On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life by Eric L. Santner

Author:Eric L. Santner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Many predications are possible about personality, as many as about individuality. As individual predications they all follow the scheme B A, the scheme in which all the predications about the world and its parts are conceptualized. Personality is always defined as an individual in its relation to other individuals and to a Universal. (69; emphasis added)

But as he quickly adds, “There are no derivative predications about the self, only the one, original B B” (69).The self, that is, signifies the part that is no part (of a whole), a nonrelational excess that is out of joint with respect to the generality of any classification or identification.

To put it in the most mundane terms, when one reads “personal ads” in the newspaper, one typically finds listings of the positive attributes someone is searching for in a partner: stable professional life, loves travel, sushi, long walks on the beach, and so on. All such attributes belong to the personality: any number of people can fit the bill, no one is truly singled out by these generic properties, and any number of other people might identify with the list as the re ́sume ́ of the kind of partner they would want. We are, in a word, within the order of exchange and substitution, the order of B A (the typical abbreviations used in personal ads—“SWF”—underline the generality of the “object” being addressed). But as we all know—and here we touch on the truth of what might at first glance look like mere sentimentality—when one truly loves another person, one loves precisely what is not generic about them, what cannot be substituted for by someone else, in a word, what is irreplaceable. But this singular “something” that Rosenzweig calls the (metaethical) self and that resists generic identification—that has no general equivalent—is not some other, more substantial self behind the personality, not, that is, some sort of true self that, say, assumes a distance to the social roles of the personality; it is, rather, a gap in the series of identifications that constitute it. Borrowing the discourse of the infinitesimal calculus, Rosenzweig at times refers to this gap that nonetheless manifests a peculiar positivity as a differential. To paraphrase Scho

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