INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES
By Mehnaz M. Afridi
Death, and Desire: Thinking of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Charles E. Winquist
“Well, I’ve missed my way. I turned from art to a profession, which is also dying. Law and art both belong to the past. I can’t master the new art, as you have done, and like you, I failed to study science. How can I find the lost ecstasy of creation? Life is so short and I can’t forget the vertigo caused by the fellow’s words: Don’t we live our lives knowing that our fate rests with God?
“Does the idea of Death disturb you?”
“No, but it urges me to taste the secret of life.”
The urge “…to taste the secret of life,” in Naguib Mahfouz’s writing is a recurring theme in my intellectual journey that has encapsulated my relationship with the world and who I am as an intellectual and whom I admire as my main contemporary philosophers today. No country, nation, religion or political party would replace ideas, critical moments, tense dialogue, and an endless love that could replace the world of my favorite philosophers. The themes that echo within the writings of these particular thinkers are; desire, and death. As a Religious Studies student at Syracuse University I worked closely with Charles E. Winquist, a secular theologian, who passed away in April of 2002. His death left an indelible mark on me, which sometimes is intense, powerful, and joyous. Contrapuntally he has left a feeling of helplessness, sadness, and loneliness behind that is at times terrifying and abysmal. In 2004, Edward Said passed away and on that day I recall driving to meet a Jewish friend and colleague whose work centers on anti-Semitism and post-Shoah studies. After I told him that Edward Said had passed away, we sat in silence for some time. At the time, I had no idea what my new friend felt for him but the air between us was somehow taut with sorrow. My sense of acute loss in the aftermath of Said's and Charlie’s passing was only exacerbated by Jacques Derrida’s passing in the fall of 2004. The deaths of these three vibrant men whom I felt were close friends, mentors and at the same time intellectual phantoms have impacted me more deeply than any other thinkers in my comparative approach to Judaism and Islam.
Charlie, whom I knew personally for many years, was to me like an old ship that had wrecked the confines of thinking and attracted me to think about the intensity of life and that living out the bad days of life was also a part of the oceanic experience. He was raised Mormon, and I Muslim. He was an American man, and I a Pakistani woman. But we both possessed a secular humanistic outlook. So many differences yet he convinced my mother when my father suddenly passed away that I should be encouraged to pursue a doctorate and live in the United States. At that time, I was unaware of his positive insistence against my mother’s wishes that I should be allowed to simply think because he sensed a “fierce independence” in my work. This confidence was an immense gift, the true nature of which was only revealed to me much later when my mother confessed to me that “He was a true supporter of you, and insisted that I let you pursue your doctorate,” she told me this when she learned that I was going to attend his memorial service in Syracuse. He had led me through a path that he knew I loved so deeply and had already felt an urgency that perhaps I may never be ever to be an intellectual with him upon his ship but he made that sail possible.
Edward Said who fought a long and hard battle against his illness taught me invaluable ways to think about myself as a Muslim woman living in the “west”; he encouraged me to think in and out of European models, walk upon Arab and Palestinian mappings of literature, poetry, and narrative. He fostered an independent awareness of myself as the “other” which was self-interrogating and also liberating from being always already being possessed by the European gaze. He taught me that there was no objective lens, and that I too was superficially speaking as something, which was the problem of categories of identity for Said, he never allowed me to be as he stated: “No one is born purely one thing”.
Similarly Jacques Derrida taught me that philosophy was a tool, always happening, dying, living, and deconstructing. Derrida was always on the corners of my pages when I read about Egyptian history, Modern Islamic philosophers and just any good old books. I was always aware that my conclusions were never my own anymore but belonged to the constructions of what I decided to experience and what I tried to avoid as experience.
This last week, I was reading the London Review of Books, in which a piece by Judith Butler caught my attention, she writes:
In October 1993, when I shared a stage with Derrida at New York University, I had a brief, private conversation with him that touched on these issues (How do you finally respond to your life and name?). I could see in him a certain urgency to acknowledge those many people who had translated him, those who had read him, those who had defended him in public debate, and those who had made good use of his thinking and his words. I leaned over and asked whether he felt that he had many debts to pay. I was hoping to suggest to him that he need not feel so indebted, thinking as I did perhaps naively Nietzschean way that debt was a form of enslavement: did he not see that what others offered him, they offered freely? He seemed not to be able to hear me in English. And so when I said “your debts”, he said: “My Death?” “No” I reiterated, “your debts!” and he said: “My death!”
What I found so fascinating about Judith Butler’s piece was the idea of “debt” and “death” ---the consolation of owing, giving, taking and then mourning. Charlie, Said, and Derrida had been owed “debt” but they were people who gave freely. In other words, I was graced with the influences of these 21st century thinkers to enter the life of a Muslim woman who always saw in them her work, life, relationships and intense intellectual reflections. Do we allow ourselves to take from these thinkers what they gave freely and openly, an embrace, gesture, a book, an archival fever, a contrapuntal tone or even an epistemological undecidebility? The answer is yes, we allow taking freely and giving freely.
This maybe a personal reflection on three thinkers but I want to take three men from completely different backgrounds and demonstrate the connectedness within the mosaic of how one might see them as similar, different but always yearning for the desire of creativity and passion of ideas.
All of these thinkers spoke of loss, fear, abandonment, displacement, and yes of course Difference. I learned from Said that I too could become “homeless,” living in many countries far from my heritage. As a Pakistani woman in American college classrooms I crave to create minor voices that are not usually heard from within. In this manner Said’s own biography often resonates with me, especially when he writes:
Something about the invisibility of the departed, his being missing and perhaps missed, in addition to the intense, repetitious, and predictable sense of banishment that takes you away from all that you know and can take comfort in, makes you feel the need to leave because of some prior but self-created logic, and a sense of rapture. In all cases, though, the great fear is that departure is the state of being abandoned. Even though it is you who leave.
Even as I flipped to the first page of Said’s memoir for a footnote, I have bittersweet recollections of a brief email exchange with him and sharing a moment during a conference at UCLA. That was all and yet the sense of writing of abandonment like debt invites me to think even deeper, as I recall how he has departed but perhaps he has been abandoned or had a feeling of loss as he traveled across the world except to his old homes, Palestine and Egypt. I return to Said’s early writings frequently these days and marvel at his late work Humanism and Democratic Criticism, where the great mind was struggling heroically with the cancer that finally overcame him. For years Said had astounded us with his sheer will to battle the illness that threatened to prevent him from completing his intellectual dreams.
Charlie and I used to discuss Edward Said or Jacques Derrida’s work, and I recall him remarking that I had developed a crush on “phantom writers” an “obsession” he called it since I had entered graduate study at Syracuse. He would sit across from me with his glass of wine and his left eye would blink, his voice had melodic stammer and I recall the intensity with which one can indeed fall in love with philosophers, thinkers, and ideas. He would lean back on a wooden chair and in his deep throated voice claim that “life is full of possibilities and singularities,” I then would want a truth, a story, a parable or even some gossip to back up his comment but he just would smile and hunch towards his glass of wine as if he held in it a potion of intellectual vigor that no one could quite apprehend or grasp. His mystery of meaning and thinking remains ingrained in the many folds of my own consciousness. He writes:
Consciousness, therefore, cannot tell the tale of its origination. Nor can it immediately witness to the forces of desire in its own originating meaning. The meaning that consciousness knows is a defected meaning. Its presentment is secondary.
This was my mentor’s mystery and I still will never know how deep his idea of consciousness was since I could never fully get his brilliance to flourish in my way and this in itself was why Charlie was crucial to many others and myself. The meaning that he gave to gestures, and colors and even at times to elephants and dogs was more profound than anything I have witnessed about the ordinariness of life! He created semantics of teaching and writing that twisted the mind and asked forgiveness in the reckoning of one’s categorical thinking. No puzzle could be solved nor was he going to solve it for you, he was there but not there. As he would ask: “what is real and important to you?” I would at first think to myself: “Nothing…everything…something?” But in the depths of my consciousness I knew that he was calling me forth to think in the raw, to see through Alice’s looking glass, and to struggle with it all alone but with him. This was his most precious gift to me; he gave openly, without debt, and with love.
Jacques Derrida and I met briefly at UC Irvine when a close friend and colleague of mine Dr. Greg Lambert presented a paper. Greg, who is brilliant, critical and fun, introduced me to this setting. I remember how excited I was to finally see a man that had been a ghost and portrait on the jackets of so many books since I was 19 years old. Derrida was smiling, his protruding French cheek, a mop of gray hair, an audacious French color combination suit, and the French- English words that danced back and forth gave me a lovely impression of a man who had sent my thinking to read Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze…I remember reading his book Archive Fever that I relished in two days, obsessed with the past as I am, I learned that the past, present and future are continually occurring:
There is no archive without place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.
What incredible singularities that all these three thinkers have occupied in the multiple folding of my mind, I cannot desist from, and as I sit in my garage tonight I see them, feel them, envision their nights of labor upon a book, manuscript, and they are with me. I turn to my current research on Naguib Mahfouz who is now 92 years old, and contemplate how this man has impacted me and that not only my dissertation but book in progress surrounds his fictional world of Cairo, Egypt. The inspiration I found in Mahfouz’s narrative and his stories became and is my life (for now), and as the oldest thinker of all three thinkers he is still alive, very much alive, and perhaps this is the point of this short personal note that all are still alive and very much in conversation with myself but so many others. They gave me so much without debt and their death is still giving openly, freely, and lovingly.
As Naguib Mahfouz writes:
Your light, a summit in the sky,
Aten, the living God,
Aten, the first of life,
When your rays appear in the East,
The world is a festival of light.
Aten, living sun,
Aten, shining above,
Your light unifies the two lands,
And all that you created.
You may be distant, but your rays are here on earth. (Naguib Mahfouz, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth, p.104)
Charles Winquist’s work was a result of the 60’s where secular theologians had proclaimed the “Death of God”; one of the most prominent of these theologians is Thomas J. Altizer who insisted that to understand theology one must insist on a God that is unknowable and renews the protestant and Christian view of God. Charlie’s theology was both nihilistic simultaneously his language was imbued with a Christology that he wanted to bring into what he called “ordinariness” or the “secular” realm. He probed the tensions of the religious and secular, he created a language by which one could have a relationship with the sacred and the profane, for him there were few contradictions and more and more synergistic alliances of theological and secular concepts.
Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1960, pub. 1559) begins by explicitly claiming that there is no knowledge of God or self unless there is knowledge of both. To look upon oneself is to turn thinking into a contemplation of God, and it is the knowledge of God that convinces us of our “unrighteousness, foulness, folly, and impurity” (Winquist, p.227)
One of the main influences that Charlie had upon me was the idea that the sacred, God, ritual were not external to the person but internal and reflection of who one was, and is today. As I traveled back and forth from Pakistan during summers, I would bring with me the ideas of religious thought into my family and community at home where I was transforming the many concepts and rituals that my family had partaken in without knowing what and why they were performing certain rituals. For example, in Pakistan, Muslim women get together and have a Milad, which is a congregation of women who recite the Prophet Mohammed’s life and sayings. There is a moment in this congregation when all the women stand up when Mohammed’s name is mentioned as if he were God, I thought it odd that Muslims who believe in prophecy but clearly in this instance are giving Mohammed more than that sacred being and desist in looking at oneself throughout these congregations, and create a sacred reality that only belongs to God, and not any human form. Here, I began to take Charlie’s own formulations and reflect on my own Islam, as if I had never reflected on how the approach could be a reflection of the person, culture and desire of the community. As “The concept of the person is implicated in an other that is not an other that is thought theologically in articulations instantiating the negativity of the wholly other for consciousness or in more ethnological thinking about the others of different cultures.” (Winquist, p.235) Islam unlike Protestant thought has not had a reformation nor does it need one as I have argued in my own thesis on Mahfouz, however thinking can be transformed if one can have self-reflexibility of one’s own vision of who and why we are, as the Qu’ran says: “ Verily, God does not change men’s condition unless they change their inner selves… (Surah: 12:11 Ar-rad). This type of thinking is itself an invitation to think about what is important to one in terms of the desire of thinking otherwise. Many recent Muslim scholars have called forth for a new thinking and renewal of certain Islamic concepts that might allow for a winquistian reading of both the elements of religion and the secular to be intertwined. As I pressured my own thinking as a young student and living in and out of Pakistan, it occurred to me that so much could be brought out in thinking seriously in two worlds living amidst and amongst two even three worlds.
As Edward said lived in many worlds, he too was subject to analyzing his Christian tradition but as he says in a recent video on his life, “There are no separate identities, the Chinese can also speak English and the French can speak Chinese…” (Edward Said, 2002) Not only does Said insist that alterity is almost a necessary condition of being but also seeing oneself, allowing the generosity of critique, and the ability to give without debt. As Said notes that memory or how we want to remember things are inaccurate, we learn that memory is actualized by our own perceptions, “When I arrived in Cairo after graduation, I soon saw that my memory of it during my exile in the United States as a place of stability was no longer accurate,” Similarly my unscathed summer memories of Karachi have transformed into deep reflection of a place that was always in transition and even war in the 70’s as I frolicked with my cousins in the wide open gardens, British clubs, and verandas as carefree and happy. The memory of “home” for me is a remote dream of stability, family gatherings, Eid, birthdays, games, love, and above all acceptance. As I grew older, I came to actualize that Edward Said too like me was longing for the home he believed he was most comfortable in but through his work and my experience, my comfort is in two worlds colliding, swinging, touching and always overlapping in multiple ways.
Charlie introduced me to another layer of multiplicity in identity that did not necessitate culture or even material reality but existential and philosophical experience, whereby one could become actualized how one wanted, there was to him, no knowledge before experience (Immanuel Kant) but more importantly, Charlie introduced me to what he termed “the changing collage of feelings that inhabit the world of the self.” (Winquist, 33) His work was calling for a new metaphysics that he termed the unconscious, “The Metaphysical notions of unconscious and conscious relationships and the interplay of actuality and possibility are manifested in all behavioral patterns.” (Winquist, 33). This type of thinking led me to explore the realm of metaphysics, psychoanalysis, philosophy and my crucial area of study Theology or I should say the materiality and spirituality of God.
Edward Said who too would agree with Winquist on the idea of consciousness and unconsciousness within Metaphysics goes into what he terms the realm of Alterity, the Other, and the unknown. I, as a young student was fascinated like many students to find out what really was there to uncover, know, actualize and see in the unknown realm that somehow all scholars pointed to as the known. All of this was extremely confusing for me but through Jacques Derrida’s analysis of God, writing and subjectivity, I discover as he states:
…So that God may indeed be, as Jabes says, an interrogation of God, would we not have to transform a final affirmation into a question? Literature would then, perhaps, only be the dreamlike displacement of this question: “There is the book of God in which God questions himself, and there is the book of man which is proportionate to that of God.” (Derrida, 78)
To interrogate God in Islam is to interrogate oneself and this to me resonated with the concept of God that I had been brought up with, and I understood that Derrida’s Jewish ness was very similar to my own identity as a Muslim having lived in Europe and North America. Derrida’s understanding like Said and Charlie that identification with the Other or an unknown alterior object or subject could indeed cause difference and contrapuntal worlds of realities that overlap and become an openness and “Our relationship to the world is both a receiving and transforming process in which both world and self are given definition.” (Winquist, 73)
As I write this, I am not quite sure if this is a eulogy or a discovery of these thinkers for myself as a teacher? I am intrigued by my own desire to recount the thinking and importance of these writers. Should this personal yet intellectual note be an offering to them or others? Or is this a way of me accepting the debt and their death? Whatever motive has compelled me to write this piece has lured me to think deeper in the tunnels of interdisciplinary models and across cultures. A freedom overcomes me as I reflect on how these thinkers were always already deconstructing immense constructions of identity and religion. The freedom question that arises in so many debates is one that is utmost effective when one looks deeper within into the depths of consciousness to find that indeed there are others always living in the dungeons of the oppressed. I give these men openly, freely, and take from them gifts that remain with me as I sit and read the words from their writings. I thank them and remember them in the depths (debts) of my mind.