Chapter 19: The Spotlight and the “Courage to Be an Absolute Nobody”
19
The Spotlight and the “Courage to Be an Absolute Nobody”
Toward a Kierkegaardian-Chestertonian Political Theology of Ego
I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete—that’s what scares me. . . . Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
—J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Introduction
In the above epigraph, Salinger highlights a conundrum present in any competitive scenario—the fact that the very act of competing seems to be ethically dubious because of its inherent egotism. True courage, Salinger submits, is located, not in a willingness to compete, but in a decision not to—a decision located in an other-serving self-effacement or self-denial, which operates beyond the dualities produced by egotism. This provocation reflects the many great reversals found in the New Testament; where those who lack spiritual wealth are the blessed,932 where adamancy disguises uncertainty,933 where lastness upends the politics of firstness,934 and where humility is a sign of true greatness.935 To read these great reversals too hastily and unthinkingly, however, is to arrive at a simplistic injunction—Denounce ego! Deny yourself!—without necessarily understanding either why or how such an injunction would make sense. It would be important, for instance, to question the way that enforcing humility has become one of the more problematic ideological constructions in the history of Christian theology—a way to ensure a neat distinction between those who have a “predestined” “right” to rule and those who only have the “right” to serve (and thus be abused). In short, a reductionist ethics of self-denial mistakes what is essentially a critique of political ideology as being an affirmation of political norms and abuses. Therefore, in this essay, our aim is to provide a more nuanced theo-political assessment of ego by drawing on the work of two great Christian thinkers, Søren Kierkegaard and G. K. Chesterton, both of whom provide valuable insights on what the desire to “be somebody” or to “be important” or to have the “spotlight” means for Christian ethics and discipleship.936 Although we may not be able to arrive at a neat or definitive political theology of ego, this reflection should at least map some important considerations for such a thing.
Egotism: Despair
At the start, it is helpful to note Kierkegaard’s concern that egotism is essentially a lie. It is not the truth of the human subject because, among other things, it resists the possibility of self-reflection and self-awareness. If anything, “worldly fame and status are such dangerous traps (dangerous just as wealth tempts one in the direction of losing faith in providential care),” because they set up the coordinates according to which egotism might believe its own misguided hype.937 Egotists “do not want to enter God’s kingdom as little children but want to be something.”938 This is a problem for Kierkegaard, because it is a forgetting of the essential difference between God and man, and is therefore also a denial of reality.939 Simply “being the object of attention by the many, having the fate of all these people in one’s hands, can so very easily lead to the erroneous conclusion that [the leader] is more important to God as well.”940
Kierkegaard notes that a position of power locks the leader into a (mimetic) relationship with the mindless crowd.941 Such a relationship is suggested by the apocryphal story about Alexandre Ledru-Rollin who, seeing a crowd pass him by, hurriedly set off to join it while remarking to those in his company, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”942 In Kierkegaard’s view, being bound to the crowd in this way—whereby the leader’s egotism is a compliant, crowd-pleasing egotism—resists what is essentially ethical; after all, the ethical is something that “can be carried out only by the individual subject”—the subject who does not mimic the untruth of the crowd.943 Essential to Kierkegaard’s conception of the ego is its connection with a lack of self-awareness, inwardness or subjectivity.944 Consequently, egotism and its alignment with the spotlight and the system that affirms it would be far from desirable. So why, then, would anyone give in to it? Kierkegaard suggests that this attachment is related to the issue of despair.
Tom Miles suggests that “for [Kierkegaard’s] Anti-Climacus despair is always an internal problem, a misrelation to one’s self, even if it also involves a misrelation to what exists independently of the self. Despair can be called the internal collapse of a way of life in that a self that avoids itself or pretends to be what it is not is internally divided within itself.”945 Attachment to the spotlight or the idea of being “something” is, as Miles intimates, unconscious, and it begets further unconsciousness. Feelings of despair like “frustration, anxiety, and depression” are in fact not despair per se. Rather, these are “merely symptoms of the disease of despair.”946
This distinction between the disease and its symptoms indicates that one may be sick without necessarily experiencing the symptoms of one’s sickness: “one could be in despair without feeling despair. . . . This is the case with the person whose immersion in conformity, mediocrity, or pleasure is successful enough to avoid any such unpleasantness.”947 In fact, it is possible to be in despair without experiencing it as despair; it is possible to be in despair while only having a sense of security, peace, and repose.948
Ego is its own enemy in this regard: it can provide feelings of loftiness, godlikeness, and power that conceal despair from the despairing subject. Thus, when the subject loses his place in the spotlight, he is likely to experience the loss itself as despair. This, in Kierkegaard’s view, is a profound misunderstanding of what is really going on; this experience of loss is precisely a moment of awakening to the true despair of being in the spotlight. It is the attachment to the spotlight that is the real despair: the source of an “underestimating or overestimating [of] one’s self in relation to God.”949 What sustains the lie of the spotlight is that it has become synonymous with truth.
Kierkegaard’s (that is, Anti-Climacus’s) conception of the “despair of immediacy” further assists in understanding why an attachment to the spotlight can be persisted with despite its unreality. The immediate—experienced in things like financial security, the admiration of others, or the pleasure of power—somehow presents itself as having greater weight than one’s spiritual self or true self. Immediacy prevents the recognition of others. This idea is evident in Chesterton’s Father Brown story about “The Invisible Man.” In that story, the character James Welkin is felt as a presence (a hidden truth, the other) but is somehow never seen in the immediate environment. Therefore, the character Laura Hope relays her strange experience of hearing James Welkin laugh without seeing him when receiving a letter.950 Later in the story, to dismiss the superstitions around the mystery of James Welkin, the amateur detective Father Brown offers his own explanation for the man’s invisibility.
Have you ever noticed this—that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean—or what they think you mean. Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, “Is there anybody staying with you?” the lady doesn’t answer “Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlour-maid, and so on,” though the parlour-maid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says: “There is nobody staying with us,” meaning nobody of the sort you mean.951
Father Brown highlights that Laura Hope could not have been “quite alone in a street when she start[ed] reading a letter just received. There must be somebody pretty near; he must be mentally invisible.”952 In the context of Kierkegaard’s understanding of despair—here symbolized by the fact that, owing to a spiritual myopia, Laura Hope does not see herself as being equal to the “nobody” James Welkin—this mental invisibility must be dismantled and exposed. And this is precisely what cannot take place under the spotlight of success, fame, power, and political influence. Ironically, the spotlight—a thing that is supposed to reveal—in fact conceals, while humility—symbolized by Father Brown’s porous, questioning mind—reveals; the spotlight nurtures egotism, while humility deconstructs it. Moreover, as Chesterton contends, it is humility that brings joy—the redemption of and alternative to despair.953 What is essential here, especially in relation to what we refer to as a political theology of ego, is that humility, as Kierkegaard and Chesterton frame it, becomes not only a gateway to understanding but also an essential pathway to ethical action. As Christopher Ben Simpson notes on Kierkegaard’s ethics, “the ethical self chooses itself, affirms itself.”954 It is only in this affirmation of the self outside of the illusions framed by the spotlight that one is able to stand as both an individual and as a universal—that is, as one who embodies a concrete truth in the service of others.955 The egotistical self, on the other hand, chooses against itself, as well as its others.
Incarnation: God’s Spotlight-Aversion
The central challenge offered by both Kierkegaard and Chesterton to the cult of ego in politics and social relations is found in their radical presentation of the orthodox Christian idea that God does not want to “be somebody” (in the sense of possessing worldly ambition or being in the spotlight). Rather, in their work, God is the Ground of Being—absolute love hidden within, beneath and beyond the veil of materiality—and therefore escapes the confines of ambitious desire. Desire, after all, requires the possibility of imitation or mimeticism, as the work of René Girard shows, and God—as the Ground of Being—could not possibly imitate anyone; God could not enter the realm of rivalry or competition.956 Indeed, God even “takes the side of the victim”—one who cannot be envied or viewed as a rival.957 It follows that God does not experience the despair of the spotlight as human beings do; instead, God models a necessary humility or self-effacement that calls the spotlight and any political-egotistical attachment to that spotlight (and its supporting structures) into question.
Kierkegaard’s famous story of the “King and the Maiden” extends this idea in a parable. The story goes that a king with the greatest available political power—a king whose authority caused even other kings to tremble—this king “loved a maiden of lowly station in life.”958 Unfortunately, this love posed a problem, because presenting himself (in his “spotlighted” kingly form) to the humble maiden and declaring his love for her would prevent him from ever knowing whether her reciprocation was genuine; perhaps she would only claim to love him so that she could share in his power or pretend to love him to protect herself from being the target of his wrath. Thus, in the words of Philip Yancey, the king’s “kingliness tied his hands.”959
In Kierkegaard’s story, the king’s status—a status not real but conjured in the minds of admiring others—was an obstacle to genuine romance primarily because it threatened to crush the freedom of the maiden. The only way for the king to know the maiden’s love—to be assured that it was authentic—was to degrade himself by taking on the form of a beggar, and thereafter approach the maiden’s cottage “with a worn cloak fluttering loose about him.”960 To be truly persuasive, this humble form could not only be a temporary disguise. It had to be “a totally new identity.”961 The king therefore “renounced his throne to declare his love and to win [the love of the maiden].”962
One could read this parable through a Hegelian lens and conclude that it represents a process whereby a king takes leave of his position of power, and thereby negates his kingliness. Such a dialectical interpretation, however, would not comply with the essentially paradoxical or nondual stance on the incarnation adopted and proposed by Kierkegaard (and also by Chesterton). It is more likely that Kierkegaard is pointing to the very character of this king, rather than just to his apparent position: subverting the view of others who perceive him as a threatening presence, what the king ends up doing—giving up his throne—provides an insight into who he really is. This king is, ontologically speaking, a self-effacing king, a king who does not take the spotlight of his title “king” too seriously. In this, one cannot help but be reminded of Jacques Lacan’s idea that a madman who thinks himself a king may be no more problematic than a king who thinks himself a king.963 This king’s self-effacement is not something that exists only as a result of his abdication of his throne, but is something that precedes it. The king, as we have already noted, does not imitate some other model, but enacts and makes apparent what he really is, which surpasses the title given to him.
Consequently, this is a parable that concerns the king’s qualitative difference from the politics of egotism; it signals his essentially humble nature, not just his measurable actions or discernable authority. In other words, it is not that humility is merely the opposite of egotism (and is thus parasitic upon egotism), but is rather something that transcends egotism (and the dialectic of self and other) entirely. Chesterton rearticulates this insight when he presents the image of “something which the scientific critic cannot see.” In the incarnation, “the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.” It is “upon this paradox” or “jest” that “all the literature of our faith is founded.”964
Chesterton conceives of the incarnation as a joke. It is profoundly incongruous and perhaps even laughable to the ego-obsessed. It undercuts worldly ambition and power by translating the transcendent God into the body of an infant—utterly vulnerable and dependent. This image or jest is more jarring than the one offered by Kierkegaard; in Kierkegaard’s parable, we can imagine the king retaining a sense of aura around who he was, but in Chesterton’s description, which is in keeping with Kierkegaard’s wider vision, we encounter a God who empties himself—Being, the limitless, takes on the form of a finite, limited being.965 This is most radically evident in the centrality of the crucifixion of Jesus in Christian theology: the entire event may be read as a parody of the spotlight. Jesus is named as king, but crowned with thorns, tortured, and murdered. As Chesterton suggests, through this experience, God-Incarnate even enters into the existential despair of the atheist.966 This is an event that adds courage to the virtues of the Creator. As the enfleshment of God, Jesus thus represents the surprising necessity of overcoming the spotlight through kenosis. The spotlight is a thing to be challenged, not celebrated; it is to be subverted, not affirmed. In undergoing the cross, Jesus appears as the word spoken against the false glory of kingliness.
Incarnation: Indirect Communication
The hypostatic union of the divine and the human in Jesus, and the challenge that this poses to the spotlight, is a communication event. Kierkegaard understands, for instance, that communication is an uneven or imbalanced affair and therefore relies on negotiating meanings through a shared symmetry or point of identification. “Direct communication presupposes that the recipient’s ability to receive is entirely in order,” but in the relationship between God and humanity, there is a problem of extreme asymmetry.967 As St. Thomas Aquinas had noticed, our embodiment is precisely how we know things, such that even “if an angel could speak, we would not be able to understand what he said.”968 As a consequence, even the symmetry of shared being—that is, a shared participation in Being that is required for communication to be possible—presupposes asymmetry—that is, the impossibility of direct communication. Simpson writes the following on Kierkegaard’s perspective on communication:
In order to communicate the truth to another where they are it is assumed that the truth, in whole or in part, is what the other is lacking. But to presume to communicate the truth directly to one who is in untruth, who believes falsehood, will likely be met with resistance, rejection, dismissal—for, from the perspective of the other, one is presuming to give them something they already have, something they do not lack, namely the truth.969
Every communication of truth therefore assumes the necessity of miscommunication. Even in the gospel story, God appears, communicates himself indirectly to man as a man, and is then so misunderstood that he is mistaken for a political rebel or rival and crucified as such. Nevertheless, this is precisely what seems to be required for truth to stand a chance at being given a hearing. It is better that it is misheard than not heard at all; it is better to communicate something than nothing at all. It is this indirect communication, this asymmetrical event of mutual self-giving, that is the foundation of relationship.
In Kierkegaard’s parable, then, there is a sense that the maiden will not see the king for who he is, or perhaps will not see him at all, if he clings to his title and his throne; this implies that the inherent egotism of political power poses a problem to perception itself. It suggests that falsehood will persist if miscommunication is not risked. This is something that Chesterton echoes, albeit differently from Kierkegaard. Chesterton pictures a beggar at the front door of a house being met by the elitist who lives there.970 The elitist, failing to give himself over to the risk of indirect communication and thus also failing to recognize the humanity of the beggar, simply turns him away and shuts the door. Chesterton points out the significance of this act of shutting the beggar out. It indicates that “from everything that we shut out we are ourselves shut out.”971 Thus, if we shut out those who God is present with, we shut out God himself. Chesterton continues:
When we shut our door on the wind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door on us. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man—the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant.972
Egotism functions the way that any “philosophy of self-satisfaction” functions: it results in “looking down upon the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant,” and this results in seeing things as if from a great height or distance, with “everything foreshortened or deformed.”973 This foreshortened perspective is further captured in Chesterton’s contention that all people are prone to living their lives like a “man who has forgotten his name.”974 He continues:
The man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.975
Here, Chesterton notes that it is in self-forgetting or self-effacement—that is, in being caught up in “spirit” or “art” or any other ecstatic experience—that we remember who we are; it is only in humility that we are able to perceive even ourselves more fairly. It is only in resisting egotism that false perceptions may be properly addressed.
Insofar as Kierkegaard and Chesterton are concerned, the qualitative gap remains between God and humanity even in the incarnation. God as absolute otherness—perhaps more like nothing than like anything else—retains God’s otherness, but nevertheless elects to translate this into the failing, fragile, dying body of a human so that (indirect) communication can occur between God and humanity. Kierkegaard writes that “one learns more profoundly and reliably what the highest is by reflecting on suffering than by reflecting on achievements.”976 He thus overcomes duality by noticing that the highest is inside what is lowly, just as Chesterton would say that hierarchy is subverted when he writes that the incarnation offers a “heaven” that “is under the earth”977 or a home that is discovered only when one is away.978
Through Kierkegaard, we find that the lowly cannot see those who are exalted if the exalted do not step down, and through Chesterton, we find that the exalted themselves cannot perceive things clearly without stepping down. Moreover, in the work of both Kierkegaard and Chesterton, we find an image of a God who operates outside of the realm of ambition—a God who does not wish to be associated with the distance and distortion of pure bliss or great stature, and who would rather step into the role of a peasant or a beggar to set up the coordinates according to which love can flourish.
Again, Kierkegaard and Chesterton do not claim the incarnation as a denial or negation of divinity, but instead indicate it as its affirmation, albeit via a redefinition of divinity. If humanity bears the image of God, then there is a congruency in the fact that God would not find that image deplorable or as being in any way beneath Godself. It nevertheless remains to be seen whether humanity will be willing to stoop to the level of bearing God’s image, and this is precisely the challenge that a political theology of ego must grapple with. Chesterton suggests in this regard that every human being needs to “enact for itself the gigantic humility of the incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.”979 For it is in descending into flesh in this way that humanity stands a chance of properly understanding and imitating God’s lack of egotism.
This is precisely what many of the early Christians demonstrated in their posture against the violence of the Roman Empire, and especially in their understanding of what it meant to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”980 An apparent contradiction existed in the early days of the church in the ideas of (1) “accept[ing] the authority of every human institution”981 while also (2) “obey[ing] God rather than any human authority.”982 But this contradiction was resolved by many of the early Christians in the following way, as explained by George Kalantzis:
Unlike the Maccabees who rebelled against Hellenistic domination because of the Seleucid imposition of religious practices antithetical to Judaism (1 Macc. 11:21) and as a sign of Jewish apocalyptic revivalism (1 Macc. 6:16), the apostles neither rebelled against Rome nor sought a particular national identity separate from the eschatological kingdom of Christ (e.g., 2 Thess 2:1–2). Christians honored the emperor and the governors as [their] appointed authorities by following the example of Christ in refusing their consent and by submitting themselves to the consequences of their rejection, including scourging and death. That is what “rendering to Caesar what is Caesar’s” would look like in the new economy; a simultaneous “yes” and “no” that point back to God as supreme. In doing so, they overturned . . . the normative paradigms of the classical traditions and showed how, for the Christians, power is gained through submission.983
This was something that “the Romans did not comprehend”—the fact that even martyrdom was not “the fate of the powerless” but was rather “a witness to the state of its subordination to the God of heaven.”984 For these martyrs, this was a “repetition” of the ethical posture of Jesus, to borrow Kierkegaard’s terms. They did not see themselves as victims of state violence or as confirming the state’s death-trade, but as witnesses to a love and a power that does not even fear death. Of course, there is an immediate problem raised by this example, namely the appearance, noted in our introduction, that submission itself might be taken as an inflexible rule. However, such an absolutization of martyrdom would produce a new immorality; it would be to confuse the methodology (dying at the hand of empire) with its ethical aim (to challenge Empire). What is key here is that this martyrdom was a stance against victimization, not a confirmation of it. Again, God does not become human to confirm the importance of the “violence of Rome,” as certain atonement theories would perhaps have us believe, but precisely to call it into question through a provocative and subversive humility. Put differently, the point is not to affirm injustice, but to move more steadily toward real justice and social change.
Incarnation: God Incognito
There is something in Christ that reflects this divine selflessness and a resistance to the spotlight. On this point, Jason Mahn writes about the “incognito” aspect of Christ and his mission.985 Jaime Ferreira’s commentary on Four Upbuilding Discourses also carries this idea with reference to giving: the idea that the giver of any gift should become as “‘invisible’ as possible in the act of gift-giving,” “should vanish without waiting for thanks.” “The requirement,” Ferreira points out “is to give joyfully without calling attention to oneself—i.e., to hide oneself.”986 To put the point more radically in relation to the narratives of the Gospels, it is as if the fame of Christ was an accident, perhaps even a mistake, and not his aim. If Mahn and Ferreira are right in suggesting that we are to view Jesus’ life as an “incognito life,” then what does this incognito mission have to do with the imitatio Christi and imago Dei? At the very least, the idea of “Christ incognito” implies that our own embracing of anonymity is likely to bring us into harmony with the incarnate imago Dei. To be sure, by embracing anonymity, we will have more in common with the family of God—the “great cloud of witnesses” visible only to the eyes of faith—the vast majority of whom have not been memorialized in any way.
Anonymity can be problematic, of course, as Chesterton was quick to point out. It can mask self-interest; one might even use anonymity to do and say whatever one likes, and thus abandon all forms of accountability.987 This sort of anonymity would merely be the handmaiden of arrogance. But this is not the anonymity that we find emblematized in the doctrine of the incarnation. Rather, an incarnational anonymity is of a kind that assumes a position for the sake of love: the incarnation represents God’s act of stepping down to serve. This fact adds an important facet to understanding humility. Humility is a movement, not just a position. A pauper before a king, for example, is not humble but humiliated; his position has been chosen for him by a larger context and is not a matter of will. But a king who stoops before a pauper demonstrates true humility. Christ can walk the earth incognito because he is Christ: he can be nobody because he is not nobody.
We, too, can only choose to lay down ego when we possess an ego. Thus, it needs to be emphasized that for many who have been degraded, victimized and had their self-worth questioned by dominant ideologies and political systems, an absolutist ethics of self-effacement would be deeply damaging and not at all liberating. In the end, it is humility, not humiliation, that we are supporting here, and this is done in a very particular context. We are not speaking only generally about a political theology of ego but are interested in what may be said about the value of self-effacement for those who are caught up in the superficial game of wanting the spotlight.
Of course, one argument used for moving against this self-effacement—that is, against this laying down of ego—is usually one linked to the possibility of the “good” that can be done when one is in the spotlight. Take, for example, the person who wants to be a famous politician, professor, or pastor; or the college graduate who has her mind set on changing the world. This ideological posture is no doubt seductive: I am the one we have been waiting for! The problem with this argument is that it offers little more than a concealed narcissism: it presumes that the one who seeks the spotlight should be the “one” to right all wrongs, to address and correct all (or any) social evils. It is also an argument that exaggerates the role of top-down social change. Historically speaking, social change, together with all goods that come from such change, tends to depend far more on those “below,” especially those marginalized by political systems, than on those “above.” To cite just one example, Lisa Lowe shows how “liberal abolitionist arguments were less important to the passage of the Slave Trade Act and the Slavery Abolition Act than were the dramatic revolts and everyday practices of enslaved peoples themselves.”988 Indeed, there is much to be gained from the spotlight—fame, privilege, applause, praise, and wealth. But at what epistemic cost? The problem with wanting that prestigious position, or to break records, or to win the approval of politicians, is that it distorts and blinds us to what is good, true, and right. The crowd and the spotlight corrupt our sense of what justice is. Having the courage to be an absolute nobody does not mean refusing to fight or to speak loudly or to wreak havoc or disruption. It does not mean shutting up. Rather, it means coming to recognize “the epistemic privilege of the oppressed,” or the nobodies, and “the way that suffering attunes us to justice.”989
This brings us, again, to the issue of love suggested in Kierkegaard’s parable of the king and the maiden. This is something with vital political implications that is discussed at length by Amy Laura Hall. Hall notes that, following Kierkegaard, “the kind of love we are to choose, will, and cultivate has as its key the self-giving life of Christ, who did not ‘seek his own.’”990 Moreover, “in order to hope in eternity in the way that Kierkegaard commends, we must cease counting up bits of love in a miserable attempt to determine whose love is greater or first or best, but instead ‘lose’ ourselves in the assumption that the other’s love is true.”991 This is love that contests any suggestion that “large, public acts of beneficence, respectable acts of frugality, or reciprocated gestures of generosity” might be thought of as examples of “earnestness.” Christian charity has mercy, not magnanimity, as its goal. Its “love wins in a quiet way totally foreign to those who seek remarkable signs of achievement.”992
Chesterton’s understanding of love reflects this stance, as well. While egotism is forever expanding—Chesterton coins the word panegotism to reflect this perpetual expansion at the expense of the other—love accepts limitations and thus allows the other her place in the world.993 Love binds itself, not to an ideal or system detached from experience, but to individual others in their concrete specificity.994 The lover begins to love where she is, not at the level of egotistical goals, but at the level of self-giving mercy. Thus, “loving those who can give back nothing is more akin to Christian love than receiving the approbation of others.”995 Hall follows this reasoning when she argues that Kierkegaard’s view on progress points, not “toward our more perfect imitation of Christ,” but instead points toward “perfect awareness of our imperfection.”996
In the end, the final curse of the spotlight, together with its masking of despair and its negation of the indirect communication that makes relationships possible, is in the fact that it opposes the freedom that is able to challenge the politics of the spotlight. This is something already indicated in Kierkegaard’s parable of the king and the maiden. The actual metaphor of the spotlight becomes particularly important on this point: a spotlight is a thing that conforms the object or subject of its focus to its own gaze. The spotlight forces the object or subject of its devotion to fit the mold of expectation and power that it represents. Leaders are more often than not forced to follow the mindless crowd. When Kierkegaard and Chesterton talk of love, they are talking about a unique kind of freedom, which elects constraints that benefit not only others, but also the one who has chosen them. To love is to accept that one is already loved, instead of believing love to be the consequence of achieving some sort of greatness. Additionally, these constraints counteract the pull of the spotlight, because they recognize the self as inherently limited. Kierkegaard and Chesterton are pointing to a unique kind of freedom—the kind that David Foster Wallace sums up as follows:
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. . . . The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.997
In the end, it is not difficult to find all the ways that the spotlight has become an idol in various political contexts—an ossified ideological construct that possesses the minds and imaginations of many. However, as we have noted at length, Kierkegaard and Chesterton seem to regard this egotistical construct with a deep suspicion because it is antithetical to the ethical. It does not give rise to love, justice and social change, because it is not ultimately about those things. Rather, it concerns itself with an impotent politics that can only, at best, pretend to be powerful or pretend to work for the good. It preserves self but does not see that it is self-giving that is at the center of any kind of authentic ethics. In a way, what we have presented here is both a critique of the politics of ego and a kind of manifesto. In short, individuals must have the courage to be an absolute nobody for the sake of the community and for the sake of justice. Moreover, we have argued that this is not just because of what God has done (he has become a nobody), but because of where he is (he is with the nobodies, as a nobody).
Conclusion
Arguably, it is failure that is the subversive core of the above theo-political assessment of ego, which, to quote Jack Halberstam, “turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable.”998 This failure considers the importance of loss for reimagining “other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.” If we take Chesterton and Kierkegaard seriously, then we might start to recognize all the ways that the Christ event reflects this kind of failure. The incarnation shows us the impossible (God becomes a nobody), the irrational and the foolish (God wants to become a nobody, enacts a failure of ambition). The incarnation shows us a God who undergoes misrecognition and rejection. When humiliated and laughed at, this embodied God appears as a farce and even as a parody of the divine. And yet, we find a potent political subversion in this joke-God. He helps us to imagine “other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being”—truths located beyond the lie of the spotlight. He gives us another conception of divinity, which does not rely on the hero systems that endorse and create spotlights.
If the field of political theology is frequently about the critique of ideology and idolatry, it must follow a trajectory like the one established by Chesterton and Kierkegaard, who critique many games that people play—games played to seek and arrive at the top; games played to become a “somebody” in the eyes of the crowd; games played to become a “somebody” at the expense of the nobodies; games played to become a “somebody” under the guise of helping the nobodies. This manifests itself in many ways. Success becomes equated with the accumulation of wealth, career advancement, the recognition by the elite members of one’s field, and even recognition by systems supported by the state’s monopoly on violence. However, to merely critique the ideology and idolatry present in the egotistical games people play is not sufficient. As in Kierkegaard and Chesterton’s understanding of the incarnation, political theology must also find a way to “lose quietly” and help people find creative ways to care for, cooperate with, and enjoy one another.
Moving forward, perhaps Kierkegaard and Chesterton’s political theology of ego—or, rather, their call for a subversive kind of humility—might best be read as a theology that imagines a preferential treatment for the nobodies—those who are not famous nor want to be famous; those who desire attention and affirmation from their loved ones rather than from a Twitter feed; those who are either outside of or resist capitalistic notions of success; those who never receive nor even desire the applause of the state and its violent institutions. A preferential option for the nobodies calls us to stand alongside the nobodies, to come down from the “top,” away from the “center” and into the margins. This would not be a strategy for pulling the nobodies “up” from the bottom, nor would it seek to bring those in the margins to the center. Rather, this would involve a solidarity with the nobodies that could lead us to a place of unique insight—perhaps even a reimagining of the political order. In short, a theological preference for nobodies serves not only as a strategy for social justice, but also as a window into the divine.
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932. Matt 5:3.
933. Matt 9:9–12; 13:13; John 9:41.
934. Matt 19:30.
935. Luke 9:48; 14:11.
936. Obviously, Kierkegaard and Chesterton differ in many ways, especially with respect to their personalities, but also with respect to their contexts and aims. Nevertheless, both thinkers share a commitment to their respective Christian traditions, and thus share a predilection for paradox—and this includes a distrust of egotism. Owing to certain constraints, what follows is not a forced or comprehensive synthesis of the work of these two writers, but rather draws from a selection of their ideas.
937. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 1:1010.
938. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 501, emphasis added.
939. Simpson, Truth Is the Way, 34.
940. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2:1010.
941. Kierkegaard, Essential Kierkegaard, 471.
942. Quoted in the New Yorker Magazine (vol. 80, 2005), 143.
943. Ibid., 217; see Bellinger, “Crowd Is Untruth,” 103–19; See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 146–47.
944. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 176, 203.
945. Miles, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, 108.
946. Ibid., 109.
947. Ibid.
948. Ibid.
949. Ibid., 108.
950. Chesterton, Father Brown, 93.
951. Ibid., 106.
952. Ibid., 107.
953. Chesterton, Collected Works, 234.
954. Simpson, Truth Is the Way, 105.
955. Ibid., 105–6.
956. Oughourlian, Genesis of Desire, 64.
957. Girard, I See Satan Fall, xvii.
958. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 26.
959. Yancey, Disappointment with God, 103.
960. Ibid., 104.
961. Ibid.
962. Ibid.
963. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 21.
964. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 191.
965. Phil 2.
966. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 243.
967. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 54.
968. Eagleton, Faith, Reason, and Revolution, 129.
969. Simpson, Truth Is the Way, 12.
970. Chesterton, The Defendant, 100.
971. Ibid.
972. Ibid., 100–101.
973. Ibid., 101.
974. Chesterton, Collected Works, 364.
975. Ibid.
976. Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses, 100.
977. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 196.
978. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, 162–63.
979. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, 70.
980. Matt 22:21.
981. 1 Pet 2:13–15.
982. Acts 5:29; 4:19.
983. Kalantzis, Caesar and the Lamb, 35.
984. Ibid.
985. Mahn, Fortunate Fallibility, 137.
986. Ferreira, Kierkegaard, 64.
987. Chesterton, “Illustrated London News,” December 17, 1932.
988. Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 13; see also Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Scott, Weapons of the Weak; Spade, Normal Life.
989. Lloyd, Black Natural Law, ix.
990. Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, 32.
991. Ibid.
992. Ibid., 35.
993. Chesterton, The Defendant, 23.
994. Chesterton, Collected Works, 1:243–44.
995. Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, 35.
996. Ibid., 16–17.
997. Wallace, This Is Water, 120.
998. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 88.