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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2009
In the introduction to Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Maurice Bloch makes some forthright admissions about the methodological and theoretical pitfalls threatening a project of the scope he undertakes in this slim, provocative volume. He acknowledges, for instance, the temptation, when arguing for what he describes as a “quasi-universal” religious structure, to present “a tendentious selection of examples, and make this structure appear to be present everywhere.”1 In the face of this danger, independent readers, who “choose to continue the exercise by trying to see whether what is proposed here stands up to the test of the other cases they know” become the most important critical constraint.2 In what follows I test Bloch's theory of rebounding violence against the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish theologian.
1 Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 2.
2 Independent readers can also, Bloch writes, correct for “the problem of skewed presentation” of examples. Independent readers have repeatedly criticized Bloch's skewed presentation of his Japanese example. See, for instance, David N. Gellner, “Religion, Politics, and Ritual: Remarks on Geertz and Bloch,” Social Anthropology 7 (1999) 135–53, and Nicholas Van Sant, “A Tendentious Presentation of Details: Reviewing the Japanese Case in Maurice Bloch's Prey into Hunter,” Ziggurat: The Brown Journal of Religion 1 (2006) 17–26.
3 Texts require interpretation for which the author's meaning and intentions are normative, but the author's beliefs and intention are susceptible to explanations that depart from his or her understanding. The same rules apply to texts that compose the various stages in the history of the reception of another text (e.g., sermons or biblical commentaries). The interpretation of (e.g.) rituals and social formations is, of course, a more complex matter because of the question of who “authors” a ritual or social formation. In this article I argue that applying social theory to a modern Western thinker reminds us to credit the agency or authorship of the individuals or groups who produce rituals and social formations. Our explanations need not depart drastically from the understandings of those responsible for rituals or social formations. On interpretation of texts, see Quentin Skinner's articles in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (ed. James Tully; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). On the divergent imperatives of interpretation and explanation, see Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985) 190–227.
4 Bloch, Prey into Hunter, 23.
5 Ibid., 4.
6 Ibid., 79.
7 Ibid., 5.
8 Ibid., 6.
9 Ibid., 5.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 21.
12 Ibid., 98.
13 Ibid., 91.
14 Ibid., 94.
15 Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (trans. Howard and Edna Hong; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998) 23.
16 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (trans. Alastair Hannay; London: Penguin Books, 1985).
17 Bloch, Prey into Hunter, 27.
18 Kierkegaard takes for granted the opposition that Kant champions between eternal, absolute duty and finite, temporal inclinations. The task facing an existing being, Kierkegaard maintains, is to enact the eternal absolute in one's temporal existence. Hegel, of course, sublates the duty/inclination dualism. Kierkegaard believes that Hegelian ethics fails to take the ethical challenge of existing seriously enough. Kant's ethical thought both informs Kierkegaard's account of the ethical, and lays the foundation for the religious, which, Kierkegaard claims, supercedes it.
19 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (trans. Howard and Edna Hong; 2 vols.; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press) 1:294.
20 Ibid., 1:138.
21 See C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard's Fragments and Postscript: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1983) 43.
22 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 55.
23 Ibid., 461.
24 Ibid., 433.
25 Ibid., 483–85.
26 Ibid., 486, 483.
27 Ibid., 409.
28 Ibid., 500.
29 Climacus takes issue with the unqualified hidden inwardness that Silentio describes and claims that the religious person cannot completely succeed in hiding his or her inwardness, but nevertheless will not express the absolute relation directly, using the humorous as an incognito (Ibid., 500–1).
30 Ibid., 463.
31 Ibid., 410.
32 Ibid., 413.
33 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 124.
34 Ibid., 124.
35 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 266–67.
36 Ibid., 267.
37 Fear and Trembling, 124.
38 Ibid., 67.
39 Ibid., 68–70.
40 Ibid., 78.
41 Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity (trans. Howard and Edna Hong; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991) 213.
42 Ibid., 253.
43 Ibid., 106.
44 Ibid., 67.
45 Point of View, 18.
46 Søren Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings (ed. and trans. Howard and Edna Hong; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998) 69.
47 Ibid., 69–70.
48 Ibid., 70.
49 In a late unpublished draft of an article for The Moment, Kierkegaard again takes going to the amusement park as his example, but now begins with the assumption that God wills that humans not go to the amusement park, reversing Climacus's primary example of the new immediacy (The Moment and Late Writings, 348).
50 Point of View, 18.
51 Ibid., 268–69.
52 Ibid., 20.
53 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 82.
54 Bloch, Prey into Hunter, 6.
55 Ibid., 5.
56 Kierkegaard famously writes in his journal that if he had truly had faith he could have married his beloved Regina.
57 In all likelihood this allusion refers to the Corsair affair in 1846, in which Kierkegaard provoked a Danish periodical to satirize him repeatedly. Kierkegaard himself recognized how this episode contributed to the eclipse of the new immediacy in his later thought. “If I had not taken this action [against the Corsair], I would have escaped completely the double-danger connected with the essentially Christian, I would have gone on thinking of the difficulties involved with Christianity as being purely interior to the self” (The Moment and Late Writings, xv–xvi).
58 The Moment and Late Writings, 402.
59 Ibid., 396.
60 Ibid., 8, 14.
61 Bruce Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990) 3.
62 See for example, Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) xiv.
63 Bloch, Prey into Hunter, 6.
64 Ibid., 105.
65 Ibid., 4.
66 Stanley Stowers has argued this point forcefully in personal conversations with me.
67 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Classics, 1994).