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TIvee FoIds SeavcIing Jov MiIlon's Favadise Losl Ielveen Moses, Lacan and Bevvida
AulIov|s) MallIev BiIevnan
Souvce BeIigion & Lilevaluve, VoI. 38, No. 3 |Aulunn, 2006), pp. 177-201
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THREE FOLDS: SEARCHING FOR MILTON'S
PARADISE LOST BETWEEN
MOSES,
LACAN AND DERRIDA
-for Julia
and Graham
Matthew Biberman
In a recent
essay
in
Diacritics,
Ken Reinhard and
Julia Lupton
summarize
Jacques
Lacan's
reading
of the
Decalogue
in order to
explore
the affinities
between
psychoanalytic
notions of the self and intimations of the same as
found in the earlier tradition of
Jewish hermeneutics,
that
is,
of Midrash.
In
doing
so Reinhard and
Lupton
stress two
points:
first,
that "the secular
subject
is
produced by religious
discourses that
precede
and continue to
speak through it,"
and
second,
that this
insight
is
performed dramatically
in the narrated event of the
Decalogue,
a text that has been
subsequently
glossed theologically
in
language
such that the
resulting corpus
is but an
earlier iteration of
psychoanalytic
formulations
(7 1). Earlier,
Jacques
Derrida
also
closely
examined this same
complex dynamic, though through
his own
characteristic
language.
For him this theme meant
taking up
the
question
of
why
the Freudian notion of
nachtraglishkeit (the
after-the-fact-ness of
lived,
temporal reality) always already
finds itself first in the
language
of the
Jews.
Thus we find
him, writing long ago
in "Freud and the Scene of
Writing,"
that "the
irreducibility
of the 'effect of deferral'
-
such,
no
doubt,
is Freud's
discovery" (W&D 203);
but
always
when Derrida uses a word like "discov-
ery"
it has the effect of
sending
one
hunting
for a counter statement from
him that would rewrite such a claim into a reiteration
(a
trace of a
trace).
R&L 38.3
(Autumn 2006)
177
1 78
Religion
& Literature
This
case,
for
instance,
calls to be
placed alongside
his comment elsewhere
in that same collection
(in
his
essay
on
Jabes)
where he notes that "The
only
thing
that
begins by reflecting
itself is
history.
And this
fold,
this furrow is
the
Jew" {W&D 65).
Derrida
goes
on to
gesture here,
as he did
largely
and
increasingly
in
vain,
for his
signature
to be ascribed to the definition that
understands the
reflexivity
mechanism touched on in both
quotations
to
be identified as a
thing
neither
Jewish
nor
Psychoanalytical;
neither Greek
nor
Philosophical (or
"theoretical" for that
matter)
but rather to be known
simply
as a "movement
through
which the
book,
articulated
by
the voice of
the
poet,
is folded and bound into itself and for
itself, [and
that at the
very
least at its
outset,
this
movement]
is not critical or
speculative
reflection,
but is first of
all,
poetry
and
history" (65). Though
Derrida wanted to think
through
how such
poetry
would write
itself,
what he
increasingly
took
up,
it
seems to
me,
is how this
Jewish
/
Psychoanalytic linkage (cemented,
as we
will
shortly see, through Lacan)
is made to trade in a
profound way upon
the
repression
of the
intervening
Christian
tradition,
one that as such
equally
participates
in this
articulation,
this movement.
Already
then it is
my hope
that we can envision the three folds of
my
title: the first fold is formed from
and in
Jewish writing,
the third consists of the discourse of
psychoanalysis
(and ultimately
of
theory broadly construed), leaving
buried in between the
second fold identified with and as the
intervening
Christian tradition.
In this
essay
I seek to take
up
this
very problematic
as I think Derrida left
it,
or at least to take
up
two
aspects
of this
incomplete project.
The first I
just
introduced: it is the occlusion of the Christian
supplement
in the
just-
sketched
topography.
The second concerns the
metaphorical
or
analogical
representation
of this
repressed
tradition in the Freudian theorization as
transmitted
through
Lacan. Yet Derrida is not himself able to
identify
fully
-
and thus
explicate
-
this
aspect
of
psychoanalytic
discourse
(that
is,
Derrida
habitually
handles these
linguistic tropes
and
figures,
the ones
psychoanalysis
uses to
convey
this
repression
of the Christian
tradition,
but he does so without
dwelling
on this
aspect
of their
meaning).
He does
know, however,
that what I wish to write about here is out there
-
he senses
it, repeatedly noting that, though
Freud's
conceptualization
of the mental
apparatus
for
perception
is
analogous
in its
working
to either an
optical
machine or a
writing machine,
such an
analogy
is not the master
language
Freud is
using
to
get
at the entire
operational
structure of
being.
There,
in
short,
is another
aspect
of the Freudian
project,
and Derrida identifies it as
having
to do with "the
sociality
of
writing
as drama"
{W&D 227)
and he also
observes that its
presence
makes
perception actually
closer to
being
a tool
than a machine. In the
posthumous
On
Touching
-
Jean-Luc Nancy,
Derrida
again
takes
up
the trail of what it must mean to
imagine writing
as a social
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 79
act,
a dramatic act. He does so
through
a meditation on the
ways
in which
this other structure that holds or
deploys perception
is conceived
(such
that
whatever this
larger
affect machine
is,
it
is,
for
Nancy
and thus for Derrida
as
well,
at base
tactile),
but never to
my knowledge
does Derrida
squarely
address the
ways
in which an
application
of
applied physics
of the most
basic macro
sort, specifically
an
application
of the
language
and
conceptual
thinking
of mechanical
engineering,
answers to the need and name of this
mystery
discourse. For in
my eyes,
it is mechanical
engineering
that remains
the
unacknowledged
vehicle
(so
to
speak)
within the
analogy required by
and for
philosophy
if it is to
complete
the structure within which the
optical
/
writing
machine is made to situate itself. Thus
by noting
how mechani-
cal
engineering operates
within
psychoanalysis
I also
hope
to
gain
a better
sense of how the overt
acknowledgement
of
Judaic
filiations occludes
(and
thus trades off
of)
the
equally strong presence
of Christian influences.
Or,
in other
words,
I wish to entertain the
proposition
that it is
through
the
analogical language
of mechanical
engineering
that the now
repressed
thematics of the Christian tradition are
conveyed,
both in the limited
sphere
of
contemporary
theoretical
discourse,
and in the culture at
large.
To take
up
this
argument
in
earnest,
I would like to return to
my reading
of the
Lupton
and Reinhard
essay
with which I
began.
There are
many
beautiful moments where
they
illustrate how the Midrashic tradition uses
the
story
of the
Decalogue
to model
-
in advance of Freud and Lacan
-
conceptions
of
subjectivity
that are
deeply
consonant with the most basic
insights
of the
psychoanalytic
tradition. Here I will limit
myself
to but one
instance,
their review of Rabbinic
thought
on the
significance
of the first
commandment where we learn that the Ram Bam
[Maimonides]
observed
that the Lord's
speech
lacked "distinct
phonemes"
and that in Genesis
Rabbah it is recorded that God's voice had no echo.
Lupton
and Reinhard
then
suggest
that Rashi
supplies
one such echo when he adds this embel-
lishment: that "after
speaking
the commandments all at
once,
God
began
to
repeat
them one
by one;
even this was more than the
people
could
bear,
and
they begged
Moses to shield them from God's terrible voice
by speaking
the commandments for him."
Lupton
and Reinhard
gloss
this
story
with
the observation that here "God
speaks twice,
a
doubling
that institutes the
folds of tradition"
(75).
More
precisely (if
more
pedantically)
I think we
could
say
that in
this,
the
Big Bang
moment that is the
Giving
of the
Law,
the initial fold referenced here stands for the
emergence
of
thinking itself,
1 80
Religion
& Literature
where
thought
is understood as
(to
use Derrida's
apt formulation)
an "'excess'
that
'inexorably' pushes outwardly,
until it is
throwing
or
jettisoning (ejecting,
dejecting, objecting, abjecting)
the
ego's subjectivity
into
exteriority" {Touching
27-8)
where such
spacing
is understood as a void that is at the same time a
synthesis produced
from
thought's being
incommensurable with the
body.
When this
logic
is
applied
to the narrative of the
giving
of the
Decalogue
what we
get
is a model for foundational or institutional creation where that
act is taken as both the site and the
template
for
subsequent
iterations,
a
nesting
of reflexive folds such that each successive act of
ego
formation is
itself a
replication
of the divine initial act of
throwing
itself
-
its
voice,
its
law,
its
subjectivity
into
space and, crucially,
as exterior
space,
an
unfolding
of the divine
ego
that is
figured
as
generating
in tandem and in
reciprocal
fashion a set of ever-more folds both inside and outside.
The
resulting
model is a visual
one;
Freud will call it an action of
spaltung
(or splitting).
It
yields
two sets of
oppositional
arcs,
each
originating
from
a center
point;
each
traversing paths
that take it
away
from the start
point.
These sets of arcs
(Freud
will call them
bahnung, pathways)
are understood
to move at once
deeper
into the self
(thus fashioning
the
space
of
interiority)
and at the same time ever outward into exterior
space,
so that these arcs
are,
rather too
quickly
for
my taste, interpreted
as roads on a
map.
Of
course,
the self here is
being
conceived
along
the lines of
Descartes,
and indeed the
entire tradition of western
metaphysics,
that
is,
as a
monad, generated
in a
process
of what Derrida likes to call auto-affection. This movement is taken
up
in our first level of
analogy,
the first
fold,
a movement of self-reflexiv-
ity
that is seen
fundamentally
as a turn inward that
generates
an interior
landscape,
a
topography
of the
psyche
that is then
mapped
via the tradition
of Freudian
analysis (id, ego, etc.).
The Derridean
critique
here is to
point
out that this interior
process
is
always
at the same time an exterior
process,
but that this realization is not
fully
addressed in
psychoanalytic theory
(though
one must note the efforts of Winnicott and the
resulting
school of
intersubjective object
relations
theory
as a strand that is
very
much attuned
to this
problematic).
As Derrida has demonstrated
(in "My
Chances" and
elsewhere),
with the
exceptions
of a few wild
(and occult) surmises,
Freud
strenuously
excludes communication at the level of the unconscious be-
tween individuals: thus there is
thought
transmission but not
telepathy
in
the
psychoanalytic
worldview. To admit
telepathy
into the
psychoanalytic
model,
Derrida
argues,
is
something
Freud
periodically proposes
but then
removes from the table because it strikes him as
unscientific, but,
as Derrida
persuasively
demonstrates,
the collective model of
psychoanalysis
unwit-
tingly
assumes
telepathy,
for the
building
of exterior
space
and our settled
collective
perception
of it
(a phenomenon
Freud dubs the
reality principle)
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 8 1
inescapably
demands the admission of such a shared strata of communal
intrapsychic
existence.
'
As
insightful
as this observation
is,
it ends
up becoming
a distraction that
allows Derrida to
pass
over the second fold with its
butterfly flap
arcs in a
way
that
prevents
him from
giving
a full
accounting
of it. Such is Derrida's
own
repression (verdrangung).
In On
Touching,
he understands
profoundly
that
the center
point
for the
spaltung
is the skin and that it is the moment of touch
that serves to incite the double arcs that result in the addition of more
space
both inside the self and outside of it. Yet he then makes a
fascinating leap.
He sees that this
swinging
motion,
this
rocking,
can
only
be
grasped
via the
language
of
gross physics,
of an
object moving
back and forth. But then his
next move is
always
from
recognizing
the
splitting
action to
re-conceptual-
izing
it so as to be not
simply pathways,
but roads. For
example,
he observes
that "We should have to
study together, genetically
and
structurally,
the
history
of the road and the
history
of
writing"
(W&D
214).
But that of
course is to
put
the cart before the horse. It is to
perform
the
repression
that
is the
object
of this
study (as
we shall
shortly
see when we take
up Milton).
For before
you
advance to the
road, you
need first
acknowledge
and think
through
the
object
that travels
upon
it.
Crucially then, you
need to take
up
residence within this
moving
vehicle. For the road is not an
example
of the second fold but of the third
(which
is
expressed
via the
analogy
of
networks,
where a network is
perceived
as a
map
or
grid
that
you
examine
from an omniscient aerial
view).
Thus we have now to
acknowledge
what
we have occluded in our action of
forging
a first-third
relation,
as Derrida
does when he
aligns writing
with roads.
Simply put,
it is
my
contention that
there must be a vehicle
traveling upon
that
road,
and that such a vehicle is
obeying
the
logic
of mechanical
engineering,
both in its act of
propulsion
(typically,
in terms of its
carriage,
its
wheels)
and in the internal movements
of its motor.
And
yet
in the
Jewish
/ Lacanian
account,
such
recognition
is
repeatedly
repressed.
To see how this is so let us return
again
to
Lupton
and Reinhard's
discussion of the Midrashic tradition
concerning
the
Decalogue.
In
glossing
the
giving
of the law at Sinai as "the institution of
tradition,"
what
Lupton
and Reinhard wish to teach us is what Lacan means when he
speaks
of the
subject
as
barred,
as one who
signifies
in
nothing
but the
"suspension [of]
the
possibility
of a
subject" (Lupton 85).
To teach this
point
with reference
to the
story
of the
giving
of the
Decalogue
is to seek to root this
theory
historically,
and to
provide
it with a
primal
illustration so as to burnish its
Hegelian affinities,
such that one can
glimpse
a kind of
unfolding process
through
which and as which
subjectivity
itself comes to its
present
state.
Such a
story (a
historical fable
designed
to
explain
the evolution of the
self)
1 82
Religion
& Literature
is a clear
example
of the sort of
analogical
work I have reviewed above. In
this instance we can
say
that for
Lacan,
this exercise at
modeling
the self
begins
at Sinai so that the
primary
cut into
identity
formation occurs with
the event of the
giving
of the law
(where
the face of man is before the face
of
God);
it is a cut that is
repeated
in
(or
is understood to
simultaneously
punctuate)
the nature of
language;
or
alternately,
the cut is understood to
mark the name of God
(as
the
tetragrammaton),
and is manifest as the
absence of a divine echo to his
voice,
a
gap
that the
Jewish
tradition then
both fills and
mimics,
and
that,
in Lacan's
reading, psychoanalytic subjec-
tivity
reinscribes. Thus from this
vantage point,
with its
superimposition
of
theory
on to
midrash,
we are able to see the
giving
of the
Decalogue
as a moment of
spaltung
that releases a kind of
infinitely expanding
set of
bahnung, pathways being
made
through
not one nor three but
(at least)
four
channels: the
long
first stream of God's
voice,
the
partial repeat
of
it,
the
Mosaic
translation,
and Rashi's
commentary. Moreover,
it could be said
that this multi-track moment of
speech effectively
swallows
up
God's
echo,
for as
Lupton
and Reinhard
note,
it is recorded in the Midrash that God's
voice has no echo. This act of subtraction
(the
swallowed
echo), figuratively
rendered in
theological discourse,
also serves as an excellent
metaphor
for
conveying
at the same time how human
meaning
and
being
comes to flood
reality
in its ex-istence. In
offering
such an
account,
Lacanian
psychoanalysis
is able to stitch
together
the first and third fold
through
the
repression
of the
second
fold,
for absent is both
any
serious
engagement
with the Christian
tradition or with the
analogical language
of vehiculation. Thus we have
it all:
spaltung, bahnung
and
verdrangung
and a
resulting subject
whose base is
a
barring
from which it is
launched,
all
conveyed through
the Mosaic ac-
count.
Equally important
we have the dark
tone,
that sense of
falling (via
the swallowed
echo)
with which Derrida was
always preoccupied.
With this
linkage
between
psychoanalysis
and Midrash in full
view,
I
now wish to
place
it in
play
with Miltonic notions of
subjectivity.
I do so to
better understand the fold where
Christianity,
in its earlier modern
phase,
supplements
or rewrites this relation in its
production
of a
religious subject
using
the same set of
signifiers
-
the
Decalogue.
To
engage
in this work is to
understand much more
clearly
how the echo of the Midrash most
certainly
called
up
its
abjection
when we examine the
strong revisioning
Milton occa-
sions
upon
the
figuring
bound
up by
the rabbinic traditions that
gloss
these
Hebrew Bible
passages.
The first
thing
to note is that the Miltonic self is
built from
precisely
the same material but for a minimal difference:
through
the force of the New
Testament,
the focal
point
in the narrative of self
fashioning
is thrown back from Sinai to Eden. Milton thus evacuates
Sinai,
converting
a site of
retrojection (e.g.
the resituation of the Sinai moment in
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 83
Eden).
And as for
why,
I believe his reasons are
prosaically
delivered for him
by
the eminent
English
Hebraist and Divine
John Lightfoot
in a sermon of
March 1660:
In divers
places
of the New
testament,
where mention is made of the
law,
and where
you
would think it meant both of the
tables,
it comes off
only
with mention of the
second;
"If thou wilt enter into
life, keep
the commandments:"
you
would look for all
the
ten;
but look
forward,
and he
pitcheth only upon
the second table.
So,
Roman.
xiii.8 "He that loveth
another,
hath fulfilled the
law;" you
would look for the whole
of the law to be mentioned
there;
but look
forward,
ver.
9,
and
only
the second table
is mentioned.
So, Jam. ii.8,
"If
you
fulfill the
royal
law
according
to the
Scripture,"
&c:
you
would look for the whole
law;
but he concludes all under this "Thou shalt
love
thy neighbor
as
thyself." Why,
where are the duties of the first table.
See,
how
God
put
even all
religion
into the second table. As it is
said,
"Behold! how he loved
Lazarus:" so behold! how God loveth
honest, up-right,
charitable
dealing
betwixt
man and man.
(vi. 272-3)
What Milton will teach via
epic poetry, Lightfoot
teaches here emblemati-
cally:
the first tablet's duties
(man's dealings
with
God)
are dissolved into
the second tablet
(the
laws
conjuring
a relation between man and man that
would define what it means to act
ethically,
or as
neighbors). Lightfoot's
lesson
presupposes
the same
linkages
and visualized schemes we see in the
rabbinic tradition and in
psychoanalysis.
Indeed in their
essay,
Reinhard and
Lupton
dwell on this
complex
relation and even end with it: "the Lacanian
account of the
subject
of
religion," they write,
"delimits the
space
between
the two tablets as the arena of critical
practice" (96).
Here
Lupton
and Re-
inhard
punningly
allude to Lacan's famous
reading
of
Antigone
entombed
and so "between the two
deaths,"
and
they
do so in order to reframe that
reading
so that it can function as a kind of
general
model for how to theo-
rize
subjectivity.2 Just
as
Antigone struggles
to understand her existence
by
apprehending
it as a life lived between
physical
death and
symbolic death,
so too must all of us think
through
what it must mean to
perceive
lived ex-
istence as the
space
that is ever
opening (but
ever
bound)
between the two
tablets of the
Decalogue.
Yet there is a messianic
leavening
that
appears
in the Christian account.
You see this with
Lazarus,
a reversal of the
dynamic
Lacan sees: the
falling
dissolution of the first tablet into the second calls forth a
rising
resolution-
ary
movement that will reconstitute the first tablet.
Consider,
for
example,
Lupton
and Reinhard's observations
concerning
the
alignment
of the law
against idolatry (law 2,
first
tablet,
second
slot)
with
adultery (law 7,
second
tablet,
second
slot):
As
such,
this
Jewish
discourse of the master constitutes "l'envers du discours
psych-
analytique"
-
the
underside,
the
reverse,
but also the
enabling ground,
of
psycho-
1 84
Religion
& Literature
analysis,
which will strive to recover
knowledge
as
sexual,
but will find at the core
of that
knowledge
the lack of a sexual relation. The is the
insight
of Genesis 1.28
and its
exegetical
coordination with the Second Commandment: the
very
accession
to
language
that casts
humanity
in God's likeness
simultaneously relegates
the twin
rewards of control over nature and sexual satisfaction to the order of an
imaginary
compensation
that will frustrate more than
satisfy
this brave new
subject. (82)
In contrast to this
fully
modern
tragic
vision
(notable
for its
passivity),
Milton
sees instead an
early
modern
theological comedy,
one that
hinges
off the
same
points,
the same
pathways
even. Once
again,
the theoretical
express
from the
Decalogue passages
in Exodus and
Deuteronomy
takes us back to
Genesis
1.28,
the
primary positive
commandment: "Be fruitful and multi-
ply." Except
of course that for Milton it was not brave new
subjects
-
on
the order of
Shakespeare's
Miranda
-
who are frustrated into
being,
but
rather a reconciled
couple
who with sad and slow
steps
make their
way
(bahnung)
from what the
fiery
cherub barred. And barred it was because of
the violation of the
primary negative
commandment
-
the
prohibition
not
to taste from the tree of
knowledge.
Let us
pause
for a moment to
align
this
pair
of
mutually missing
elements:
the Lacanian
/Jewish
account introduces the
concept
of the barred
subject
as a cut that occurs at Sinai while
passing
over the Genesis
prohibition (not
to taste from the tree of
knowledge)
that is if
anything
a far more dramatic
emblem of the classical Freudian nexus
uniting sexuality
and reason
through
body cuts;
while on the other
hand,
the Miltonic / Christian account strives
to work
through
the trauma of what it cannot
fully confront, namely
the
centrality
of Sinai and its effective ban on
populating futurity,
or on
Utopian
projection (the insight conveyed
so
clearly through
the
Jewish reading
of
Job
that casts him in a black
comedy [e.g.
"Where were
you
when
I, God,
made.
.."]).
Yet
regardless
of such a
ban,
like
Lazarus,
Milton's Adam and
Eve,
in their
repentance,
rise to a second life
through
the
forgiveness they
show each other in accordance with the law of
marriage (that is,
in
obeying
the Law of Genesis
1.28),
which in turn contains the whole of the second
table. For
Milton,
as for
Lightfoot,
this act of
loving-kindness
becomes the
foundation from which
humanity
can advance to the
challenge
of
repairing
the first table. Here we have the
strategy
behind Milton's
Utopian projection
that is the substance of the
prophetic
books of Paradise Lost.
Milton's
strategy
reflects a
complex engagement
with the same tradition
that
produces
the Lacanian model of
subjectivity.
In
contrast, however,
the
Miltonic self is a
dynamic
cut or
fold,
one that swallows Sinai
(and
with it
the
primary cut)
in an act of
retrojection
while at the same time
throwing
forward a line of
flight
as
harbinger (a
two headed arrow of
flight
to
give
the
figuration
a Lacanian
cadence).
Such a
movement,
I
submit,
is the
sig-
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 85
nature of the second
fold,
but for it to be seen as
such,
we must resist the
urge
to envision these lines of
flight
as
roads;
rather
they
need to be seen as
the
trajectories
of vehiculated
subjectivity.
As such
they
are both the self in
motion and the
workings
of a motor
postulated
to be within the self. The
space,
in
short,
between the two tablets is not
being
filled with roads but with
vehicles
moving,
as
subjectivity
reacts
against
the first fold's move inward.
That
is,
the second fold moves
outward, ejecting
a self that is on the
go.
We see this
development
in Milton's
epic
most
especially
in his
portrayal
of Adam and Eve after the Fall.
Consider,
for
example,
how
Eve,
in her
analysis
of what has
happened, expressly
casts the matter in terms of two
problems:
"both have
sinned,
but thou /
Against
God
only,
I
against
God
and thee"
(10.930-1).
The
phrasing
here is unmistakable: Milton here has
his first
couple reasoning
between the two
tablets,
armed
(and
so
Fallen)
with all the
presumable
treasures of Gaul called
up
in our
crossing
of the
Lacanian with the
Judaic.
This
knowledge richly
colors Eve's
plea
to abstain
from sex and so avoid
bringing
children into the word: "Childless thou
art,
childless remain"
(10.989).
What else is there to
say
but that Eve here
teaches Adam
everything
Lacan
gestures
toward when he
negates
the sexual
relation,
and
Adam,
what else can he do but take
up
the
legal profession?
In this moment of the
poem,
I like to think of Milton
casting
us as readers
back inside a Venetian
courtroom,
where we watch the
settling
of one small
account
involving ajew
and three thousand
ducats, only everyone
has faded
away
from
Shakespeare's
scene with the
exception
of Portia and
Shylock.
A true son of
Portia,
Adam
recognizes
Eve's clever case for abstinence to
be in violation of the law of
marriage ("Be
fruitful and
multiply").
Like
Shylock,
she is
demanding
a bond that would mean no bond. Milton then
further twists
Shakespeare's
comic
plot by having
Eve
(in
contrast to
Shylock)
acknowledge
the
wrong
and in a
way
that
grants
Adam his
legal
desire to
appear
as unfallen
(or only partially fallen).
We
gain
this
insight
because
Adam's
counter-argument
to
severing
the sexual relation is to
plead
that
Eve not force him to violate both tablets as she states she has.3
This act of
psychic splitting
in Milton's narrative needs to be seen as
operating precisely
in accord with Melanie Klein's theorization of the
concept, just
as Derrida intuits: "Klein's entire
thematic,
her
analysis
of
the constitution of
good
and bad
objects,
her
genealogy
of morals could
doubtless
begin
to
illuminate,
if followed
prudently,
the entire
problem
of
the
archi-trace,
not in its essence
(it
does not have
one),
but in terms of
valuation and devaluation.
Writing
as sweet nourishment or as
excrement,
the trace as seed or mortal
germ.
. ."
(
W&D 23
1).
Derrida sees how the first
fold which in his
language
is the
space
of the
archi-trace,
that sense of an
initiating
absence that is felt as such so that we can
say
that it marks both
186
Religion
& Literature
a
past
that never was and
conveys
a sensation of
falling,
a
falling
from the
outset
("an emptying
of the semantic
plenitude
of the lexeme 'to
be','')
but
never
simply
a
falling
from a
position
that is
prelapsarian;
instead he insists
that we must
begin by proceeding "analogically
toward a
superlapsarian
agency, something
before the
copula [e.g.
"to be" as
simple grammatical
extension
-
this is
that]." (MP203).
Milton
anticipates
such a
superlapsarian
position
when he
positions
his readers in a
way
that forces them not
just
to entertain an active fall in Eden but also the
strategy
of
catalytic
recon-
stitution hammered out when Adam convinces Eve to resume their sexual
activities.
Finally,
and most
importantly,
Milton
requires
a
superlapsarian
point
view if we are to understand how it is that Eve has fallen not once
but
twice,
while Adam somehow
clings
to a belief that he has fallen
only
once. Such life
trajectories require
the
conceptualization
of
subjectivity
as a vehiculated
experience,
and a
disengaged space
from which to watch
these
moving
selves as
they
fall and seek to rise within the
space
that has
opened up
between the tablets.
Certainly,
the
superlapsarian vantage point
requires
the third
fold, yet
as Derrida
painstakingly points
out,
such a view
is not transcendental but rather a kind of transitional
-
Derrida uses the
word transferential
-
layer
that enables the
perception
of what it means to
be
engaged
in vehiculated movement: to be
falling
and wish to
rise,
to be
fallen and at the same time unfallen
(as
Adam
asserts).
Moreover,
this semiotic structure also enables us to better understand
Adam's
projection
into the
figures
of Revelation. After
all,
it is critical
when
reading
Milton's
ennobling
of
monogamy
to remember that this act
of
fidelity
is
always joined
with an antithetical force that launches itself
through marriage.
The
description
Milton
provides
of this
generative
force
is
very interesting
in how it models what Freud will call
negation,
the bar-
ring through
which
humanity
realizes itself as
living
death. He tells Eve that
celibacy
and other
...such acts
Of
contumacy
will
provoke
the
Highest
To make death in us live: then let us seek
Some safer
resolution,
which methinks
I have in
view, calling
to mind with heed
Part of our
sentence,
that
thy
seed shall bruise
The
serpents head;
No more be mentioned then of violence
Against ourselves,
and wilful
barrenness,
That cuts us off from
hope,
and savors
only
Rancor and
pride, impatience
and
despite,
Reluctance
against
God and his
just yoke (10.1026-1045)
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 87
Engaged
in a rational discussion with Eve on how to solve the
Fall,
and
deploying
the terms of the tablet schema outlined
above,
Adam
diagnoses
the
problem
as a
legal one, comprised
of two
parts,
with the first
part
be-
ing
to continue to honor the law of
marriage. Moreover,
he assumes that
this
reparation
will solve the second
problem, crushing
the
serpent's
head
(10.1035).
Here we see Milton
performing
an
astonishing
act of
figural
reinscription,
thus
anchoring
the
falling
action that he is
tracing
as the vio-
lation of the
negative
commandment and the dissolution of the first tablet
and its
migration
across the
space
between the two tablets before
coming
to rest within the matter of the second where it lies dormant but
waiting
to
be
driven, catalyzed,
in a reverse
upward
motion across the
space
between
the two tablets in an
act,
or set of actions that would
repair
the Fall and
realize or re-realize a
Utopian
existence of the sort
figured
in Eden within
his
epic. By grasping
both
movements,
the reader can see how Milton's act
of
retrojection operates
in tandem with an act of
projection
into the
figural
language
of Revelation. I would ask that
my
reader entertain the
proposition
that one
thing
that is
missing
from current
psychoanalytic
theorizations of
projection
is a failure to
recognize
that it lies situated within the second fold
and in tandem with
retrojection (and
not
introjection,
a conclusion Lacan
rightly
deduced
long ago,
about which more
later).
In the Sinai narrative the
ontological
center in the rabbinic / Lacanian
account turns not on death as that which veils the
real,
but God's name.
Milton, however, consistently refigures religious subjects
so that
they (that
is,
he and
she)
are oriented not around the nonce word of the
tetragram-
maton but rather around death as that which binds
up everything
in the
negative
commandment
(do
not eat of the
tree).
This substitution
-
death
for God
-
as the focal
point (or
in
Lacanese,
as the
primary signifier
that
will call the
subject
into
being)
needs now to be
recognized
as that which
constitutes the second fold. We see Adam
doing precisely
this in Book 4 of
Paradise Lost when he
explains
to Eve the nature of the
punishment
that has
been set for them should
they transgress:
This
one,
this
easy charge,
of all the trees
In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So
various,
not to taste that
only
Tree
Of
Knowledge, planted by
the Tree of
Life,
So near
grows
death to
life,
whate'er death
is,
Some dreadful
thing
no
doubt,
for well thou know'st
God hath
pronounced
it death to taste that
Tree, (4.421-28)
Clearly
the fall into
subjectivity
for Milton is a fall not
simply through
the
word
death,
but
through
death as the
covering
to an encounter with God
188
Religion
& Literature
that will enable him to understand death's
meaning.
Matched
up
with
Adam's admission of
only breaking
the first
tablet,
this theorization of how
to reverse or
mitigate
the Fall can be read as a rationalization in the follow-
ing way:
it is to consent to
having
introduced death
only by simultaneously
staking
out a
position
that
might just
overcome death. Remember: Adam
explicitly accepts
Eve's
rendering
of
justice
and nowhere does Milton ef-
fectively gainsay
this movement in the
poem;
he can not do this for the
simple
reason that he needs this
slight
of hand or
ideological hostage
as the
base from which to launch his
projection
in which death is overmastered.
Thus death is
parried
in a
way
that will continue to orient the work of the
idealist
philosopher.
In an effort to
get
a better sense of how to read Adam's decision to halt
his dialectical
engagement
with
Eve,
I would like to
suggest
that we see his
action as a kind of defensive wall of the sort sketched out
by Michelangelo
and Leonardo in their work as
military designers.
In
Sexuality
and
Form,
Graham Hammill reads such aesthetic
projects
as
binding up
the master
binary
of war and
civility, impulses
that
together induce,
in Foucaultian
fashion, sexuality
and its histories. To me the movement outward
into,
for
example,
da Vinci's war machines is to be identified with the reformational
impulse
we see in Milton
retrojecting
Sinai as a
way
to induce
eschatologi-
cal
projection.
Here we have
ground
for
drawing
a distinction between the
mechanism that
produces
the
primary symptom
that will bind
up
the reli-
gious (or post-religious) subject
as that which we
speak
of when we reference
the Sinai event with its
spatial
fold
(the
first
fold) involving
the two tablets
and the mechanism of
secondary symptom
formation as that which we see
occurring
in the second fold as the interrelated movement of
retrojection
and
projection
that follows from the
resituating
of the flows so as to be
anchored in Eden.
This
development
courts
strongly
the French
Jewish philosopher
Em-
manuel Levinas'
explanation
for
why
it is difficult to
forgive
such Germans as
the
philosopher
Martin
Heidegger.
The observation of Levinas' that I have
in mind
appears
toward the end of his
reading
of the Talmudic commen-
tary (Yoma 85a-85b) concerning
the declaration that God does not
forgive
transgressions
committed
by
individuals
against
other individuals who have
not first
sought forgiveness
from the
wronged party (again,
we return to
the second tablet and the
space between).
Levinas
writes,
"One can
forgive
many Germans,
but there are some Germans it is difficult to
forgive.
It is
difficult to
forgive Heidegger" (25).
Levinas' entire
reading
here is
pitched
over the
recognition
that it is
impossible
to
grant forgiveness
to
somebody
who
you
believe to be aware of his
wrong only
at the unconscious level. He
puts
it thus: "How is one to
forgive
if the
offender,
unaware of his
deeper
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 89
thoughts,
cannot ask for
forgiveness?" (25).
Is not this the same
question
to
be asked of Milton
concerning
Adam's refusal and the turn to death as the
primary signifier?
Are we not here
touching
in Derridean fashion
upon
a
pairing
-
Milton and
Heidegger
-
that
speaks profoundly
to how modern
subjectivity
is bound to a
metaphysical
structure that
operates
within the
second fold's
covering
of God's name with the nonce word Death? This
question,
it seems to
me, speaks
to the
impasse Lupton
has arrived at in
her theorization of the literature and the secular
subject
as that which falls
out from the
sublationary
dialectic that is modernism as
experienced
in
the West. The sublation that did occur is
quite precisely
the
swallowing up
of Sinai
by
Eden as
performed by
Milton: this action needs to be read as
the
encasing
of the
primary symptom
in a tissue of
secondary symptoms
(Derrida's
"trace as seed or mortal
germ");
the
consequent recognition
concerning symptom failure,
that
is,
the
diagnosis
of the
misaligned subject,
of remainders with their
disfigurations
that are each somehow more in the
body
than the
body
in which
they
are
contained,
more even in the marks
(the cuts, boils, scars, etc.)
on that
body
than those
secondary
marks can
signify,
so that this
repeated gesture,
the
signaling
to the realm
beyond
to
get
at what we
really
are
-
all of this is to be understood as what it means
to work
through secondary symptom
formation.
At the same time it is
important
to
recognize
that this
space,
the Adamic
space
as carved out in the second
fold,
is
precisely
what Fredric
Jameson
firmly
and
rightly
identifies as
utopic space:
"an
imaginary
enclave within
real social
space... [that]
is itself a result of
spatial
and social differentia-
tion"
(15)
and "a kind of mental
space
in which the whole
system
can be
imagined
as
radically
different"
(16). Perhaps
we can risk this formulation:
the Miltonic self
-
the
self,
in short
-
of the second fold is an
attempt
to
counter what it sees as the first fold's
tragic passivity
with an act understood
to be one of
tragic
action.
By tragic passivity
I mean the mood
conveyed
with such assertions as we
get
in
Lupton
and Reinhard when we read "in
Lacan's
strong
formulation...
religious
discourse
supposes
us
-
supports
and
underwrites our
very
structures of
being, subjectivity,
and social interaction.
That
is,
the secular
subject
is
produced by
the
religious
discourses that
precede
and continue to
speak through
it..."
(71). Rightly
or
wrongly,
such astute
thinkers as Walter Davis
reject
this
program
in the belief that Lacanian
analysis
does not lead to an existentialized
subject
but to a dissolved
subject,
lost "in the blind embrace of
impersonal
Drive or transcended in the
supe-
rior
irony
of one who looks on human
phenomena
from the
perspective
of
a God who is
'indifferent,
paring
his
fingernails'" (116).
In
contrast,
Davis
argues
to counter such
misguided tragic passivity
with a
regime
of
tragic
action,
described thus: "That the task is to reverse the force of
Thanatos,
the
1 90
Religion
& Literature
destructiveness of the
superego, by making
deracination the
relationship
one
lives to
oneself";
he then defines deracination
(a
term with obvious affinities
to
Heideggerian destructuring)
as
acting
so as to
"engage
in
self-overcoming
within the
crypt
of one's most
deeply
buried conflicts and anxieties"
(116).
I introduce this debate not to
adjudicate
it but rather to use it to
get
at the
way
this later critical
impasse
is itself a
reinscription
of the action that occurs
in the second fold where we encounter Mil tonic
retrojection
/
projection.
Adam's declaration that he eats undeceived and does so to be with Eve is
clearly
an act of
tragic action,
one that could be said to
inaugurate
u
topic
space;
the
problem
is that this
opening
is
purchased
at the
expense
of his
verbal refusal to
join
Eve in
accepting
the violation of the second tablet.
This bind leaves us in the
impasse
we
just
visited in our
staged
Davis vs.
Lacan face-off where we are left
wondering
which
position
is the
right
one,
which is
deluded, psychotically
in thrall to
Thanatos,
and which is the real
attempt
to work
through
Thanatos?
Grasped so,
we see that what lies before us is the
question
of stasis and the
lurch into motion. Put another
way
what I am
getting
at is that the models
of
subjectivity
that we have so far been
considering
in our
population
of
the second fold have at their core a
conceptualization
that involves not
just
the movement of the self but of movement within the self.
Internally
these
figures
for the self are not static and
simply spatial, they
are not mediums
with
layers (or rings); rather,
they
are motive devices.
Turning
then to the
question
of their internal
movements,
simple questions
arise,
and
they
in-
volve
seeing
the
resulting system
of the self as either a
turning
in
place
or
a circular motion such that the
system
returns the self to its
starting point,
or it sees the self as in motion
moving
from its
starting point
to some other
point.
In its
complex form,
the
question
takes the form of a
superimposi-
tion,
that
is,
it asks how is it
possible
for the self to both turn in
place
and
go
somewhere. To turn
internally
without outward movement then is the
diagnosis
that
accompanies
the
recognition
that the self is
acting passively,
in thrall to
Thanatos, caught
in the first fold. To turn
internally
and to
go
somewhere,
in
contrast,
is to see the self
acting tragically
in its
struggle
with
Thanatos,
a
struggle
that occurs within the
space
of the second fold
(death
over
god,
outward motion over inward
motion).
No
surprise
then that when it comes to
Milton,
the self as conceived is
fundamentally
motive in this second sense: there is a
dynamic
interior ac-
tion and there is
transport.
For
example
when we read of Satan's
journey
from hell to earth we learn that it is
"rage"
itself that
"Transports
our
Adversary, [Satan]
whom no bounds / Prescribed"
(3.80-2).
And
later,
in his account of
sex,
Adam will tell the
angel Raphael
that "here / Far
otherwise,
transported
I
behold,
/
Transported
touch;
here
passion
first I
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 9 1
felt"
(8.528-30).
Such
moments,
it seems to
me,
anticipate
or court
Jameson's
descriptions
of the
utopic
self as "a
momentary
formation of a kind of
eddy
or self-contained backwater within the
general
differentiation
process
and its
seemingly
irreversible forward momentum"
(15).
Unlike Milton's
proto-fictive
formulations, Jameson's figures operate
in classic
post-structural
language:
the exterior flows are
open
and
abstract,
the self is closed-off in a
performance
of the most minimal of actions: an
eddying,
or
looping
back
that results in both its own containment and its drive
against
the current.
Yet we see the
profound
connection that unites this theorization with the
equally spare rendering
Milton
provides
here in our two
examples:
to be a
self it is to be
transported,
most
directly through
touch
(that is, movement,
ideally against
or
through boundaries).
We see this not
only
in the curi-
ous
way
that the
qualifier
"no bounds" denies the act of
flight
the
power
to endow Satan with
identity,
but also in how Adam's account of sex as a
kind of frictional
transport
at the
edges
of bodies
provides
him with what
is denied to the devil.
Most
famously
elsewhere in
Milton,
of
course,
we have the
re-staging
of the Fall's commencement
through eating
the
prohibited
fruit and thus
shattering
the first tablet. Here the
touching
is rendered as a
tasting
-
it
is,
of
course, through eating
the
apple
that the Fall itself occurs. This stress
in Milton on taste / touch and not the Lacanian
pair
of voice /
gaze may
very
well be the most
telling
omission that results from the
repression
of
the second's folds
presence
in current theoretical discussion.
Perhaps
the
most
significant departure
from this silence is Derrida's
provocative
medi-
tation On
Touching
-
-Jean
Luc
Nancy,
a work to which I
already
referred. In
this
posthumous text,
Derrida offers a
compelling argument
to reconsider
Kant's claim that touch "is the foundation of the two other
objective senses,
sight
and
hearing,"
and Derrida then
attempts
to situate this
insight
as the
unacknowledged
foundation of Freud's "transcendental
psychoanalytic
aesthetics"
(41, 44).
Yet
throughout
this bravura
performance,
never does
Derrida
register
the
degree
to which his
commentary
is an odd
reinscrip-
tion of Milton's much earlier intervention. Derrida
writes,
"A certain
tact,
a 'thou shalt not touch too
much,'
'thou shalt not let
yourself
be touched
too
much,'
or even 'thou shalt not touch
yourself
too
much,'
would thus be
inscribed a
priori,
like a first
commandment,
the law of
originary prohibi-
tion,
the
destiny
of tactile
experience" (47).
It is
especially striking
that here
Derrida fails to note that he has introduced into the text the kind of crux on
which he made his
reputation.
After
all,
here he
speaks
of the
prohibition
as one of touch and not of
taste,
and
yet
as
any
reader schooled
sufficiently
to see that
apple
in Eve's hand knows: it is most
assuredly
about
eating
the
fruit,
not
just touching
it. Moreover Derrida
repeatedly
notes the
logic
and
1 92
Religion
& Literature
traditions that
identify
taste as a sub-set of
touch,
and he even
parses,
often
with
great insight,
how
Christianity
rests on touch as a foundation that must
serve as a locus for what
Nancy proposes
as a deconstruction of Christian-
ity,
but nowhere does Derrida take
up
the Midrashic
tradition,
familiar to
Milton,
that uses the
primal negative prohibition
as a textual crux in order
to
explore
the
ambiguity
of taste / touch itself.
Though
saddened at the
prospect
of
having
to do it for
him,
I will labor
the
point
in Derridean fashion because it allows us to understand how Milton
richly explores
the terrain of the tactile and the
experience
of
transport.
As
I
proceed,
I would ask
my
reader to bear in mind Derrida's hard-earned
conclusion
(in
the
essay
"How to Avoid
Speaking")
that "What finds itself
reduced to the condition of a threshold is
being itself, being
as a
place" (52).
Although
there are
variations,
the
significance
of which I shall address in
a
moment,
rabbinic
commentary
focuses on the
discrepancy
between the
prohibition
as
given
in Gen 2.17 and Eve's restatement of it in Gen 3.3
("Ye
shall not eat of
it,
and
ye
shall not touch
it,
lest
ye die")
which in its
rephrasing
extends the ban from
tasting
so as to include
touching
as well. As
one rabbinic text
(the
Pirkei de-Rabbi
Eliezer) presents
the
story,
"The
serpent
went and said to the woman:
Behold,
I touched it
[the Tree],
but I did not
die;
thou
mayest
touch
it,
and thou wilt not die"
(95);
thus in the rabbinic
tradition,
when Satan tricks
Eve,
he takes
advantage
of her confusion over
the exact boundaries of the
prohibition,
which is to
say
her confusion of the
distinction between
tasting
and
touching.
Because she believes it
wrong
to
touch the
tree,
Satan can
perform
a false demonstration that convinces her
that she can violate the divine decree with
impunity.
An alternate version
of this Midrash
appears
in the
ohar.
R.
Judah said,
"the
way
in which the
serpent
seduced Eve was as follows. He said to her:
'See,
I have touched
the tree and
yet
am not
dead; you
also
put you
hand on it and
you
will not'
(for
it was he who added on his own account the 'neither shall
ye
touch
it')" (36a). Lupton
and
Reinhard,
with whom we
began,
took
up
a
point
of
Rashi's;
so it is
fitting
as I end to take us back: "to the command not to eat
of the fruit of the tree Eve added also the command not to touch the
tree,"
Rashi
observes,
"and was
thereby
led to lessen the
original
command"
(70).
In
Rashi,
the
serpent
then talks Eve into
touching
the tree before then an-
nouncing
that "there is no death in the
eating
of the fruit. . ."
(90).
Literary
critics who have noticed this
apparent
debt to the rabbinic
tradition have down so
basically
in the service of a
larger argument
on
behalf of some
particular Judaic
source as the source of Milton's
Judaica
(see especially
the work of Golda Werman and
Jason Rosenblatt.).
In
my
opinion,
in his
incorporation
of this
Midrash,
Milton is
working
with what
is at variance
among
these rabbinic
versions,
after
encountering
this
story
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 93
in more than one form. Milton understands the
question
as follows: Who
taught
Eve to
say
that it was forbidden to touch as well as to taste? Did she
teach herself? That is Rashi's conclusion. Did Satan teach her? That is The
^phar's
conclusion. Did Adam teach her? That is the conclusion advanced in
the Avos d'Rabbi
Nosson,
a text that has not been advanced
(so
far as I
know)
as a Miltonic source
(Bereishis
1 16 n.
3).
Aware of such
disagreement,
Milton
writes a
poem
in which he
puts
forward his own candidate for Eve's teacher
into error. It is a choice of rich
suggestiveness
in terms of the theme we are
now
examining.
Let us see
then,
how the issue of taste and touch is handled in Paradise
Lost. In Book 7
touching
the tree makes its first
appearance,
and it occurs
in Milton's address to the muse:
Say goddess,
what ensued when
Raphael,
The affable
Archangel,
had forewarned
Adam
by
dire
example
to beware
Apostasy, by
what befell in heaven
To those
apostates,
lest the like befall
To Paradise to Adam or his
race,
Charged
not to touch the interdicted
tree,
If
they transgress,
and
slight
that sole
command,
So
easily obeyed
amid the choice
Of all tastes else to
please
their
appetite,
thousfh wandVine. (41-50)
So,
in his
guise
as the
epic
voice,
Milton himself broadens the
prohibition
to include not
just tasting
but
touching.
When therefore we
bring
rabbinic
teaching
to bear on Paradise Lost it works to
suggest
that it is from Milton
that the evil inclination in Eve
flows,
and
through
this bond Milton acknowl-
edges
that he is both Eve's
offspring
and her author. Notice also that after
Eve states the restriction as not to taste or
touch,
Satan announces that he
has
touched,
but the rabbinic
gambit
is not
fully
realized: there is no scene
in which he either touches the tree as a clear demonstration or throws her
against
it. Instead after Satan's
speech
in which he exhorts Eve to taste the
fruit,
what we
get
is the return of the
epic
voice,
once
again revealing
itself
as the source of error:
Meanwhile the hour of noon drew
on,
and waked
An
eager appetite,
raised
by
the smell
So
savory
of that
fruit,
which with
desire,
Inclinable now
grown
to touch or taste
(9.739-42)
Equally important,
Milton's use of "or" here makes it clear that he is not
1 94
Religion
& Literature
using
"taste" and "touch" as
synonyms,
and
yet,
of
course,
he is.
Through
this
slippage
Milton introduces the transmission of error into his
poem,
and
the form of transmission chosen resists
empirical logic; instead,
the
pathway
through
which error
spreads
is an inversion of
reason,
and of time.
If,
as
Derrida reminds
us,
Kant would have it that touch is the foundation for
sight
and
hearing,
then we see in Milton the
anticipatory
reverse movement
as evil is woven into the
poem's temporal
fabric as the
collapsing
of taste
into
touch, through (to
use rabbinic
phrasing)
the
improper
extension of
the law. And
also,
in Paradise Lost inversion introduces error from the
pres-
ent into the
prelapsarian past,
and
error,
in
turn,
becomes the
precondition
for the violation of the
prohibition.
Our
recognition
of such an
economy
demonstrates
indirectly
that there is a third
level,
a transferential
layer,
en-
abling
these
complex
transactions. The conclusion I would ask
my
reader
to entertain is that Milton's introduction of a kinetic
pathway
of error
backwards
through
time functions in advance as an intimation of Freud's
notion of
nachtraglichkeit,
and that this arc backwards
appears
as the neces-
sary compliment
to the
projective
arc forward into the
poem's
Christian
eschatology.
Seen this
way
the entire
production,
in its
figures, possesses
exactly
the abstract network that
epitomizes
the articulated
logic
of the third
fold even as that fold will
repress
this intermediate
presentation. Being then,
for
Milton,
as it was for
Derrida,
is about the
threshold,
where threshold is
at once the
slippage
from
touching
to
tasting,
as well as the dissemination
from the son back to the
mother,
a master web that reveals not
just
how
the
past
haunts the
present,
but how the future
appears
as a
specter
within
some version of the
past imagined
otherwise.
Though
about
Nietzsche,
the
following
comment from Derrida
captures quite distinctly
this
economy
of
error in Paradise Lost "Must there not be some
powerful utterance-producing
machine that
programs
the movements of the two
opposing
forces at
once,
and which
couples, conjugates,
or marries them in a
given
set,
as life
(does)
death"
{Ear 29).
The "utterance
producing
machine" Derrida
posits
would
not
only explain
the
proliferation
of error
(by functioning
as its
enabler),
it also allows us to
glimpse
the shift from the second fold to the third
fold,
for here we have left behind our
conception
of vehiculated
subjects
and
taken
up
our discussion of networks: the machine
produces
the utterances
that are the networks of the third
fold; however,
Milton's aesthetics do not
point
to the machine's
products
so much as to its inner
workings:
if we
are
witnessing
an
economy
in
Milton,
it is not so much of the roads
being
made
by
the machine outside of
itself,
but of the
energy
flows within the
machine as it works to
spit
out the mediated networks where we have taken
up
our residence.
Finally,
as a
way
to conclude our examination of Milton as our
repre-
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 95
sentative architect of the second
fold,
consider the entrance of evil itself
in Paradise Lost when
upon hearing
the Son
proclaimed Messiah,
Lucifer
"could not bear /
Through pride
that
sight,
and
thought
himself
impaired"
(5.665-6).
Milton's Latinate diction facilitates the sense that a line of
sight
(carrying
the vision of the
Son)
travels
through Satan,
despite
his
parrying
efforts. Thus we see first the self as a monad formed
through pride;
then
the encounter with the vision of the Son creates
(via spaltung)
a.
twined,
or
impaired
self
(Lucifer
/
Satan)
fashioned around or from the
linguistic gap
that has
opened
in the text with Milton's
negative
formulation of Satanic
self-fashioning (a
creation that falls out from not
bearing
the
sight
of the
Son after
hearing
the
proclamation).
From such
study
I would
suggest
that
(once
we set to one side the
question
of the crossed
senses)
a common
spa-
tial model
appears,
one that can be reduced to the
following
schema: an
offensive line
(itself
an oscillation of
sight
and
hearing) moving horizontally,
and a defensive circle
(understood
as
matter,
as a field for
touch) turning
vertically
within that horizontal line.4 Here we see that Kant's claim that
touch "is the foundation of the two other
objective senses, sight
and hear-
ing"
offers itself
up
as the view from the matter
being broached,
a
dynamic
image
that demands the shift from
touching
to
tasting
as the
penetrating
line
passes through
the defensive
line,
the wall of the monadic self. At the
same
time,
such an
insight
is self-reflexive and
requires
what Derrida terms
a transferential third
perspective
that is able to
step
outside of the broached
material and see in the abstract the
just
described movement.
At this
point, however,
a
good
mechanical
engineer,
who most
likely
knows
nothing
of
Derrida,
or this
philosophical discussion,
will realize that
we have
simply
arrived at the
recognition
of the need to introduce into
our
conceptualizations
an element called
(with
no
fanfare)
the differential:
something redirecting energy,
in this
case,
back and forth between the hori-
zontal
(the up
/ down
looping)
and the vertical
(the line). Conceptualizing
such a differential has been a critical crux for
engineers
for a
very long
time. It was no
surprise,
for
instance,
for me to learn from a recent review
of "Leonardo da Vinci:
Man, Inventor,
Genius"
(at Chicago's
Museum of
Science and
Industry)
that what the show reveals via its effort at construct-
ing
the machines da Vinci
obsessively
drew is that the famous inventor was
haunted
by
a desire to disclose the "concrete architectural and mechanical
elements that could be combined into ever more exotic and
sophisticated
creations. Here is a
simple
machine that turns circular motion into vertical
motion;
over there is one that turns vertical motion into
sideways
motion"
(Rothstein B7).
Like da
Vinci,
I
gained
this
insight experientially,
in
my
employment
as a
motorcycle
mechanic.
Any good
tradesman will make
an effort to understand fundamentals and does so in
part
out of the Zen-
1 96
Religion
& Literature
like
power
such
principles possess.
As a
way
to conclude this
preliminary
investigation
into western
conceptions
of
existence,
I will
try
now to
point
out some
ways
to
complicate
further the schema we have come to
posit
as
operating
between the two tablets in the second fold: this
looping against
/
within / as the
oncoming
flow. I do so in the
hope
that these modifications
will
ultimately
form more nuanced differential mechanisms in our common
modeling
of
post-Freudian subjectivity.
To do that I would like to return to HammilPs
reading
of the war
engine
and its counter
move,
what Hammill
perceives
as an
internalizing
and mas-
tering
that he locates
quite brilliantly
in Bronzino's
paintings
of beautiful
boys,
where each
portrait appears
as the
epitome
of
civility
and
grace.
Like
Hammill,
I
recognize
that the western
religion binary
is in
play
here as
well,
structuring
the nascent secular set of ideals that comes to be bound
up
with
the twin
projects
of humanism and civic
liberalism;
he
puts
it thus: "while the
modern
age explicitly
turns from a
theological
version of
history,
neverthe-
less it also
recuperates Christianity's eschatological thinking
in the form of
political utopianism" (12).5
But here I wish to force a
point.
Hammill offers
this
conceptualization
for the forces he sees as
uniting
those war
drawings
and
the
portraits:
"The civilized
subject's introjection
of
judgment
is not a direct
response
to the threat of war" but rather "a
duplication
of the distinction
between
interiority
and
exteriority by
which the
subject attempts
to affirm
a limited sense of
freedom, primarily economic,
in relation to communal
mores that the civilized
subject
sees itself as
having superseded" (9).
In
many respects,
I
agree
with this
formulation,
but we can
sharpen
the model:
Lacan comments in his first Seminar that "One has to find another word
than
introjection"
to
"designate [as]
the correlate of
projection" (83).
Here
Lacan is
pointing
out that
introjection
and
projection
cannot be
co-joined
because
introjection,
which is
always
the
speech
of the
other,
"introduces an
entirely
different dimension from that of
projection,"
and then as a
way
to
explain
his dimension
metaphor
Lacan seizes
upon
the
ego
as that
which,
switch-like,
unites the different dimensions of
introjection
and
projection
(83). Again
what we have arrived at is the failure of the
psychoanalyst
to
pursue
Freud's schema back to its
source,
to mechanical
engineering,
which
is to
say
the
figural
world of motive
devices,
a world birthed in the second
fold.
Simply
stated,
in
Lacan,
the
ego
here is
operating
as a differential: it
converts the
energy
of
introjection
into the
energy
of
projection.
At this
point
it is
possible
to
expand
our model of the motive
system
operating
between the two
tablets,
at least as I see it in its 2.0
instantiation,
that
is,
in the second fold
signaled by
Milton: the
introjection
is the circular
looping
of the self that
operates
in the vertical
plane, projection
is here as-
sociated with forward
motion,
with the
straight
line
speeding
toward the
right
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 97
margin.
Its
opposite
in the horizontal
plane
is
retrojection;
at the
juncture
of the three actions is the self understood as a
differential,
as a construct
designed
to facilitate the
re-routing
of
energy
flows. Paul
Verhaeghe
states
this
directly
in his excellent
primer
"The Lacanian
Subject":
"The
ensuing
alienation is a continuous
flywheel
movement around the lack in the chain
of
signifiers, resulting
in what Lacan called Uavenement du
sujet,
the advent
of the
subject" (168).
At the risk of
being charged
with
over-reading
the
metaphor
here,
I am
going
to work
through
the
implications
that follow from
the characterization of the
subject
as that which is
caught up
in a
flywheel
movement. One of the easiest
flywheel designs
to
picture
is that found in
a
modern,
conventional
bicycle.
On such a
bicycle,
the
flywheel apparatus
consists of two cranks with
pedals
that are attached to a front
sprocket
around which a chain will run. The
up
/ down motion of the
cyclist's legs
provides
the
energy
that is then
spun by
the cranks into the circular motion
of the
flywheel.
The chain
wrapped
around the
sprocket
then
completes
the
differential as it enables the conversion of
up
/ down vertical motion into
the forward or backward horizontal motion of the wheels. There are of
course variations: the
original tall-wheelers,
the
velocipedes
of the
1860's,
with their delicate and miniaturized
trailing
wheel,
dispensed
with
any
sort
of drive train so there was no chain
running back,
the rear wheel of the
carriage simply being
used as is done on a child's
tricycle today
or as one
uses the rudder or tail-fin of a boat to
steady
the
craft,
but what we now
understand to be the
platonic bicycle employs
one chain
running
on a
pair
of toothed
sprockets.
That is the sort of
cycle
I believe Freud
contemplated
(of
the
type
associated with the British manufacturer
James Starley
who
showed such a
project
to the world in 1
884)
and
indirectly
served as a
model,
though
the mechanical motion
just
described was no doubt a
ubiquitous
sight
-
think but of those massive
gangs
of train wheels
cranking
out of a
station. Please
keep
in mind then that I am not
arguing
that the self exists
as a
metaphysical
motive device on the order of a
bicycle
or a train. Rather
I am
arguing
that a set of
interlocking psychoanalytic concepts
now central
to
theory
derive from Freud's decision to model the mind
using
the discourse
of mechanical
engineering,
most
especially
motive
transportation,
and that
Freud's
thought
derives
directly
from a mode of
conceptualization largely
inaugurated
in the Renaissance where what I have I dubbed the second fold
gets fully deployed
as a
register
of the western
psyche.
I have
already
run
through
one such
arrangement
in order to
posit
ret-
rojection
as the
missing
term to which Lacan refers. To
get
to it I
passed
through
two folds: the first fold which is a static face-off that features an in-
ward turn toward
negation (and introjection),
and a second fold that
respon-
sively opens space through
motive
conceptions
that turn on
retrojection
and
1 98
Religion
& Literature
projection.
I also made much of the rotation of Sinai back to Eden in order
to
clarify
what I mean when I
speak
of the Miltonic self as
fundamentally
an
example
of the blot between the
primary
and
secondary symptom set,
or,
to use Derrida's
phrasing,
Milton's
epic
is an
early
aesthetic
rendering
of
being
as the
place
of thresholds
-
an
encasing
of the
past
that is at the same
time a
flight
from vehiculated
subjectivity
to
mapping. Derrida,
no
doubt,
understood all this better than
I,
but in his work I see a consistent
repres-
sion or
slippage,
and that action occurs most
prominently
when he converts
conceptualizations
of the second fold
(arcs
of vehiculated
movement)
into
third fold roads where we
get
the
replacement
of the
mechanically
motive
mindset sketched so far with mediational
networks,
models that
increasingly
mimic first the
language
of electrical
engineering
and then
cybernetics (a
development brilliantly
detailed
by
Friedrich
Kittler).
Derrida returned to
address this
repression
-
this
symptom
of his
-
fully
aware that
though
the
aim
may appear
modest,
it would
require
the deconstruction of
Christianity
to execute. It has been
my hope
here to offer a model
illustrating why
this
is so.
(Similarly,
with
Lacan,
I
hope
I have demonstrated how
-
precisely
because his theoretical
system
is a creature of the third fold
-
his
metaphors
derive from second fold
operations
and as such need to be seen in those
terms.) Finally
I
glimpse
-
and so would now like to
speak
of a fourth fold
facing
us: in the words of
Jameson,
it "forces us
precisely
to concentrate on
the break itself: a meditation on the
impossible,
on the unrealizable in its
own
right" (232).
University of
Louisville
NOTES
1 . Freud's
unwillingness
to
acknowledge telepathy
as a
component
is illustrated
clearly by
Derrida in
"My
Chances." There Derrida offers a
reading
of a Freudian anecdote in which
a coachman drove the
good
doctor
(who
was on his
way
to treat an
elderly
female
patient)
to the
wrong
address. To attach
prophetic meaning
to this turn events
(and conclude,
for
example,
that the old
lady
would soon
die)
would
be,
for
Freud,
to
practice superstition
and
not
psychoanalysis.
On the other
hand,
for
Freud,
if he had
simply
driven himself to the
wrong address,
then that misfortune would have
psychoanalytic significance.
For
Derrida,
in
making
this distinction "Freud seems
immediately
to exclude all communication between the
coachman's unconscious and his own"
("My
Chances"
22).
Derrida
convincingly
contends
that Freud closes down this line of
thought
in an effort to found
psychoanalysis
as a
posi-
tive science and that "Lacan follows Freud to the letter on this
point" (24).
In The
Uncanny,
Nicholas
Royle provocatively explores
Derrida's surmise that it is "difficult to
imagine
a
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 199
theory
of what
they
still call the unconscious without a
theory
of
telepathy. They
can be
neither confused nor dissociated"
(qtd.
in
Royle 261).
The
strongest
connection between
my
effort in this
essay
and
Royle
's brilliant deconstruction of
narratology
comes when he
notes
exactly
the same
linkage
at the
analogical
level of
literary criticism,
where structuralist
(or post-structuralist discourse)
is still
operating
with the residue of what he calls "Christian
ambiance"
(260).
Thus he shows how all the new
jargon
-
"focalization"
being
the
recently
installed master term
-
reinscribes the Christian
ideology
that animated the earlier terminol-
ogy
centered on "omniscience." Seen as such this
marriage (of engineering
and
Christianity)
in
literary
criticism is then
juxtaposed by Royle
with the effort to reveal a kind of animate
and erratic web of
flashing connections, periodically uniting
at a
telepathic
level various
individual
minds, forming
a kind of
shifting map
that would be identified as the true
(un-
canny)
heir of the
psychoanalytic
and the
Judaic.
2. See
especially "Antigone
between the two
deaths,"
The Ethics
of Psychoanalysis, pp.
270-
83,
where Lacan
writes,
"From our
point
of view man is in the
process
of
splitting apart,
as if
as a result of
spectral analysis,
an
example
of which I have
engaged
in here in
moving along
the
joint
between the
imaginary
and the
symbolic
in which we seek out the
relationship
of
man to the
signifier,
and the
'splitting'
it
gives
rise to in him"
(273-4).
The
temporal
schema
created
by Lupton
and Reinhard in their
pun (of
Mosaic tablets for the deaths that bracket
Antigone)
is one
deserving
of
deep
reflection. This
essay
offers a
response
in its
suggestion
that this "fold"
(of
deaths over
tablets)
can be situated in a three fold schema
where,
here
for
example,
we see Lacan's
modeling working firmly
in the second fold when he
speaks
of
"moving along
the
joint
of the
imaginary
and the
symbolic."
This
conception
is controlled
fundamentally by
the discourse of mechanical
engineering, just
as we see it in Freud. From
experience,
I
suggest that,
with
Lacan,
we are
deeply lodged
in
engineering
discourse at this
point,
and it is not third fold discourse
("media" theory)
that Lacan elsewhere
adopts (that
takes its cue from network or
systems theory
where the
presiding spirit
is that of electrical
circuits,
and solid state or laser
technology).
Rather Lacan's talk of the
real, symbolic
and
imaginary
is "old school"
-
on the order of motive science and the internal combustion
motor and
nothing beyond
what
you
would hear in the back of
any good "hop-up" shop
fifty years ago.
3. In what can
only
be described now as a
fascinating example
of willful
self-immolation,
Miltonists have worked hard to sever the vital connections between their field and Shake-
speare.
For
example,
Albert C. Labriola concludes his
entry
on
Shakespeare
in A Milton
Ency-
clopedia (
1
979) by declaring
that "The numerous
parallel passages
cited between
Shakespeare
and Milton are not
very meaningful,"
and that "substantial indebtedness seems
unlikely"
(vol 7, 191).
Now contrast that with the
prevailing
view from
fifty years
earlier
-
James
Holly
Hanford's far more reasonable intuition that
though
we shall never know "How far
Shakespeare permanently
determined Milton's modes of
conceiving
dramatic characters
and situations. . .we seem to catch in the
representation
of Satan
plotting against
Adam and
Eve an echo of similar relations of
Iago, Othello,
and
Desdemona,
or in his
unrepentant
remorse a
parallel
to the
soliloquy
of
King
Claudius"
(265). (A
few brave souls are
swimming
against
this isolationist
current, among
them
John Guillory,
Paul Stevens and Harold
Toliver.)
The connection I am
positing
between
Shakespeare's
Merchant and Milton's
epic
rests
fully
on the method
espoused by Hanford, namely
an
appreciation
for
English
literature.
4. But see also Susannah B.
Mintz,
Threshold Poetics: Milton and
Intersubjectivity
for an
insightful
and innovative account that utilizes the work of "feminist
psychoanalyst" Jessica
Benjamin
to
argue
that Milton
explores
in his
poetry
"a dialectical self that
emerges
from
the
complexities
of
interrelationality" (26).
5. I
agree fully
with
Slavoj
Zizek that
utopic projection
of the sort we see in Milton in
200
Religion
& Literature
itself cannot be said to constitute the
appearance
of what Freud will call
paranoid projec-
tion. As Zizek
notes,
the standard
theory
of
'projection,' according
to which the anti-Semite
'projects'
onto the
figure
of the
Jew
the disavowed
part
of himself is not sufficient. The
figure
of the
'conceptual Jew'
cannot be reduced to the
externalization of the anti-Semite's 'inner conflict.' On the
contrary
it bears witness to
(and
tries to
cope
with)
the fact that the anti-Semite is
originally decentered, part
of an
opaque
network whose
meaning
and
logic
elude his control.
(195)
Zizek here
rightly
notes the need to
distinguish
between normative
projection,
understood
as a kind of
garden variety
exercise in border maintenance
(Carl
Schmitt's friend or foe
test),
and the kind of
psychotic projection
we find in what I call the PPB model of house
destroying
violence
(what
Walter A. Davis terms now
"ecocide")
where the violent act is
understood as a
projection (P),
the
doing
of a
paranoid (P), seeking
to harmonize
by passing
sublimely through
a
blockage (B,
hence
PPB).
Zizek's normative
projection
is instead an act
of
distinguishing
that is
classically oedipal
and wards off the fall into
psychosis, though
at
the inevitable cost of
misalignment.
This
misalignment
in Milton is
figured
most
basically
as
shifting
the nonce word from God as
Logos
to a God reached via a swerve around the
negative prohibition
that is Death.
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