Imperative Interrogativity

Imperative exchange is a sacrificial order: I give up something, some part of myself, and in return, the gods, God or some hypostasized concept of “society” or ‘reality” will give me something. Ultimately, this kind of order must reach its limits. Declaratives will only be able to go so far in “rationalizing” at least some of the more egregious discrepancies between what the individual gives and what the individual receives. Moreover, there is an escalatory logic to imperative exchange, or the gift economy, or sacrificial logic, whereby what the center has given is incommensurable with anything one could give in return.

According to Rene Girard, whose account is accepted in its essentials by Eric Gans, the sacrifice of Jesus exposes the limits of sacrifice, or what I call imperative exchange. If we’re thinking sacrificially, we are looking for something that we own that can be given to the center. When sacrifice fails, it makes sense to up the ante—to increase the sacrifice so as to appease whatever being we place at the center. This logic eventually leads us to human sacrifice. This is the logic exposed by Jesus’s self-sacrifice—all the “reasons” given for killing Jesus are fraudulent and driven by sacrificial logics. “All” Jesus said was, in essence, stop scapegoating (sacrificing) some member of the community—this is not what God wants. For this, he was sacrificed. Acknowledging Jesus’s sacrifice means that we can no longer engage in imperative exchanges in good faith: we know it’s all just rationalization.

The concept of “imperative interrogativity” (which seems to be interchangeable or perhaps complementary with “interrogative imperativity”) is an attempt to answer the question: what, in grammatical terms, comes after imperative exchange? There must still be some kind of exchange with the center, but giving a part of oneself, or a part of the community, is no longer adequate. One must give everything—even sacrificing one’s first born is a kind of “cheating.” If I give everything, devote and donate myself completely to the center, what can I ask the center give in return? The center can supply me with the means for deferring imperative exchanges, helping us liberate ourselves from the logic of sacrifice. Rather than the articulation of two imperatives, this involves the articulation of an imperative and an interrogative: my request of the center is to remind me to pose for myself the question, “what imperative exchange is to be deferred (and reinscribed as a donation to the center) here?” This concept implies a massive cultural and moral transformation that may have been initiated by Jesus’s “radicalization” of the tradition of Israelite prophecy (and in other ways in other traditions) but is far from complete. Imperative interrogativity initiates the moral and intellectual possibilities that follow from becoming increasingly adept at and committed to anticipating and “rerouting” what I call here “violent centralization.” The question is how to pre-empt violent centralization by creating new forms of naming-as-commemoration.

Uses

In everyday experience, instead of responding with e.g. an "eye for an eye" reaction when one i offended, one instead starts inquiring into the imperatives that led to the offence, and then trying to work out an alternate set of imperatives that reduces the likelihood of repeat offences.