Multiplying Homonyms

It may be that the history of thought is a history of misreadings, but there is no need to proliferate misreadings for the sake of misreadings. Clarity of thought, whenever it is possible, is preferable to sloppy thinking. Or is that too presumptuous?

Thinking about the Titanic missing the iceberg does have its merits, although it is much more fascinating and thought-provoking to see the ship hit that clear mountain of ice. In the same way a polemic gains clarity through the definition of its terms, because such definition facilitates a head-on clash of ideas that might lead to a more transparent dialogue.

A case in point is the intellectual non-collision which occurred on the pages of JCRT 9.2. The Titanic of Crockett’s response completely missed the iceberg of Bielik-Robson’s critique. In large part they evaded each other because of their homonymous use of the term “theology.”

The concept of “homonymy” is something that I lifted from Alexandre Leupin’s Fiction and Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology and Literature in the Middle-Ages. He happened to lift it from Kojeve. Homonymy is a situation where, "a single word designates different ideas and things in a conceptual reapportionment” (Leupin, Fiction and Incarnation xv).

The most stereotypical example is the modern vs. the pre-modern concept of time. It is argued that the modern understanding of time is dynamic and highlights becoming, whereas the medieval understanding of time tended toward a static, eternalizing, understanding of time. These two concepts of time are so radically different that two different terms should be used for them. But since there is no consensus on such terms, we must deal with homonymy whenever the word “time” is used to designate both of these distinct phenomena and worldviews.

These ruptures in meaning are something that Bielik-Robson seems to understand better than Crockett. Her critical response to Crockett’s Interstices of the Sublime is an exercise in sifting out homonymous uses of the word “theology.” Right from the gun she points to a case of homonymy, “the psychoanalytic sublime wanders off, in a typically Freudian anarchic style of Sinnwandlung, into strange regions that not only defy concepts of traditional theology, but also, at much more fundamental level, defy its affects.”

In the final count she distinguished at least four meanings of “theology” in her essay: Crockett’s psychotheology (characterized by “petrifying” negativity), Levinas’ messianic theology, traditional theology as represented by Radical Orthodoxy, and a theology of the dynamic sublime.

On the other hand, Crockett appears to reject both messianic theology and traditional theology as impracticable. Furthermore, he argues that Bielik-Robson’s characterization of his thought as a theology of the purely negative mathematical sublime misses the point. Crockett does this by articulating his postmodern psychotheology of the sublime, thereby uncovering homonymy within theologies of the sublime themselves: “the modern sublime essentially represents the aesthetic formlessness that opposes the form of traditional religious belief and practice, but the key to the postmodern sublime is that it indicates a proliferation of forms rather than a simple absence of them.”

In all fairness, the dissonance within the debate was not simply caused by homonyms. Crockett was correct in pointing out that the sublime is a dynamic process, however, the passages from his books utilized by Bielik-Robson seemed to show that Crockett’s writings stick a stick into the spokes of the sublime’s dynamism, halting it in the negative moment.

This dissonance between the two positions cannot be harmonized until I can give Crockett’s books a close read. The latter is something Crockett should have done with his critic’s last name, as it is misspelled throughout his response. Distinctions really do make a difference.

Artur S. Rosman is a doctoral student in comparative literature at the University of Washington.