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.<\/p>\n
… 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<\/em>?\u00a0 In fact, what motivates the unethical subject to recognize or respond to the other at all?\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n That is, the Levinasian story as Critchley<\/a> tells it seems to require that the subject already<\/em> be ethical in order to respond in the way that would lead<\/em>it to ethicality.\u00a0 In this account, the dividual subject is nothing other than an ethical subject from the start, a person who for some unexplained<\/em>reason, 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<\/span><\/p>\n … Critchley never explains what would motivate <\/em>the subject to attempt to relate to a radical other with whom there can be no relation<\/em>.\u00a0 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<\/em> by which that responsiveness is achieved<\/strong>. Still something <\/em>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 …\u00a0 (200).<\/span><\/p>\n 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 … Continue reading “rothenberg non-self-coincidence”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,24,15],"tags":[143],"class_list":["post-4678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-lacan","category-subjectivity","tag-excessive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4678"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6203,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4678\/revisions\/6203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"