...superfluous).

--Georges (qtd in Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy" 273)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil: A Parable" (1835), the riddle of a man whose community is sent into paroxysms of fear at the inexplicable concealment of his identity, is ripe for re-reading in our time of terror and State sacrificial politics. What continues to intrigue about this story--at least one aspect of it, for it is a vast text--is the strange, or estranged, relation between the man, Parson Hooper, and the community, Milford. The emblem of this estrangement between individual and community--a hostly as well as a hostile medium, as we shall see--is the infamous black veil, the "two folds of crape, which entirely concealed [Hooper's] features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, farther than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things" (Hawthorne 372). This essay will inquire into the status of this black veil from the point of view of sovereignty and sacrifice. Such an inquiry will demand a number of detours through other important writings on these two difficult concepts, including texts by Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The concepts, to the extent that they are concepts, will therefore open, as they must, onto other concepts and interventions, including "writing," secrecy, community, and, anticipating Nancy, the unsacrificeable. While these "themes" have been written about extensively, if not excessively, over the last several decades, recent world events return us to the awareness of the crisis pressing on the very fabric of our political knowledge and praxis and whose doxa has always been the conceit of the enduring political community.

In A Taste for the Secret, Derrida comments on the paradoxical nature of community, and in doing so suggests the ongoing need for a certain political calculation of space and time:

The desire to belong to any community whatsoever, the desire for belonging tout court, implies that one does not belong. [...] This can have political consequences: there is no identity. There is identification, belonging is accounted for, but this itself implies that the belonging does not exist, that the people who want to be this or that are not in fact. [...] This is why the family [...] is never a state. (28)

Perhaps one should speak, not of calculation, but of a calculus, a means for thinking about this odd sense--this problematic--that one can simultaneously belong and not belong (including under the sign one the "self," the community, the family, the state, and so on). No problem has preoccupied political theory and philosophy more than this one. The apparent simplicity of the quotation is belied by the difficulty of the problem to which it exposes thought. Derrida's language itself institutes a fissure, or a crisis, within itself that we still do not know how to think, insofar as really thinking this crisis would imply the (political) institutionalization of its "value," the putting to work of this value (of course, this is the whole question), or letting this value "work" on our institutions, letting it come. "There is identification," but "there is no identity"; "belonging is accounted for," but "belonging does not exist"; the desire to do something implies the impossibility of acquisition. These words and phrases institute a limit "inside" themselves, and "appear" as the concepts of presence and absence, belonging and not-belonging, desiring and not. The difference between the "inside" and "outside" of identity establishes a kind of spatial relationship. But also "belonging is accounted for [...] "; there is "desire" to belong (is there, therefore, desire not to belong?). Who desires? Who counts? When? If the difference between inside and outside establishes a spatial relation, the question of counting and desiring institutes a temporal dimension. The question at stake is perhaps this: if there is at once identity and no-identity at an ontic level, then is it only through force that identity's concept achieves actualization, that belonging (or not) takes place? What is gained and lost ontically as the effect of such force? As signs of force and its aftermath, sovereignty and sacrifice, respectively, appear as two aspects of a single problematic, at once hostly and hostile.

"The Minister's Black Veil: A Parable" begins with its own curious detour, in the form of a footnote. The asterisk protruding off the end of "Parable" re-routes the reader to a note at the bottom of the page regarding "Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody" who "In early life [...] accidentally killed a beloved friend," and, subsequently, "till the hour of his own death [...] hid his face from men" (371). Just as we will later discover about Hooper, Moody hid his face from men, but the symbol, as the footnote tells us proleptically, "had a different import" for Hooper than it did for Moody. What is the reader to do with this tragic information in the footnote about an accidental killing by a historical person, whose reasons for wearing his veil, moreover, "had a different import" from the ones that concern our Parson Hooper? What interpretive decision is one to make with this information? The information regarding the killing may or may not be reducible to the information of the story "proper," Hooper's story. It all depends on how we decide to read it. Another way of asking this question is this: What does one sacrifice in collapsing the note and the text into a single, coherent meaning? What does one sacrifice in allowing the note to "escape" one's interpretation? Do these questions fall under the same economic purview?

J. Hillis Miller, in his superb book-length reading of "The Minister's Black Veil," Hawthorne & History, implies that such questions are unanswerable, or, better, undecidable, the story "may mean this or [it] may mean that. It is impossible to tell for sure which reading is the correct one" (114). No textual evidence, no proof text, "can authorize a single unambiguous reading. The tale mutely submits to whatever reading we impose on it, but it does not unequivocally justify any one reading" (115). Yet what is the relation between reading (decision) and text here? Miller's personifying language--"The tale mutely submits"--appears to place the text in a relation of servitude to the masterly dictates of the interpreter. Moreover, the text's muteness extends to its incapacity to "unequivocally justify any one reading" (115). From another perspective, indicated by the first epigraph above, the silent text--writing--exhibits a certain sovereignty with respect to the reader, and subjects the latter to its infinite potentiality. Miller reverses the relation and places the reader in a position of sovereignty over the text. What seems clear is that the force of interpretation, while delimiting the potentiality of the text, perhaps, is also always conditioned by the text's priority. The text remains...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Discourse (Detroit, MI)
Piercing the screen of words: reflections on the political poetics of ..., March 22, 2005
What about Schmitt? Translating Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty a..., March 22, 2005

Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.