Just Athens and Jerusalem? What about Banaras? Heroes, Nomads, and Bhaktas at the Cross-cultural Roads

Contemporary Continental philosophy uses ethnotropes—symbolic figures from literature and religion—to critique transcendental phenomenology. The Greek hero Ulysses represents Husserl's transcendental ego, which reduces the other to a transparent object of intention, erasing the ethical space between self and other. The Jewish nomad Abraham, used by Derrida and Levinas, represents a deconstructive subject who awaits the other's arrival, but this messianic structure still ties the other to future presence. The article argues that the Hindu Bhakta, specifically in the tradition of viraha bhakti (love-in-separation), offers a third ethnotrope: the other (Krishna) is withdrawing from presence, establishing a negative messianic where the other is not coming. This completes the ethical critique left unfinished by the Jewish nomad.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Contemporary Continental philosophy employs “ethnotropes” in its ethical critique of transcendental phenomenology. Ulysses, the Greek Hero, stands in for Edmund Husserl’s transcendental ego. Abraham, the Jewish Nomad, stands in for Jacque Derrida’s and Emanuel Levinas’s deconstructive subject. Ethical concerns arise when the transcendental ego is posited as the ground for all experience. The transcendental ego intends its world. The fulfillment of intention constitutes the metaphysics of presence. According to Derrida and Levinas, the other is reduced in the transcendental ego’s experience. The other becomes transparent to phenomenological intention. Transparency elides the space between self and other necessary for ethics. Husserl’s transcendental ego is in this way like the Greek Hero Ulysses who conquers all others, returning to Athens unaffected by an encounter with true alterity. Derrida and Levinas employ the Jewish Nomad to offset the violence of the Greek Hero. Unlike Ulysses, for whom all others are merely moments on a centripetal, not to mention violent and heroic, return to the homeland, Abraham never reaches the other, a point constitutive of return. This is the case because Abraham is always awaiting the arrival of the other. Abraham waits for the Messiah to come. Accordingly, Abraham is the ethnotrope for the deconstructive subject for whom the messianic establishes a permanent structure of absence. The messianic is intended as an ethical critique of the heroic. The deconstructive project falls short of its ethical intention. This is the case because the messianic remains tied to the metaphysics of presence. The other is still to come to presence. To complete the critique, a third ethnotrope is available, the Hindu Bhakta. According to the Hindu tradition of viraha bhakti, or love-in-separation, the Other (i.e., Krishna) is withdrawing from the presence of the Bhakta. This establishes the negative messianic. The ethical critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology finds its full voice in Hinduism’s negative messianic. Not only is the other not present, the other isn’t even coming. Banaras’s Hindu Bhakta affords an ethnotropic resource with which to complete the ethical critique of Athens’s Greek Hero begun, yet left incomplete, by Jerusalem’s Jewish Nomad. Keywords: Phenomenology; deconstruction; Hinduism; ethnotropes