To begin, I want to explain the complex triple reference in the title. What I want to do in this chapter is to read Descartes as a modern Job, that is, to see the Cartesian process of methodical doubt as a case of what Jewish theology calls âlamentationâ (kinah): an existential outburst of doubt, an anxiety, which inevitably leads to the crisis in the relation between Creator and his creature. Just as Job loses everything and in the end clings desperately to his reduced bare life, so too does Descartes lose everything and, in the midst of loss, clings to the naked fact of his existence. And just as Job, when he has nothing more to lose, faces his God, who, since the moment of this confrontation, will never be the same againâso too does Descartes, at the lowest ebb of the hyperbolic doubt, face his devious God, who, after the crisis, will no longer be able to haunt the living the way he used to. Of course, there is the difference of style: Jobâs kinah is a classical lamentation, full of explicit disorientation and painâwhile Descartesâ treatise, conceptually impeccable, is only implicitly lined with existential anxiety. But just as there is a grain of the philosophical accusation of the arrangement of being in Jobâso is there a grain of painful kinah in Descartes.
Although it does not mention Job explicitly, Hans Blumenbergâs reading of Descartes suggests this affinity very strongly. In the crucial chapter of Legitimacy, âTheological Absolutism and Human Self-Assertionâ, which culminates in the nominalist interpretation of Cartesian hyperbolic doubt, Blumenberg portrays Descartes as the first modern man in search of self-assertionâwith or without God. The nominalist moment of this portrayal is absolutely crucial here: according to Blumenberg, the genius malignus, the Malicious Demon who appears in the darkest night of Cartesian doubt, is a philosophical avatar of deus fallax, the Devious God of the nominalist theologians (William Ockham, Duns Scotus and Nicolas of Autrecourt). The experience of encountering such God is a metaphysical horror, vertigo, and disorientation, akin to the Joban condition of a human subject finding himself thrown into the terrifying Real: even if masked by a religious piety or a seemingly neutral philosophical idiom of a âmetaphysical fableâ, its content is traumatic. According to Blumenberg, the fictitious and semi-neutralizing effect of the way in which Descartes tells his genius malignus hypothesis does not derive from the lightness of a thought experiment, but rather from the fact that it offers an innovative philosophical translation of the theological âhistorical situationâ, which also announces a moment when, for the first time, modern philosophy liberates itself from theology:
Although presented in the form of âmethodical freedomâ, the content of the hyperbolic doubt which leads to the confrontation with deus fallax is the sheer negativity which is looked in the eye by the first modern philosophy, but not yet, as in Hegel, squarely âin the faceâ.1 Though no longer blurred by the appeasing films of piety, which bows down in the face of the almighty God and, in fear and trembling, hopes for his kindness and self-limitation in regard to human beings, the Cartesian form of a âmetaphysical fableâ and its freely chosen arbitrary conditions of âas ifâ is also a manner of dealing with the trauma. Yet, as Blumenberg shows, this dealing is not simply repressive, as in the case of the pious nominalist formula; rather, thanks to its new philosophical translation, the trauma can also be, for the first time, confronted and worked through. By reaching, in Derridaâs words, a âzero point of madnessâ, the philosopher must make a decision after which (if there ever comes an âafterâ) nothing stays the same: either the mad abyss of the extremely voluntaristic God engulfs all, or a new order emerges, which no longer pictures God in its centre. It is precisely this modern decentred order of things arising out of the philosophical crisis of theological absolutism which will concern me here.2The deus absconditus and deus mutabilissimus who is not committed to kindness and dependability except under the conditions of salvation as defined by revelation could only be taken into account philosophically as if he could be the genius malignus in relation to manâs certainty of the world. By transforming the theological absolutism of omnipotence into the philosophical hypothesis of the deceptive world spirit, Descartes denies the historical situation to which his initial undertaking is bound and turns it into the methodical freedom of arbitrarily chosen conditions. (LMA, 184)
Thus, although the juxtaposition itselfâof Descartes and Jobâis not Blumenbergâs idea, it is inspired by the latterâs interpretation of the Cartesian condition of distress, very much resembling the one Job experienced in front of a transcendent, omnipotent and voluntaristic God. Blumenberg never mentions Job in his analysis of Descartes, which may be caused by his reluctance to see modernity enmeshed in the theological imbroglio, but a bridging point was offered by Hans Jauss, also a member of the Poetik und Hermeneutik group, who in his essay âJobâs Questions and Their Distant Reply: Goethe, Nietzsche, Heideggerâ presents Job as the first hero of self-assertionâa theological variant of the working-through of the trauma of the terrifying Realâand although he, as if symmetrically, does not mention Descartes in his analysis of Job, he nonetheless prepares the ground for their comparison, which will be my theme here.3
In my reading of Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job), I want to focus on the critical moment of reversal in which lament suddenly breaks into a self-assertive performance, by first provoking and then destroying the order about which it laments. Just as Job changes the rules of the theological game, so does âDescartes appear not so much as the founding figure of the epoch as rather the thinker who clarified the medieval concept of reality all the way to its absurd consequences and thus made it ripe for destructionâ (LMA, 187). The moment of the destruction of the old sense of reality is also a beginning of a new one: an epochal break establishing a new set of affects, the most important of which would be, in the formulation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, le sentiment de lâexistence, the âsense of existenceâ.4 While the Joban lament derives its accusatory power from enumerating all negative aspects of finite existenceâtransience, passive dependence, suffering, vulnerability to fate, and finally deathâself-assertion converts them into a powerful modern sense of the Real. The possibility of this conversion can be seen already in Jobâs âinsubordinate and unorthodox questionsâ which challenge the absolutist God: âShall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his Maker?â (Job 4.17). This questioning series could and should be continued in the more and more provocative cadence: Shall mortal man also exist in a more true way? Shall he possess a treasureâhis suffering and painâholding the key to the kingdom of being? This new anchorage in the Real, centred around the âpainful realityâ, which Adorno calls the Archimedean point of modern philosophisingâmy pain/suffering/distress/trauma is the most real and certain thing in the universe, which nothing, even the most powerful God, can invalidateâgives the subject a completely new intuition of being, which has a power to revolutionize metaphysics, that is, transform in turn the traditional most existing, eternal and immutable Absolute into a Cartesian âmetaphysical fableâ, or an ontological fiction: for, according to the modern sense which I want to explore here, what cannot suffer, cannot exist either. In modernity, the subject gets redefined as the subject-to-traumatization; suffering becomes a new condition of all truth.5
If, theologically speaking, modernity begins with Duns Scotusâ democratic thesis on the univocity of being, it really gathers momentum only in this affective turning of the tables, in which the Scottian abstract claim truly becomes flesh. So, just as Job eventually discovers that he, precisely because of his extreme deprivation, exists at least as strongly as God and this gives him a new vantage point in his negotiationsâDescartes, undergoing a similar reduction, discovers the âindivisible kernel of his beingâ, which leads him to the self-assertive exclamation: âEven if He deceives me, I am, I exist!â This self-assertive reversal constitutes the gist of the modern revenge against God conceivedâin Derridaâs termsâas âthe unscathed Absoluteâ.6 When the negative moment of pathein (passivity and suffering) becomes the new criterion of existence, the Absolute, which cannot say I hurt, therefore I am, gets wiped out of existence.
Self-Assertion, or the Reversal
There are few readings of Descartesâ Meditations which do not treat them as an exercise in pure thought, but pay attention to their anxious affective aura: âthe other light, a black and hardly natural light, the vigil of the âpowers of unreasonâ around the Cogito.â7 Although Descartes himself called his essay in methodical scepticism a âmental experimentâ, this rhetorical manoeuvre should not mislead us: the true content of Meditations is the most extreme anxiety which touches the very core of the âsense of existenceâ. In those existentially vigilant interpretations of Descartesâgiven by Hans Blumenberg, Simone Weil, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marionâthere comes to the fore one common motif: the Cartesian cogito emerges as the product of working through the absolute dependence on the powerful Other, which can never be shaken off completely, but only transformed from within. This dependence is experienced either as an extremely traumatic relation, leading to madness, despair, vertigo, the loss of substance and, finally, death (so Derrida, and to some extent Blumenberg)âor, on the contrary, as a positive foundation which gives life and lets be, although always within the perimeters defined by, in Kierkegaardâs words, the omnipotent âHe who has made meâ (so Weil , Marion and, to some extent, Levinas).8 The first line of Descartesâ existential interpretation focuses on his attempt to rebel: to oppose the non-transparent bonds of dependence, which he refuses to trustfully rely upon (as the Hölderlinian âbonds of loveâ9) and thus projects as Stricke, oppressive confines, imposed by the omnipotent genius malignus, which may be a âfictionâ (as Descartes calls it), but still derives from quite real existential anxieties of being merely a plaything in the hands of a capricious and not necessarily loving God. The second line accentuates Descartesâ moment of abdication, in which he recognizes the futility of his struggles for ontological autonomy and the necessity to embrace and gratefully accept dependence as the only way to be.
Curiously enough, this division among Cartesian interpreters seems to mirror pretty exactly the traditional conflict among the readers of the Book of Job: the split between those who concentrate on Job the Rebel and see his mutiny against the all-powerful God as at least partly victoriousâand those who see only Job the Pious, full of contrition, who in the end admits that, according to Kafkaâs aphorism, Sein heisst Ihm zugehören (âto be means to belong to Himâ).10 As I have...