not a prophet but a professor of prophecy.
The Agon of Humanism
reject your parents vehemently enough, and you will become a belated version of them, but compound with their reality, and you may partly free yourself. 27
Page 35
But these days, even professors of prophecy have their uses. The unwieldy but willful qualities of Bloom's prose and the generically blurred but urgently voiced argumentation of his project are, both Bloom and his commentators know, agonistically related to the crisis of humanism conveniently represented by postwar modes of Continental thought. With its panoply of sources ancient and modern, Bloom's theory is both a symptom of and a response to this crisis; his Americanized Gnosis, pragmatic and self-reliant, is formulated at least in part as a rejoinder to "all Gallic modes of recent interpretation because they dehumanize poetry and criticism." 28 And while a comprehensive discussion of this crisis, broadly involving questions of the efficacy of scientific knowledge, of the autonomous self, and of the authority of textual traditions, is beyond the scope of any one book, certain of Bloom's formulations go directly to its heart.
Because Bloom and his generation of critics have made even more overt use of religious models of interpretation than their New Critical predecessors, we can say, along with Mileur, that the crisis of humanism focuses in more narrow literary terms upon "the enormously problematical notion of secularization." 29 If the tradition of secular literary culture is threatened by post-structuralist versions of the "human sciences," then Bloom's reappropriations of ancient religious revisionism (Kabbalah, Gnosticism, etc.) can be regarded as a defensive return to origins, an apophrades indicating the strong possibility that no definitive break was ever made between sacred and secular textual traditions. As we have observed, Bloom makes no distinction between sacred and secular texts within the confines of his revisionary paradigm; thus he can offer a comparative reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the tale of Jacob and the angel from Genesis, and find in both of them the same vision of "a catastrophe creation, a transference, and a family romance." 30 When a literary critic performs feats of this sort, he is playing for high stakes indeed: against contemporary modes of thought which decenter and reinsert the subject as a counter in various linguistic, political, social, or economic processes, Bloom reasserts the primacy of the individual psyche and the authority of a textual tradition based upon such primacy and capable of defending itself against historical vicissitudes through the uncanny mechanisms of persistent revisionism.
The fact that since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, the authority of sacred texts has been dispersed and only partially redistributed among a series of canons that can be defined broadly as "literary" ultimately makes little difference to Bloom; as Mileur points out, his
Page 36
is an essentialized and ahistorical Gnosis fueled by "his insistence on breaking down the distinction between religion and secularity, which is so constitutive of our sense of ourselves and our activities." 31 Bloom is both an ancient and a modern, or perhaps both a religious and a secular writer, since he responds to the most modern of intellectual predicaments with what many intellectuals today would perceive as the most archaic of stances. That he has put such a figure as Freud in the service of his theory in no way mitigates this circumstance: in order to further the vitality of any text, Bloom, true to his Jewish heritage, must make all things old. When an aggressive Postmodernist like Foucault declares that
criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of
The Agon of Humanism
reject your parents vehemently enough, and you will become a belated version of them, but compound with their reality, and you may partly free yourself. 27
Page 35
But these days, even professors of prophecy have their uses. The unwieldy but willful qualities of Bloom's prose and the generically blurred but urgently voiced argumentation of his project are, both Bloom and his commentators know, agonistically related to the crisis of humanism conveniently represented by postwar modes of Continental thought. With its panoply of sources ancient and modern, Bloom's theory is both a symptom of and a response to this crisis; his Americanized Gnosis, pragmatic and self-reliant, is formulated at least in part as a rejoinder to "all Gallic modes of recent interpretation because they dehumanize poetry and criticism." 28 And while a comprehensive discussion of this crisis, broadly involving questions of the efficacy of scientific knowledge, of the autonomous self, and of the authority of textual traditions, is beyond the scope of any one book, certain of Bloom's formulations go directly to its heart.
Because Bloom and his generation of critics have made even more overt use of religious models of interpretation than their New Critical predecessors, we can say, along with Mileur, that the crisis of humanism focuses in more narrow literary terms upon "the enormously problematical notion of secularization." 29 If the tradition of secular literary culture is threatened by post-structuralist versions of the "human sciences," then Bloom's reappropriations of ancient religious revisionism (Kabbalah, Gnosticism, etc.) can be regarded as a defensive return to origins, an apophrades indicating the strong possibility that no definitive break was ever made between sacred and secular textual traditions. As we have observed, Bloom makes no distinction between sacred and secular texts within the confines of his revisionary paradigm; thus he can offer a comparative reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the tale of Jacob and the angel from Genesis, and find in both of them the same vision of "a catastrophe creation, a transference, and a family romance." 30 When a literary critic performs feats of this sort, he is playing for high stakes indeed: against contemporary modes of thought which decenter and reinsert the subject as a counter in various linguistic, political, social, or economic processes, Bloom reasserts the primacy of the individual psyche and the authority of a textual tradition based upon such primacy and capable of defending itself against historical vicissitudes through the uncanny mechanisms of persistent revisionism.
The fact that since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, the authority of sacred texts has been dispersed and only partially redistributed among a series of canons that can be defined broadly as "literary" ultimately makes little difference to Bloom; as Mileur points out, his
Page 36
is an essentialized and ahistorical Gnosis fueled by "his insistence on breaking down the distinction between religion and secularity, which is so constitutive of our sense of ourselves and our activities." 31 Bloom is both an ancient and a modern, or perhaps both a religious and a secular writer, since he responds to the most modern of intellectual predicaments with what many intellectuals today would perceive as the most archaic of stances. That he has put such a figure as Freud in the service of his theory in no way mitigates this circumstance: in order to further the vitality of any text, Bloom, true to his Jewish heritage, must make all things old. When an aggressive Postmodernist like Foucault declares that
criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of
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