State University of New York at Oswego
Professor Cascardi's book is an interesting compilation of
theoretical discourses about the subject in the modern world. His primary
thesis is that the subject of modernity is not single but divided and
heterogeneous. He sees modernity's goals as contradictory because the subject
is inscribed in a society no longer founded on the basis of virtue and
tradition, one in which the terms of transcendence have been rendered suspect.
Since Descartes, Cascardi argues, selfhood has been transformed into
subjectivity, and
—135→
subjectivity has become
«a self-legitimizing attempt to ground the values of a new
age»
, that is, freedom and autonomy, in rational self-consciousness
and by means of the liberal state
(64). In the modern age, the subject's experience is
therefore shaped by a series of related splits between fact and theory, reason
and desire, value and rule. It is positioned at the intersection of
contradictory discourses of which Descartes, Cervantes, Hobbes, Pascal, Milton,
and the myth of Don Juan are supposed to be representative. Cascardi claims
that these splits or antinomies have remained
«unacknowledged by thinkers on both sides of the debate
over modernity and postmodernism»
(65), and he posits the need to introduce imagination
and its discourse into a world that has been rationalized, wherein
philosophical discourse has been privileged. This is the aim of his
project.
The book is divided into six chapters: I, The «disenchantment» of the world; II, The theory of the novel and the autonomy of art; III, Secularization and modernization; IV, The subject and the State; V, Subjective desire; VI, Possibilities of postmodernism.
In the first chapter, Cascardi uses Max Weber as his springboard in discussing the bureaucracy of the modern world, its reification of social relationships, and its «normalizing» of social institutions in the absence of transcendental norms. Habermas's theory of «communicative action» is interpreted by Cascardi as the rationalized sublimation of any expressive content or experience by means of the «construct» of communicative reason. The well-known Foucaultian and Derridean positions against the «fictive» absolute nature of origin are included to reinforce Cascardi's premise.
In Chapter II, Cascardi attempts to show that the novel forms an
essential part of the debate on modern culture and that those who, like
Habermas (in Cascardi's view), focus on aesthetic judgment rather than on
aesthetic experience fail to derive the
«expressive potential and inner coherence»
of
art
(117). A genre like the novel, he says, can provide
«access to values that could seem irrational when measured
in relation to a purely representational concept of the real»
(104). Basing himself primarily on Lukács's
Theory of the Novel, Cascardi attempts to
situate literature between the terms of history and theory. Descartes's
position of the subject as
«standing beyond possibility of sensory error and beyond
all conceptual doubt»
becomes the corollary for the formation of a
«new novelistic point of view, one that relies on the
separation of values from facts»
(83). This point of view which is constructed by the
«subject» becomes now a possibility in
Don Quixote, which is seen as modern because
it can no longer be subsumed under the image of any
«pre-existing social or aesthetic whole»
(84). It also shows that the traditional promise of
literature as ethical is
«pitted against the 'dangers' of fictional or quixotic
modes of readerly identification»
, and thus necessitates resistance
to the text
(105). Cascardi sees
Don Quixote as revealing
«the ethical risks present in a world without essential
forms»: 1) the self may be transformed into a subject governed by an
arbitrary will; 2) the effort to refashion the existing world may give way to
the pressures of a purely iconoclastic desire with respect to society as it
stands;
—136→
3) the fact that in the absence of transcendent values,
inner-worldly things, like Dulcinea, may assume the status of a transcendent
value-ground
(123). But
Don Quixote's heterogeneity can still be
«synthesized» because, for Cascardi, the tension inherent in the
secularization/disenchantment paradigm is not yet dominant. The loss of the
power of fiction to command belief, for example, can still be compensated by
the need to invent aesthetic and ethical theory as in the Canon's criteria for
the legitimation of fictions (Don Quixote, I, 47).
In a world devoid of transcendental norms, normative social
practices are described (in Chapter III) as replacing traditional religious
ideals. Figures like Pascal and Milton are brought in to argue
«that the invention of transcendental subjectivity does
not in fact eliminate
but rather guarantees the competing
transcendence of faith»
(128; Cascardi's emphasis). For Cascardi, Habermas
provides a
«wholly secular alternative»
(which, by the way,
Habermas intended to do)
(140). Rorty's category of the
«interesting» as a term of secular aesthetics makes him
«a critic of 'unexamined' prejudices»
(151). Kant's displacement of religion to the
«inward» space of conscience leaves the subject with a heightened
sense of duty and with no clear sense of what that duty should serve (157).
Weber is cited as
«an example of someone who holds convictions that no
longer follow from beliefs»
(178).
The premise of the fourth chapter is that the founding of the
state along rational lines is inherently contradictory. Hobbes and Machiavelli,
as would be expected, are brought in to bear out the claim that rhetoric is
essential in modern political life because
«modern political philosophy is marked... by two principal
features»: an interest in self-preservation, which has replaced
aristocratic virtue as the basis of political life, and the transformation of
politics from a self-reflective praxis based on prudence into a technical
science
(207-08).
Chapter V posits a deliberately contradictory premise: on the one
hand, where
«there are no natural ends or objects of desire, and where
reason does not itself supply those ends, the result may be a form of
empowerment, a freedom of self-creation...»
(230); on the other hand,
«the liberation of desire from reason and from its
attachment to any 'natural' objects indicates the difficulty of directing
desire toward a single coherent end»
(230). Cascardi sets out
«to recover the transformative or emancipatory potential
of desire»
and sees the
«characteristic variability of modern desire»
exemplified in the myth of Don Juan
(231). He rejects the Freudian position that desire
must be repressed or subdued, reminds us of the Foucaultian position that in
equating excessive desire with a madness in need of control we merely reinforce
the authority of reason in the West, and posits desire
«as a form of empowerment that attempts to reconstitute a
vision of society from the demand for recognition that modern subjectivity
inherently creates»
(232). Using the Lacanian binarism of need and demand
as a springboard, Cascardi locates the creation of desire in the space between
need and demand and equates it with the search for recognition. But,
«in order
—137→
for there to be
self-consciousness, desire must be directed toward a non-natural object, toward
something that goes beyond the reality of the given world»
(230). And this he finds in the Don Juan myth.
Cascardi acknowledges throughout Chapters I-V that he has
attempted to analyze the contradictions of subjectivity in relation to the
culture of modernity, that history and theory have made demands they cannot
satisfy, that what is at stake in his book is
«the need to fashion a mode of discourse, a practice of
judgment, and a model of selfhood in response to these demands»
. He
promises that
«we shall finally see how a solution to the otherwise
devastating antinomies of modernity may be achieved»
(15). This solution is to be found in Cascardi's
reinterpretation of Kant's «aesthetic judgment» in Chapter VI.
Cascardi attempts to do this by preserving the
«originary tension» of modernity he finds in Kant
and by resisting all efforts «to contain or reduce it»
(299). He pinpoints
«the transformative potential of desire; its orientation
to the 'beyond'... [which] may be revealed in and through the recognition of
concrete others»
(271), and he focuses on providing the
«means for shifting from one domain of experience to the
next»
(305). His solution is to introduce Lyotard's
«principle of movement» into Kant's aesthetic judgment.
The erudition of the book is undeniable, and the breadth of the
author's scholarship, admirable. But something is wrong with the book. In the
words of the Canon in
Don Quixote,
«Propone algo, y no concluye
nada»
(I, 6). The book simply fails in its aim to
«equalize the conflicting discourses». Let me give some examples.
Cascardi's avowed aim has been to introduce imagination and its discourse into
a rationalized world wherein philosophical discourse has been privileged.
Cascardi, however, consistently makes the aesthetic discourse ancillary to
philosophical, theoretical discourse, and too often he forces it to fit into
his conceptual framework. He also claims that the contradictions of the modern
subject have remained «unacknowledged» by scholars before him. The
book itself, however, refutes that claim. Cascardi's analysis shows how
arduously Weber, Hegel, Kant, Habermas, the postmodern critics, as well as the
«relatively conservative thinkers»
(Cascardi's
adjective) Leo Strauss, Stanley Rosen, Alasdair MacIntyne, among others,
acknowledge the contradictions inherent in the «rationalization» of
a world where the subject can no longer resort to supra-natural truth claims.
Cascardi's language is often obscure and tendentious. There are unnecessary
repetitions which add nothing to the argument. On page 301, for example, ten
lines are repeated verbatim from page 300. Cascardi disagrees with former
critical-theoretical positions, and he does this with impressive erudition. He
promises a
«solution to the otherwise devastating antinomies of
modernity»
(15), but what emerges is a reiteration of Kant's
well-known concept of aesthetic judgment, with Cascardi's added emphasis on the
fact that Kant is
«replicating rather than resolving the tensions between
the individual and community»
(303), and with the introduction of Lyotard's familiar
«principle of movement» into Kantian theory. Cascardi seems to need
to emphasize how his theory
—138→
differs from theirs. He claims that
he has not interpreted Kant's aesthetic judgment in the
«traditional» way, as an autonomous power or force, but that he has
provided
«a means for shifting from one domain of experience to the
next»
(305), and that he has tried
«to reformulate... [Lyotard's] dialectic»
, to
«recover the mobility of the terms involved»
(305). The reader, however, cannot quite see what real
deviations from Kant or Lyotard such reformulations constitute.
Cascardi aligns himself with such postmodernist critics as
Charles Altieri, François Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze, yet he speaks in
terms of totalizing and redemptive paradigms which these authors reject. For
example, Cascardi sees in
«the opacities of desire» what «may remain...
unrealized[,] ... unrepresented within the framework of what has been
historically achieved [and which] might represent the means or powers by which
to transform the world»
(272; my emphasis).
The most unsettling part of the book, however, is Cascardi's
handling of Tirso de Molina's
burlador. Don Juan is made to fit
Cascardi's conceptual framework of modernist desire, and consequently,
«the myth of Don Juan consistently appears to admit a
vision of subjective desire, which seems to permit a heterogeneity of
objects... while at the same time it seems to sacrifice that vision to the
demand for cultural order... characteristic of the 'traditional'
world»
(243). Tirso de Molina's Don Juan in
El burlador de Sevilla, whose primary focus
is on humiliating, becomes for Cascardi a romantic rebel and an honorable man.
Based on the interchange with the Stone Guest, wherein Don Juan says,
«I am a man of honor, and I keep my word, because I am a
knight»
, Cascardi concludes that
«the psychological mobility of Don Juan»
, far
from being
«a threat to the ethical foundations of traditional
society»
is, instead, indicative of
«an extreme concern for honor and virtue, the very basis
of self-consciousness in a traditional world»
(245). Don Juan becomes the paradigm of
«transgressive desire»
, a
«revolutionary»
, and, according to Deleuze's and
Guattari's model, a
«post-Oedipal model of desire»
, and the
«emancipatory potential of a desire freed from all
constraints...»
. In the convoluted language which so often
characterizes the book,
«Don Juan's principle [sic] effort is to come into contact
with a reservoir of energy which he discharges in typically modern fashion,
that is, in the form of discontinuous flows»
(245-46).
This is a book which could have been highly informative, but readers seeking insights into literature will be distracted by its irritating excursuses, and students of philosophy may well wonder what the philosophical structure is meant to uphold.