Abstract
A tradition does not live by continuity alone. Philipp Rosemann, in this smart, brief, erudite, and heterogenous book, wants us to realize this. The Christian tradition, like all others, needs difference and otherness, rupture and irruption, and transgressions that disrupt the forgotten exclusions by which its identity was originally constituted. It needs its originary forgettings, but benefits more from forgetting in the present. Characteristically, Rosemann makes this point by commenting on a proem to a commentary on Peter Lombard’s 12th-century Sentences textbook by Denys the Carthusian in the 15th century, complaining about the proliferation of recent commentaries, which Denys wishes could be forgotten in order to get back to the earlier and better commentaries on the original Sentences, which of course is not an original but a kind of commentary itself.
It is not as if we ever escape commentary in this book, which is steeped in both the Western Christian tradition and a postmodernism that is now a hefty academic tradition of its own, with extensive commentaries written about authors like Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault, whose originality is itself almost always derived from commentary on prior moments of the Western tradition. These postmodern writers, in Rosemann’s commentary, signal a healthy tradition’s need to actively forget its own recent past by means of what Husserl calls an Abbau, an unbuilding of the layers of sedimentation that cover an original discovery, which is translated by Heidegger into something more Latin when he calls it a Destruktion that aims at a retrieval or repetition (Wiederholung) of a primordial uncovering, or what Derrida teasingly re-labels a deconstruction, which is something like a Destruktion that opens up and destabilizes our thinking by not pretending to free us from différance—the unpronounceable difference and deferral that never quite gets to the elusive origin of the tradition.
Meanwhile the term ‘transgression,’ which plays a central role in the book, is unfolded in Rosemann’s initial commentary on Foucault’s programmatic preface to the first edition of his early work, Folie et déraison. This seminal text can be hard to find because Foucault removed it from later editions, as he turned to a more historical mode of thought, rather than what he originally endorsed, in a Nietzschean vein, as the ‘immobile structures of the tragic.’ This suppression of the original preface exemplifies its thesis, which can be summed up in an intriguing phrase Foucault uses but does not explain: ‘charred root of meaning.’ Rosemann, taking this phrase as his title, ventures a gloss in his own preface. He points out that there are plants in the desert that cannot be fruitful and multiply except after a wildfire that chars them to the roots. We get to the root of meaning, in other words, by destroying a great deal of what grew from it. In Foucault’s case, we have to destroy a great deal of Foucault to retrieve his seminal notion of transgression.
Another metaphor that Rosemann uses to point to the same kind of phenomenon is that of a tradition unfolding and then folding back on itself. The Christian tradition unfolds expansively when it translates the Scripture, disseminating it in a wide variety of languages and cultures though all sorts of commentary and exposition. But the tradition keeps needing to fold back to its ever-elusive origin, in what Augustine describes as the Truth of God calling us back from our soul’s dispersion and distention in time, or what Luther more brusquely calls a theology of the cross that destroys the ‘good works’ of the theology of glory he had learned in his university studies.
All this commentary makes me wonder: exactly how transgressive is Rosemann’s book? It concludes with a ‘genealogy of transgression’ (can one be more Foucauldian?) that laments a certain kind of deconstruction of transgression itself. This is easy to see in the fashionable world of high art, where gestures of transgression such as the famous photograph, Piss Christ, grow less and less transgressive all the time, despite their best efforts, as the Christian tradition they try to transgress has less and less social power. Once upon a time, transgression could amount to blasphemy, which could get you into real trouble. Now it’s a way to become famous—but an increasingly less reliable way, as there are fewer authoritarian Christians in positions of power to be offended.
Transgression really isn’t what it used to be. At its origin, we could say, it was an attempt at transcendence that reached for the holy by violating sacred boundaries, like the people of God who were fenced off at the base of Mount Sinai. The scholars in their commentaries (in particular, the prologue to an early set of glosses on Lombard’s Sentences by someone now labeled ‘Pseudo-Peter of Poitiers’) keep wanting to go where Moses feared to tread, to break on through to the other side, where the holy Other is. Indeed, the commentaries in this book all seems to function like a scholar writing a prologue that gestures at something hard to see: There’s the boundary you must not cross, beyond which no words can carry you. Transgress at your own risk! The possibility of such risk is quite lost in a consumerist art and its cult of transgression, where every boundary is recognized only after it has been transgressed and its power forgotten.
So there’s a bit of nostalgia in Rosemann’s book. Also perhaps an underlying tension, half-buried under a rich sediment of postmodern commentary, medieval scholarship, and biblical exegesis that is well worth sifting through for its own sake, containing many fine nuggets. Here’s the nugget I’m interested in: Foucault’s original ambition seems to have been to erect ‘transgression’ as a standing alternative to the Hegelian progress of Aufhebung or sublimation of difference, which protects the continuity of tradition by always absorbing the negative (the different, the other, the transgressive) into a higher synthesis. Foucault’s suppression of his preface suggests that this ambition founders on the shoals of history: it sets up a standing ‘oppression of difference’ that can only be disrupted by a Dionysian eruption from below, which looks embarrassingly like the Freudian ‘return of the repressed’ from the depths of the Unconscious. As his work became more historical, Foucault wanted to steer clear of such depths.
And that leaves us with something more like Hegel. But not entirely. Rosemann is willing to describe the New Testament’s relationship to Judaism (represented by Paul’s conflict with Peter in the letter to the Galatians) as a fulfillment by way of Aufhebung, but one that leaves us something to regret and even fear: a Christian founding that supersedes its Jewish origins by excluding Judaism as the Other that is necessarily outside, in order to constitute the Self that is just a bit hollow on the inside because of the blank space left by the absence of the Other. Hegelian Aufhebung happens, indeed, but it does not succeed in cancelling and absorbing all difference. The excluded Other whom we would like to forget remains outside, oddly indispensable to the inner shape of our own identity—another form of the charred root of meaning.
The tension—and I am wondering how unstable it is, how likely to move historically in unexpected directions—is whether this excluded Other does us good, not by virtue of the elusive original exclusion (interestingly on this point, Rosemann does not take up the work of René Girard on mimetic violence and the scapegoat) but by provoking us with present transgressions for which we who are Christians are quite responsible. The Christian tradition has often wished away the existence of ‘the Jew,’ as the Other who will be converted at last and brought into our kingdom at the end of time. But at the present time we are in a better place, not quite done with repenting of the violence that has unfolded from this Christian wish. This is undoubtedly good for us, but is it just one more version of the Hegelian ‘labor of the negative’ that ends up in ‘a negation of the negation,’ cancelling and absorbing all that is different from itself?
Probably not. On the one hand Jewish existence is blessedly persistent, and on the other hand history does have a way of throwing up new problems that we don’t know how to deal with. What a Hegelian theory of tradition must reckon with is that it is not inevitable for any one tradition to survive its own conflicts, especially those deeply internalized conflicts that Alasdair MacIntyre calls ‘epistemic crises.’ There is no certainty that your tradition’s next epistemic crisis won’t put an end to the tradition altogether. The charred root of meaning can be burned to ashes. This is the grim news that MacIntyre, who shows up briefly in Rosemann’s book, brings to a broadly Hegelian view of the continuity of traditions.
At this point the Christian tradition surely has no recourse but to the mercy of God. There is a fiery image for this in the narrative of divine irruption on Mount Sinai, with which Rosemann begins his series of biblical exegeses. Like all the commentators, we desire to transgress and enter the holy cloud of darkness at the top of the mountain, but even this desire is only possible because the holy Other has first transgressed by entering into our world, descending from heaven onto the mountaintop. That descent results in an originary exclusion that puts us on the outside. We find ourselves decentered, on the outside looking in, standing firmly on earth that is suddenly bereft of privilege and power. Sinai deprives us of our own centrality but affords us an image of inexhaustible hope that the exclusions constituting our being in history and tradition are not merely our own doing, but come from a divine gift that draws us to a reconciliation and a good we do not yet know how to see.