butlerEthics – Page 3

Ž on Levinas Butler pt2

But, again, cannot this fidelity be understood precisely as a fidelity to the call of the vulnerable Other in all its precariousness? 🙂 This is Critchley’s argument that Ž disagrees with:)

The answer is not that the ethical agent should also experience his or her own fragility ― the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the neighbor, or what Levinas effectively did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.

Levinas deploys the notion of the subject as constituted by its recognition of an unconditional ethical Call engendered by the experience of injustices and wrongs: the subject emerges as a reaction to the traumatic encounter with the helpless suffering Other (the Neighbor).

This is why it is constitutively decentered, not autonomous, but split by the ethical Call, a subject defined by the experience of an internalized demand that it can never meet, a demand that exceeds it.

The paradox constitutive of the subject is thus that the demand that the subject cannot meet is what makes the subject, so that the subject is constitutively divided, its autonomy “always usurped by the heteronomous experience of the other’s demand”: “my relation to the other is not some benign benevolence, compassionate care or respect for the other’s autonomy, but is the obsessive experience of a responsibility that persecutes me with its sheer weight. I am the other’s hostage.”37

My elementary situation is thus that of an eternal struggle against myself: I am forever split between egotistic rootedness in a particular familiar world around which my life gravitates, and the unconditional call of responsibility for the Other: “The I which arises in enjoyment as a separate being having apart in itself the centre around which its existence gravitates, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation, and purges itself interminably.” [Critchley Infinitely Demanding]

Levinas likes to quote Dostoyevsky here: “We are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others.” The underlying cruelty is that of the superego, of course.

What is the superego? In a Motel One, close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin, the do-not-disturb signs read: “I am enjoying my Motel One room … please don’t disturb!” Not only is this message obscene insofar as it compels the hotel guest who wants peace and quiet to declare that he is enjoying his room, the deeper obscenity resides in the fact that his desire not to be disturbed is implicitly characterized as a desire to enjoy himself in peace (and not, for example, to sleep or to work).

Recall the strange fact, regularly evoked by Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors, about how their intimate reaction to their survival was marked by a deep split: consciously, they were fully aware that their survival was the result of a meaningless accident, that they were not in any way guilty for it, that the only guilty perpetrators were their Nazi torturers. At the same time, they were (more than merely) haunted by an “irrational” feeling of guilt, as if they had survived at the expense of others and were thus somehow responsible for their deaths ― as is well known, this unbearable feeling of guilt drove many of them to suicide. This displays the agency of the superego at its purest: as the obscene agency which manipulates us into a spiraling movement of self-destruction.

The function of the superego is precisely to obfuscate the cause of the terror constitutive of our being-human, the inhuman core of being-human, the dimension of what the German Idealists called negativity and Freud called the death drive. Far from being the traumatic hard core of the Real from which sublimations protect us, the superego is itself a mask screening off the Real.

For Levinas, the traumatic intrusion of the radically heterogeneous Real Thing which decenters the subject is identical with the ethical Call of the Good, while, for Lacan, on the contrary, it is the primordial “evil Thing,” something that can never be sublated into a version of the Good, something which forever remains a disturbing cut. Therein lies the revenge of Evil for our domestication of the Neighbor as the source of the ethical call: the “repressed Evil” returns in the guise of the superego’s distortion of the ethical call itself.

But there is a further question to be raised here: is the opposition between fellow-man and Neighbor the ultimate horizon of our experience of others?

It is clear that for Levinas the “face” is not the name for my fellow-man with whom I can empathize, who is “like me,” my semblant, but the name for a radical facelessness, for the Real of the abyss of an Otherness whose intrusion destabilizes every homeostatic exchange with others.

However, does not the very fact that Levinas can use the term “face” to designate its opposite, the faceless abyss of the other, point to the link between the two, to the fact that they belong to the same field? Is not the faceless abyss of the Neighbor a faceless Beyond engendered by the face itself, the face’s inherent overcoming, like the terrifying image (vortex, maelstrom, Medusa’s head, Irma’s throat …) which is too strong for our eyes, which closes down the very dimension of what can be seen?

Insofar as, for Lacan, the face functions as an imaginary lure, the Real of the faceless Neighbor is the imaginary Real; the question is thus whether there is another, symbolic, Real. What emerges if, in a vague homology, we push the symbolic as far as the same self-canceling into which the face is pushed to give rise to the faceless abyss of the Neighbor?

What would be the status of the human individual as a symbolic Real?

What emerges at this point is the subject, the Cartesian cogito which, according to Lacan, is none other than the subject of the unconscious. No wonder that Lacan refers to this subject as an “answer of the real”: it emerges when the symbolic is pushed to the limit of its impossibility, of its immanent Real. This subject is totally de-substantialized; coinciding with its own failure-to-be, it is a mere cut, a gap, in the order of being.

If the axis fellow-man/Neighbor remains our ultimate horizon, we have to abandon the dimension of universality: the Neighbor is a singular abyss which resists universality.

But is it then the case that the non-universalizable Neighbor is the ultimate horizon of our ethico-political activity? Is the highest norm the injunction to respect the neighbor’s Otherness?

No wonder Levinas is so popular today among leftist-multiculturalist liberals who improvise endlessly on the motif of impossible universality―every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.

The question to be posed here is whether every ethical universality is really based on the exclusion of the abyss of the Neighbor, or whether there is a universality which does not exclude the Neighbor.

The answer is: yes, the universality grounded in the “part of no-part,” the singular universality exemplified in those who lack a determined place in the social totality, who are “out of place” in it and as such directly stand for the universal dimension.

Ž on Levinas Butler pt1

Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile, and with a “broken heart” ― this is the liberal core of Levinas’s thought, a core to which Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject, caught in the abyss of decentered symbolic representation, and whose very identity hinges on an external, inconsistent network. Precarious Life, London: Verso Books 2006.

It is this precarious status of subjectivity which functions as the zero-level of all ethics: the absolute call, the injunction, emanating from the vulnerable neighbor’s face. To be an ethical subject means to experience oneself, in one’s singularity, as the addressee of that unconditional call, as responsible and responding to it even when one chooses to ignore it.

[From a Christian perspective, we should go to the end here: if man is created in God’s image, the becoming-man-of-God means that the same goes for God: in Christ, God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, and impotent.]

The first thing to note here is the basic asymmetry of the situation: the other’s face makes an unconditional demand on us; we did not ask for it, and we are not allowed to refuse it. (And, of course, what Levinas means by “the face” is not directly the physical face: a face can also be a mask for the face, there is no direct representation of the face.)

This demand is the Real which cannot be captured by any words; it marks the limit of language, every translation of it into language already distorts it. It is not simply external to discourse―it is its inner limit, as the encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there can be no discourse without the other. It is the real of a violent encounter that (as Badiou would put it) throws me out of my existence as a human animal. 827

[The irony here is that, with Butler, the encounter with the Other in its precariousness and fragility (finitude, mortality) has exactly the same structure as the Badiouian encounter of the Event which opens up the dimension of immortality or eternity.]

And Butler is fully justified in emphasizing that this ethical injunction, at its most basic level, is a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other-neighbor, to kill him (this urge can easily be accounted for in Freudo-Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter with the intrusive Neighbor-Thing)

But for Freud and Lacan (as was convincingly elaborated by Jean Laplanche), the traumatic encounter with the Other as a desiring which “interrupts the narcissistic circuit” is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity―which is why, for Lacan, desire is a “desire of the Other.”

Thus Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis” stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience, … Lacan’s option involves neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the Other – Neighbor-Thing, nor its reversal into accepting the Other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. But why not?

🙂 constitutive of desiring subjectivity, is this initial approach what do you want. the enigma of the desire of the other which is mind blowing and throws us totally out of joint, we react as one would violently, or indifference, but the ethical call is to not forego hiding away, and to do something. This something as we have seen is within the 4 discourses 🙂

We should note that, in Levinas’s account, it is not me who experiences myself as precarious, but the Other who addresses me. This is why, in my very asymmetric subordination to the Other’s call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the Other, I assume supremacy over the Other.

Do we not encounter this wounded-precarious Other almost daily, in advertisements for charity which bombard us with images of starving or disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such adverts are one of its exemplary manifestations. 828

Butler shows how the face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists or despots (bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), and how the power regime also decides which faces we are allowed to see as worthy of grief and mourning and which not — it was pictures of children burning from napalm that generated ethical outrage in the US public over Vietnam. Today, the very fragility of the suffering Other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive. 828

***

What must be added to the precariousness and vulnerability of the ethical subject is the notion of absolute fidelity, the reference to an absolute point of infinity, in accordance with Pascal’s well-known thought that man is a tiny speck of dust in the universe, but at the same time infinite spirit. 828

***

Fragility alone does not account for ethics ― the gaze of a tortured or wounded animal does not in itself make it an ethical subject. The two minimal components of the ethical subject are its precarious vulnerability and its fidelity to an “immortal Truth” (a principle for which, in clear and sometimes ridiculous contrast to its vulnerability and limitations, the subject is ready to put everything at stake)―it is only this presence of an “immortal Truth” that makes human vulnerability different from that of a wounded animal. Furthermore, to these two, we should also add the “demonic” immortality whose Freudian name is the (death) drive, the very core of the Neighbor-Thing. 829

[This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, there is no face-to-face, neither the analyst nor his analysand sees the other’s face: only in this way can the dimension of the Neighbor-Thing emerge.]

Butler on Levinas, Arendt

Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger At European Graduate School in 2011

The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place.

The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose and responding to solicitations and languages we may not understand or even wish to understand.

… I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered.

Can we understand the working of an ethical obligation upon our sensibilities. Indeed this word sensibility is one that Levinas reserves for that region of responsiveness that precedes the ego. A kind of response that therefore is and is not my response. To say it is my response is to lodge the ego as its source. But what we’re trying to talk about here is a form of responsiveness that implies a dispossession of the egological.

Ethical obligations that impose themselves upon us without our consent.

It is, of course, one thing to claim this in the abstract, but quite another to understand what the difficulties are in struggling for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, we recognize and affirm an interconnection with them, even when we do not know their names or speak their language. At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.

My own thesis is that the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the global circuits in these times depends on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. If I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary.

If I am only bound to those who are “human” in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling.

But if ethical relations are mediated – and I use that word deliberately here – confounding questions of location such that what is happening “there” also happens in some sense “here” and if what is happening “there” depends on the event being registered in several “elsewheres”, then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a “here” and “there” that are fundamentally bound to one another.

In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also, no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost. It is not just that one discrete population views another through certain media moments, but that such a response makes evident a form of global connectedness, however provisional, with those whose lives and actions are registered in this way. In short, to be unprepared for the media image that overwhelms can lead not to paralysis but to a situation of (a) being moved, and so acting precisely by virtue of being acted upon and (b) being at once there and here, and in different ways, accepting and negotiating the multi-locality of ethical connections we might rightly call global.

Can we, then, turn to some versions of ethical philosophy in order to reformulate what it means to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds?

I am trying to articulate a version of cohabitation that follows from the account of ethical obligation I am describing. Turning to Palestine/Israel to suggest a set of Jewish views of cohabitation that demand a departure from communitarianism and even Jewish communitarianism and that may serve as a critical alternative during this time that state of Israel seeks to secure its claim to represent Jewishness.

Levinas’s position allows us the following conclusion: that the set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no ways depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual.

Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation.

Here is where a most painful division within Levinas’s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don’t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own.

On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. It is an agonizing contradiction at the heart of Levinas’s writing. But is it possible to take the ethical philosophy formulated there and deploy it against the very exclusionary assumptions by which it is sometimes supported? Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary condition and limit?

Let us take as an example his argument that ethical relations are asymmetrical. In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean? Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?

For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself.

I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain intertwinement between that other life, all those other lives, and my own — one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.

In my view (which is surely not mine alone) the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense “our” life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.

In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another.

And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one’s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one’s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.

Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us. In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precarity [precariousness].

At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one’s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.

If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.

It is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other, and readers of Levinas object all the time to his formulation that we are, all of us, in some sense responsible for that which persecutes us. He does not mean that we bring about our persecution – not at all. Rather, “persecution” is the strange and disconcerting name that Levinas gives for an ethical demand that imposes itself upon us against our will. We are, despite ourselves, open to this imposition, and though it overrides our will, its shows us that the claims that others make upon us are part of our very sensibility, our receptivity, and our answerability. We are, in other words, called upon, and this is only possible because we are in some sense vulnerable to claims that we cannot anticipate in advance, and for which there is no adequate preparation.

For Levinas, there is no other way to understand the ethical reality; ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that vulnerability and by that ethical relation. This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm.

This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the “you” whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this “I” makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego.

Another way to put this point is that the “I” becomes undone in its ethical relation to the “you” which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible. If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation to you. The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.

Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt? Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered.

And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to co-habit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to co-habit the earth.

There is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. As I have suggested, to make such a claim is to enter into a policy of genocide. This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes mode of equality for a necessarily and irreversibly heterogenous population.

Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation serve as well as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population, and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable.

Thus, from unchosen co-habitation, Arendt derives notions of universality an equality

that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable.

But what is evident is that her views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality were in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state.

Although it is so often taught that Israel became an historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews, there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnus, who thought among the most important lessons of the Holocaust was an opposition to illegitimate state violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation.

For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live.

For whoever “we” are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion.

We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the “chosen people” but rather to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a liveable life.

In Sweden on May 27 2011 at the Nobel Museum Butler gave a similar talk and this is her paper here. IF you want to download it click here. Download a copy of Butler’s talk

butler antigone lacan real

The Act as Feminine: Antigone Between Lacan and Butler
Author: A. Hugill. Goldsmiths College London.

Lacan insists throughout his lectures on Antigone that the tragic heroine should be taken as exemplary of the beautiful, in the Kantian sense.

… the relation of the beautiful to death and desire in Lacan – would gain nuance if the concept of the beautiful from which Lacan is working, namely as it appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgement, were further elaborated.

Echoing Kant’s own definition of the beautiful, Lacan frames it in terms of the pure ‘there is’ (il y a); that which is beautiful “communicate[s] a sign of understanding that is situated precisely at equal distance from the power of the imagination and that of the signifier.” Similarly, Kant’s crucial insight in the Critique of Judgement is to radicalize any exclamation that a thing is beautiful, by pointing to the indeterminate character of the object in question.

Beauty, rather than being a property of an object, describes a sensation of pleasure arising from an overwhelming feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) engendered by the free play of the cognitive powers, imagination (Einbildungskraft) and understanding (Verstand), insofar as they are not restricted by any determinate concept.

Beauty is distinguished from the good and the agreeable inasmuch as it is, for Kant, the only free liking. This free liking to which Kant refers is called favour (Gunst) and it is marked by a “letting-be” of the object, a disinterested interest. Interest in the Critique of Judgement refers to a certain use-value, desire or concern with the existence of the object that, in order for a pure aesthetic judgement to arise, should not be taken into consideration.

Lacan’s own definition of the structure of desire is in fact precisely in tune with this definition of beauty as disinterested interest: the object cause of desire (the objet petit a), for Lacan, can never be attained and so too causes desire to function as a means without end. In the same paradoxical manner, one’s desire resists conceptual rationalization and is sustained by the tension of its unfulfillment. Something remains beautiful so long as it resists being fully conceptualized.

The feeling of the sublime describes those “moments when something entrances us so much that we are ready to forget (and to renounce) everything, our own well-being and all that is associated with it; moments when we are convinced that our existence is worth something only in so far as we are capable of sacrificing it.” In the case of Antigone, we see a subject who identifies entirely with the Thing, the limit, without a protective distance and in so doing meets her demise.

It is against this backdrop that Antigone’s act is radically re-thought by the Lacanian school, as a case of pure means. For Lacan, Antigone is precisely driven by a certain jouissance and not – as is the case with Creon – by any adherence to a concept of an ethical good (representing family or divine law, as some other commentators suggest). As Butler explains, “Antigone will emerge, then, for Lacan as a problem of beauty, fascination, and death as precisely what intervenes between the desire for the good, the desire to conform to the ethical norm, and thereby derails it, enigmatically, from its path.” Antigone’s act could not be judged beautiful in the Kantian sense if it were merely an external embodiment of a moral good. It is precisely the non-conceptual element of her act that fascinates Lacan and propels his interpretation forward in his later consideration of feminine sexuality in Seminar XX.

Zupancic’s description of the sublime as the ‘jouissance of the Other’ in the above-cited passage provides a key to understanding why it is that Antigone’s act is formulated as a ‘feminine act.’ In Seminar XX: Encore,, feminine jouissance is defined precisely as the ‘jouissance of the Other.’ In this lecture, Lacan discusses the particularity of feminine jouissance in contrast to phallic jouissance. The title of the seminar, meaning “again”, signifies the manner in which enjoyment (jouissance) is never satisfied. There is always a gap or remainder left over and desire is sustained through this impossibility of satisfaction in the sexual relationship. In his lesson “On jouissance,” Lacan famously says that “to man insofar as he is endowed with the organ said to be phallic – I said, ‘said to be’ – the corporal sex or sexual organ of woman – I said ‘of woman,’ whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole – woman’s sexual organ is of no interest except via the body’s jouissance.”

He is here describing what he calls ‘phallic’ jouissance or the jouissance of the organ – which should not be misconstrued as concerning a biological category. There are phallic women and non-phallic men. It rather denotes to what extent a person identifies with the phallic function. Phallic or “sexual” jouissance, for Lacan, is “the obstacle owing to which man does not come (n’arrive pas)… to enjoy woman’s body, precisely because what he enjoys is the jouissance of the organ.”

Feminine jouissance, on the other hand, is “beyond the phallus” by virtue of its non-subsumption in the phallic order. Impossible to know anything about it other than that some women (and men) experience it, Lacan explains it using an example of mystical ecstasy. In his invocation of God and the mystics, Lacan’s ‘explanation’ of feminine jouissance points to a pure jouissance of being, a being that is at the very limit of language. With recourse to (post)-Lacanian thinkers like Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, it is possible to conceive of this feminine jouissance as relating to the primary relationship with the m(O)ther and the pre- or extra-symbolic inscription of language on the body. In Kristeva, we find a model of this in her concept of the semiotic, the unnamable within the symbolic, what she calls the “transsymbolic, transpaternal function of poetic language.”

Returning to Antigone, we find in Lacan’s Ethics a clear alignment of Antigone’s act – her unwavering love for the pure ‘there is’ of her brother – with this experience of the limits of language. Antigone’s act is fixed to the singularity of her brother’s being, without reference to any particular content:

“The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, or of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is nothing more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man. That break is manifested at every moment in the fact that language punctuates everything that occurs in the movement of life.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

The purity of Antigone’s act is at the limits of the means-ends logic constituting the symbolic order. The work to which Antigone commits herself, insofar as it can be called a ‘work,’ is marked by a ceaseless ‘unworking.’ She quite literally goes to the limit – to her own death – and as the multiple and never-ending interpretations of Sophocles’ play suggest, Antigone’s insistence is ultimately ambiguous with regard to any positive conceptualization and offers no determinate program in advance. Though her explicit action is to bestow Polyneices with a proper burial, it is uncertain in which name she insists upon doing so (whether divine or family law, or defiance of the state, or something entirely else).

Lacan suggests that Antigone acts in relation to the pure ‘there is,’ the singularity of her brother independent of any particular content, in the ineffaceable character of what is. Lacan regards this unshakeable yet indeterminate stance as the crucial issue of Sophocles’ text, and the reason for its ceaseless fascination:

“What is, is, and it is to this, to this surface, that the unshakeable, unyielding position of Antigone is fixed. She rejects everything else. The stance of the-race-is-run is nowhere better illustrated than here. And whatever else one relates it to, is only a way of causing uncertainty or disguising the absolutely radical character of the position of the problem in the text.” [Lacan, Ethics, 279]

In his book Enjoy Your Symptom!, Zizek draws on this insight with regard to Antigone, in order to put forward a model of a political subjectivity that might be called ‘anarcho-communist.’ He recounts a historical event: Tito’s ‘No!’ to Stalin in 1948, or the split of Yugoslav Communists from the international communist movement. Zizek argues that the importance of this act was to deny Stalin’s hegemony outside of any pre-determined positive ideological project, and to do so from the very situated position of communism itself; to resist Stalin as a communist, to create a rupture in the communist monolith from within, and to subject it to renewed critical consideration. Zizek remarks that a typical liberal reproach to this Lacanian ethic is to depict it as incompatible with a notion of community, as a suicidal ecstasy that suspends the social dimension. Instead, Zizek wants to suggest that a ‘suicidal gesture’ –as Antigone comes to exemplify it – is at the very foundation of every new social link: “with an act, stricto sensu, we can therefore never fully foresee its consequences, i.e., the way it will transform the existing symbolic space: the act is a rupture after which ‘nothing remains the same.’” Antigone’s No! to Creon is presented as the real feminine act, the real ethical act as such, because it is situated at the limit of being, the very birthplace of the social itself, a place of pure potentiality from which real change can emerge.

[…] However, at the heart of Mendieta’s artistic action is a commitment to a certain identity, charged with a kind of naïve essentialism. And it is this fixed notion of community that both Butler and Lacan are working against in their writing on Antigone, though from very different poles. On the one hand,

Butler wants to posit a multiplicity of meaning that is never fixed beyond the performance of a deed. In this sense, Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’ is not so different from the Lacanian ethical idea; but only to the extent that it puts into question the notion of a ‘doer behind the deed’ – a fixed subjecthood – just as the Lacanian ethical act destabilizes the subject.

[…] Rather than pursuing the destabilized subject to the point of rupture, extreme danger and risk, the point where new possibilities truly emerge, Butler believes in the possibility to gradually dismantle what already exists by parodically using the tools already given, without the act of destruction.

Converging on the body of Antigone, we can see two political stances emerge: death-driven insistence on the singularity of being in contrast to a vitalist view of the limitless plasticity or multiplicity of being. In this sense, Antigone’s legacy concerns, fundamentally, no less than the state of our social order itself. Antigone brings to the fore the question of resistance today. Is it any longer possible to resist capitalist-patriarchal heteronormativity by means of parody? Or is it not, rather, that notions of parody and performance have themselves been subsumed within that very order itself and thus exposed to their own impotency?

Sophocles’ Antigone has been repeatedly resurrected over the last centuries as a result of the fascinating, timeless and unresolved problematics that it presents. In Lacan’s account, mobilized to support his ethics, the radical non-instrumentality of Antigone’s act is brought to the fore. In this way, it becomes for Lacan the site of similarly constituted ideas: the beautiful and the sublime in Kant’s aesthetics, and feminine jouissance. I have added to this list désoeuvrement and radical passivity. What each of these thoughts holds in common is a paradoxical active-passivity, an ‘unworking’ that pursues the limits of experience. In the pursuit of the limit – the Lacanian Real – the subject is in a position of extreme risk and death-driven instability without recourse to any pre-determined conceptual aim. For Zizek, this is the act par excellence, the act that puts into crisis the stability of any order. Indeed, Antigone’s act “most forcefully exposes the utter injustice and contingency of the Law, the fact that the Law functions precisely to ‘actively’…cover over the fact that it is constructed across a void.”

undead Kant

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

Fink’s take on Bollas

Bruce Fink’s take on Christopher Bollas (it isn’t pretty)
Note that Bollas (1983), who is referenced by many relationalists, tried to co-opt Lacan’s term Other by situating the Other in himself as analyst. He wrote, “It is a feature of our present day understanding of the transference, that the Other source of the analysand’s free association is the psychoanalyst’s countertranference” (p.3). This reduces the triad Lacan presented as crucial to the analytic situation — the analysand’s ego, the Other (as the analysand’s unconscious), and the analyst’s ego — to a dyad, which amounts to a collapse of the symbolic dimension into the imaginary. For example, rather than simply ask his analysand “Helen” why she thought she often lapsed into silence (or what was going through her mind at such times, to see if anything had occurred to her from the Freudian “Other scene” known as the unconscious — the “anderer Schauplatz” that Freud 1900/1958 pp. 48 and 536, borrows from Fechner — or if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, to see if the pauses were related to her history) Bollas responded to her by saying that it must be difficult for her “to speak to this stranger (the analyst) and … to entrust the simplest things to him” (p. 13). This total presumption on his part is based on his own sense of what it must be like to talk to someone new (many of my analysands, for example, have no such trouble at the outset). Moreover, this interpretation, like several others he made based on his countertransference, had little if any effect, and Helen’s silences only seemed to stop when they were connected the experience of her mother — that is, her history with her mother. Note that this is probably what she would have told him at the outset ( that is, approximately a year earlier) had he simply asked if anyone had ever lapsed into silence like that with her in the past, since it was her mother who had done so. The detour he took via his own subjectivity — that is, his attempt to understand her experience through his own experience of himself with her in the analytic setting — seems quite sterile, requiring him to make a series of guesses based on his own personality and countertranference, none of which really seem to hit the mark. And this detour (this attempt to fathom her subjectivity on the bases of his own subjectivity) is necessitated by his failure to ask one of the most elementary questions imaginable. [Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Page 149. note 26.]

Butler take on Bollas

The analyst is, in her own way, dispossessed in the moment of acting as its site of transfer for me, and for reason that I cannot know. What am I calling on her to be? And how does she take up that call? GA 55

… Bollas makes the case that the analyst must not only allow himself to become used but even “be prepared on occasion to become situationally ill” (Bollas 204). The analyst allows hims to be deployed in the environmental idiom of the analysand at the same time as he develops a reflective and deliberate capacity for analysis within that difficult situation. … One patient speaks and then falls silent, leaving Bollas with a sense of aloneness and disorientation. When he finally gives voice to this sense within the session, it is to suggest that for and with him the patient has effectively recreated the environment in which she had felt suddenly isolated and lost as a young child. He asks whether she has asked him to inhabit this experience through her long pauses so that he can know what it was she then felt. What she offers, then, is less a narrative than a recreated scene of suddenly abandoned communication and a disorienting loss of contact.

There is a narrative dimension to his subsequent intervention since he asks whether this experience belongs to her past. The point, however, is less to reconstruct the precise details of the story than to establish another possibility for communication within the transference.

When he suggests that she has given him the position of re-experiencing her own experience of loss and absence, he communicates to her in a way that has not been done before, and the conversation that follows, explicitly thematizing this broken form of communication, constitutes a more connected mode of communication, working to alter the default scene of address.

The model of psychoanalytic intervention that Bollas affirms constitutes a significant departure from the classical notion of the cold and distant analyst who keeps every counter-transferential issue to himself. For Bollas, “the analyst will need to become lost in the patient’s world, lost in the sense of not knowing what his feelings and states of mind are in any one moment” (qtd in Butler 57).

Later he remarks that only when the analyst presents himself to be used by the patient is there any hope that the counter-transference can facilitate a new set of object relations:

“Only by making a good object (the analyst) go somewhat mad can such a patient believe in his analysis and know that the analyst has been where he has been and has survived and emerged intact” (qtd in Butler 57).

Bollas clearly suggests that the analyst must allow him- or herself to be impinged upon by the client, even undergo a kind of dispossession of self, as well as to maintain a reflective psychoanalytic distance and attitude.

His interpretations were meant to be played with — kicked around, mulled over, torn to pieces — rather than regarded as the official version of the truth. [Bollas qtd in Butler 57].

Butler structure of address

If I give an account, and give it to you, then my narrative depends upon a structure of address. But if I can address you, I must first have been addressed, brought into the structure of address as a possibility of language before I was able to find my own way to make use of it. This follows, not only from the fact that language first belongs to the other and I acquire it through a complicated form of mimesis, but also because the very possibility of linguistic agency is derived from the situation in which one finds oneself addressed by a language one never chose. GA 53

I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, but an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. GA 63

This view has implications for the making of moral judgements as well: namely, that the structure of address conditions the making of judgements about someone or his or her actions; that it is not reducible to the judgement; and that the judgement, unbeholden to the ethics implied by the structure of address, tends toward violence. … To hold a person accountable for his or her life in narrative form may even be to require a falsification of that life in order to satisfy the criterion of a certain kind of ethics, one that tends to break with relationality. GA 63

.. we must think of a susceptibility to others that is unwilled , unchosen, that is a condition of our responsiveness to others, even a condition of our responsibility for them. It means, among other things, that this susceptibility designates a nonfreedom and, paradoxically, it is on the basis of this susceptaibility over which we have no choice that we become responsible for others. GA 87-88

Butler on Arendt

Here is her article Monday August 29, 2011 JB asks what did Arendt mean by the term “banality of evil”? JB takes up Arendt’s interpretation of the Eichmann trial. Butler insists that what Arendt meant by this statement was not intended to convey any notion that what the Nazis did was nothing to be noted, boring etc. On the contrary, the crimes of the holocaust is proof that what went on was a prohibition of thinking, a non-thinking instead of a thinking. Essentially JB is making the case for philosophy, for a new way of thinking, a critical thinking. JB states:

“If the “I” who thinks is part of a “we” and if the “I” who thinks is committed to sustaining that “we”, how do we understand the relation between “I” and “we” and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?”

Again this is touches upon the themes dear to JB’s theoretical project; that proper thinking implicates more than the individual, a thinking is necessarily ‘beyond the self’ addressing a wider community. This is what of course, Arendt points out that Eichmann’s failure.

JB also makes the point that Arendt’s critical defense of Kant’s philosophy against Eichmann’s attempted exploitation of it for his explanation for his actions, shows that Arendt was committed to bringing together the seeds of German classical philosophical thought and Jewish politics, “In many ways, Arendt’s approach is itself quite astonishing, since she is, among other things, trying to defend the relation between Jews and German philosophy against those who would find in German culture and thought the seeds of national socialism.”

From a May 2007 article on Arendt in LRB

“A polity requires the capacity to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging. This is the vanquishing of self-love – the movement away from narcissism and nationalism – which forms the basis for a just politics that would oppose both nationalism and those forms of state violence that reproduce statelessness and its sufferings.”

precarity question (8)

Question:

If preserving the life of the other is a precondition of the self, are we not still arguing out of self preservation?

Judith Butler: (at 6:33)

If it’s the case that I only am obligated to preserve the life of the other because I must preserve my own life and if my own life is the final reason why I preserve the life of the other then you’re absolutely right (I’m a modernist egological Bush right-winger RT).

But if in preserving the life of the other I am articulating my social and political existence in the relation to the other then I have left an egological framework for a relational one and I have lost my bounded I, or rather recast it as a certain kind of relational practice, so I would be preserving my ‘self’ my new self my recast self as a secondary effect of preserving the life of the other since it would turn out that I am bound. But it would not be for myself rather than the other or on the basis of any other distinction between self and other that that act of preservation would occur.

precarity (7)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

Finally, I want to say that sometimes these bonds are wretched ones, that one population is up against another in ways that feel unliveable, and the modes of interdependency are characterized as exploitative or colonizing. This is surely the case in Israel/Palestine where the notions of a national home and homeland are inevitably implicated in relations of internal heterogeneity and adjacency which bring up the issue of unchosen co-habitation in yet a different way.

Israel and Palestine are joined; they overlap, and through the settlements and the military presence, Israel invades and pervades Palestinian lands. Even if they sought a full-scale separation from each other, the two would still be bound to one another by the separation wall, by the border, by the military powers that control the border. The relationship would only be extended in its wretched form.

There are settlements now in the West Bank populated with right wing Israelis who nevertheless depend on local Palestinians for conveying food or menial jobs. And we might point out as well that the soldiers at the checkpoint are in constant contact with Palestinians who are waiting there or passing through. These are forms of contact, adjacency, unwilled modes of co-habitation that are not only clearly inegalitarian, but where the military presence is hostile, threatening, and destructive.

I would include among these the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which now has an Israeli version, which stipulates that co-existence requires equality and cannot take place under conditions where one party is subjected to colonial subjugation and disenfranchisement – an Arendtian view, to be sure. These are but a few of the many insistent and important ways of practicing and thinking about alliance, modes of working together, but sometimes working in separate venues against the illegal occupation and for Palestinian dignity and self-determination.

Over and against these instances of co-habitation, there are, as we know, antagonistic ties, wretched bonds, raging and mournful modes of connectedness. In those cases where living with others on adjacent lands or on contested or colonized lands produces aggression and hostility in the midst of that co-habitation.

Colonial subjugation and occupation is surely one way to live without choice next to and under a colonizing population. The mode of unchosen co-habitation that belongs to the colonized is surely not the same as the notion of a democratic plurality established on grounds of equality.

And this is why only those forms of alliance that struggle to overcome colonial subjugation carry the trace of any future possibility of co-habitation between the inhabitants of that piece of earth. Otherwise, Palestinians remain disproportionately exposed to precarity, and Israelis act to shore up their territory and majority-rule through extending colonial control and heightening their modes of military aggression.

It seems to me that even in situations of antagonistic and unchosen modes of cohabitation, certain ethical obligations emerge.

Since we do not choose with whom to cohabit the earth, we have to honor those obligations to preserve the lives of those we may not love, we may never love, we do not know, and did not choose.

Second, these obligations emerge from the social conditions of political life, not from any agreement we have made, nor from any deliberate choice. And yet, these very social conditions of liveable life are precisely those that have to be achieved. We cannot rely on them as presuppositions that will guarantee our good life together. On the contrary, they supply the ideals toward which we must struggle.

Because we are bound to realize these conditions, we are also bound to one another, in passionate and fearful alliance, often in spite of ourselves, but ultimately for ourselves, for a “we” who is constantly in the making.

Thirdly, these conditions imply equality, as Arendt tells us, but also an exposure to precarity (a point derived from Levinas) which leads us to understand as a

global obligation imposed upon us to find political and economic forms that to minimize precarity and establish economic political equality.

Those forms of cohabitation characterized by equality and minimized precarity become the goal to be achieved by any struggle against subjugation and exploitation, but also the goals that start to be achieved in the practices of alliance that assemble across distances to achieve those very goals.

We struggle in, from, and against precarity. Thus, it is not from pervasive love for humanity or a pure desire for peace that we strive to live together.

We live together because we have no choice, and yet we must struggle to affirm the ultimate value of that unchosen social world, and that struggle makes itself known and felt precisely when we exercise freedom in a way that is necessarily committed to the equal value of lives. We can be alive or dead to the sufferings of others, – they can be dead or alive to us, depending on how they appear, and whether they appear at all;

but only when we understand that what happens there also happens here, and that “here” is already an elsewhere, and necessarily so, that we stand a chance of grasping the difficult and shifting global connections in which we live, which make our lives possible – and sometimes, too often, impossible.

precarity (6)

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.

In my view, ethical claims emerge from bodily life itself, a bodily life that is not always unambiguously human. After all, the life that is worth preserving, and safeguarding, who should be protected from murder (Levinas) and genocide (Arendt) is connected to, and dependent upon, non-human life in essential ways; this follows from the idea of the human animal, a different point of departure for thinking about politics.

If we try to understand in concrete terms what it means to commit ourselves to preserving the life of the other, we are invariably confronted with the bodily conditions of life, and so a commitment not only to the other’s corporeal persistence, but to all those environmental conditions that make life liveable.

The possibility of whole populations being annihilated either through genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe they can decide among whom they will inhabit the earth, but because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics:

the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency.

We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance and who, therefore, are at risk of statelessness, homelessness and destitution under unjust and unequal political conditions.

As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency.

Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable, and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance. In my own view, then, a different social ontology would have to start from this shared condition of precarity in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity.

No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life – it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance.

Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility.

And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.