Homesick

“I don’t know my way home.”

“That’s okay. . .  I don’t either.”

That is the dialogue in the closing scene of director Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent 1971 film Straw Dogs. The first line is delivered by Henri Niles, the mentally impaired character played by David Warner in the film. The reply comes from David Sumner, the highly intelligent (perhaps too intelligent) character played by Dustin Hoffman, a character who has just violently defended his rented house against armed intruders—a defense that has resulted in the death of a number of those intruders, as well as some other individuals. 

That closing dialogue takes place after all the violence—at least all the overt violence--has finally ended, and David is driving Henri back to the place where Henri lives. By what each says, neither knows his way home. However, Henri’s not knowing his way home is utterly different from David’s. 

Henri has what he experiences as a home, a place where he feels he belongs and to which he wants to return. It is just that because of his mental difficulties he doesn’t know how to direct David to drive there. 

On the other hand, David no longer knows just where, if anywhere, he has any such place of his own, a place where he feels he belongs and can live his own life. David is homeless in a deep and deeply disturbing sense that Henri’s very impairment protects him from ever having to experience. It is such utter lostness from all home that finds expression in David’s final words, especially as delivered with the enigmatic grin with which Dustin Hoffman delivers them.

2.

Do any of us know our way home today? 

Hardly.

Just where, if anywhere, do any of us today have a home at all any longer—any place where, as we honestly experience it, we truly belong? 

Why don’t we know our way home today? Whom in Peckinpah’s film do we most resemble in that regard? Henri or David? Are we of today not all, whether we have been brought to acknowledge it yet or not, just like David Sumner, who is forced by his own eruption into violence to acknowledge that he no longer knows his way home, at the end of that so graphically and disturbingly violent film? 

Even more crucially, isn’t the all too ever-present threat of our own eruptions into extremes of violence itself rooted in the very same radical homelessness to which David’s own eruption into such violence finally calls his attention?

In the scene at issue at the end of Peckinpah’s film, the underlying sense of David’s verbal acknowledgment of his own lack of knowing the way home any longer is something that only David himself can discern. It is an acknowledgment really directed solely to himself, not to Henri, the only other person in the car. Henri’s mental impairment assures that he will not understand what David is saying, and David knows that perfectly well. In what he is actually saying, David is talking to himself.

In so talking to himself, David is at last receiving a gift for which his whole life up till then has been preparing him. If he continues to be open to it, that gift will eventually bring him home again, but letting him truly know his home for the very first time. The gift to David, as it were, of his own outburst into violence is the shattering of his illusions about himself, and the revelation to him that he is indeed utterly homeless.

David’s violence shows him that he is homeless in a way that has nothing to do with having some “house” to defend against intruders, as—in an earlier scene in which the violence is just beginning to erupt into the open—David says is what he is going to do. David’s homelessness has nothing to do with the lack of adequate housing. Rather, it is rooted entirely in the deeply ingrained tendency to erupt into violence against anything or anyone who augurs to reveal precisely one’s very homelessness itself to one, a homelessness far more radical than any such lack of housing. 

3.

What is David’s problem, and by implication our own? Just why can’t David and the rest of us find our way home anymore? Henri’s inability to find his way home is due to his mental deficiency; but what about David—and all the rest of us by implication? What is the cause of David’s and all of our inability any longer to find the way home? 

Is that condition due to some sort of moral failure on our part? Something for which we ourselves are to blame, such that with a bit more courage and discipline we might have been able to avoid having lost our way home in the first place? Or is it something else?

It is something else.

Our homesickness is rooted in our own involuntary uprooting. We are wandering aimlessly in search of home, having lost all sense of where we are and how to get home again, because we have been torn out of what previously provided humans their home: We have been torn out by the roots from our “native soil.” 

Understanding that, however, leaves us to ask just what our true “native soil” is? 

That is a question that we all need to ask, alone and together. I will therefore let it remain open, as I should—at least for now.

Final scene of Peckinpah’s film

Reanimations, Reiterations, and Resurrections

Archimedes was literally resurrected.

                                                —Alain Badiou 

Badiou spoke those words in a session of his two-year long weekly seminar of 1996-1998, on his “axiomatic theory of the subject” (as opposed to the “object”), the text of which seminar has only recently been published.* Badiou made the remark  in the context of discussing the European recovery during the Renaissance of ancient Greek mathematics. Europe had long before lost that entire tradition, but it had been preserved throughout the many intervening centuries by the great Islamic scholars of Arabian civilization, who eventually returned it to the Europe from which it had first come. 

Early in his session of March 4, 1998, Badiou observed that when, during the 16th and 17th centuries C.E.,  “the works of Archimedes, who represents the stupefyingly creative culmination of Greek mathematics,” were at last recovered during the 16th and 17th centuries “Archimedes was literally resurrected”—that is brought back from the dead. In that recovery Archimedes, after being buried for many centuries, returned to dwell among the living: Archimedes—not just some equivalent of Archimedes, but Archimedes himself--came back from his grave. 

In understanding Badiou’s remark, it is important to remember that, as Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng observed almost half a century ago concerning another return from the dead, what is involved in such literal resurrections is no such thing as a mere “reanimation of a corpse.”** Especially in the case of Archimedes, who lay dead for many centuries not just for a few days, on the day of his resurrection there would, in fact, have been no corpse left to reanimate. It would have returned to dust long before.

Resurrection is not reanimation.

Archimedes Thoughtful, a painting by Domenico Fetti, 1620

2.

[T]he presence of the master in the work is the only genuine one. The greater the master, all the more purely does the master’s person vanish behind the work.

                                                                                    —Martin Heidegger***

 Even less is resurrection reiteration.

To reiterate is to produce again and again instances of one and the same type. Reiterations of a given type are struck from a template, as coins are struck at a mint. 

It is worth noting that the word type itself comes from a root meaning “to strike,” just as we strike the keys on a “typewriter” to reproduce printed letters from the keys. Every strike of the same key produces a new iteration of that key’s embossed letter, just as every strike of the coin-press at a mint produces a new reiteration of the coin at issue. At its core, the process of reiteration is the production of multiple versions of one and the same type, kind, or sort of thing, versions that differ from one another only in inessential ways, such that all the reiterations are interchangeable one with another.

Such interchangeability means that, for all essential purposes, any one reiteration is a good as another—and, as the old saying has it, “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” Every 2017 Kia Sorento, to use my own current automobile as an example, is as good as any other, aside from such accidental factors as personal color preferences, or number of scratches from prior usage, and the like.

Any given iteration can always be replaced, should it break or wear out of be lost, just so long as the mold remains available to strike off another instance of the same kind. Any given iteration can in that way be replaced by another iteration of exactly the same type, struck from the very same template, or another template of the same type, as was the broken, worn out, or lost iteration. That remains so, unless all the templates for whatever is at issue have themselves been broken or worn out, of course. However, even in that case another iteration of the very same type of template could itself still be struck, unless the template for making that type of template had itself been broken, worn out, or lost—and so on endlessly. 

However, what is absolute in its singularity and uniqueness—as is, for example, every human being, whether Archimedes, Jesus of Nazareth, or the kid down the block—can never be reiterated. No replacement of the same type, kind, or sort can be made, because what is singularly unique in never an instance of a multi-instantiable sort, kind, or type. 

Thus, each unique singularity is un-reiterable. 

Each and every unique singularity is “one of a kind,” as we put it, and not an instance of a type for which there is any template or mold from which new instances of the same type might be struck. 

That is precisely what is so striking about anything uniquely singular: No replacements can ever be struck for what is truly one of a kind. If what is one of a kind comes back again after having once gone, then it is that singular, unique one that returns, not another thing just like it. That applies to coming back to life from the dead—that is, to resurrection, “taken literally.”

3.

What does it mean to take something literally? Specifically, what does Badiou mean when he says that, with the recovery of Greek mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, “Archimedes was literally resurrected”?

Well, taken literally literal means “by the letter” (from Latin littera, “letter, alphabetic sign”), but the common usage of the term means the same as “not metaphorically or allegorically or the like,” that is, not just “rhetorically,” for oratorical effect. What Badiou means is that when Europe recovered ancient Greek mathematics, Archimedes—Archimedes himself, the one and only, and not any mere simulacrum, copy, or other instance of the same type of person, mathematician, or whatever: Archimedes himself, and none other—was resurrected, that is, brought back to life, after being dead for centuries.

4.

In thinking of resurrection, we all too easily fall prey to superstition and idolatry. Perhaps if we combine Badiou’s and Heidegger’s remarks above we can find valuable pointers to follow in order to avoid such superstitious idol worship.  Let us take Badiou literally—just as he tells us he means to be taken—when he observes that Archimedes was himself resurrected with the recovery in and for Renaissance Europe of the ancient Greek mathematics of which his work was the “stupefyingly creative culmination.” Let us also take no less literally Heidegger’s observation that the “genuine presence” of those who are masters of the creative arts is to be found in the works themselves that those masters create. Joining together those two observations from those two philosophers might let us at last see the truth of such things as the remark Jesus makes, according to the Christian Gospels, that wherever two or three are gathered together in his name, there he is in the midst of them. 

We may thus come at last to see that in saying such things Jesus is using no metaphors.  We may hear at last that he is speaking quite literally.

Archimedes Mirror Used to Burn Roman Ships, a painting by Giulio Parigi, c.1599

* Théorie axiomatique du sujet (Paris : Fayard, 2019), pp. 281-282, my translation. 

** Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, translated by Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), pp. 104-105. I discuss the passage at issue in greater detail in “What Is a Christian? A Gentile Inquiry”—an essay I wrote in or around 1984 that is published as an appendix to my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available elsewhere at this website. 

*** “Gelassenheit,” in Gesamtausgabe Band 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 517, my translation.

Taking a Holiday Break

From December 23, 2019, through January 6, 2020, I am taking a holiday break from my blog. I will resume weekly posts beginning January 13, 2020..