Narrative and recognition in the flesh

I On stories and imagination: Recapping an intellectual trajectory

[Gonçalo Marcelo] Carnal Hermeneutics, the book you recently edited with Brian Treanor, presents us with a very ambitious project, which, if successfully undertaken, could lead to a radically different understanding of the relations between meaning, interpretation and the materiality of our bodies. What I would want you to do now is to look back at your already long and prolific career and tell me if you feel that there is a certain continuity or discontinuity between the topics you chose to emphasize. In your first books like Poétique du possible ¹⁰ you explored the notions of possibility, and later conducted investigations in modern and postmodern imagination. And yet it was only recently that you came to very heavily insist on the carnal aspect of all of this, drawing from the phenomenologies of the body in Sartre, Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty, but also aiming at going beyond them. Would you say that there has been a shift in your focus, or not at all?

[Richard Kearney] I would say that the carnal emphasis was actually there from the beginning though it may not have been entirely explicit in, say, Poétique du possible and the works on imagination. But it was implicit because imagination as I understand it – but also as Aristotle and even Kant understood it (therefore both the classical and the modern interpretation of imagination) – is an indispensable bridge between the sensible (the body) and the intelligible (the mind). Thus, in effect, imagination is the refusal of the dualism of body and mind. And Aristotle acknowledged this already in the Poetics ¹¹ when he said that catharsis is practical intelligence – what Ricoeur calls phronetic understanding. There is a dianoia (a thought) involved in the poetic imaginative process, the narrative process, and there is affect: i.e. catharsis by purging pity and fear. Narrative – mythos-mimesis (emplotted imitation of suffering in action) is already a way of combining affect, pathos (pity and fear), and phobos in a form of acknowledgment. So narrative acknowledgment combines knowledge (which the chorus of a tragedy teaches) with a deep affective response of pity and fear. Now, Aristotle thematizes this when he distinguishes two kinds of imagination: phantasia logistike (intellectual) and phantasia aesthetica (affective). The animal has affective imagination. But only humans have both. Now, coming to Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason: when he affirms that imagination is ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul’, ¹² he is stating that while we in the West have, since Plato, divided the world into the intelligible and the sensible, imagination is actually that productive schematizing force that precedes the division. It synthesizes by means of an unconscious activity ‘of which we are seldom even conscious’ [Unbewusstsein]. ¹³ It is the ‘common root’ of the intelligible and the sensible and operates at both levels before we ever make the distinction between the analytic and the aesthetic. So I would say that my earlier fascination with imagination was already an ambidextrous procedure of working through intellectual ideas while always recognizing its emotive, affective power. There is also a personal aspect to this. As I was writing philosophy I was also writing novels, and novels are usually meant to strike you, move you, affect you. Fictional narratives don’t just give you a theory, they touch you. That is why you keep reading them. So I see fictional understanding as a necessary complement to what we might call logical understanding. I would say acknowledgment is the realm of narrative imagination. It is a combination of knowledge and affect.

When reading your books and the topics you deal with we sometimes get the feeling that your intellectual investigations are also some sort of personal journey, and that translates into both the form and the content of what you write. Do you feel that there is this journey of narrative imagination, stemming from your own vital preoccupations, and that in some way it informs your practice of philosophy?

II Carnal recognition

This is a good description of the functions of narrative. But you also acknowledge that there is something beyond (or maybe below) narrative and language. In Carnal Hermeneutics you tell us that that hermeneutics has to go all the way down. And so one way of reading it would be to take it as telling us that there are ways of expression which are pre-linguistic or non-linguistic (I am thinking of the role you attribute to Odysseus’ dog Argos, ²³ who is the only one possessing the ‘hermeneutic flair’ to recognize his master). You seem to admit certain limits to narrative. For instance, we can argue that in order to understand the relationships of recognition which structure our practical lives, we have to take into account their corporeal dimension. But if so, what are the theoretical and practical implications of this for a different kind of hermeneutics? Or, if we are to honor Odysseus’ dog, an ‘argoneutics’?

Let me pick up on your example and go back to Argos. I think it is very important that when Odysseus returns to Ithaca recognition comes initially not from human beings but from animals. Ultimately, the first person to recognize him is actually not a person but his dog, Argos. And this is accompanied by a number of scenes that are all examples of what I would call carnal hermeneutics. For instance, Eurycleia, his nurse, tells the story of his wounding but eventually reaches a limit, stops, and then goes on to touch his wound. So there is a limit to what narrative can do; but narrative is a response to the wound that she recognizes in Odysseus from his childhood. She is his nurse and she has touched him, bathed him, been close to him carnally in a way no one else has. So the narrative story is actually accompanied by a return to the body. The implication of this is, I would say, unraveling it diacritically, that you need both. This is not an either-or situation. You need narrativity and carnality; and I would say that the touch itself is already proto-linguistic, sensing is already sensibility. A kind of basic hermeneutic tact. As such I don’t see it as being anti-linguistic, extra-linguistic, or pre-linguistic unless we understand pre in the sense of vor, i.e. proto. We must realize that already in the touching of the scar there is a writing and a reading; the scar is itself the body experiencing pain and expressing itself through a writing on the body – as scar, trace, mark. Tactile and tactful savvy precedes and founds savoir. Eurycleia speaks and touches.

So you would say that there is a continuity between the two, that is, that language has to further elaborate something which is proto-conceived by the touch?

III Carnality and excarnation

It seems you actually have a continuist approach because in a way everything is interpretation at different levels, within the body, in language, and there is always a surplus of meaning to be interpreted, in what could perhaps be a never-ending process. And you already mentioned the complementarity between the notions of imagination, embodiment, and so forth. So let me just problematize it a little by thinking about the notion of identity with which you are of course very well acquainted. One of the most important topics in contemporary philosophy is the notion of personal identity and you probably subscribe to the Ricoeurian notion of identity as ipseity; so what I would like to ask you is about the troubling cases of personal and bodily identity in the relation between the body and imagination. Let us assume that our body is finite whereas our imagination is infinite, which is perhaps a standpoint reminiscent of Ricoeur’s early anthropology in a book like Fallible Man. ²⁷ This means that people can feel many things (for instance, that they were born in the wrong body) and imagine many other things, including that their bodies are completely different from what they actually are or that they have multiple bodies. How do you assess these phenomena against the background of the rapport between the body and imagination? Do they show that there is a certain degree of positive plasticity in the formation of our own bodily identities or, on the contrary, that the very notion of bodily identity is threatened and could eventually lose its conceptual relevance?

Well, I’ll come back to my first point about imagination actually being the bridge, the chiasmus between body and mind. The finite and the infinite…I do not see them as alternatives, but as chiasmic, as criss-crossing. The infinite is in the finite, through the finite; it is transcendence in and through immanence. That does not mean it is unidimensional or univocal; rather, it is two-dimensional, bifocal, but in a chiasmic way. Now, let me pick up on the puzzling cases. Ricoeur, I think, makes a very important point that you are well aware of in his chapter on ‘The Self and Narrative Identity’ in Oneself as Another. ²⁸

The debate with Derek Parfit

IV The Guestbook Project – from hostility to hospitality

What you just did was actually an excellent diagnostic of a contemporary social situation, or a social pathology that in a way you are addressing in the good tradition of critical theory. Let me now transition to a perhaps more political question, taking into account your interventions as a public intellectual. You have been directing the Guestbook Project for some years now. Your goal is to encourage the exchange of stories between members of war-torn, divided or otherwise conflicted communities, hoping to foster hospitality and reconciliation through a use of creative imagination. How do you assess, at this point in time, the goals and results of this international project?

The first thing I would say is that hospitality – whence the name Guestbook – comes from the idea of host and guest, which in most Indo-European languages were designated by the same term: in Greek, Xenos: in old Germanic, Gast; in Latin, Hostis. Hostis has the double sense of enemy and friend. Hospitality comes from the same root as hostility, which means that if hospitality exists it is because of a wager, a challenge, a difficult perhaps even ‘impossible’ task. It is not a fait accompli. Hospitality is like love. Who’s against hospitality? Who’s against love? But it means nothing unless you see it as difficult adventure and a struggle. And so that is part of the effort of Guestbook. It is to acknowledge that hospitality is always a wrestle with hostility. The handshake is the first gesture of civilization; it entails offering an open hand to an open hand rather than reaching for a sword. It is the moment in the Iliad, ³⁶ when the two warriors, Glaucus and Diomedes, come together and instead of killing each other decide to throw down their weapons and make peace. What we encourage young people to do in Guestbook is to acknowledge their transgenerational traumas and see how they impact upon present conflicts. We work in places like Serbia, Jerusalem, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, where there have been historic struggles, and we encourage youths in those divided communities to begin by telling their stories of enmity, listening to each other as enemies in a mutual exchange of stories. Then they are encouraged, and this is the important thing, to weave together, from their exchanged stories, a new story. To transform enmity into empathy. So that the old stories that informed their history of violence and war, can give birth to alternative possible histories. In fact, in many languages the same word is used for both story and history – histoire, Geschichte, and so on. But this effort to keep peace would not work if one were to come along with a purely aspirational call for universal brotherhood and peace, without acknowledging the hidden traumas of division. You have to address the repressed wounds (Greek: traumata) and allow them to be spoken, reclaimed and revoiced for the exchange to occur. So the two protagonists in each case candidly acknowledge each other as hostes, enemies, before they can become guests and hosts for each other in a reverse reciprocal process. This second crucial move towards a shared, co-created narrative involves a leap of imagination. A radical belief in the impossible. Without revisiting the transgenerational cycles of repeated acting out of compulsive repetition, of unworked wounds and wrongs, there cannot be a second movement towards a writing and rewriting of scars. This move from the impossible to the possible is the inaugural gesture of all civilizations.

Could you give some concrete examples of how this might actually work?

V A new ethos for Europe: Mutual exchange of recognized narratives

Let me come to my last question, by picking up that thread of the cycles of hostility and violence and the difficult or maybe even impossible task of hospitality, of moving from one situation to the other. One of your other concerns as a public intellectual has been the task of ‘thinking after terror’ as one of your essays put it. ⁴³ Living in the USA you have witnessed first-hand the post-traumatic consequences of 9/11. Before that, you had of course contributed intellectually to reshaping our understanding not only of Ireland, but also, indirectly, of Europe. Well, it seems we are now, once again, going through difficult times in Europe. Not only has terror struck again at the very heart of Europe, with the attacks at Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan nightclub, the Nice promenade and others; in addition, we are still feeling the consequences of the economic crisis and the risk of a possible unraveling of the EU amid growing populism and the threat of an ascent of the extreme right in France, Hungary and other places. Brexit is also an example of secessionist nationalism. It thus seems as if we are between the Scylla of so-called Islamic terrorism and the Charybdis of a revival of the extreme right. Amid all of this, what hope is there for the poetic envisioning of an inclusive, solidary Europe, able to fulfill the ideals of the founders of the European Union, and not give up on the hopes and dreams of its citizens?

Allow me to suggest, without any hubris or presumption, that perhaps we could follow the same thread and try to apply the Guestbook idea to Europe itself. Let me say, following Ricoeur, ⁴⁴ that a new ethos for Europe requires an exchange of narratives. And that means two things, two tasks. The first is that we need an exchange of narratives of the woundedness that we have suffered. We have carried the suffering of multiple European wars – religious, national, military – through centuries and decades and this transgenerational trauma is something we need to acknowledge. If we do not we just repeatedly act out aggression in all kinds of other ways. Many of us like to think we live in a cosmopolitan, civilized, laïque society but in fact we continue to live with all kinds of repressed and compulsive reflex actions. The wounds have not gone away.

Secondly we must remember the therapeutic power of stories, the narratives of healing. We should recall that again and again Europe has been through brutal violent conflicts going back to Troy, the sacking of Rome and Byzantium. Not to mention the Crusades. And still each time there was a new beginning. A handshake. Take, in recent memory, the handshake of Saddat and Begin in Jerusalem, of John Hume and Gerry Adams in Northern Ireland, of Willy Brandt and Havel in Prague. We would not have had peace without these gestures. And I do not mean just presidents and politicians. They are the ones you see, who get the Nobel prizes. But there are countless people on the ground too. Hand-to-hand peacemaking cannot occur, in my view, on its own, without narrative exchange. So just as we talked about Eurycleia touching the wound of Odysseus, we also need to tell the story of Odysseus’ wounding and healing. Remember, he survives. He comes back to Penelope. So we need the stories of success as well as the stories of failure. We need the stories of breakthrough, in the handshake, as well as the stories of trauma and war. Now, take the contemporary situation, say in France – you mentioned Charlie Hebdo. I would say this. France has to acknowledge that if it is indeed a secular enlightened république, its culture of laïcité must not dissolve into a langue de bois, mere lip service to fraternity and equality for all. Les droits de l’homme et du citoyen proclaimed by the French Revolution acknowledged the universal (l’homme) and the particular (citoyen) in rhetoric – but it has not yet been translated into reality. This is very important. If you espouse a purely rhetorical universalism, you are saying that when people go to school they cannot bring their inherited wounds or identities with them. So you are closing off the possibility of owning and acknowledging such differends in an exchange of narratives – which can issue in genuine hermeneutic dialogue (inter-cultural, inter-ethnic, inter-religious). By forbidding this, you risk having Muslims going to Muslim schools, Catholics going to Catholic schools, Protestants going to Protestant schools, atheists going to atheist schools and so forth. This means an absence, a failure, of exchanged narratives. Ricoeur was correct, I think, when he spoke of the right of young Muslim girls to wear the veil when they went to republican state schools. And the same goes for the particular insignia of Jews, Christians or Sikhs, each with their specific symbols. In the UK and Ireland they can do that by the way, or in Canada, or in America. So why not France? Ricoeur’s argument was, if they come to the public space with their differences, they will look at each other, sit beside each other and ideally share the stories of their different religions and cultures, which is not permitted in the laïque culture at the moment. To me, this is a problem. In the exchange of narratives, youth of different religious, ethnic and cultural identities would acknowledge that the person beside them is just as human as they are. If you exclude them from the beginning you are ensuring, alas, that the only people who are ‘really French’ are those who are laïque in the sense of not carrying any cultural presuppositions with them. But everybody brings presuppositions, including the laïque. Let me clarify that laïcité is perfectly legitimate in my view, in its secularity. But secularism, as Charles Taylor ⁴⁵ says, should be inclusive of the multiple voices that come to the table. If you say: the table is open but you can only come if you leave your shoes and your hat and your veil behind, then the conversation cannot even really begin. And Ricoeur’s point was very practical too. If young kids come together wearing their different signs and symbols of identity, they can then decide afterwards if they want to continue wearing those symbols or not. They might like to exchange hats or decide they want to be a secular atheist or agnostic. At least they will have a choice. Otherwise you are allowing their parents to ultimately decide – and their parents are usually the ones who send young kids to schools with veils and hats in the first place. Permitting a space of open conversation – a genuinely creative ‘conflict of interpretations’ in Ricoeur’s sense – is crucial.

Europe today needs a pedagogy of narrative exchange. That is the future of Europe at the level of heart, narrative, affect, phronesis. At another level of course you need constitutional and legal reform. You need what Habermas aptly calls ‘Constitutional Patriotism’. ⁴⁶ I’m all for that: transnationalism as an overcoming of absolute national sovereignty, a kind of post-national constellation. In my book Postnationalist Ireland, ⁴⁷ this is what I am talking about. A post-nationalist, post-unionist Ireland overcoming the neurosis of sovereignty. The idea of the nation as ‘one indivisible people’ is nonsense nowadays. It does not make sense. There is no pure, homogenous people in France or any other nation-state in Europe or elsewhere. There has to be recognition of a plurality of voices in our culture. This is more urgent than ever in the wake of Brexit, the triumph of Trump and the increasing rise of tribal extremism in our world.

There can be no reconciliation without recognition of difference.