The Fall of Literary Theory. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen
(ideal identity) actually existed in the past, that it was lost at some point due to some form of impurity interfering with the social/mythical world, and that this identity is retrievable. In other words, what has been lost in the fall from a perfect world can be, in this first perspective, recreated, brought back into actuality, if only all the imperfections or corrupting elements in the social system can be eliminated. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel, for instance, are punished by God because “Israel has brought defilement on himself./ Their misdeeds have barred the way back to their God.” There is always the promise that “He has torn us, but he will heal us,/ he has wounded us, but he will bind up our wounds …. Let us strive to know the Lord,/ whose coming is as sure as sunrise.”16 This is the fall that haunts social organizations, even in their most atheistic forms (atheism itself can be, functionally, a religion), such as the communist utopia. For instance, communist doctrine is modeled on the basic taboos and rules of the Christian Ten Commandments, replacing God with an abstract collective god of the proletariat.
Any social structure that places emphasis on the rules of interaction, also creating a hierarchy of interaction, will likely deem individual life disposable. Rousseau transfers the power of God to the power of the social collective, “founded on convention.”17 Friedrich Nietzsche sees in Rousseau a seducer who, in advocating “society” as a new god, continues the momentum of Christianity into the French Revolution.18 It is very clear that the power to dismiss individuality in view of the promise of social perfection remains as strong as in Christianity: the social contract is sacred; to transgress it, “To violate the contract by which [the body politic] exists would be to annihilate itself; and that which is nothing can produce nothing.” There are huge implications in this statement: there is a threat to individuality to be “nothing” rather than something; to be able to remain something, a transgressing individual has to accept death because “it is to secure himself from being the victim of assassins that a man consents to die if he becomes an assassin.”19 It appears that it is against the chaos of an “other,” even the Other within the self, that the individual has to inscribe himself or herself within a system that brings order to human interaction. From the notion of protection derives the notion of restriction, since there is no protection without the definition of what and whom (what territory) is to be protected, and against what intruder. That is why the “citizen,” the inhabitant of a territory, is protected by an act such as the American Constitution. At the same time, the Constitution dictates that the individual will accept punishment in case of transgression, so that the Constitution can continue to protect its citizens. In the name of order, dictated by a law—whether it is the law of God, or human law—individual life becomes irrelevant to the pursuit of social/moral perfection, in the Western mythical momentum.
As Rousseau suggests, this promise of perfection is always under threat. There is always an enemy that stands in the way of achieving social perfection, whether it is another community (race, nation, continent), a class that interferes with the order imposed by the dominant class, or certain individuals who are excluded or exclude themselves from within a community (the barbarian, the diseased, the abnormal). There is a very obvious opposition between members who aspire to perfection, in a community, and those who stand in the way of that perfection, and who need to be either subdued or eliminated. Yet this opposition is contained in the notion of identity: identity would not be perfectible without the element that contaminates it.
Derrida explains that a structural tendency such as Rousseau’s is prompted by the fear that the contaminating element is already inside: “just as Rousseau and Saussure will do in response to the same necessity, yet without discovering other relations between the intimate and the alien, Plato maintains both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficent penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside.”20 In other words, the idea that constructs the identity (all the way from Plato) is infected by the fear of its own corruptibility, which at the same time is the only way that identity can be conceived: as potentially uncorrupted.
The pagan god, the demon, the possessed, the cultural Other, the Jew, the American, the terrorist: all are different modes of perceiving what is not redeemable toward order, depending on what defines the community whose order has been infected and whose purity needs to be retrieved. Rothstein identifies the Middle Eastern “reluctant” nations as “the beast,” bringing back the binary of civilization versus wilderness that has informed most colonizing and imperialistic acts.21 In one of his State of the Union Addresses, President Bush was drawing precisely on this tradition of hierarchical identity that divides the civilized (Western and Westernized) world from the threat of whatever “territory” is left outside of this civilization. He notoriously called this corrupting territory the “axis of evil,” the “terrorist parasites” (intruding elements), that endangered the civilized world in unprecedented ways. President Bush territorialized abstract concepts with the same type of moral stroke that defines opposing identities: “A terrorist underworld … operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the center of large cities.”22 It appears that, due to the disseminated nature of the terrorists (they could be anywhere, originating anywhere), they are even more abstract than an enemy such as “communism” during the Cold War. Although communism was also believed to be easily and threateningly disseminated, it had a very specific territory of origin (in terms of the practice of communism). In the case of terrorism, its territory is so corrupting that it lies at the very heart of freedom, contaminating it (or, as Derrida would say, writing it).
The most restrictive societies (for instance, totalitarian societies) offer to their subjects hypothetical access to the innocence from which the social system has fallen, turning innocence into an individual and collective stake; innocence needs to be retrieved at the cost of human life, for the sake of social perfection. It is not a coincidence that the people who died in the Twin Tower collapse were identified as innocent after the fact, so that in the name of their innocence anything was permitted, any destruction. In The Toronto Star, Jody Williams (Nobel Laureate for Peace) noted that “When innocent civilian lives are taken in any kind of military or terrorist attack, the mind recoils, [so that] individual freedoms are subordinated to the survival of the state.”23 She warned against the danger that the concept of innocence could obliterate any regard for individual life in the name of a larger purpose that took its momentum from innocence. At the same time, she understood innocence as the hallmark of the victim as well, her fear being that more innocents would suffer. The stake of innocence could be therefore preserved, despite her effort to critique its implications. Similarly, after the events in 2001, in addressing his people, Osama bin Laden maintained the same opposition between good and evil, a conflict in the name of which he stressed “the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy.”24 His statements prove that violence, on either side, places individual life into well defined identity categories, which perpetuates the mythical perception of the world.
In order to demonstrate the extent to which innocence as identity can be harmful to life, as well as the processes of subjection that come into play in this cycle of violence, I use Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in Chapter Three as an example to pinpoint the dynamics of subordination of the individual to the community and to the concept of innocence. I will interpret the character of Billy Budd as both a representation and a victim of innocence.
Next, I will refer to the second mode of perceiving fallenness and individuality as the fall from authenticity. It is a “fall” inward, in the space where the meaning that is corrupted by the outside world can still be retrieved. Walt Whitman’s poetry is a good example of this search for meaning that would spring from the self and return to the self to make it whole, in the metaphor of a spider (in “A Noiseless Patient Spider”): “And you O my soul where you stand/, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space/, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect