Language, Ideology, and the Human

New Interventions

Sanja Bahun, Dusan Radunović

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138108424
• eBook ISBN: 9781317107941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions redefines the critical picture of language as a system of signs and ideological tropes inextricably linked to human existence. Offering reflections on the status, discursive possibilities, and political, ideological and practical uses of oral or written word in both contemporary society and the work of previous thinkers, this book traverses South African courts, British clinics, language schools in East Timor, prison cells, cinemas, literary criticism textbooks and philosophical treatises in order to forge a new, diversified perspective on language, ideology, and what it means to be human. This truly international and interdisciplinary collection explores the implications that language, always materialising in the form of a historically and ideologically identifiable discourse, as well as the concept of ideology itself, have for the construction, definition and ways of speaking about 'the human'. Thematically arranged and drawing together the latest research from experts around the world, Language, Ideology, and the Human offers a view of language, ideology and the human subject that eschews simplifications and binary definitions. With contributions from across the social sciences and humanities, this book will appeal to scholars from a range of disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, law, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and political science.

PART I
Revisiting

Chapter 1
The Politics of Madness: Kierkegaard’s Anthropology Revisited

Leonardo F. Lisi

It is a standard view in the reception of Søren Kierkegaard that his thought does not provide an adequate foundation for political philosophy. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual, interiority, and subjectivity appear to be incompatible with a proper political and social perspective. Already in his 1933 dissertation on Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno argues that Kierkegaard’s distance from the economic conditions of his world turned his thought towards an objectless interiority that prevents all active engagement with the social sphere (71–2). Similarly, Martin Buber, in another central contribution, claims that Kierkegaard champions a resignation from the world as the only possible access to God, and thereby necessarily negates not only ethical relations among individuals but also politics in general (224, 229). In a still more dismissive reading, Georg Lukács argues that Kierkegaard’s “irrationalism” denies ethics and society and prevents any active intervention in history (231, 241). More recently, positions such as these have been echoed by, for example, Louis Mackey, who claims that Kierkegaard’s ethics is caught in a self-contradiction that denies the reality of the external world it supposedly attempts to save (157).1

Efforts to salvage Kierkegaard from such attacks have sought to emphasize passages in his work in which these concerns are explicitly addressed. Such an approach, however, tends to be unsatisfactory, both because the sheer number of passages supporting the opposed, anti-social and anti-political view will always be greater, and because it does not address the deeper question of the relation of either of these stances in Kierkegaard’s writings to the more fundamental principles that ground them. As a consequence, the image of Kierkegaard’s social and political thought that emerges from positive interpretations is frequently a surprisingly benevolent one, in which the most radical and provocative aspects of his thought are either displaced to a parallel universe or mysteriously asserted to be compatible with pleasant forms of bourgeois life (a mystery that Kierkegaard’s writings themselves frequently invite).2

In this chapter I would like to work towards a solution to this exegetical dilemma by suggesting that the proper context for understanding Kierkegaard’s political relevance must be located not in his explicitly political or social writings, but rather in his conception of the human. I will do so in three steps. In Part I, I provide a brief exposition of Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology and show how it is grounded on an opposition between thought and experience, language and immediacy, that directly negates ideology in its traditional sense. I further argue that this negative aspect of Kierkegaard’s conception of the self must be complemented by his notion of God as a positive but transcendent standard of measurement. From this perspective, God serves as an epistemic principle that simultaneously provides the criterion for the determination of the world by language and yet keeps that determination open by remaining inherently and explicitly at odds with our human faculties. In Part II, I link this reading to current political debates, taking as my point of focus an insightful discussion of Kierkegaard’s conception of the religious mode of existence by Slavoj Žižek, which, to my knowledge, has been largely ignored by Kierkegaard scholars.3 As I hope to show here, Žižek’s appropriation of Kierkegaard not only gestures to the terms in which the latter’s anthropology may be politically relevant in the contemporary debate, but also relies on a number of misreadings that lay bare important divergences between their views. These differences and misreadings, I argue, center on three characteristics of Kierkegaard’s conception of our relation to God, all of which pose significant challenges to Žižek’s theory. On this basis, I conclude in Part III by suggesting that Kierkegaard’s philosophical anthropology ultimately points toward a political project both more and less radical than that proposed by Žižek.

I

Kierkegaard’s most cogent and famous definition of the human can be found at the opening of The Sickness unto Death:

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self. (13)

For all the opacity of its language, two central points can easily be extrapolated from this passage. First, the self is defined not as a singular unit or substance, but as a relation. This relation, moreover, does not consist simply of the dualism of the terms involved, which Kierkegaard on the same page defines as only a “negative unity,” the mere possibility of a self, but rather of the relation to that relation, the self-consciousness of that relation, which is the positive third term. Second, such a self is not a given, a quid facti from which philosophy can begin, but a result, the effect of relating to the relation in the correct way.

The distinction between infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, freedom and necessity, invoked in this passage, clearly resonates with the dualisms inherited from Kant’s Copernican Revolution. In Kierkegaard, the opposition is most frequently articulated as that between thought and experience, which are simply too different to make their subsumption under a common principle possible. The objects of the former are abstract, universal, and eternal (cf., e.g., Concluding 171, 314), while those of the latter are concrete, particular and in a constant process of becoming (cf., e.g., Concept of lrony 21-3; Concluding 301). In the early Johannes Climacus, or de omnibus dubitandum est, this same conflict is presented in terms of the intrinsic failures of language to signify:

In immediacy, then, everything is true; but cannot consciousness remain in this immediacy? If this immediacy and that of animals were identical, then the problem of consciousness would be canceled, but that would also mean that man is an animal or that man is inarticulate. Therefore, it is language that cancels immediacy; if man could not talk he would remain in the immediate.

This would be expressed, he [Johannes Climacus] thought, by saying that the immediate is reality, language is ideality, since by speaking I produce the contradiction. When I seek to express sense perception in this way, the contradiction is present, for what I say is something different from what I want to say. I cannot express reality in language, because I use ideality to characterize it, which is a contradiction, an untruth.

The possibility of doubt, then, is implicit in the duplexity of consciousness … (255)

The passage plays on Hegel’s “Sense Certainty” chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit. To Hegel, this negative relation between language and immediacy is the point of departure for the dialectical process that will culminate in the resolution of all such contradictions in the absolute knowledge of philosophy. That which resists assimilation to, and sublation in, the trajectory of reason, “which is called the inexpressible,” is accordingly, “nothing else … than the untrue, the unreasonable, the simply meant” (92; my translation). A similar process of closure or totalization, in which every part finds its proper place within a whole, has frequently been associated with ideology, particularly in its aesthetic forms. Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that the split between the realms of nature and freedom that Kant’s Critique of Judgment aims to bridge mirrors the conflict in bourgeois society as we have come to recognize it since:

Facts are one thing, and values another—which is to say that there is a gap, at once troubling and essential, between bourgeois social practice and the ideology of that practice. The distinction between fact and value is here one between actual bourgeois social relations, and the ideal of a community of free rational subjects who treat one another as ends in themselves. You must not derive values from facts, from routine market-place practice, because if you did you would end up with all the most undesirable kinds of value: egoism, aggressiveness, mutual antagonism. Values do not flow from facts, in the sense that ideologies are intended not simply to reflect existing social behaviour, but to mystify and legitimate it. (82)

If the anarchical and lawless interactions of capitalist society (the realm of facts) contradict our moral demands for an ordered and purposeful world (the realm of values), the work of art is able to remove that problem by presenting experience as mysteriously conforming to the latter (85).4 In his own reading of Kant, Paul de Man has similarly argued that the attempt to represent the idea in the sensuous only succeeds in literary discourse, where the constant paradigmatic synthesization of the syntagmatic process of reading provides the partial totalizations that fail in the philosophical realm due to the aporias of intellect and sensibility (“Phenomenality” 77–8, 86–7). As de Man remarks elsewhere, it is in the substitution of this linguistic unification for the actual contradictions that ideology consists (“The Resistance” 11).

Kierkegaard, too, rejects any such aesthetic-ideological reconciliation of the contradictions he identifies between language and immediacy, thought and being, on the grounds that it constitutes a false resolution to the fragmentary nature of experience. As he puts it in The Concept of Irony, for example, the poetry of early German romanticism provides

a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living; no transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation, but it reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another, a higher and more perfect actuality … (297)

To the extent that the aesthetics of early romanticism and Hegel’s speculative philosophy both seek to reduce the contradiction of consciousness to an underlying identity, they constitute two sides of the same coin (Concluding 121, 296–7). In fact, to Kierkegaard, any philosophical position, whether idealist or empiricist, that bases its definition of knowledge on the correspondence of thought and experience, inevitably falsifies the nature of existence (189–90).

Kierkegaard’s rejection of an ideological resolution to the contradiction that constitutes the human is nevertheless not his final word on the topic. The crucial element in this respect comes in the paragraph from The Sickness unto Death that immediately follows the one quoted earlier: “If the relation that relates itself to itself has been posited by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation that relates itself to that which has posited the entire relation” (13; trans. modified). The relation between the antagonistic principles of thought and being, language and immediacy, cannot be established adequately by the individual in its autonomy. Rather, to Kierkegaard, the proper relation to our faculties that brings about the condition of being a self requires the additional relation to an external term as a guide for doing so, “that which has posited the entire relation,” or God. As Kierkegaard goes on to reformulate the proposition as a whole: “The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God” (29–30). The proper definition of the human, that is, must include God as a constitutive moment.

The precise function of God in this context can be further elucidated through Kierkegaard’s famous concluding text in Either/Or, the “Ultimatum.”5 While the “Ultimatum” has not yet received adequate scholarly attention (in spite of its notoriety), it provides a crucial enumeration of the three characteristics of the relation to God central to an understanding of Kierkegaard’s larger project. Presented as part of the consideration of “The upbuilding that lies in the thought that in relation to God we are always in the wrong” (346), the first of these characteristics is the claim that God serves as a standard of measurement for our understanding. Invoking an analogy to love, Kierkegaard writes:

[If] a person who is the object of your love were to do you a wrong, is it not true that it would pain you, that you would scrupulously examine everything but that you would then say: I know for sure that I am in the right; this thought will calm me? Ah, if you loved him, then it would not calm you; you would investigate everything … You would wish that you might be in the wrong; you would try to find something that could speak in his defense, and if you did not find it, you would find rest only in the thought that you were in the wrong … you would reach for every probability, and if you found none, you would tear up the accounting in order to help you forget it, and you would strive to build yourself up with the thought that you were in the wrong. (347–8)

In the relation of love, the beloved is received as the standard of our meaning. “Love” is whatever the other does, and if this contradicts our previous notions and criteria, these must either be rejected as false (since the other deceives me, it must by wrong that love is defined as the absence of deceit), or redefined (given that the other’s acts must count as loyalty to me, it must be that loyalty is not characterized by fidelity, concern for my emotions, rejection of other people’s sexual advances). The imposition of a standard of meaning by the other thus provides the criterion for the organization of our discursive world: on the basis of the other’s a priori justification, this emotion, event, pronouncement, etc., must be classified in such and such a way (as “devotion,” “hatred” …), which can thereby enter into relation with these other concepts, events or emotions, in order to be compatible with the one fact that I know to be the case beyond all doubt (since I know the other is right, “devotion” is compatible with leaving me in despair, which in turn must be classifiable as “bliss,” which now receives as attributes emotions it did not previously contain, etc.). If the structures of our language start to break, they must be renegotiated until the aim is met.

In this way God serves as the term within a field of meaning that organizes the scope of and relation between all the other terms. The second characteristic of the relation to God emphasized in the “Ultimatum” strongly qualifies the first by emphasizing God’s radical alterity:

Now, if it were a person whom you loved, even if your love managed piously to deceive your thinking and yourself, you would still be in a continual contradiction, because you would know you were right but you wished and wished to believe that you were in the wrong. If, however, it was God you loved, could there then be any question of such a contradiction, could you then be conscious of anything else than what you wished to believe? Would not he who is in heaven be greater than you who lived on earth; would not his wealth be more superabundant than your measure, his wisdom more profound than your cleverness, his holiness greater than your righteousness? Must you not of necessity acknowledge this—but if you must acknowledge it, then there is no contradiction between your knowledge and your wish. (348–9)

With respect to human beings there can be no absolute justification of the other because he or she shares our ontological condition. Any determination of the human other in absolute terms must fail (or be ideologically false) because we know that he or she is subject to the rules of our experience rather than being their standard: since I can be wrong, it must in principle be possible for the other to be so as well. Any perceived rupture with our system of meaning enacted by the beloved c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Introducing, Intervening, and Introspecting
• PART I REVISITING
• PART II IN THE WORLD, PROSPECTING
• Afterword: Language, Discourse, and Rhetoric
• Index