A kind of ending: reading two modern texts on the secular

So how, finally, do we make anthropological sense of the secular? It is difficult to provide a short answer. Instead I conclude with two contrasting accounts that relate myth, symbol, and allegory to definitions of the secu­lar: Paul de Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,”⁹⁸ and Walter Ben­jamin’s book The Origin of German Tragic Drama." Taken together, they indicate that even secular views of the secular aren’t all the same.

De Man’s famous essay is primarily concerned with the romantic movement and with the way it has been written about in modern histories. The romantic image, says de Man, has been understood as a relationship between self and nature (or subject and object), but this is mistaken. At

98. In P. de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contempo­rary Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

99. W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, London: Verso, 1977· first romantics rediscovered an older allegorical tradition from the Middle Ages, but that rediscovery occurred in a world where religious belief had begun to crumble faced with the discoveries of modern knowledge; It was—as Weber had said—increasingly a disenchanted world. In the me­dieval world allegory was simply one of a set of figures whose meanings were fixed by the Church’s teachings for the purpose of biblical interpreta­tion, and thus of exerting its authority. Because ecclesiastical disciplines were now no longer unchallenged, and belief in the sacred had begun to be undermined, de Man informs us that for the early romantics allegory was rediscovered in a different predicament. By virtue of the conventional suc­cession of the signifier by the signified, allegory essentially played out an inescapable temporal destiny in which self and nonself could never coin­cide. Early romantic imagery therefore constituted the site of a reluctant coming to terms with the secular—a world in which there are no hidden depths, no natural continuities between the subject’s emotions and the ob­jects of these emotions, no fulfillment of time.

In his study of German baroque drama known as Trauerspiek Walter Benjamin describes a different trajectory, one that directs the reader to a secular world that is not merely discovered (through clear-sighted knowl­edge of the real) but precariously assembled and lived in contradictory fashion. Although de Man also displays a sense of the precariousness of sec­ular life in his writings, he retains a commitment to the secular as “the real” that Benjamin doesn’t have.

Thus when Benjamin distinguishes between subject and object he begins not with the contrast between self and nature (as de Man does) but with the opposition between persons. It is the obscurity of intentions not of objects that generates suspicion, desire, and deceit in the exercise of power, and that makes a simple resort to sincerity impossiblerBenjamin’s baroque is a social world to which allegory and not symbol is central. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays that Benjamin analyzes—prima­rily German but also English and Spanish—reflect a conception of history that is no longer integrated into the Christian myth of redemption. That is one aspect of their secularity. Another less obvious aspect is displayed in the emblematic character of Socrates’ death. The legend of Socrates’ judi­cially imposed suicide, Benjamin maintains, constitutes the secularization of classical tragedy, and hence of myth, because it substitutes a reasoned and exemplary death for the sacrificial death of a mythic hero.

Given the social instability and political violence of early modern times, there is a continuous tension in baroque drama between the ideal of restoration and the fear of catastrophe. The emphasis on this- worldliness is a consequence of that tension. Skeptical detachment from all contestable beliefs was conducive to self-preservation. In a striking sentence Benjamin observes that even “The religious man of the ba­roque era clings so tightly to the world because of the feeling that he is being driven along a cataract with it.”¹⁰⁰ Thus Benjamin presents the emerging salience of the secular world in early modernity not by as­suming the triumph of “common sense,” or by invoking criteria ac­ceptable to his secular readers for determining what is worthy of belief. He displays actualizing provincial rulers as they seek desperately to control an unruly world as allegorical performances.

Why is allegory the appropriate mode for apprehending this world? Because, says Benjamin, unlike romantic symbol (timeless, unified, and spiritualized) baroque allegory has a fluid temporality, it is always frag­mented, and it is material. Allegory expresses well the uncontrollable, in­determinable, and yet material world of the baroque princely court with its intrigue, betrayal, and murder. In brief, this world is “secular” not because scientific knowledge has replaced religious belief (that is, because the “real” has at last become apparent) but because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainly, without fixed moorings even for the believer, a world in roo.

What Might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? 6$ which the real and the imaginary mirror each other, In this world the pol­itics of certainty is clearly impossible.

That de Man attributes the secular attitude to the early romantics while Benjamin places it in the earlier, baroque period is really beside the point for my purposes. What is worth noting is that through his account of baroque allegory Benjamin provides a different understanding of “the secular” than the one de Man does in his discussion of romantic symbol­ism. For Benjamin takes allegory to be not merely a conventional relation­ship between an image and its meaning but a “form of expression.” Citing Renaissance sources, Benjamin argues that emblems and hieroglyphs do not merely show something, they also instruct. (Language is not an ab­straction that stands apart from “the real”; it embodies and mediates the life of people, gestures, and things in the world.) And what the emblems have to teach is more authoritative than purely personal preferences. The interweaving in such communication of what today many would separate as the sacred and the profane remains for Benjamin an essential feature of allegory.

This in at least two senses. To begin with, there is the power of a sign to signify: for in allegorical textuality, “all of the things that are used to sig­nify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, [a power] which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them.” Actuality is never translucent even to the agent, says Ben­jamin. It must always be (provisionally) read. The representation (or signi- fier) and what it represents (signified) are interdependent. Each is incom­plete, and both are equally real.

Second, the interdependence of religious and secular elements in alle­gorical writing implies a “conflict between theological and artistic inten­tions, a synthesis not so much in the sense of a peace as a treuga dei [Truce of God] between the conflicting opinions.”¹⁰¹ In other words, it is this con­flict between the two poles that creates the space for allegory—so Ben­jamin maintains—and thus makes possible the particular form of sensibil­ity called baroque.

In both de Man and Benjamin the secular, is clearly opposed to the mythical. For de Man this means the exclusion of symbolism, for Ben­jamin the inclusion of allegory. The two approaches seem to me to have different implications for research as well as for politics. The one calls for ioi. Ibid., op. cit., pp. 162-77.

unmasking a collective illusion, for seeing through an “enchanted world,”¹⁰² the other for exploring the intricate play between representations and what they represent, between actions and the disciplines that aim to define and validate them, between language games and forms of life. Be­cause Benjamin tries to maintain a continuous tension between moral judgment and open inquiry, between the reassurance of enlightenment and the uncertainties of desire, he helps one to address the ambiguous con­nections between the secular and modern politics.

102.1 dojiot want to be taken as saying that de Man’s views on unmasking are simple. Far from it. Thus in “Criticism and Crisis” he writes: “In the same manner that the poetic lyric originates in moments of tranquility, in the absence of actual emotions, and then proceeds to invent fictional emotions to create the il­lusion of recollection, the work of fiction invents fictional subjects to create the il­lusion of the reality of others. But the fiction is not myth, for it knows and names itself as fiction. It is not a demystification, it is demystified from the start. When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being de­mystified by it; but since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves” (de Man, p. 18). Literature, he main­tains, is concerned with naming, but what it names is not an absence—as critics *who seek to demonstrate its ideological function suppose—but “nothingness.” However, it seems to me that there is, in de Man’s statement, a wish to evoke an echo of the sacred within a “disenchanted” world.