John Randolph LeBlanc

Conclusions from a Transitive Space

We began our work saying that we discovered, in the course of our own conversations, that one of our interlocutors was Emmanuel Levinas. This discovery points to our method as scholars, as transitive and hybrid thinkers. Levinas desires to find a way to have transitivity without violence. Like Levinas, we too seek a nonviolent way. Yet that path is difficult. Levinas is clear that discourses—with their totalizing tendencies—cannot perform the act of yielding to the Face of the Other, cannot accept that freedom lies in the very act of limiting the self. The announcement of the Other, “It’s me,”1 undoes all theoretical language. For us, this undoing must await recognition of another undoing. If my sense of self is fixed and stable—most of us find comfort in assuming it is—the Other’s announcement undoes that fixity and stability. Properly understood, the Other throws us back on ourselves. This encounter reveals the transitivity of our self-understandings and the hybridity of the world we move around in. To say the least, the recognition is jarring. The key to moving forward is whether we react like Sophocles’ Creon or respond like Dr. King. In the former instance, we are controlled by the circumstance, reacting with the desire to control it ourselves. In the latter, we embrace and recognize the possibilities and limitations of our agency, seeing ourselves in our Other. In reaction lies violence and non-understanding; in considered response lies the possibility of peace.

Introduction: Negotiations in Transitive Spaces

The co-authored chapters in this volume are the result of over a decade of ongoing conversation. While our training is in the distinct disciplines of religious studies and political theory, our concerns overlap in several places including, but not restricted to, cultural criticism; the role, function, and power of discourse; the “other,” in all the forms that it can take, particularly in literature and literary criticism; and, more generally, “meaning” in all human activity. These diverse mutual interests coalesce around a shared concern with narratives of otherness and dislocation. In this book, we read these narratives not merely as critiques of existing structures, but, more significantly, for what they bring forward from the traditions in which they are embedded and how they challenge those traditions, both political and religious. We also read these narratives for what they tell us about either overcoming those structures or creating meaning within them, for while we cannot live outside meta-narratives, our interdisciplinary approach seeks new spaces in which answers to questions of meaning are made possible. This relation between “tradition and the individual talent,” as T. S. Eliot would put it, or between tradition and the “other(s),” as we would put it, is the site where culture develops.1

The Power of Horror: Variations and Re-framings of The Bacchae

Postmodernism has argued against a fixed sense of identity and has therefore questioned notions of essence. To essentialize is to reduce, to type, and to confine. For those who are among the colonized, however, ideas of identity and essence are not so simply resolved. Cherokee writer and activist Marilou Awiakata, in Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Wisdom, argues that essence does not mean static, reduced, completely defined, and finished.1 Instead, essence indicates a stable point, a balancing point from which to take off, a taproot from which to draw nourishment, and a spirit that creates. “You adapt your form,” Awiakata writes, but “never, never your essence. Your spirit sustains the balance.”2 The sense that there is “someone there” who is and is inviolable sustains those who have been defined as “other.” If essence is esse—to be, soul, identity, deep self—what do we lose by saying it is not?

The Transitive “In-Between”: Culture, Meaning, and the Political in Voegelin and Bhabha

Political questions force us to explore the directionality of the transitive space. Here, we will examine the work of two thinkers: Eric Voegelin, a political philosopher, and Homi K. Bhabha, a political sociologist. Voegelin argues that the transitive—the “in-between,” as he calls it—is most efficacious as a vertical space: one that seeks truth while remaining anchored in the “ground of being” that undergirds all reality. He turns towards theology—namely, that of Paul Tillich1— as does Giorgio Agamben in his own way, in the current generation of thinkers. Despite Voegelin’s insistence to the contrary, the “transcendence” of this ground of being does suggest marked territory, a territory anchored in symbols. Bhabha, in contrast, argues that the transitive is most effectively understood as a horizontal space. He turns to the anthropological model of Michel De Certeau and the “practice of everyday life.”2 The “practice” of everyday life is a way to redefine political language, as well as other binding structures, through the creativity of the active human being. In a sense, we argue, Voegelin and Bhabha cross, and at that crossroads, we locate transitivity, which, for us, involves the contact zone, the space in which the colonial overcomes the “other.” But it also suggests more: the reality that, in that space, as Ashis Nandy showed us, symbols are both in tension and merging into new forms.3 Could we but harness this power, our reading of Voegelin and Bhabha suggests, we would have a fertile ground, though not one without tensions, for rethinking identity, community, and political form in the (post) modern world.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” Sophocles’ Antigone and the Crisis of Union

In the Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln makes a deceptively curious statement, one that draws a critical distinction. “These slaves,” he says, “constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”1 Lincoln’s reference is to slaves (persons) and not slavery (an institution). He had emphasized the institution in the First Inaugural, and this later statement that these persons, not the institution, are the cause of the war suggests the centrality of black persons to his thought on America and the Union by the time of the Second Inaugural. Indeed, black people marched in Lincoln’s second inaugural parade, constituting a significant and, no doubt, unsettling presence. After all, as signifiers these people marked all the contradictions of America: slave/free; human/property; black/white; wealth/poverty. Lincoln’s assertion, however, recognizes these black persons as something more than signifiers, however. They are the bodies of living breathing human beings, though yet to be recognized as such; they are the challenge to be met if a deeply flawed community is to move forward together and heal the wounds of civil war.

Self-Cultivation and the Practices of Peace: Foucault on the Stoics and Peacemaking in the Modern World

In The Care of the Self, the third volume of his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault turns to the Roman Stoics and their influence, acknowledged and unacknowledged, on the modern world. His focus is on the emergent notion of the “‘private’ aspects of existence” and how they relate to the public: domestic, political, and social frameworks.1 Foucault’s work here continues the postmodern interest in the classical world and its notions of virtue, but also, as he says in “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” the interest in where Christian technologies of the self came from and how they have been distorted.2 In The Care of the Self, Foucault, as always, is interested in both power and pleasure. He asks how “taking care of oneself,” that is, self-cultivation, relates to the larger issues of domestic and political life, specifically issues of control of sexuality and power politics.

Going Home in the Work of Charles H. Long and Ashis Nandy

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues that, in looking at our overlapping histories, we need an alternative to the politics of blame and to the “even more destructive politics of confrontation.” He writes: A more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciation of the past, the expressions of regret for its having ended, or—even more wasteful because violent and far too easy and attractive—the hostility between Western and non-Western cultures that leads to crisis. This world is too small and interdependent to let these passively happen.1 Like Said, Ashis Nandy, an Indian politician and psychologist, and Charles H. Long, an African American historian of religions, seek a response to the postcolonial dilemma, one that avoids anger, denunciation, nostalgia, and passivity. Nandy in The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism and Long in the essays in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion examine how the cultures of oppressor and oppressed intersect, often unconsciously cooperate, and repel each other.2 Mary Louise Pratt calls such a space “the contact zone.”3 How does one construct new notions of freedom in a creolized space?

Negotiating Space(s): Reframing Political Conflict in Walzer and Lyotard

Contemporary theoretical conceptions of political justice, because politics involves the interaction of self-interested human beings on the level of stuff and power, equate justice with the distribution of “goods.” The assumption that there are goods to be distributed “justly,” brings a corollary assumption about the environment in which those goods are distributed. Postmodern, postcolonial, feminist, and other critiques, however, suggest that taking the contents of the political environment for granted, works against our grasping the complexities of establishing and maintaining a just social order. There is, in other words, a need for a careful consideration of the space(s) in which this distribution occurs.

Oedipus at Colonus and The Gospel at Colonus: African American Experience and the Classical Text

At the core of Oedipus at Colonus and of The Gospel at Colonus is the working out of divine justice in one human character.1 The “lonely I” of the Oedipus the King, the accursed object, in Sophocles’s last play, written at the end of Sophocles’s life and set in the place of his birth, is transformed into a blessing for Athens. He is changed through suffering and choice and by a rite that lets him do the most simple yet most difficult of acts: tell his story. So too, in a subtle way, Lee Breuer, in his African American Holiness-Pentecostal rendering of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, The Gospel at Colonus, tells a tale of African American life in America. The consequences in the rite done and the story told mark the differences between the settings and ultimate meanings of these plays, one Greek and tragic and the other, finally, Christian and transformed by joy. As Oedipus confronts us, he points to the complexity of the human being—in short to us: to “those strange, unthought-of connections—sex and death, lust and violence, desire and degradation—[that lie] deep in even a good heart’s chambers”2 and to, to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, spoken at the beginning of the American Civil War, “the better angels of our natures.”

Alice Walker: Suffering and the Task of the Revolutionary Artist

Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens was, on its publication in 1983, a revolutionary work in two ways.1 It offered, first, an alternative to or African American extension of feminism and even black feminism with its definition of a “womanist,” and it signaled the first in many volumes of the exploration of this black woman’s life and consciousness. Walker, along with Maya Angelou, has been one of our most fearless autobiographers, engaging, in the tradition of the slave narrative, in self-revelation in the public eye. Doing so, she is a symbol of transitivity—particularly of the transitivity without violence that Emmanuel Levinas seeks. Walker has extended her self-examination into an on-going examination of self and society.