Real Presences
by George Steiner
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Book Summary Information
Author: George SteinerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1991-04-23
ISBN: 0226772349
Number of pages: 246
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Book Reviews of Real Presences
Book Review: Against the Idols of the Age
Summary: 5 Stars
On rare occasions does one truly *encounter* a book whose graceful eloquence both witnesses to the beauty of the human mind and to the beauty of human communication. To affirm both is to affirm the possibility - or, perhaps better, the probability - of a transcendent point of reference beyond our own humanity. Real Presences "proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that nay coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the fainal analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence" (3).
To read this book by Steiner really is something of an event. It tours metaphysics, particularly through in its Catholic incarnation (and the title of the book is very much along these very Catholic lines - although whether or not Steiner is Catholic I do not know), as well as art. As he affirms early on, asking what music is can also be understood as a way of asking what humanity is. The book begins with the essay "A Secondary City" (which certainly evokes St. Augustine), moves on to "The Broken Contract" (with its intimations of Enlightenment political philosophy), and ends with "Presences" (an affirmation of the wager for God's existence as the ground in which we walk).
This is a polemic against nihilism, particularly in its guise of deconstruction, which has nothing to say about death and is incapable of affirming the possibility of determinative meaning. Thus "art for art's sake" is pure narcissism and pure suicide - and it seems to me that the target of such "art for art's sake" are those theorists who write for the sake of writing, rather than for the sake of communicating. In calling poetry, sculpture, painting as witnesses for his case, Steiner deems art a "leap out of nothingness" (202) where the artist, as in Joyce, imitates God. Questions of art are fundmentally theological.
However, Steiner is by no means willing to affirm that presence is given or seen in full (citing St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians). Borrowing imagery again from the Catholic tradition, he writes that we all live in journey of Saturday, even as we are on our way to Sunday, the lineaments of which "carry the name hope (there is no word less deconstructible)" (232). In the meantime, it is the arts - with their doxologies of the messianic - which give us to patience.
Dense and highly rewarding, you will likely ponder these things for some time to come.
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