I delivered this at my minyan at Germantown Jewish Centre yesterday. I worked on it pretty hard and I think I more or less like it, although (as always) while I'm giving it I'm thinking, "this is so vapid and obvious." But because it represents (concisely!) what I've been able to absorb of Laclau after studying him for so long, I thought it might be worth jotting down here.
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I wanted to acknowledge that this is a relatively scholastic dvar, which may not be the biggest need people have this time of year. With such a high level of anxiety and tension over the election, I almost feel I should be offering therapy instead. But everyone has their own way of dealing with anxiety, and deep contemplation and study is mine, and I feel that the results of this do speak to this moment in time, as I’ll explain in a minute.
A recurring theme of these opening chapters of Genesis is a set of recurring motifs – of unity, on the one hand, and division or multiplicity on the other. In the days of creation, for example, God divides the universe into progressively specialized realms – darkness from light, water from dry land and so on. In this week’s parasha, we have the unity of humanity, represented by Noach’s family, being progressively divided and scattered into different realms. And just as in the creation story of Genesis, this actually is recounted two times, in two different ways. First we read in Chapter 10 that Noach’s sons are scattered, each with its own language. Then we read in chapter 11 that God, confronted by the city of Babel, confounded human speech and scattered people around the earth.
This seems timely to me at this political season because this progression from primeval unity to complexity is one that, I think, is a deep part of both the religious and the political imagination. In a diverse, democratic world, how do we define our larger goals for humanity? As Jews we look forward in our liturgy to a day when “the Lord shall be one and his Name one”- to accomplish an ideological and linguistic unity of understanding – that is what the messianic age is meant to represent. And in the political realm, as citizens of a democracy, we look ahead to a world where justice, truth, compassion, and freedom are felt by all. And yet here we have a text that suggests, rather subversively, that such a human unity has been frustrated directly by God – that multiplicity, diversity, and confusion are part of the divinely mandated order of this world. How can this be so?
I recently came across an interesting argument by the late post-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau that I find very suggestive in thinking about this paradox. Laclau is a theorist of political language, and I’m neither a philosopher nor a linguist, so I find his arguments very difficult to follow. But in his last book, Laclau illustrated one of his ideas by exploring a spiritual text that is actually part of the high holiday liturgy – the piyyut
Ha’aderet veha-emunah – and is also often recited, as we do, on Simchat Torah. It’s also part of the daily liturgy of the Sephardim.
This is from a first-millennium mystical text known as the “Hekhalot Rabbati.” According to Gershom Scholem, these hymns were used for concentration and meditation on the nature of the divine, to allow the mystic to become closer to the divine presence. This poem represents the “song of the angels” near the center or destination of that mystical journey. You can see that the poem lists different qualities or attributes belong to God. Power and faith, understanding and blessing, greatness and pride, knowledge and speech, purity and order, and so on – all to “the one who gives life to the world.” Scholem, from whom Laclau found this text, notes that there is a kind of vacuous, litany-like quality to this list – we don’t really learn anything in particular about God in it. It’s part of the liturgy because it works on the emotional level, as a way for a believer to find many “ladders” or personal connections to the divine.
Now, we see how this poem represents an old problem in the monotheistic imagination that we wrestle with at many points in Jewish liturgy. How can we use words to express a knowledge of the Divine, which by definition is beyond all expression? When we talk of God reigning as a king, the act of our thinking of a human king with a robe and scepter etc. is entirely inadequate, perhaps even bordering on blasphemous – but our words and imagination are all that we have as human beings. We only have words to give expression to the inexpressible.
Laclau notices that the mystic’s way of approaching this problem is to acknowledge all of the multiplicity – all of the things that are particular to us as humans, and that we do know, and to make them equivalent to one another in this sense. The mystic creates “horizontal” chains of equivalence between them. Before God, power and faith, understanding and blessing, and so on – all are the same, all are in that sense only, interchangeable with one another. They are both entirely “full” of meaning (because they are attributes of God) and “empty” (because they are all inadequate expressions of God).
What is interesting about this from Laclau’s point of view is that there is a similarity to what we do with such terms that are in the political realm. I mentioned at the outset that terms such as truth, justice, freedom are universal and positive to us. If we see protesters holding signs demanding truth and justice, without even knowing the content of what they want, those terms resonate with us. Some political philosophers have used this phenomenon to posit the idea of an underlying, universal morality.
But to Laclau, terms such as these “empty signifiers” are only really effective to us once we have given them a particular content. The analogy with mystical thinking is clear – the process of pushing terms toward the universal leaches them of their particularity. As humans, a term such as “freedom” means something specific to each of us – for those protesters, perhaps “freedom of the press from persecution by the state” – that is, a particular time and place.
To Laclau, the process of politics is about different actors creating chains of rhetorical equivalence between these universal terms, and the particular concerns of different times and places. Progressives create a claim that “justice” means “universal health care.” The goal of politics is to create (or disrupt) a chain of horizontal equivalences between particular grievances and these universal terms, so that “defending the Republic” means supporting this candidate or policy.
One conclusion of this is that the process of making these equivalences is not and never can be complete. This tension between the particular and the universal is baked in to how we speak and thus how we perceive the world. It also means that there can never be a moment in which all of America is either liberal or conservative, Republican or Democratic. That is, the logic of contingent alliances and attempts to make different chains of equivalence cannot ever truly end. George Bernard Shaw’s famous comment on linguistics was that England and America are divided by a common language. In the ultimate sense, this is what this means for politics as well –terms that unite are terms that divide.
The linguistic paradox between unity and multiplicity, then, is baked into both the political and the spiritual realms. What’s interesting about the Babel story is its suggestion that this paradox of multiplicity is part of the divinely mandated order of the world. No matter how eloquent we are or how reasonable we seem to be, there will always be alternate ways to create these chains of equivalence because the unity they are reaching toward is both accessible to everyone, and in this sense, meaningless.
Does this seem nihilistic or hopeless? I don’t think so. It doesn’t say that change for the better is impossible. What it says is that this kind of change is not inevitable – that there’s nothing in the way that the world is constructed that naturally leads to better outcomes. It’s accomplished, not through inexorable progress, but through human action, through struggle, in every generation, again and again. This year has revealed some stark truths about our nation that will still exist on Wednesday, regardless of the outcome on Tuesday. The work ahead is more urgently needed than ever – and we are the ones who must act.
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