ethics – Page 7 – objet (a)

sinnerbrink on Žižek on Hegel

International Journal of Žižek Studies. Volume Two, Number Two “The Hegelian “Night of the World”: Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality” Robert Sinnerbrink – Macquarie University (Australia)

Hegel’s 1805- 6 Jenaer Realphilosophie manuscripts, the enigmatic “night of the world” passage:

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head — there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful (Hegel 1974: 204; quoted in Verene 1985: 7-8).

Žižek goes on to link the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ with Schelling’s conception of the subject as “pure night of the Self”, “infinite lack of Being”; the “violent gesture of contraction” that also forms the basis of Hegel’s account of madness as the cutting of all links with external reality, which Hegel then construes as the subject’s regression to the level of the “animal soul” still unreflectively immersed in its immediate natural environment (Žižek 1997: 8; 1999: 34-35).

Where Žižek differs from Hegel, however, is in arguing that this withdrawal from the world, the subject’s contraction and severing of all links with the Umwelt, [Umwelt German, ‘environment’] is rather the founding gesture of ‘humanization’, indeed the emergence of subjectivity itself (1997: 8).

The passage through madness is thus an ontological necessity; there is no subjectivity without this experience of radical negativity, this cutting of links with the Umwelt, which is then followed by the construction of a symbolic universe of meaning (1997: 9; 1996: 78).

The question, psychoanalytically, is not so much how the fall into madness is possible, but rather how the subject is able to attain “normalcy” by climbing out of madness — for Hegel, this radical withdrawal from the world—in order to reconstitute social reality through symbolic mediation.

Indeed, rather than a metaphysical tract on the ‘totalising’ Subject of absolute idealism, Hegel’s famous passage can be read as an account of the radical finitude of the Subject; the constitutive negativity that both makes possible and delimits autonomous subjectivity. To quote Hegel:

Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject … (Hegel 1977: 19).

What is striking in this celebrated passage is the way that experiences of finitude—of death, negativity, absence, loss—are all presented as constitutive of the power of the self-conscious Subject as Geist.

Subjectivity is thus constituted through a negative self-relation: a relation to itself that is necessarily a relation to the Other; a mediated self-relation in which the self finds itself precisely in and through its relation to the Other. At the same time, this self-relation through the Other is made possible only because of a violent rending of the immediate self-feeling and immersion of this seemingly isolated proto-subject within its natural environment. The subject is not only negative self-relation, a relation to the Other, it is also a self-relating negativity: that which wins its truth (its self-identity in otherness) only through the experience of radical negativity or the freedom to negate itself, to say ‘no!’ to everything, even itself; or as Hegel puts it, through the experience of finding itself in and through “utter dismemberment”.

Once again, for Hegel this negativity is constitutive, ontological rather than ontic, as Heidegger would say. Self-conscious Spirit is this power of self-relating negativity, which is to say free subjectivity, only through “tarrying with the negative”. Indeed, this fundamental moment of negativity, we should note, is a decisive feature of every key experience in the phenomenological journey of consciousness and self-consciousness (the most famous example being the life-and-death struggle and experience of mastery and servitude, not to mention the alienated ‘freedom’ of self-consciousness in stoicism, scepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, or the radical affirmation of freedom in the French revolution and subsequent negative moment of Terror as the ‘violence’ of abstract universality). This power of radical negativity, this “abyss of freedom,” is precisely what for Hegel defines and determines “the Subject” (8).

In The Ticklish Subject as well as elsewhere, Žižek’s analysis of the Hegelian “night of the world”is explicitly linked with the question of abstract negativity and its relationship with concrete universal. In an argument charged with political resonances, Žižek shows how the radical negativity of subjectivity—the capacity to negate all our finite, particular determinations—enables the dialectical passage from abstract to concrete universality. In practical terms, this means there is a dimension of violence, conflict, or antagonism that cannot be eliminated in historical and socio-political experience. Far from rehearsing the cliché of Hegel’s reconciliationist stance towards the state, Žižek claims that the radical negativity of the subject—the ‘night of the world’ — means that there can be no concrete universal without the historico-political passage through madness, violence, even revolutionary terror (as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the post-revolutionary Jacobin Terror, an abstract negativity that ushered in the modern bourgeois state (Hegel 1977: 355-363)). This Hegelian argument concerning abstract negativity and concrete universality provides an essential backdrop, frequently misunderstood, to Žižek’s critique of various contemporary forms of ‘post-political’ ethical resistance to the state (most recently, Simon Critchley’s ethically grounded neo-anarchism (see Critchley 2007; Žižek 2006: 332-334; Žižek 2008: 339-350).

Žižek returns again and again to the Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality. What does it mean? Against the prevailing stereotype of Hegel’s subordinating of particularity to universality, Žižek points out that universality in its concrete dimension is realised through individualisation; that is, the concrete universal is embodied in the individual. As Žižek observes, Hegel was the first thinker to argue that the “properly modern notion of individualisation” occurs through secondary identification (1999: 90). The individual is initially immersed in its immediate milieu, the particular life-form into which he or she is born (family, local community).

It is only once one’s primary identifications with one’s ‘organic’ community are broken that one becomes an “individual,” namely by asserting one’s autonomy through identification with a secondary community that is also universal and ‘artificial’; that is, mediated and sustained through the free activity of independent subjects (profession, nation, independent peer-group versus traditional apprenticeship, organic community, prescribed social role, and so on) (Žižek 1999: 90).

The abstract opposition between primary and secondary identifications (where primary identifications are rejected in favour of secondary identifications) is suspended once the primary identifications are reintegrated and experienced as the “modes of appearance” of my secondary identifications (Žižek 1999: 90).

Žižek then further complicates this account of concrete universality, ‘crossbreeding’ it with Hegel’s distinction between neutral “positive” Universality and differentiated “actual”Universality (1999: 90). The former refers to the “impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content”; the latter to the actual existence of Universality, “which is individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted” (Žižek 1999: 91). The Universal as neutral ‘container’ that is indifferent towards the particulars it subsumes is contrasted with the Universal as “the power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation” (Žižek 1999: 91). The latter is the Universality of the individuated subject as power of the negative; the power to oppose and negate all particular determinate content.

Indeed the passage from abstract to concrete universal, Žižek argues, proceeds thanks to the power of abstract negativity; phenomenologically speaking, this power of the negative “comes into existence in the guise of the individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction” (Žižek 1999: 91)—via what the Phenomenology will later describe, with reference to the discursive understanding, as the subject’s power to “tarry with the negative”.

The striking conclusion Žižek draws from this analysis is that the only way to make the passage from abstract to concrete universality is via “the full assertion” of this power of radical negativity, the negation of all particular content (1999: 92). At one level this would seem to be an instance of the famous Hegelian Aufhebung; we must lose immediate reality in the self contraction of the “night of the world” in order to regain it as social reality, symbolically mediated by the subject; or we must renounce the immediate organic whole, submitting ourselves to the activity of the understanding, in order to regain it at a higher, mediated level as the “totality of Reason” (Žižek 1999: 92).

Here the standard objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung looms, much rehearsed by poststructuralist readers of Hegel (see Žižek 1991: 31-38); namely that Hegel allows the moment of radical negativity, recognises “the horror of the psychotic self-contraction,” the radical dismemberment in which Spirit finds itself, but only in order to dialectically recuperate this negativity in the name of the “reconstituted organic whole” (Žižek 1999: 92-3).

From Abstract to Concrete Universality

Žižek’s radical reading of Hegel challenges this orthodoxy: the passage through negativity, from abstract to concrete universality, is not about avoiding the moment of radical negativity in favour of the rational totality. Rather, it claims that this passage is unavoidable; the passage to the high passes through the low, the direct choice of the higher is precisely the way to miss it (Žižek 1999: 93).

Citing another favourite speculative passage from the Phenomenology, Žižek refers to the peculiar conjunction of opposites that Hegel observes in the case of the penis, a conjunction which Nature “naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfillment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination” (Hegel 1977: 210).

It is not a matter of choosing insemination rather than urination (as though these comprise an abstract opposition, as representational consciousness would have it).

Rather, we have to pass through the ‘wrong choice’ (biological excretion, urination) in order to attain the ‘right choice’ (biological conception, insemination, the reproduction of life): the speculative meaning — the Hegelian infinite judgment that articulates the co-existence of excretion/elimination and conception/reproduction, indeed the shift from biological conception to rational comprehension —emerges only as an after-effect of the first, ‘wrong’ reading, which is contained within, indeed constitutive of, the speculative meaning (Žižek 1999: 93).

Žižek’s point here is to show that the movement from abstract to concrete universality requires this passage through radical negativity, that is to say the ‘wrong’ choice of the abstract negativity of conflict and violence is the only way to arrive historically at the ‘right’ choice of a stable, rational, democratic state.

At the level of social and political life, the attempt to bypass the negative and directly choose “the ‘concrete universality’ of a particular ethical life-world” results in the even greater violence of a “regression to premodern organic society”; a denial of the “infinite right of subjectivity” that, for Hegel, is the principle of modernity itself (Žižek 1999: 93).

The modern subject-citizen cannot accept being immersed within a particular determinate social role prescribed within an organic social Whole; rather, as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the French revolution, it is only by passing through the “horror of revolutionary Terror” that the constraints of the premodern organic ‘concrete universality’ are destroyed and the “infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity” can thus be asserted (Žižek 1999: 93).

Again, Žižek questions the standard reading of Hegel’s famous analysis in the Phenomenology of abstract freedom and Terror, according to which the revolutionary project, with its “direct assertion of abstract Universal reason,” perishes in “self-destructive fury” because it fails to organise its revolutionary energy into a stable and differentiated social order (1999: 93).

Hegel’s point, rather, as Žižek argues, is to show how the revolutionary Terror, despite being an historical deadlock, is nonetheless necessary in order to effect the historical passage towards the modern rational state (1999: 93). The historical situation that opposes “a premodern organic body and the revolutionary Terror which unleashes the destructive force of abstract negativity” always involves an Hegelian forced choice:

“one has to choose Terror” (the ‘wrong’ choice) against premodern organic community, in order to create the terrain for the ‘right’ choice; namely to create the conditions “for the new post-revolutionary reconciliation between the demands of social Order and the abstract freedom of the individual” (Žižek 1999: 94).

The destruction of organic community, the subject’s ‘irrational’ insistence on some ‘abstract’ feature of the whole that disrupts its harmonious unity, is the very movement by which the subject is historically actualised — or to put it in Hegelese, the manner in which substance also becomes subject.

As Žižek argues, the unity that emerges from this passage through negativity is thus no longer a substantial organic unity; rather it is a “substantially different Unity,” a Unity grounded in negativity, one in which this movement of negativity assumes a positive existence (1999: 96)—precisely in the modern political state, the formalised ‘embodiment’ of negativity that nonetheless retains the trace of this violent power to expose the life of its citizens. Hegel thus anticipates the Foucaultian-Agambenian theme of biopolitics, the ‘negative’ power of the state to both expose and administer the biological life of its citizens. 14

Revolutionary violence disrupts social reality through the exercise of abstract negativity, temporarily returning the subject to the elemental level of proto-subjectivity, the dismembering violence of the ‘night of the world’. Here one cannot help but make the comparison between Hegel’s brutal observation concerning the guillotine—the post-revolutionary reduction of death to a mechanical cut, “a meaningless chopping off of a cabbage head” (Hegel 1977: 360; Žižek 2006: 43)—and the archaic revival of ‘sacrificial’ beheadings practised by Islamist terrorists. Such beheadings occur through knife-wielding executioner rather than the impersonal operation of the guillotine; and while performed in secret they are video recorded in order to be disseminated via Jihadist propaganda websites for a globally dispersed audience.

In the latter case, however, this abstract negativity or political violence is not in the service of “Absolute Freedom,” as was the case, from Hegel’s perspective, with the post-French revolutionary Terror.7 Rather, Islamist terrorism is more akin to a violent abstract negation of the modern ‘right of individual subjectivity’: a simultaneously ‘pre- and post-modern’, technologically primitive (knives, boxcutters) and sophisticated (internet and communicational media), attempt to negate the ‘morally decadent’ liberal democratic capitalist order that makes this right of subjectivity possible.

The point of Hegel’s analysis, it must be said, is to show that this revolutionary Terror is fundamentally self-undermining; that it cannot reconcile the drive towards (abstractly conceived) Absolute Freedom with the historically achieved norms of freedom and subjectivity that define the institutions of modernity. Žižek’s claim is that such violence is nonetheless historically unavoidable as the way in which the transition from abstract to concrete universality is effected.

Here I return to my earlier question concerning the relationship between imagination and understanding: the contrast between the ‘romantic’ reading of Hegel that gives priority to the ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination of the ‘night of the world’ (abstract negation) versus the ‘idealist’ reading that emphasises the “power of the negative” articulated through the discursive understanding (determinate negation).

Žižek combines the two forms of negativity (abstract and determinate) in a Schellingian manner, arguing that they are two aspects of the same power of negativity. This move, however, exposes him to the criticism that his account of revolutionary Terror flirts with a political romanticism that valorises the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggle over the determinate negation that results in the rational social and political institutions of the modern state.

For Hegel, the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben in the rational organisation of the self-reforming social and political institutions of modernity. We only revert to the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence when these norms and institutions have utterly broken down, lost all legitimacy and normative authority, that is, when the (violent) historical transition to a new configuration of Spirit is already well underway.

Must we say, however, with Žižek that abstract negation is the only way that concrete universality — the freedom of subjectivity— can be historically realised?

Global Capitalism: ‘End of History’ or ‘History of Violence’?

The question for us today, then, is to ask what happens when this rational totality (Western neoliberal democracy) becomes disturbed by the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism. There are at least two distinct Hegelian responses: one is to point to the role of the self-reforming institutions of modernity, those of capitalist liberal democracy, to effectively pacify, manage, or control these contradictory dynamics without entirely eliminating them. This line of thought — given popular expression in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) — tends to the conclusion that liberal democratic capitalist modernity is here to stay; we have effectively reached the ‘end of history’ in which radical revolutionary political transformations are no longer likely or even possible.

This ‘Fukuyamaian’ line then cleaves into at least two opposing positions: the moral or religious conservative position arguing for a return to traditional values to offset the deracinating effects of neoliberalism, a desperate attempt to refound the disturbed Sittlichkeit of multicultural liberal democracies; and the libertarian-postmodernist position that displaces political radicalism to the contested sphere of culture, arguing for a cultural politics of difference, utopian multiculturalism, radical affirmation of the Other, and so on, as ways of affirming ethical forms of freedom and plural modes of subjectivity made possible by capitalist liberal democracy.

The point, for Žižek, is that both moral-religious conservative and libertarian-postmodernist positions share the ‘Fukuyamaian’ thesis: that capitalist liberal democracy is here to stay, hence needs to be either resisted or reformed. “The dominant ethos today,” as Žižek remarks, “is ‘Fukuyamaian’: liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is render it more just, tolerant, and so forth” (2008: 421).

On the other hand, there is the romantic, revolutionary position, which argues for a retrieval of the abstract negativity of the revolutionary tradition in order to perform a destructive negation that would disrupt the capitalist economico-political system. This is the line of thought — Hegelian but also Marxist-Leninist in inspiration— that Žižek argues for in his most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008).

For Žižek, we must first of all question and theoretically reject the ‘Fukuyamaian’ liberal democratic consensus: capitalist liberal democracy is not necessarily the ‘universal and homogeneous’ form of the state, as Kojève put it, in which the atomised post-historical animals of the species homo sapiens will privately enjoy their narcissistic consumer pleasures (Kojève 1969: 157-162).

Rather, the contradictory dynamics of contemporary global capitalism— we need only mention global credit, fuel, oil, and Third World food crises, and the stark reality of ecological and environmental limits to growth—suggest that it is possible that Western societies may be entering a period of instability, uncertainty, even decline.

Žižek cites four key antagonisms that are relevant here:

1. the ecological crisis (global warming, ‘peak oil’);

2. the challenge to concepts of private property posed by new forms of ‘intellectual property’;

3. the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (biogenetics); and

4. new forms of apartheid, particularly the proliferation of slums, separated communities, non-state governed zones of disorder (2008: 421-427).

In light of these intersecting antagonisms confronting global capitalism, the historical question of whether it is possible to redeem the failed revolutionary attempts of the past (Benjamin) may not yet be entirely closed.

Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist wager is directed primarily against contemporary liberal democratic but also ‘postmodernist’ politics that depoliticise the economy—‘naturalising’ it as the unquestioned background of society, culture, and politics—and thereby displace political conflict to the sphere of culture and subjectivity. One could argue that the displacement of political radicalism to the cultural sphere—our contemporary‘aestheticisation of politics’—is an ideological disavowal of the real source of the antagonisms afflicting modern liberal democracies.

It represents a politically debilitating attempt to transpose the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggles to the ‘sublimated’ sphere of culture (as in the familiar ‘culture wars’ that pit social and religious conservatives against secular liberals and libertarian ‘postmodernists’ in symbolic struggles over moral and cultural questions of subjectivity, identity, and values). The problem with this pseudo-Hegelian sublimation of politics into culture, however, is that it leaves untouched what Marx correctly identified as the ‘base’ of these morally driven forms of sociocultural struggle: the economic dynamics of global capitalism.

This is why Žižek’s has recently argued—notably in In Defense of Lost Causes—for a refusal of the liberal democratic ‘moral blackmail’ that condemns in advance any form of radical politics as ‘totalitarian’ or ‘terroristic,’ and why he now advocates an active reclaiming of the historical and political revolutionary heritage of the Left.

Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist proposal would entail acknowledging the power of negativity defining modern subjectivity, a recognition of the suppressed ‘night of the world’ or abstract negativity that continues to haunt the precarious ‘imaginary community’ of liberal democracy. The question, however, is whether this can be done without relapsing into the nightmarish violence of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’.

Are there more determinate forms of negation —of social and political struggle against the normative orders of capitalism— that might disturb the liberal democratic ‘moral consensus’ that has so strikingly paralysed the Left? Does reclaiming the history of revolutionary activism also imply the risk of embracing forms of violence that have marred twentieth-century political history? Or can the revolutionary spirit —the spectre of Marx, if one will— be reanimated without repeating this history of violence? Žižek’s Hegelianism and his Marxist-Leninism pull in different directions precisely on this issue.

The Hegelian answer would be that the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben through the formation of rational social and political institutions capable of reconciling the deracinating effects of capitalism with the principle of individual subjectivity. The Marxist-Leninist response, on the other hand, would argue that such liberal-capitalist institutions themselves be subjected to revolutionary violence—a ‘negation of the negation’—that would create the historical conditions for future (communist) emancipation. We should note, though, that the Hegelian response is retrospective and descriptive; a conceptual comprehension of the underlying logic of the dynamics of modernity that would reconcile us to the vicissitudes of modern freedom.

The Marxist-Leninist response, by contrast, is prospective and prescriptive; a demand to translate theory into practice, overcoming this alienating opposition by means of revolutionary action. Žižek appears to argue for a synthesis of these distinct, seemingly incompatible, responses, which raises the following difficulty: how is the Hegelian account of the negativity involved in the transition from abstract to concrete universality to be reconciled with the Marxist-Leninist demand for revolutionary action that would negate all such merely ‘ideological’ comprehension?

One response would be to suggest that Žižek is simply pointing to the unavoidability of the moment of negativity in any theorisation —and political practice— of the historical realisation of free subjectivity. He reminds us that the Left forgets this Hegelian lesson at its peril.

For in that case it either assents to the ‘Fukuyamaist’ consensus that there is ‘nothing to be done’ since we’ve already arrived at the (liberal-capitalist democratic) ‘end of history’; or else it naively asserts the need for a renewed romantic-revolutionary response that demands a violent (abstract) negation of the status quo.

The Hegelian response, by contrast, would be to argue for the possibility of a retrieval of the revolutionary tradition that has also become historically reflective and socio-politically determinate: not simply an abstract ‘violent’ negation of modern liberal-democratic institutions but rather a determinate negation of the normative consensus — the implicit background of economic neo-liberalism — that sustains them; a productive negation that would both preserve their emancipatory potentials while also negating their alienating sociocultural effects. Such a task, of course, is easier said than done.

Žižek’s bold engagement with the relationship between the negativity of the (Hegelian) subject and the antagonisms defining global capitalism thus throws down the philosophico-political gauntlet. All the more so if one believes that social and political movements today should reclaim that seemingly most ‘lost’ of causes — the Leftist revolutionary tradition committed to the concrete universality of freedom.

Žižek, S. (1991). For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor

Žižek, S. (1992/2001). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, Revised Edition, New York/London: Routledge.

Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology,

Žižek, S. (1994). The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality,

Žižek, S. (1996). The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters,

Žižek, S/F. W. J. von Schelling (1997). The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World.

An Essay by Slavoj Žižek with the text of Schelling’s Die Weltalter (second draft, 1813), in English translation by Judith Norman, Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Žižek, S. (1999). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology,

Žižek, S. (2006). The Parallax View,

Žižek, S. (2008). In Defense of Lost Causes

butler Hegel life as sociality

Public lecture presented by the Humanities and Arts Research Centre of Royal Holloway, the School of Psychosocial Studies (Birkbeck) and the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research 4th February, 2009.

Norms constitute specific ontologies of the Subject, historically contingent ontologies, being of the subject given over to norms, to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, the body is a social ontology, NORMATIVE PRODUCTION OF ONTOLOGY, HISTORICALLY CONTINGENT ONTOLOGY

Our very capacity to discern and name the being of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition.

differential allocation of precarity

Apprehension of precariousness leads to heightening of violence, insight into vulnerability increases desire to destroy them

Butler on Hegel

At begin of Lordship and Bondage: a self-consciousness sees another self-consciousness and is scandalized by this event.

Some Other appears, at first that Other appears to be me, how is it possible that this is me over there? How can I account for this apparent distance between me over there and the “I” who regards this “me”.

If I have come outside myself then I am no longer localized and this tells me something new about who I am, my relation to space. If I am no longer localized, I am not fully or in exclusively a bounded being, I have the capacity to appear elsewhere.

I am a kind of being here and there apparently at once. I can as it were face myself, and this involves a certain amount of self-loss. I am then not quite bounded in space as I apparently assumed, this unboundedness by which I am now characterized, seems bound up as it were with a redoubling of myself. The I seems to have become 2.

The problem is that the Other whom I face, is in some sense me and is some sense not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance re-doubled. I encounter at the same time and through the same figure the limit to what I can call myself. Both of these things happen at the same time, but this does not mean that these two encounters are reconciled. On the contrary they exist in a certain tension with one another. This Other who appears to be me is at once me and not-me. So what I have to live with is not just the fact that I have become 2, but that I can be found at a distance from myself and what I find at that distance is also and at once not myself.

This Other who appear as me is at once me and not-me. I encounter myself at a spatial distance redoubled.

—————-

Hegel has established through these steps the constitutive sociality of this self-consciousness. The apprehension of the Other as a living being, one whose living is like my own is essential to this process of developing a social bond. There’s a shape over there, a living one and its understood as belonging to this or that living thing.

The living consciousness can only return to its absolute singularity by risking its own life, but dead that living consciousness cannot achieve the self-certainty it seeks. So the question becomes, how best to live and how best to live with others. The defensive effort to shore up one’s singularity in the face of a duplication or substitutability is apparently overwhelming, but is only by considering

Singularity and Substitutability without a dialectical synthesis that an ethical opening to the other can take place.

Who is this I who is on the one hand substitutable and yet also singularly alive on some other hand. If this “I” is to register its substitutability it has to survive as this singular life to do precisely that. In other words its singularity is the precondition of its understanding of substitutability and is presupposed logically by the idea of substitution itself which involves replacing one term by another.

The Non-substitutable, is the persistent, logical and existential condition of substitutability. As much as the “I” might be threatened by negation or threatens the other with negation, so it is clear that the life of the one is dependent on the life of the other. This interdependency becomes a new way of conceiving of life as sociality. Sociality cannot be reduced to the existence of this identity or that identity, this group or that group, but is the open temporal trajectory of interdependency and desire, struggle, fear, murderous dispositions as well as the desire to maintain and repair social bonds.

So although I find my departure here in Hegel, I move in at least two distinct directions:

1. The ethical necessity of a non-coincidence of singularity and substitutability. I’m not interested in a dialectical synthesis of those two terms. The ethical demand to live both singularity and substitutability as an ongoing paradox is something that I affirm.

2. There can be no recognition of my life being like another’s life except through the specific social norms that allow certain populations to emerge as living beings and others to be considered as non-living, as only partially living, or as actually figuring a threat to life itself.

We cannot remain dependent on existing and already established norms of recognition, if we are to try to expand our understanding not only of who deserves to live, who lives are worth protecting but more fundamentally whose lives count as lives and whose lives are finally grievable.

The problems is not merely to include more people in the existing norms but to consider how existing norms allocate recognition differentially? What new norms are possible and how are they wrought.

What might be done to produce a more egalitarian set of conditions for recognizablity. What might be done in other words to shift the very terms of recognizability in order to to produce more radically democratic results.

New egalitarian norms of recognizability.

butler scene of address

Third International Conference of the Whitehead Research Project
Date: December 3-5, 2009
Location: Claremont, California

Judith Butler at the Claremont Graduate School, School of Art and Humanities. Look for it on Itunes or here In her 2 hour talk with students on her book Giving Account of Oneself I found this to be one of her most interesting points. She made this in response to a question at 1:18:30 into the talk.

When we strive for the single, the one account. When we are asked to give an account even of an accident, we go back and tell the story one way, and then another way, we give different accounts at different times, each of these accounts produce a constellation, so there has to be a revisability that should not be understood as falsification, each of these accounts produce a constellation that gives us a more complex idea of what happened.

But when we come to the question of identity, if we say I am this and this and also this and we try to undo the logic of “non-contradiction” that governs our statements about what we are. I am not this, I am rather this and this. I am both, I am both and more. But we are still within what Foucault calls the “regime of ontology.” I’m still trying to determine what I am, I’m just doing it multiplee (multiply? multiple? Judy pronounces it with a long ‘e’ sound, as in ‘multiplicity’).

But maybe the thing is to NOT determine who I am whether singly or multiplee, but to be engaged in a kind of scene of address to oneself, to another, to a set of others, where those terms get re-worked in ways that make a difference, then we are less interested in determining who we are singly or multiply than in some act of communication, or some act of avowing and articulating a relationship which is more ethically significant than establishing who I am. I guess I would displace the framework to some degree.

udi aloni judith butler interview

Judith Butler Interview with Udi Aloni February 2010

Online version 1 and another version

Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel.

In Israel, people know you well. Your name was even in the popular film Ha-Buah [The Bubble – the tragic tale of a gay relationship between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim].

[laughs] Although I disagreed with the use of my name in that context. I mean, it was very funny to say, “don’t Judith Butler me,” but “to Judith Butler someone” meant to say something very negative about men and to identify with a form of feminism that was against men. And I’ve never been identified with that form of feminism. That?s not my mode. I’m not known for that. So it seems like it was confusing me with a radical feminist view that one would associate with Catharine MacKinnon or Andrea Dworkin, a completely different feminist modality. I’m not always calling into question who’s a man and who’s not, and am I a man? Maybe I’m a man. [laughs] Call me a man. I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women’s safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.

A beautiful Israeli poem asks, “How does one become Avot Yeshurun?” Avot Yeshurun was a poet who caused turmoil in Israeli poetry. I want to ask, how does one become Judith Butler -especially with the issue of Gender Trouble, the book that so troubled the discourse on gender?

You know, I’m not sure that I know how to give an account of it, and I think it troubles gender differently depending on how it is received and translated. For instance, one of the first receptions [of the book] was in Germany, and there, it seemed very clear that young people wanted a politics that emphasized agency, or something affirmative that they could create or produce. The idea of performativity – which involved bringing categories into being or bringing new social realities about – was very exciting, especially for younger people who were tired with old models of oppression – indeed, the very model men oppress women, or straights oppress gays.

It seemed that if you were subjugated, there were also forms of agency that were available to you, and you were not just a victim, or you were not only oppressed, but oppression could become the condition of your agency. Certain kinds of unexpected results can emerge from the situation of oppression if you have the resources and if you have collective support. It’s not an automatic response; it’s not a necessary response. But it’s possible. I think I also probably spoke to something that was already happening in the movement. I put into theoretical language what was already being impressed upon me from elsewhere. So I didn’t bring it into being single-handedly. I received it from several cultural resources and put it into another language.

Once you became “Judith Butler,” we began to hear more about Jews and Jewish texts. People came to hear you speak about gender and suddenly they were faced with Gaza, divine violence. It almost felt like you had some closure on the previous matter. Is there a connection, a continuum, or is this a new phase?

Let’s go back further. I’m sure I’ve told you that I began to be interested in philosophy when I was 14, and I was in trouble in the synagogue. The rabbi said, “You are too talkative in class. You talk back, you are not well behaved. You have to come and have a tutorial with me.” I said “OK, great!” I was thrilled.

He said: “What do you want to study in the tutorial? This is your punishment. Now you have to study something seriously.” I think he thought of me as unserious. I explained that I wanted to read existential theology focusing on Martin Buber. (I’ve never left Martin Buber.) I wanted look at the question of whether German idealism could be linked with National Socialism. Was the tradition of Kant and Hegel responsible in some way for the origins of National Socialism? My third question was why Spinoza was excommunicated from the synagogue. I wanted to know what happened and whether the synagogue was justified.

Now I must go Jewish: what was your parents’ relation to Judaism?

My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.

My mother’s uncles and aunts were all killed in Hungary [during the Holocaust]. My grandmother lost all of her relatives, except for the two nephews who came with them in the car when my grandmother went back in 1938 to see who she could rescue. It was important for me. I went to Hebrew school. But I also went after school to special classes on Jewish ethics because I was interested in the debates. So I didn’t do just the minimum. Through high school, I suppose, I continued Jewish studies alongside my public school education.

And you showed me the photos of the bar mitzvah of your son as a good proud Jewish Mother…

So it’s been there from the start, it’s not as if I arrived at some place that I haven’t always been in. I grew very skeptical of certain kind of Jewish separatism in my youth. I mean, I saw the Jewish community was always with each other; they didn’t trust anybody outside. You’d bring someone home and the first question was “Are they Jewish, are they not Jewish?” Then I entered into a lesbian community in college, late college, graduate school, and the first thing they asked was, “Are you a feminist, are you not a feminist?” “Are you a lesbian, are you not a lesbian?” and I thought “Enough with the separatism!”

It felt like the same kind of policing of the community. You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity. Is that person really Jewish, maybe they’re not so Jewish. I don’t know if they’re really Jewish. Maybe they’re self-hating. Is that person lesbian? I think maybe they had a relationship with a man. What does that say about how true their identity was? I thought I can’t live in a world in which identity is being policed in this way.

But if I go back to your other question… In Gender Trouble, there is a whole discussion of melancholy. What is the condition under which we fail to grieve others? I presumed, throughout my childhood, that this was a question the Jewish community was asking itself. It was also a question that I was interested in when I went to study in Germany. The famous Mitscherlich book on the incapacity to mourn, which was a criticism of German post-war culture, was very, very interesting to me.

In the 70s and 80s, in the gay and lesbian community, it became clear to me that very often, when a relationship would break up, a gay person wouldn’t be able to tell their parents, his or her parents. So here, people were going through all kinds of emotional losses that were publicly unacknowledged and that became very acute during the AIDS crisis. In the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, there were many gay men who were unable to come out about the fact that their lovers were ill, A, and then dead, B. They were unable to get access to the hospital to see their lover, unable to call their parents and say, “I have just lost the love of my life.”

This was extremely important to my thinking throughout the 80s and 90s. But it also became important to me as I started to think about war.

After 9/11, I was shocked by the fact that there was public mourning for many of the people who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, less public mourning for those who died in the attack on the Pentagon, no public mourning for the illegal workers of the WTC, and, for a very long time, no public acknowledgment of the gay and lesbian families and relationships that had been destroyed by the loss of one of the partners in the bombings.

Then we went to war very quickly, Bush having decided that the time for grieving is over. I think he said that after ten days, that the time for grieving is over and now is time for action. At which point we started killing populations abroad with no clear rationale. And the populations we targeted for violence were ones that never appeared to us in pictures. We never got little obituaries for them. We never heard anything about what lives had been destroyed. And we still don’t.

I then moved towards a different kind of theory, asking under what conditions certain lives are grievable and certain lives not grievable or ungrievable.

It’s clear to me that in Israel-Palestine and in the violent conflicts that have taken place over the years, there is differential grieving. Certain lives become grievable within the Israeli press, for instance – highly grievable and highly valuable – and others are understood as ungrievable because they are understood as instruments of war, or they are understood as outside the nation, outside religion, or outside that sense of belonging which makes for a grievable life. The question of grievability has linked my work on queer politics, especially the AIDS crisis, with my more contemporary work on war and violence, including the work on Israel-Palestine.

It’s interesting because when the war on Gaza started, I couldn’t stay in Tel Aviv anymore. I visited the Galilee a lot. And suddenly I realized that many of the Palestinians who died in Gaza have families there, relatives who are citizens of Israel. What people didn’t know is that there was a massed grief in Israel. Grief for families who died in Gaza, a grief within Israel, of citizens of Israel. And nobody in the country spoke about it, about the grief within Israel. It was shocking.

The Israeli government and the media started to say that everyone who was killed or injured in Gaza was a member of Hamas; or that they were all being used as part of the war effort; that even the children were instruments of the war effort; that the Palestinians put them out there, in the targets, to show that Israelis would kill children, and this was actually part of a war effort. At this point, every single living being who is Palestinian becomes a war instrument. They are all, in their being, or by virtue of being Palestinian, declaring war on Israel or seeking the destruction of the Israel.

So any and all Palestinian lives that are killed or injured are understood no longer to be lives, no longer understood to be living, no longer understood even to be human in a recognizable sense, but they are artillery. The bodies themselves are artillery. And of course, the extreme instance of that is the suicide bomber, who has become unpopular in recent years. That is the instance in which a body becomes artillery, or becomes part of a violent act. If that figure gets extended to the entire Palestinian population, then there is no living human population anymore, and no one who is killed there can be grieved. Because everyone who is a living Palestinian is, in their being, a declaration of war, or a threat to the existence of Israel, or pure military artillery, materiel. They have been transformed, in the Israeli war imaginary, into pure war instruments.

So when a people who believes that another people is out to destroy them sees all the means of destruction killed, or some extraordinary number of the means of destruction destroyed, they are thrilled, because they think their safety and well-being and happiness are being purchased, are being achieved through this destruction.

And what happened with the perspective from the outside, the outside media, was extremely interesting to me. The European press, the U.S. press, the South American press, the East Asian press all raised questions about the excessive violence of the Gaza assault. It was very strange to see how the Israeli media made the claim that people on the outside do not understand; that people on the outside are anti-Semitic; that people on the outside are blaming Israel for defending themselves when they themselves, if attacked, would do the exact same thing.

Why Israel-Palestine? Is this directly connected to your Jewishness?

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps. There were those who would and could speak out against state racism and state violence, and it was imperative that we be able to speak out. Not just for Jews, but for any number of people. There was an entire idea of social justice that emerged for me from the consideration of the Nazi genocide.

I would also say that what became really hard for me is that if one wanted to criticize Israeli state violence – precisely because that as a Jew one is under obligation to criticize excessive state violence and state racism – then one is in a bind, because one is told that one is either self-hating as a Jew or engaging anti-Semitism. And yet for me, it comes out of a certain Jewish value of social justice. So how can I fulfill my obligation as a Jew to speak out against an injustice when, in speaking out against Israeli state and military injustice, I am accused of not being a good enough Jew or of being a self-hating Jew? This is the bind of my current situation.

Let me say one other thing about Jewish values. There are two things I took from Jewish philosophy and my Jewish formation that were really important for me… well there are many. There are many.

Sitting shiva, for instance, explicit grieving. I thought it was the one of the most beautiful rituals of my youth. There were several people who died in my youth, and there were several moments when whole communities gathered in order to make sure that those who had suffered terrible losses were taken up and brought back into the community and given a way to affirm life again. The other idea was that life is transient, and because of that, because there is no after world, because we don’t have any hopes in a final redemption, we have to take especially good care of life in the here and now. Life has to be protected. It is precarious. I would even go so far as to say that precarious life is, in a way, a Jewish value for me.

I realized something, through your way of thinking. A classic mistake that people made with Gender Trouble was the notion that body and language are static. But everything is in dynamic and in constant movement; the original never exists. In a way I felt the same with the Diaspora and the emancipation. Neither are static. No one came before the other. The Diaspora, when it was static, became separatist, became the shtetl. And when the emancipation was realized, it became an ethnocratic state; it also became separatist, a re-construction of the ghetto. So maybe the tension between the two, emancipation and Diaspora, without choosing a one or the other, is the only way to keep us out of ethnocentrism. I suppose my idea is not yet fully formulated. It relates to the way I felt that my grandfather was open to the language of exile while being connected to the land at the same time. By being open to both, emancipation and Diaspora, we might avoid falling into ethnocentrism.

You have a tension between Diaspora and emancipation. But what I am thinking of is perhaps something a little different. I have to say, first of all, that I do not think that there can be emancipation with and through the establishment of state that restricts citizenship in the way that it does, on the basis of religion? So in my view, any effort to retain the idea of emancipation when you don’t have a state that extends equal rights of citizenship to Jews and non-Jews alike is, for me, bankrupt. It’s bankrupt.

That’s why I would say that there should be bi-nationalism from the beginning.

Or even multi-nationalism. Maybe even a kind of citizenship without regard to religion, race, ethnicity, etc. In any case, the more important point here is that there are those who clearly believe that Jews who are not in Israel, who are in the Galut, are actually either in need of return ? they have not yet returned, or they are not and cannot be representative of the Jewish people. So the question is: what does it mean to transform the idea of Galut into Diaspora? In other words, Diaspora is another tradition, one that involves the scattering without return. I am very critical of this idea of return, and I think “Galut” very often demeans the Diasporic traditions within Judaism.

I thought that if we make a film about bi-nationalism, the opening scene should be a meeting of “The First Jewish Congress for Bi-Nationalism.” It could be a secret meeting in which we all discuss who we would like to be our first president, and the others there send me to choose you? because we need to have a woman, and she has to be queer. But not only queer, and not only woman. She has to be the most important Jewish philosopher today.

But seriously, you know, it would be astonishing to think about what forms of political participation would still be possible on a model of federal government. Like a federated authority for Palestine-Israel that was actually governed by a strong constitution that guaranteed rights regardless of cultural background, religion, ethnicity, race, and the rest. In a way, bi-nationalism goes part of the way towards explaining what has to happen. And I completely agree with you that there has to be a cultural movement that overcomes hatred and paranoia and that actually draws on questions of cohabitation. Living in mixity and in diversity, accepting your neighbor, finding modes of living together. And no political solution, at a purely procedural level, is going to be successful if there is no bilingual education, if there are no ways of reorganizing neighborhoods, if there are no ways of reorganizing territory, bringing down the wall, accepting the neighbors you have, and accepting that there are profound obligations that emerge from being adjacent to another people in this way.

So I agree with you. But I think we have to get over the idea that a state has to express a nation. And if we have a bi-national state, it’s expressing two nations. Only when bi-nationalism deconstructs the idea of a nation can we hope to think about what a state, what a polity might look like that would actually extend equality. It is no longer the question of “two peoples,” as Martin Buber put it. There is extraordinary complexity and intermixing among both the Jewish and the Palestinian populations. There will be those who say, “Ok, a state that expresses two cultural identities.” No. State should not be in the business of expressing cultural identity.

Why do we use term “bi-nationalism?” For me it is the beginning of a process, not the end. We could say “multi-nationalism,” or “one-state solution.” Why do we prefer to use the term “bi-nationalism” rather than “one state” now?

I believe that people have reasonable fears that a one-state solution would ratify the existing marginalization and impoverishment of the Palestinian people. That Palestine would be forced to accept a kind of Bantustan existence.

Or vice versa, for the Jews.

Well, the Jews would be afraid of losing demographic majority if voting rights were extended to Palestinians. I do think that there is the fundamental question of “Who is this ‘we’?” Who are we? The question of bi-nationalism raises the question of who is the “we” who decides what kind of polity is best for this land. The “we” has to be heterogeneous; it has to be mixed. Everyone who is there and has a claim – and the claims are various. They come from traditional and legal grounds of belonging that are quite complicated. So one has to be open to that complication.

Now I want to move to the last part of the conversation. It was over three years ago, at the beginning of the Second Lebanon war, that Slavoj Žižek came to Israel to give a speech on my film Forgiveness. The Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel asked him not to come to the Jerusalem Film Festival. They said that I should show my film – as Israelis shouldn’t boycott Israel, but they asked international figures to boycott the festival.

Žižek, who was the subject of one of the films in the festival, said he would not speak about that film. But he asked: why not support the opposition in Israel by speaking about Forgiveness? They answered that he could support the opposition, but not in an official venue. He did not know what to do.

Žižek chose to ask for your advice. Your position then, if I recall correctly, was that it was most important to exercise, solidarity with colleagues who chose nonviolent means of resistance and that it was a mistake to take money from Israeli cultural institutions. Your suggestion to Žižek was that he speak about the film without being a guest of the festival. He gave back the money and announced that he was not a guest. There was no decision about endorsing or not endorsing a boycott. For me, at the time, the concept of cultural boycott was kind of shocking, a strange concept. The movement has since grown a lot, and I know that you’ve done a lot of thinking about it. I wonder what do you think about this movement now, the full Boycott, Diversion and Sanction movement (BDS), three years after that confusing event?

I think that the BDS movement has taken several forms, and it is probably important to distinguish among them. I would say that around six or seven years ago, there was a real confusion about what was being boycotted, what goes under the name of “boycott.” There were some initiatives that seemed to be directed against Israeli academics, or Israeli filmmakers, cultural producers, or artists that did not distinguish between their citizenship and their participation, active or passive, in occupation politics. We must keep in mind that the BDS movement has always been focused on the occupation. It is not a referendum on Zionism, and it does not take an explicit position on the one-state or two-state solution. And then there were those who sought to distinguish boycotting individual Israelis from boycotting the Israeli institutions. But it is not always easy to know how to make the distinction between who is an individual and who is an institution. And I think a lot of people within the U.S. and Europe just backed away, thinking that it was potentially discriminatory to boycott individuals or, indeed, institutions on the basis of citizenship, even though many of those who were reluctant very much wanted to find a way to support a non-violent resistance to the occupation.

But now I feel that it has become more possible, more urgent to reconsider the politics of the BDS. It is not that the principles of the BDS have changed: they have not. But there are now ways to think about implementing the BDS that keep in mind the central focus: any event, practice, or institution that seeks to normalize the occupation, or presupposes that “ordinary” cultural life can continue without an explicit opposition to the occupation is itself complicit with the occupation.

We can think of this as passive complicity, if you like. But the main point is to challenge those institutions that seek to separate the occupation from other cultural activities. The idea is that we cannot participate in cultural institutions that act as if there is no occupation or that refuse to take a clear and strong stand against the occupation and dedicate their activities to its undoing. So, with this in mind, we can ask, what does it mean to engage in boycott? It means that, for those of us on the outside, we can only go to an Israeli institution, or an Israeli cultural event, in order to use the occasion to call attention to the brutality and injustice of the occupation and to articulate an opposition to it.

I think that’s what Naomi Klein did, and I think it actually opened up another route for interpreting the BDS principles. It is no longer possible for me to come to Tel Aviv and talk about gender, Jewish philosophy, or Foucault, as interesting as that might be for me; it is certainly not possible to take money from an organization or university or a cultural organization that is not explicitly and actively anti-occupation, acting as if the cultural event within Israeli borders was not happening against the background of occupation? Against the background of the assault on, and continuing siege of, Gaza? It is this unspoken and violent background of “ordinary” cultural life that needs to become the explicit object of cultural and political production and criticism. Historically, I see no other choice, since affirming the status quo means affirming the occupation. One cannot “set aside” the radical impoverishment, the malnutrition, the limits on mobility, the intimidation and harassment at the borders, and the exercise of state violence in both Gaza and the West Bank and talk about other matters in public? If one were to talk about other matters, then one is actively engaged in producing a limited public sphere of discourse which has the repression and, hence, continuation of violence as its aim.

Let us remember that the politics of boycott are not just matters of “conscience” for left intellectuals within Israel or outside. The point of the boycott is to produce and enact an international consensus that calls for the state of Israel to comply with international law. The point is to insist on the rights of self-determination for Palestinians, to end the occupation and colonization of Arab lands, to dismantle the Wall that continues the illegal seizure of Palestinian land, and to honor several UN resolutions that have been consistently defied by the Israeli state, including UN resolution 194, which insists upon the rights of refugees from 1948.

So, an approach to the cultural boycott in particular would have to be one that opposes the normalization of the occupation in order to bring into public discourse the basic principles of injustice at stake. There are many ways to articulate those principles, and this is where intellectuals are doubtless under a political obligation to become innovative, to use the cultural means at our disposal to make whatever interventions we can.

The point is not simply to refuse contact and forms of cultural and monetary exchange – although sometimes these are most important – but rather, affirmatively, to lend one’s support to the strongest anti-violent movement against the occupation that not only affirms international law, but establishing exchanges with Palestinian cultural and academic workers, cultivating international consensus on the rights of the Palestinian people, but also altering that hegemonic presumption within the global media that any critique of Israel is implicitly anti-democratic or anti-Semitic.

Surely it has always been the best part of the Jewish intellectual tradition to insist upon the ethical relation to the non-Jew, the extension of equality and justice, and the refusal to keep silent in the face of egregrious wrongs.

I want to share with you what Riham Barghouti, from BDS New York, told me. She said that, for her, BDS is a movement for everyone who supports the end of the occupation, equal rights for the Palestinians of 1948, and the moral and legal demand of the Palestinians’ right of return. She suggested that each person who is interested, decide how much of the BDS spectrum he or she is ready to accept. In other words, endorsement of the boycott movement is a continuous decision, not a categorical one. Just don’t tell us what our guidelines are. You can agree with our principles, join the movement, and decide on the details on your own.

Yes, well, one can imagine a bumper sticker: “what part of ‘justice’ do you fail to understand?” It is surely important that many prominent Israelis have begun to accept part of the BDS principles, and this may well be an incremental way to make the boycott effort more understandable. But it may also be important to ask,

why is it that so many left [wing] Israelis have trouble entering into collaborative politics with Palestinians on the issue of the boycott, and why is it that the Palestinian formulations of the boycott do not form the basis for that joint effort? After all, the BDS call has been in place since 2005; it is an established and growing movement, and the basic principles have been worked out.

Any Israeli can join that movement, and they would doubtless fine that they would immediately be in greater contact with Palestinians than they otherwise would be. The BDS provides the most powerful rubric for Israeli-Palestinian cooperative actions. This is doubtless surprising and paradoxical for some, but it strikes me as historically true.

It’s interesting to me that very often Israelis I speak to say, “We cannot enter into collaboration with the Palestinians because they don’t want to collaborate with us, and we don’t blame them.” Or: “We would put them in a bad position if we were to invite them to our conferences.” Both of these positions presume the occupation as background, but they do not address it directly. Indeed, these kinds of positions are biding time when there is no time but now to make one’s opposition known. Very often, such utterances take on a position of self-paralyzing guilt which actually keeps them from taking active and productive responsibility for opposing the occupation even more remote.

Sometimes it seems to me that they make boycott politics into a question of moral conscience, which is different from a political commitment. If it is a moral issue, then “I” as an Israeli have a responsibility to speak out or against, to sink into self-beratement or become self-flagellating in public and become a moral icon. But these kinds of moral solutions are, I think, besides the point. They continue to make “Israeli” identity into the basis of the political position, which is a kind of tacit nationalism. Perhaps the point is to oppose the manifest injustice in the name of broader principles of international law and the opposition to state violence, the disenfranchisement politically and economically of the Palestinian people. If you happen to be Israeli, then unwittingly your position shows that Israelis can and do take positions in favor of justice, and that should not be surprising. But it does not make it an “Israeli” position.

But let me return to the question of whether boycott politics undermines collaborative ventures, or opens them up. My wager is that the minute you come out in favor of some boycott, divestment or sanctions strategy, Udi, you will have many collaborators among Palestinians. I think many people fear that the boycott is against collaboration, but in fact Israelis have the power to produce enormous collaborative networks if they agree that they will use their public power, their cultural power, to oppose the occupation through the most powerful non-violent means available. Things change the minute you say, “We cannot continue to act as normal.”

Of course, I myself really want to be able to talk about novels, film, and philosophy, sometimes quite apart from politics. Unfortunately, I cannot do that in Israel now. I cannot do it until the occupation has been successfully and actively challenged. The fact is that there is no possibility of going to Israel without being used either as an example of boycott or as an example of anti-boycott. So when I went, many years ago, and the rector of Tel Aviv University said, “Look how lucky we are. Judith Butler has come to Tel Aviv University, a sign that she does not accept the boycott,” I was instrumentalized against my will. And I realized I cannot function in that public space without already being defined in the boycott debate. So there is no escape from it. One can stay quiet and accept the status quo, or one can take a position that seeks to challenge the status quo.

I hope one day there will be a different political condition where I might go there and talk about Hegel, but that is not possible now. I am very much looking forward to teaching at Bir Zeit in February. It has a strong gender and women’s studies faculty, and I understand that the students are interested in discussing questions of war and cultural analysis. I also clearly stand to learn. The boycott is not just about saying “no” – it is also a way to give shape to one’s work, to make alliances, and to insist on international norms of justice. To work to the side of the problem of the occupation is to participate in its normalization. And the way that normalization works is to efface or distort that reality within public discourse. As a result, neutrality is not an option.

So we’re boycotting normalization.

That’s what we’re boycotting. We are against normalization. And you know what, there are going to be many tactics for disrupting the normalization of the occupation. Some of us will be well-equipped to intervene with images and words, and others will continue demonstrations and other forms of cultural and political statements. The question is not what your passport says (if you have a passport), but what you do. We are talking about what happens in the activity itself. Does it disrupt and contest the normalization of the occupation?

You remember that in Toronto declaration against the spotlight on Tel Aviv at the film festival, it was very clear that we do not boycott individuals, but the Israeli foreign minister tried to argue that we were boycotting individuals. Yet the question is about institutions. On that note, I want to clarify: You will not speak in Tel Aviv University… forever? Well, not forever…

When it’s a fabulous bi-national university [laughter]

Udi Aloni is an Israeli-American filmmaker and writer

houlgate master slave

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit”

Insofar as one’s identity arises and is defined only with other people, killing the others is self-defeating, for one loses precisely that source of recognition that one has come to require.

If either self-consciousness is to attain recognition, therefore, one of them must back down. This is not to say that in every such struggle one party will in fact back down, but that the logic of the situation requires that one capitulate. The one that does so shows thereby that it is not absolutely free after all. It is actually attached to life and afraid of death, and accepts that its identity is (at least in part) determined and limited by what is given to and other than it. This consciousness thus acknowledges that its identity depends on its own body and the realm of natural things around it, and in consciousness of this dependence it becomes the servant, bondsman, or slave of the other. The other self-consciousness, having succeeded in proving itself to be absolutely free and fearless, is recognized by the slave as his (or her) lord and master. The life and death struggle thus leads logically — if not always in fact — to the relation of master and slave (21).

This relation — Hegel’s famous account of which profoundly influenced Marx — is not intrinsic to social life. It is not to be encountered, for example, where there is genuine mutual recognition. It is the result of a struggle for recognition by two (or more) primitive self-consciousnesses, one of which — the slave– finally accepts what Tom Rockmore rightly calls the “deep truth” that “life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” and thereby lets the other enjoy the feeling of unencumbered freedom.

Desire in the Master and Slave

Desire, we recall, negates and consumes things; but it also runs up against the independence of things, and so fails to “have done with the thing altogether” and thereby to achieve complete satisfaction. By interposing the slave between himself and things, the master succeeds in separating these two sides of desire from one another. He leaves the slave to deal with the independence and resistant “thereness” of the thing, and reserves for himself “the pure enjoyment of it.” With the help of the slave, the master thus frees himself from the frustrations of desire and revels in the pure joy of consuming.

The problem faced by the master is twofold. On the one hand, though he receives recognition from the slave, the master does not recognize the slave in turn, and so cannot find true value in the slave’s recognition of him. The outcome, Hegel writes, “is a recognition this is one-sided and unequal.” On the other hand, the very relation that embodies for the master his absolute freedom — his dominance over the slave — also reminds him that in his freedom he is actually dependent on another.[…]

There is a further sense, however, in which “the truth of the independent consciousness” — the master — is to be found by looking to the slave: for in the slave we begin to see what the freedom and indepence to which the master lays exclusive claim are in truth. …

How, then does the slave prove to be free? First of all, through his labour: for even though he is forced to work by the master, his labor is nonetheless his own activity. Furthermore, unlike the master’s unchecked desire, which consumes the object and leaves nothing behind to mark its activity, labor enables the slave to give enduring objective expression to his freedom. The slave may not find himself recognized by the other self-consciousness, but he does find his freedom embodied in the object of his labour.

Equally important to the slave’s freedom is his fear of death. In the original life and death struggle, both self-consciousnesses seek recognition for themselves as “purely negative being” — being that is “self-identical” yet not tied to being anything in particular. …

Fear is sometimes understood by commentators merely to be that which forces the slave to labor in the service of the master in the first place. Hegel’s point, however, is more subtle. It is that fear alters the slave’s understanding of the meaning of labor itself.

The slave has to labor because he is subservient to the master. Through his labor, however, the slave discovers that he has the freedom to transform things himself and, indeed, to transform them according to his own will and intention. In working on things, he thus acquires what Hegel calls “a mind of his own”. The slave’s freedom, however, is the freedom to transform the particular things that he encounters: to turn this piece of wood into a chair or these ingredients into bread. Accordingly, the slave develops particular skills, depending on what he is required to work on. The freedom that he exhibits in his labor is thus still a limited freedom: it consists in the particular ability to give new shape to these particular objects, and bears witness to the fact that the slave’s consciousness is still mired in the world of given particularities (or, as Hegel puts it, that “determinate being still in principle attaches to it”).

mutual recognition

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Eds. Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman, 2003. 8-29. Print.

On what makes self-consciousness social

page 16: For Kojeve, what drives self-consciousness to become social is its desire to assimilate (as well as be desired by) another’s desire; for Hegel, by contrast, what renders self-consciousness social is its acceptance of the other as an independent source of recognition for itself.

page 17According to Kojève, the direct consequence of desire’s entrance into social relations is struggle and conflict. Each desire, Kojève insists, “wants to negate, to assimilate, to make its own, to subjugate, the other Desire as Desire.” Furthermore, each seeks to have its exclusive right to satisfaction recognized by all desires. This “fight” or struggle in turn leads to the creation of masters and slaves. Human social and historical existence is thus distinguished principally by fighting, slavery and work. For Kojève’s Hegel there is a point at which historical development stops: namely, when a community of mutual recognition is produced that puts an end to struggle and domination. … Nevertheless, what has prevailed throughout history prior to this point is nothing but struggle and domination, because these are generated by the very desire that gives rise to social interaction in the first place.

Achieving self-consciousness as we have seen, requires that I relate to myself in relating to that which is other than me. This means that I must relate to another self-consciousness that recognizes me alone. Self-consciousness must, therefore, be social and intersubjective. We now know that by itself recognition accorded to me by the other is not sufficient to enable me to be concretely self-conscious. To attain that end I must be recognized by another that I recognize in turn as a free and independent other. Genuine self-consciousness thus requires not just recognition of my identity by the other, but mutual recognition by each of us of the other. Self-consciousness must be a “double movement of the two self-consciousnesses” working freely together. In such a movement, Hegel writes, “each sees the other do the same as it does; each does itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only, would be useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both.”

Mutual recognition, for Hegel, requires the uncoerced cooperation of the two (or more) self-consciousnesses involved. Indeed, not only must the two self-consciousnesses freely recognize one another; in fact, they must both recognize that their mutual recognition and cooperation is needed for either to be concretely and objectively self-conscious. In Hegel’s own words, they must “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.”

Genuine self-consciousness involves much more than mere desire (though it must also incorporate desire). Whereas desire “seizes upon and negates the object,” genuine self-consciousness requires recognition from the other, which in turn entails “allowing the other to be what it is” and “letting the other go free.” Self-consciousness would like to know only itself in the other and be the sole object of the other’s recognition. Such self-certainty can be achieved, however, only “through membership or partnership with Other.” For one person to have a concrete and objective understanding of himself, he must join together with somebody else.

as beings who are by necessity conscious of what is other than ourselves, we can achieve certainty of ourselves only when we are recognized by another whom we recognize as free in turn. This conception of mutual recognition, I contend, lies at the heart of Hegel’s whole social and political philosophy. (20)

Žižek subjectivity

houlgate on kojève

Houlgate, S. G. W. F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Houlgate opines on page 13:

In my view, however, Kojève seriously distorts Hegel’s account of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology by conflating the idea that desire is the activity of negation with the further idea that the subject of desire is essentially “empty.” According to Kojève, the desiring subject is “an emptiness (vide) greedy for content; an emptiness that wants to be filled by what is full”; that is to say, “desire is absence of being” that seeks to fill itself “with a natural, biological content.” To my mind, this distinctively Kojèvian conception of desire finds no place in Hegel’s account. Desire does, indeed, negate the object. Yet it does so not to fill a void in the subject, but rather to confirm and enhance the subject’s sense of self: desire, Hegel writes, is simply the movement of consciousness whereby its “identity of itself with itself becomes explicit for it.” Pace Kojève, the desiring self in the Phenomenology does not lack a sense of its own being. If anything, it is rather too full of itself, for it regards everything around it as there for it alone. In so doing, desire considers the other to be nothing but an opportunity for desire itself to negate it. Desire is thus for Hegel “certain of the nothingness of this other,” but it is by no means clear that desire takes itself to be sheer “absence” or “emptiness.”

houlgate phenomenology desire

Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman eds. The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Print.

According to Hegel, I cannot fully understand who I am, if I remain alone by myself with only the objects of nature to attend to. I gain a proper consciousness of myself only when my self-understanding is recognized and confirmed by others.

The Phenomenology describes … the development of consciousness from its most primitive or naive form which Hegel names “sensuous certainty” to its most mature form: self-knowing spirit or “absolute knowing.”

Sensuous certainty: form of consciousness that takes itself to be aware of the simple immediate presence of things, eschewing all mediating categories and is certain in its own mind that what it has before it is nothing but this, here, now in all its simplicity.

Perception: the more developed standpoint of perception is logically implicit in that of sense certainty, and those wedded to immediate sensuous certainty should acknowledge that the objects they relate to are more complex than they first think. Hegel argues that perception grasps its object as a complex unity of many “nows” and many “heres,” but that it cannot decide whether the true nature of the object lies more in its unity or in its multiplicity. Perception ends up distinguishing between the manifold character and the inner unity of the object. As soon as it regards its object as having an inner unity, however, it ceases to be mere perception and becomes understanding.

Understanding: then learns that inner unity of the thing actually consists in lawfulness, reason, and life. When this happens, Hegel claims, understanding proves to be not just consciousness of objects, but also self-consciousness — because it finds in its objects the very qualities that constitute its own nature.

Prior to its mutation into self-consciousness, understanding already incorporates an element of self-understanding: it knows that it is precisely the understanding, rather than mere perception of objects.

Yet only when it encounters in the objects themselves nothing but qualities belonging to itself does it come to be self-consciousness in the full sense, that is, consciousness of itself above all else.

Hegel points out that understanding always takes itself to be conscious of what is other than it and does not realize that it is self-conscious. It is we phenomenologists, not understanding itself, who recognize that understanding is in fact conscious of itself. In Hegel’s own words, “it is only for us that this truth exists, not yet for consciousness.” Nevertheless, in understanding something else to be rational and law-like, understanding is, indeed, “communing directly with itself, enjoying only itself” … Hegel’s next task is to examine what is involved in being explicitly self-conscious, or “what consciousness knows in knowing itself.”

We become explicitly self-conscious when we make our selves and our own identity the explicit and all consuming object of our concern, when we become wholly and overtly absorbed by ourselves.

1. consciousness comes to be wholly absorbed by itself while remaining conscious of what is other than it. When consciousness wakes up to the fact that it is primarily conscious of and concerned with itself, the objects of perception and understanding do not suddenly disappear from view. ON the contrary, they remain before us as the external objects in relation to which we are principally conscious of ourselves. For Hegel, self-consciousness is thus not exclusively consciousness of oneself; it is a relation to something other than me in which I relate to myself above all.

This is not to deny that, like Descartes in the Mediations, I can “shut my eyes, stop my ears, withdraw all my senses” and “converse with myself” in total separation from things. What can be reached through Cartesian doubt, however, is no more than abstract self-consciousness, because such doubt abstracts from the conditions under which alone concrete, all-embracing self-consciousness is possible: namely, consciousness of an external world in relation to which we find ourselves. … Hegel acknowledges that such abstract self-consciousness is possible and is an important moment of true, concrete self-consciousness. He claims, however, that true self-consciousness itself does not merely abstract from but (to borrow Kant’s term) “accompanies” our consciousness of objects.

From Hegel’s point of view Descartes overlooks the moment of other-relatedness that is essential to true consciousness of oneself. Yet there is nevertheless something to be learned from Descartes about true self-consciousness: for in remaining conscious of real, external objects, self-consciousness must also seek to negate those objects. Consciousness finds itself in what is other than it; but the very otherness of the objects I encounter inevitably prevents me from relating wholly to myself. In order to achieve unalloyed self-consciousness, therefore, I must regard the object before me as something that is not essentailly other than or independent of me after all, but there merely for me. I continue to consider the object to be real, and (unlike Descartes) do not declare it to be a figment of my imagination: but I deem it to offer no resistance to me and to yield to my ability to negate or consume it for my own satisfaction and self-enjoyment. Insofar as self-consciousness relates to itself through negating objects around it, it is, in Hegel’s word, desire (Begierde). Self-consciousness necessarily takes the form of desire, therefore, because Descartes is half-right: consciousness does enhance its sense of itself by negating the objects around it, but it directs its activity of negation at a realm of objects whose reality is not in doubt and that, consequently, forever remains to be negated.

Note that desire arises at this point in the Phenomenology not (or, rather, not just) because we are organic, embodied beings, but because of the very nature of self-consciousness itself. Concrete self-consciousness is not immediate self-awareness, but self-awareness mediated by and inseparable from the awareness of what is other. Self-consciousness is interested in itself above all, and yet, as a complex form of consciousness, it is necessarily related to external things.

If it is to attain an undiluted consciousness of itself, it must thus negate and destroy the other things in encounters. As this activity of negating what is other than itself, self-consciousness is desire. In Hegel’s own words, the origin of desire is thus the fact that “self-consciousness is … essentially the return from otherness.”

Note that what we desire, in Hegel’s view, is not the object as such, but rather, as Jean Hyppolite puts it, “the unity of the I with itself.” If Hegel is right, in seeking to enjoy the object, we are in fact seeking to enjoy ourselves.

kant 1724 – 1804

West, David. An Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Cambridge MA: Polity Press, 1996.

Analytic truth: straightforward definitions, can be found to be either true or false simply in virtue of the meanings of the terms they contain or, in other words, by analysis. “A bachelor is an unmarried male” is, simply true by definition. In Kantian terms, the concept of the predicate (‘… is an unmarred male’) is included in the concept of the subject (‘A bachelor’). Analytic truths, which depend simply on the meanings of the terms we use and tell us nothing about the real world, are plausible examples of a priori knowledge. We don’t find out that they are true by observation or experience.

The truth of synthetic peopositions, on the other hand, cannot be decided in this way. That “No woman has ever been President of the USA” is a truth that can be known only synthetically. In this case the concept of the predicate is clearly not included in the concept of the subject (being male is not part of the definition of President). factually informative based on actual evidence or experience, and therefore are a posteriori truths

Kant’s philosophy imples that we can have substantive or non-trivial knowledge of the structure of experience independently of all experience. TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

A moral action must be motivated purely by the intention to do what is right, not by any particular interest or desire of the individual. The ‘synthetic a priori principles of orality must be derived, therefore, fromteh abstract notion of a rational will or agent, from which all distinguishing inidivudal features have been expunged. The inidivudla acts freely andmorally when he or she acts purely in obedience to a universal moral law that is the product of reason alone.

Accordingly, Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’ invites agents to ‘universalize’ the maxim of their actions: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’

on Hegel

Fichte

Given the fact that an individual shares the external world with other free subjects, this is possible only if individuality is recognized by those other beings as setting limits to their own free agency. This mutual recognition [Anerkennung] is an important influence on Hegel’s move from subjectivity to intersubjectivity.

Mutual recognition, or … subjectivity requires intersubjectivity. Furthermore, rights cannot be deduced from ethical individualism but require intersubjectivity. In a sense, Fichte is criticizing all previous philosophies, particularly those dealing with rights, for not first demonstrating the need for intersubjectivity, or the impossibility of thinking of the individual as isolated, which he sees as the same thing. For Fichte, intersubjectivity is a necessary condition for the very existence of individuality and self-awareness. The idea of natural rights outside of a community is a fiction:

There is no condition in which original rights exist; and no original rights of human beings. The human being has actual rights only in community with others, just as—according to the higher principles noted above—the human being can be thought of only in community with others. An original right, therefore, is a mere fiction, but one that must necessarily be created for the sake of a science of right.

Thus, it is impossible to think of rights without thinking of an individual in relation to other individuals. Hegel’s attempt to reconcile individual liberty with community follows Fichte’s lead. Nor, for Fichte, can we think of free beings as existing together unless their rights mutually limit each other (39).

butler desire recognition

The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine (35).

To revise recognition as an ethical project, we will need to see it as, in principle, unsatisfiable (43).

🙂 Butler maintains that going back to some of her earliest debates over the perils of seeking to come establish common principles on the identity of political subjects in order to engage in political action. At that time Butler discouraged attempts to discipline the feminist subject around a core set of features. But the debate has matured greatly since those early days. Now the political salience of fluid identities has been displaced by Butler who rejects the ontological moorings that would even lay claim to any claim of an ‘identity’ as an ontology of ‘identity’ is rejected. For Butler, it isn’t that identities are bad, or not useful, of course we have identities to a certain degree to function every day, however, in the realm of politics, of being addressed, of having to give an account in various state and other social institutional frames, immigration hearing, marriage ceremony, citizenship hearing, child adoption, job application, and other social arrangements and institutional settings that require one to give an account and stand in judgement of that account. Butler’s ethico-political project is to overturn and open up the the normative frames within which these institution function. The formation of the subject relies on a social ontology and for Butler this means that she underscores the importance of relations that humans depend upon in order for a human life to flourish. Relations with primary caregivers at the start of life, relations with other sentient life forms and the environment, all figure in to Butler’s project of a non-anthropocentric conception of the human

even a non-anthropocentric philosophical anthropology. The other way of saying this is that wherever the human is, it is always outside of itself in the non-human, or it is always distributed among beings, among human and non-human beings, chiasmically related through the idea of precarious life. So we can neither lodge the human in the self, nor ground the self in the human, but find instead the relations of exposure and responsibility that constitute the “being” of the human in a sociality outside itself, even outside its human-ness. (interview in 2009 Theory and Event)

… desire sets the limits and the conditions for the operation of recognition itself. Indeed, a certain desire to persist, we might say, following Spinoza, underwrites recognition, so that forms of recognition or, indeed, forms of judgment that seek to relinquish or destroy the desire to persist, the desire for life itself, undercut the very preconditions of recognition (44).

This failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others. Although some would say that to be a split subject, or a subject whose access to itself is forever opaque, incapable of self-grounding, is precisely not to have the grounds for agency and the conditions for accountability, the way in which we are, from the start, interrupted by alterity may render us incapable of offering narrative closure for our lives. The purpose here is not to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence, but only to point out that our “incoherence” establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustaind by a social world that is beyond us and before us (64).

rothenberg non-self-coincidence

I am going to quote at length Rothenberg’s critique of the position of Simon Critchley. Critchley argues that as subjects we are initially called upon by an other with a demand that we cannot meet, which is traumatic. This trauma is what turns one into an ethical subject.

… if the initial state of the subject is unethical because it is self-absorbed, grasping, and autonomous, what motivates this self-centered subject to experience the demand of the other as traumatic? In fact, what motivates the unethical subject to recognize or respond to the other at all? What will pierce the self-satisfied autonomy of this possessive selfhood so that it will feel the other’s presence as infinitely demanding? And what will guarantee that the experience of an infinite demand will call forth a sense of insufficiency, a traumatic sense of insufficiency, on the part of the subject? Or, put another way, why doesn’t the subject who encounters the other simply walk away, or try to annihilate the other, or help the other in some limited way and go home to an untroubled sleep?

That is, the Levinasian story as Critchley tells it seems to require that the subject already be ethical in order to respond in the way that would leadit to ethicality. In this account, the dividual subject is nothing other than an ethical subject from the start, a person who for some unexplainedreason, responds to the presence of others as requiring more of the subject than the subject can give. Nothing in the story accounts for the transformation of the unethical subject, because the change-agent (trauma) can only be generated if the subject is already responsive to the other. And once we start with an ethical subject, the whole circuitous route to ethicality through trauma is superfluous. 197-198

… Critchley never explains what would motivate the subject to attempt to relate to a radical other with whom there can be no relation. It just seems to him to be obvious that any subject would react to such an encounter with a sense of responsibility, so he never inquires into the means by which that responsiveness is achieved. Still something has to make the subject desire a relation with the other, rather than, for example, a rejection or obliteration …his model doesn’t explicate the production of the ethical subject … (200).