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.
This brings us to the radical anti-Levinasian conclusion: the true ethical step is the one beyond the face of the other, the one of suspending the hold of the face, the one of choosing against the face, for the Third. This coldness is justice at its most elementary.
Every preempting of the Other in the guise of his or her face relegates the Third to the faceless background.
And the elementary gesture of justice is not to show respect for the face in front of me, to be open to its depth, but to abstract from it and refocus onto the faceless Thirds in the background.
It is only such a shift of focus onto the Third that effectively uproots justice, liberating it from the contingent umbilical link that renders it “embedded” in a particular situation.
In other words, it is only such a shift onto the Third that grounds justice in the dimension of universality proper.
When Levinas endeavors to ground ethics in the Other’s face, is he not still clinging to the ultimate root of the ethical commitment, afraid to accept the abyss of the rootless Law as the only foundation of ethics?
Thus, truly blind justice cannot be grounded in the relationship to the Other’s face, in other words, in the relationship to the neighbor. Justice is emphatically not justice for —with regard to— the neighbor.
since the limitation of our capacity to relate to Others’ faces is the mark of our very finitude. In other words, the limitation of our ethical relation of responsibility toward the Other’s face which necessitates the rise of the Third (the domain of regulations) is a positive condition of ethics, not simply its secondary supplement.
“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how their hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
However, what this means is that, in order to practice justice, one has to suspend one’s power of imagination; if hate is a failure of imagination, then pity is the failure of the power of abstraction.
the face is the ultimate ethical lure, and the passage from Judaism to Christianity is not the passage from blindly applying the harsh law to displaying love and pity for the suffering face.
It is crucial that it was Judaism, the religion of the harsh letter of the Law, that first formulated the injunction to love thy neighbor: the neighbor is not displayed through a face; it is, as we have seen, in his or her fundamental dimension a faceless monster.
It is here that one has to remain faithful to the Jewish legacy: in order to arrive at the “neighbor” we have to love, we must pass through the “dead” letter of the Law, which cleanses the neighbor of all imaginary lure, of the “inner wealth of a person” displayed through his or her face, reducing him or her to a pure subject.
Levinas is right to point out the ultimate paradox of how “the Jewish consciousness, formed precisely through contact with this harsh morality, with its obligations and sanctions, has learned to have an absolute horror of blood, while the doctrine of non-violence has not stemmed the natural course towards violence displayed by a whole world over the last two thousand years. . . . Only a God who maintains the principle of Law can in practice tone down its severity and use oral law to go beyond the inescapable harshness of Scriptures” (DF,138).
But what about the opposite paradox? What if only a God who is ready to subordinate his own Law to love can in practice push us to realize blind justice in all its harshness? Recall the infamous lines from Che Guevara’s testamentary “Message to the Tricontinental” (1967): “Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”
And it is crucial to read these lines together with Guevara’s notion of revolutionary violence as a “work of love”: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary with-out this quality.”
One should confer to the words “beyond the natural limitations of man” their entire Kantian weight: in their love/hatred, revolutionaries are pushed beyond the limitations of empirical “human nature,” so that their violence is literally angelic.
Therein resides the core of revolutionary justice, this much misused term: harshness of the measures taken, sustained by love. Does this not recall Christ’s scandalous words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes even his own life —he cannot be my disciple” [Luke 14 : 26]), which point in exactly the same direction as another famous quote from Che? “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness. You may have to cut the flowers, but it will not stop the Spring.” 54
This Christian stance is the opposite of the Oriental attitude of nonviolence, which —as we know from the long history of Buddhist rulers and warriors— can legitimize the worst violence. It is not that the revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a nonviolent harmony; on the contrary, the authentic revolutionary liberation is much more directly identified with violence — it is violence as such (the violent gesture of discarding, of establishing a difference, of drawing a line of separation) which liberates.
Freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance, but the violent act which disturbs this balance.