The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. In the most recent critical appraisal of Bloom’s whole intellectual career, from 1959 (the date of publication of his doctoral thesis on Shelley) to 2005 (the editors called for contributions to commemorate Bloom’s seventy-fifth birthday ), Graham Allen and Roy Sellars complain in the preface that “while it may be true that Bloom’s work is difficult to adopt as a methodology, and that it presents itself as a kind of literature, its unrepeatability does not, on its own, explain the lack of academic dialogue . . . Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida and De Man are equally unrepeatable, for example, and yet their works, unlike those of Bloom, have been subject to a widespread and intensive (if not always successful) incorporation into academic discourse” (2007, xiv). My book can thus be seen as filling this lacune by delivering the discussion that should have happened in the ’70s and ’80s, but for many reasons, which I will also try to explain here, did not. 2. The term “counter-narrative” is used in this specific context by Michael Mack in German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses as a revisionist response to David Biale’s notion of “counter-history,” which he created originally in reference to Gershom Scholem’s work on the kabbalah, offering an alternative vision of the Jewish tradition. Mack’s useful innovation consists in the fact that, contrary to the latter , the “counter-narrative” does not limit itself to telling the same story from a different perspective, but insists on the transformation of crucial concepts and ideas in which this story is told. 3. See most of all: Geoffrey H. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness; Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses; Norman Finkelstein, The Ritual of New Creation; Jean-Pierre Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity; Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor; and Moshe Idel, “Enoch and Elijah: Some Remarks on Apotheosis, Theophany and Jewish Mysticism,” being his contribution to The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, edited recently by Graham Allen and Roy Sellars. 4. As Franz Rosenzweig calls it in The Star of Redemption, pointing to an essential unity of the philosophical project from the pre-Socratics to Hegel. 5.To what extent Bloom truly is a “religious critic” will be a matter of a serious discussion in the following chapters of this book, for this is indeed a characteristic that may raise some protests, and not only on the side of the Jewish thinkers more favorably inclined toward orthodoxy. For instance, Leslie Brisman, in his 319 recent essay “Bloom upon Her Mountain: Unclouding the Heights of Modern Biblical Criticism,” claims that Bloom is rather “a powerful and plain-spoken critic of religion—or, perhaps more precisely, of what happens to literary imagination when it degenerates into religious imagination” (2007, 336). On the other hand, Moshe Idel, whose essay figures as next to Brisman’s in The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom, opens his reflections on the Bloomian “angelology” with the statement indicating the very opposite: “Among leading contemporary thinkers, Harold Bloom’s interest in and contribution to a novel understanding of religion is outstanding” (2007, 347). This is not to say that these two opinions cannot be dialectically reconciled: for Bloom, every normative or—how he calls it after Nietzsche—“priestly” religion contains a vivid core of a “frontier speculation,” which is still unencumbered by the pieties of dogmatic orthodoxies . This hot and fluid core tends to “fossilize” due to normative pressures and for this reason needs to be brought to life again in religious criticism. The religious criticism, therefore, is both criticism of religion and criticism for the sake of religion. One could thus say, paraphrasing Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s aggressive defense of Enlightenment, that Bloom tries to defend religion against itself. 6. In particular, see Peter de Bolla, Harold Bloom: Towards the Historical Rhetorics; David Fite, Harold Bloom: The Rhetoric of Romantic Vision; and Graham Allen, Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict. 7. The motto taken from Stevens’s An Ordinary Evening in New Haven is as follows: “A more severe,/More harassing master would extemporize/Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory/Of poetry is the theory of life,/As it is, in the intricate evasions of as.” 8. In Fallen Angels, Bloom speculates on Hamlet as a literary figure anticipating the aporetic style of philosophical deconstruction: “Hamlet thinks too well, and thus perishes of the truth, pragmatically becoming a version of...