Previous articleNext article FreePaul A. Bové, Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human Poetry against Torture: Criticism, History, and the Human. Paul A. Bové. Aberdeen: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. Pp. viii+159.Bruce RobbinsBruce RobbinsColumbia University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA series of lectures delivered at the University of Hong Kong, Paul Bové’s Poetry against Torture follows in a line of distinguished statements made by Western intellectuals to audiences in East Asia, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels and Pierre Bourdieu’s “Pour un corporatisme de l’universel,” which were delivered in Japan in 1965 and 1989, respectively. Something about the occasion seems to encourage largeness of thought, as in the last-lecture format but without its forced cheeriness. Bové, who has published widely but is probably best known for his rigorous contributions to Foucauldian thought, as in his book Intellectuals in Power (1986), uses the Hong Kong opportunity in order to face up to a question of genuine substance: What in the Western tradition is still worth transmitting to a world that has had good reasons to be skeptical of what passes for Western wisdom—and this after Western critics themselves have contributed enormously to the skepticism? Elaborating an answer entails some self-critique, some moments of unpredictable dialogue with Edward W. Said, and some powerfully multivalent reflections on what remains most alive in the concept of humanism.Said famously seized upon Erich Auerbach’s exile in Istanbul during World War II in order to sketch an image of the intellectual as located both inside and outside the Western humanist tradition, preserving it from the fascist bonfires while also trying to stretch its painfully cramped Eurocentrism. Along with the model of intellectual life as exile, Bové shares Said’s admiration for Auerbach (the subject of a richly intertextual appreciation) and especially for Giambattista Vico, who is discussed in each of the book’s first two chapters. Both Vico and Auerbach help fill in the adjective “historical” in what Bové calls “historical humanism,” the version that Bové wants to separate from the blandness of humanism in general. Bové’s humanism might equally be described as “secular,” an even more important term for Said, especially in the transnational context of thought that Said did so much to establish and legitimate. Critics have weighed Said’s seemingly irreconcilable commitments to Foucault and to humanism since James Clifford’s influential review of Orientalism in 1980. Bové’s book tries to claim for humanism both Said, who increasingly embraced the term, and Foucault himself, who did not.The book presses this claim by presenting the prime threats to the human as emanating now, as in Vico’s time, from a paradoxical alliance between science and religion. Religion, Bové argues, shares with science a fundamental disrespect for human history, hence also for the secular human will, disobedient to any divine authority, which made and makes history. In an extended and inspired reading of Vico’s 1708 oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (On the study methods of our time)—itself a lecture delivered in a foreign presence, as Bové points out, Naples having just been taken away from the Spanish by the Austrians—Bové presents Vico’s case for philology against Bacon and Descartes as both a defense of history against “certain forms of (amnesiac) modernity” (7) and a case for a higher form of modernity. Modernity can be neither rejected, Vico argues, nor surrendered to its amnesiac admirers. But to be worth defending, it must hold on to “inherited resources of human achievement” (10). Otherwise it will result in research that “has no heartbeat” (12). Bové comes close to suggesting that this (Saidian) existential diagnosis might apply even to Foucault, whose antiscientism is in its own way scientistic, caught up in a coldly surgical quest for the ultimate truth about truth. But he aims the no-heartbeat charge more consistently at pragmatism—at Stanley Fish, who is repeatedly mentioned by name, and behind Fish at Richard Rorty. Vico rejected Cartesian doubt, Bové suggests, in part because he saw it as a form of Stoicism that, as in classical times, complacently accepted its social empowerment. Displays of the flimsiness of knowledge, however acrobatic, did not lead to withdrawal from social membership or from participation in the cruelties that membership entails. In ethical rather than epistemological terms, skepticism is useless—hence the monitory example of Marcus Aurelius, discussed at length in the John Stuart Mill chapter, whose philosophy did not prevent him from having Christians tortured and killed. Stoics are too respectful of common opinion, which is to say too respectful of nations, their prejudices, and their power. For Bové, the only thing that can disengage us from social consent or protect our saving marginality is historical memory, which guarantees (by analogy with geographical displacement) a sort of temporal exile. One question here is whether such memory is indeed historical in the strong sense—that is, tied to particularity of time and place—or, on the contrary, floats free of them to form an eternal conversation of great but decontextualized minds, as in the old-fashioned humanism of the Great Books programs. Such programs encourage in their way a kind of exile from society’s present. But it is not clear either that this exile deserves the modifier “historical” or that it would satisfy Bové’s or Said’s political criteria. Poetry against Torture shows its polemical teeth when it gets to John Stuart Mill, who, like Vico, is the subject of two full chapters. Said was critical of Mill in Orientalism because of Mill’s defense of the British Empire. Bové defends Mill against Said but perhaps even more against Fish and, more generally, the fashion for antiliberalism and postsecularism. Mill’s liberalism remains a historical achievement, he argues, despite its manifest imperfections. On imperialism, the record is mixed: “Mill’s own thinking undermined the administrative plans he and other imperialists made to remove politics from ‘local administration’” (65), and he deplored the “massacres and cruelties required to suppress the Indian Mutiny” (88). Mill stood up against torture, and it is to stand up to torture that we still need him. We also need him as a defender of secularism. Mill’s humanism “is relentlessly secular, uncompromising in his insistence that finite human will is honorable if imperfect, correctible by education, and formative of human ambition and ideals” (61). Christianity is his necessary enemy to the extent that it makes self-will into man’s greatest offense.This seems both timely and unambiguous. Yet within pages of his account of the follies of Christianity, Bové is quoting Mill’s outrage at Marcus Aurelius’s treatment of the Christians and, more pertinently, his outrage that the philosopher emperor could not see “that Christianity was to be a good and not an evil to the world” (83). Granted, torture is always an evil. But was Christianity indeed a good and not an evil for the world? The question would be a tricky one for Bové even without reference to Christianity’s treatment of pagans, Jews, and heretics once it had taken power or, for that matter, reflection on how we are supposed to feel about the “barbarians” Marcus Aurelius was fighting along the Danube. Are we supposed to continue to think of them as indeed barbarians and thus to take the side of Rome, whether Christian or pagan, seen by contrast as a center of civilization? To be genuinely historical might lead us to be more sympathetic to the Christians, the Romans, the barbarians, or all of the above. History undiluted can have a corrosive effect on those “inherited resources of human achievement” on which humanism depends. Things would be easier if humanism, history, and truth could be depended on to cohere in an organic and consistent whole.Like Said, Bové seems to need the concept of truth in order to oppose both official religions and, in the supposedly secular academy, unofficial cults of illiberalism, perpetual irony, and unknowability. Yet it is a sign of his predicament, which I think is a generally shared one, that the investment in truth can so easily feel like a form of absolutism, a religious investment, while the commitment to history can feel as if it demanded commitment to a less than absolute sense of truth. When Bové discusses the positive value that Mill, unlike Bentham, gave to history, he implies that thinking historically will necessarily relativize truth and falsity. In judging a proposition to be false, Bentham would not “inquire into either the meaning that the false proposition had for those who believed it or the historical reasons why the proposition had had value for those who held it” (64). For Bové, as for Mill, it is these un-Benthamite concerns that define a proper sense of history. Here Bové begins to find common ground between Mill and Foucault. For Mill, history seems to entail openness to the possibility that the passing of time and the struggle of different minds will remove the certainty with which we look at any given truth. Foucault would not have disagreed.Bové’s preference is for the late, ethical Foucault, the Foucault of the care of the self, over the earlier epistemological Foucault, whose critique of knowledge was fatally tempted by a version of the certainty that it overturned—a certainty that Bové, like Foucault, sometimes associates with the discipline of philosophy. Uncertainty then is a key to Bové’s renewed humanism. For him a totalizing critique of liberalism, the West, or modernity, as can be found in garden-variety postcolonialism, is itself a form of imperialism, an expression of what Said called “religious criticism.” Proper humanist critique involves a humble willingness to live with uncertainty and contradiction.As Bové notes, this is not a shocking characterization of humanist virtue. The same might be said of historical generosity, like the generosity that Mill shows toward the early Christians and that Bové shows toward Mill. The humanism in which I was raised made much of Matthew Arnold’s praise of Edmund Burke at the moment when Burke expressed resignation in the face of the French Revolution, which he of course rejected on passionate principle. As presented by the heirs of Arnold, his was a signature humanist gesture: a renunciation of dearly held political or ethical principles, or of principle as such, in the face of historical fact as such, however irrational the fact. For this brand of humanism, one might say, history demanded generosity lest our presentist principles of justice lead us either to some violent political breach of the status quo or, inside the university, to an ill-tempered break with the tradition we are paid to preserve, interpret, and transmit. If this humanism of historical generosity has held up so well over the decades, it is hard to discount the part played by professional self-interest in sustaining it—or the part it itself has played in sustaining religion.Another of humanism’s impulses, and clearly a related one, is to dissociate itself from the exercise of power. When Bové comments on Mill’s commentary on Marcus Aurelius, it is this impulse that he is revisiting in a not quite post-Foucauldian mood. Marcus Aurelius is the model of the intellectual who, as emperor, got as close to power as it is possible to get and, alas, spectacularly failed to retain any critical distance in his use of it. Thus, like George Steiner’s concentration camp Kommandant who spent his evenings playing Bach or reading Goethe, he obliges us to ask whether the humanities indeed humanize, whether humanism accomplishes anything in the world. If not, this would not seem to be a point in humanism’s favor. Still, the temptation remains strong to value humanism simply for doing no harm or for declaring its exteriority to power. Vico indicts the Cartesians because they think they can know God’s mind and because for them this knowledge is a preparation for the wielding of power. For Bové, the moral seems to work just as well today. But this does not end the conversation or even Bové’s part in it.If the goal is not to wield power otherwise, then humanism obviously risks becoming a permanent opposition to power, comfortable in its habits of nay-saying and crankily resisting proposals that it might do anything more constructive. Poiesis cannot resolve this dilemma. Like Said, Bové follows Adorno in distinguishing it both from art for art’s sake, on the one hand, and from engagement, on the other. Form, he writes, “manifests those human capacities that negate by the evidence of their very existence both the truth of existing norms and their necessity” (5). But when he sets it against torture, Bové may be asking it to do more than Adorno, Said, or anyone can properly demand. Poiesis includes the making of shoes as well as the making of poems, but it does not include much of what we look for in the neighboring concept of praxis.However, this is only one of the positions Bové restlessly explores. His strongest doubts about humanism as he himself describes it—and it is important to say that these doubts represent fresh thoughts rather than vestiges of his earlier antihumanism—come in the chapters on Foucault and William Empson. In Foucault, Bové plays up various elements that might be seen as humanistic or cryptonormative, such as Foucault’s insistence that games (like the game of love) cannot be condemned, even though power is obviously exercised in them, so long as the roles are reversible. But Bové also insists that pedagogy is a game that is not reversible. The teacher really does know better, and for the set of situations that pedagogy can represent, it is necessary to accept power (and domination—the distinction is not crucial here) as an untranscendable horizon. Empson, similarly, embodies for Bové a critical style in which mastery or domination is acceptable and indeed to be prized: “When Empson felt that others held opinions he knew were ‘dirty or disgusting’ he set about correcting them and if the others refused to listen or learn, he took to insulting them, having decided they too were dangerous, stupid, boring, or some horrifying combination of those vices” (118). The implication is that a criticism that is unable or unwilling to do this sort of insulting might be unworthy of the name. It might seem cruel, but the greater offense is to refuse to stand up to cruelty, to be unable or unwilling to denounce the sadistic authoritarianism that Empson saw in Milton’s God. It is more than incidental that Empson is an antagonist to cruelty, to religion, and (on Milton) to Stanley Fish. If Bové’s book is dazzling in the rapprochement it negotiates between Foucault and John Stuart Mill, I think it is no less dazzling in the rehabilitation it operates on Empson, a Westerner who stood with the Chinese under Japanese assault and who now seems fit to stand with Edward Said as a figure for secular humanism at its most forceful. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 110, Number 1August 2012 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/666088 Views: 200Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.