Category: ethics

zupančič ethics of real

Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real. 2000
It is at precisely this point that we must situate the scandal of this dialogue: the terror of Turelure ‘s demands pales before the terror inflicted upon Sygne ( through the intermediary of Badilon ) by the Holy Father.

Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, has not lost its currency. The commandment in question is evident in the profane discourse of ethics (and politics), where it presents itself under the flag of ‘cultural diversity’ and the associated commandment: ‘Respect the difference of the other.’ This commandment, it is true, does not ask that we love the neighbour/other — it suffices that we “tolerate” him or her. But it seems that at bottom, as Freud would say, it comes down to the same thing. … Thus Badiou has observed:

A first suspicion arises when we consider that the proclaimed apostles of ethics and of the ‘right to difference’ are visibly horrified by any difference that is even a bit pronounced. Because for them, African costumes are barbarous, Islamic fundamentalists are frightening, as is the Chinese totalitarian, and so on. In truth, this famous “other” is not presentable unless he is a good other, that is to say, insofar as he’s the same as us … Just as there is no freedom for the enemies of freedom, so there is no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences.

That is to say: one finds here the same conjuncture as in the case of the commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’: what happens if this neighbour is ‘wicked’, if he or she has a completely different idea of the world, if he or she gets his or her enjoyment in a manner that conflicts with mine?

When Lacan, in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, comments on the commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, and on Freud’s hesitation regarding this subject, he formulates its impasse with essentially same words as Badiou uses in speaking of the ‘right to ‘difference ‘ :

My egoism is quite content with a certain altruism, altruism of the kind that is situated on the level of the useful. And it even becomes the pretext by means of which I can avoid taking up the problem of the evil I desire, and that my neighbour desires also … What I want is the good of others in the image of my own. That doesn’t cost so much. What I want is the good of others provided that it remain in the image of my own.

we cannot conceive of radical alterity, of the ‘completely other’ (to which Lacan gives the Freudian name das Ding [the Thing]), without bringing up the question of the Same (as opposed to the similar). The similar [le semblable] presupposes and necessitates difference; it requires — in Badiou’s terms – a multiplicity, even an ‘infinite multiplicity’.

Contrary to this, the problem of enjoyment is the problem of the Same, which must be excluded so that this multiplicity can be closed, or ‘united’.

The moment the similar gives way to the Same, evil appears, and with it the hostility associated with the ‘completely other’.

Sygne’s real ethical act does not consist simply in her sacrifice of everything that is dearest to her; this act is, rather, to be found in the final scene of the play: the act in the proper sense of the term, the ethical act, resides in Sygne’s ‘no’ It is only this ‘no’ that propels her sacrifice into the dimension of the real. Let us now turn to this ‘no’ to determine its status, and to specify the relation between the two scenes or ‘events’ in question, Sygne’s sacrifice and her ‘no’.

The thesis which seems the most questionable is the one according to which we realize at the end that Sygne, ‘by some part of herself’, had not really given way or adhered to the politico-religious compromise demanded of her. Contrary to this reading we would insist that:

1. Her act (of sacrifice) is not an instance of ‘giving up on one’s desire ‘ but, rather, one of pure desire; it is characteristic of the logic of desire itself to have as its ultimate horizon the sacrifice of the very thing in the name of which Sygne is ready to sacrifice everything.

2. There is in fact a connection that leads from ‘Sygne’s choice ‘ (her sacrifice) to her final ‘ no ‘. That is to say: without her initial choice, Sygne would never have reached an occasion for Versagung, and — it follows from this —

3 . In the final analysis, it is precisely Badilon who leads her to this ‘negation’; this means that he is not the simple opposite of the analyst but that, in a certain respect, he ‘personifies’ the position of the analyst.

Maxim of ethics of desire: Sadder than to lose one’s life is it to lose one’s reason for living.

Sacrifice everything, including her life to HONOUR (her reason to live).

Life is situated not in the register of being, but in the register of having, HONOUR is something that belongs to the very being of Sygne. 231

It is not this choice: Life or HONOUR

It is this choice: if HONOUR is the only thing left to her, if she has nothing else to give, she will have to give this last thing 231

The logic of Sygne’s sacrifice remains inscribed in the logic of desire, and represents the ultimate horizon of her ‘fundamental fantasy’. But the paradox here is that the moment Sygne attains this ultimate horizon, she is already obliged to go beyond it, to leave it behind.

ethics zupancic review

Jason B. Jones. “The Real Happens” Emory University jbjones AT emory.edu Review of: Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. New York: Verso, 2000.

The point of Lacan’s identification of the Real with the impossible is not simply that the Real is some Thing that is impossible to happen. On the contrary, the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens. This is what is so traumatic, disturbing, shattering–or funny–about the Real. The Real happens precisely as the impossible. (“Signs”)

Ethics of the Real merits the serious attention of anyone interested in one of the great ethical crises of our time: Why is nothing but fundamentalism deemed worth dying for any longer?
Continue reading “ethics zupancic review”

taking responsibility for excessive jouissance

In arguing that the subject’s relationship to itself changes as a consequence of symbolic divestiture, Žižek promotes a conception of ethics that psychoanalytic theorists will recognize as Lacanian insofar as it depends upon an intrasubjective relationship. Lacan’s statement that the only ethics proper to psychoanalysis involves the subject’s relationship to its desire (“do not give way on your desire”) explicitly contrasts both with the ethics of responsibility to the other extolled in Levinas and Derrida and with the “service of goods” that underwrites utilitarian versions of ethics. While remaining committed to an intrasubjective version of ethics, Žižek derives a somewhat different ethical stance from the later Lacanian theory of the sinthome.

Decidedly, this is not the ethics of the “service of goods,” the traumatic encounter with the impossible demand of the Other, some officious busy-ness in the lives of our neighbours, or adherence to the Golden Rule. Instead, the ethical stance requires taking responsibility for one’s own excessive dimension and jouissance. (Rothenberg, Excessive 194)

reinhard lacan with levinas

Reinhard, Kenneth. “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas” MLN The Johns Hopkins University Press, 110.4 (1995) 785-808.

Hence for Lacan the sixties did not signal the libido’s momentary liberation from the constraints of repressive cultural ideals, but the construction of yet one more line of defense against the disturbing impossibility of intersubjective sexuality, the inconsistency in the symbolic order that materializes as a factum or “Thing” whose concealment, according to Lacan, both defines human relations and marks their limit.

“Love” has at least two distinct and perhaps contradictory valences for Lacan. On the one hand, love can dissimulate the unavailability of a sexual relationship by imagining a relationship between the self and the other. This version of love projects a “specular mirage” that simulates symbolic interaction by addressing me from a hypothetical point where I am seen in the way I would like to be seen, thereby fostering an illusion of reciprocity that is “essentially deception” (Seminar XI 268).

footnote: In Seminar VIII: Transference (1960-1) and Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1963-4), Lacan distinguishes between the two modalities of love in terms of two aspects of transference. The goal of analysis that emerges in the later sixties and seventies involves “traversing the fantasy,” the process in which the analyst, idealized in the first moment of transference as a supposed subject of knowledge, is de-idealized or “de-completed” in transference’s second moment of “separation,” in which love’s effect of imaginary coherence is stripped away to reveal love as pure drive.

On the other hand, Lacan suggests that there is another love, a love not bound by the circulation of images, but which arises, as Juliet Flower MacCannell has written, “outside the limits of the law” (25)–neither within nor beyond specularity, but on what we might call, after Levinas, the “hither side” of the mirror, more proximate to me than either myself or my alter-ego.3 Insofar as it aims precisely at the traumatic lack of a sexual relationship, this love is closely allied with the sublimation of the excessive enjoyment or jouissance that in Lacan’s Seminar VII forms the imperative of the ethics of psychoanalysis.4 At the conclusion of Seminar XI, Lacan warns that specular love barely conceals an internecine aggressivity that culminated most horrifically in the sacrificial fury of the Holocaust (274-6). 5

The “other” love, on the other hand, in aiming, as Renata Salecl writes, at “what remains of the object when all the imaginary and symbolic features are annihilated,” sacrifices precisely those illusory characteristics of the other person that fuel the love of sacrifice. 6

For both Lacan and Levinas, substitution does not imply an act of self-sacrifice within an economy of expiation and redemption, but rather the sacrifice of sacrifice. The moral economy of sacrifice entails giving up enjoyment for a place in the symbolic order (always advertised as a “higher” pleasure). The sacrifice of sacrifice, on the other hand, insists not on the enjoyment that attends responsibility, but rather on the responsibility for enjoyment, the obligation to maintain the jouissance that makes responsibility possible. In Lacan’s dictum, “the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one’s desire” (SVII 321); renunciation in the name of the symbolic order to morality is merely a ruse, a resistance to desire and the trauma that is its cause. For Levinas, enjoyment is not simply renounced by the subject of responsibility, but remains its intimate and ongoing condition: “only a subject that eats can be for-the-other, or can signify” (OTB E 74). Levinas articulates the responsibility of “for-the-other” as a substitution that determines not one meaning among others, but rather opens the field of signification as such. Like Lacan’s substitutive love, Levinasian responsibility institutes the process of metaphorization without abandoning jouissance, which indeed depends on the primal signification of substitution: “I can enjoy and suffer by the other only because I am for-the-other, am signification” (OTB 90). For Levinas the subject’s passive responsibility for its neighbor is experienced as a “deafening trauma” that creates the subject as the response to a call so loud or so close that it cannot be heard, cannot be fully translated into a message. In the deferred temporality that places ethics before ontology, responsiveness before being, the subject is produced as “the echo of a sound that would precede the resonance of this sound” (OTB 111)

Žižek universal singularity

Which is why, from the Lacanian perspective, it is problematic to clam that we humans “seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause of much tragedy”: on the contrary, we humans have enormous difficulty in accepting the infinity`(undeadness, excess of life) in the very core of our being, the strange immortality whose Freudian name is the death drive. IDLC 344

… for Lacan, the radically heterogeneous Thing whose traumatic impact decenters the subject is, … the primordial “Evil Thing,” something that cannot ever be sublated (aufgehobun) into a version of the Good;  … It is … the very unconditional “fanatical” commitment to a Cause which is the “death drive” at its purest and, as such, the primordial form of Evil: it introduces into the flow of (social) life a violent cut that throws it out of joint.  The Good comes afterwards, it is an attempt to “gentrify,” to domesticate, the traumatic impact of the Evil Thing.  In short the Good is the screened/domesticated Evil. IDLC 345

… the incompatibility of the Neighbour with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbour. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbour. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbour.

Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbour as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality.

Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality.

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasps this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity.

the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular. ID16-17

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.

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.

Arendt (4)

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

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. 11

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. We can choose in some ways how to live and where, and in local ways we can choose with whom to live. But if we were to decide with whom to co-habit the earth, we would be deciding which portion of humanity may live, and which may die.

If that choice is barred to us, that means that we are under an obligation to live with those who already exist, and that any choice about who may or may not live is always a genocidal practice, and
though we cannot dispute that genocide has happened, and happens still, we are wrong to think freedom in any ethical sense is ever compatible with the freedom to commit genocide.

The unchosen character of earthly co-habitation is, for Arendt, the condition of our very existence as ethical and political beings. 13

Arendt stands for this plurality when he argues that none of us may choose with whom to co-habit the earth; we can surely choose with whom to share a household and perhaps also with whom to share a neighborhood or a region, or where to draw the boundary of a state, but we are not in such instances deciding against the right to live for those who are outside of those communities.

But when people decide that they will not share the earth, that means that they are committed to
eradicating a population from the face of the earth. Not only is this choice an attack on co-habitation as a precondition of political life in Arendt’s view, but it commits us to the following proposition:

we must devise institutions and policies that actively preserve and affirm the non-chosen character of open-ended and plural co-habitation.

Not only do we live with those we never chose and to whom we may feel no immediate sense of social belonging, but we are also obligated to preserve those lives and the open-ended plurality that is the global population. 13

Arendt … has offered … an ethical view of co-habitation that serves as a guideline for particular forms of politics. In this sense, concrete political norms and policies emerge from the unchosen character of these modes of co-habitation. The necessity of co-habiting the earth is a principle that … must guide the actions and policies of any neighborhood, community, or nation. The decision to live in one community or another is surely justified as long as it does not imply that those who live outside the community do not deserve to live.

In other words, every communitarian ground for belonging is only justifiable on the condition that it is subordinate to a noncommunitarian opposition to genocide.

The way I read this, every inhabitant who belongs to a community belongs also to the earth, and this implies a commitment not only to every other inhabitant of that earth, but we can surely add, to sustaining the earth itself. And with this last proviso, I seek to offer an ecological supplement
Arendt’s anthropocentrism.

it appears that “belonging” must actually no know bounds and exceed every particular nationalist and communitarian limit. Both the arguments against genocide and the arguments for the rights of the stateless depend upon underscoring the limits of communitarianism. 15

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. 15-16

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. 16

Butler on Levinas (3)

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Butler on Levinas (2)

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

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. 8

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 interwinement (sic) between that other life, all those other lives, and my own – one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.

In my view … 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 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.

Can we use Levinas against himself? (1)

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

Butler’s Thesis

I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon 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. 2

– Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?

– Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take responsibility for it? If I myself did not make this suffering, am I still in some other sense responsible to it?

How do we approach these questions? … I want to suggest that the ethical solicitation that we encounter in, say, the photograph of war suffering brings up larger questions about ethical obligation.

… ethical obligation imposes itself upon us without our consent, suggesting that consent is not a sufficient ground for delimiting the global obligations which form our responsibility. 4

[What does it mean] 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? 5

I hope it will become possible to understand an alternative set of Jewish views on co-habitation, ones that not only demand a departure from communitarianism but that may serve as a critical alternative to the views and practices of the state of Israel, especially its version of political Zionism and settler colonialism.

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. And yet, he was of the one who claimed in an interview that the Palestinian had no face, and that he only meant to extend ethical obligations to those who were bound together by his version of Judeo-Christian and classical Greek origins. In some ways, he gave us the very principle that he betrayed. And this means that anyone and everyone are not only free, but obligated, to extend that principle to the Palestinian people, precisely because he could not. His failure directly contradicts his formulation of the demand to be ethically responsive to those who exceed our immediate sphere of belonging, but to whom we nevertheless belong, regardless of any question of what we choose or by what contracts we are bound, or what established forms of cultural belonging are available.

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. 7-8

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 limit?