I’ll not attempt to summarize the essay – or its response to
Agamben’s use of the Haggadah’s Talmudic parable about Rabbi Akiba, who
succeeds in contemplating the transcendent whole, in contrast to Aher, who
analytically isolates the separate qualities of the whole, thus “cutting the
branches for Akiba.”
Instead, I’ll just mention some of what I found particularly
stimulating about the larger themes at work in Adam’s essay.
The potential to achieve the highest meanings can be
thwarted by isolating and separating meaning into the constituent parts that
can be communicated – that can be said. As a result, “saying” the separate
parts can “occlude” that larger potential to posit and sustain transcendent
meaning, what can be termed “sayability.”
In a sense, Akiba’s attainment of the embrace of
transcendent wholeness is an example of the Paradisal state Walter Benjamin
identifies in the Edenic Adam’s naming of the contents of the world, a state of
being in which the name and the named, the word and the thing, sustain an
organic connection and embody a transcendent meaning, proclaiming an ideal
world where the symbol conjures up the spirit, where to say is to be.
We live in a world in which that organic connection is
broken, in which the edifice of power and of images is fractured in a wide range of ways. Allegory replaces symbol and is a symptom of the break, embodying a
recognition of that breakdown of connection between language and reality or
sign and signified, “leaving language in an arbitrary and ‘autonomous’
relationship to reference” (page 177 in Adam’s essay).
What sort of ethics can emerge in the face of the broken
connections? Here’s a rough summary of the logic Adam Thurschwell presents
(though all distortions in this representation of his pages 192-6 of his essay are
mine alone):
There is the ethical challenge to identify the showing forth
of transcendent possibilities as if through cracks in the edifice of speech and
acts, of the here and now. Derrida’s exploration of Benjamin’s thinking
explores this challenge to resurrect the broken, abandoned, discarded hopes of
human beings – what Benjamin calls a second order of messianic possibilities.
Yet the search through the perpetually collapsing edifice
can be misguided. Another possibility is to call for an end to it, a sort of
death of law, the state, and history itself – to follow Agamben in
comprehending death as an opening-up or unfolding of being, “an eschatological
ontology.” But even for Agamben, a sort of messianic ethics can apply in “the
time that remains” before the end of history.
Agamben finally builds on the ideas of Benjamin and Derrida
(and finally also Levinas) by developing the notion of “responsibility” –
almost in the sense of ‘responsability’ or the ability to respond, and the
obligation. For responsibility is presupposed by the urgency even of posing a
question, of speaking itself, of saying. Language itself emerges finally from
the ability and necessity to respond. Such at least is the hope.