Real Presences

by George Steiner

Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.

"A real tour de force. . . . All the virtues of the author's astounding intelligence and compelling rhetoric are evident from the first sentence onward."—Anthony C. Yu, Journal of Religion

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Art, Literature, Theology, Essays

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

George Steiner was a French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator whose work explored the relationship between language, literature, and society, with a particular focus on the moral and cultural consequences of the Holocaust. Multilingual from an early age, Steiner grew up speaking German, English, and French, and studied the classics under his father, while overcoming a physical handicap with his mother’s encouragement. His family relocated to the United States during World War II, an experience that shaped his lifelong reflections on survival, morality, and human cruelty. He studied literature, mathematics, and physics at the University of Chicago, earned an MA at Harvard, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Steiner held academic posts across Europe and the United States, including Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature at Oxford, and Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, teaching in multiple languages. A prolific writer, he produced influential works in criticism, translation studies, and fiction, including Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, The Death of Tragedy, After Babel, and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., blending historical insight with philosophical reflection. His essays and books explored the power and ambivalence of human language, the ethical responsibilities of literature, and the persistence of anti-Semitism, while his fiction offered imaginative examinations of moral and historical dilemmas. Steiner was celebrated for his intellectual breadth and lecturing style, described as prophetic, charismatic, and sometimes doom-laden, and he contributed extensively to journals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and The New Yorker. He was married to Zara Steiner, with whom he had two children, David and Deborah, both of whom pursued academic and public service careers. Steiner’s work remains widely respected for its integration of rigorous scholarship, ethical inquiry, and literary sensitivity, marking him as one of the foremost thinkers in twentieth-century literature and comparative studies.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading a George Steiner book, one is forced to take on the force of the entirety of the Western tradition. Fortunately, Steiner is so deft a writer that it feels less like the notes to a Great Books club and more like the personal musings of your favorite polyglot literature professor. In Real Presences, Steiner's proposed task is enormous: explain the difficulty of grasping meaning, tell us why deconstruction, though philosophically viable, is ultimately unfruitful, and try to point a different path out. Though his arguments are far from watertight, Steiner's book represents a real attempt to overcome the most influential intellectual force of our time, and does so in a very entertaining way. Bravo, Mr. Extraordinary Fellow (his actual title at Cambridge)!

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's the first Steiner's book I read. I had seen him on TV. It releases from this person a wisdom and a generosity which has those which know.
Georges Steiner is a dynosaure. He is the reflection of this culture mittel europa which was destroyed in the Second World War. His erudition is extraordinary, never pedant. His sense of humour punctuates his demonstrations. We feel clever when whe read him.
Please, Mr. Steiner,don't ever die.

[Davis Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are very few nonfiction books written in the last century that have a legitimate claim to be Great Books that will be studied with relish and interest by posterity. This is one of them. It's truly a shame that it's not more accessible. Only attempt it if you would consider yourself an experienced student of philosophy and the arts, and if you know at least bits of the classical languages. But I know of no more definitive critique of deconstructionism and scientific materialism than what Steiner offers here (if you have even just a little bit of familiarity with Derrida, it's fascinating to see how Steiner apes his style and uses some of his tactics). Even if you just want to read Part 1, you'll find a stunning, prophetic engagement with modernity that puts the cherry on the superb sundae of 1980s books that also did just that (After Virtue, Norms and Nobility, The Closing of the American Mind, Amusing Ourselves to Death). As a deist (I guess?), Steiner is also remarkably fair toward Judeo-Christian claims and legitimately understands them. Perhaps my favorite thing that he does is to take apart familiar words that have been beaten to death in philosophy and reveal their Greek and Latin etymology to show their deep implications. This will take you a long time to read and digest. But it's not dry or pedantic at all—it's even moving at times—it's just very dense. I highly advise serious literature and philosophy students to read this at some point. It's a landmark text in literary theory and aesthetics, but it is ultimately an attempt to reintroduce the vocabulary of theology to the domain of secular humanities scholarship. Clearly that hasn't happened in the interim, but that doesn't mean we should pay any less attention to it.

[Robbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this with a dictionary. The basic premise is good and well-argued: There is a transcendent reality that upholds all meaning. All creative acts are a wager on the existence of God.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

The earlier sections in which Steiner lays out his critiques of the humanities as they exist in the 20th century, as well as the faults of deconstruction, should be mandatory reading for anyone considering pursuing the study of literature at a higher level. (Hopefully succeeding in dissuading them from doing so). Literary theory as it has emerged since 1900 seeks to cloak what are essentially statements of opinion in the borrowed prestige of science: to make it appear capable of objective findings. This because what really is capable of objective utterance (literary history, philology) is quickly exhausted. One suspects this is also the reason why it devolves so quickly into politics, into revealing the implicit agendas behind texts (I believe Habermas made this explicit case for the humanities). Because it has to find justifications for itself in a materialist environment. How else to explain the absurdity of someone holding a degree in English literature that has never read the King James bible?

But the main thrust of Steiner's argument in these early sections is that we live in what he calls the 'post-word' world. A world where the signified is no longer taken to exist a priori of the signifier, but is in fact created by it. Language speaks Man, as Heidegger puts it. Steiner's criticism of deconstructionism is thus similar to Nietzsche's attack on atheists: you have killed God but you have not accepted the consequences of his absence. You still behave as though morality exists. Thus he writes: 'deconstruction teaches us that where there is no 'face of God' for the semantic marker to turn to, there can be no transcendent or decidable intelligibility. The break with the postulate of the sacred is the break with any stable, potentially ascertainable meaning of meaning.'

The last section wherein Steiner puts forth his argument for the real, irreducible presence of the Other, the transcendent, in the work of art, I found less interesting. It is written in the same tortured academese which Steiner is himself critical of. No one should be able to write 'the facticity of death' without blushing.

[John Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book expecting an erudite and engaging argument about how art relates to God; I discovered the best piece of rhetoric that I have read this decade. I say "rhetoric" not to denigrate Steiner's work but to praise it for its excellent prose and pathos. Unlike so much written about the arts in particular and art in general, "Real Presences" justifies itself by the excellence of its presentation.

Steiner's penetration into the interplay between art and the transcendent cannot be easily summarized. For Steiner is well aware that we live in an era that distrusts art precisely on account of its being revealed to be a human product. Steiner reveals that the the nihilism that infects our culture cannot be disproven on its own terms. Instead, one must reflect upon art in order to see how it is a "reverent struggle" between creature and creator. Accordingly, Steiner grapples with how to show that human creation relies upon and presupposes an act of creation by The Creator. Anyone who wants to understand better how to reach God should read this work. Anyone interested in poetry, music, and artwork will likewise find much offered in "Real Presences." Anyone who wishes to understand the mysteries of this universe should certainly read this book.

[Andrew]

Steiner, you would. You true weirdo. Congrats on your interpretation of literature as theology. Perfect marks for originality.

Does his argument convince me? No, not really, but that is fully beside the point. The point is that he is dancing with all the humanities simultaneously, and that makes reading him refreshing and interesting. He isn't trying to convince you of much. He simply wants you to dance along.

[iane]

I'm moved by Steiner's emotional commitment here to go big or go home. He surveys the state (circa 1990) of literary and artistic interpretation, arguing that a lot of contemporary theory is internally consistent but fundamentally empty, then proceeding to defend the numinous inexhaustibility in art, literature, and music—that the residue of Creation is present in all such work. He's transparent about the fact that he's taking a leap of faith, and I like seeing such a ridiculously erudite academic be so openly intuitive.

This book is a very good graduate-level lecture about awe and wonder. I'm not convinced by Steiner's theological argument but I enjoyed the ride. And it's a worthwhile read for anyone considering an English PhD—especially to take in Steiner's close look at self-absorption in humanities academia, then ask, "Am I sure I want to do this with my life?"

[Garrett Mikulka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a good experience. Steiner highlights the absurdity of talk about talk, of endless tertiary response to art in lieu of actually experiencing, or making, art itself. This absurdity lies in the slippage of language itself: anything can be said about anything. A capitalistic academy greedily exploits this cancerous fact of language.

The problem arises, according to Steiner, when deconstruction as a critical ideology severs the good faith relationship between word and world. In the endless downward spiral of deconstruction, meaning becomes impossible and elucidation of that impossibility becomes kindling for yet another academic article. There is no answer to deconstruction (this is where I think I appreciated Steiner most). Acknowledging the sound logic behind deconstruction lets the proverbial cat out of the bag, and there can be no ignoring it thereafter. But this defies a very basic common sense in us. Meaning certainly isn’t impossible, even if slippery. Further, art greatly affects us. The root of this common sense, he argues, is in alterity. Experience with art is the encountering of the other, the not us, the greater than us. Good art requires presence of another, he argues. I’m inclined to agree.

Steiner’s final little chapter about the possibility of an “after-word” (his term for ideologies post-severance of word and world) kind of art is chilling to me. I don’t want to imagine it. I don’t think I will much.

In the end, what Steiner seems to do is schematize intuition, and one that I share, mostly. But that has its shortcomings too. Steiner makes what I take to be rather grave errors in considering canon, race, and gender. Some intuition is built on limited perspective, and his, as I see it, is not only limited but undermines a lot of great work being done by a lot of brilliant people. This would certainly be a different book were it written in this decade.

[Fr. Wirth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even with six years of seminary formation, this is one of the most difficult books I have ever read. That being said, this book is masterful and a powerful read.

As a professor, philosopher, & rhetorician, Steiner is at the top of his class. Extremely well-read (to the point that the language he used was exceptionally high and hard to follow at times)

Definitely will have to go through this many more times in order to appreciate it fully, but nevertheless, I appreciate his belief/thesis that God's Transcedent Being and Real Presence is necessarily found in the arts, especially in music.

(3.75 stars out of 5)

[Silvia Giliberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un testo fondamentale su tutte le questioni più rilevanti per chi si occupi di arte. Tra gli altri: cos'è la critica, il senso dell'interpretazione, il mistero dell’esperienza estetica, i metodi della ricerca artistica rispetto a quella scientifica. Non è di facilissimo accesso: per capire appieno certi passaggi è necessario avere conoscenze (anche approfondite) di ermeneutica. Alcuni passaggi inoltre li trovo nostalgicamente conservatori, compresa la visione religiosa di fondo (e un siparietto simil-maschilista estremamente risparmiabile). In ogni caso, un testo di grande rilevanza che riesce, soprattutto nella prima parte, ad individuare tutti i temi scottanti del fare arte o goderne.

[CJ Bowen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Grammatical-logical discourse is radically at odds with the vocabulary and syntax of matter, with that of pigment, stone, wood, or metal. Berkeley hints at this contrariety when he characterizes matter as one of the 'languages of God'." - 16

"The best readings of art are art." - 17

"Intimacies between the process of creation and that of analytic-discursive reflection are not native. Constrained by the very ambiance of academic hospitality to a deliberate practice of self-awareness and self-explanation, the painter-in-residence, the poet in the seminar, the composer at the lectern, will find himself ousted from the exigent isolation. From the inchoate dynamics, opaque to himself, of his calling. The welcoming scrutiny he receives can render him falsely transparent." - 37

"The Saturn of explication devours that which it adopts. Or, more precisely, it makes it servile....The Byzantine dominion of secondary and parasitic discourse over immediacy, of the critical over the creative, is itself a system. An anxious desire for interposition, for explicative-evaluative mediation between ourselves and the primary, permeates our condition. To cite Byron's mocking distinction, we prefer reviewers to bards; or, rather, we cultivate those bards who are most reviewable, who 'can be taught'." - 38

"I shall be arguing that we crave remission from direct encounter with the 'real presence'...We seek the immunities of indirection." - 39

(Discussing Judaism's exegetical tradition as representative) "...there is a sense in which all commentary is itself an act of exile....On the other hand, the commentary underwrites - a key idiom - the continued authority and survival of the primary discourse....In dispersion, the text is homeland." - 40

- CJ - is Christian life the re-presentation? Re-presencing by the Spirit?

"...the very methodologies and techniques which would restore to us the presence of the source, of the primary, surround, suffocate that presence with their own autonomous mass. The tree dies under the hungry weight of the vines." - 47

"...of the making books on books and books on those books there is no end." - 48

"...laughter being, at crucial times, another name for the seriousness of good sense..." - 49

" We must come to recognize, and the stress is on re-cognition, a meaningfulness which is that of a freedom of giving and of reception beyond the constraints of immanence." - 50

"The chain of signs is infinite. It is one's perception of the nature and status of that infinity, either transcendent or, in the severest and yet also most playful sense, meaningless, which will determine one's exercise of understanding and of judgment." - 59

"In practice, how do we proceed?...We count heads and we count years." - 62 (In determining the truth or truth value of aesthetic critique which we presume to be meaningful)

Two points:
1. No aesthetic proposition is refutable
2. The canon is oligarchic, not democratic - 68

Theorizing, as a matter of explanation via scientification, fails via indeterminacy and complementarity, because "To look closely at the world is to alter it." - 71

"Why it should be that the external world, on the naive, obvious sense, should concur with the regularity-postulates, with the mathematical and rule-bound expectations of investigative rationalism, no one knows.... Descartes and Newton make appeal to a divine inception and guarantee. Such appeal is, in regard to meaning in the language and the arts, precisely the one I am seeking to elucidate." - 71-72

"We do not say Smith's or Brown's second law of thermodynamics. We do say, and with every justification, 'Pope's Iliad'. The implied differentiation is of the essence." - 77

"Observe an historian or sociologist resorting to equations and you will, well-nigh invariably, witness a retreat from thought." - 79

Theorizing as the imposition of or expression of morality upon the arts! - 80

Semiotic approaches fails to produce theory at the level of meaning, "when they proceed upward from the phonetic, the lexical and the grammatical to the semantic and aesthetic." - 81 (This is what Barth senses vis-a-vis Julischer and the historical critics! See preface to Romans)

"The reason is intuitively self-evident; but very difficult to articulate plainly. A sentence always means more." - 82

"I would define literature (art, music) as the maximization of semantic incommensurability in respect of the formal means of expression." - 83 (My phrase: explorations in infinity - obvious sub-creative imago dei implications.)

"I would define the claim to theory in the humanities as impatience systematized." - 86

"There would be no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any 'social contract' or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world." - 89 (What will a universalized hermeneutic of critical suspicion do, then, but erode meaning and communication?)

"Responsible response, answering answerability make of the process of understanding a moral act. This is the source and intent of what I am trying to say." - 90 (Cf. Rosenstock-Huessy's respondeo etsi mutabor.)

"Truth...was answerability to the meaning of the world." - 90

"It is this break of the covenant between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself." - 93

"After the Word." - 93

"What is the status and meaning of meaning, of communicative form, in the time of the 'after-Word'?" - 94

"Derrida's formulation is beautifully incisive: "the intelligible face of the sign remains turned to the word and the face of God". A semantics, a poetics of correspondence, of decipherability and truth-values arrived at across time and consensus, are strictly inseparable from the postulate of theological-metaphysical transcendence." - 119

"That presence (of Logos), theological, ontological, or metaphysical, makes credible the assertion that there 'is something in what we say'. - 121

(Under deconstruction, in the after-Word) "Any truth-claim, philosophical, ethical, political, aesthetic and, above all, (where the very use of 'above' should alert us to the unfounded pretences involved), theological, will always be dissolved by the textuality in which it inheres " - 123

"There is in every proposal of interpretive context a potential of infinite regress, as there is, by illuminating analogy, in any appeal to subconscious motivations or intentions." - 123

"The central dogma (of the deconstructionist), according to which all readings are misreadings and the sign has no underwritten intelligibility, has precisely the same paradoxical, self-denying status as the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars." - 129

"New masks grow beneath the skin." - 131 (Ie, the possibility of seriously asking "Did I mean that?")

"Messianic" meaning (138) - might this alternatively be characterized as Trinitarian meaning, the perfection of communication within/between the Three-One? Is Trinitarian communication the Answer, or is it social Trinitarian nonsense?

"All representations, even the most abstract, infer a rendezvous with intelligibility or, at the least, with a strangeness attenuated, qualified by observance and willed form." - 139

"...we are monads haunted by communion." - 140

Encounter with the aesthetic as transformative - 143

"'Art for art' is a tactical slogan, a necessary rebellion against philistine didacticism and political control. But pressed to its logical consequences, it is pure narcissism." - 143

"The temporal-ontological movement from the primary to the secondary is one from autonomy - within the constraints of human potentiality - to dependence." - 151

"The primary text - the poem, picture, piece of music - is a phenomenon of freedom. It can be or it cannot be. The hermeneutic-critical response, the executive enactment via performance, via vision and reading, are the clauses dependent on that freedom....their freedom is strictly a secondary one." - 151

On scientific vs. artistic givens (154-155) - is Steiner overstating here? Are there not artistic givens inherent in the medium? Where inventio supersedes, is this not also possible in science? The overcoming of limits? Are the givens merely differently placed?

Any act of intended reception presupposes potential intelligibility - 156

"In short, the movement towards reception and apprehension does embody an initial, fundamental act of trust." - 156

"Our encounter with the freedom of presence in another human being, our attempts to communicate with that freedom, will always entail approximation." - 175

"It is the very fact that circumscription and determination are only partial, that they remain mobile, self-correcting, which confirms both the autonomy of the meaningful presence in the poetic and the integrity of our reception.... The falling-short is a guarantor of the experienced 'otherness' - the freedom to be or not to be, to enter into or abstain from a commerce of spirit with us - in the poem, the painting, the piece of music." - 175

"A canon is the guarded catalogue of that in speech, music and art which houses inside us, which is irrevocably familiar to our homecomings....No man or woman need justify his personal anthology, his canonic welcomes. Love does not argue its necessities." - 184-185

"The 'otherness' which enters into us makes us other." - 188

"It is via language that we are most markedly and enduringly 'translated'. The construct of the verbal is, so far as we know, uniquely and essentially human." - 189

"In the poem, in the prayer, in the law, the reach of words is made very nearly equivalent to the humanity in man." - 189

"The hold of oral narrative, or inherited fictions over so-called primitive or illiterate societies is even stronger. Such societies can almost be defined as communities of authorized remembrance, of ritual pre-scription. Because we are language and image animals, and because the inception and transmission of the fictive (the mythical) is organic to language, much, perhaps the major portion, of our personal and social existence is already bespoken. And those who speak us are the poets." - 195

"A world without music is, strictly considered, outside our persuasions of order and desire. It need not be a dead world in the geological or biological sense. But it would be explicitly inhuman." - 196

"... On the secular level, on that of pragmatic psychology or general consensus, the claims of nothingness cannot be adequately answered. If the terms of the argument are solely those of immanence, the free, real presence of meaning within form cannot be adequately defined or given metaphysical plausibility." - 199 (Life under the sun is vanity)

"... It is in this tensed caesura between analytic intelligibility and perception, when cognition holds its breath, that our sense of being is host to beauty. Why, then, art, why the created realm of fiction? Compelled to take the guise of a verbal proposition, of an abstract claim, no reply can be adequate to match the force of the obvious. I can only put it this way (and every true poem, piece of music or painting says it better): there is aesthetic creation because there is creation. There is formal construction because we have been made form." - 201

"I believe that the making into being by the poet, artist and, in a way yet to be defined, by the composer, is counter-creation. The pulse of motive which relates the begetting of meaningful forms to the first act of creation, to the coming into being of being... is not mimetic in any neutral or obeissant sense. It is radically agonistic.... The human maker rages at his coming after, at being, forever, second to the original and originating mystery of the forming of form." - 203-204 (Wow. Counter-creation, not sub-creation. All the Calvinist anti-art worries rise up with Puritan conviction at this, for this is idolatry.)

"All nomination - and the poets, the artists are those who give names to the shapes and the presences of being - contains its grain of violence, its wrestling for primacy. The image of Jacob and his Angel is, above all others, emblematic of the poetic." - 205 (Fallen naming, no longer Adamic. But why is the Adamic not prototypical? How might Christ be centered here?)

Procreation as fulfilling for women what art fulfills for men? - 206-207 (And yet, women are hardly free with respect to the 'art' that is their child. Children are 'given'.)

"...the impulse to rivalry with a 'jealous God' which seems to me so crucial to the aesthetic?" - 207

Gauguin (via Strindberg) makes: "A creation, one would add, obsessively Edenic, almost vehemently intent on a cancellation of the Fall." - 209

On art as more than photorealistic representation: "...we remake the making." - 210

On art: "All departures, all beginnings out of the peace of nothingness, are fearful." - 211 (The experience of writing)

"...it is, very exactly, the quantum leap between the character as letter and the character as presence, and as a presence often far richer, more exigent of exploring assent, far more lasting than our own, which makes the point. Save in a formalistic sense, no sum of 'characters' creates a 'character'." - 212

"Without some such supposition (of transcendent prior creation) as to the felt continuities between the making of poetry and art on the one hand and the residue or re-enactment of the prior creation of being on the other, there cannot, I suggest, be any intelligible view of our inner experience of the aesthetic, nor of our free answer ability to that experience. If 'characters' are only 'characters', then form is only formality and meaning only a momentary innocence or self-deception in the face of self-subverting, semantically arbitrary sign-sequences. I have tried to show that this alternative is, within its own terms, within its own ironizing rhetorical play, irrefutable. It is also, I believe, manifestly false to human experience, to that of the artist as well as to that of the receiver." - 212-213

"This essay argues a wager on transcendence. It argues that there is in the art act and its reception, that there is in the experience of meaningful form, a presumption of presence.... These convictions are, as current linguistic philosophy puts it - when it is being polite - "verification transcendent". They cannot be logically, formally or evidentially proved.... But let there be no mistake: such "verification transcendence" marks every essential aspect of human existence. It qualifies our conceptualizations, our intellections of our coming into life, of the primary elements of our psychic identity and instruments, of the phenomenology of Eros and of death." - 214

"So far is it wagers on meaning, an account of the act of reading, in the fullest sense, of the act of the reception and internalization of significant forms within us, is a metaphysical and, in the last analysis, a theological one. The ascription of beauty to truth and to meaning is either a rhetorical flourish, or it is a piece of theology. It is a theology, explicit or suppressed, masked or avowed, substantive or imaged, which underwrites the presumption of creativity, of signification in our encounters with text, with music, with art. The meaning of meaning is a transcendent postulate." - 216

"Where a rationality modelled, naively, on that of the sciences and of technology prevails, where agnosticism, if not a consequent atheism, is the norm of approved discourse, it is immensely difficult for an artist to find words for his making, for the "vibrations of the primal" which quicken his work. Pervasively, however, major art in our vexed modernity has been, like all great shaping before it, touched by the fire and the ice of God." - 223

"Can a logic of immanence account for the coming into being of the fact of meaningful form?" - 224

"There was, presumably, no need of books or of art in Eden. That which has been indispensable thereafter has communicated the urgency of a great hurt. It is in the perspective of death - how can we die, how are we able to? - that Western consciousness has spoken, has sung its realizations of love and of caritas." - 224-225

"Serious music, art, literature, in their own wager on survivance, are refusals of analytic-empirical criteria of constraint." - 226

"All good art and literature begin in immanence. But they do not stop there. Which is to say, very plainly, that it is the enterprise and privilege of the aesthetic to quicken into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and 'the other'. It is in this common and exact sense that poiesis opens on to, is underwritten by, the religious and the metaphysical." - 227

"Despite the psychoanalytic demonstration, itself foreshadowed by Hume, by Feuerbach and by Marx, that religious propositions are illusory phantasms which originate in infantilism and neurosis, the makers do not seem to be listening." - 227-228

"What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose 'nerve and blood' are at peace in skeptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if." - 229

"It is only when the question of the existence or non-existence of God will have lost all actuality, it is only when, as logical positivism teaches, it will have been recognized and felt to be strictly nonsensical, that we shall inhabit a scientific-secular world." - 230

"...Ours is the long day's journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savor of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?" - 230

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 1 out of 5]

Picked it up on a whim. Made it to about page 67, though this one was getting churlish around the time Steiner dropped the ball on Rabelais. Bakhtin would have straight whooped ya ass, George. This shit is straight up dubious.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

To many people, the term “literary critic” immediately suggests a figure like the apocryphal J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D., in the film "Dead Poets Society"--he whose grotesquely pedantic pages on the evaluation of poetry are torn from the students’ textbooks at the command of their poetry-loving teacher, the unconventional Mr. Keating. George Steiner is a literary critic, one who is legendary for his erudition, yet his message is not unlike Mr. Keating’s. Deploring the extent to which academic criticism has occluded the literature, the painting, the music that is its ostensible subject, he urges his readers to engage great works of art at firsthand, wrestling with their mysteries and their imperious demands.
In speaking of literature (and art in general) in this way, Steiner is challenging some of the most deeply entrenched assumptions of contemporary thought. Most emphatically, he is challenging the rejection of transcendence that pervades our culture, from the mandarin texts of deconstruction to the casual nihilism of films and popular fiction. Part sermon, part argument, part celebration, Real Presences is an inspired and inspiring book. Ultimately for me the message of transendence is key because that it the foundation of all the books that I consider great.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really compelling ideas. Slow reading (I'm only 1/3 through after 2 months, and it's a short book - no sign of making much progress anytime soon, either).

I've been reading a lot of books that put forth some kind of argument for the relationship between divinity -- or at least faith, or just a religious structure -- and language. Most of them, like this one, seem to focus on literature...I'm looking for a way to make it work with applied linguistics, or with a social practice view of language. (Not easy, since most contemporary theories about language are based on blithely secular or explicitly nonreligious thought.) Still, I have a feeling I'm going to have to write a 'notes toward postmodern Christian understanding of language' someday. Lord knows what it'll be about.

(The author is Jewish, by the way. He once said "Marxism and Christianity are footnotes to Judaism." Interesting!)

[Robert Sloan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest things I have read in years. A very slow read, but a joy to read with its style, artistic use of words, and its profound conclusions regarding the reality of transcendence for any assumptions regarding meaning in art--sculpture, literature, or music.

[Pater Edmund]

Anyone who has heard the siren-song of Derridean deconstruction should read this book.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a mystery.

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes to criticism as creations. Strained examples, the prose even more so.

[Justin Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

George Steiner’s central argument in Real Presences is that the experience of meaning in art, music and literature presupposes the existence of God. In his words: “any coherent account of the capacity of human to communicate meaning or feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God presence” (3). For our communicative acts to have meaning, Steiner argues, we must at least “wager” or “assume” that there is something transcendent there to ground it in reality. In the arts we encounter real meaning, real presences, and this means that encounters with art are fundamentally religious, calling forth a response of hospitality. Steiner’s argument divides into three parts: 1) a lament over the loss of primary creativity; 2) an exposition of the erosion of semantic trust that has left us without a ground for meaning; 3) a phenomenology of our encounter with the presence of freedom in art, a freedom that evokes our freedom (and responsibility) in response.

In part one, A Secondary City, Steiner mourns the triumph of criticism over creativity. From journalism to literary studies, everything is now secondary rather than primary experience. Instead of the immediacy of encountering meaning in art; we prefer to discuss the many possible interpretations. Here Steiner imagines a primary city, one marked by primary creation, “a city for painters, poets, composers, choreographers, rather than one for art, literary, musical or ballet critics and reviewers, either in the market-place of in academe” (6). Steiner is not against criticism: Rather, he advocates a criticism by creation (“all serious art, music and literature is a critical act”, 11) instead of the parasitic criticism that trades off the primary without adding any value of its own. By contrast, in our secondary city, we are numbed from encountering the mystery and power of primary texts; “the secondary is our narcotic” (49).

Part two expounds on what Steiner calls The Broken Contract. The contract here is between the word and the world. We have lost confidence (what Steiner calls “semantic trust”) that our words actually describe the world. Steiner’s bogeyman is deconstructionism, which has eroded our confidence that human communication has any ontological grounding; instead words are signs referring to other signs, and it is signs “all the way down”. Given deconstruction, words have no stable meaning and that art has little significance outside of our criticism/reaction. Steiner takes deconstructionism seriously; he writes: “on its own terms… the challenge of deconstruction does seem to me irrefutable.” He affirms that deconstruction teaches us that “where there is no ‘face of God’ for the semantic marker to turn, there can be no transcendent or decidable intelligibility” (132). Without God, the transcendent ground for communicating meaning and feeling dissolves. We are left with nihilism.

“All this is so,” Steiner writes. “And yet.” (174) While nihilism makes sense philosophically, Steiner rejects it as a conclusion on the basis of the deep experience of meaning in human experience. That reality is ultimately meaningful we must take on faith. Indeed, Steiner believes that we already take this on faith. In other words, communication happens; music moves us; in art we seem to encounter the presence of the other. He writes, “there is language, there is art, because there is ‘the other’” (137). Notwithstanding the instability of meaning, we speak and create because we implicitly believe that meaning and feeling can be successfully though not comprehensively conveyed. Every time we communicate, create or encounter art, we wager that language and artistic creation are meaningful, even if we cannot philosophically justify that meaning, or prove its ground. This is what Steiner means when he says that we must assume God (a transcendent Other) in order to have meaning at all. God may or may not be there, but we must suspend disbelief and wager his existence in order to ground meaning in reality.

Thus, in part three, Presences, Steiner argues that something in art meets us, giving us an intense experience of presence. This experience of presence calls for an ethics of reception: we must learn to receive the presence of the other with hospitality. Art, indeed, tests us in our capacity for this perception. We are caught between “the desire for absolute singularity” (the urge to reduce the other to ourselves) and the “dread of solitude”(138). Thus, communicative creation occurs, and though the “ideal of the complete echo” is a myth (there are always gaps in communication), some communication does occur, even if all that is communicated is otherness. The presence of the other in artistic creation breaks in, interrupts us, confronts us, says to us “change your life” (Rilke): “The voice of intelligible form… asks: ‘What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?’” (142). To respect the otherness of the presence we find in requires the development of courtesy, hospitality, and tact: “in which we allow ourselves to touch or not to touch, to be touched or not be touched by the presence of the other…. The issue is that of civility… towards the inward savour of things” (148).

Steiner is careful to avoid the intentional fallacy, once again giving modern critical theory its due, writing: “the promise of authorized, finally revealed meaning may be the Siren song. No such authorization… can be materially demonstrated.” And yet, he writes, “this truth does not justify the denial of intentional context”; “the ‘emptiness of meaning’ postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism.” The encounter of freedoms that takes place in any act of communication “will always entail approximation. So will our perceptions, our decipherments of articulate imagining” (174-75). In other words, our inability to grasp completely what is communicated to us does not preclude our ability to allow its mystery to have its effect on us: “How music possesses us is a question to which we know no credible, let alone materially examinable answer. All we have are further images. And the defiant self-evidence of human experience” (198). Or again, “there is always, there always will be, a sense in which we do not know what it is we are experiencing and talking about when we experience and talk about that which is” (215).
Yet to take the wager of transcendence is to choose to believe that language and art are ultimately meaningful because reality is ultimately meaningful, and it is meaningful because it is grounded in the presence of God. This entails that “everything we recognize as being of compelling stature in literature, art, music is of a religious inspiration or reference” (216), as is the category of meaningfulness itself (225). Steiner concludes his essay arguing that our immanent frame is in danger of suffocating our artistic ability: “where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable” (229).

Steiner’s work has obvious implications for developing a theology of general revelation. Indeed, Steiner invites theologians to weigh in: “the questions: ‘What is poetry, music, art?’ ‘How can they not be?’, ‘How do they act upon us and how do we interpret their action?’, are, ultimately, theological questions (227). Steiner argues that all artistic creation is ultimately a reply to the initial speech-act of Creation. This means that no matter how fallen or agonistic our creative acts may be, the very impulse to create is obedient; we cannot help but create. Thus every act of creativity unwittingly continues the conversation that God is having with creation. Steiner also helpfully reminds us that there are experiences that do not fit into our neat theological systems; there are saturated phenomena where the experience exceeds our categories to contain it. Are we comfortable being completely moved without completely understanding what is moving us?

[pievinis katilėlis]

Steiner įsivaizduoja tokią visuomenę, tokį pirminį miestą, kuriame būtų uždrausta kalbėti apie menus, muziką ir literatūrą. Jis daro išimtį XVIII a. filosofiniams biuleteniams ir XIX a. ketvirtiniams žurnalams, nes anksčiau žmonės publikuodavo nejausdami spaudimo atsiskaityti, rašė skaitymui.

Antriniai miestai – antriniai tekstai (tekstai apie tekstus).
Antriniai tekstai – makulatūra ir dvėseliena.

Literatūra, muzika ir menai be literatūros kritikos, recenzijų, analizių vystytųsi ir egzistuotų toliau.

Vykdytojas interpretavimo procesui atsiduoda savo būtybe.
Recenzentas ar literatūros kritikas žvelgia iš šalies.

,,Parazitavimas'' – menininkas neatpažįstamas be kritiko. Kritika svarbi nebent pradėjusiems rašyti, kad į juos būtų atkreiptas dėmesys. Menininkui reikalingas kritikas.

,,Vartojimas‘‘ → išmokimas atmintinai. Išmokti atmintinai – suteikti tekstui arba muzikai įsigyvenantį aiškumą ir gyvybinę jėgą, būdas skaitytojui arba klausytojui tapti pajaustos prasmės vykdytoju. Svarbu pajusti ir patirti pačiam. Atsiminimas tampa atpažinimu ir atradimu.

,,Susiurbimas‘‘ → tai, kas lengvai prieinama elektroninėse vaizdavimo priemonėse. Menas įgyja mechaninį ir kolektyvinį pobūdį, lieka išorinis.

,,Mėgėjas‘‘ yra mylintis (amatore) tai, ką jis pažįsta ir atlieka. Mėgėjai praktikuoja skaitymo, muzikos, tapybos menus kiek įmanoma tiesioginiais būdais, siekia, kiek leidžia jų sugebėjimai ir laisvė, atsiliepti ir atsakyti veiksmu. Interpretavimas yra didžiausiu mastu išgyvenamas.

Interpretavimo (hermeneutikos) ir vertinimo (normatyvinės kritikos) židinys glūdi pačiame kūrinyje.

Interpretacijos ir kritiniai vertinimai, kylantys iš paties meno, pasižymi tokiu autoritetu, kuriam retai prilygsta tai, kas pateikiama iš šalies, yra siūloma recenzento, kritiko, akademiko.

Mes kuriame formą, todėl nes patys turime formą. Pagal Steiner, kūrėjas imituoja ne objektą (kaip mimezė), o veiksmą.

[Joostr · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered this book in my time as a student in Paris around 1994. Didn't succeed in reading it. Tried a second time some 15 years ago and failed again. The third time I finished. I came to it again because I heard Steiner in a podcast on "tragedy". I was impressed by the man.
It's the most challenging book I have ever read but it is totally worth it.
I was particularly struck by chapter 2 "The broken contact". It helps to better understand all the political and social turmoil we are experiencing these few last years. If the contact is broken, there is no meaning, no truth, no sense. The strong and mighty will decide for us but always in their interest.
All along I asked myself what Steiner would have said of the quest for AGI, artificial general intelligence. But he's dead, so what would Demis Hassabis say about his quest for AGI after having read this book ?
I'll come back to it a fourth time.

[Jeff Bjorgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hands down, one of the least accessible books I have read, although that speaks less to the author and more to my lack of discipline. Worth the read? Absolutely. But you need to work at it. His essential argument is that art, in all its variations, cannot exist without transcendence. How he gets there (his critique of the secular world, of nihilism, et al, and his apologetic for "creativity mimics a creator") is equally head-turning and inspiring. You feel smarter after reading him, if only you can regurgitate easily in your own words what he accomplishes in saying.

[Mike Enwright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely need to reread this many more times, one of the most important and challenging books I’ve ever read. His constant name-dropping and extremely large vocabulary are irritating and make it kinda hard to follow moment to moment, but ultimately it feels like he has no other way to explain what he’s talking about. Great argument against deconstructionism and more importantly, for meaning through (/in?) art

[Kendall · Rating 1 out of 5]

This guy criticizes journalists and critics for a huge chunk of the book without realizing that he himself is guilty of many of the same sins he sees in others. I would say he is actually worse than many critics because at least they aim at intelligibility and don’t just throw the dictionary and their massive cultural knowledge at you to show that they can.

[Matthew Sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'm not really smart enough to understand everything that was said here, but i thought this book was a lovely, clearly written, and persuasive argument. tl;dr - deconstructionist art sucks, words mean things, & good art is underwritten by the fundamentally irrational belief in transcendence / possibility of human connection

[Filip Antosik · Rating 1 out of 5]

dawno takiego gówna nie czytałem, chłopie piszesz cały esej, o tym, że współczesność potrafi tylko komentować i reprodukować "WiElKiCh MiStRzÓw", a sam nie potrafisz napisać akapitu bez wymieniania Platona/Hegla/Schopenhauera, 200 stron i ani jednej ciekawej myśli, wszystko napisane z takim patosem i nadęciem, że chce się tylko pierdolnąć książką w kąt

[Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a work of genius. Steiner asks us to make the bet on transcendence—that all of art points to real presence. Interact with the real art; do not settle for merely reading criticism of the art. I had a few quibbles with his work, but it would be unfair to rate this book anything other than five stars.

[Lee Barry · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first Steiner book. I don’t mind having to think while I’m reading, but I found myself at-sea with much of this—not impressed by much. I like his lectures and interviews however. He was a wonderful speaker.

[M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

32. A book about a subject you're passionate about

Can't say I agreed with everything but some very interesting and thought provoking things to say, especially on how to face art without reducing it or 'deconstructing it'.