forgot to ask ann and monika yesterday. but discussing metanoia with them i had some new thoughts which anke and me can still include before we hand the manuscript in). i read some parts of the intro:
“I now see things in a new light.” We have all at some point had the experience that reading a book changed us in a fundamental way. We have all said or heard others say about reading a book: “I was never the same afterward. . .” or “Only then did I realize . . .” or “Only since then have I . . .”
We can describe metanoia, the phenomenon that interests us in this book, as “a new way of seeing” or a new intuition. Yet what do we really mean when we say that something like “I see the world with new eyes”? Such statements implicitly acknowledge that our understanding now is different from our earlier perspective. But can we ever regain this former perspective? To see the world with new eyes means that our thinking has changed once and for all. And not only that: to see the world in a new light also always means that the world, too, sees us in a new light and looks back at us differently.
The question just raised can thus directly be answered in the negative: an earlier understanding is no longer accessible to a new way of thinking. Although understanding and not understanding remain mutually exclusive, the new understanding arrived at thanks to metanoia is accompanied by not understanding: “How could I ever think that?,” “I have no idea what I was thinking!,” “Of course I now see things completely differently.” At the most, something like an auto-hermeneutic act, a philology of the self, can recall how we used to view the world. Understanding and not understanding switch positions, the new understanding overwrites the old one.
Because of this “overwriting,” we no longer perform our earlier “readings” of the world. Metanoia is more than just a problem of understanding; it always shifts an existing relation of thinking and world. Only in language does the world present itself to our thinking. To express a new thought also always means to invent a new language game appropriate to that thought. Perhaps language is not arbitrary, however obvious such arbitrariness may seem to contemporary theorists of language; perhaps it performs a differentiation of the relationship between thought and world. In fact, language develops our understanding of the world in the same way and to the same extent that it continues to develop itself. This is why the possibilities of a new understanding are immediately tied to finding or inventing a new language.
Metanoia is a fundamental transformation of the mind. What does that mean? What happens in metanoia? We read a book and cannot put it down. We read a book, and when we stop reading, we have changed. Once we have stopped reading, the world itself has changed through our reading. Through metanoia, we become intellectuals; metanoia makes philosophers philosophers; through metanoia, literary scholars become the literary scholars they are; basically, metanoia has made us all who we have become. Metanoia touches on and creates the existential core of thinking. Without metanoia, that is, without having been, a Deleuzian, say, or a Lacanian, without ever having understood everything (really understood everything!) in Jakobson’s or Shklovsky’s or somebody else’s terms, we would not be writing this today, we would think something completely different–“we,” this much is certain, wouldn’t even be here.
Metanoia rarely occurs more than once a decade, and it tends to come with significant relocations, epochal changes, or the collapse of personal worlds. When in fact “the whole” shifts, the meaning of each and every part changes. Whenever this happens, the past suddenly is no longer what was, no longer what it was before, but that which returns as something that is not understood. Metanoia does not just (bring about) change—it institutes reality. Put succinctly: Afterwards, what comes before is different.