On St. Augustine

A Public Penance -- St. Augustine's Confessions and the Open-Reader Text



Autobiographical writing assumes many forms, some of which are more private than others: there are those written for publication and mass-exposure (such as memoirs or biographies), while others may be intended to be private (diaries, journals). Out of all the varieties of autobiographical record, the most personal statement imaginable is an individual's confession to God. The purpose of this essay is to determine the aim and significance of Augustine's choosing to write his confession to God as a text open to all readers. According to Henry Chadwick, while a great deal of the text is devoted to praising the goodness of God, the Confessions may also be read as an exercise in self-justification. If this is so, then how does Augustine justify making this intensely private, intimately personal testimony a document of public presentation?

To answer this question, it is necessary to analyze Augustine's view of human nature and his understanding of Christianity in general. When Augustin speaks of himself, he has little to say that is good; in the very first book of the Confessions, Augustine presents his view of infancy: "At the time of my infancy I must have acted reprehensibly...infant limbs [are] innocent, not the infant's mind." In later passages, he chastises himself with even greater vigor: "I became evil...it was foul, and I loved it...I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall." Augustine's self-loathing is also seen when he speaks of God, as he sees God in terms of discipline and punishment: "You imposed discipline on me and have forgiven me the sin of desiring pleasures." With this statement, Augustine becomes a champion of self-denial; his psychology is further revealed when he writes of the penalties that befell him during his youth: "Punishments were imposed...and no-one feels sorry for the children or the adults." He delights in the fact that he was punished because, as the reader knows, his conception of God is also based on punishment: we are all to be punished for the evil, sinful nature of humankind. It is on the basis of this model--children punished by the adult world, humanity punished by God--that Augustine makes his sweeping, authoritative judgments: "These are the chief kinds of wickedness. They spring from the lust for domination or from the lust of...sensuality"; "The consequence of a distorted will is passion."

Augustine's narrative gains credibility when he confesses his former willingness to live a sinful life: "I came to Carthage and...sought an object for my love; I...polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence." He states how he enjoyed the sinful pleasures of the non-Christian life and takes great pains to detail his psychological state during that period. For instance, when the adolescent Augustine steals the pears, he states: "Wickedness filled me. ... My desire was...not stealing but merely the excitement of doing what was wrong." In relating youthful misdeed like the stealing of the pears, Augustine uses the literary device of prosopopoeia to construct a portrait of himself in words. In the Confessions, Augustine paints himself as the happy sinner: a man who has lived a sinful life, yet was divinely blessed. Indeed, a second prosopopoeia occurs when Augustine is given sainthood, as his entire life is sanctified when the Church enshrines his memory. In this way Augustine becomes a Christ figure who is born, dies, and rises again--the second time as the father of the Church, as one who has lived a life 'free from sin'. Still another prosopopoeia occurs when Augustine constructs the 'face' of God in the following terms:



Who are you then, my God? ... Most high, utterly good, utterly powerful, most omnipotent, most merciful and most just, deeply hidden yet most intimately present, perfection in both beauty and strength...incomprehensible, immutable yet changing all things.



In passages such as this one, Augustine justifies his behavior simply by constructing an all-powerful-God who exists as supreme legislator over every facet of the world, surrounding the individual at every turn. As an unintended result, Augustine makes the soul a prisoner of God just as he makes the body a prisoner of its own sexual desire. This idea of man-as-prisoner, constantly under surveillance by the all-seeing eye of God, would come to play a role of tremendous importance in the Western conception of human nature. Augustine's justification lies simply in the fact that he recognizes God as the unblinking ruler of life, and pays him His due tribute with flattery and an elegant prose.

"In seeking him they shall find him, and in finding they will praise him," Augustine says, seeing his confession as an act performed through God's love. To Augustine, this confession is a form of oblation, a gift-giving performance to God. "How can I call upon you," Augustine asks, "Surely when I call on him...[it is] an act of believing in [God]." This indicates Augustine's motivating force in writing the Confessions is to affirm his faith. "Lord, I would seek you, calling upon you--and calling on you is an act of believing in you." For this sentence, it is clear that Augustine believes his confession is an act of faith; the act of writing down his sins will bring him closer to the lord and closer to the nature of God. If this logic were to continue, it would follow that the more Augustine writes about God, the more he is a believer. Although this reasoning may have its holes, it nevertheless agrees with the logic of this period. In his ontological proof, St. Anselm (1033-1109) verifies the existence of God with a tautological statement that was, at best, circular and fallacious: according to Anselm, God's existence is proven simply by the fact that we can imagine such a being. Augustine employs a similar kind of logic when he reasons, "Why do I request you come to me when, unless you were within me, I would have no being at all?"

Certainly, the open-readered quality of the narrative is related to the religion Augustine has become a member of; Christianity itself is a self-justifying pfactice, as the Church legislates which thoughts and deeds are permitted and which are not. If one is a Christian, one is obligated to remain committed to the Christian code, a regime of signs which uses the Bible as a sacred, unquestionable text. Augustine uses his alignment with the Christian faith and its self-justifying ideology as a way of covering his tracks--this mendacious new way of defending the self: the tactics of the early Christians who throw down their weapons, as if to say, 'Look here, I come unarmed--let me go in peace--or else run the risk of jeopardizing thy soul'. Augustine clearly understands how, by using the Bible as the proof-text of a divine will, one can have no weapons, yet remain impervious. Augustine uses this same authority of the Bible to flesh out and substantiate his arguments: in the first book alone, there are over sixty Biblical quotations. In this way, with scripture and entreaties, through supplication and prayer, Augustine creates the illusion of being true to the facts. Augustine's text is so dependent on Biblical references, one suspects that he cannot even draw breath without finding God on his lips.

In book VIII, Augustine relates the most important chapter in his life: his conversion. He begins by telling the story of Victorinus, whose conversion is met with great celebration. This conversion story foreshadows Augustine's own acceptance of the Christian faith. Upon hearing this story, Augustine eagerly decides to follow Victorinus' example; at that time, Augustine tells us, he was growing aware of a dichotomous will within his own being: "one carnal, the other spiritual...their discord robbed my soul of all concentration." After Ponticianus has gone, Augustine goes into the garden, where he is confronted by a vision of "the dignifies and chaste Lady Constinence," who gives Augustine the courage to accept a life of chastity by givine him insight into the nature of Christianity.



There were large numbers of boys and girls, a multitude of all ages, young adults and grave widows and elderly virgins. In every one of them was Continence herself, in no sense barred but 'the fruitful mother of children...'



This sequence with Lady Continence can be read as the story of a writer who discovers his audience: when Augustine sees the faces, he experiences a revelation--he is flooded with ecstasy and a sense of purpose. Augustine then experiences a second supernatural vision, coming in the form of a voice of a young child, repeating the phrase, "Pick up and read, pick up and read." Taking this voice as an instruction, Augustine reads a passage which speaks of the worthlessness of a life of the flesh, and writes, "with the last words... All the shadows of doubt were dispelled." With his conversion, Augustine renounces his sinful life and "ambition for success in this world." Having discovered that continence is the meaning of a Christian life, Augustine gains the inspiration and courage necessary to live as a man of God. He accepts his lot as a man whose pleasure lies in making faces with words; he will become a man of God, and will write an autobiography that will prompt others to a similar conversion.

Herein lies the justification for this most private testimony as a text to be read by others: by confessing his life as a sinner and his conversion to the Lord, Augustine sees his confession as a work that convinces one of the vanity of sinfulness and the emptiness of the sinful life. The Confessions are not for God alone but, rather, are addressed in the spirit of the Lord to all Christian believers and to all potential Christians; to all those Augustine saw when Lady Continence spread her arms and displayed the multitude of faces who remained continent, and served the Lord. By justifying his life's passage from sin to conversion, Augustine justifies the 'open-readered' nature of his text. He writes this public confession because he wishes to acknowledge the transformative power of Christ in the hopes that his reader may also experience a similar conversion. For the same reasons that he became a Christian, then, does Augustine allow others to read his confessions: to bring the human soul closer to God.

On the Baroque age

The music of the Baroque period was from 1600 to 1750 and it flourished in Europe, particularly in the regions of Italy, Germany, England, and France. This period was an age of Adventure and Innovation. The churches and courts were the center of music. The texture of the music was sung in the churches in the native tongue. The music played in the church was performed in sacred polyphonic and monophonic texture, the main instruments used was the organ and harpsichord in which skillful church musicians played in the church. The modern Churches today still use sacred polyphonic and monophonic texture. The music in the Baroque period focused on the Harmonic and choral writing of the music. What initially came out of this were the major and minor tonality systems which shifted from church modes to major and minor tonality systems. This was as system of scales in which focused on a cord of rest and a dominant cord of movement. This system changed in how people heard music. The term Modulation refers to a change from one key to another frequently by a harmonic progression.

The Baroque period was an era of innovation and great intellectual accomplishment. The sciences and new traditions in philosophy came into play and it was romantic and an era of the heights of accomplishment in music as well. The princes of the era created wealthy palaces which functions on the basis of creating new music for the kingdom. There were court-appointed composers and musicians, artists were deemed needed to supply the royal court with music and also to entertain the growing population of aristocrats. But even in the lower quarters, secular music and folk music was heightening in popularity. Protestant music became a significant contributor to Western music's harmonal shift and added to the repetoire of musical motifs and functions. There was a shift away from the polyphony of the Renaissance; songs were no longer sung in Latin nor were they founded on the structures of the Gregorian chants that we have previously covered in this course. Now the Lutheran chorale became the model for compositional structure and musical tonality formation.

Most of the time, music was being created to be sung by congregations and the chorale harmonization evidenced character or styles that were simple, chordal, homophonic, strophic and hymnlike. One of the great styles of music that we still continue to this day is the Opera and it had its genesis in the Baroque period; its development of the aria and the recitative were two great elements that caused this artistic style to thrive and bring a narrative element to music that was tremendously popular with both the royals and the commoners. The harpsichord and the organ were made the focal instrument of many works giving new artistic life to the instrument. Orchestras came into being and gave a new artistic palette for the composers and composers started to write music with the intention of evoking specific emotions, qualities of mind and with the purpose of focusing on specific instruments in the orchestra.

Musicians in the Baroque period became masters of their instrument as never before, displaying a musical virtuoisity hitherto unknown. The Baroque period witnessed the emergence of new genres and forms which remain in use even in contemporary times. Many of the instruments in our current listening repetoire first came into musical artistic production values during the Baroque period. Polyphonic music was still being composed, but now there was a shift in compositional activity to music with homophonic texture, a key component in writing music featured in Operas. The older, polyphonic style of music typically contained two or multiple melodic lines. A second significant development was the creation of the major-minor tonal system, which allows music to be written in the way we are familiar with today; diatonic writing, notes written in a key for a particular instrument is how we listen to music today still. Most of the music of the Baroque period was diatonic, with notes outside the key being referred to as chromatic or altered notes.

With the emergence of the continuo, the musician who was responsible for the base line stressed the key musical signatures of the chordic harmonies. The role of the keyboard player is to "realize" the harmonic features of the work, working in conjunction with the continuo to reify or make the vocal melody line into a thing which structures and supports a new tonal music; this is in contrast to the model music we have covered in previous weeks and musical eras. Composers found the liberties gained through this new mode of music making allowed them to compose with more skill and surprise; their composition took on a new life as word painting as Renaissance composers came to be able to communicate more thoroughly through music specific feelings or emotions. Composers used music to represent text or scenes in literature and were able to do so more positively through their increasing adaptation of the word painting techniques up until the late Baroque period where they became more accomplished practitioners of the art.

In a Baroque piece of musical art, the rhythm of the music is noted for its regularity, energy, and time-sequences. The figured bass is noted for its improvisational movements, maintaining an even rhythm and dynamism throughout the piece. Now dances in both the courts and popular culture became the genesis for baroque pieces. As these dance pieces began to proliferate, so did the appearance of pieces in which the voice -- for the first time in the history of Western music -- came to assume the status of equal import as a musical instrument. While there was no set standard for instruements in an orchestra, the instruments in orchestras were mostly similar to those used today. With these musical changes and innovations, there was also a continuation of older forms of Renaissance music featuring polyphony as these forms were adapted and used for Baroque music that was instrumental. New musical forms exploded onto the scene taking on a new range of expression such as chamber music and multimovement orchestra pieces, choral works and of course operas.

In 1600 the opera was given birth from taking a new form "from the spirit of music" and came into being from a variety of factors including the previously mentioned Word Painting movement where Baroque composers used music to convey the emotions of meaning of texts; the first featured use to accompanied melodies which was a shift from polyphonic to homophonic compositional elements and textures, the first features use of words presented in a cogent manner meant to be understood by listeners. The first operas, produced in Italy around 1600, were works such as Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi and Dido and Aeneas by an Englishman, Henry Purcell (which was produced in 1689). From this opera comes the era's most notable aria, which had its genesis in Virgil's Aeneid, a story of two people who falls madly in love with one another.

Orchestra were occasionally performed in conjunction with dance suites. The predominant dances were called the allemande, the courant, sarabande and the gigue, there were used sets of contrasting dances to form a single multimovement work. Writing to produce multiple combinations of instruments -- whether in orchestras or as solo performance pieces -- were the church sonata and the champer sonata. Likewise, there were two major choral forms in the Baroque period, known as the cantata and the oratorio. The oratorio was a complex composition performed in concert and the cantata was part of the worship ceremony. But a similarity in both cantatas and oratorios was the use of arias. The accompanying musical figures were different for both forms however; cantatas were frequently accompanied by an organ, while oratorios were accompanies by an orchestra.

The most famous musical presence to come from the Baroque period is one still played frequently, the name is Johann Sebastian Bach, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest composers of music of all time. He was part of a noted musical German family. He was a court organist in Weimar and wrote music for the organ. His famous choral music he did not compose until the end of his life, when he resided in Leipzig, where he was employed as cantor for St. Thomas's Church. More than any parallel figure from his day and age, Bach's music innovations and accomplishments continue to be praised and celebrated even today. His musical achievements include his use of tonal counterpoint in choral music, his adaptation of chord progressions in chorale harmonizations and his use of the art of the fugue in paino music. He is simply the universal master of compositional technique, and is noted for his mastery of polyphonic usage of tonal harmonic compositional works. His most significant works of art more than compositions are his Mass in B Minor, St. Matthews Passion and more than 300 church cantatas. Through my interest in this course I was led to borrow a CD copy of my friend, it was Glenn Gould plays Bach's Goldberg Variations and I was tremendously impressed. It is also worth noting that Bach's music was not appreciated to a great extent during the Baroque period, it was more or less rediscovered during the early 1800s.

I liked the Goldberg Variations so much that I decided to do a little research on it. The Goldberg Variations was composed in 1741 when Bach was employed as a cantor in Leipzig. The Goldberg Variations were published as part of a series of musical practice exercises called the Clavierubung ("keyboard practice") in German, but was considered to difficult to play so the music did not sell well. At this time in Germany music publishing was Bach's many way of earning a living but Bach was not so much interested in catering to his public audience as he was interested in exploring music of "higher dimensions". This work was composed for the harpsichord and is an example of a high Baroque lyricism that is distinctly German. It begins with an aria, a sarabande -- in this case a regular dance with binary metrics in sixteen bars. The aria is repeated at the end of the piece and in between there are regular canons spaced out at regular internals; they are based and arranged around the number three. A surprising feature of this work is that Bach introduces the concept of a Quadlibet. According to my research on the internet, a quodlibet is "a contrapuntal piece built upon several different melodies" and Bach injects some humor into the work by incorporating two folk tunes. There are even some unvoiced lyrics given here, including the lines: "Cabbage and turnips have driven me away/Had my mother cooked meat, I would have chosen to stay." I now see Bach as one of the most playful composers we have studied thus far.

Another native of Germany who was among the great composers of the Baroque era is George Frederick Handel. Handel gained widespread fame and musical acclaim as a master of the Opera during his lifetime (unlike Bach). His most significant acclaim came from his composition of oratorios, especially Handel's Messiah. While researching on the internet, I discovered that Handel's Messiah has a long and complex history. It was composed after Handel left Germany and after a trip to Italy, when he settled in England; it was first presented at the Royal Music Hall in Dublin on April 13, 1743. Handel's Messiah is unlike other Baroque oratorios in that it does not present a story in the traditional manner. The Messiah is unlike most of Handel's oratorios because here the soloists do not dominate the music and the choir does not sing only brief choruses, as is typical of Handel's work. According to Laurence Cummings, director of the London Handel orchestra, the chorus is responsible for carrying the action forward and moves the story forward. I found this quote in the Smithsonian online magazine. It is interesting to note that this is the best known work by Handel. The Messiah is a Christmas tradition and is still being performed by orchestra over two hundred years after the death of its composer.

What was a music consciousness dominated by sacred and polyphonic choral music changed after the early Renaissance and late Middle Ages. The rise of the Baroque period changed the given musical forms and elements of style available to composers. Now composers had the ability to choose between choral and instrumental music and between sacred and secular music forms. The Baroque period allowed for new forms to take root including the major-minor tonal system, homophonic textures and compositions for orchestras. Opera came into being and orchestras came into play using instruments that are common still today; the foundation was laid for symphonic works and the string quartets that would become common during the classical period. In my opinion, the most important distinguishing characteristic of the Baroque period was the use of music to mimic dramatic actions as understood in a narrative text.

On de Man vs. Derrida

Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and the Production of Deconstruction



Being more sedentary, I was attacked not by boredom but by melancholy; my langour turned to sadness. I wept and sighed for no reason. ... Finally I fell seriously ill. ... How sweet death would have been if it had come then. ... My soul would have departed in peace without the cruel consciousness of man's injustice, which poisons life and death alike. --Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions



The last twenty-five years have been a watershed era in the history of Rousseau interpretation: when Jacques Derrida, creator of the critical apparatus known as Deconstruction, devoted a larger section of his influential work, Of Grammatology, to a reading of The Confessions, he propounded a view which broke with the standard line of Rousseau interpretation. According to Derrida, the proper name, that signature which is put to the text in the form "Rousseau" constitutes a significant event, not only in literary history, but in the history of philosophy as well, as it marks the developmemt of a new form of subjectivity. Rousseau's Confessions, then, must be regarded as a significant literary event in that this text marks the emergence of this new human subject, Rousseau, who relates the story of his life in a revolutionary way. Derrida finds Rousseau's text to be of prime significance because, in this work, Rousseau's story is based, not only on his experiences in the physical world, but on his feelings and emotional reactions as well.

Derrida's interpretation of Rousseau entailed his discovery that his texts were significantly marked by "the praise of living speech," indicating his adherence to a system of binary oppositions which privileged speech over and above writing as the primary, originary, most natural mode of communication. According to Derrida, Rousseau's view of the relation between the spoken word and written language justifies this view, as he sees speech as the manifestation of full, immediate presence whereas writing falls short of these qualities. In this view writing is hampered by the fact that it is never permitted to manifest a presence which is not, at the same time, an absence; that is, writing is unable to make its presence known without coalescing with words, the mediating signifiers which allow thoughts to be shared. This relationship runs to the detriment of writing, for Rousseau sees speech as a self-sufficient organic mechanism, which writing serves only as a supplement, an excess which, potentially, could be used as a substitute for one's nature. If one were to deny one's natural existence in this way, then one would be in great danger, for the supplement ought not to stand in the place of what it supplements. Rousseau cautions his readers against falling into that situation, as he did, using sexual fantasies, first as a supplement, later as a replacement for the sexual experience itself, a substitute for the sexual dimension of human life.

Extrapolating from this concept, Derrida suggests that the best example of a supplement standing in to take the place of the real is in those situations where speech, being unable to perform the task of communication, must be replaces by a written language which is able to communicate. Aware of the inherent falsity in the logic of interpersonal communication, Rousseau laments his subjugation to writing as a necessary means of disseminating his thoughts; however, in reaction against this, the dominance of the secondary over the primary, he casts writing into the role of a 'dangerous supplement' in that it denies our existence as authentic beings. The society which acknowledges writing as its primary mode of communication becomes a society of simulation, artifice, supplementarity, as writing imposes a space which isolates individuals, establishing a form of social existence which permits the decline of being, of civilization, of society as a whole by repositioning the social world on the side of decadence, novelty and everything that runs counter to a healthy society. This world which Derrida prophecies vis-a-vis Rousseau, this world where being has suffered a fall (Verfall), a lapse, an erosion of authenticity, is a world where the natural system of priorities has been disturbed by the logic of supplementarity.

Through his construction of an idealized world where writing exercises no detrimental influence on the social order, Rousseau envisions a community which exists in a state of purity, a society free from the unnatural classifications and hierarchies of class and social rank. As Rousseau sees it, the most advantageous quality of this ideal community is reflected in its structure, whose transparency enables it to come to a full awareness of itself as presence. However, Derrida debunks Rousseau's ideal society of non-writing, stating that the pernicious figure of writing is always already present in his attempt to conceive of the pre-alphanumeric society; indeed, writing is present even prior to his attempt to conceive of the natural state of the world: the triadic psychology in inscription, craftsmanship and textual production have so throughly permeated his being that Rousseau is unable to dissociate himself, even in his most daring conceptual moment, from the society of writing, of supplementarity.

Rousseau's organic community conceals itself, denying that it contains traces of the metaphysics of presence but, as Derrida points out, Rousseau is unable to eradicate these distinguishing marks. This is a feature that depletes the community of any authenticity which Rousseau may have ascribed to it, for these metaphysical principles merely reconfigure the supplementary society which Rousseau seeks to break free from by inverting the social order; he merely alters the relationships of dominance and subjugation in precisely an inverse fashion; thus, this 'ideal' society prescribed the absolute marginalization of writing to the despotism of living speech. So, too, is this society contaminated by the cultural logic which necessitates the use of supplements, as Derrida proclaims that any creation of Rousseau's will, by necessity, be marked by an order of subliminal constraints that function in such a way that any meaning Rousseau attempts to impose upon his text is subject to the alterity of textual deployment, that is, the inherent potentiality of a misinterpretation in the circuit from producer to receiver, against all of his express intentions; Derrida sums up this paradox of Rousseau's attempt to conceive that which has never taken place, to conceptualize the pre-originary perspective, saying, "Such is the constraint of the supplement, such, exceeding all the language of metaphysics, is this structure 'almost inconceivable to reason'."

By denouncing writing as both a perverted copy of speech and the dispersal of presence, and by positing the opposition which places writing against speech, in its dichotomous conceptual scheme, Derrida sees Rousseau's text as reaffirming the foundation of philosophies which, like metaphysics, are complicit with those essentializing, totalizing modes of thought which need to be subverted. This characteristic of Rousseau's thought is, in Derrida's opinion, proof that he represents yet another figure who has entered into a complicitous relationship with the logocentric tradition which has marked Western meta-philosophical discourse since the age of the Greek fathers. Logocentrism, as Derrida defines it, stands for that tradition in Western philosophy that postulates a belief in presence, a belief in the existence of a center, comprising the belief in an inner being called the self, and a belief in a central repository of meaning. As a result of this logocentric bias, Rousseau's concept of a small community where self-presence is accessible to each and every citizen signifies Rousseau's subscription to a philosophical inheritance associated with Plato. According to Derrida, it is to Rousseau's credit that his writing adheres to the dominant values of the logocentric tradition; although the tradition itself may be deplored, nevertheless, Rousseau must be praised as a writer who is consistent both in his philosophy of writing and in his psychology as an author.

Some years later, Derrida's deconstructive reading was challenged in an essay where Paul de Man turned the tables on Derrida, deconstructing this deconstructive reading of Rousseau. De Man analyzes Derrida's critical methodology and poses Derrida's engagement with Rousseau's text in "That Dangerous Supplement" as a doubling of the relationship Rousseau has with the text of his autobiographical confessions. In this way de Man suggests a similarity in the posture of the two authors, finding a similarity in the way they position themselves in relation to their texts, how they manifest their being textually, and how this textual being reveals a hidden complimentarity between the two producers of text. Specifically, the similarity between these two authors lies in their dual relationship to the logocentric tradition. Pace Derrida, it is de Man's contention that Rousseau may not be classified as logocentric in that his thinking is far from consistent; indeed, if one were to accept Derrida's thesis as a rule, then Rousseau's text would be marked by numerous incongruities. In fact, as de Man's close analysis of the Confessions reveals, Rousseau never ceases to undermine his own text; hence, Derrida's attempt to make Rousseau into an icon of logocentrism must be seen as fallacious.

By choosing to remain ignorant of this phenomenon, this becomes, in de Man's view, Derrida's aporia, his critical blindness; however, this critical blindness is not something which can be avoided: gaining mastery over one's aporia is not an attainable goal, although there has been a massive effort to do so over the course of literary history. Deconstruction defers this goal in recognition of the fact that any text of penetrative, insightful literary criticism, including the texts of Jacques Derrida, contains, to some degree, the blindness that is necessary for criticism to function. Blindness is a necessary constituent of criticism in that, just as Rousseau's aporia supplies Derrida with the material he required to compose his text, so Derrida's own critical blindness provides de Man with a critical position from which he can construct an alternative reading of Rousseau. De Man catches Derrida in his blindness, criticizing him for inscribing his falsified tale of philosophical history, which de Man recognizes as a fictitious story; this anagnorisis, de Man's recognition, suggests that Derrida has employed Rousseau as a textual decoy.

De Man reveals that, just as the text of Rousseau's autobiography is controlled by his double desire to legitimize and de-legitimize logocentrism, so Derrida's text displays a similar contradictory nature. In a move to deconstruct the father of deconstruction, de Man attempts to show how Derrida practices a 'bad-faith' literary criticism in that, by imposing a structure upon Rousseau, positioning him as a logocentric structure, he sets the stage in advance of his critical performance. Through his reading of Rousseau, Derrida is constructing a fiction, and his fictive game has a number of repercussions on the critic's ability to validate an interpretation. The critic's ability to conceive of the author within the history of literature is significantly disabled when de Man says that any imposed historical structure can only be seen as a fictional artifice, a device which allows one to comprehend events in terms of their narrarative formation. Indeed, any critical enterprise which reads texts in terms of their broader 'historical' circumstances, or any such other attempt to legitimize the critic's appraisal of the author as a fictional being, must be denounced as an inauthentic representation of that literary personage. This is perhaps de Man's most salient critical point, when he disparages any critic who, as Derrida does, attempts to 'think' literature as a historical process; specifically, de Man suggests that the fallacy in Derrida's argument lies in the fact that he uses Rousseau's Confessions, a literary work, to complete his theory of philosophical history. This, then, becomes the centerpiece in de Man's problematization of Derrida's reading, for de Man views Derrida's placement of Rousseau's text in the logocentric tradition to be akin to imposing the work in an artificial historical context, in that the ready-made philosophical tradition of logocentrism is one which Derrida has judged, even before coming to Rousseau's text.

Furthermore, even before he begins writing, Derrida's text is impaired by the fact that he incorporates into his philosophical world-view Rousseau's notion of the true source of origins. In general, post-structuralism is skeptical about the origin of the text; indeed, the origin is deprived of any authoritative privilege in its claims to primacy, as the goal of deconstruction is to liberate the text from the context of the natural state. In fact in this instance both texts, de Man's as well as Derrida's, are equally unsuitable as originary critical principles, for the aim of deconstruction is to reveal that knowledge, although it may be located at an originary site, may not necessarily harbor that rich plenitude that one would suppose; in fact, it may be the case that this so-called origin, for all of its celebratory posturing, is, in fact, bankrupt due to the issue of dogmatic and empty directives at the expense of knowledge. If one were to inquire into the problem of the origin to the fullest extent one would see that this 'impossible' notion, the coexistence of two contradictory judgments such as de Man's and Derrida's is, in fact, no longer of relevance here. With deconstruction, the essential validity of rationalism is no longer simply taken for granted; in a similar movement, deconstruction demands a flight from all that which is culturally validated as 'natural', and it demythologizes these supposedly 'natural' attributes in an attempt to reveal them as mere cultural constructions.

As de Man sees it, Derrida's writing itself, both by being constructed through language and governed as a subject of language, evinces, at all times, a complicitious relation with the structure of rhetoric; that is, the rhetorical structure in which Derrida composes his text undermines the logical structure of his text while simultaneously, in a parallel movement, the fictional structure of Rousseau's text undermines the empirical structure of his existence, the 'true' facts of his life which he endeavors to communicate. Accordingly, de Man composes his piece with the knowledge that any attempt to annul Derrida's interpretation of Rousseau through an incontrovertible refutation would be to take up those same rules of the classical rhetorician which deconstruction looks to move away from, seeing those types of classical models as being bankrupt, both epistemologically and ideologically. Rather, through his critique of Derrida's reading, de Man's role is to provide a critical assessment of the philosophical ideas expressed in "That Dangerous Supplement"; thus, a deconstrucitve argument constitutes a move away from the argumentative style of classical rhetoric. This form of argument is institutionalized by Deconstruction in de Man's critique of Derrida.

Although de Man does not accept Derrida's rhetorical argument, this does not mean that he rejects his interpretation of Rousseau's texts. The clash of these two texts constitutes, in miniature, the emergence of the post-structural paradigm, in that here we are witness to the production of a language which is devoid of truth-claims in the classical rhetorical sense. In this way deconstruction presupposed a new understanding of the purpose of criticism: if de Man were to adopt an argumentative style as prescribed by the classical rhetoricians, any attempt to refute that which he perceives in Derrida as an untruth would inevitably degenerate into the kind of dogmatic philosophical discourse, condemned to remain imprisoned in the abstract language of modern literary criticism, without ever having confronted the real obstalces to thinking. Here we see that deconstruction is a method of criticism which renounces the beliefs in classical, rhetorical argument, rejecting the belief that the critic can achieve a solid ordering of the world through words and logic alone.

Taking up Nietzsche's critique of philosophical perspectivism, Paul de Man develops a philosophy of textuality which illuminates our profound inability to make any interpretation which is not itself a perspectival analysis; these new claims for the fidelity of interpretation potentially disrupt any claims that a critic, such as Derrida, might make concerning the authoritative interpretation of a text, such as Rousseau's (as well as any other claims to the province of truth, regardless of who is speaking). De-legitimizing any claims to a privileged authoritative position, de Man insists that any authoritative reading is, by necessity, a misreading. Here de Man suggests that the deconstructive critic is not a parlor-magician, a charlatan who waves a wand to perform his interpretative 'trick', revealing the truth which emerges from a concealed trap-door; he neither bids the truth to come forth through rational arguments, nor through the moral principles he affixes to the text. Rather, the deconstructive critic is one who inflicts a violence upon the text, imposing a reading through the sheer force of will alone, the critic's will-to-truth. De Man makes it clear: the modern critic is that person who attacks the moral convictions of the text he or she interprets, regarding them not as sacred literary masterpieces, such that one's reading is done in a state of fear and trembling; instead, the modern critic makes a continuous journey, traveling through literary history in a labyrinth of multiple reading pathways.

In his reading, Derrida's express intention is to circumvent a psychoanalytic reading of the text, a reading which privileges the discourse of the self as the foundational repository of truth and meaning. Similarly, de Man de-legitimizes those interpretations which privilege authorial intentions, implying that there is a discernable meaning which lies hidden in the text, yearning to be discovered; in its place he proposes a model of textuality that sees the text as a netowrk of contradictory impulses, a structure which, although not lacking in form, is not affirmed from outside the text: this, too, may be found in Derrida's argument, which destroys the metaphysical belief in a transcendental signified, a referent which exists outside the bounds of textuality. This pertains to the larger themes of deconstruction in general, for the two faces of Rousseau, as constructed by de Man and Derrida, are not be seen as mutually exclusive propositions, for the self is in fact a multiplicity of identities, and may be subject to any number of interpretive endeavors.

De Man introduces a new dimension to deconstruction when he constructs a model of literary criticism which specifies that no longer may the critic invoke a privileged route of access to a reality that is not subject to the rules of textuality. Any interpretation, to prevent its being rules out of court, is more than an enumeration of textual evidence gained by the critic; the deconstructive reading is one which simulates the social relationship created in the reading of a text: here de Man institutes a re-historicized view of literary criticism as the critical task is seen, not as a collection of signs divested of social context, but as signs whose social inclusiveness allows them to represent reality in a percipient way. In this way Derrida and de Man join forces to construct an ideal model of textuality and a model of the ideal critic, one who is blind to authorial intent, to psychological motivations found in the text and reproduced by historical literary criticism, a tradition which sediments a fixed image around both the literary figure and their work.

The claim that deconstruction signifies a reconfiguration of the model of logical argument itself may be made by looking at the reasons why de Man's piece does not refute Derrida in the traditional sense. Regardless of the disparities between the two critics, de Man and Derrida do not contradict each other for, as de Man's thesis illustrate, writers such as Rousseau are themselves divided, in that what they say is different from what they mean to say. The two presences, de Man and Derrida, are not to be taken as mutually exclusive entities; with the advent of deconstruction, to acknowledge one's indebtedness to one critic does not oblige one to exclude the critical estimation of the second critic, although this second viewpoint may run counter to the first. Deconstruction recognizes that the writer, a being engaged in a complex task, the creator of independent textual matrices, exists as a divided self, a schizophrenic in the sense that what the writer intends to vocalize is often radically different from what emits, or manifests itself only in an embryonic state, the subvocalizes words and images of a work left unfinished, such as the novels of Kafka, or the plays of Mallarme. Accordingly, deconstruction recognizes the differential space between these two critics and, affirming the existence of these differences, sees this space as an element that is necessary in order for these critics to root themselves in their critical positions. Specifically, the larger themes of deconstruction (and of post-structuralism in general) may be found in this new model of refutation, for Paul de Man's challenge to Derrida's thesis, his decoding and overcoding Derrida's model of Rousseau witnesses the establishment of a confluence of voices, a critical synthesis of these two thinkers, which opens up a range of potential critical horizons, including turning a critical eye to the production of textual production itself.

Deconstruction represents a new form of consciousness-logic, a form whose system of inclusionary rules are flexible enough to allow a plurality of theories concerning the essence of a text to coexist harmoniously, as this new logical order prevents the reader from directly splitting these two readings of Rousseau into two isolated categories, one being Derrida's view, the other being the view of de Man. Deconstruction recommends analysis over and above understanding for, in this new logical order, the onset of truth occurs simultaneously with the moment of decision. In my opinion, this deconstructive turn to our critical methodology is dependent on a radical shifting in out epistemological viewpoint which may have resulted from a bankruptcy of the state of the enlightenment paradigm. Deconstruction reveals an epistemological shift, a shift which, contrary to the opinion of critics such as Christopher Norris, does not automatically make it into an attempt to legitimize the free-ranging relativist viewpoint which, seeking to discredit the very notion of truth-values, casts epistemology aside as a thing of the past; however, it is true that critics such as Derrida believe that there no longer exists a legitimate referent outside the text which functions as the adjudicator of oppodisitional truth-claims. In this respect, post-structualism has led, not to an erosion of credibility in epistemological distinctions between truth and falsity, but to the production of a multiplicity of theories, some of which, like those of Derrida and de Man, although appearing to contradict each other, nevertheless reside amongst each other thanks to a deconstructive logic which contains a principle of non-contradiction.

In conclusion, let me re-state that, in composing his critique of Derrida, although de Man does not want to affirm the conclusions Derrida reaches, neither does he wish to extirpate in entirety Derrida's reading of Rousseau, replacing it with his own. The coexistence of these two contradictory judgments is only made possible in that, with deconstruction, critics are no longer required to vouch for a singular validity of their critical positions. Post-structual theories such as deconstruction allow a critic to abjure modernist traditions which emphasize the individual as a being which possesses the ability to fashion a truth-value out of some inherent transcendental quality of the self. So, too, the rightful critical position is not to be found in the sturm und drang of a self-validating individual; rather, it is something which simply emerges as a consequence of the clash of intellectual viewpoints. Thus, in allowing de Man to develop his argument, without displacing Derrida's essay from the locus of meaning, deconstruction provides for the safe passage of alternative modes of thought, and a wider discursive focus for society in general.

The opposition of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man reveals the larger themes of deconstruction, the critical apparatus which holds the view that there is no transcendental answer forthcoming; that there is no highest authority, not even the author's intentions, which can grant one particular interpretation as being the ultimate truth; that an argument of pure refutation is not the most successful argument. Deconstruction is about the expansion of textuality, not about closing it off by excising all that which does not corroborate with one's assumptions, and thus shutting doors to new forms of textuality. As de Man's essay shows, deconstruction is not about criticaal refutations; it attempts to enter into a new area, an area where the game of critical warfare does not play by the rules of the classical rhetoricians, not, for that matter, does it follow those rules of criticism that are based on the principles of a structualist philosophy: to do this would be to re-enter that hierarchical system of oppositions which deconstruction intends to forsake. Rather than prescribing a code of rules for one's critical movements, deconstruction instead seeks to re-codify these rules within a non-hierarchical structure.

In this way deconstruction hopes to instigate the revitalization of texts in such a way that new texts are produced which are able to assimilate other forms of textuality, thereby expanding the field of textual power. Deconstruction differs from the modernist paradigm of literary criticism in that, instead of canonizing a select number of literary texts and bringing them to a plane of eternal signification, a plane which all other texts must reverently bow to in acknowledgment before passing by, deconstruction allows texts to share in each other's power, regardless of whether or not they are seen as grandiose artistic masterpieces; in this way deconstruction seeks to prevent the marginalization of texts, as it is an empathic extension linking one text to all other forms of textuality, thus allowing everything to be said, permitting no exclusion, repression or non-filtration into the discusive cosmos that is human consciousness. Finally, by permitting this extension of textuality, this inter-textual communication, deconstruction allows critics such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man to reach beyond their individual singularity and into the province of ideal textuality, a site which in my opinion attains a supplemental position, in that it may serve as a substitute for the now debased concept of the transcendental signifier; it is here that each author is able to catch a glimpse into the universe of textual unity, and into the Being of the text itself.

Introduction

Obsession, Narcissism, Repression: A Literary Genealogy of Rousseau's Confessions



"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies--captivating books... If only a man know how to choose among what he calls his experiences, that which is truly his experiences, and how to record them truthfully." --Ralph Waldo Emerson



When I first read Howard Stern's Private Parts, I was struck by the many parallels between his work and the work of other autobiographers, writer who have attained significant places in literary history. While the status of Stern's book, by no means a 'literary' work, could not be more unlike the status of Rousseau's Confessions, a work that is considered to be among the major texts in the genre of autobiography, nevertheless, I feel it is quite appropriate to examine Stern's autobiography in relation to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as there are important insights to be gained through a comparison of the two works. In addition, Private Parts entered the literary world as an anomaly and, as an extremely successful anomaly, it faced the same kinds of discriminatory practices as the writings of Henry Miller.

The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau have helped to create the view that the craft of writing presents an obstacle to the acquisition of virtue. This notion is only part of a widespread cultural viewpoint that sees all artistry as being potentially more damaging to one's mooral character, much more so than other, more mundane professions, such as that of carpenter or soldier. Indeed, the Confessions so firmly established as a lascivious and immoral person that, even a hundred years after his death, the mere mention of Rousseau's name could send members of the female sex into a state of delirium which, in the words of a member of the Academie Francaise, bordered on epilepsy: "Their eyes burn with rage, they go pale and start frothing at the mouth from which there rushes a torrent of curses..." In the period immediately following his death, Rousseau came to be seen as a figure whose fame was derived from his morally outrageous life: David Hume, whom Rousseau lived with during the period he spent in England, later described Rousseau as a "monster who regarded himself as the only important being in the universe; Horace Walpole, who served as the first prime minister of England, dismissed Rousseau pithily, pronouncing him to be a charlatan; Voltaire needed a whole string of abusive phrases to sum up his feelings. He called Rousseau everything from "a malicious rascal" to "a little man bursting with conceit" to "a monster of vanity and baseness."

The second author I will be looking at in this project is Henry Miller, who is, in Erica Jong's opinion, the most frequently misinterpreted writer in the history of American literature, as he is seen from either one of two extreme viewpoints: depending on the perspective from which one views his writing, Miller is either "a pornographer or a guru, a sexual enslaver or a sexual liberator, a prophet or a pervert." His works, including Tropic of Capricorn (1938), on which I shall be focusing, as well as his most famous book, Tropic of Cancer (1934), were banned in the United States due to their 'obscene' contents. These works eventually became renowned for their inflammatory subject matter: Norman Mailer has written that, in the freshman class of Harvard in 1939, Miller was celebrated as a great dirty writer whose books, while unpublishable in America, could be obtained in France; he was seen as a writer who was different from everybody else alive.

The third and final figure I will be writing about is none other than Howard Stern. Who is Howard Stern? In case any of my readers are unfamiliar with this name I will provide a short summary of who he is, and why he is important for my purposes. After a number of years building a New York audience, morning talk-show radio host Howard Stern has established a daily listener-base that has propelled him into the eyes of the nation. Originally transmitting exclusively in New York City, he later went on to conquer radio markets in Washington and Philadelphia. Stern, who now broadcasts nationally, has developed a radio following that now extends across the country: he can be heard in Los Angeles, Cleveland, and other cities throughout the nation. As his radio show came to national attention, Stern began to receive a good deal of coverage in the press; recent articles have appeared, not only in the New York newspapers and magazines, but in national monthlies such as Time. Many of the recent articles about Stern focus on the rising predominance of authoritarian figures in popular culture; the Time magazine article focuses on Stern along with Rush Limbaugh, another immensely popular personality who taps into Stern's style of acerbic radio. Indeed, there appears to be something of a historical movement in our mode of confessional discourse.

In 1993 Stern published his autobiography, Private Parts, a book which, like the work of Rousseau and Miller before him, has been derided as containing nothing more than obscene, trivial nonsense. As it will be seen in this paper, this has been a recurrent objection which has plagued literary texts throughout history, so much so that it has become a type of literary tradition; this tradition stretches back to include a great many writers who are now accepted, such as the canonical figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the less-than-canonical Henry Miller. In pointing out how the works of these three authors share a set of structural themes, I intend to demonstrate that the high-culture/low-culture opposition is not the strict either/or barrier one might be led to believe it is. As I conceive it, my argument bears some similarities to a Foucauldian enterprise in that I will be taking cultural achievements from different ages and, through a process of literary genealogy, revealing their hidden complimentarity. Perhaps Foucault would commend me for proposing this endeavor, an endeavor about which some of my readers may be mildly apprehensive: to draw a comparison between the work of Rousseau, who is so deeply engrained in our cultural memory, with the writings of Henry Miller and Howard Stern.