleological—“projective”—poetry of the Black
Mountain poets and their maverick models: Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, Hilda Doolittle, Louis Zukovsky, among others, whose guiding
principle was William Carlos Williams’s radically revolutionary ontological
dictum: “no ideas but in things.”
I vividly recall, for example, the anecdote recounted by Allen Ginsburg
to Creeley after a visit with the dissident Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko
in the Soviet Union. It was a simple gesture—perhaps too simple.
Ginsburg raised his right hand and drew a square in the air over his
head. This could have been interpreted as a gesture that would later
come to be called American exceptionalism. But that—and the Black
Mountain School’s strong emphasis on the radical finiteness of its
American poetry—would not name Ginsburg’s gesture and Creeley’s
retelling of the exemplary anecdote to us. It was, rather, as the square
suggested, a criticism of a foreign poetry that, like so much of the political,
end-oriented American poetry of that Cold War era, did not attend hardly
enough to what mattered: the need, activated by the banalization of the
Western languages—and, as Hannah Arendt was reminding us by way of
her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the consequent
dehumanization of humanity—for an open-ended, “errant,” language
that the Black Mountain poets insisted was the imperative of a liminal
modern world that in the early 1960s was, though hardly noticed, implod-
ing, that is, becoming “postmodern.”
From that inaugural time at Knox College on, Bob Creeley and I
became friends, not close but very respectful of each.
1
A few years later—it was 1967—I took a position in the English
Department at SUNY Binghamton, which at the time was being trans-
formed from Harpur College into a university similar to SUNY Buffalo,
SUNY Stony Brook, and SUNY Albany. I decided to transfer because,
despite my admiration of its student body, I had found that at such a liberal
arts college as Knox it was almost impossible to undertake the scholarship I
so wanted to pursue. I did manage to publish the first of the two-volume
edition collecting the most prominent writing of the founders of the
existentialist initiative (including my essay “The Detective and the
Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Imagination”). But this did
not satisfy my urgent need to do scholarship in behalf of the American
postmodern initiative.
The most important event of my first few years at Binghamton, in
this respect, was my and my colleague’s, the late Robert Kroetsch’s,
founding of boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature, which, in
defiance of the disinterestedness of the typical academic American jour-
nal, was “interested” in the etymological sense of the word made
prominent by Søren Kierkegaard: interesse, “to be in the midst”—and
thus to care. It was our intention not only to publish postmodern
literary criticism, both American and continental, but also postmodern
poetry, particularly the distinctively postmodern poetry associated with
the Black Mountain school. I immediately wrote to Robert Creeley,
asking him to contribute some of his poems to the journal. He com-
plied enthusiastically. Here is an example:
I’ll not write again

things a young man
thinks, not the words
of that feeling.
There is no world
except felt, no
one there but
must be here also.
If that time was

echoing, a vindication
apparent, if flesh
and bone coincided—
let the body be.

See faces float
over the horizon let
the day end.
(Creeley 1978, p. 103)
This inaugural collaboration with Creeley led to my closer relationship

with him.
In 1978, a short time after publishing a special critical issue of boundary
2 on the poetry of Charles Olson—a number of interviews I conducted
with poets associated with Black Mountain poetry (David Antin, Jerome
Rothenberg, Nathaniel Tarn), and substantial literary critical supplements
on the poetry of Robert Duncan and Amiri Baraka—I decided it was time
to undertake a special issue on the poetry and prose of Robert Creeley, who
was now teaching at SUNY-Buffalo. The critics and poets I solicited work
from were enthusiastic about this project, asserting in one way or another
that it was high time to honor Creeley’s ground-breaking American poetry.
In preparation for this issue of boundary 2, I wrote to Robert to ask if I
could drive up to Buffalo to interview him. He answered positively with
enthusiasm. I met him at a bar near the Buffalo campus. We had a couple of
drinks, then drove to his modest apartment in Buffalo above a grocery
store, where his daughter, a beautiful twenty-or-so year old, also lived. She,
trying to be as unobtrusive as possible, went into another room when we
sat down to talk, though I had the impression that she was listening intently
to our conversation. Creeley donned his skull cap, a prerequisite apparently
of such interviews—he said the cap helped him to think more clearly—sat
down crossed legged on the living room floor, and, inviting me to do the
same, said, “O.K., Bill, let’s begin.” In turn, I told him that I didn’t want
this interview to be an ordinary one, in which I asked him questions and he
provided answers. That kind of informational interview I had no patience
with. Instead, I said, I hoped that we could have a conversation about his
poetry and American poetry in general that engaged both of us in what
Martin Heidegger called an Auseinandersetzung, a loving strife in which
each position is enhanced rather than diminished by the other’s response.
After all, I said, because of the United States’ intervention in Southeast
Asia, our topic of discussion, American poetry, is necessarily a controversial
one that requires dialogue, not pontification. I was thinking of the musical
counterpoint Edward Said was just beginning to introduce to the world of
literary criticism. Also attuned to the United States’ arrogant intrusion in a
country whose people were struggling to gain their independence from

colonial rule, whether Western or Soviet and Chinese communism, Robert
was sympathetic with my request. He, too, he told me, was not a fan of
these informational interviews; their pedestrian nature bored him. They
were careless. I then turned on the miniature recorder I had brought with
me, and thus we began a dialogue on American poetry that, to risk criti-
cism, I think is one of the best on record.
I will let the reader decide on this opinion after reading the interview.
Here, I will only comment on the general drift of this, in my mind, amazing
conversation as it pertained to the postmodern issues I wanted to raise with
him about American poetry, past and present. What I immediately
responded to in his dialogical responses to my questions and comments
was Creeley’s incredible eloquence. It was not simply that his command of
the American language was extraordinary; it was also the unusual range and
depth of his references. I came to the interview expecting him, as he had
done at Knox College, to restrict his discussion to the American scene and
that I would have to supplement his remarks, contrapuntally as it were, by
invoking such continental figures as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida,
who were beginning to penetrate the arrogantly provincial American cultural
borders. I was surprised by his erudition. This is not to say that he was versed
in the thought of the continental thinkers I invoked to speak of the insidious
effect of the banalized modern American perspective on global life. It is to
say, rather, that their names and the gist of their postmodern thought were
familiar to him. Above all, to my delight, Creeley, like Olson and Williams
(“no ideas but in things”), had a profound sense of the crucial ontological
foundation of his poetry. This was most memorably exemplified in the
interview by our discussion of the resonant word “occasion,” one of the
most pervasive in Creeley’s vocabulary, which, I think, he had adopted from
Wallace Stevens’ “Poetry is the cry of its occasion.” I quote from what I take
to be the heart of our conversation, but in so doing, point to Creeley’s
deliberate use of the oral as opposed to the hegemonic visual (“I hear,” not
“I see”) in his responses to my etymological suggestions:
WS: Which gets us of course to the positive to the valorizing of the

immediacy of experience. This again connects with what I would call
the postmodern impulse not only in American poetry, in Williams’
“no ideas but in things,” but you know, Husserl too (and William
James, for that matter), who says against the Western metaphysical
tradition: “We must return to the things themselves (zu den Sachen
selbst).” And, of course, this becomes the fundamental point of depar-

ture for Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology: the return to the
things themselves. Which opens up also into what strikes me as being
your most pervasive and in fact beautiful and potentially significant
word in the rhetoric of your poetics: “occasion.”
RC: Occasion. I keep thinking that as the Latin occasus, which I always
would mistranslate or very often. I couldn’t remember whether it
was “sun rise” or “sun set.” But it’s that occasus. I can’t to this
day remember whether it’s the “rising of the sun” or “the setting.”
I think it’s . . . anyhow. . . . It’s one of them (Laughing).
WS: O.K. Let me . . .
RC: I was wondering which it is. . . . We should look it up?
WS: Let me suggest this: that etymologically “Occasion” derives ulti-
mately from the Latin word cadere, which means “to fall” . . .
RC: So it’s the “setting of the sun.” O.K. (Laughing). I always thought it
was . . .
WS: Do you know the medieval version of tragic drama called De
Casibus . . . de Casibus Virorum Illustrium, “Of the Fall of Great Men?”
The way I see it, and what strikes me as being so rich in this term which
you’ve been using for fifteen years now, is that a poetry which derives out
of its occasion—Olson refers to it as “the act of the instant”—is a poetry
which involves the fall into time, into temporality . . .
RC: I hear . . .
WS: . . . into finiteness. It is the poetry which is oriented—I put this word
under erasure—not eastward but westward, not upward, but
downward . . .
RC: Right . . .
WS: . . . In being-in-the-world. Like the course of the sun. It’s an occident-
ing, so to speak, a westering . . .
RC: I hear, I hear. Again, for example, it brings into focus, so to speak, that
sense I’d have with Duncan or other poets of my dear company—that
sense of being given to write poems as opposed to casting about for
various possible themes or subjects, the sense of there being—or
Olson’s sense of life as being unrelieved. Or suddenly I was thinking
of Mallarmé’s “A Throw of the Dice.” I was thinking of the word
“case” as for example: “This is the case,” that whole sense that there
can be no appeal from anything other than that which is. . . . (“Robert
Creeley: A Gathering,” pp. 19–20)
Creeley’s appeal to the ontological foundations of language, and to the

history of the Occident (Abendland in German), was something I had
rarely heard from the American poets I had read or with whom I had
the opportunity to talk. Rather, as in the case of most of my “creative

writing” colleagues at Binghamton (the novelists Robert Kroetsch and
John Gardner, and the poet Liz Rosenberg were redemptive exceptions),
what I invariably heard was a strong, even militant, and decisive assertion
that philosophical ideas of this kind contaminated the purity of poetry.
This, I told Creeley in one way or another, was the Iowa Workshop
mentality, the hegemony of which, I felt, he and the Black Mountain
poets were trying to overcome in the name of the care-ful, open-ended,
and “errant” imagination of the occasion. Creeley whole-heartedly agreed
with my diagnosis. This scope and depth of Creeley’s postmodern
Americanness, which I had intuited on the occasion of his talk at Knox
College and then when I first began to read the apparently austere, cut-to-
the-bone, but always tentative, that is, errant, vernacular language of the
poetry he had been “given to write”—the poetry that was “the measure of
its occasion”—was corroborated during the memorable wide-ranging
dialogue in Buffalo, in which the sound of the related cluster of words
(rendered negative by the privileged language) circling around the condi-
tion of human finitude—“be-ing” (as opposed to Being), “care” (as
opposed to objectivity), “interest” (as opposed to disinterestedness),
“periplus” (as opposed to map—“not as land looks on a map / but as
sea bord seen by men sailing”), “projective” (as opposed to static), “hear-
ing” (as opposed to seeing), and so on—pervaded the errant space we
inhabited that afternoon.
2
In the mid-1980s Robert Creeley’s English wife, Penelope, applied to and
was accepted by the graduate school of Cornell University to take a Ph.D.
in political science (I think). He, not wanting to be apart from her,
decided to relocate during the time of her graduate studies to be closer
to her. The result, with my and Bob Kroetsch’s enthusiastic support, was
an appointment to the creative writing program of the Binghamton
English Department. I, of course, was elated. It meant, besides the oppor-
tunity of reestablishing my relation to a friend I had come to admire very
much over the years since our meeting at Knox College, the coming of a
welcomed voice that would counter the stranglehold that the Iowa
Workshop mentality (with the exception of Liz Rosenberg, John
Vernon, and Bob Kroetsch) had on the teaching of poetry to our under-
graduate and graduate students.
But, alas, it didn’t turn out that way. Creeley’s casual teaching style—a
deliberately anecdotal orientation that talked around the philosophical,
cultural, social, and political issues that poetry, in one way or another, had
to address—was anathema to most of the Binghamton teachers of poetry.
Though most of his students were mesmerized by Creeley’s eloquence and
range and depth of reference, his explorative style, and his focus on the
anti-American “Americanness” of the American poetry he was interested
in, his colleagues were decidedly not. They felt that Creeley was travesty-
ing the teaching of poetry by way of his Black Mountain “bullshit.” The
result was, incredibly, the refusal to renew his contract after his second
year, at which point he returned to Buffalo.
But he did leave his mark on the SUNY Binghamton community. One of
the most memorable occasions—and it was, to me, an occasion in the
etymological sense of this favorite word of his and mine—was his organiza-
tion of a public event, held in Waters Theater, the university auditorium,
featuring a number of American artists, friends of Robert who represented a
cross section of the emergent artistic community that was committed to
postmodernizing American art. They included the composer John Cage,
the dancer Merce Cunningham, the poet Robert Creeley, and several other
postmodern artists whose names now escape me. What I found engaging
about this public event was its implicit manifestation in microcosmic form of
that indissoluble continuum of being that was then, under the influence of
Heidegger’s destruction of the ontotheological tradition, emerging as a
fundamental principle of my thinking about and criticism of the world as
it existed. Each of the artists performed in her/his particular medium—
poetry, music, dance, art—demonstrating in the process, against the
received idea that they were irredeemably distinct artistic practices—not
only the indissoluble relationship between their distinctness, but also, and
more important, their exhilarating improvisational nature. I mean, as the
word’s etymology suggests, their rejection of the spatializing vocational
imperatives of a pre-established pro-vid-ential design, which did the bidding
of a “Higher Cause,” in favor of the exhilarating errancy of the irreparable
finite world. The American artists Creeley convened that night were more
evidence of his postmodern will to subvert the hegemonic modernist under-
standing of the truth, both that which determined contemporary American
socio-economic-political practice and the worldless poetry that the New
Critics, in their disdain of this banalizing practice, opposed to it.
Having said this, it would be remiss of me not to confess to an important
reservation about Creeley’s and the Black Mountain School’s poetry. It is a
reservation, latent from the beginning of my acquaintance with Robert

Creeley, that culminated in my mind as a viable question in the early 2000s,
when I began to address the exceptionalism of American literature—the
overdetermination of its Americanness. I hear the echoes of the world
outside America’s borders in this poetry, particularly in its emphasis on
an American vernacular that is opposed to the banalized language of the
Western world. But that’s because I had had the privilege to talk at length
with Creeley. But now, in the wake of the United States’ post-9/11 effort
to achieve global hegemony, I wonder if ordinary readers of his poetry can.
Isn’t it possible that even those who admire Creeley’s poetry admire it for
its Americanness rather than for its global socio-political implications, that
is, for its American exceptionalism? Consider, for example, one of Creeley’s
most famous poems, “I Know a Man”:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking—John, I
sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
(Creeley 1982, p. 132)
My late question, in other words, is this: in thinking the indissoluble

relationship between ontology, the subject, language, and culture (poiesis)
as I have claimed he did, did Robert Creeley and his Black Mountain
colleagues (Olson, to me, is a different matter) neglect the most worldly—
and now most urgent—of these sites on the continuum of a de-structured
being: the political? As I have shown, everything in Creeley’s prose and
poetry (including that of the Black Mountain community) points tenta-
tively to the identityless identities of the “coming community” that has
now, in the liminal post-9/11 world, which has borne witness to the self-
de-struction of the binarist identitarian logic of the Western nation-state,
become an urgent global topic. I offer this question, then, in the spirit of
the Auseinandersetzung we established many years ago. Robert Creeley,
alas, is now dead. He cannot, therefore, respond. I would like to think,
however, that, were he still alive, he would have been able to offer a
positive answer. Either way, in the end, Robert Creeley must be counted
as one of the greatest American poetic voices of the postmodern era. And
this is precisely because what that voice said—what we heard it say—was
always “the measure of its occasion.”
CHAPTER 10
Cornel West
My Black-American Brother
Abstract I met Cornel West at a conference on the “hermeneutic crisis”

he organized in 1979 when he was teaching at Union Theological
Seminary. That occasion led to my invitation to Cornel to join the editorial
board of boundary 2, which in turn provided us relatively frequent oppor-
tunities to continue the dialogue that began at Union. What I found
attractive about West was his deliberate rejection of the neutral academic
persona in favor of an engaged writing and teaching that emanated from the
abhorrent conditions of the Black American people he represented. His
insistent refusal to separate America’s war in Vietnam from the plight of
Black Americans was always a reenergizing reminder of my own commit-
ment to the idea that being constituted a continuum from the ontological
to the more worldly cultural and political sites. I also loved Cornel’s appeal
to popular Black American culture, particularly to Jazz and Soul. These
were not appendages but indissolubly related to his human being. Indeed,
this last chapter focuses on an occasion in which I bore rapt—epiphanic—
witness to “Brother Corn’s” singing along with Marvin Gaye’s unforgetta-
ble song about the Black-Americans’ response to the Vietnam War, an
occasion that compelled me to conclude that he was gifted with grace.
Keywords Race matters Liberation theology Union Theological

Seminary Improvisation Marvin Gaye Grace (charis)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5_10
The liberal/conservative discussion conceals the most basic issue now facing
black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence. This threat is
not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political
powerlessness. . . . It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound
sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair
so widespread in black America.
Cornel West, Race Matters
I first met Cornel West, the awesome Black-American philosopher pro-

phet, in the late 1970s after Robert Kroetsch and I had founded boundary
2: a journal of postmodern literature. Having taken his B.A. from Harvard
and Ph.D. from Princeton University (1980), he began teaching at Union
Theological Seminary in New York. This was the seminary that in the
1960s had established the Union Settlement Association in East Harlem
to give public visibility to the terrible plight of black migrants, and
throughout the 1970s and after was, under influence of the late religious
radical Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was executed by the Nazis), and the
existential theology of Henry Sloane Coffin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the
German expatriate, Paul Tillich, the spiritual center of the American
protest movement against the United States’ brutal intervention in
Vietnam.
Under the influence of Edward Said and Paul Bové, who were teaching
at the adjacent Columbia University, Cornel convened a conference at
Union in the fall of 1979 on “the hermeneutic crisis,” but, equally to the
point, to explore the affiliative relationship between boundary 2’s postmo-
dernist commitments and what had come to be called Union’s radical
“liberation theology.” And he invited me to give a talk.
It was an invitation I accepted with great enthusiasm, not only because it
would allow me to meet this enormously intelligent young prophetic black
firebrand whom my boundary 2 colleagues Paul Bové and Dan O’Hara
spoke so highly about. It would also enable me to return to Union, where
Margaret Prince and I were married in 1955 by my former colleague at
Mount Hermon Prep School, David Jewell, who was then taking an
advanced degree at Union. This was no minor matter, since it was David
(and his brilliant wife, Steffe), along with Jim White, the pastor at Hermon,
and John Angevin, all graduates of the seminary and students of Niebuhr
and Tillich and committed exponents of the liberation theology the semin-
ary espoused, who had, through their intimate knowledge, rendered the
theology of Søren Kierkegaard a living presence in my intellectual life.
10 CORNEL WEST 121
My talk, “Postmodern Literature and the Hermeneutic Crisis,” was

well received, though I remember Cornel telling me that my reliance on
Heidegger’s authority was questionable (an opinion he never aban-
doned). But what made the evening memorable for me was the impression
I got from Cornel’s participation in the ensuing discussion: his extraor-
dinary eloquence, the easy commerce between his Black-American verna-
cular and the abstractions of contemporary philosophy, and the prophetic
passion of his liberation theology. Not least, as these testify, it was his
commitment, unique at that time to a Black-American, to a critique of
American modernity that, like mine, was not restricted simply to the sites
of race or to politics, but was open to an indissoluble, however historically
uneven, relationship between ontology—the very question of the be-ing
of being—the subject, language, race, gender, economics, the socius,
culture (including pop culture), and politics. To him, of course, at this
specific historical conjuncture in Western, but particularly American his-
tory, it was, above all, as he put it many years later in a resonant phrase that
became the slogan of the Black-American protest movement following the
killing of a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, “race that mattered.”
But what I found different and profoundly compelling about Cornel’s
diagnosis of American modernity was his profound awareness that the
racial problem would not be solved simply by political action, but would
require an intervention at all the sites on the continuum of being. And this
was because, as I too had implied in my talk, the racism of American
society was grounded in a deep ontological structure of feeling that had
its origins at the moment of the founding of Western “civilization,” when
it deliberately defined itself, in opposition to its “barbaric” Black African
and “recidivist” Oriental “others,” as the Occident. Sensing the love of
humanity informing Cornel’s comments that evening, I was, needless to
say, immensely pleased when, near the end of the conference, he began to
address me as “Brother Bill” or simply “Bro.”
On returning to Binghamton, I wrote to Cornel inviting him to
join the boundary 2 editorial board, which, as I told him in my
note, against the journal’s theoretical policy of inclusiveness, had no
blacks or women to represent—to tell the stories of—these oppressed
“others” of American society. Cornel accepted my invitation, thus inau-
gurating a long relationship—sometimes collaborative but just as often
argumentative—that lasted until the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury when his commitment to the life of the public intellectual made it
impossible for him to fulfill his editorial obligations.
1
As a member of the b2 editorial collective, Cornel, in those early years, was a
conscientious contributor. He faithfully read and commented on the sub-
missions that were assigned to him and he attended and participated in the
three annual meetings of the collective devoted to selecting the essays that
would appear in the journal during the coming year. Above all, he never
stopped reminding—spectrally, as it were—his white “bros,” who, despite
their unanimous sympathy with the dismal plight of Black America, were all
too prone to focus on more recent global matters such as American
Orientalism, that the most pressing issue of our post-Vietnam War occasion,
as the radically uneven numbers of blacks and whites who fought the war
bore telling witness, was that of American racism. As the contrapuntal voice
of the editorial collective, Cornel also kept us abreast of the revolutionary
activism inspired by the Black Panthers, with whom he sympathized but
could not entirely endorse because of his Christian commitments; by the
active revolutionary resistance of Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; and, not
least, by the passive resistance of Martin Luther King, particularly the late
King who finally came to perceive the indissoluble continuity between
American racism and America’s imperialist intervention in Vietnam.
One of those revelatory occasions, it is worth recalling, during which
Cornel called my own “radical” perspective into question, occurred dur-
ing that portion of a b2 editorial board meeting in Binghamton sometime
in the late 1980s that was open to the public. I can no longer remember
the worldly context of that exchange. But I’m pretty sure it had to do with
the United States’ humiliating defeat by the materially much weaker
Vietnamese insurgents struggling to free their people from the brutal
and demeaning Western colonialism they had suffered for over a century.
In my talk, I had relied almost entirely on the august authority of Martin
Heidegger’s destruction of the Western ontotheological tradition to
explain the US’s reasons for its intervention in Vietnam and its consequent
blindness to a mode of warfare practiced by the Vietnamese insurgents
that, in refusing to be answerable to the beginning-middle-end impera-
tives of the United States’ Western mode of warfare, ended in the defeat of
the most powerful army in the history of warfare.
At a certain point, Cornel interrupted my learned disquisition: “Bro,”
he said (I will not try to reproduce his utterly inimitable language), “what
you’ve told us about the United States’ intervention in Vietnam makes
some good intellectual sense. But your audience will have noticed that in
10 CORNEL WEST 123
the process of talking about the traditional Western mode of warfare, you’ve
said nothing about the actual American soldiers who fought and lost that
war. I mean, above all, all those very real black brothers who, disproportio-
nately to the black and white populations of the United States, fought and
died in Vietnam. Didn’t that disproportion have something fundamental to
do with America’s defeat? What incentive did they have to fight? I mean
those black brothers, pulled out of the margins to which they were relegated
by white America to center stage to win a foreign war, a war against an
Oriental people that a racist America detested as much as it detested its own
black population. Think, brother Bill, of brother Marvin Gaye’s great 1971
song, ‘What’s Going On’”—and he began to sing:
Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother,
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today
Father, father
We don’t need to need escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
To bring some lovin’ here today. . . .
When the song had come to its end, Cornel added,
As for Heidegger, brother Bill, how can you rely on his ontological abstrac-
tions about being as the definitive authority for your diagnosis of the United
States’ brutal intervention in Vietnam? After all, he was, in fact, a farm boy
who never left that provincial German environment and probably never
spoke to a black man. And as a result of this provincialism, he gave his
tacit blessings to the Nazis and their horrible racist anti-Semitism.
In response to Cornel’s criticism, I invoked the indissoluble continuum of

being to which Cornel too was committed, but I had to admit to myself—
and it was Cornel quoting from Marvin Gaye’s great Black-American pop
song that compelled this admission—that my philosophical diagnosis of
the United States’ intervention in Vietnam and its humiliating defeat was
not entirely convincing. And that was precisely because, having forgotten
the specific cultural and political sites on the continuum of being, I had
effaced the indissoluble relationship between the American war in Vietnam
and the simultaneous on-going Black-American civil rights struggle in the
United States during that fraught liminal decade of American history.
This is what I loved about Corn’s participation in the b2 meetings: that
ineffable combination of Black-American vernacular and a highly sophis-
ticated philosophical language infused by passion and a self-effacing love
of the marginalized humanity which was always his subject matter. What
name, I asked myself, could I give this unnamable gryphon-like beast that
had undermined my Adamic Logos? “Brother Corn”—that’s what we on
the b2 editorial board came eventually to call him—though pleasurable to
me, was not quite adequate.
2
The meaning of the name, if not the name itself, came to me as an epiphany
a few years later, around 1990, on the occasion that brought several of the
b2 editorial board—Paul Bové, Dan O’Hara, Joe Buttigieg, Jonathan Arac,
Cornel West, and me—to the English Institute at Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts to talk about Edward Said, whose Orientalism
had by that time catapulted him into global prominence. More specifically,
it occurred during the night before the meetings, following a dinner that
Jonathan’s mother had graciously prepared for us. Since I was the only one
who had driven to Cambridge, we used my car to transport us to the hotel
near Harvard where we had made our reservations. But, because I was tired
after the long five-hour drive from Binghamton, I asked for a volunteer to
take over the wheel, and Cornel immediately accepted my request. We piled
into the car, Cornel and I in the front, Paul, Dan, Jonathan, and Joe in the
back. As we were about drive off to the hotel, I remembered that I had
earlier, probably reminded by West’s reminder on that earlier occasion in
Binghamton, put a recording of Marvin Gaye’s great
What’s Going On in the automobile’s CD player. Pushing it into place, I

said to Cornel, “You will like this, brother.” And as soon as Marvin’s
golden voice came on, Cornel began to accompany him. Gaye’s voice is,
of course, inimitable. There is, in my mind, no singer in the entire history
of Motown, indeed, of black soul music, who is comparable to him. What
was uncanny, however, was that Cornel’s imitation—and it was true to all
10 CORNEL WEST 125
of Gaye’s vocal idiosyncrasies—was virtually the same as the beautiful voice

he was imitating:
Mother, mother
There’s too man of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
To bring some lovin’ here today, eheh
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
To bring some lovin’ here today, oh oh oh
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh what’s going on?
What’s going on?
Yeah, what’s going on
Ah, what’s going
I don’t know what the other passengers in the car thought or felt about
Brother West’s spontaneous rendition of the lyrics of Gaye’s great song
that night. To me, however, to use a later language I learned from the
contemporary philosopher, Alain Badiou, that unlikely combination of
black soul singer and black philosopher was an event: a revelation that
not only exposed the void at the very bottom of the American exception-
alist national and global ethos in a way that no Heideggerian abstraction
could, but also, in the loving strife with which both voices delivered the
song, pointed to the new American polis that one day would emerge from
that disclosive void.
3
A number of years later, it must have around 2000, Paul Bové invited me
to spend a weekend with him and his wife, Carol, at their home in
Wexford, Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Pittsburgh. After dinner
and a refreshing bottle of Chianti, the red Italian wine we invariably drank
during our visits, he suggested, knowing my deep admiration for Edward
Said and his ground-breaking commentaries on musical counterpoint, that
we watch a documentary film about the pianist Glenn Gould, in which he
is shown playing the notoriously different two versions (1955 and 1981)
of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”
Sitting down in the TV room adjacent to the kitchen with a glass of
Chianti, we watched/heard Gould’s two breathtaking, quite antithetical
versions of the first of the “Variations,” all the while indifferent to his
audience’s expectations: not only the daring—some called them outra-
geous—interpretive liberties he took with Bach’s contrapuntal scores, but
also his audible humming of the tunes as he played. It was the first time I
had heard these versions consecutively, and I was astonished by the play of
difference I heard. To me, it was another uncanny manifestation of the
careful postmodern will to free a banalized modern humanity from the
repressive authority of the logocentric tradition.
When the documentary had come to its end, Paul, shaking his head in
disbelief, said to me, “Glenn Gould, Bill, was one of the few artists in
history who had grace.” And that instigated a conversation about the
enigmatic word and who among the artists and thinkers of the Western
tradition also had grace that lasted until it was past the time to retire. As I
recall only four other names emerged in our conversation that evening
that we could be certain were gifted with grace: Herman Melville, the
eccentric nineteenth century American author; Henry Adams; Thomas
Pynchon; and Edward Said.
Having responded with a shock of recognition to Paul’s identification of
Glenn Gould as an artist who was gifted with grace—whatever that meant—
I became obsessed with the question as to what that word meant and who had
been gifted by it. So, when I returned to Binghamton, I decided that I would
improvise a CD in which I would try to name those artists and thinkers I had
come across in my lifetime who, I believed, were gifted with grace, and in this
erratic improvisational process learn what the strange word itself meant.
One late afternoon, sitting on the deck of my country home in Castle
Creek drinking a glass of Sancerre Chardonnay, after having begun the
improvisational process by way of recording Glenn Gould’s first version of
the first of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and quoting analogous passages
from Melville, Adams, Pynchon, and Said, I wrote Paul a lengthy email
message informing him of my project and telling him why this question of
grace had become important to me. Though I wasn’t sure what it meant,
10 CORNEL WEST 127
I informed him, I knew that it had to do with a comportment

towards being that, in its generosity, was the antithesis to that
which Hannah Arendt, characterizing the Nazi functionary Adolph
Eichmann’s appallingly thoughtless thought at his trial in Jerusalem
as a symptom of Western modernity at large, had called “the banality
of evil.”
In the improvisational process of this long-term recording—it extended
from August 1 to September 15, 2001 (a date, not incidentally, only four
days after the United States’ declaration of its unending war against terror
in the wake of the 9/11 Al Qaeda destruction of the World Trade Center
in New York and the Pentagon in Washington)—I realized that grace is
not restricted to artists and thinkers identified with “high culture,” but
also included the unremembered members of “low cultures.” I recorded a
beautiful Greek folk song, for example, in which the singer, watching a
young peasant woman dancing a tsamiko (a slow stately circular movement
expressive of mourning) in the process stamps her feet against the unfor-
giving earth:
This earth, Kura Yiorgina,

This earth we tread,
This earth we tread,
All shall enter one day.
This green earth devours young and old men.
This flowered earth devours young women and girls
This earth will devour me too, and my arched eyebrows.
If only I knew how to escape,
I would give my silver to the earth,
This earth which will devour us,
Give it to her with your foot.
At a certain moment late in the improvising process, I remembered the

night years before driving to the hotel in Cambridge when Cornel West,
accompanying Marvin Gaye, sang “What’s Going On.” And it suddenly
dawned on me that “grace,” charis in Greek (from which the totally
inadequate English word “charismatic” derives), was the anti-Adamic
“name” that I was searching for, but that had obstinately eluded me on
that evental night. Brother West, this African American, I concluded was
not only another figure who was gifted with grace; his practice, character-
ized by its passion and generosity—the loving strife between Black and
White, high and low, the transcendental and the profane, the answer and
question—that opened up rather than closed down human potential—also
offered me an insight into the existential meaning of the profoundly
attractive but enigmatic word “grace.”
Thus, in the last entry of my four disc recording, which I entitled “On
the Gift of Grace: A Meditation in Sound,” I brought my improvisational
labor to its disclosive conclusion by recounting that memorable night
years before when, driving to our hotel in Cambridge, Brother Corn
sang Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” And, in so doing, it instigated
a meditation about his personhood that not only terminated in my realiza-
tion that he and the Black-American pop singer, Marvin Gaye, whom he
loved so much, were gifted with charis, but also that their charis consisted
precisely in the unending loving strife intrinsic to the hyphen between
their African-American identities.
When I “completed” the set of CDs, I wrote Cornel the following note
on March 28, 2006:
Dear Cornel,
I was listening to Marvin Gaye the other night—“What’s Going On”—and
remembered that time, very long ago, when, in Boston, we were driving from
Jonathan’s mother’s apartment to an English Institute meeting. You were
driving my car and I was sitting in the front seat with you. I popped the tape
I had been listening to earlier in the tape deck. It was Marvin Gaye singing
“What’s Going On.” You started singing along, and at the end you said
something to the effect that that song was “scripture” to you when you were
growing up in Sacramento, which I took to mean that Marvin Gaye had grace.
Many years after that, in 2001, at Paul’s and Carol’s home in Wexford,
Pennsylvania, we listened-watched Glenn Gould perform his 1955 and 1981
versions of the opening tune of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. When it ended,
one of us—I think it was Paul—said Glenn Gould had grace. And that
inaugurated a conversation on what that enigmatic word meant. A week
or so later, the word was still resounding in my head, so I decided to make a
CD taking off from that first variation that, I hoped, would suggest its
meaning—of the music and writing that had made a deep impact on me
over a life time.
The result, after several intense weeks of recording, are these 4 CDs I’m
sending you in gratitude for your flickering but very real presence in my life.
As ever,
Bill.
10 CORNEL WEST 129
4
Cornel, as I have said, eventually withdrew from the b2 editorial board, not
because he was disaffected by its policy, though the journal’s turn away from
American to World literature in the post-9/11 era must have had some-
thing to do with it, but because the life of the public intellectual to which he
had been catapulted by such books as Race Matters (1994) and Democracy
Matters (2004) made it impossible for him to devote his time and energies
to the work the journal demanded from its editors. As a result I lost practical
contact with him in the years after 2001, following this turn in his life. But
he remained a living presence in my mind and in my writing.
Thus, for example, around 2012, after teaching a graduate course on
American Exceptionalism, which, with West’s own criticism of the excep-
tionalist ethos in mind, I undertook a reading of his Princeton colleague
Toni Morrison’s great novel Paradise, in which I tried to show that its
purpose was to criticize that growing nationalist aspect of modern Black-
American life which, in modeling itself on the Old Testament Exodus
story, was inadvertently replicating the genealogical itinerary of white
America, the very exceptionalist itinerary, inaugurated by the founding
Puritans’ prefigurative identification with the Old Testament Hebrews
(particularly the Exodus story), that had been responsible for producing
the racism that had made Black-American life perennially miserable.
In that novel, it will be remembered, the motto on the face of the
communal oven in Ruby, the vocational symbol of the at-homing oneness
of the racially pure nationalist black community—“8-rock,” its dominant
exceptionalist male exponents call it—is undergoing a radical transforma-
tion in the minds of the younger members of the Ruby community. Under
the influence of the related protest movement against America’s imperial
war in Vietnam and the Black civil rights movement, they read the alleged
original motto, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” as an imperative to
become actively involved in these related struggles in behalf of justice:
“Motto? Motto? We talking command!” Reverend Pulliam pointed an ele-

gant finger at the ceiling. “‘Beware the Furrow of His Brow.’ That’s what it
says clear as daylight. That’s not a suggestion; that’s an order!”
“Well, no. It’s not clear as daylight,” said Misner. “It says ‘ . . . the Furrow of
His Brow.’ There’s no ‘Beware’ on it.”
“You weren’t there! Esther was! And you weren’t here, either, at the begin-
ning! Esther was!” Arnold Fleetwood’s right hand shook with warning.
“She was a baby. She could have been mistaken,” said Misner.
Now Fleet joined Deek in the aisle. “Esther never made a mistake of that
nature in her life. She knew all there was to know about Haven and Ruby
too. She visited us before we had a road. She named this town, dammit.
’Scuse me, ladies.”
Destry, looking strained and close to tears, held up his hand and asked,
“Excuse me, sir. What’s so wrong about ‘Be the Furrow’? ‘Be the Furrow of
His Brow’?”
“You can’t be God, boy.” Nathan DuPres spoke kindly as he shook his head.
“It’s not being Him, sir; it’s being His instrument, His justice. As a race—”
“God’s justice is His alone. How you going to be His instrument if you
don’t do what he says?” asked Reverend Pulliam. “You have to obey him.”
“Yes, sir, but we are obeying Him,” said Destry. “If we follow His com-
mandments, we’ll be His voice, His retribution. As a people—”
Harper Jury silenced him. “It says ‘Beware.’ Not ‘Be.’ Beware means ‘Look
out. The power is mine. Get used to it.’”
“‘Be’ means you putting Him aside and you the power,” said Sargeant.
“We are the power if we just—”
“See what I mean? See what I mean? Listen to that! You hear that,
Reverend? That boy needs a strap. Blasphemy!”
(Morrison 1999, pp. 86–87)
This revision of the oven’s motto draws the wrath of the exceptionalist 8-
rock elders of Ruby, who see it as a blasphemous initiative indissolubly
related to that de-centering one, they claim, being carried out by the errant
women in the convent. It is also a self-righteous wrath that is extended to
include the new minister, Reverend Richard Misner, the one male adult of
Ruby who sympathizes with the young Ruby and the unconventional, and,
therefore, threatening women of the convent. In the process of representing
the decisive town meeting convened by the elders of Ruby to resolve the
crisis—to them it is “a war” to the end—the infinitely generous narrator
characterizes the torn Reverend Misner, a newcomer to the community
unwelcomed by the exceptionalist 8-rock male elders for his heretical open-
ness to change, in the following resonant way:
Suitable language came to mind but, not trusting himself to deliver it with-
out revealing his deep personal hurt, Misner walked away from the pulpit, to
the rear wall of the church. There he stretched, reaching up until he was able
to unhook the cross that hung there. He carried it then, past the empty choir
stall, past the organ where Kate sat, the chair where Pulliam was, on to the
10 CORNEL WEST 131
podium and held it before him for all to see—if only they would. See what
was certainly the first sign any human anywhere had made: the vertical line;
the horizontal line. Even as children, they drew it with their fingers in snow,
sand or mud; they laid it down as sticks in dirt; arranged it from bones on
frozen tundra and broad savannas; as pebbles on river banks; scratched it on
cave walls and outcroppings from Nome to South Africa. Algonquin and
Laplanders, Zulu and Druids—all had a finger memory of this original mark.
The circle was not first, nor was the parallel or the triangle. It was this mark,
this, that lay underneath every other. This mark, rendered in the placement
of facial features. This mark of a standing human figure poised to embrace.
Remove it, as Pulliam had done, and Christianity was like any and every
religion in the world: a population of supplicants begging respite from
begrudging authority; harried believers ducking fate or dodging everyday
evil; the weak negotiating a doomed trek through the wilderness; the
sighted ripped of light and thrown into the perpetual dark of choice lessness.
Without this sign, the believer’s life was confined to praising God and taking
the hits. The praise was credit; the hits were interest due on a debt that could
never be paid. Or, as Pulliam put it, no one knew when he had “graduated.”
But with it, in the religion in which this sign was paramount and founda-
tional, well, life was a whole other matter.
(Morrison 1999, pp. 145–146.)
After describing the agonizing but redemptive lynching on a cross of a

black man that replicates Christ’s crucifixion, Misner’s silent meditation
on the ominous impending fate of Ruby under the aegis of 8-rock excep-
tionalism comes to its paradoxical opening close:
All of which testified not to a peevish Lord who was His own love but to one
who enabled human love. Not for His own glory—never. God loved the way
humans loved one another; loved the way humans loved themselves; loved
the genius on the cross who managed to do both and die knowing it.
But Richard Misner could not speak calmly of these things. So he stood
there and let the minutes tick by as he held the crossed oak in his hands,
urging it to say what he could not: that not only is God interested in you; He
is you.
Would they see? Would they? (Morrison 1999, pp. 146–147)
In this richly suggestive destructive central passage of Paradise the cross

Misner bears replaces the circle—the traditional symbol of a paradisiacal
totality, of being-at-home, and of a satisfying hearth, and the vocation of
servitude it demands (“Beware the Furrow of His Brow”)—metamorphoses
into the paradoxical symbol of the strife-ridden profane life that generates
care or, in the narrator’s language, love, in its inhabitants. Reading her
words, which allow the Word to be, but render its traditional meaning
inoperative, it was impossible for me not to conclude, rightly or wrongly,
that Toni Morrison’s portrait of the torn Reverend Misner was in some
fundamental sense an affectionate portrait of her Princeton colleague,
Cornel West, the Black Christian minister/philosopher who, both in his
living practice and his writing, has rendered all these traditional binarist
terms of the exceptionalist ethos, its servile vocation, and its paradisiacal
hearth and home inoperative in behalf of an earthly coming polis informed
by a life-enhancing loving strife.
After completing my essay on Paradise—with Søren Kierkegaard’s enig-
matic Christian existentialism in mind, not incidentally—I thought of writing
a note to Brother Corn, suggesting that Toni Morrison, his Princeton collea-
gue, had modeled the paradoxical protagonist of her richly provocative novel
Paradise, Reverend Richard Misner, on Cornel’s person and his prophetic
profane Christianity. But I did not. I did send him a copy of my essay on
Paradise, but in the end, I decided to let the intuition be in the name of the
loving strife of charis—in this case, that Black-American life matters—that
every gesture of Cornel West’s mind and practice exudes.
REFERENCES
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993a. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993b. The Coming Community. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000a. Means Without End. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2000b. The Time that Remains. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Profanations. New York: Zone.
Arendt, Hannah. 1976. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History. London: Verso.
Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War. London: Verso.
Creeley, Robert. 1978. “Robert Creeely: A Gathering.” Boundary 2 Spring/Fall:
103.
Creeley, Robert. 1982. Collected Poems, 1945–1975. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
de la Durantaye, Leland. 2009. Giorgio Agamben. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Eliot, T.S. 1932. Selected Essays, 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company.
Eliot, T. S. 1957. On Poetry and Poets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Eliot, T. S. 1958. T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Ford, Jeff and Robert Mooney. 1995. “Remembering John Gardner: A
Conversation with William V. Spanos.” New Myths/MSS II:2/III:1; 297–319.

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Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Parmenides. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Basic Writings. Edited by David F. Krell. New York:
HarperCollins.
Jaspers, Karl. 1954. The Way to Wisdom. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1958. Johannes Climacus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 1964. Repetition. New York: Harper.
Kroetsch, Robert. 2000. Completed Field Notes. Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press.
Kroetsch, Robert. 1976. The Stone Hammer Poems, 1960–1975. Landsville, BC:
Oolichan Books.
Kroetsch, Robert, and Dawne McCance. December 2001. “Bill Spanos in
Conversation.” Mosaic 34.
Morrison, Toni. 1999. Paradise. New York: Plume.
Mufti, Aamir R. 2004. “Critical Secularism.” Boundary 2 31: 2.
Rancière, Jacques. 1990. Dis-agreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Richards, I.A. 1924. Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Spanos, William V. 1993. Heidegger and Criticism. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Spanos, William V. 2012. Exiles in the City. Columbus: Ohio State University
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Yeats, W.B. 1956. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan.
INDEX
A Aristotle, 96
Adams, Henry, 126 Aronson, David, 87
Adorno, Theodor, 48, 73 Auerbach, Erich, 6
Agamben, Giorgio, 23, 30, 34, 37–38, Austen, Jane, 52, 71
44, 71, 102
aletheia/veritas, 7, 20–22, 56, 58, 68
biopolitics, thanatopolitics, bare life B
(homo sacer), & the camp, Bach, Johann Sebastian,
24–25 125–126, 128
The Coming Community, 10, 27 Badiou, Alain, 14, 18, 23, 125
Homo Sacer, 25, 61 The Rebirth of History, 25–26
Means without End, 12–14, 27–28, Balibar, Etienne, 23
62–63 Baraka, Amiri, 111
Profanations, 9–10, 46–47 Barthes, Roland, 79
The Time That Remains, 10–11 Barth, John, 79, 94, 96
Althusser, Louis, 67, 68, 70 Being, 10
and interpellation, 10 as continuum, 7, 19, 20, 23, 44, 52,
American exceptionalism, 9, 10, 70, 87, 115, 116, 121, 123
129–132 nothing, 30
American studies, 35 nothingness, 5, 46
Antin, David, 111 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 57
Anxiety (Angst), 22–23 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 36
Apollo/Dionysus, 97, 102–103, 105 Biopolitics, 59
Arac, Jonathan, 124 Black Mountain school, 83, 108–110,
Arendt, Hannah, 13, 24, 59–60, 72, 109 111, 115
banality of evil, 60–61, 127 Black Panthers, 122
homo faber, 60 Blazer, Robin, 79
Life of the Mind, 60 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 120

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47871-5
136 INDEX
Boundary 2, 18, 36, 54, 67, 80–87, Donne, John, 39

90, 94, 110–114, 120, 121 Dresden, 3, 4, 5, 6, 18–19, 20, 22, 27,
Bove, Paul A., 50, 67, 75, 86, 120, 28, 52
124, 125–128 Dru, Alexander, 3
Bowering, Fred, 79 Duncan, Robert, 111
Bowering, George, 79
Burney, Bill, 68
Butler, Judith, 26 E
Frames of War, 26 Eichmann, Adolf, 54, 109, 127
Buttigieg, Joseph, 124 Eliot, T.S., 6, 30, 36, 50, 74, 81
Collected Poems, 39
Four Quartets, 32, 34–38
C Murder in the Cathedral, 35
Cage, John, 115 On Poetry and Poets, 31–32
Camus, Albert, 35 Escoubar, Elaine, 20
Christian existentialism, 35, 132 Eso, David, 90–91
Cleaver, Eldridge, 122 Event, 4, 18, 28, 125
Coffin, Henry Sloane, 120 Existentialism, 3–7, 14
Cold War, 54, 109
Columbia University, 46, 50, 66, 120
Conrad, Joseph, 52, 67, 71 F
Heart of Darkness, 66 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 46
Contemporary Literature, 49 Ford, Jeff, 103–105
Cooley, Dennis, 87 Foucault, Michel, 7, 24, 58, 61, 67, 68
Coover, Robert, 79, 94 Frankfort University, 54
Cornell University, 46, 114 Freiburg University, 55
Counterpoint, 36–40, 63, 70–71, 73,
74–75, 126
Creeley, Robert, 79, 88 G
Cunningham, Merce, 115 Gardner, John, 114
Grendel, 94, 97
Mickelsson’s Ghosts, 95, 101,
D 102–103
Debord, Guy, 27, 38 On Moral Fiction, 94, 97, 102
de Bouvoir, Simone, 35 October Light, 97
deconstruction, 51 Sunlight Dialogues, 97
de Durantaye, Leland, 44–45 Gaye, Marvin, 123–125, 127–128
Deleuze, Gilles, 68 Germanacos, Nikos, 83, 96
Dembo, Larry, 49 Ginsberg, Allen, 109
DePaul University, 54 Globalization, 87
Derrida, Jacques, 50, 79, 112 Gould, Glenn, 126, 128
Dolittle, Hilda, 109 Grace (charis), 126–132
INDEX 137
Gramsci, Antonio, 70 J
Guattari, Felix, 68 James, William, 112
Jaspers, Karl, 57
The Way to Wisdom, 81–82
H Jewell, David, 120
Habermas, Jurgen, 57–58 Johnson, Samuel, 39
Hagopian, John, 78 Jolas, Emil, 81
Harvard University, 120 Joyce, James, 81
English Institute, 124
Hegel, 15
Heidegger, Martin, 30, 33, 41, 44, 50,
67, 69, 71, 80, 96, 112, 121, K
122–124 Kazantzakis, Nico, 98
anxiety (Angst), 22 Kazin, Alfred, 54
Being and Time, 19, 20, 28 Kennedy, John F., 108
Bestand (standing reserve), 24 Kierkegaard, Soren, 32–35, 41, 44,
Dasein, 4 50, 110, 120, 132
Destruktion, 7, 19, 55 Concluding Unscientific
enframing (Gestell), 19, 23–24, 90 Postscript, 12
Geworfenheit (thrownness), 9, 43 and dread, 5
nothing (das Nichts), 19 Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus
ontotheological tradition, 7, 12 Dubitanduim Est, 3
Parmenides, 20–22 Journals, 3
“The Question Concerning recollection and repetition, 33
Technology”, 19, 23 unmastered irony, 39
Sorge (care), 4 King, Martin Luther, 122
“What is Metaphysics?”, 17, 20, 22 Kipling, Rudyard, 52, 71
Wiederholung, 2 Knox College, 35, 78, 108, 109,
Heidelberg University, 55 112, 114
Hoffman, Fred, 34 Krell, David Farrell, 54, 63
Homer, 31, 96 Kroetsch, Robert, 54, 67, 79, 84, 110,
Hulme, T.E., 32 114, 120
Humanism Bad Lands, 84
as “naturalized supernaturalism”, 8 But We Are Exiles, 79
Huppé, Bernard, 78 Gone Indian, 84
Husserl, Edmund, 112 The Ledger, 84
Seed Catalogue, 84
The Stone Hammer Poems, 84,
I 85–86
Identityless identity, 30, 36–37, 69 The Studhorse Man, 84
Interregnum, 71 What the Crow Said, 84
Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 78, 79, The Words of My
80, 114 Roaring, 79
138 INDEX
L N
Lacoue-Labarthes, Phillippe, 79 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 79
Lentricchia, Frank, 36 Nation-state, 7, 12, 23, 28, 37, 58,
Liberation theology, 120 71, 87
Loving strife (Auseinandersetzung), 9, Nazi Germany, 5, 18, 20, 24, 54, 58,
13, 18, 30, 38–39, 58, 61, 63, 69, 60, 62, 69, 120, 123, 127
71, 75, 79, 96, 102, 111, 125, New Criticism, 3, 6, 32–35, 39, 49,
127, 132 78, 109, 115
Niebuhr, Reinhold, 5, 120
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58, 96, 103
9/11, 15, 127
M
Non-humanist humanism, 69
MacDonald, Dwight, 54
Malcolm X, 122
Mannheim University, 55
Marburg University, 56 O
Marlatt, Daphne, 79 Occasion, 4, 112
McCance, Dawne, 88 O’Hara, Daniel, 36, 120, 124
McCarthy, Mary, 54 Olson, Charles, 79, 111, 112, 116
McGrath, Peter, 82, 86 The Maximus Poems, 108
Melville, Herman, 9, 98, Ondaatje, Michael, 79
101, 103 Ontotheological tradition, 7, 19, 28
“Bartleby”, 73, 74 Orient/Occident, 5, 66, 68, 121
Moby-Dick, 98, 103
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 35
Metaphysical Poets, 6 P
Metaphysical thinking, 19, 55, Palestine, 13, 54, 57, 62
68, 80 Plato, 96
Mize, David, 3, 5, 33 Poirier, Richard, 66
Mizener, Arthur, 46, 49 Postcolonialism
Modernism, 44, 46, 49 Irish, 41, 47, 49
Mooney, Bob, 103 Postmodernism, 67, 83, 94, 96, 102,
Moon, Sam, 108, 109 109, 115
Morrison, Toni Post-poststructuralism, 23, 26, 38, 52
Paradise, 129 Poststructuralism, 50, 70
Mosaic, 88 Pound, Ezra, 81, 109
Motown, 124 Princeton University, 120, 129
Mount Hermon, 5, 6, 46, 67, Pritchard, William H., 36
74, 120 Protestant work ethic, 6
MSS, 103 Puritans, 129
Mufti, Aamir, 8 and the calling, 10
Mussolini, Benito, 52 Pynchon, Thomas, 79, 94, 96, 126
INDEX 139
R T
Ranciere, Jacques, 23 Tallman, Warren, 79
Dis-agreement, 25 Tarn, Nathaniel, 111
Repetition, 90 Tillich, Paul, 5, 120
Richards, I.A. Time of the now (ho nyn kairos), 12
Principles of Literary Criticism, 39 Tolstoy, Leo, 96
Riddel, Joe, 35 Transition, 81
Rockefeller, Nelson, 78
Rosenberg, Liz, 94, 98, 101, 104, 114
Rosenthal, Bernard, 101 U
Rothenberg, Jerome, 111 Union Settlement Association, 120
Union Theological Seminary, 5,
S 46, 120
Said, Edward W., 2, 6, 7, 13, 23, 39, University of Alberta, 78
42, 46, 58, 62, 80, 94, 120, 126 University of Athens, 80
Beginnings, 67 University of Calgary, 87
counterpoint, 18, 52, 111 University of California, 78
Culture and Imperialism, 36, 66, 70 University of Manitoba, 86
and humanism, 7 University of Wisconsin, 34, 49
Humanism and Democratic
Criticism, 75
late style, 48, 50 V
Orientalism, 8, 67, 68, 70, 124 Vernon, John, 114
Out of Place, 68 Vietnam, 6, 54, 87, 109, 111, 120,
and secularism, 7 122, 129
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 4, 28, 35 Virgil, 31
Schoenberg, Arnold, 70 Vocation, 10, 28, 47
Secular, 2, 7 revocation, 23, 34
as profane, 46
profane, 49
Spanos, William V. W
The Christian Tradition in Modern Wah, Fred, 79
British Verse Drama, 5, 7 War on Terror, 15, 62
The Errant Art of Moby-Dick, 9, 98 Wasson, Richard, 66
Exiles in the City, 57, 58 Weber, Max, 2
“On the Gift of Grace”, 128 Webern, Anton, 70
Heidegger and Criticism, 5, 12 Wesleyan, 3, 5
“Hermeneutics and Memory”, 35 Wesleyan University, 2, 5, 18, 31
In the Neighborhood of Zero, 18, 52 West, Cornel
Stevens, Wallace, 112 Democracy Matters, 129
Strehle, Susan, 94, 97 Race Matters, 129
140 INDEX
Wikipedia, 18 Collected Poems, 42, 45, 47

Wiley, Paul, 6, 35 “The Phases of the Moon”, 44
Williams, Charles, 3 “Sailing to Byzantium”, 50
Williams, William Carlos, 109, 112 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 109
Wilson, Doug, 109 Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth
World War II, 2, 15, 20, 30, 32, For the Love of the World, 56
39, 61
Z
Y Zizek, Slavoj, 23
Yeats, William Butler, 30 Zukovsky, Louis, 109

Spanos - On The Ethical Imperatives of The Interrgnum

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Pivotal Studies in the Global

American Literary Imagination

More information about this series at

Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956663

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

In the case of Søren Kierkegaard, what compelled my profound interest

Similarly, I found in W. B. Yeats, another modern poet celebrated by the

Coda: A Note on the Genealogy of My Style:

of a different and more original understanding of truth from that which, in

I am grateful to Daniel O’Hara and Donald Pease for encouraging me to

1 Retrieving Kierkegaard for the Post-9/11 Occasion 1

2 Heidegger and Das Nichts 17

3 The Enigma of T.S. Eliot 29

4 On the Place on Excrement 41

5 Hannah Arendt, Non-Jewish Jew 53

6 Edward W. Said and William V. Spanos 65

7 Robert Kroetsch, Play, and the Specter 77

9 Robert Creeley, Quintessential Postmodern

10 Cornel West 119

Retrieving Kierkegaard for the Post-9/11

Abstract In the case of Søren Kierkegaard, what compelled my profound

Keywords Recollection Repetition Dread (angest) Interest (interesse)

Reﬂection is the possibility of relationship. This can be stated thus:

© The Author(s) 2016 1

As anyone familiar with my scholarship and criticism is aware, the idea

Journals. It was a statement categorically rejecting disinterested inquiry

This can also be stated thus: Reﬂection is disinterested. Consciousness

by Kierkegaard’s existentialist thought, not least, that engagement in the

formal constructs. The dissertation, to my surprise, was eventually published

transcendental, and in the process, as Said warned against in Orientalism,

Secular criticism in Said’s reckoning is, ﬁrst of all, a practice of unbelief; it is

Committed to maintaining its affective force, Mufti then pointedly goes

In other words, according to Mufti, the catachresis renders the traditional

recognizing the reemergence of that impulse in the midst of secular

In Agamben’s commentary on the “Letter to the Romans,” it is Paul’s

According to the apostle, this movement is, above all, a nulliﬁcation:

On encountering Agamben’s interpretation of the messianic calling as this

The creative process in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts [in radical oppo-

Thus, according to Agamben’s revolutionary rereading of Paul’s “Epistle

mean simply the adoption of an existential subjectivity. As his overdetermina-

is that it become—simultaneously and without territorial partition—the

In an analogous way, we could conceive of Europe not as an impossible

of the transcendental and the irreparable ﬁnite that radically distinguished

Heidegger and Das Nichts

Keywords Anxiety (Angst) Repetition Destruction Disclosure

What about this nothing?

© The Author(s) 2016 17

I looked around at my comrades, at our guards, at the smoldering waste

I have been called more or less universally a “Heideggerian critic” from

Spanos is a distinguished professor of literature and comparative literature at

While there is some truth to this assertion, it is essentially misleading in its

temporality to das Nichts—the nothing—to underscore the paranoid

The nothing is rejected precisely by science [modernity], given up as a

Following this startling genealogy of Western modernity, which locates its

And in a separate paragraph he adds, “Anxiety reveals the nothing.”

enframing of technology as an irresistible momentum that, in reducing the

Yet when destining reigns in the mode of enframing, it is the supreme

Following Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben radicalizes his mentor’s diagno-

we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion beyond the limits of

What follows in Agamben’s persuasive genealogical study of homo sacer is