Disappearing Act:

“And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!” – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Dickens’s story is a Christmas classic. It reminds us to keep Christmas by looking to the needs of others just as the Creator looked to the needs of his creatures. During this past Christmas (Dec. 17), Durham City Council unanimously decided to keep Christmas by passing a prohibition on begging. I reminded of another Christmas story with a similar situation, but this town didn’t need legislation to accomplish its goal. It was sometime around 4 A.D., when a pregnant mother with her husband needed a place to stay the night. Her husband, Joseph, begged the townsfolk of Bethlehem for somewhere to stay. An innkeeper offered one place that was out-of-sight, a stable for animals. Since Bethlehem was Joseph’s hometown, his neighbors probably heard that Mary got pregnant before she lived with Joseph. Many people call that a whore, and most people prefer to ignore or avoid undesirables like that. The same desire seems to be at work 2000 years later in Durham. Scrooge felt the same way when he told Tiny Tim not to beg near his office. Perhaps we need the same change of heart Scrooge had.

Friends at the Divinity school have brought some of us other students together to protest this ordinance, namely through letters to the city during the Lenten season. We invited other students to participate, too, should they desire. There have been some questions as to the point of this protest. The goal of this protest is not to allow for the continuance of begging so that the Church will not take care of people in need. Nor do protesters believe that it is the state’s or civil community’s duty to take on this “burden” to the exclusion of the Church. We take issue with the city’s solution to the begging problem and the motivation behind this prohibition. Prohibiting begging is not a solution to poverty, nor does it seek to “protect” someone who is begging in high traffic areas. Wanting to keep undesirables out of sight by making begging illegal motivates this prohibition.

As Christians, we cannot support this “solution.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it well in Discipleship: 

"God’s own Son was dishonored and humiliated in order to honor the Father. But the Father, refusing to be separated from his Son, will likewise not be separated from those whose humanity the Son assumed as an equal and for whose sake the Son bore his humiliation" (124). 

We cannot accept any “solution” that requires separating certain undesired bodies from desirable bodies in public. The prohibition amounts to indirect segregation by prohibiting undesirables among us to not perform actions that will remind us of their existence. The protest laments a failure to regard the existence of others as grace rather than burden.

God Died So Humans Could Live: How Nietzsche Killed A God Who Needed To Die:

If God is at the root of slavery, then slave-owners traffic in an economy of lies. But as with any effective lie, serpents masterfully mask their idolatrous words as convincing icons of truth. In his essay on freedom, belief and language in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Michael Lackey argues that Nietzsche liberates the “subject” not simply by killing God. True liberation requires renouncing faith in grammar. As such, God is not the slave-master; rather, the real masters disguise themselves as his priests by inserting their will in divine discourses articulated to rule the imaginations of the faithful. Such is the case with words like “consciousness” and the “subject,” which reflect someone’s will framed in language more than stable anthropologies. This means that authentic freedom and identity are not possessions to be known, but unstable performances conducted through a lifelong cycle of deconstructing counterfeit “subjects” constructed by priests’ wills to power articulated in divine discourses about God and metaphysics.

Individuals can only kill God with words, according to Lackey, because of the nature of belief. Whereas the pious believe they exercise freedom by willing to believe or not in different concepts, Nietzsche positions freedom in opposition to belief (in grammar) altogether. For Nietzsche, using language itself is a performance of faith, because when one speaks words or articulates concepts, she must believe 1) that there is an existing reality signified by language and 2) that such language adequately captures these realities. To the extent that a person believes in language, she limits her imagination and experience (freedom) by vocabulary. But how adequately can language frame reality? What is the nature of mediation?

Middle Nietzsche rejected the existence of a one-to-one correspondence between language and reality, and late Nietzsche rejected any correspondence entirely. Against correspondence, he argued that language users implant their will into things by naming them. As an act of faith, therefore, language is either the innocent ad hoc invention birthed by ignorance for the sake of communicating or a willfully devised duplicity parading around as sacred truth. The former evolves into the latter when a “subject” buries her will in a newly articulated vocabulary and claims that her vocabulary faithfully mediates reality. Therefore, when an individual believes that signs faithfully signify referents, faith subjects the believer to the will of the one who names. Lackey explains,

This [subjection] is so because the directionality of linguistic dependence has been effectively reversed—it is not the pre-encoded referent which limits the linguistic sign but rather the originary language uses who, in fixing the semantic coordinates of language, coerce language users to see and experience the world as they deem fit (750).

Whether or not a pre-encoded, pre-discursive reality exists, limits come from the language of liars claiming to be priests. Language is the performance of faith that binds a person to the will of the speaker. Freedom “as such” precedes discourse; it resides with the one who slays the serpent before it speaks a word with its silver tongue.

But what is so attractive about language? At the heart of this faith is anxiety of instability. Emotion exercises tremendous power/authority over those who wish to seize security as a subject buttressed by God and metaphysics—by analogia entis. In overblown rhetoric, Nietzsche prescribes suicide for pessimists and the execution of God for “subjects,” because both acts constitute an affirmation of life—a life freed from subjection to the wills of others. Like, Luke Skywalker, the prototypical orphan searching for his identity and place in the universe, we must search our feelings in order to recognize and break our bondage to those conceptual masters from which we stabilize our identity/”subject.”

But if language limits freedom, how can individuals overcome the subject without replacing one master tongue for another creedal language? What does Nietzsche’s goal—liberation of the individual—entail? Lackey writes, “Nietzsche wants to deconstruct the sovereignty of all words, including his own, so that individuals will become creators themselves—they will put their will into things, rather than seeing in things a will” (752). So long as individuals perceive correspondence between words and an established ontological reality, they continue to be either the herd animals subject to the wills of ranchers or the decadent serpents using their linguistic guile to seduce others into “slavery.”

The idea of the “subject” is particularly misleading: “If consciousness is nothing more than a lordly ruler’s will to power, then in coming to know our ‘selves’ as beings with consciousness, we know, not our own ‘natures’, but someone else’s will to power, a will which has gained ascendancy in us through language” (752). In short, identity is unwieldy and elusive. Nietzsche writes, “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves … So we are necessarily strangers to ourselves” (752-753). Freedom, then, is outside belief in stability (God and metaphysics) framed in language. Rather, individuals exercise freedom instead by “discover[ing] how one has been constructed by other people’s wills to power, because it is in understanding how one has been constructed that a person can begin the process of overcoming one’s currently constructed self” (753).

As perhaps the first deconstructionist (after Jesus), Nietzsche believes this performance must be a lifelong cycle of deconstructing each new construction of the “self.” Freedom is not a static possession but a performance, because “wills to power, effectively concealed in the guise of language and values, insidiously work their way into our bodies, encoding us, whether we know it or not, so that we become the involuntary carriers of other people’s verbal projections” (753). Masters use these communicative tactics like naming slaves and marking their bodies in order to stabilize social relations (identities) and rule social imaginaries. The goal, then, is not to seize a (impossible) final construction that simply re-inscribes these relationships, but to recognize greater freedom with each deconstructive performance.