illustrator © Archipictor Ossi Hiekkala

Emmanuel Levinas claims that the Kierkegaardian subject, as radically inward, is egocentric: “Kierkegaard very powerfully rehabilitated the topics of subjectivity, uniqueness, and individuality.  He objected to the absorption of subjectivity into Hegelian universality, but he replaced it with subjectivity that was shamelessly exhibitionistic.” In order to demonstrate this self-important selfhood, Levinas refers to the Abraham of Fear and Trembling, the most offensive instance of “a subjectivity raising itself above the ethical to the level of the religious.”¹⁰³ Yet Levinas makes such subjectivity far too easy.  The self thus constituted by repetition does not precede repetition itself, but emerges through it, and is thoroughly infused with the God-relationship. This subjectivity, then, is relational rather than identical and, insofar as the religious subject is constantly in a state of becoming, thanks to what Gillian Rose calls “the eminence of futurity at the intersection of eternity and time,”¹⁰⁴ dynamic rather than static.  Repetition, as Deleuze reminds us, is always a gift and, as such, a scandal; the subject cannot merely summon repetition and constitute himself qua subject.  Kierkegaardian subjectivity, I would argue contra Levinas, does not raise itself above the ethical; rather, it is raised above the ethical. Between the two there is an absolute difference. And the subject that emerges through the madness of repetition is not a self-identical individual, alone in inwardness; it is rather a subject related at every turn to the eternal.  The highest form of this selfhood is only selfhood insofar as it exists in the God-relationship—inwardness, in other words, gives rise to something infinitely higher than inwardness (Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Kierkegaard’s Socrates: A Venture in Evolutionary Theory,” Modern Theology 17, no. 4 (2001), p. 467).

Emphasizing the paradoxical nature of such an inwardness, Rubenstein says, “The very locus of the subject’s self is beyond him. In other words, this subjectivity, which cannot be considered by itself but only repeated, is profoundly ecstatic” (ibid).

103. Emmanuel Levinas, “Existence and Ethics” in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain, eds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 26-38; p. 34.
104. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 99.

The impetus for my theory comes from Ben’s remark toward the end of “This Place is Death” where he is driving with Sun and Jack and he, in good Ben-fashion, has a hissy-fit, stops the van, and says, “What I am doing is helping you.  And if you had any idea what I’ve been doing to keep you safe, to keep your friends safe, you’d never stop thanking me!”

If you recall, at the beginning of Season 4, Sayid is working with Ben as his hitman, killing various people: Mr Avellino on the golf course, and Elsa in “The Economist” who was working for Widmore, plus who knows how many others at Ben’s whim.  So, it is probably not much of a stretch at all to link these events, and it was probably the intention of the writers to make us recall the events from Season 4 with Ben’s remark.

The new bit of information that we now have, however, is that Ben is working with Eloise Hawking, who we first saw in season 3 in “Flashes Before Your Eyes” (incidentally, this was first aired exactly two years ago today of the writing of this post, on Valentines Day 2007).  This episode centers around what happens to Desmond immediately after he turns the key in the final episode of Season 2.  He flashes back to various times, and at one point meets Ms. Hawking at a ring shop where Desmond is shopping for an engagement ring for Penny.  She convinces Desmond not to buy the ring or else a series of events will not take place.  Soon thereafter, Ms. Hawking explains that a man who was wearing red sneakers was killed by a scaffolding because it was his fate.  If she were to warn him about the collapsing scaffolding, he would have been killed another way.  Ms. Hawking explains that the universe has a way of “course correcting” itself so that things eventually work themselves out in a set fashion.  We see this logic unfold throughout the remainder of Season 3 with regards to Charlie’s eventual death in the final episode, even though Desmond did everything he could to prevent Charlie’s fateful demise.

With this in mind, I now have to wonder, is Benjamin Linus trying to “cheat” the fate of the universe?  My theory is that Ben was using Sayid in an attempt to do such a thing.  We also know that Ben’s aims in Season 4 have to do with DHARMA and Ben’s rivalry with Charles Widmore, but these things may not necessarily be that different, viz., perhaps the ‘universe’ wants Widmore to succeed?  Perhaps Benjamin was using Eloise Hawking to make her fancy calculations in an effort to actually escape the actual fate of the island so that Ben could bend the unfolding of events to his usual selfish motives?

The writer/producer Damon Lindelof has talked about Ms. Hawking as a kind of “temporal police[wo]man.”  But then what are her motives?  If her motives are just to police the universe’s temporality, then what about her son, which we all assume now to be Daniel “George McFly” Faraday.  But it seems that up until this point, it would seem that her assumption is that her son may be missing, dead, or stuck in time loops on the island, which is why Faraday had to bother Desmond in the very first episode of Season 5 (“Because You Left“) to tell him to find his mother … but the time-shift happens so we do not know what it was Desmond was supposed to do exactly.  Do Faraday and his mother share similar motives?

Either way, my guess it that whatever Ms. Hawking’s motives are, Ben Linus’ motives most likely do not square up with hers, because we always know that Ben ultimately operates in his own self-interest.  Even Christian Shepherd (is this Jacob?) asks Locke, “Since when did listening to him [Ben] get you anywhere worth a damn?”

Clearly, there are still a lot of holes, or at least variables not yet known here, but my theory boils down to: Ben, working with Ms. Hawking, knows what the fate of the island is, and Ben is most  likely trying to subvert the plan of the ‘universe’ for his own misguided ends.

My friend and colleague Jeff reminded me of a big unanswered question that, if answered, would shed an incredible light on this theory: what ultimately happened to Sayid’s relationship to Ben?  What led to Sayid telling Hurley, “Whatever Ben tells you to do, you do the opposite”?

Perhaps the decisive cunning of Ben is that he actually knows how things will ultimately turn out, but he’s clever and wicked enough to devise ways for the outcomes to finally be the same while causing events along the way to maximize his own benefit and desires.  If this is the case, it would make sense of the increasing ambiguity of whether Ben is actually doing things for an ultimate ‘good’, even though the way in which he does it is always deceptive.

Will Desmond be the ultimate key to undoing Ben’s plans?  Faraday said that the “rules” do not apply to him and that he is “miraculously” unique.

Thoughts?

Here is the rest of the schedule:

• 19 January – Chapter 2: “Ernst Troeltsch: The Triumph of Ideology and the Eclipse of Apocalyptic”, response by David Congdon
• 26 January – Chapter 3: “Karl Barth: Foundations for an Apocalyptic Christology”, response by John McDowell
• 2 February – Chapter 4: “Stanley Hauerwas: Apocalyptic, Narrative Ecclesiology, and ‘the Limits of Anti-Constantinianism’ “, response by John W. Wright
• 9 February – Chapter 5: “John Howard Yoder: The Singularity of Jesus and the Apocalypticization of History”, response by Douglas Harink
• 16 February – Chapter 6: “Towards an Apocalyptic Politics of Mission”, response by James K. A. Smith
• 23 February – Concluding response by Nathan R. Kerr (although he has already been providing helpful clarifying comments already)

Also, Nate informs me that Cascade Books is still offering a 40% off discount if the book purchased through their site using the discount code “KERR40″, bringing the book down to $16.80 (significantly cheaper than Amazon).

Dave Belcher informs us that there will be a panel at this year’s Wesleyan Theological Society conference on Nate’s book as well.  Panelists include Scott Daniels, John Wright, Sam Powell, and Michael Cartwright, with Nate responding, and Dave Belcher at the moderating helm.

It is often said by the British that Americans do not understand irony. I think this is true depending upon which swath of Americans are being referred to, but by no means is it true in my circles of friends on the West coast. If I remember correctly, though, the place I heard this generalisation uttered was referring more to American pop culture: whereas American pop culture is more defined by glitz, glorification of celebrity, explosions and violence on television on movies, British pop culture, from what I can tell thus far, seems to be more defined by–yes–irony, wittiness (or attempts thereof), and sly humour.

Having now lived in England for a short period of about six months, I’m not so sure if irony is as ‘essential’ to the culture (if there can be such a thing) as just the fact of societal indirectness. When it comes to humour, this is great. But when it comes to relationships it seems like at its worst, such indirectness can quickly become passive aggressive writ large. Although, perhaps Americans are just too direct, too aggressive.

Now, on one level, as long as it moves beyond it’s stylistic embodiments in culture, irony is perfectly fine. Heck, I even wrote an MA thesis partly on irony (“Contradiction, Paradox, and Irony: Theological and Philosophical Stances of Hegel and Kierkegaard”). Søren Kierkegaard, in more ways than one, was an ironic figure, and even extoled the virtues (so to speak) of indirectness and indirect communication. In so many ways, especially within his context of Christendom, Kierkegaard’s approach seems to me the right one — and are we not in the same context?

Yet, I am not always so sure about this. Because of it’s tendencies toward sarcasm (of the biting kind), and because real relationships don’t really seem to work very well if one person thinks they can really be a gadfly, I am reminded of when Jesus said that we should let our “yes be yes” and our “no be no” (Matthew 5:37; James 5:12). Quintilian’s definition of irony is that the “phenomenon is different from the essence”; in other words, that when one speaks, they do not mean what they say. This is the famous definition of Socratic irony.

I am not entirely sure what to make of this yet… I went to sleep last night thinking of this for some reason. Clearly, I am not going to make some banal claim such that “see, Socrates isn’t Christian” or other obviously anachronistic idiocies. Kierkegaard/Anti-Climacus is correct when he talks about the indirect communication of the God-man in Practice in Christianity, which is something quite different from one’s communication. It’s like the indirectness of the God-man was more an existential one of stance or ‘comportment’. But then, I am reminded that Jesus Christ is the Father’s communication as the Word, so then I get confused again. I’m just thinking aloud.

Meanwhile, this book is up on the MIT Press website now: The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?  It’s a conversation between Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank (ed. Creston Davis).  [via]

The absolute paradox would be if the Son of God became man, came to the world, went around in such a manner that absolutely no one recognized him; if he became an individual human being in the strictest sense of the world, a person who had a trade, got married, etc. . . . In that case God would not have been God and Father of mankind, but the greatest ironist. . . . The divine paradox is that he becomes noticed, if in no other fashion, then by being crucified, by performing miracles, etc., which means that he is recognizable, after all, by his divine authority, even if faith is required in order to solve its paradox.[1]

When I first read this, I missed the difference between absolute and divine. Wow. If this is a real difference, and I think it is, this is an extremely illuminating passage from Kierkegaard’s journals. I only wish that there were better citations in Garff’s biography so that I could find this passage easier for the full context. Although journals are often fragmentary, so maybe there is not much more (?).  Those are Garff’s ellipses above though, not mine, so I dunno.

Many authors introduce their books with a caution: it is inevitable that somewhere in this book there is an error. This is a common claim in prefaces. But do the authors that write these claims believe them or not?

If the author is asked of each specific claim in the book Is this an error? then he will say No. For each individual claim that the author makes, he believes that it is true.

If the author believes that each claim is true, though, then mustn’t he believe that every claim is true? A collection of claims, none of which is an error, contains no errors. The author believes that his book is a collection of such claims; he believes that it contains no errors.

Yet the author also believes that somewhere in the book he will have made a mistake. Aware of his fallibility, he believes that not every claim in the book is true, that somewhere in the book there is an error.

What is really odd about this is not that authors have inconsistent beliefs, it is that the author is being perfectly rational in believing both that his book does and does not contain errors.

In Graham Priest’s article “What Is So Bad About Contradictions?” Journal of Philosophy vol. 95 (August 1998), he cites this paradox, which is a perfectly acceptable example, as proof that “Rational belief is not, therefore, closed under logical consequence.” Otherwise, if it was, every author who has a claim like the above would think their book contained a contradiction, but they do not.

And yes, that man in a Karate-style pose pictured above is Graham Priest!

After reading this statement, re-reading the opening line from Kripke’s “Outline of a Theory of Truth” seemed a lot less ridiculous than I first thought:

Ever since Pilate asked, “What is truth?” (John XVIII, 38), the subsequent search for a correct answer has been inhibited by another problem, which, as is well known, also arises in a New Testament context.  If, as the author of the Epistle to Titus supposes (Titus I, 12), a Cretan prophet, “even a prophet of their own,” asserted that “the Cretans are always liars,” and if “this testimony is true” of all other Cretan utterances, then it seems that the Cretan prophet’s words are true if and only if they are false.  And any treatment of the concept of truth most Somehow circumvent this paradox. (Saul Kripke, “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 72 no. 19 [November 6, 1975], p. 690).

Top Red Guard: “You can’t ask us. You can only ask one of us.”
Top Blue Guard: “It’s in the rules, and I should warn you that one of us always tells the truth, and one of us always lies. That’s a rule too.” Gesturing to the TRG, “He always lies!”
TRG: “I do not! I tell the truth!”
TBG: “Oh, what a lie!”
Sarah: “Alright,” to the TRG, “answer yes or no: would he [TBG] tell me that this door leads to the castle?”
TRG: “Uhhh…yyyes?”
Sarah: “Then, the other door leads to the castle, and this door leads to certain death.”
Both Guards: “oooOOoooh.”
TRG: “How do you know? He could be telling the truth!”
Sarah: “But then he wouldn’t be. So if you told me that he said ‘yes’, I know the answer is ‘no.’”
TRG: “But I could be telling the truth!”
Sarah: “But then he would be lying. So if you told me that he said ‘yes,’ then I know the answer would still be ‘no.’”
TRG: “Wait a minute,” to the TBG, “is that right?”
TBG: “I don’t know –I’ve never understood it!”

“Irony is a way of containing two opposites in your head at the same time.”

–Douglas Coupland, “The Post Modern Ironic Wink,” in To the Best of Our Knowledge, Wisconsin Public Radio, Jun 26, 2005. 

“The Socratic personality was ethical precisely because it was neither fully presented nor at one with itself but in a state of constant presentation.  Indeed, contrary to both traditional and modern readings of Socrates, the Romantics also stressed the contradictions of irony and Socratic irony (Albert 1993).  Irony was not just signaling the opposite of what was said; it was the expression of both sides or viewpoints at once in the form of contradiction or paradox: ‘Irony is the form of paradox.  Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great’ (Schlegel 1991, 6).  And any reader who feels that ‘behind’ the irony there is a hidden sense has fallen into the very simplicity and singleness of viewpoint that irony sets out to destroy.  For Schlegel, therefore, the dissimulation of Socrates was not in the service of intending another higher or non-contradictory idea that the privileged few might understand and that might resolve the dialectic; it was about allowing—almost involuntarily—both sides of a tension: 

Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation.  It is equally impossible to feign it or divulge it.  To a person who hasn’t got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed.  It is meant to deceive no one except those who consider it a deception and who either take pleasure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world or else become angry when they get an inkling they themselves might be included.  In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden . . . It contains and arouses a feeling of indissoluble antagonism between the absolute and the relative, between the impossibility and the necessity of complete communication.  It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this continuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy and take what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke. (Schlegel 1991, 13).” 

Claire Colebrook, Irony: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 53-4. 

“Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do.  He who does not understand irony and has no ear for its whispering lacks eo ipso what might be called the absolute beginning of the personal life.”

–Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony (1841) 

“…Where the ideas are in action, we have drama; where the agents are in ideation, we have dialectic. 

Obviously, there are elements of ‘dramatic personality’ in dialectic ideation, and elements of dialectic in the mutual influence of dramatic agents in contributing to one another’s ideational development.  You might state all this another way by saying that you cannot have ideas without persons or persons without ideas.  Thus, one might speak of ‘Socratic irony’ as ‘dramatic’ and of ‘dramatic irony’ as ‘Socratic.’ 

Relativism is got by the fragmentation of either drama or dialectic.  That is, if you isolate any one agent in a drama, or any one advocate in a dialogue, and see the whole in terms of his position alone, you have the purely relativistic.  And in relativism there is no irony.  (Indeed, as Cleanth Brooks might say, it is the very absence if irony in relativism that makes it so susceptible to irony.  For relativism sees everything in but one set of terms—and since there are endless other terms in which things could be seen, the irony of the monologue that makes everything in its image would be in this ratio: the greater the absolutism of the statements, the greater the subjectivity and relativity in the position of the agent making the statements.)”

–Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969), p. 512.