Faith in the Ghosts of Literature. Poetic Hauntology in Derrida, Blanchot and Morrison’s Beloved
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2013, Vol 4, Issue 3
Abstract
Literature, this paper argues, is a privileged language that can give form to those specters of existence that resist the traditional ontological boundaries of being and non-being, alive and dead. This I describe as the “hauntology” of literature. Literature, unlike our everyday, referential language, is not obliged to refer to a determinable reality, or to sustain meaning. It can therefore be viewed as a negation of the world of things and sensible phenomena. Yet it gives us access to vivid and sensory rich worlds. The status of this literary world, then, is strangely in-between; its ontology is not present and fixed, but rather quivering or ghostlike. The “I” that speaks in a literary text never coincides with the “I” of the writing subject, rather they haunt each other. This theoretical understanding is based on texts by Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot. The paper also draws an analogy between this spectral dynamic of literature and an understanding of religious faith or belief. Belief relates to that which cannot be ontologically fixed or verified, be it God, angels, or spirits. Literature, because it releases and sustains this ontological quivering, can transmit the ineffable, the repressed and transcendent. With this starting point, I turn to Toni Morrison’s book Beloved (1987) and to Beloved’s strange, spectral monologue. By giving literary voice to the dead, Morrison releases literature’s hauntology to express the horror that history books cannot convey, and that our memory struggles to contain.
Authors and Affiliations
Elisabeth M. Loevlie
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25319
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel4030336
- Views 337
- Downloads 20
Violence and Nonviolence in Shinran
This article examines the Pure Land Buddhist thinker Shinran (1173–1263), from whose teachings the Shin Buddhist tradition emerged. Shinran’s ideas provide an alternative model for considering moral judgments and issue...
The Catholic Bishops and the Rise of Evangelical Catholics
White Catholics are increasingly trending toward the Republican Party, both as voters and candidates. Many of these Republican-leaning Catholics are displaying a more outspoken, culture-war oriented form of Catholicism...
Religions and Psychotherapies—Special Issue
The birth of modern psychotherapies—along with the birth of psychology as a science on one side and with psychoanalysis, other depth-psychological treatments and behavioral therapies in addition to medical treatments o...
Brazilian Validation of the Brief Scale for Spiritual/Religious Coping—SRCOPE-14
The concept of spiritual-religious coping gained attention in Brazil with the adaptation and validation of the RCOPE Scale (Panzini 2004; long version: 87 items and brief version: 49 items). The Brief RCOPE still conta...
Namaste Theory: A Quantitative Grounded Theory on Religion and Spirituality in Mental Health Treatment
A growing body of research is beginning to identify characteristics that influence or are related to helping professionals’ integration of clients’ religion and spirituality (RS) in mental health treatment. This articl...