Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon’s blood, and that spot which it covered is mortal. There is a crack in everything God has made. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”[1]
We may imagine we are invulnerable, but then a wound opens. A world that seemed complete, cracks open so that both darkness and light flood in through the gaps. Flannery O’Connor, in various forms and characters, describes how the gaps can open, revealing the dark suturing point holding our world together, and this inevitably is conjoined with enlightenment. In her story Revelation, Ruby Turpin’s visit to the doctor has her reflecting on her good fortune relative to those she surveys in the waiting room.[2] There is the rude child who will not make room for her to sit down, the leathery old woman in a cotton print dress with the same print as sacks of chicken feed, the woman in wine colored gritty-looking slacks with a yellow sweatshirt, the ugly girl with a skin problem. She judges their shoes, their socks, and besides the pleasant looking lady and the common girl, she concludes they are mostly white trash “worse even then n….” “Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home and land owners, to which she and Claud belonged.”
While she surveys the various low-grade humans by which she is surrounded, a gospel hymn was playing and Mrs. Turpin mentally supplied the final line, “And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.” The ugly girl, Mary Grace, seems to read Ruby’s thoughts (and clearly picks up her demeaning racist conversation), and at a moment in which Ruby is thanking Jesus for her own good disposition and circumstance, Mary Grace heaves her book and hits Ruby over her left eye. “The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she whispered.” Ruby Turpin’s world cracks apart as she comes to terms with the opening of this fissure, which she takes as a revelation.
Both Slavoj Žižek, the atheistic philosopher, and William Desmond, the Irish Catholic philosopher, speak of a “crack in everything.” Both are engaging the Hegelian reflection on the Kantian antinomies and coming to different conclusions about the significance that our world does not hold together but is somehow out of joint. The One does not correspond with itself; the subject can be its own object; thought does not arrive at the thinking thing; I and me do not entirely align. This discord may be taken as an indicator either that reality is incomplete or that it opens onto something beyond. With Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality. O’Connor reaches a depth of darkness on the order of Žižek, but she combines this realization as only being exposed in the light of revelation. The discord between atheistic materialism and philosophical theism points to the “between” we all occupy. The disease of being stuck, of desire which gives rise to drive, may be the predominant force in our lives, but this force, which seems to be for evil, is the gap through which the light potentially shines.
Žižek calls this the “parallax gap” and he defines it as “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”[3] He notes, Kant referred to this as the “transcendental illusion,” in which one can describe the same phenomena from two different perspectives between which no synthesis or mediation is possible. This gap exists all around us, though our tendency is to “balance” or “harmonize” binary opposites, imagining the out-of-jointness is temporary, and it is best if we are not over-focused on the problem. We are surrounded by binary opposites such as masculine and feminine, liberal and conservative, wave and particle, nature or nurture, freedom and determinism, mortality and immortality, the individual or the group, or in Kant’s summary of the problem “phenomena and the noumena.” Everything from the colors of the rainbow (wave length and the appearance of color) to mind and brain are disjointed, posing a gap. “Thus there is no rapport between the two levels, no shared space—although they are closely connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip.”[4] There is a minimal difference within a singular thing in which it is divided against itself. Reality cannot be completely synthesized, so it might seem that Kant has named the problem for which there is no solution; that is, it may seem as if Kant has the final word over Hegel.
In Žižek’s reading of Hegel, antinomy is not the problem of reality but its basis. Where Kant exposes the structuring principle of the world in antinomies, Hegel presumes this is not a problem to be solved, but the very nature of reality and this is Žižek’s point of departure. “And does not Hegel, instead of overcoming this crack, radicalize it? Hegel’s reproach to Kant is that he is too gentle with things: he locates antinomies in the limitation of our reason, instead of locating them in things themselves, that is, instead of conceiving reality-in-itself as cracked and antinomic.”[5] Psychoanalytically the divided self (the split within Paul’s I) may seem to be the primary problem but this problem for Žižek is also the cure. There is no escape from the conflict of drives or the antagonism between the registers of the self (symbolic, imaginary, and real), but recognition of this reality is the first step to controlling it. The perceived gap or difference is constitutive of “reality” and closure of the gap or dissolution of dissonance, the exposure of the primordial lie, would amount to a dissolving of this perceived reality. The goal is not to overcome the gap but to conceive it in its “becoming” and thus manipulate it.[6] So, one should learn to enjoy their symptom rather than cure it, as sickness is the reality of the Subject.
Žižek, unlike Desmond, argues that Hegel’s was not a closed synthesis, while Desmond develops his metaxological understanding presuming he is moving beyond Hegel, though both are developing the significance of the gap, which Desmond dubs the “metaxological.” According to Desmond, “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[7] As he explains, “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[8] While Žižek presumes this tension is inherent to Hegel, Desmond thinks Hegel’s synthesis goes beyond the tension, which he sees as a continual resource. The “mystery” of the middle draws us toward it. “The strangeness is not that of a hostile stranger, but rather of an intimate from which one has been estranged, which estrangement now begins to be slowly overcome.”[9] Desmond describes an awakening on the order of O’Connor’s: “Our ears, long caked with misunderstanding, hear sporadically only a faint echo of song. We have been deaf for too long. This deafness can last centuries, as with Western modernity that has systematically closed its hearing to ‘It is good.’”[10]
In a passage that sounds very much like Hegel, Desmond describes truth both as the enabling reality and the impetus toward a deepening of reason: “Self-determining thinking is released into its own freedom to think for itself by an enabling resource that is not self, a source not captured in terms of this or that determinate thought, or by thought’s own determination by and for itself. There is more that allows thinking to be itself more than itself.”[11] In the “crack” there is a mystery which does not speak of absence or lack but an excess which the theologian recognizes as Logos. Desmond does not explicitly identify the Logos but this is implicit. He speaks of “a call” more primal than self-assertion in which through the process of conversion (metanoia) we feel an indebtedness which endows us to move beyond the self and self-glorification to a sense of gratitude. “There is reverence for what has been given rather than arrogance for what is claimed as one’s own.”[12]
The wakening up of this reverence occurs in the “godsend” which frees from obsession with the self, working through the gap: “there are graced communications when self-transcending is freed from self-circling and an energy of generosity is released towards the otherness of the between, into the givenness of creation as good, into the neighborhood of others as good. A godsend of generosity visits us in the between.”[13] The between of self and other, work toward a realization or enlightenment opening up to reality: “We start in the midst of things, and we are open to things. We are open because we are already opened. Before we come to ourselves as more reflectively thoughtful, we already are in a porosity of being, and are ourselves as this porosity of being become mindful of itself.”[14] This mindfulness is a personal realization of what Hegel might call “spirit” becoming aware of itself in the individual. For Desmond, the godsend opens up the crack in reality, exposing the darkness and letting in the light.
Desmond appeals to O’Connor’s Revelation, as an example; the exposure of the racism by which Ruby Turpin orders her world, and then her godsend literally strikes her in the face in the form of the book and the girl’s harsh words. Her dark reality is exposed. She looks at the girl who had thrown the book, “‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath waiting, as for a revelation.” Long past the events, after the girl is gone and Ruby and Claud have returned home, she silently carries on the conversation. “Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.” She answers the girl’s accusation: “’I am not,’ she said tearfully, ‘a wart hog. From hell.’ But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now.” She recognizes from whence this godsend has come and complains directly to God: “‘What do you send me a message like that for?’ she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. ‘How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?’” She rages at God, “‘Why me?’ she rumbled. ‘It’s no trash around here, black or white, that I haven’t given to. And break my back to the bone every day working. And do for the church.’”
As the sun is setting and the light is fading, “A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, ‘Who do you think you are?’” The question reverberates back, putting everything she knew into question. Then she catches a vision: “Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge.” She sees a vast swinging bridge stretched toward heaven, and on it were companies of white-trash, black folk, “battalions of freaks and lunatics” “clapping and leaping like frogs.” And then she sees her own kind at the back, marching with all the dignity they could muster. “Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
This seemingly random act of violence, for Ruby is a revelation about herself and her world. Her sense of self, her invulnerability, her station in life, which she thought free of illusion turns out to be a lie. Like the prodigal son who comes to his senses among the pigs, like Peter caught in the midst of denying Christ and suddenly broken, like the two on the Road to Emmaus who encounter a stranger who turns their world upside down, the godsend, Christ, may come in any number of forms, through which one world is undone in opening another. Could it be that something like Žižek’s dark hopelessness necessarily accompanies Desmond’s godsend? As Ryan Duns writes, “The ‘crack’ in everything renders philosophy and theology, or at least a metaxological philosophy and theology, porous to one another. The theological layer is not imposed but exposed and revealed by the godsend and our response, in faith, is to live according to the logic of these depths.”[15] There is a speculative darkness eclipsed by joy in the theological turn to philosophy; a path opened by Žižek’s Hegel which comes alive in Desmond.
Ruby’s vision fades but the realization it brought remained. “At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”
(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace”: This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. We will examine various forms of false peace and ask what peace is positively, its metaphysical and religious status as a concept and as a lived reality. Is peace possible? How is it characterized? How does Jesus make peace? Can difference be understood, lived, and resolved, not in violence and victory but in cooperation and mutuality? We will be guided into such questions by voices past and present, including Augustine, Thomas Merton, Raimon Panikkar, William Desmond, Rowan Williams, and more. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)
[1] Ryan Duns deploys Emersons quote for his opening epigraph. Ryan Gerard Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age? William Desmond’s Theological Achievement (Boston College PhD, 2018) 76.
[2] Flannery O’Connor, Revelation, included in her collection titled “Everything That Rises Must Converge” but also available online https://andrewmbailey.com/oconnor_revelation.pdf.
[3] Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) 4.
[4] Parallax View, 4.
[5] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 8). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
[6] Parallax View, 6-7.
[7] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.
[8] Reader, 199.
[9] William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: SUNY, 1995) 205.
[10] Being and the Between, 205.
[11] William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic (Washington DC:CUA Press, 2012), 217. Cited in Duns, 349.
[12] William Desmond, “Consecrated Thought: Between the Priest and the Philosopher,” (Louvain Studies, 30, no. 1-2 (2005): 92—106), 97. Cited in Duns, 350.
[13] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition), loc. 4207.
[14] Desmond Reader, “Wording the Between,” loc. 3730.
[15] Duns, 351.