Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DOI 10.1007/s11007-009-9125-x
Gerald L. Bruns
David Kleinberg-Levins book takes its bearings from a text belonging to Friedrich
Holderlins later years, In lieblicher Blaue, which contains a question that
Heidegger brought to prominence: Gibt es auf Erden ein Maa? (Is there a
measure on earth?). This is, as Kleinberg-Levin develops it, Holderlins question
to modernity, which means to those of us who have arrived after the gods have
departed and so are left to stand on our own, unguarded and unguided. For the
romantics the Enlightenment turned out to be, against all reason, a time of anarchy,
without principle or rule, but also a time of possibility, because anarchy is, whatever
else it is, a condition of freedom. So the disappearance of the gods has left us
destitute, but also disencumbered, perhaps not unlike old Oedipus, whose eyeless
state was not without its dignity, or even transcendence. As K.-L. shows, this two-
edged sword cuts, like the word measure itself, through much of Holderlins
writings, and through much of European thinking after Heidegger as well.
Well, not measure exactly. The English word is a good deal more unruly than
the German Maa. Idiomatic expressions run fast and loose with the term. One
takes the measure of a man, but not with a measuring stick. There are musical
measures and draconian measures. Kubla Khans caverns are measureless to man,
and so is much of human evilthe subject here of Chapter 4, on Primo Levi and the
Holocaust. In large measure means for the most part, or in no small measure,
whereas justice, as Rawls said, should be distributed in equal measure.
Shakespeares Measure for Measure is about undoing the repression of freedom,
where discord resolves itself comically in celebration of the middle-way. According
to the OED, most obsolete meanings of the term have to do with restraint,
moderation, and compromise, both in the conduct of authority and in the privacy of
ones rooms. What Holderlin misses in the world around him is a measure that has
G. L. Bruns (&)
William P. & Hazel B. White, Professor Emeritus of English,
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
e-mail: Gerald.L.Bruns.1@nd.edu
123
574 G. L. Bruns
123
Book Review 575
practically but ethically as well: think of touching as a value judgment that redeems
the commodified world. Likewise, the historian (as Benjamin embodies him) is in
touch with his material by way of copying and citation, as in the Passagenwerk.
Meanwhile Heidegger cultivated a paleotechnical fetish of the handrecall his
diatribe against the dehumanizing typewriter:
The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the
realm of the word. In the time of the first dominance of the typewriter, a
letter written on this machine still stood for a breach of good manners. Today a
hand-written letter is an antiquated and undesired thing; it disturbs speed
reading. Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the
written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition,
mechanical writing provides this advantage, that it conceals the handwrit-
ing, and therefore the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same
(cited by K.-L., pp. 2089).
As K.-L. shows in detail, Heideggers hand is at work in all the regions of his
philosophypointing ones finger is an event of disclosure, Gelassenheit is tactful
forbearance that restrains the conceptual grasp, and (of course) handicraft is
everywhere the model of thinking (as opposed to systematic construction, among
other techniques of modernity).
Chapter 9, Two Hands Touching: Chiasmatic Gestures in Merleau-Ponty, is
something of a pilgrimage to the site of the man who rescued the body from
philosophical oblivion without embalming it in a premodern fluid. Thus typing for
M.-P. is knowledge in the hand, one of the ways the body knows its way around its
world by intertwining with it. Just so, we are intertwined with others, not at the level of
reflective consciousness, but in the flesh, or in a choreography of reciprocal (chiasmic)
gestures like a simple waving of the hand. (Interestingly, breaking this bond of mutual
contact, as when one someone you know looks through you, is known as cutting.)
Still, on K.-L.s reading, the paradox is that Merleau-Ponty had no feel for the
phenomenon of touching. He was too much the visile for whom intercorporeality is
understood chiefly in terms of eye-contact or the exchange of glances.
Contrast in this respect Emmanuel Levinas (Chapter 10), for whom the ethical
subject is made of skin, where skin is not the taut, glistening surface of the Greek
body, with its magnificent bone structure and muscular strength; rather, skin is
biblical or Jewish, that is, flesh, with its definitive experience of weakness,
vulnerability, and exposure not just to the touch but to cold, hunger, and the
impingement of others, as when I am called upon to give up the bread out of my
own mouth. In Against Ethics, John Caputo gave a memorable description of the
passive corpulence of flesh as against the aesthetic nole me tangere of the Greek
body, but K.-L. figures it differently: Specifically, I would suggest that the flesh is
the spiritual potential of the body. The flesh is the body in the mode of its spiritual
sublimation, the body in regard to its prophetic, supersensible destination. The
flesh is the body in its assumption of responsibility as medium for the realization of
a prophetic spirit; it is the preoriginary dimension of the body out of which this
spirit emerges into the light of consciousness; it is the body in its preoriginary
passivity, its submission to the spirit of the moral law (p. 341).
123
576 G. L. Bruns
Ill leave to others the question of whether this does not turn Levinas back to
Kant, as if to contest the im-possibility of ethics that Derridas reading of Levinas
made so dramatic (what is forgivable requires no forgiveness; the unforgivable has
the force of an ethical demand). Anyway, being torn up from oneself for the good
of another is not K.-L.s idea of the Good Life. He is rather more interested in
Levinass pages on the caress, which suggests a relation of tenderness between
oneself and another that alleviates the more gothic exposure to outrage that
became Levinass signature figure of the ethical relation.
Just so, David Kleinberg-Levin is nothing if not a thinker who has always tried to
save philosophy from itself. Gestures of Ethical Life is a book of careful close
readings, lucid articulations of concepts, and critical counterstatements. In the
bargain it is beautifully writtena rare achievement even in the best of times,
whenever they might have been.
123