Aichele and I

Abstract

Many years ago, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a very short essay titled ‘Borges and I’, in which someone who refers to himself as ‘I’ puzzles over the relationship between himself and the one called ‘Borges’, who writes and is a scholar, and who is ‘the one things happen to’ (1964, 246). ‘I’ concludes this essay by writing, ‘I do not know which one of us has written this page’ (1964, 247). When David Odell-Scott first approached me about an SBL session on George Aichele, I confess to feeling something of the weirdness that runs through Borges’s essay, and now, having read these intriguing statements from my friends, I feel it even more strongly. I am deeply grateful to each of the contributors to this collection for their careful and critical readings of my writings, but at the same time I find myself astonished at this mysterious being called ‘George Aichele’. As the ‘I’ of ‘Borges and I’ says, ‘my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him’ (1964, 247). And hence ‘he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him’ (1964, 246). I write this knowing that even this text stands in my place, speaking not simply for me but instead of me, interrupting my story, separating me from that story. I'm intrigued by Gary Phillips’s descriptions of me – that is, of ‘Aichele’ – as ‘postmodern psychopomp’ and ‘Charon of critical theory’. While the idea of being a ‘ferryman’ to ‘foreboding shores’ certainly has its appeal, I hope that any insinuation of the death (of postmodernism or critical theory) is as the famous saying goes, premature. It is true, though, that as these onceforeboding terms increasingly spread throughout the discursive formations of our world, and are especially used by fundamentalists and others who are anything but postmodernists or critical theorists, their semantic value has been diluted, and I at least find myself using the words less and less. As for ‘The Matrix’, while ‘I’ prefer the image of layers of reality/virtuality without end in David Cronenberg’s film ‘eXistenZ’, ‘Aichele’ does like Morpheus better than Neo. And we both agree that Chauncey Gardner is one of the great heroes of Western civilization. I haven’t read much Levinas, but as one who cut his wisdom teeth on Sartrean existentialism, I am sensitive to the idea of an ‘ethics of reading’, especially in the de Manian/Barthesian sense of fully laying out and critiquing my own assumptions and trying to be scrupulously ‘responsible’ to the text itself, no matter how much I might like to think that it ‘really means’ something else. Thus I deeply mistrust all claims (first and foremost my own) to ‘exegesis’ of a text, and I have become increasingly convinced that every purported exegesis is never anything more than carefully ‘managed’ (in the worst sense) eisegesis. I learned much of that while working with Gary on Semeia 69/70 (Scholars Press) and with our other friends in the Bible and Culture Collective, Fred Burnett, Elizabeth Castelli, Bob Fowler, David Jobling, Stephen Moore, Tina Pippin, Regina Schwartz, and Wilhelm Wuellner, on The Postmodern Bible (Yale University Press). ARTICLES