Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh: Body, Belief, and Human Identity

Stanley Bill's book tells the story of Czesław Miłosz's adventure with the body. It entered his poetry long before it became the key argument of contemporary anti-Cartesianism. The point is that the body is for the poet as much an object of affliction as of admiration—and the author of Czesław Miłosz's Faith in Flesh proves this in various ways. It can't be otherwise: our attitude to the body is derived from our views on—bagatelle!—nature, culture, politicity, and, finally, the subject; hence, from Bill's book we learn about Miłosz's views on all this. This is one of the undeniable advantages of his book: here we get a monograph on Miłosz's poetry. And at the same time, we get an insight into what constituted Miłosz as a thinker and author. This something is a predilection to cultivate ambivalence, and more: contradictions. As a result, in Miłosz's work we find contradictory images of poetry and diverse representations of the human self. Miłosz was fond of repeating after Simone Weil that “contradiction is the lever of transcendence.” Not surprisingly, Bill's discourse is governed by oppositions: “on the one hand . . ., on the other hand . . . ”—is the most frequently used rhetorical figure in this book. The Miłosz he reads, and from his debut to his late poems, has an almost hostile attitude towards the body: this is the result of dualistic thinking that prescribes the opposition of a luminous soul and pure reason to a slothful and mortal body, echoing the Christian contempt for the body, and finally the poet's private Manichaeism.At the same time, paradoxically, one could just as well speak of the poet's affirmative attitude to the body “as the source of both religious experience and the poet's own creative faculty.” Miłosz is trying to supplement the “vertical” dimension of transcendence with a “horizontal” one. The poetic word for Miłosz stores the memory of the divine logos, but it is at the same time a product of the body, as best evidenced by the non-semantic dimensions of poetry's “meaning” having its source in the subconscious, coming to the fore through what in the text belongs to the corporeal and therefore affective dimension: “semi-conscious associations evoked by imagery, sound, syntax, and rhythm.” They come, as Bill reminds us after Julia Kristeva, from the “semiotic” order of language, which is most fully manifested in women's writing as writing with the body: writing that entrusts itself to the flux of life and moves toward a record of unity with the rhythms of the world. Miłosz coquettishly writes about his “female anima,” but at the same time remains in thrall to the stereotypical figures in patriarchal culture, treating her rather as a mascot or even repressing her.On the one hand, Miłosz clearly defines the poetic word against nature and the body: poetry is a matter of form, convention, and artificiality necessary to free itself from the affects which impoverish the writer and threaten his subjectivity. Rhythm as an instantiation of literariness gives order to what is amorphous, but on the other side as an exposition of the “semiotic” makes the body and the unconscious come to the fore, so in the poem Being itself chants. Miłosz's “struggle against verse” represents his attempt to suppress or control this unconscious meaning with the meaning of rational discourse. But also the poet appears a benevolent victim of rhythm as an instance without which poetry does not exist. It is the non-discursive dimensions of Miłosz's language, which Miłosz himself insists on and which Bill analyzes with great meticulousness, precisely those related to the rhythm of blood, breath, incantation, that work for that specific surplus of meaning that determines the idiomatic poeticity of the text. And more, they create new forms of very material transcendence that sacralize what is carnal, express a revitalized religious faith. “For Miłosz, too, religious feelings are often instinctive, involuntary, and rooted in the body,” says Bill. Miłosz still longs for a theology of the body awaiting a horizontal variant of this-worldly transcendence. It is significant that Bill ends his book by writing about Miłosz as homo ritualis. Although Miłosz's ambivalence in his approach to the body opens up the poet's perspective of transgression, the declarations made by the poet that it is ritual that establishes and sustains the existence of human community determine his ultimately conservative choices. Ritual is a form whose logic must always be embodied, Bill writes, but after all, he writes it with the knowledge that ritual is controlled by the symbolic. In the face of death, the only real transcendence is available through the creations of human form, and so by installing themselves in what is symbolic, and poetry is one such form. But at the same time Miłosz affirms, all systems of meaning begin with the body. Hence Miłosz's opposition to the treatment of the body in biopolitical thinking, in the ideologies of secularized capitalist society, or earlier—in the world under communism. Miłosz opposes the reduction of the body to a merely material dimension, and he aspires to restore the “mystery of the body.” This aspect makes him strongly argue for affirming the transcendent value of the individual in the face of modern biopolitics. In The Land of Ulro, he writes that Darwin's theory—like Newton's cosmology—has “a distorting, maiming effect on the human imagination” and has influenced and validated the totalitarian ideologies. Bill points out that also the Christian fixation on purity and excarnation degenerates into a justification for totalitarian utopia—here the neo-Manichaean idiosyncrasies of Miłosz the Neo-Manichaean are moderated by Miłosz the poet, and often the intellectual project is in conflict with the poetic one.“We don't know what our body is capable of,” wrote Spinoza, who was referred to by such philosophers of affect as Gilles Deleuze or Brian Massumi. Spinoza was never Miłosz's philosopher. But in The Metaphysical Pause we find a very Spinozian note: “Is God thus understood not imperceptibly identical with the very rhythm of the blood and is He not present in the entrails, in the muscles, in the savoring of oneself which is like the stretching of a cat? A. One must begin with the body, for the body is a wonder of nature in its transience and incomprehensible particularity. By immediately reaching too high, how can we properly judge our consent to disease or misfortune? For then the body is against us.” Bill's reading wanders along the tropes suggested by Miłosz, but his excellent reconstruction of the poet's worldview makes us realize that on the grounds of Miłosz's theology of the body, the poet remains myopically close to the strangeness of postmodern philosophers. Language is a trace of the body in the mind, a scar from the separation of soul and body, a stammering wound that produces phantasms of reunion. Miłosz continues to aspire to “poetry of the future,” which would make contact with the material “real” in its most intimate dimension: the fluids, membranes, and flesh of the body. The issue is that similar poetry was written by many male and female poets already during Miłosz's lifetime. It is already situated beyond the classical dualism, still present in Miłosz, also beyond the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, M. H. Abrams, or Charles Taylor, not to mention John Paul II (who gets into Bill's book a bit like Pilate in the Credo, but the poet himself provoked him to do so). This is the poetry of those who have gone beyond the boundaries of patriarchal phallo-logocentric domination, close to—for example—Georges Bataille's heretical and perverse ontology, or Luce Irigaray's feminist theology, and therefore close to the thinking that, as Bill writes, referring to the author of This Sex Which Is Not One, makes the body the transcendent core of human identity and the matrix of a new metaphysics. In other words, given Miłosz's axiology, they were committing profanity, which is not to say that, as Miłosz often believed, they were becoming accomplices of nihilistic barbarism. The profane gesture is a displacement of the traditional opposition of sacred vs. secular and an assimilation of the sacred into the profane order. All this is situated in an order alien to Miłosz's thinking, but after all, it is not useless in considering the perplexities of Miłosz's ambivalences. It is only when we reach for this perspective that the body equally as God eluding intelligible cognition, the body as the Lacanian Thing that frightens us, speaks with its voice in the text. Only then does it become apparent that—as the philosopher says—also the idea of God is a trace of the body in the mind. As long as we stay in the power of dualisms our torn condition makes us ask the question: is it me who owns the body, or rather the body that owns me? The casus of Miłosz writing about his adventures with the body is the casus of someone who understands a lot and who feels a lot, but remains in bondage to his categories, and that is what this excellent book is about.