butlerEthics – Page 2

164 Kafka odradek

Žžek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006

Odradek, as an object that is transgenerational (exempted from the cycle of generations), immortal, outside finitude (because outside sexual difference), outside time, displaying no goal-oriented activity, no purpose, no utility, is jouissance embodied: “Jouissance is that which serves nothing,” as Lacan put in his seminar 20, Encore.

There are different figurations of Thing-jouissance— an immortal (or, more precisely, undead) excess — in Kafka’s work: the Law that somehow insists without properly existing, making us guilty without us knowing what we are guilty of; the wound that won’t heal yet does not let us die; bureaucracy in its most “irrational” aspect; and, last but not least, “partial objects” like Odradek.

They all display a kind of mock-Hegelian nightmarish “bad infinity” — there is no Aufhebung, no resolution proper; the thing just drags on. We never reach the Law; the Emperor’s letter never arrives at its destination; the wound never closes (or kills me). The Kafkan Thing is either transcendent, forever eluding our grasp (the Law, the Castle), or a ridiculous object into which the subject is metamorphosed and which we cannot ever get rid of (like Gregor Samsa, who changes into an insect). The point is to read these two features together: jouissance is that which we cannot ever attain and that which we cannot ever get rid of.

Kafka’s genius was to eroticize bureaucracy, the nonerotic entity if there ever was one. 164-165

Back to Odradek: in his concise analysis of the story, Jean-Claude Milner first draws attention to a peculiarity of Odradek: he has two legs, he speaks, laughs; in short, he displays all the features of a human being. Al-though he is human, he does not resemble a human being, but clearlyappears inhuman.

As such, he is the opposite of Oedipus, who (lamenting his fate at Colonus) claims that he became nonhuman when he finally acquired all properties of an ordinary human: in line with the series of Kafka’s other heroes, Odradek becomes human only when he no longer resembles a human being (by metamorphosing himself into an insect, or a spool,or whatever).

He is, effectively, a “universal singular,” a stand-in for humanity by way of embodying its inhuman excess, by not resembling anything “human.” The contrast with Aristophanes’ myth (in Plato’s Symposium) of the original spherical human being divided into two parts, eternally searching for its complementary counter-part in order to return to the lost Whole, is crucial here: although also a “partial object,” Odradek does not look for any complementary parts, he is lacking nothing. It may be significant, also, that he is not spherical.

Odradek is thus simply what Lacan, in his seminar 11 and in his seminal écrit “Positions de l’inconscient,” developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human “undead” organ without a body, the mythical pre-subjective “undead” life-substance, or, rather, the remainder of the life-substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the “acephal” drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile.

The choice underlying Kafka’s story is thus Lacan’s “le père ou pire,” “the father or the worse”: Odradek is “the worst” as the alternative to the father. 166-167

159 Kant undead madness

The same paradox is at work in the core of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”: although Adorno (and Horkheimer) conceive the catastrophes and barbarisms of the twentieth century as inherent to the project of enlightenment, not as a result of some remainder of preceding barbarism to be abolished by way of bringing “enlightenment as an unfinished project” to its completion, they insist on fighting this excess-consequence of enlightenment by the means of enlightenment itself.

So, again, if enlightenment brought to the end equals regression into barbarism, does this mean that the only concept of enlightenment that we possess is the one which should be constrained, rendered aware of its limitation, or is there another positive notion of enlightenment which already includes this limitation?

There are two basic answers to this inconsistency of Adorno’s critical project: Jürgen Habermas or Lacan. With Habermas, one breaks the deadlock by formulating a positive normative frame of reference.

Through Lacan, one reconceptualizes the “humanity” of the deadlock/limitation as such; in other words, one provides a definition of the “human” which, beyond and above (or, rather, beneath) the previous infinite universal, accentuates the limitation as such: being-human is a specific attitude of finitude, of passivity, of vulnerable exposure. 159

Therein resides, for Butler, the basic paradox: while we should, of course, condemn as “inhuman” all those situations in which our will is violated, thwarted, or under the pressure of an external violence, we should not simply conclude that a positive definition of humanity is the autonomy of will, because there is a kind of passive exposure to an overwhelming Otherness which is the very basis of being-human.

How, then, are we to distinguish the “bad” inhumanity, the violence which crushes our will, from the passivity constitutive of humanity?

At this point, Butler compromises her position, introducing a naive distinction which recalls Herbert Marcuse’s old distinction between “necessary” repression and “surplus” repression:

“of course we can and must invent norms which decide between different forms of being-overwhelmed, by way of drawing a line of distinction between the unavoidable and unsurpassable aspect here and the changeable conditions there”.

What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.

Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”) and when a nonpredicate is affirmed (“the soul is nonmortal”). 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 judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead; they are the mon-strous “living dead.” [For a closer elaboration of this distinction, see chapter 3 Tarrying with the Negative 1993. The Lacanian objet petit a also follows the logic of indefinite judgment: one should not say that it isn’t an object, but rather that it is a nonobject, an object that from within undermines/negates objectivity.]

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, that he is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inher-ent to being-human.

And perhaps I should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, but since Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the surrounding darkness).

So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. 159-160

158 What Levinas leaves out the nonhuman

The limitation of Levinas is not simply that of a Eurocentrist who relies on a too narrow definition of what is human, a definition that secretly excludes non-Europeans as “not fully human.”*

What Levinas fails to include into the scope of “human” is, rather, the inhuman itself, a dimension which eludes the face-to-face relationship of humans.

In a first approach, Butler may seem to be more sensitive to this aspect — say, when she provides a subtle description of Adorno’s ambiguity with regard to the “inhuman”: while Adorno is well aware of the violence involved in the predominant definition of what counts as “human” (the implied exclusion of whole dimensions as “nonhuman”), he nonetheless basically conceives “inhuman” as the depository of “alienated” humanity — ultimately, for Adorno, “inhuman” is the power of barbarism we have to fight.

What he misses here is the paradox that every normative determination of the “human” is only possible against an impenetrable ground of “inhuman,” of something which remains opaque and resists inclusion into any narrative reconstitution of what counts as “human.”

In other words,although Adorno recognizes that being-human is constitutively finite, nontotalized, that the very attempt to posit the Human as “absolute subject” dehumanizes it, he does not deploy how this self-limitation of the Human defines “being-human”: Is being-human just the limitation of human, or is there a positive notion of this limitation which constitutes being-human? 158

*One may formulate the reproach also at this level, however. Today, in our politically correct anti-Eurocentric times, one is tempted to admire Levinas’s readiness to openly admit his being perplexed by the African-Asian other who is too alien to be a neighbor: our time is marked, he says, by “the arrival on the historical scene of those underdeveloped Afro-Asiatic masses who are strangers to the Sacred History that forms the heart of the Judaic-Christian world” (DF,160)

155-7 I am a hole in the order of being obscene supplement to levinas

Although Levinas asserts this asymmetry as universal (every one of us is in the position of primordial responsibility toward others), does this asymmetry not effectively end up in privileging one particular group that assumes responsibility for all others … in this case, of course, Jews … “The idea of a chosen people must not be taken as a sign of pride. … It knows itself at the centre of the world … for I am always alone in being able to answer the call, I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility” (DF,176 –77).

Self-questioning is always by definition the obverse of self-privileging; there is always something false about respect for others which is based on questioning of one’s own right to exist. 155

For Spinoza there is no Hobbesian “Self” as extracted from and opposed to reality. Spinoza’s ontology is one of full immanence to the world; in other words, I “am” just the network of my relations with the world, I am to-tally “externalized” in it. My conatus, my tendency to assert myself, is thus not my assertion at the expense of the world, but my full acceptance of being part of the world, my assertion of the wider reality only within which I can thrive. The opposition of egotism and altruism is thus overcome: I fully am, not as an isolated Self, but in the thriving reality, part of which I am. When Levinas writes that “enjoyment is the singularization of an ego. . . . it is the very work of egoism” and when he concludes from it that “giving has meaning only as a tearing from oneself despite oneself. . . . Only a subject that eats can be for-the-Other,” he therefore secretly imputes to Spinoza an egotistic “subjectivist” notion of (my) existence. 156

His anti-Spinozistic questioning of my right to exist is inverted arrogance, as if I am the center whose existence threatens all others.

So the answer should not be an assertion of my right to exist in harmony with and tolerance of others, but a more radical claim: Do I exist in the first place? Am I not, rather, a hole in the order of being? 156

This brings us to the ultimate paradox on account of which Levinas’s answer is not sufficient: I am a threat to the entire order of being not insofar as I positively exist as part of this order, but precisely insofar as I am a hole in the order of being. As such, as nothing, I “am” a striving to reach out and appropriate all (only a Nothing can desire to become Everything).

Friedrich Schelling already defined the subject as the endless striving of the Nothing to become Everything. On the contrary, a positive living being occupying a determinate space in reality, rooted in it, is by definition a moment of its circulation and reproduction.

The figure of Benny Morris, this symptom of the falsity of the liberal-benevolent-peacenik Israelis, is to be conceived as the concealed obscene supplement to Levinasian ethics. After bringing to the light the “dark” side of the emergence of the State of Israel (the aim of David Ben-Gurion and the first generation of Israeli leaders in the 1949 war was to provoke the Arab population to leave Palestine … including raping and killing innocent civilians), for which he was shunned by the Israeli academic establishment, Morris…stated that these “dark” acts were necessary for the constitution and survival of the State of Israel…Ben-Gurion’s mistake was that he did not complete the ethnic cleaning, including expelling Arabs from the West Bank — in this case, there would have been peace today in the Middle East. 157

The merit of this reasoning is that it thoroughly avoids the standard liberal hypocrisy: if you want the State of Israel, you have to accept the price of ethnic cleansing; there was never any third way of living peacefully side by side with the Palestinians in a Jewish or even secular democratic state.

All the liberal complaints about the unfair harshness in the treatment of Palestinians, all their condemnation of the terror of the West Bank occupation, avoid the key issue by sustaining the illusion that a little bit more tolerance and withdrawal will bring peace.

…the State of Israel was possible only through the ethnic cleansing of the majority of people living there prior to the Jewish resettlement.

One should effectively read Morris as anti-Levinas par excellence, as the truth of Levinas’s hope that the State of Israel will be a unique state directly grounded in the messianic promise of Justice; to retain his vision of Israel, Levinas has to deny what Morris ruthlessly admits.

Morris’s attitude, his cold acceptance of the fact that we have to kill others in order to survive, is the truth of the Levinasian questioning of one’s own right to exist. 157

147 the face ultimate fetish shame Jerry Lewis

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.

The face is thus the ultimate fetish, the object which fills in (obfuscates) the big Other’s “castration” (inconsistency, lack), the abyss of its circularity. At a different level, this fetishization— or, rather, fetishist disavowal — is discernible also in our daily relating to another person’s face. This disavowal does not primarily concern the raw reality of flesh (“I know very well that beneath the face there is just the Real of the raw flesh, bones, and blood, but I nonetheless act as if the face is a window into the mysterious interiority on the soul”),

but rather, at a more radical level, the abyss/void of the Other: the human face “gentrifies” the terrifying Thing that is the ultimate reality of our neighbor.

And insofar as the void called “the subject of the signifier” ($) is strictly correlative to this inconsistency (lack) of the Other, subject and face are to be opposed: the Event of encountering the other’s face is not the experience of the abyss of the other’s subjectivity — the only way to arrive at this experience is through defacement in all its dimensions, from a simple tic or grimace that disfigures the face (in this sense, Lacan claims that the Real is “the grimace of reality”) up to the monstrosity of the total loss of face.

Perhaps the key moment in Jerry Lewis’s films occurs when the idiot he plays is compelled to become aware of the havoc his behavior has caused: at this moment, when he is stared at by all the people around him, unable to sustain their gaze, he engages in his unique mode of making faces, of ridiculously disfiguring his facial expression, combined with twisting his hands and rolling his eyes. This desperate attempt of the ashamed subject to efface his presence, to erase himself from others’ view, combined with the endeavor to assume a new face more acceptable to the environs, is subjectivization at its purest.

However, Lacan’s counterargument is here that shame by definition concerns fantasy. Shame is not simply passivity, but an actively assumed passivity:if I am raped, I have nothing to be ashamed of; but if I enjoy being raped, then I deserve to feel ashamed. Actively assuming passivity thus means, in Lacanian terms, finding jouissance in the passive situation in which one is caught. And since the coordinates of jouissance are ultimately those of the fundamental fantasy, which is the fantasy of (finding jouissance in) being put in the passive position (like the Freudian “My father is beating me”), what exposes the subject to shame is not the disclosure of how he is put in the passive position, treated only as the body. Shame emerges only when such a passive position in social reality touches upon the (disavowed intimate) fantasy.

Let us take two women, the first, liberated and assertive, active; the other, secretly daydreaming about being brutally handled by her partner, even raped. The crucial point is that, if both of them are raped, the rape will be much more traumatic for the second one, on account of the fact that it will realize in “external” social reality the “stuff of her dreams.” Why?

There is a gap which forever separates the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being from the more “superficial” modes of his or her symbolic and /or imaginary identifications — it is never possible for me to fully assume (in the sense of symbolic integration) the fantasmatic kernel of my being.

When I approach it too closely, what occurs is the aphanisis of the subject: the subject loses his or her symbolic consistency, it disintegrates. And the forced actualization in social reality itself of the fantasmatic kernel of my being is, perhaps, the worst, most humiliating kind of violence, a violence which undermines the very basis of my identity (of my “self-image”) by exposing me to an unbearable shame.

142-4 neighbor real thing and its symbolic gentrification

Smashing the Neighbor’s Face
How does subjectivity relate to transcendence? There seem to be two basic modes exemplified by the names of Jean-Paul Sartre and Levinas.

(1) The “transcendence of the ego” (Sartre), in other words, the notion of subject as the force of negativity, self-transcending, never a positive entity identical to itself.

(2) The existence of the subject as grounded in its openness to an irreducible -unfathomable- transcendent Otherness — there is a subject only insofar as it is not absolute and self-grounded but remains in a tension with an impenetrable Other; there is freedom only through the reference to a gap which makes the Other unfathomable …

As expected, Hegel offers a kind of “mediation” between these two extremes, asserting their ultimate identity. It is not only that the core of subjectivity is inaccessible to the subject, that the subject is decentered with regard to itself, that it cannot assume the abyss in its very center;

it is also not that the first mode is the “truth” of the second (in a reflexive twist, the subject has to acknowledge that the transcendent power which resists it is really its own, the power of subject itself), or vice versa (the subject emerges only as confronted with the abyss of the Other).

This seems to be the lesson of Hegel’s intersubjectivity — I am a free subject only through encountering another free subject— and the usual counterargument is here that, for Hegel, this dependence on the Other is just a mediating step/detour on the way toward full recognition of the subject in its Other, the full appropriation of the Other.

But are things so simple? What if the Hegelian “recognition” means that I have to recognize in the impenetrable Other which appears as the obstacle to my freedom its positive-enabling ground and condition? What if it is only in this sense is that the Other is “sublated”?

143:

The topic of the “other” is to be submitted to a kind of spectral analysis that renders visible its imaginary, symbolic, and real aspects — it provides perhaps the ultimate case of the Lacanian notion of the “Borromean knot” that unites these three dimensions.

First, there is the imaginary other — other people “like me,” my fellow human beings with whom I am engaged in the mirrorlike relationships of competition, mutual recognition, and so forth.

Then, there is the symbolic “big Other”— the “substance” of our social existence, the impersonal set of rules that coordinate our coexistence.

Finally, there is the Other qua Real, the impossible Thing, the “inhuman partner,” the Other with whom no symmetrical dialogue, mediated by the symbolic Order, is possible.

And it is crucial to perceive how these three dimensions are hooked up. The neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be “gentrified.”

In his seminar 3, Lacan already indicates this dimension:

And why “the Other” with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife — after all, what do you know about it? You are my master — in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which charac-terizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. [Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, livre 3: Les psychoses (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 48.]

Lacan’s notion, from the early 1950s, of the “founding word,” of the statement which confers on you a symbolic title and thus makes you what you are (wife, master), is usually perceived as an echo of the theory of performative speech acts …

However, it is clear from the above quote that Lacan aims at something more: we need the recourse to performativity, to the symbolic engagement, precisely and only insofar as the other whom we encounter is not only the imaginary semblant, but also the elusive absolute Other of the Real Thing with whom no reciprocal exchange is possible.

In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves — there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order.

So no axis between the two terms can subsist without the third one one: if the functioning of the big Other is suspended, the friendly neighbor coincides with the monstrous Thing (Antigone);

if there is no neighbor to whom I can relate as a human partner, the symbolic Order itself turns into the monstrous Thing which directly parasitizes upon me (like Daniel Paul Schreber’s God who directly controls me, penetrating me with the rays of jouissance).

If there is no Thing to underpin our everyday symbolically regulated exchange with others, we find ourselves in a Habermasian “flat,” aseptic universe in which subjects are deprived of their hubris of excessive passion, reduced to lifeless pawns in the regulated game of communication.

We can clearly see, now, how far psychoanalysis is from any defense of the dignity of the human face. Is the psychoanalytic treatment not the experience of rendering public (to the analyst, who stands for the big Other) one’s most intimate fantasies and thus the experience of losing one’s face in the most radical sense of the term? This is already the lesson of the very material dispositif of the psychoanalytic treatment: no face-to-face between the subject-patient and the analyst; instead, the subject lying and the analyst sitting behind him, both staring into the same void in front of them. There is no “intersubjectivity” here, only the two without face-to-face, the First and the Third. 148

140 Ž begins his critique of butler the act neighbor as Thing

The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter.

This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy.

Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act —what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”

What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy.

Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.”

What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation — the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai — is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship.

When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.

In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor — the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.

For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”

— in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”

138-9 plea ethical violence Ž summary of B’s position

Here is Žižek’s interpretation of Butler’s ethics

The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I reconstruct my life in a narrative, I always do it within a certain intersubjective context, answering the Other’s call-injunction, addressing the Other in a certain way.

This background, including the (unconscious) motivations and libidinal investments of my narrative, cannot ever be rendered fully transparent within the narrative. To fully account for oneself in a symbolic narrative is a priori impossible; the Socratic injunction, “know thyself,” is impossible to fulfill for a priori structural reasons.

My very status as a subject depends on its links to the substantial Other: not only the regulative-symbolic Other of the tradition in which I am embedded, but also the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds it: what makes an individual human and thus something for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty to help, is his/her very finitude and vulnerability.

Far from undermining ethics (in the sense of rendering me ultimately nonresponsible: “I am not a master of myself, what I do is conditioned by forces that overwhelm me.”), this primordial exposure /dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each other’s vulnerability and limitation.

Crucial here is the link between the impenetrability of the Other and my own impenetrability to myself: they are linked because my own being is grounded in the primordial exposure to the Other. Confronted with the Other, I never can fully account for myself. And when Butler emphasizes how one should not close oneself off to this exposure to the Other, how one should not try to transpose the unwilled into something willed, is she not thereby opposing the very core of Nietzsche’s thought, the stance of willing the eternal return of the Same, which involves precisely the transposition of everything unwilled, everything we are thrown into as given, into something Willed?

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one’s exposure / thrownness, being overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant “live and let live” attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to “who are you?” because the Other is a mystery also for him /herself.

To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (“I recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable”), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable. 🙂 Žižek is looking for an opening to insert something of his monstrous neighbor.

Page 139: Butler’s central “Hegelian” reflexive turn here is that it is not only that the subject has to adopt a stance toward the norms that regulate his activity — these norms in their turn determine who and what is or is not recognized as subject.

Relying on Foucault, Butler thus formulates the basic feature of critical tradition: when one criticizes and judges phenomena on behalf of norms, one should in the same gesture question the status of these norms. Say, when one holds something to be (un)true, one should at the same time question the criteria of “holding something to be true,” which are never abstract and ahistorical, but always part of a concrete context into which we are thrown.

This move, of course, is the elementary Hegelian move formulated in the introduction to the Phenomenology: testing is always minimally self-relating and reflexive, in other words, when I am testing the truth of a statement or an act, I am always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard of success or failure should also be problematized. This reference to Hegel is mediated by Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s idealism, a critique which Butler submits to critical reading.

When Adorno claims that “the true injustice is always located at the place from which one blindly posits oneself as just and the other as unjust”, does he thereby not basically repeat Hegel’s old argument about the Beautiful Soul: “The true Evil is the very gaze which sees evil all around itself”? Recall the arrogance of many West Germans in 1990, when they condemned the majority of East Germans as moral weaklings corrupted by the Communist police regime — this very gaze which saw in East Germans moral corruption was corruption itself.

(Symptomatically, although many DDR files were opened to the public, the ones that remained secret are the files recording contact between East German and West German politicians — too much West sycophancy would be revealed here.)

[There is a double paradox in Butler’s establishing the link between Adorno’s critique of the ethical violence of the abstract universality imposed from outside upon a concrete life-world and Hegel’s critique of revolutionary terror as the supreme reign of the abstract universality.

First, one should bear in mind that Hegel here relies on the standard conservative motif (elaborated before him by Edmund Burke) of organic traditional ties which a revolution violently disrupts and that Hegel’s rejection of universal democracy is part of the same line of thought. So we have here Butler praising the “conservative” Hegel!

Furthermore, Hegel is not simply rejecting revolutionary terror. He is in the same gesture asserting its necessity: we do not have a choice between the abstract universality of terror and the traditional organic unity — the choice is here forced, the first gesture is necessarily that of asserting abstract universality.

136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler Ž

To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man “regressed” to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo — the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel?

Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long be-fore European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). … What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the “hard facts,” but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.

The ultimate irony is that this “critique of ethical violence” is some-times even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such “moral sensitivity” culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for “happiness” without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance.

No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler, whose last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation.

Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,” the subject’s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order.

Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom? In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on.

Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other (symbolic order), it can perform separation (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it. 137

🙂 Ž doesn’t go anywhere with this last point. He says Lacan, contra Butler, allows for a strong subjective autonomy. Ok. So? This is the one and only time he speaks of separation.

Adorno Prize

Can one lead a good life in a bad life?
Judith Butler September 11 2012 Adorno Prize Lecture download

JB starts her talk with a quote from Theodore Adorno: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen (Wrong life cannot be lived rightly).

She uses this quote to structure her talk firstly as a question of morality and ethics, what is it to live a good life? And secondly, “what form does this question take for us now? Or, how does the historical time in which we live condition and permeate the form of the question itself?”

Good life cannot be separted from the question of whose life? Life must be seen as that something which many who follow outside of the parameters that define life as such, do not even register. So what would this question mean for those who lives do not count properly as lives.

Taking the term as it stands: “good life” ambiguity surrounding this term. Those who claim to be living the good life may be living off the profits made off the back of workers, thus in relations of exploitation. The phrase “has become a vector for competing schemes of value.”

So where does JB go. She rejects Aristotelian formulation as too individualistic and on the other that ‘the good life’ has been too “contaminated by commercial discourse to be useful to those who want to think about the relationship between morality, or ethics more broadly, and social and economic theory.”

Ok so JB has cleared her slate to begin her theoretical investigation from perspective that as hinted earlier, begins from a perspective of the relationship between morality/ethics and social theory, as she quotes Adorno from his Problems of Moral Philosophy, that the individual “who exists pure for himself is an empty abstraction.” Butler thus is angling towards looking at how the broader “operations of power and domination enter into, or disrupt, our individual reflections on how best to live.”

Are we surprised? Of course not. Butler really does not waste any time in underscoring the importance of embedding the question “what is the good life” into a wider sociality. She intends to address the fact that a “good life” is dependent upon a wider social configuration of forces.

“And And so it makes sense to ask: which social configuration of ‘life’ enters into the question, how best to live? If I ask how best to live, or how to lead a good life, I seem to draw upon not only ideas of what is good, but also of what is living, and what is life. I must have a
sense of my life in order to ask what kind of life to lead, and my life must appear to me as something I might lead, something that does not just lead me. And yet it is clear that I cannot ‘lead’ all aspects of the living organism that I am, even though I am compelled to ask: how might I lead my life? How does one lead a life when not all life processes that make up a life can be led, or when only certain aspects of a life can be directed or formed in a deliberate or reflective way, and others clearly not?

Here Butler touches on all the themes that she will follow in her discussion: Life is something I must have a sense of, of something I can lead but at the same time, it is something that “leads me.” What are we to make of this?

Morality and Biopolitics
Biopolitics Butler broadly defines as management of life, “powers that differentially dispose lives to precarity as part of a broader management of populations.” 10

How am I to lead a good life?

1. lives are disposed to differential precarity
2. Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter, lives not recognizable as living or count only ambiguously as alive?

WE cannot take for granted that all living human beings bear the status of a subject who is worthy of rights and protections, with freedom and a sense of political belonging; on the contrary, such a status must be secured through political means, and where it is denied that deprivation must be made manifest. 10

Whose lives are grievable, and whose are not?

The biopolitical management of the ungrievable proves crucial to approaching the question, how do I lead this life? And how do I live this life within the life, the conditions of living, that structure us now?

At stake is the following sort of inquiry: whose lives are already considered not lives, or only partially living, or already dead and gone, prior to any explicit destruction or abandonment?

Grievability leads Butler to argue for the necessary structure of support that goes to sustaining a life.

Not worth protecting, or seen as worth under the “dominant schemes of value.”
Only a grievable life can be valued, and thus eligible for
– social and economic support
– housing
– health care
– employment
– rights of political expression
– forms of social recognition
– conditions for political agency

“… and one must be able to live a life knowing that the loss of this life that I am would be mourned and so every measure will be taken to forestall this loss.” 11

Do I establish myself in the terms that would make my life valuable, or do I offer a critique of the reigning order of values?

Modalities of social death

… the term ‘precarity’ can distinguish between modes of ‘unliveability’: those who, for instance,

– belong to imprisonment without recourse to due process;

– those living in war zones or under occupation, exposed to violence and destruction without recourse to safety or exit;

– those who undergo forced emigration and live in liminal zones, waiting for borders to open, food to arrive, and the prospect of living with documentation;

– those that mark the condition of being part of a dispensable or expendable workforce for whom the prospect of a stable livelihood seems increasingly remote, and who live in a daily way within a collapsed temporal horizon, suffering a sense of a damaged future in the stomach and in the bones, trying to feel but fearing more what might be felt.

How can one ask how best to lead a life when one feels no power to direct life, when one is uncertain that one is alive, or when one is struggling to feel the sense that one is alive, but also fearing that feeling, and the pain of living in this way? Under contemporary conditions of forced emigration, vast populations now live with no sense of a secure future, no sense of continuing political belonging, living a sense of damaged life as part of the daily experience of neoliberalism. 12

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004.

Impossibly, against all reason, my project stakes its claim to the very space that “politics” makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement … lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the sideof those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself. 6

cohabitation

15 September 2012 Jüdischen Museum Berlin

Butler on the contemporary reduction of Zionism

Butler begins stating that when people ask her are you a Zionist they mean, “Do you believe that the State of Israel has the right to exist?”

If you say, Well no I’m not a Zionist, that seems to imply on destruction of State of Israel. destruction of state meant to protect jewish people, you are in favour of destruction of Jews … the debate is impossible here.

Is Zionism the best political form to protect Jewish people,and for governing jews and palestinians?

You could be a Zionist prior to 1948, a cultural Zionist, renewal of jewish spirituality, renewal of people, understand Israel as a land but not necessarily as a state. Federated solution, commonwealth solution … It seems to me now, if you take the position of cultural zionism, you are considered an anti-zionist. Zionism has become: “Do you believe in the right of Israel to exist? This is what zionism has been reduced to. And it is a trap. Reduction of Zionism to this question. And this is an impoverished situation. Israel through 1967 you could be a left Zionism, cultural Zionist and debate about different solutions. Now if you make these arguments you are considered a threat to the people.

This question of whether there is a Palestinian partner, belongs to a discourse I don’t fully understand, implies Israel is already willing to be a partner. I think there are resistances to partnership on both sides and for different reasons.

There are different models of bi-nationalism already at work in the region, some are strange and sad. Settlers in West Bank depend on Palestinian labour. Occupier and occupied, lived near one another, depend on one another. What would bi-nationaism look like after the occupation, and after the entire project of settler colonialism comes to a halt. You need the end of occupation, so you can meet as EQUALS. Otherwise you ratify the colonial structure, yes we’ll be good colonial subjects etc.

We don’t know what the Palestinian political positions would look like post – Occupation. It would be a new political configuration.

Disaspora/Cohabitation

Diaspora: jews have scattered, lost their home, wait, long and struggle for return to home. That home has been understood as the nation of Zion, of Israel. But there is another strain in Judaism that accepts the diasporic, most of the Kabbalah, which means that we are not just as Jews scattered throughout the world, but we by necessity live with the non-jew in this scattered place. The diasporic affect is how jew and non-jew live together, in a common world that is neither Jewish nor non-Jewish, a meeting place, of various faiths, traditions, cultural formations. There is an Affects of cohabitation emerges from the diasporic condition becomes the actual ethos of Israel-Palestinine. A foundation of a new political ethos for Israel-Palestine. A Jewish affects of cohabitation that would be non-nationalist.

Jewish ethics of cohabitation, the experience of exile is precisely a condition in which one has a heightened sensitivity to others who are dispossessed, lost their homes, lost their homeland, who are speaking in a language not their own, without their basic rights. From the position of the exilic, that an ethics has emerged that has resulted in forms of Jewish socialism, Jewish internationalism, cultural zionism that have expressed an ethical commitment not just to Jews who are dispossessed, but to ALL THOSE who are dispossed This is a UNIVERSALISING gesture that emerges from the Jewish tradition, and historical tradition of EXHILE, including forced exhile from Spain, Russia. There is an ethics that emerges from expulsion and it is not necessarily a nationalist one.

How to live in the diaspora, how to live in this scattered way, how to live with others who are not necessarily Jewish. What kinds of obligation do we owe to those whom we share the earth.

1947-1948: Necessary cohabitation, not necessarily chosen, or ideal, but to have a border or link with another polity within a single state or 2 states, meant there had to be some sort of commitment to cohabitation. Arendt did not believe that Jews should have the demographic majority, there had to be equal rights for all inhabitants. The real question is whether a Zionism of cohabitation can re-emerge, or whether those in favour of cohabitation need to distance themselves from Zionism. It’s not about producing a perfect State, 2 state solution, bi-nationalism with 1 state or 2 states, etc. Its not about trying to produce an IDEAL state, its about accepting the necessity of living with others and having that unchosen proximity being the basis of ethical obligations to one another. THis is not just a problem with Israel-Palestine, but those who share borders, and history of conflict, the unchosen necessary character of living with others. I’m not talking about everyone loving each other.

When we think of Palestinian resistance to Israel, we could say that its anti-semitism, or destruction of state of Israel. But there other forms of resistance is seeking the end to colonial oppression, not to existence of Jewish population. The anti-colonial struggle is pledged to co-habitation and openly refutes anti-Semitism.

If the Occupation came to an end, and conditions of equal co-habitation were established, there would be greater possibilities for living in peace and security. Strengthening the Occupation, the Wall, the Palestinian people will resist these conditions. There are non-violent resistance which is what BSD is. I don’t think occupying other groups, or depriving other groups of their rights has ever made the occupier more safe.

The state of Israel, claims to be a state for Jewish refugees, especially after the WWII. It establishes a right of refugees for itself. The state of Israel at its founding produced close to 800,000 refugees. So if it believes in Right of Refugees the right of return and sanctuary, one wants to be able to stay, we need an int’l jurisprudence that will be internally consistent and be a solution to Palestinian refugees which now numbers 5 million. Acknowledge a serious dispossession took place in the name of producing a homeland for another group of refugees. This is a contradiction at the founding of Israel. This is not to say that Israel can’t right this wrong. There is an organization in Israel, made plans where would the Palestinians re-settle, made maps of all Palestinian villages destroyed, built monuments and memorials to those villages, and trying to reconstruct that history and produce an archive and trying to think what the practical dimensions of return will be.

I think the structure of Settler Colonialism needs to be changed. The boycott three principles 1) End the Occupation 2) Equal rights for non-Jewish Palestinian Israelis that make up 30% of Israeli citizens don’t have equal rights 3) Right of Return, it is an open question. it is a refugee problem. It should be put on the table and discussed. What can be done there?

What Edward Said thought which I find IMPORTANT, and made clear in his book on Moses and critique of Palestinian nationalism.

– The RETURN, not a return from the diaspora to homeland, but bring the principles of diaspora to the homeland, and ETHIC OF CO-HABITATION this is what he understood the return to be. There is a tradition of Zionism that confirms this, but have to bring the history of Zionism forward into a more contemporary debate.

– RETURN means binationalism outside the structure of settler colonialism

Question: Relation cohabitation and Zionism, which one is solution anti-Zionism or redefining Zionism back to its cultural form and federated state

59 minutes in video Answer: Kafka letter to Felice Bauer: What I really can’t stand are the Zionists, what I really can’t stand are the anti-Zionists.

I know there is a worry that the boycott singles out Israel, for its violation of human rights, and non-compliance with int’l law, and then there is another argument that says: Why is Israel always treated as exception to int’l law and human rights. I don’t want to enter that argument. For me it’s hard for Israel to claim that it represents the Jewish people. No, not all the Jewish people, not all the diaspora, not even all the Jewish Israelis, its a complicated situation. I do think what the boycott does, it produces an int’l community that demands that the state of Israel complies with int’l law and does not hold itself above the law. Pressures manufactures and cultural institutions, the boycott becomes the means by which an int’l movement is formed. IT is the largest non-violent movement seeking to hold Israel to int’l law. I don’t support targeting individual Israelis.

For those who believe that the only way to fight anti-semitism is to support the state of Israel. Then any critique of Israel is to embrace anti-semitism. This is a prison house, and there is no way out. They are many different kind of Jewish people, they are not singly and exclusively represented by the state of Israel, we are complex creatures with a diverse set of viewpoints. The presumption that the state of Israel represents the Jewish life, viewpoint. A great number of Jews accept its role, are fundamentally committed to Israel. But we must let the Jews be complex. Even diasporic Jews that support Israel, have disagreements with its politics. If anything comes out of these discussions, I would hope that it is the insight that the Jewish people have internal differences and are a complexity.

1:22 minutes

That said, it would be an entire mistake if entire conversation of Palestine or Co-habitation took place within an intra-Jewish context. Because that would mean that Jewish framework becomes the dominant framework for thinking the problem of Palestine. That framework has to be displaced not effaced or erased, but a decentering of Jewish perspective has to happen for Co-habitation to be thinkable. So I speak awkwardly as a Jew, at the same time I can’t allow that identity to be the only way to think ethically and politically, I have to allow myself to become decentered to have an ethical relationship to others and to participate in a democratic way of life.

This requires a decentering of my identity so there is an absolute necessity for an intra-Jewish discussion and there is also a limit to what its usefulness can be.

It matters to me that the commandments are spoken, and they are delivered through a mode of Address. THOU SHALT NOT KILL. is something one can only hear or obey if the conditions for hearing are first established. Even the commandment Thou shalt not kill, demands either that I understand the language in which the commandment is given or that the conditions of audability are established. WHat the commandment comes in a language I don’t understand, or I don’t hear it, or if there is no media to relay the commandment to me. It doesn’ t have to be a spoken voice, a picture or a sound (Levinas thought it could be a sound). What it means is that a certain problem of translation, of media, of establishing the conditions of audibility is there for the reception of the commandment and the struggle to comply with the commandment.

We are all called upon in certain ways, that there are ethical obligations that are addressed to us, this is an important Levinasian way of thinking the commandment, then I’m also saying that there is a theological/political struggle to figure out my responsibility and how do I respond to such a call. It is not that I am called at the expense of others, We are all called. And yet it seems to me that there is a great deal of noise that keeps us from hearing, and fear that keeps us from acting and responding, but it’ll be a great loss of if we lose our responsiveness and our responsibility. So yes there is a theological dimension to my thinking of ethics.