defines opposing identities: “A terrorist underworld … operates in remote jungles and deserts, and hides in the center of large cities.”22 It appears that, due to the disseminated nature of the terrorists (they could be anywhere, originating anywhere), they are even more abstract than an enemy such as “communism” during the Cold War. Although communism was also believed to be easily and threateningly disseminated, it had a very specific territory of origin (in terms of the practice of communism). In the case of terrorism, its territory is so corrupting that it lies at the very heart of freedom, contaminating it (or, as Derrida would say, writing it).
The most restrictive societies (for instance, totalitarian societies) offer to their subjects hypothetical access to the innocence from which the social system has fallen, turning innocence into an individual and collective stake; innocence needs to be retrieved at the cost of human life, for the sake of social perfection. It is not a coincidence that the people who died in the Twin Tower collapse were identified as innocent after the fact, so that in the name of their innocence anything was permitted, any destruction. In The Toronto Star, Jody Williams (Nobel Laureate for Peace) noted that “When innocent civilian lives are taken in any kind of military or terrorist attack, the mind recoils, [so that] individual freedoms are subordinated to the survival of the state.”23 She warned against the danger that the concept of innocence could obliterate any regard for individual life in the name of a larger purpose that took its momentum from innocence. At the same time, she understood innocence as the hallmark of the victim as well, her fear being that more innocents would suffer. The stake of innocence could be therefore preserved, despite her effort to critique its implications. Similarly, after the events in 2001, in addressing his people, Osama bin Laden maintained the same opposition between good and evil, a conflict in the name of which he stressed “the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy.”24 His statements prove that violence, on either side, places individual life into well defined identity categories, which perpetuates the mythical perception of the world.
In order to demonstrate the extent to which innocence as identity can be harmful to life, as well as the processes of subjection that come into play in this cycle of violence, I use Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in Chapter Three as an example to pinpoint the dynamics of subordination of the individual to the community and to the concept of innocence. I will interpret the character of Billy Budd as both a representation and a victim of innocence.
Next, I will refer to the second mode of perceiving fallenness and individuality as the fall from authenticity. It is a “fall” inward, in the space where the meaning that is corrupted by the outside world can still be retrieved. Walt Whitman’s poetry is a good example of this search for meaning that would spring from the self and return to the self to make it whole, in the metaphor of a spider (in “A Noiseless Patient Spider”): “And you O my soul where you stand/, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space/, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them/, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold/, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.”25 These lines are a perfect example of the “surrounded” yet “detached” self (the authentic inner identity of the “I”) is the organizing principle that provides meaning to the randomness of the outside world by attaching the “thread” somewhere.
This return to the self does not happen in a vacuum, which is why I will explain it also as a fall. The shift inward is, historically, most often a reaction to the oppressiveness of the social/mythical order. This reaction is mainly that of the individuals who cannot gain acceptance in this order. Following their rebellion, these individuals are deemed inadequate and cannot aspire toward unfallenness, or innocence. To come to terms with themselves and still see themselves as redeemable for identity, these individuals tend to try either to revolutionize the social order (with the example of the French Revolution and the end of European feudalism), or to retreat from the social system into the space of their individual selves. Modernist dissatisfaction with traditional society and the turn toward the self as a locus of meaning provide very straightforward examples of such retreats or escapes. If we look at one of the most beloved modernist poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” this withdrawal into the self appears as problematic, insofar as it is still a promise of meaning, not a fulfillment. The poet finds torment in the refusal of the outside world to speak to him: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”26 In the search for meaning within himself, although he hopes for answers, Prufrock is left with questions. That is why he is not able to say, as he wishes he could say, “I am Lazarus, come back from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all,”27 which is where the second set of problems addressed by this book (as the second kind of fall) is located.
In turn, the social structure from which the individual is alienated responds (as to any threat, if individualism is perceived as such), by forging an even harsher social order that refines earlier limits (as, for instance, socialism and communism striving to abolish private property). Social and cultural revolutions tend to be ambivalent, in the sense that they may be inclined to favor the individual (as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, or American Transcendentalism), but at the same time they try to offer a new, improved social order. This second order still fails to distance itself enough from the emphasis on social identity because, in offering a better way to organize society, it maintains to some degree the ideal of innocence and social perfection. A very obvious example is American individualism, structured as a new social order, and centered around the ideal of innocence. Literary texts that explore the “American Dream” as the ideal of individual fulfillment tend to point to the impossibility of that individual to succeed without getting entangled in the web of corrupting social forces, so that the struggle for self-identity can lead to tragedy, as portrayed, for instance, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In this modern tragedy, the individual who maintains the ideal of innocence as opposed to the corrupted nature of the world of success is crushed in his attempt to find a place where both innocence and success (personal fulfillment) can be reconciled.
Innocence, then, is what remains at stake when corrupting elements threaten the system. The paradox of individuality is that it still remains a territory, a subjected identity, even in its most “free” self-perception, which is why freedom functions both as social binder and as individualizing force. On the other hand, the complete divorce from the social world, in the name of individual identity, shifts the stakes toward a different kind of fall. Dissatisfaction with the social system taken to an extreme (as a tendency in existentialist and modernist thought) tries to change the emphasis altogether, and to claim that the social order distracts from attaining identity, because identity is a personal issue. Authentic being is what has been lost and needs to be retrieved, and this is a personal struggle. Unsurprisingly, only the individual is assumed to know who he or she will become, identity-wise, on condition that all social distractions are eliminated. The problem is that identity still remains a stake, which renders others and even the self disposable. This makes individual identity perhaps as dangerous and as potentially violent as the collective one. In Chapter Three, Absalom, Absalom! is the example I use to illustrate how individual identity turns against others and against the self. In William Faulkner’s novel, Thomas Sutpen “falls,” or plunges, into a downward spiral that can only end in his death, since he has given himself no choice but to follow his identity toward destruction.
The third mode of perceiving identity, which I call the fall from meaning, functions by denying that identity is a stake and trying to show that it is a social construct. Deconstructive criticism of the media, for instance, focuses on the fact that the objects and images that we deem necessary for our identity (such as a certain car, a certain body lotion, a certain body type that we try to attain) are not naturally part of us, but language has tricked
