Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190. Here is Ž in Oct 2010 at Princeton in a great lecture outlining these points
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.
This is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of the Shoah, one thing is self-evident apropos his questioning of one’s own right to be and his emphasis on one’s unconditional asymmetrical responsibility: this is not how a survivor of the Shoah, one who effectively experienced the ethical abyss of Shoah, thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.
That is to say, insofar as, in his description of the ethical call, Levinas reproduces the basic coordinates of ideological interpellation (I become an ethical subject when I respond with “Here I am!” to the infinite call emanating from the vulnerable face of the other), one could say that the Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer able to say “Here I am!” (and in front of whom I can no longer say “Here I am!”).
Recall the big gesture of identification with the exemplary victim: “We are all citizens of Sarajevo!” and such; the problem with the Muselmann is that this gesture is no longer possible. It would be obscene to proclaim pathetically, “We are all Muselmänner!”
When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind
wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible.
However, at this point, we again confront the key dilemma: what if it is precisely in the guise of the “faceless” face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other’s call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing a Muselmann, one hits upon one’s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic?
In short, what about bringing together Levinas’s face and the topic of the “neighbor” in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous, impenetrable Thing that is the Nebenmensch,the Thing that hystericizes and provokes me?
What if the neighbor’s face stands neither for my imaginary double/semblant nor for the purely symbolic abstract “partner in communication,” but for the Other in his or her dimension of the Real?
What if, along these lines, we restore to the Levinasian “face” all its monstrosity: face is not a harmonious Whole of the dazzling epiphany of a “human face,” face is something the glimpse of which we get when we stumble upon a grotesquely distorted face, a face in the grip of a disgusting tic or grimace, a face which, precisely, confronts us when the neighbor “loses his face”? To recall a case from popular culture, “face” is what, in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, the heroine gets a glimpse of when she sees for the first time the Phantom without his mask (and, as a reaction to the horror that confronts her, immediately loses her consciousness and falls to the ground).
far from standing for absolute authenticity, such a monstrous face is, rather, the ambiguity of the Real embodied, the extreme/impossible point at which opposites coincide, at which the innocence of the Other’s vulnerable nakedness overlaps with pure evil. 162
That is to say, what one should focus on here is the precise meaning of the term neighbor: is the “neighbor” in the Judeo-Freudian sense, the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor, the same as the neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other’s face?
Is there not, in the very heart of the Judeo-Freudian inhuman neighbor, a monstrous dimension which is already minimally “gentrified,” domesticated, once it is conceived in the Levinasian sense? What if the Levinasian face is yet another defense against this monstrous dimension of subjectivity?
And what if the Jewish Law is to be conceived as strictly correlative to this inhuman neighbor?
In other words, what if the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?
In short, the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbor, 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. 163