The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction

Introduction: Life as an Argument: Harold Bloom’s Antithetical Vitalism

Introduction Life as an Argument: Harold Bloom’s Antithetical Vitalism A fresh poem written now, a fresh critical essay written now, a fresh story or novel, competes against a vast overpopulation. That, I think, is what criticism must address itself to. But that is not the classstruggle : it is a question of how we individuate. —Harold Bloom, in an interview with Imre Salusinszky One needs to think about Kierkegaard’s declaration that he had fought for becoming an ‘individual’ in the strictest meaning of the word, but that he had failed—yet, despite all this, he had an idea that his funeral inscription should simply read: “this individual.” —Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God If there is a slogan which captures the force of Bloom’s theoretical efforts, from his earliest works on romanticism, through his engagement with deconstruction, to his latest inquiries into the aesthetics of genius, it ought to be drawn from the marginal notes of Blake: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess” (Johnson and Grant 1979, 440). However, trying to give justice to a living singularity is not exactly a topic for theory: in order to avoid “general knowledges” it must simultaneously “resist theory,” and this resistance can succeed only to a certain point. This is precisely why Harold Bloom is such a paradoxical theorist, and, a fortiori, why the project to write about his peculiar antisystematic mode of thinking must always conceed the possibility of failure. However, it is a risk worth taking, for the position, which will eventually 3 emerge from our—hopefully—strong misreading of Bloom’s work, appears as not only original but also urgently lacking in the panorama of contemporary ideas. Bloom’s stance—as I propose to call it here, antithetical vitalism—goes completely against the grain of deconstructive, reductive, and deathbound tendencies that dominated the scene of the twentieth-century thought. Yet, despite the philosophical angle, very strongly present in this book, I will not attempt to make Bloom an heir of Heidegger, or a revisionist of the deconstructivist tradition. On the contrary , my aim will be to stage an intensely polemical juxtaposition thanks to which Bloom could emerge as a strong thinker with a new discursive, not just poetico-critical, voice of his own. The Saving Lie is a consciously belated book. Yet, written almost forty years after the clash between Bloom and deconstruction had taken place, it does not limit itself to a reenactment of the past debate. I chose the word “clash” quite deliberately, for, despite all appearances, there was, in fact, no debate; Bloom’s “High Argument” from the ’70s, first stated in The Anxiety of Influence, and then elaborated in the three remaining works of his famous tetralogy (A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, Poetry and Repression), was almost entirely neglected by his deconstructionist opponents. The reason for writing this book, therefore , came from a feeling of a missed chance or a “missed encounter” which, I thought, needed to be restaged in an almost Benjaminian gesture of reading the recent history of the humanities against the grain in order to recover its lost, or simply wasted, chances.1 The other reason for writing The Saving Lie was more personal, but not without theoretical bearings. When reading Bloom, I was always struck by an intriguing affinity between him and myself, both the descendents of East European Jewry, a refreshingly “agonistic” ingredient that I wanted to decipher in order to understand better my own instinctive discontent with contemporary philosophy, and enbolden my so far deeply repressed desire for a strong “counter-narrative.”2 Obviously, I am not the first to notice Bloom’s obsessive Jewishness that singles him out from the group he mockingly labeled “Heidegger and his French flock”; there were others before me who have already focused on this theme: Geoffrey Hartman, Cynthia Ozick, Susan Handelman, Jean-Pierre Mileur, Norman Finkelstein, and Moshe Idel.3 Yet, my own approach is somewhat different; I try to argue throughout this book that Bloom’s agonistic engagement with the Western tradition of philosophical logos (word), culminating in his dispute with deconstruction, actually managed to produce a strong “counter-narrative” of davhar (meaning 4 introduction “word” in Hebrew), a truly new theoretical position deriving “out of the sources of Judaism,” which I decided to call “antithetical vitalism.” Having almost...