From Word To Word

Dave Humphrey and I have been discussing his notion of coping for some time now, even before he had settled on this particular term to describe it.  He has recently published a post that summarizes some of where this discussion has taken us, an interesting read that is particularly interesting for me in that it articulates more concisely an idea that I had previously encountered only in the context of our long, sprawling, often interrupted conversation.  It is fascinating for me to see which aspects of the conversation he includes, for example, and to recall the occasions on which some of these ideas first arose between us.

What most intrigues me in Dave’s post, however, is that he includes among his definitions of coping one that he has not yet articulated to me in person. “Coping is my existence,” he says, “when confronted by the other.”  I am arrested by this definition because it relates the idea of coping with the idea of otherness for the first time in our discussion.  Until now, Dave has defined coping almost exclusively in relation to knowledge.  Coping, in this sense, means the choice to function, not in those places where one has the illusion of sufficient knowledge, not in the place of the expert, but in the place where one is entirely without sufficient knowledge, in the place of the amateur.  It is the choice to occupy this space, not because one is forced to do so by a particular crisis, but because one values the mode of coping as such.  It is not a coping with something, even if it always appears this way.  It is coping as being.

Dave’s new definition suggests, however, that the mode of being that is coping bears a relation to the mode of being that is being confronted with the other, that these two modes are, at least in some cases, identical.  I think that this idea is profound, but I would change it somewhat in order to make clear that not all coping is encounter with the other, even if all encounter with the other is a form, perhaps the purest form, of coping.  I would say, instead, “When I am confronted by the other, my existence is coping,” and I would insist that this coping remains a function of knowledge, though in a way altogether more absolute.  Let me explain.

When I am coping in relation to an object or a situation, or even when I am coping in regard to another person in such a way that this person appears as an object rather than as the other who is confronting me, the lack of knowledge that requires me to cope is never essential or absolute.  I may not be capable of discovering this knowledge myself, of course, as with Fermat’s last theorem, or I may not be willing to do what is necessary to discover it, as with changing the oil in my car, but it will nevertheless be possible for this knowledge to be discovered.  Coping moves, therefore, from lack of knowledge to knowledge, from the amateur to the expert, and this is why the one who copes as a mode of being must constantly be going further and deeper, beyond the places where he or she has come to feel too comfortable and too masterful.

When I am confronted with the other as such, however, with the other as other, with the way that the other has encountered me, I also find myself in the mode of coping, not only for a time, but essentially and absolutely, because my knowledge of the other is and always remains profoundly lacking.  Whereas coping with a situation or an object lead to an increased knowledge, coping with the other can only lead to a greater awareness of how fully I do not and can not know the otherness of the other.  The lack of knowledge with which my being copes remains irremediable, regardless of what I might do.  It is definitive of the encounter as such.

This is not to imply that I cannot gain knowledge of a particular person, but that this knowledge would only be of the person as object, not as other.  The othernss of the other would always escape this kind of knowledge, would always be ontologically prior to the particularity of the other that I can know and comprehend.  In every case, my lack of knowledge of the other as such would remain profound, and I would find myself capable only of coping with this lack.  My relation with the other, therefore, to the degree that it seeks to honour the other, would take the form of a continual and impossible coping, a coping for which there could be no recuperative movement toward knowledge and mastery and expertise, a coping that would always remain, purely, as coping.

A friend of mine graciously volunteered to take my eldest son to the library with her own kids this afternoon.  Since my youngest was still napping, I decided to watch Errol Morris’ Dr. Death:The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., the story of a self-taught maker of execution equipment who took samples from several of the Nazi concentration camps and testified that he could see no signs that gas was used at those facilities.

Though his report was hailed by holocaust deniers and reviled by virtually everyone else, Leuchter is not a stereotypical revisionist.  He gives the persistent impression that he still does not fully understand the magnitude of what is at stake in his findings, and he seems bewildered that people would object to his lack of experience, to his questionable sample collection methods, and to the insufficient information that was given to the lab that did the testing.  He seems half-aware of this naivete, trying to compensate for it by playing the part of the expert for the camera, a pose that makes him seem alternately pitiable and absurd.

The film as a whole has so much of Errol Morris about it that it hardly needs his name on the cover.  The editing is masterful throughout, as always, but I was particularly impressed by the use of a kind of blackout effect, where the shot of someone being interviewed momentarily goes blank while the voice continues to play over the black screen.  This technique produces an eerie sort of effect, as if the power has flickered for a moment, or as if the camera can no longer bear to look at its subject unblinkingly.  It serves as a distraction for the viewer, not away from what is being portrayed, but toward it, away from anything else.

Morris himself enters the film only once, where his offscreen voice asks Leuchter whether he has ever considered the possibility that he might be wrong.  Leuchter’s answer is less illuminating, I think, than Morris’s question.  It functions almost as the crisis of the film, as the question that necessarily haunts it from the beginning, and there is a tangible sense of catharsis when Morris finally verbalizes it in the only words that he will speak.  When Leuchter answers that he does not actually consider this possibility, not after he had reached his conclusion at the camps, it is almost irrellevent. No answer he could give would suffice in any case.  It is only necessary that the question should be asked.  This is why the film was made, and this why it should be seen.

My friend James Shelley has just posted a quotation from Ivan Illich, one of my favourite authors.  I will not try to expand upon what Illich says.  It is, just as it is, a perfect articulation of what I know to be true of friendship and of learning and of hospitality.  Coming from James, whom I do not see nearly enough, it is also a reminder of how fragile and tenuous the possibility of this friendship is, and of how much it is worth pursuing.

The accidents of naming and alphabetization have made some strange neighbours on my bookshelves.

I have often wondered what Julian Barnes and Roland Barthes have to say to one another as they are waiting to be read.  Perhaps they discuss the rhetoric of love in postmodern literature, or maybe they just make cynical jokes about poor J. M. Barrie, who happens to sit in the unfortunate place between them.

Don DeLillo might have it worse though, perched precariously between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida.  Just think of the endless theorizing he must endure.  I wonder if he has anything to contribute to a debate on the nature of philosophy.  Maybe he just plugs his ears and tries to keep writing.

I imagine that Annie Dillard does a fair amount of ear plugging herself.  I have no idea how else she could sit next to the interminable Charles Dickens year after year.  No matter how much she writes, could she ever feel anything but lazy next to his incomparable production.  She probably wishes that he would just go sit beside Stephen King.  The two of them would be a match made in mass publishing heaven.

Then there is C. S. Lewis and Emmanuel Levinas.  Is a conversation between the two even imaginable, or does Levinas spend all his time looking the other way, trying to convince Claude Levi-Strauss of how problematic his essentialist anthropology really is, leaving C. S. to converse with Matthew and the other myriad Lewises.

Edmund Spencer and Art Speigelman also make an interesting pair.  I am imagining Renaissance romantic epic poetry depicted with cartoon cats and mice, or the holocaust told through the structure of a formal story cycle.  Both might have something to recommend them, but I would not look for a collaborative work any time soon, not until you can imagine a market for that sort of thing.

Nor, I think, will there be any such joint work forthcoming from Oscar Wilde and Charles Williams, though they are not perhaps so different as they might seem at first.  There is something that Williams would approve in the figure of Dorian Gray, for instance, at least to my mind, but it is probably not enough to compensate for their fundamental moral and theological differences.  Still, I would make a point of reading anything the two of them managed to create.  There would be nothing else like it in the world.

All of this makes me a little hesitant about the idea of publication, however.  What if I get set beside someone impossible?  Would I have to listen to some adjective-abusing genre novelist for all time?  Would the genre novelist have to listen to me?  I should probably check and see who my neighbours might be before I venture to send anything to a publisher.  It could save me an eternity of grief.