The Nameless Wild One: The Ethics of Anonymous Subjectivity--Medieval and Modern

He said, "How can you not know who you are?" She said, "Because I am neither a little girl, nor a female, nor a man, nor a woman, nor a widow, nor a virgin, nor a lord, nor a servant, nor a lackey."

—Sayings of Meister Eckhart

. . . Tell me, what is your name?
He said: I am called the Nameless Wild One.

—Henry Suso, Little Book of Truth

"Antipolitics," in the milieu associated with György Konrád, is a matter of turning away from official parties and state-sanctioned institutions—turning away from them, that is, in favor of unofficial "civil society."¹ The faith in antipolitics was emancipatory in 1989, but seventeen years later the institutions of civil society can appear as limiting and, sometimes, as coercive as those of the state. We may wonder if by now the time has come to turn away from even unofficial and antipolitical forms of solidarity. Of course, the first objection raised to withdrawal from social solidarity is that only forms of self-absorption are left: individualism, hedonism, solipsism, agoraphobia. But if antipolitics, as the slogan had it, was a Third Way—neither collectivist nor individualist—then the more radical turn from collectivism that I would like to discuss here is a Fourth Way and not an echo of, or return to, any "way" that social science recognizes. The Fourth Way is less readily defined, or even described, than the more famous three, and, to do so, I will need to engage with medieval conceptions of anonymous subjectivity. Especially instructive is Meister Eckhart's conception of the subject as a "Nameless Wild One," a "neither this nor that." To expand on this conception and on the ethics of anonymity related to it, I will also want to consider the anticommunitarian thinking of Alain Badiou and especially his recent work—appreciative though atheistic—on Saint Paul.²

The Anonymous

Anonymity, in the modern West, is more often than not a negative marker. There are exceptions: the "anonymous donor," for instance, is thought to display a pure magnanimity, since the gift given is not an act of self-display. The anonymity that comes with retreat from celebrity is on occasion treated positively. But more frequently, anonymity is a synonym for failure: we speak of "nobodies," those who toil a lifetime yet fail to "make a name," and of the nameless masses who "leave no mark." For us, anonymity means impotence. The nameless are those who are most powerless to differ with, or from, others. As products of the authority of others, lacking agency of their own, the anonymous remain in whatever situation, by happenstance, they initially find themselves. In general, for us moderns, anonymity is a condition that we are driven to overcome. In some intellectual circles, however, anonymity is understood as an attribute of power. Here I am thinking of power in Foucault's sense: anonymous, diffused, lacking definite location, we can never identify it with this or that class, party, group, institution, state regime, leader, or business interest. Power in this sense is everywhere and nowhere, without apparent aims or personality and hence virtually a nothing—a nothing that nonetheless manages to determine the fate of nearly everything else. The one and only subject to which we are all subjected, power manages to be itself devoid of subjectivity.

I would like to propose that there are other ways to conceive of anonymity than this pair of modern ones. It is probably accurate to say that, of the major eras into which we have come to divide Western history, the medieval period is the one we most immediately and intuitively associate with the anonymous. The darkness of the Dark Ages is in part the obscurity of namelessness. First, there is the paucity of the historical record: the innumerable literary texts, for instance, of which the author's identity is unknown. And even when an author is named, the name may function for us simply as a label, as an aid to our categorizing the text; or, appearing within the text...