In a set of five neat and appreciative essays, Bruce Holsinger develops a thesis that may come as a surprise to many medievalists. He sees a formative engagement with "the medieval" (p. x) on the part of several avant-garde French theorists writing in the 1960s whose work has had a potent influence upon critical discourse in a number of academic fields since then: Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. The author chooses with apt generality the substantive temporal adjective to embrace the many different ways these critics represent medieval thought and expression in their work. As might be expected, their views of the Middle Ages are as often quirky, schematic, and cooptive as they are disciplined, nuanced, and well-informed. The "premodern condition" as described in these pages ironically turns out to be one of the foundational constructs of deconstructive postmodernism, whether the period is treated as an exotic Other--a symbolic refuge from the rigidities of modernist thought--or as an intellectual "ally" on the principle of "the enemy of my enemy [here, Christian humanism and Enlightenment rationalism] is my friend." In fact, for the purpose of sympathetically explaining the theoretical postures of the avant-gardistes, Holsinger himself acquiesces in some of their antagonistic periodizations, since his modern period includes the whole half-millennium since the putative rejection of the Middle Ages by the Renaissance, yielding (though only at times) a caricature of the medieval period as modernity's cultural whipping boy, "the most consistently abjected era in the Western tradition" (197). Holsinger makes this claim in spite of the fact that the systematic recovery and institutionalized study of the Middle Ages in its manifold dimensions, as well as a richly expressed appreciation of its artistic forms, is a distinctive product of the "modern" era, especially during the last two centuries when positivist paradigms are presumed to have to have ruled with an iron fist. Kristevan abjection is just too blunt a concept to capture the multitude of complex responses to the Middles Ages expressed during even the earliest "modern" movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation. But the main energy of this book, and a large part of its charm, is that its author, like any good teacher, has enthusiastically joined the antimodern project of the nouvelle critique to try to understand and convey its responses to the Middle Ages from within. This insider knowledge has enabled him to identify the ways, explicit or oblique, in which these writers have construed medieval thought and how they commandeered those constructions to promote their own antimodern agenda. And in spite of a graceful demurral in his "Introduction: The Avant-Garde Premodern," Holsinger has, in fact, contributed substantially to a more complete intellectual history of the later twentieth century of which the many intertwined branches of contemporary Medieval Studies are themselves a continuing part. This book, as its several blurbs promise, will provide a new starting point for those medievalists who wish to study more deeply the part played by their discipline in the very foundations of contemporary critical thought. Many readers will come away at least intrigued by the curious permutations that medieval ideas and intellectual practices have undergone during the process of their "translation" into a postmodern idiom.
In "Para-Thomism: Bataille at Rheims," that author is shown to have been led by his "early and rigorous training in medieval studies" (22) to grasp the semiotic complexity of both scholastic philosophy and Gothic iconography; at the same time he was struck by their destabilized authority, a response provoked by the cathedral at Rheims. Bataille was inspired by this magnificent "ruin" to embrace a riot of creative, transgressive and transformational impulses, "to translate medieval nonsense poetry, write the life of a medieval child murderer, and reimagine the Summa Theologiae as a pagan catechism of Nietzschean modernity" (202). In addition, Holsinger appends an essay by Bataille from Critique (1949), translated by Laurence Petit for this volume, on "Medieval French Literature, Chivalric Morals, and Passion," not simply to demonstrate this writer's serious scholarly medievalism, but also to show how his interpretation of the psychodynamics of love and power in medieval literature sheds light on the subsequent work of Michel Foucault and that author's own "much-discussed appropriations of the Middle Ages" (22).
In "Apocalypse and Archaeophilia: Lacan's Middle Ages and the Ethics of History," Holsinger observes how that thinker, too, in his 1959-60 seminar, published as The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1997), saw "the entire tradition of ethical philosophy play itself out in the crystal ball of courtly love" (202). It is true that the author finds problematic Lacan's "archaeophilia" or impulse to locate precisely here, in the complexities of fin'amors, the foundational moment in the development of modern subjectivity and desire, but Holsinger appreciates the impassioned apocalypticism of a lecture given by Lacan on the eve of the nuclear arms race which is adduced as the motivating context of this "jeremiad" on the dreadful "failure of post-Enlightenment science to know its own desire" (93).
Holsinger shows how Pierre Bourdieu seized upon a concept from Aquinas, which he learned from Erwin Panofsky, in "Indigeneity: Panofsky, Bourdieu, and the Archaeology of the Habitus." Bourdieu had translated Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1967) into French, adding his own "Postface," which is here translated, again by Laurence Petit, into English as another appendix. Although the term habitus had already been used by Marcel Mauss to indicate the force of preformed patterns of thought and action, it was Bourdieu who turned it into a key concept of his sociology of knowledge and human behavior.
In "Gothic Invention: Liturgy, History, Of Grammatology," Holsinger explores not Derrida's own interest in the Middle Ages per se, which was perhaps the weakest among those studied in this volume, but rather his critique of Rousseau's "theoretic medievalism" or "Gothic invention" in his Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781), where Rousseau proposes a degeneration of language through time and postulates an earlier premodern, preliterate ideal in the supposed "mimetic immanence of the medieval liturgy" (24). Derrida finds this construct unsustainable and fingers the passage in which it appears "as one of the most revealing moments in Enlightenment thought" (202). Of Grammatology, according to Holsinger, thus "emerges not as the founding text of an 'antihistorical' deconstructive enterprise, but rather as a sustained critique of the ideological consequences of the very practice of historical periodization" (24). In this regard, however, it is interesting to note that Derrida's own practice is not entirely immune from the very charge he levels at Rousseau, in that he hypostatizes from a single moment in the speculations of another thinker the totalizing essence of an entire era.
Holsinger does something of the same thing himself by claiming that Roland Barthes's S/Z (1970) "represents in many ways the apotheosis of the premodern condition" as practiced by postmodern theorists (24). In "The Four Senses of Roland Barthes," Holsinger sees the context of Vatican II as manifest in that thinker's work, in particular the influence of Henri de Lubac's four-volume Exégèse médiévale (1959-64). Although familiarity with this work goes unacknowledged by Barthes himself, Holsinger believes the critic found in its fourfold apparatus of scriptural exegesis (perhaps most succinctly summarized in Dante's letter to Can Grande), not a "monolithic," rigid, stultifying, or contrived system of textual interpretation that extracted prescribed categories of quadruple meaning from single passages, but a liberating "cornucopian epitome of free play" (202) in which "the multiplicity of the text [becomes] the boundless object of hermeneutical delectation" (24). Why stop at four?
Holsinger concludes his study by adducing the medieval principle of translatio studii to describe the postmodern reenactment of the medieval period's own mode of cultural borrowing and adaptation from classical antiquity: "The avant-garde premodern was nothing if not a large-scale translation project, entailing a series of discrete acts of cultural appropriation that together define this era in part as an efflorescence of critical neomedievalism" (196). It is unclear how many of these critics would have seen their own work in precisely this way, since Holsinger himself has troubled to point out that some of them simply chose to ignore or suppress their debts to their medieval precursors: Barthes's "S/Z does not once mention the four senses of scripture despite its clear reliance upon their mechanism, while Bataille's La somme athéologique never names Thomas Aquinas, though of course his presence is everywhere" in that set of volumes (196). In its most inclusive formulation, Holsinger's thesis is that the Middle Ages provided the postmoderns with "an archive of cultural and intellectual production that seemingly escaped the moral compass of the Enlightenment...without the baggage of humanism, capitalism, colonialism, and triumphalist individualism represented by the Renaissance" (197). The medieval world was a retreat "that allowed those who turned to it the momentary fantasy that the particular modernity they both inhabited and lamented was inevitable yet noncompulsory, of the avant-garde's own making. While such an idealized Middle Ages could often provoke nostalgia for a lost age of 'natural' social relations and transparent hierarchies of power, it nevertheless provided postwar critical thought with an almost inexhaustible source of intellectual sustenance in its assault on postmedieval legacies to the Western tradition"(198).
Of course, as Holsinger notes, an imagined Middle Ages also provided an attractive haven for many conservative modern writers, as well as artists and religious thinkers from the Renaissance on, who would have found little common cause with the postmodern agenda. Indeed, in his effort to stress the importance of his own authors' engagement with the Middle Ages, Holsinger seems sometimes to dismiss, even to denigrate what he calls "the flattening effects of many other forms of theoretic medievalism over the final decades of the twentieth century" (198). Unfortunately, he declines to identify these by name, so that his readers are not easily able to assess the fairness of his judgment or determine whether their own theoretical assumptions and critical practices might not be considered to fall into the category thus described. One such "flattening" form of theoretic medievalism that Holsinger apparently has in mind is what he calls the "Exegetical method" of D. W. Robertson, whose Preface to Chaucer (1962) comes in for a brief negative assessment on p. 183, even though "Robertsonianism," controversial in its own day, has long been out of favor with most medieval literary critics, if it ever enjoyed any more dominance than one voice among others. My own view is that Robertson's interest in Augustinian hermeneutics provoked a valuable debate. In any case, invidious comparisons with unnamed opponents who pursue different theoretical approaches to the Middle Ages seems out of keeping with the general principle of polyphony, interpretative play, "hermeneutical delectation" in a multiplicity of perspectives that the author himself so warmly espouses in other parts of the book. In an effort to separate his postmoderns from other medievalist scholars and writers, Holsinger now stresses not their turning with "nostalgia" to "an idealized Middle Ages" for "an almost inexhaustible source of intellectual sustenance," but their clear-eyed "resistance" to such "idealizing nostalgia and historical essentialism" (198).
Holsinger's main point is that most postmodern critics were highly responsive to aspects of medieval semiotics, but ever restless and searching in their exploitation of these premodern modes of thought. They prowled the period for analogies, insights, inspiration, terms of art that they could use in their antimodern project. They were "less interested in promoting philologically precise accounts of the medieval world from a circumscribed archive [the activity presumably of ordinary medieval scholars and critics] than...in deriving critically useful medievalisms from a boundless field of residual memories, archaic artifacts, and cultural continuities" (198). They came home with some pretty good stuff. Bataille and Barthes found models for some of their most ambitious work; Lacan marveled at the "paradoxes of sublimation" in the poetry of Arnaut Daniel; Derrida declared "Augustine's description of melismatic singing as a crucial moment in the philosophy of language" (198); Bourdieu adapted into his sociological lexicon a medieval idea explained to him by Panofsky, a scholar who, though no narrow pedant, gave us wonderfully "precise accounts of the medieval world from a circumscribed archive."
But for Holsinger the primary value of postmodern medievalism lies elsewhere, not in the scholarly recovery of the premodern past in its own terms, but as an "archaizing provocation: as that channel through which modernity is incited to confront and stage its own historical and ontological limits" (200). The function of postmodern medievalism is to stiffen our resolve against the regime of postmedieval modernity. Yet, Holsinger himself seems less attracted to this activist posture and more to another possibility, that of a conversation between pre- and postmodern thinkers as imagined by a writer he saves for last. Jean-François Lyotard, whose meditations were posthumously published as The Confession of Augustine (2000), sought at the end of his life a deeper rapprochement with the bishop of Hippo as a philosophical fellow traveler whose searching and subtle thought on time, memory, language, and longing could still move and inspire him without requiring his acceptance of the triune divinity Augustine believed to be the author of all the signs to be read in the world. Lyotard finds that the "spirit of Augustine lives and breathes," as Holsinger puts it, "in the existentialism of Sartre and the philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger, whose invention of phenomenology gave the twentieth century its most powerful critique of Cartesian rationalism. The "present of the past" signifies for Lyotard not a cliché of diachrony, but a kind of temporal immanence that puts Augustine's epiphany in the Confessions and Husserl's dismantling of Descartes in Cartesian Meditations into a transmillennial dialogue that speaks across the fraught ideological divide of the Enlightenment" (201).
We can only wonder whether the bishop of Hippo would have been happier chatting with Husserl over the head of Descartes or with Descartes himself down in the ideological chasm of the Enlightenment. Augustine was certainly no enemy of reason and would have found much to admire in a hard-headed Cartesian epistemology that did not, after all, deny the claims of transcendent divinity. All of these thinkers are obvious heirs of Augustine in some aspects of their thought and Holsinger appropriately concludes his treatise with a final metaphor derived from an "Augustinian idiom of sacrament" (201) in which a "kernal of permanence" (202) from the life of past minds remains not only accessible through patient scholarly reconstruction, but alive and immanent to those thinkers actively engaged in the present deconstruction of false confidences. Postmodern medievalism, in this sense, is not a process of mere translation or adaptation, but of "miraculous transformation" (202). This is not a religious miracle, our post-post-Enlightenment critic hastens to assure us, "certainly not a Christian one" (202). Instead, in a warm utterance of demythologized faith, Holsinger proclaims that his high priests of postmodernity have "invoked, called into being, summoned from another place, translated from isolated fragments into whole systems of thought...the dialectic of belief and doubt that characterized the sacramental culture of the Middle Ages" (202).