What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.
Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbour is with reference to Kant’s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgement: the positive statement ‘the soul is mortal’ can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate (‘the soul is not mortal’), or affirm a non-predicate (‘the soul in non-mortal’). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between ‘he is not dead’ and ‘he is undead’.
The indefinite judgement opens up a third domain that undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the ‘undead’ are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead’. And the same goes for ‘inhuman’: ‘he is not human’ is not the same as ‘he is inhuman’. ‘He is not human’ means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while ‘he is inhuman’ means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.
And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself. (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, the ‘Night of the World’, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)
In the pre-Kantian universe, when a hero goes mad he is deprived of his humanity, and animal passions or divine madness take over. With Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. [How to Read Lacan46-47,2006. TN 159-160 2005]
Critique of Levinas
This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, “inhuman” Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the “living dead” in the concentration camps. TN 160, 2005
… the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbour, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. [TN 163, 2005]
Although I try to isolate a certain emancipatory kernel of religion, I must nonetheless emphasize that I am an absolute materialist. I think that one of the trends to which I am very much opposed is the recent post-secular theological turn of deconstruction; the idea being that while there is no ontotheological God there is nonetheless some kind of unconditional ethical injunction up to which we cannot every live. So what re-emerges here is a split between ethics and politics. Ethics stands for the unconditional injunction which you can never fulfill and so you have to accept the gap between unconditional injunction and the always contingent failed interventions that you make. Ethics becomes the domain of the unconditional, spectrality, Otherness and so on, whereas politics consists of practical interventions. This Levinasian Otherness can then be formulated directly as the divine dimension, or it can be formulated just as the messianic utopian dimension inherent to language as such and so on.
I think Lacanian ethics breaks out of this. Lacan cannot be incorporated into this paradigm. What Lacan does is precisely to assert the radical politicization of ethics; not in the sense that ethics should be subordinated to power struggles, but in terms of accepting radical contingency. The elementary political position is one that affirms this contingency and this means that you don’t have any guarantee in any norms whatsoever. You have to risk and to decide. This is the lesson of Lacan. Do not compromise your desire. Do not look for support in any form of big Other – even if this big Other is totally empty or a Levinasian unconditional injunction. You must risk the act without guarantee.
In this sense the ultimate foundation of ethics is political. And, for Lacan, depoliticized ethics is an ethical betrayal because you put the blame on the Other. Depoliticized ethics means that you rely on some figure of the big Other. But the Lacanian act is precisely the act in which you assume that there is no big Other. Conv162-163 2004
[Lenin’s] idea is simply that there is no big Other; you never get the guarantee; you must act. You must take the risk and act. I think this is the Lenin who is truly a Lacanian Lenin. Conv164