Caputo Lecture

John (Jack) Caputo visited BC on Friday, to run a seminar and provide a lecture. Caputo is one of the bigger fish in the (medium sized?) pond of contemporary continental philosophy. The first was based on a paper on Derrida's notion of the "Democracy to come" (a venir), and the lecture was on deconstructing Christianity. The two projects sound very different, but really dovetail together. Caputo follows Derrida's working with Christian terminology, but isn't interested in anything approaching traditional religion (as many of the audience members couldn't quite grasp in their questions...they made many queries coming from the perspective of god as a divine being).

In the democracy paper, Caputo takes up Derrida's statement of a "democracy to come" as a means of heeding a (transcendently ethical) call for justice. The roots of this lie with Levinas, who saw the very foundation of ontology as being based in an infinite ethical imperative we have to the Other; alterity makes a call upon us to continually become a responsible Being-for-the-Other. "Ethics" is not based on any telology, is not a system designed to keep social order, is not at all based on sympathy (a kind of violence, for Levinas, to try and deny the radical otherness of the Other), does not lead to happiness, etc.

Derrida and Caputo do find something phenomenologically compelling about this call, but want to found it better than Levinas (and move a tad away from his absolutist position that, ontologically, it is "pre-ontology"). For Caputo, the democracy to come doesn't have to do with an ideal political state - instead, due to the nature of the call, it cannot be something pre-anticipated or fore-grounded in any way. What we call "democracy" now is merely a historical marker. It need not even be a "democracy", what we are called towards. The "democracy to come" is a means of showing how the call to responsibility for the other is grounded in the hope of a justice that is not (and cannot) happen in the future, but instead is abjectly futural - an essential element of time's flow itself. Democracy is thus just the best placeholder term we have for a transcendent ethical "source" for this call we find that evokes us.

Much is the same with Caputo's treatment of Derrida's "religion without religion" - and I believe this is the difficult that confronted listeners who themselves were Christian in background. Christianity is really just the best placeholder name we have for this religion of weakness that is called for by alterity. Christianity and Jesus are merely paradigmatic because a careful hermeneutical reading of the roots of Christianity (up until Paul, really - he and everything thereafter predominately marks a grand departure from the essence put forth by Jesus...a literal misreading of the poetically-intended "miracles") shows the paramount place of weakness. What is truly divine is the humbling of the self, and the giving of the self for others - invitation, non-violence, sacrifice. Basically as far as you can get from the contemporary concept of Christianity! (to the extent that Christians are involved in charity today, I believe is analogous to capitalism's dependency upon welfare, a means of warding off awareness of the fundamental corruption of the basic institution. The boat with an ever-widening hole comes with a bucket! It never fails to amuse me the neo-conservatives that want to roll back the stance the federal government has taken to social programs since the 30s...there is a reason that American support for communism was growing exponentially up until the New Deal. Talk about hacking one's own legs off...).

My thoughts on what Caputo has to say: generally positive. But one of my friends whose opinion I value mentioned that he always found Caputo to be more style than substance..and in many respects that is the case. Caputo is certainly the definitive stereotype of "continental philosophy writing" that aims to be ultimately evocative without much literal concern for justification. But he does raise some phenomenologically valid points - the way in which "democracy to come" refers to a structure of temporality and not a specific, hoped for event/state of affairs I liked quite a bit. But the notion that the call must be wholly other seems to retain that unquestioned and unjustified claim of Levinas's - and is not in tune with my (admittedly not well established) reading of Derrida's trace. I think the very notion of something as infinitely other is a fun but dangerously vapid byproduct of idealism, and good phenomenology does not point to such a thing (both Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology; even in the Beitrage, where Heidegger gets the closest...there is still the faintest echo of silence in nearness to the Last God...and he backs away from that whole business in later works).

Also, I posed a question to Caputo about the relationship between Nietzsche's holy Yes (from the third metamorphoses of the spirit, aka the child) and receptiveness to the call, and he agreed that Nietzsche's interest in a justice-sans-ressentiment is somewhat similiar to his theology of weakness, but he feels that the source of Nietzsche's ethics ultimately boils down to overflowing which is "phallic". It cannot be weakness, a true gift, unless it is giving of one's self, not giving of what one has left over.

But is that really the meaning of Nietzsche's overflow? Or is Caputo commiting the sin he warns others about by not reading something as a poetic metaphor? I suspect that Nietzsche doesn't mean that one ought to give of oneself only after being completely satiated. Indeed, Nietzsche is interested in how far the human spirit can go in affirming despite pain and suffering and loss. The difference is that one must be able to say "Yes" to that giving - it must be through that peculiar kind of strength - or else ressentiment creeps back into the picture. There is a world of difference between trying to turn weakness into strength, and in recognizing that one can (and should!) with-stand any amount of weakness due to a higher order of strength. That sounds a lot like ressentiment, but that is because it is not meant duplicitously here. I will explore this topic a great deal more when I write the first essay in my humor series - exploring whether or not Nietzche's golden laughter is at heart tender or cruel. I may well incorporate Caputo's analysis into that paper, given the way in which I find myself spiraling back to that subject.