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We can sum up that the main postmodern thinkers, in their common guiding intuition, tried to destroy all illusions by transforming everything into a construct – with the goal to realize fully the principle of equality as the guiding principle of a more open, pluralistic and progressive society. But they did not build anything positive as alternative to the illusions. They did not create a theory, an observation that could explain what your real I or your spirit is. They just tried to destroy your false I. And nothing more. Leaving nothing behind. Nothing in the strict sense of the word. Deconstruction of the false “I”: exactly this was it, what almost everybody did in our European-Western hemisphere in the last decades, consciously or unconsciously. You can say that after 1989-91, and even more intensely after 9-11, you have the return of a very strong religious sense that tends to strengthen the traditional confessional forms of spirituality. This return is, at least in part and in our civilisation, a (regressive) answer to the “nothing” produced by (progressive) postmodernity. It is the desire for a “return of the objective” or the “return of essence” – but in a regressive form, which in many cases has to exchange rationality, equality and critical self-deconstruction with belief, “confidence” and the return of old hierarchies. It is in many cases militant and increasingly linked to a clash of cultures. On the other hand, you have those “postmodern” people today that have practiced “universal deconstruction” for decades. At the treshold of the new millennium, and especially after 9-11, they stood in the world completely free of illusions, if you can say so, but also, at the same time, completely without any objective ground to build on to answer the new needs for orientation, for sense and meaning. What they had achieved, was a “productive void” (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze). They led you into a realm of “negative” nothingness, like John Cage, into a realm of “deconstructed” I. But they couldn't tell you who you really are, or what the world is. They couldn't give you a vision what to do after 9-11, how to answer 9-11 and how to re-order the world thereafter in a better way. Why? Because: If you do what postmodernism tells you in order to become a better citizen, and take it seriously, if you really practice it, then you go into a state of nothingness that, in the end, as an ontological experience, may seem to many of us already as something semi-spiritual. Please observe: It is not nothingness like in the eastern ways, like in buddhism, for example, but genuine European-Western nothingness. Western nothingness, where, for the first time, you really know that you don't know anything, where you just see everything as a construct and therefore, to a certain extend, as an illusion – even yourself. But, secretely in their hearts, some practicing “Postmodernists”, especially those, who took all this seriously and underwent the process of deconstruction with their whole body, soul and spirit, began to wonder: Could there be some relation between this “negative” western nothingness of postmodernity and the “positive” eastern nothingness, like in Buddhism, for example? Could there be some relation – maybe not looking towards the past, but looking into the future? Even if they are methodologically very different and have completely different cultural backgrounds and histories, both experiences of “nothingness” seem to lead, at least at the beginning and to a certain extend, to similar experiences in making the first steps beyond the normal consciousness.
This is the reason why, if certain contemporary Indian thinkers, for example, look at our postmodern philosophy and culture today from the point of view of their traditions, they usually would say: “What this postmodern culture tries unconsciously to realize with deconstruction is to break through the veil of the Maya. It tries to destroy the illusion of the world and of the normal I. That is the avant-garde of this culture, but this avant-garde is deeply ambivalent. It tries to destroy all illusions; but it does it unconsciously. It does not know what it does. And therefore it knows not how to proceed after coming near the breakthrough.”
If Indian thinkers say that, they seem, from my point of view, to catch something very important, something deeply, deeply at work in the culture of the European-Western world. Positively speaking, it means: We are in the process of coming near a breakthrough that could take us beyond our normal ego, our illusionary self. But it means also: We are just at the point where we have recognized that nothing is, what is seems - but, at the same time, we have nothing essential left in our hands to build on a step further.
Question: All that seems to be a dead end street, where liberatory “nothingness” is unable to go anywhere. That seems, to a certain extend, to be a very difficult and hopeless situation, doesn't it?
RB: In fact, that's what it is. Definitely. But it means also: Today, where “nothing is anything” (Paul Feyerabend) in the postmodern mind, something else can and must be discovered. A third way between the “renaissance of religion” and the “universal void” of postmodern deconstruction. A third way, where those two ways that remain both in many ways unfulfilling or uncompleted, can converge on a higher level. A level which is spiritual, like the “renaissance of religion”, and at the same time rationally self-observing, like postmodernism. What could such a third way be? For the time being, we can say this: It must be (re-)discovered the objective realm not beyond, but in the deconstructed subjective mind. It seems to me that, for a couple of years now, we are exactly in the process that this “third way” wants to emerge genuinely out of the nothingness of the total self-deconstructed subjective mind, which postmodernism has given us. And my conviction is that this could be, in the long run, a more important “spiritual” movement than the return of traditional religions.
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RB: Postmodernism means: Deconstruct everything that you normally identify with. Deconstruct what you thought was yourself. And what comes out of this proceeding is a total deconstruction of yourself, that leaves nothing behind than a pure activity of “conscious consciousness”, which observes its own movement in every moment. It is a consciousness that observes itself in the moment when it is happening, when it thinks. It is a thinking that is thinking itself, if you want to put it in Foucault's terms. It is thinking that becomes aware of itself. That is, as it is presented by those postmodern thinkers I mentioned, something proto-spiritual, in my view. It is, at least in its hidden ambition, rationality becoming “essential” - without losing itself in the process. But the problem is, that all this, in most cases remains a desire, and does not become a reality for postmodern thinkers. In most cases, their experience of “the other” seems more like, as Bob Dylan called it some years ago, a “time out of mind” (1997). It becomes nothing stable, but more a kind of short peak experience. It is a short experience that thinking, when it goes beyond the identification with thoughts, when it comes near to the fountainhead of inspiration, of concept building, that thinking is a reality in the kósmos – a subjective-objective reality in synchronicity. That can become clear, at least to a certain extend, when you “watch tv and watch yourself watching tv”. And in fact, you can read, as I said, the late Derrida, and you will discover that he writes about subjective-objective experiences. But in the end, for most postmodern thinkers, all this remains more a desire than a conscious reality.
Question: That's my impression, too. Exactly. A walk on the borderline between desire for “the other” and real evolution of consciousness.
RB: And the second reason is that all these people were, even in their last period, unconscious or insecure about what they really did. Lyotard and Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze - they tried to understand what the “silent presence”, the “inaudible presence that is permanently vanishing” (Lyotard) may be in its own, true nature. And they tried it starting from a psycho-analytical standpoint. And therefore they were always interpreting it with psych-analytical concepts, thus always falling back into some kind of psycho-analytical reduction of what their “essential” experiences really were. Psycho-analytical concepts, even if they are immensely precious, are not made for “essential”, subjective-objective experiences. They are made for something else, for other purposes. And so the postmodern thinkers failed in the interpretation of their own doing, of their own tendencies. Here, you have two main reasons why the main postmodern thinkers in their late works only approach the borderline, but they never really cross this line.
Question: Yes, it's like an inbuilt limit. You always approach, but it never gets there.
RB: I think, many of us know that feeling of ambivalence. Because many of us, if we want to admit it or not, have the same troubles as these postmodern thinkers. For many of us, “essentials” remain a permanent borderline desire – “so near, and so far away” (Wim Wenders). You are moving towards the borderline, near the “productive void”. That, in many cases, is painful. But you feel, it will finally may let you make an important discovery, maybe even a break through. You feel, the direction, even the solution is there, in the neighbourhood of fulfilled, active nothingness of your deconstructed mind. You feel it clearly, and therefore you want go through the auto-deconstruction of your normal ego. And sometimes it can happen, for seconds, if you are lucky. But it is just an accident. Normally, if you want to go into an “essential” experience, you have first pass through katharsis, what the Greeks called katharsis: through a process of purification / deconstruction of the soul, which is painful and fulfilling at the same time. It is a transformation in most cases, connected with some kind of dissolution of the normal I, or with some kind of discovery that you normally would reject, that you don't like. And these postmodern thinkers are directly, with all their inner movement and their deconstructive powers, trying to approach this kathartic point where something else emerges out of the spheres of annihilation, of the “inaudible presence” (Lyotard) of the void. But then, they never seem to be able to go beyond, and to stay in the realm of essential experience - of the thinking that observes objectively its own subjective acts. That's the point. They reach the borderline. But they cannot cross it properly.
Question: Right. Is the kind of nothingness, you spoke of, the same as in the Eastern ways?
RB: Yes and no. It is not the kind of nothingness that, for example, Ken Wilber or Andrew Cohen mean. But it's some kind of a productive void. You just have to call it a void, not nothingness in the sense of the eastern traditions. But the productive void of postmodernity may be a door to nothingness. That is my thesis. But the inbuilt nihilism and materialism of the main postmodern thinkers made it impossible for them to use the productive void in this sense. They could not pass through this door to go beyond it.
Question: Yes, it's much more nihilistic than what you are saying that Wilber or Cohen would call, you know, nothing, or nothingness.
RB: But if you go to that point, if you do it consistently, radically, if you deconstruct everything, then it starts to transform itself into something else.
Question: Right, I agree with you. But the icons of postmodernism never went that far. Because there seems to be still a sort of nostalgia around the normal self, the normal ego itself. There isn't a sense for where is the point it wants to go with its transformation. There's such an ambivalence about whether or not this is a positive transformation. There is a compulsion to go into this direction, and yet there is, I think, a disconnection from where that compulsion is coming from. And so therefore, for the late postmodernists, it becomes a very ambivalent enterprise, because for them, consciously and conceptually, there maybe isn't anything other than a normal ego or a normal self. And so you are always in danger to actually destroying yourself in this process. So it's a very strange thing, because the Postmodernists don't seem to have anything else in their belief structure, or understanding of themselves to go one step farther.
RB: Yes, you are probably right. But there is one more point, which is important here. Ask yourself one decisive question. Ask yourself what remains if your normal ego is deconstructed totally, and that really means: if it is destroyed. What remains?
Question: My self. I mean,
RB: So, would you say that of the experience of annihilation could emerge the possibility to discover your real self?
Question: Yes, exactly.
RB: The decisive point, to me, seems to be: It must emerge, at this point. Because, in the end, you have no other choice. You have no other chance.
Question: Exactly.
RB: You will become totally mad, if you lose your normal ego, or totally high. How do you experience it? How do you call it? You will be desperate. You will be extremely depressed. Or you discover something else that has a higher status than everything you destroyed with your deconstruction. There is no other possibility. You have no third choice.
Question: Right. So it's fascinating, because there's an interesting book out of MIT Press, from Varela, and a few others who are Buddhists. It's called “The Embodied Mind”, which you may have seen. They were writing about the deconstruction that has happened ipso facto through cognitive psychology. It wasn't that the cognitive psychologists were looking to deconstruct themselves in a way that the post-modern deconstructionists were. But by the fact of finding no self within the brain and finding that there was nothing there, in quote “nothing” there in all the cognitive science experiments, apparently many of them became deeply depressed — deeply, deeply depressed. And they asked themselves: Where can we find something?
RB: Yes. It's the same thing for postmodernism, more or less. When you take postmodernism seriously, when you do it consistently, not just playing around with it as a kind of snobbism or intellectual game, but doing it seriously in your own consciousness and in your real life, applying it concretely, then you just have to be deeply depressed - or you find the “other” self. You have no third choice. When there are two ways, but no third, and you must decide to take only one of them, we call that with the Greeks a “crisis”. And this crisis could be the right thing for our present time, who knows? Because, as Hegel said: the “world process that goes through man”, is made of such crises and subjective-objective paradoxies. That is, how it has to be, as it seems.
Question: Right.
RB: But I have a third point to make. A third reason to mention, why late postmodernism has developed that specific kind of pre-, semi- or borderline-spirituality. You should never forget that many of the main representatives of postmodernism are, as I said, not only of “Core European” (German or French), but also of Jewish-Arab origins, or are strongly influenced by them. And so, when they reach the borderline, when they come into the neighborhood of “essential” experience of “the other”, or spiritual experience, they feel always near to their origin of spiritual departure. So, being a mix of French (or German) and Jewish-Arabic, a certain mechanism comes into action. Derrida, Cixous, and Levinas have this kind of sacred prohibition to make something representative out of the experience of “the other”. They don't have to create an image of “the other” and the “inaudible, silent presence”. Levinas and Derrida say it explicitly: When there is the experience of “the other” coming out of the productive void of the ego, when you have the possibility to observe your own thoughts in the very subjective-objective process of their genesis — when you become aware that “not you”, that “the other” is thinking this consciousness of yours, as Hegel said, in this very moment you have to take a step back, because you cannot create an image of “the other”. You can and should not give it a name. You don't have to think to represent all this in mental thoughts (cf., for example, Jean Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews”, University of Minnesota Press 1990). This is a very strong, even in many cases pre-rational reason, why those thinkers have created “essentials” in their intellectual life, but declined to include them actively into their intellectual works. It is completely understandable, and maybe it is far better than re-creating mythical images of the “other” realms of reality, as some of the modernists were doing in their last years.
Question: Right. Well, I always find it funny that these highly intelligent people, when it comes to reach for essence or spirituality, they all of a sudden identify “the other” with the idea of an image of God, a personal God that's from pre-modern times. That is what comes to them, and then they feel: Well we can't do that. And they're right. They're right about that, but it's funny that sort of notion of what god is. It's so impoverished actually, or so primitive.
RB: You're right. In my opinion, the postmodernists, in many cases, have a primitive - or over-intellectualized - conception not only of God, but also of Jewish religion. Jewish religion says much more, and is far more sophisticated, as they could grasp from their deconstructivistic - and often materialistic - standpoint. Therefore, there concept of Jewish heritage and religion is representative only for their own interests and intellectual possibilities, not for Jewish heritage and religion as such and as a whole.
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