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The following was taken from [http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/ Jodi Dean's I Cite]:
Eric Santner's discussion of miracles in his contribution to The Neighbor is wonderful. I have only just started going back through this, but I was struck with how beautifully and systematically he uses Rosenzweig to make good on the Lacanian/Zizekian proposition that miracles do happen.
Santner (reading Rosenzweig) posits thinking as a mode of attentiveness to a particular kind of address, to a signifying stress that accompanies our 'creaturely' life. He writes:
<blockquote>To use a Heideggerian locution, our throwness into the world does not simply mean that we alwasy find ourselves in the midst of a social formation that we did not choose (our language, our family, our society, our class, our gender, and so on); it means, more importantly that this social formation in which we find ourselves immersed is itself permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness, is itself haunted by a lack by which we are, in some peculiar way, addressed, 'excited,' to which we are in some fashion answerable.</blockquote>
Reality is fissured by lack. Symptoms thus acculmulate around this lack, symptoms of past failures to act, past failures to, as Santner writes, "suspend the force of the social bond--call it the dominant ideology--inhibiting acts of solidarity with society's 'others.'" At a particular moment, these symptoms become legible as such, recognizable as missed opportunities. He writes:
<blockquote>Miracles happen when, upon registering their 'historical truth,' we are able to act, to intervene into these symptoms and enter the space of possibilities opened thereby . . . Miracles happen when we find ourselves able to suspend a pattern ... The crucial thought in all of this that such failures/defense formations persist as a peculiar sort of stress in the individual and collective lives of those in some way linked to them. It is the signs/symptoms of such stress that await, as it were, the 'miraculous' now of their recognizability.</blockquote>
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