The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction

Chapter Six: Fair Crossings: From Mere Life to More Life

Chapter 6 Fair Crossings: From Mere Life to More Life It is fair to be crossing And to have crossed. —John Ashbery Harold Bloom has never hidden his dislike for Martin Heidegger. His introduction to The Anxiety of Influence almost begins with “Heidegger, whom I cheerfully abhor” (AI, xi), and the text itself is peppered with mocking references to “Heidegger and his French flock.”Yet, as usual with Bloom, one of the most spiteful tricksters of contemporary humanities, the opening phrase, which ends with nevertheless, suggests some deeper affinity between the two thinkers, however inadmissible on the conscious level: an affinity of obsessiveness, of thinking “one thought and one thought only, and to think it through to the end” (ibid.). In Heidegger’s case, it is the famous Denken des Seins (thinking of being), with its morbid twist of Todesdenken, where death, “the ownmost” possibility of Dasein, remains the only property of man. In Bloom’s case, it’s the very opposite: his fascination with Jacob’s vital duel with the Angel of Death. Thus, what Heidegger hands over to Being in the act of Ge-hören, obedient submission , Bloom, like all his great Jewish precursors, wants to keep only for himself. Life, always more life, is for him what death is to Heidegger: “the ownmost,” truly inalienable right of the single individual.1 DAEMONIZATION, or “the Ownmost” Sublime Monotheism seems to be closely linked to the name I am. Does not this name given to God reflect the danger that the individual feels 259 he or she is in reaching the state of individual being? If I am, then I have gathered together this and that and have claimed it as me, and I have repudiated everything else; in repudiating the not-me I have, so to speak, insulted the world, and I must expect to be attacked. So when people first came to the concept of individuality, they quickly put it up in the sky and gave it a voice that only Moses could hear. —Donald Woods Winnicott, “Sum, I am” Our typical experience of a work which will eventually have an authority with us is to begin our relation to it at a conscious disadvantage, and to wrestle with it until it consents to bless us. —Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture The question of life and vitality has always been absolutely essential for Bloom, but the ratio of daemonization—the fourth one of the six revisionary stages—brings forth the idea of the vital power in a particularly condensed form. The ephebe, in rallying what remains of his scattered inner pneuma, begins to wrestle with the demonic aspect of his precursor . The paradigm of this stage, therefore, is Jacob’s struggle with the dark aspect of Elohim in which the former wins his new name and the blessing. The new name is a sign of a true initiation, and the blessing, according to the Hebrew tradition, always means more life. Says Bloom in The Book of J: The Blessing gives more life, awards a time without boundaries, and makes a name into a pragmatic immortality, by way of communal memory. (BJ, 211)2 Bloom’s fascination with ancient Hebrew vitalism, as exemplified by J, the most enigmatic of the four writers of Torah—in The Book of J Bloom imagines her to be a Gevurah, a lady of the King Solomon’s court—is of great importance for his understanding of the process of creativity. For him, life, figuration, and vitality are synonymous. And more life is not just a quantitative augmentation, but a radical change of quality: it is life intensified, and transformed into a creative principle of expansion which knows no boundaries or limitations (or rather, as we have already seen, it does not want to know). It isn’t a vegetative life of the mythic life cycle which is all about boundaries and limitations, but a life in its pure quintessence , extracted, purified, and transmuted into will: a completely new category, for the first time sacredly represented by ancient Yahweh. This 260 wrestling harold vitalism has as its end not so much the “preservation of life” as “the burgeoning of life” (BJ, 303), a state of exuberance which reflects Yahweh’s restlessly dynamic nature. A man touched by His Blessing—like Joseph or David, in Bloom’s opinion the shiniest examples of Hebrew humanistic vitalism—is alive in a different sense than...