Transformation, Not Transcendence

This essay belongs to a series of meditations on the secular imagination, by which I mean, very broadly, the capacity of humanity (occasional though it is) to conceptualize its existence in the absence of external and transcendental authority, and thus to exercise its radical potential for transforming the conditions of its existence in full cognizance of its historical character. Obviously, such a meditation also involves an interrogation as to what constitutes the historical subject, the subject of history, as well as, of course, the subject in history, and would thus require equally an investigation of subjectivity's psychic dimensions. (Hence, the simultaneous interest of the overall project in the politics of sublimation, though on this occasion this will be broached only tangentially.) The central figure in this essay is what Edward Said has called "secular criticism," a notion I take to be indicative of an intransigent intellectual position that seeks to critique and transform existing conditions—and this holds true both in matters of aesthetic form (literature, music) and social-political action—without submitting to the allure of otherworldly or transcendent solutions. The motif of transformation against the grain of transcendence is the core element in Said's conceptual framework. It reaches beyond mere opposition of the secular to the religious to another configuration that strips away from the religious (and indeed from metaphysics itself) an assumed imperviousness to the political, so that we may speak of Said's work, rather dramatically, as an exfoliation of the repressed politics of transcendence.¹

If Said's core understanding of these elements tends to elude the majority of critics in favor of discussing his other, more explicitly political aspects, the events and aftermath of September 11 underscore ever more profoundly the urgency of what he calls "secular criticism." The present historical moment, I believe, marks a watershed of a range of positions (often held with dire political consequences) on the relation between religion and politics, which I draw here in the broadest sense to include our most elemental decisions as to what constitutes our encounter, as historical subjects, with the world. Hence the impression of real methodological and epistemological confusion over the global significance of the events of 9/11, particularly as revealed by certain voices in—let us say, for the sake of argument—the "secular Left," who are so conscious of the historical ground slipping into uncharted waters that they either fall into silence or into rapid declaration. It is difficult not to acknowledge that the continuous and yet still indeterminable unfolding of this historical moment has produced a sense of being suspended before a confounding crossroads of histories made and unmade, known and to be known. In full recognition of this sense of suspension, I begin by considering a curious incident that emerged alongside the initial ripple effects of September 11 as an allegorical instance of the wider psycho-symbolic dimensions framing the events. Placing oneself within these dimensions makes imperative precisely the mode of interrogation needed in order to break down the deadly social-historical logic that produced these events in the first place and yet continues to be strengthened by their occurrence: namely, a mode of interrogation that begins with the question, How can the secular be philosophically articulated apart from its traditional opposition to the religious? This is exactly the interrogation that Said's thought performs with such subtlety and incisiveness.

On Wednesday, September 19, 2001, in the back pages of one of the New York Times sections, a tiny unsigned article was introduced by the astonishing headline "Attacks Called Great Art." What followed was a hastily and scantily reported news item that hardly justified the stunning claim. It reported that Karlheinz Stockhausen, surely one of the leading figures in contemporary music, described the attacks of September 11 as "the greatest work of art ever," going on to reproduce a relatively long and awkward quotation by the composer himself: "What happened there—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of...