Authority

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 RUSSELL MORTON BROWN Authority Without any call for papers on the subject, this issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly finds itself organized around the subject of authority, especially in relation to the intellectual and the artist. Perhaps this common topic is an indication that the beginning of the twenty-first century, with its changed and changing hegemonies, has given new urgency to complex questions about the nature, necessity, and dangers of authority. The essays in this issue remind us of some of the twentieth century=s considerations and confrontations with this topic. These begin with T.H. Adamowski=s response to recent books on Sartre, on Heidegger, and on intellectuals more generally: >Self-Appointed Legislators to Mankind: Intellectuals and Tyranny.= The dangers that Adamowski chillingly depicts B of serious thinkers falling under the spell of absolute authority B return us to the puzzle of how it was possible for Heidegger to be so naïve in his responses to Hitler or how Sartre could ignore the sinister dimensions of Stalinism. The answer, Adamowski suggests, lies in the way the intellectual can yield to the seductive desire for >a cleansing whirlwind that destroys the established order and opens the way towards some new planetary possibility for humanity.= The utopianism suggested in Adamowski=s phrase is the subject of Jeannelle Laillou Savona=s examination of Hélène Cixous=s feminism: >Hélène Cixous and Utopian Thought: From ATancredi Continues@ to The Book of Promethea.= In her suggestion that the utopianism that lies at the heart of Cixous=s thinking is more complex than has been recognized, Savona makes us realize that while utopian logic can be distorting or even a dangerous temptation, it can also serve as a useful rhetorical gesture, a way of constructing or driving a necessary argument, of bringing a fresh vision to a world in need of another way of seeing things. Michael Cobb focuses on a more traditional but no less idealizing location of authority in his reconsideration of the representation of religion in African American culture: >Irreverent Authority: Religious Apostrophe and the Fiction of Blackness in Paule Marshall=s Brown Girl, Brownstones.= Using Marshall=s novel to rethink the place of religion in the development of African American culture, Cobb challenges previous commentators who have simply idealized the role of religion and reminds us that the accept- university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 ance of religion=s solace is also an acceptance of its implicit authority. In >Contractual Obligations: The National Ballet=s Fiftieth Season,= James Neufeld situates the questions of authority at a local and more immediate level. When the current artistic director of the Canadian National Ballet turned away from the classic mode that had been at the centre of the company and dismissed his prima ballerina, the tensions between tradition as authority and authority as necessary for breaking free from a hidebound tradition were played out. The drama that ensued B which involved defining the spheres of authority in a collaborative work such as ballet and which also showed that the artistic has her own special authority in that collaborative structure B was both fascinating in itself and has larger social resonances. Counterpoised against all tendencies to look to some form of utopianism and, more generally, against all principles drawn from idealist thinking, Eric Levy=s closing essay offers us the figure of Beckett. His description of >The Beckettian Absolute Universal= might be identified as a charting of a post-authority, post-utopian territory. While this seems an ideal of its own perhaps, it is rather, in its >unrelenting confusion= and >stunning inversion of metaphysics,= a perfect and deeply disturbing anti-ideal. What does existence look like when an intellectual and artist bases his vision on universal lack, without any authority either to embrace or to struggle against? Is what Levy calls Beckett=s >assault on abstraction= the only way we have left to avoid the temptations that Adamowski delineates? ...