The Ritual of New Creation (31 page)

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

Page 104

and again to the edge of the abyss. As we have noted, this psychocultural volatility, this attraction to nihilism and apocalyptic violence, are constituent parts of the tradition in which Steiner locates himself. They are preeminent modernist qualities, but they enter the modernist matrix partly through Jewish messianic channels.

These tendencies are compounded by the brute fact of the Holocaust, and Steiner's special sense not of mere guilt (as is the case for American Jewry) but also of an uncanny near miss, since he was born and brought up in France and did not reach the United States until 1940. Having thus been saved, this brilliant heir of secular European Judaism would naturally be attracted to a mode of thought "which did not see history as the progressive unfolding of the rational, which was attuned to the poverty of experience which the Enlightenment left in its wake, and which accepted the possibility of apocalypse."
²⁴But from a slightly different perspective, Nazism and the Holocaust present, in Steiner's thought, an
occasion,
huge and monstrous, through which a largely repressed messianic sensibility can test itself, can come to know its faith and its doubts. It is only through such testing, even against the greatest inhumanities, that the humanistic spirit can justify its devotion to the ideal of culture. This becomes clear in the final paragraph of
Real Presences,
which draws upon both Christian and Jewish messianic motifs to produce the hushed anticipation of
tikkun:

But ours is the long day's journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?
²⁵

Here as elsewhere in the tradition, messianic thought is not only apocalyptic but utopian and restorative as well: it looks forward to an end and fulfillment of history, a world made anew, which is

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simultaneously the original, unfallen state of the past. Meanwhile, that which makes history bearable, because it is the site of the struggle between the ideal and the inhuman, is art, which would be understood in radically different terms with the fulfillment of the utopian or messianic promise. For Steiner, the way in which we choose to regard and understand art is of the utmost importance, for it reveals the way in which we choose to dwell in a "post-culture."

Given prevailing currents of thought, Steiner's own choice is a brave one, and may be regarded as a direct expression of the utopian dimension of his messianism:

The thrust of will which engenders art and disinterested thought, the engaged response which alone can ensure its transmission to other human beings, to the future, are rooted in a gamble on transcendence. The writer or thinker means the words of the poem, the sinews of the argument, the personae of the drama, to outlast his own life, to take on the mystery of autonomous presence and presentness.
²⁶

Human creativity is a gamble on transcendence; human creation calls forth autonomous presence. Something is there in the artist's struggle to bring forth form; something is there in our encounter with the achieved work. The ground of belief has altered. Creeds and systems no longer have power over the modern mind, nurtured by skepticism (if not nihilism), but art, which has always partaken of mystery, maintains its power as transcendental witness. In the realm of the aesthetic we make our leap of faith:


there is aesthetic creation because there is creation . There is formal construction because we have been made form. The core of our human identity is nothing more or less than the fitful apprehension of the radically inexplicable presence, facticity and perceptible substantiality of the created. It is; we are. This is the rudimentary grammar of the unfathomable. ²⁷

This pronouncement can be readily understood, considering Steiner's heritage and his positions on related matters. As we have seen in regard to the problem of exile, Steiner can accept neither secular nor Orthodox attitudes. Although he feels himself to be cut off from ritual and systematic belief, he cannot bring himself to an understanding of culture that is totally desacralized. In this respect,

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he remains true to his modernist precursors such as Kafka and Benjamin, and feels obligated to struggle against the Postmodernism of such figures as Derrida. His answer to both the agony of modernism and the play of Postmodernism is a kind of sacred or theological aestheticism. Art does not replace religion, as Matthew Arnold had hoped, but rather, it is revealed to be the one enduring site of possible belief. When we encounter the poem, the painting, the symphony, there is a "knock at the door"; and in following the rules of courtesy, we admit the presence of the other. All secondary thought about art stems from the primal mystery of this encounter:

The meaning, the existential modes of art, music and literature are functional within the experience of our meeting with the other. All aesthetics, all critical and hermeneutic discourse, is an attempt to clarify the paradox and opaqueness of that meeting as well as its felicities. The ideal of complete echo, of translucent reception is, exactly, that of the messianic. For the messianic dispensation, every semantic motion and marker would become perfectly intelligible truth; it would have the life-naming, life-giving authority of great art when it reaches the one for whom it is uniquely intendedand here, 'uniquely' does not mean 'solely'.
²⁸

The messianic tenor of this position has its counterpart, however, in just those strands of contemporary thought which Steiner hopes to resist. As he admits in his argument against the recent preponderance of critical theory, "I would define the claim to theory in the humanities as impatience systematized. Out of Judaism grown impatient at the everlasting delay of the messianic came strange fruit. Today, this impatience has taken on extreme, nihilistic urgency."
²⁹Thus, when Steiner addresses this systematized, nihilistic impatience, he is in effect addressing one logical outcome of the intellectual tradition to which he owes his allegiance. Indeed, his confrontation with critical theory (or at least with such masters as Derrida, Barthes, and De Man) is less of an argument than a rueful appreciation, from which he finally must turn away:


On its own terms and planes of argument, terms by no means trivial if only in respect of their bracing acceptance of ephemerality and self-dissolution, the challenge of deconstruction does seem to me irrefutable. It embodies, it

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