Tag Archives: future

Second Chances?

“As an object of desire, Freud discovered, a second chance was a mixed blessing. The promise of the new was always being waylaid by the allure of the past; there was something almost addictive about the sufferings of childhood.” – Stephen Greenblatt, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, 22.

“Only the omnipotent, we might think, only God can live without second chances. And, Freud adds, only the omnipotent need to believe in them” – Adam Phillips, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, 180.

Life without second chances is unalive. You are likely aware—if not all too aware—that you are (un)likely to take your second chances.

Greenblatt and Phillips remind us that the characters of Shakespearian tragedy and Freudian psychoanalysis are, among other things, risk averse. Tragic heroes don’t believe in second chances.

Each of us, according to Freud, finds tragedy all too alluring. Beset both by disturbing internal desires and the societal frustration of those same desires—we entertain, Greenblatt observes, “wildly unrealistic and destructive cravings for power and autonomy.”

“[T]he second chance Freud offered with psychoanalysis,” Greenblatt writes, “was a more realistic, and therefore potentially more satisfying, apprehension of what he took to be our true nature: the second chance of not living as a wishful, and therefore permanently enraged and vengeful, fantasist” (25). Taking a second chance is a genuine achievement.

Second chances are premised on a first chance. Our first chance is the experience of growing up.

Growing up is hard. Leaving home is really fucking hard.

Leaving home is how Phillips describes the resolution of the Oedipus complex. In Shakespeare’s plays, according to Greenblatt, leaving home is akin to getting lost at sea or kidnapped or overcome with love.

Shakespeare seems to have thought that various happenstances force us to castaway from home. Offered this second chance, we often ride the tides back home.

Second chances as repetitions of the first are divine. “In a life of omnipotence,” Phillips writes, “there is no such thing as a second chance, for there is no need for one. (God, by definition, does not have, and could not possibly need, second chances)” (145).

Tragic heroes don’t believe in second chances. Tragedy is the stuff of self-seriousness, the unwillingness or inability to experience disappointment with one’s self.

Greenblatt describes tragedy, in the words of Macbeth, this way: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (59). Tragedy is life sans irony.

To use “algospeak,” unalive is what a lack of irony gets you. There is more than one pathway to unaliveness.

“The antisocial act,” Philips observes via Winnicott, “is the child’s attempt to be given a second chance at development, as though the child’s delinquency was a kind of unconscious performance art for the parents, or for anyone willing to be sufficiently attentive” (185). Consider Henry IV. 

Henry is a proper kid who plays at being transgressive, at disappointing his father. He ends up teaching us that there are no second chances for fathers and sons.

That’s one way to read the lesson of Shakespeare’s second chance. Mostly abandoning his family (a wife, two daughters, and a son) in Stratford to pursue his acting career in London in his early twenties, Shakespeare returns home for good (or for ill?) in his late forties.

By this time, his son is dead. His daughters are grown up. 

If we read The Winter’s Tale as Shakespeare’s way of thinking about (his) second chances, then I think we must give sufficient attention to the testimony of Leontes’s wife. When Hermione (whom Leontes tried to have killed) and Leontes are reunited, she does not address him.

Instead, Hermonie speaks to her daughter, Camillo (Leontes tried to have her killed, too). “I stayed alive for you,” she says.

Shakespeare’s return home is not a repetition of his first chance. His son is dead; the status of his relationship to his wife is an open question; one daughter is married and living her own life away from home; he does not know the daughter who has remained at home.

Shakespeare’s return home is a second chance, his chance to be a husband and a father to his daughter. His second chance is a chance to repair the life he sabotaged—but whether or not repair is possible, that’s is simply not within his power alone to decide.

Two lessons. We are as likely (more likely?) to sabotage the life we desire as we are to live it.

“Freud described people as essentially and inventively self-sabotaging,” Greenblatt again reminds us, “as though the pressures of life, both internal and external, were somehow excessive and unbearable. . . . More particularly, [people] were adept at creating, as Macbeth or Leontes do, a life they could only loathe” (102-103).

“Self-destructiveness—the compulsion to do the self-harming, devastating thing, so powerfully displayed in Leontes—is,” Greenblatt believes, “the course that a great many people assiduously follow” (103). That’s the first lesson.

The second lesson is that second chances are beyond our control. Greenblatt notes that“[i]f in your own life you suffer a trauma, and, contrary to every rational expectation, you wind up getting a second chance, it will not, the play suggests, be because you have actively brought about the happy outcome.”

Second chances, Greenblatt asserts, “happen because of chains of circumstances beyond your control, because of changes invisible to you and outside the control of your will. . . .” And if you are willing, as Leontes seems to have been, to heed what may be defined as pastoral advice, second chances “happen because you have against all odds been patient, because you have learned to face your failings and to live with your trauma” (120). Second chances are possible futures.

Thank You, Thank You, Donald Trump

Photography by Mark Wallheiser, Getty Images

*

Thank you, President Trump, for making the unfamiliar familiar for me in 2024. And thank you, Mr. President, for always keeping things interesting. In 2016, you made the world so unfamiliar to me, an ostensibly out and proud queer, that I sought familiarity in the church. Your victories have both surprised and disoriented me.

In 2016, I was certain Hillary Clinton would defeat you. I had champagne in the refrigerator. We know how that turned out.

After your first electoral victory, a part of me gave up on my assumptive world. Giving up on the world, I broke a decade-long ecclesial fast and returned to church—much to my atheist husband’s dismay.

A rainbow comma outside the church initially attracted me to the congregation I’ve belonged to since January 2017. The sign represents the United Church of Christ’s commitment to openness, surprise, newness, and aliveness.

More signs encouraged me to enter the church. I explored its website and discovered that its leadership is entirely female. The senior pastor, whom I now love and trust, is a lesbian.

A few months after joining the church, the pastor’s wife shared an observation with me: You, Mr. President, had brought me back to church. I denied it, but she was absolutely right.

There are many reasons why I became a Christian in the first place. Significant among them was my growing awareness of same-sex desire.

Adam Phillips persuasively argues that conversion is a change to end change—something we do when we are, among other things, afraid of our desire.1 One reason I became a Christian was to survive the unfamiliar.

I likely returned to the church after your first electoral victory for a similar reason. Your victory defamiliarized my world so much that I sought shelter in the church, a familiar place to hide from what I thought I really loved: queerness.

Thank you, President Trump, for shaking up my assumptive world in 2016.

**

Fast forward to 2024. I was convinced you would lose the election. My confidence was rooted in a mixture of vibes and data.

We rejected you in 2020, and that was before we knew everything we know now: your lies about the 2020 election and your role in instigating the attack on the U.S. government on January 6, 2021, your felony convictions, and your liability for sexual assault.

We also know now that your Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade and that the conservative majority has now shielded you, a convicted criminal, from any legal accountability for your actions while in office. Sadly, your Court has not given women seeking abortions similar legal protections. Many women have died or suffered irreparable harm because their doctors feared the legal consequences of providing them with the necessary medical care.

Democrats seemed prepared; we sidelined President Biden, who was on a collision course with defeat, and Vice President Harris was running a near-perfect campaign. On the eve of November 5, 2024, I was certain my fellow citizens would reject extremism and double down on dignity, democracy, and generosity.

Mr. President, you understood the mood of our fellow citizens. I didn’t.

And here we are today. As of today, January 23, 2025, you have signed executive orders rolling back protections for Trans* individuals and LGBTQ youth. Through executive order, you have also targeted birthright citizenship. Many of your actions appear designed to undermine the dignity of those you and your followers consider “other,” irrespective of their citizenship status.

You have now scorned Bishop Budde’s call to have mercy on the most vulnerable living within our country’s borders. You have even cast aspersions on the Bishop herself, and for what reason? She humbly asked you, the most powerful man on earth, to consider the inherent dignity of the least powerful among us. At the same time, you have now pardoned almost everyone who attacked the Capital on January 6, 2021.

Given all we now know, expressing gratitude for your victories might seem perverse. But once again, you have shaken up my assumptive world.

This time, however, your victory has really shaken me. Now, I see that the unfamiliar is just more of the same, an all-too-familiar way of relating to the world, women, and men.

***

Your second victory proves at least one thing: we are loyal to the familiar. To illustrate our steadfast loyalty to the familiar order of things, let’s take a detour through a bit of Protestant history. Introducing his Institutes of the Christian Religion to King Francis I of France, Calvin writes to deny that his doctrine is radical or revolutionary:

It is as if this doctrine looked to no other end than to wrest the scepters from the hands of kings, to cast down all courts and judgments, to subvert all orders and civil governments, to disrupt the peace and quiet of the people, to abolish all laws, to scatter all lordships and possessions—in short, [than to revolution]!2

Commenting on the just quoted passage from Calvin’s “Prefatory Address to King Francis I of France,” Roland Boer argues:

[A]fter setting his denials to Francis I in the context of the Affair of the Placards, the Münster Revolution, and the Peasants’ Revolt, I have argued that the tension between reform and revolution or between conservativism and radicalism is not found merely between groups. It is also found within. Calvin may say that “we” are not like “them,” but there is an element of “them” in his own thought. In other words, Calvin is not an all-out revolutionary (we can accept his denials to some extent), but he is not a conservative either (the charges of his opponents have a grain of truth to them). His thought struggles between these poles.3

I am skeptical of Boer’s claim that “[Calvin’s] thought struggles between these poles.” To explain, allow me to describe Boer’s argument in different terms.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips examines the logic of desire that Boer identifies in his study of Calvin. Rather than using the terms radical and conservative, Phillips prefers experimentalist and essentialist. He argues:

For the experimentalist [Boer’s radical] the risk is always merely more of the same: what is desired is a feeling of aliveness, and a sense of the unanticipated. The experimentalist, that is to say, wants to be surprised (the aim of development should be, say, to become as dependent as possible). For the essentialist [Boer’s conservative] the risk is loss of composure, disorientation: what is desired is reassurance, a feeling of familiarity. The essentialist doesn’t want to be retraumatized. They are both, of course, on to something.4

What the experimentalists are on to is that the familiar offers too little pleasure. However, one reason the familiar is a risk for experimentalists is that the unfamiliar may become all-too-familiar.

Likewise, the essentialists are on to the fact that the unfamiliar offers them too much pleasure. The risk in their quest to avoid the unfamiliar is that familiarity itself may become unfamiliar.

What I think Boer misses in his analysis of Calvin is that radicalism/experimentalism and conservatism/essentialism are not polar opposites. They are related tendencies.

****

Again, let’s take a detour through a bit of Protestant history, this time a horrific event in the middle of Calvin’s career: the sanctioned murder of Servetus. This event foregrounds Calvin’s political orientation.

Calvin endorsed the execution of Servetus, a spirited theologian and thinker who challenged him for, among other things, creating a new Rome. Servetus was onto something: Calvin was not struggling between polar opposite desires. He was a radical conservative or an experimental essentialist.

You, Mr. President, are a Calvinist: one driven by the unfamiliar you desire to kill. This may explain why you insist on showing contempt for Trans* individuals—or really anyone who disagrees with you.

As you know, both Democrats and liberal Christians claim to offer an alternative to the radical conservatism you share with many of your fellow Republicans and religious followers. What they propose is a conservative radicalism or an essentialist experimentalism.

The conservative radical is driven by the familiar that they desire to eliminate. Thomas Frank, for example, persuasively and pointedly argues that Democrats have spent much of their power over the past few decades on killing off the New Deal, a series of incredible Democratic legislative achievements that actually help(ed) everyday working people.5

*****

Notice, Mr. President, that violence is what both conservatisms have in common. To free ourselves from the unrelenting pull of either the unfamiliar or the familiar, we must violate what and who we claim to love. In other words, we must declare our love objects heretics.

Unfortunately, the sanctioned murder of Servetus is only one chapter in a long history of conservative desiring. David Congdon, in an article for The Presbyterian Outlook, observes:

When Christian nationalists cozy up to [to you, Mr. President,] and seek to gain a seat in American government to punish their enemies, they are thus continuing a tradition going back to the fourth century [i.e., to Augustine], when Christian bishops used Constantine’s political authority to decide which version of Christianity would have legitimacy.

You are well aware, Mr. President, that today’s winners are tomorrow’s heretics. Thankfully, you have shaken me out of love with this all-too-familiar way of loving. I am determined to give up on it.

And what that means, or at least one thing it means, is putting this history of conservative desiring behind the glass of Mallarmé’s bookcase. There, it becomes a felicitous nudge, a reason to write a new, surprising, and enlivening future.6

Again, thank you, thank you, Mr. President. You have inspired me to look forward to the future again. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, the future is the only thing we can change.7

NOTES:

  1. See my reading of Phillips, On Wanting To Change (2022), here, section VI. ↩︎
  2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion ([1559] 1960), 1.1, emphasis is mine. Notice all those brillant verbs! ↩︎
  3. Roland Bower, Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin (2009), 20. ↩︎
  4. Phillips, On Giving Up (2024), Kindle Edition, 66. ↩︎
  5. See Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016). ↩︎
  6. See Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” in Divagations ([1897], 2009), 201-211. ↩︎
  7. See, for example, Nussbaum’s Holberg Prize acceptance speech here. ↩︎