{"id":8062,"date":"2011-06-24T10:34:05","date_gmt":"2011-06-24T15:34:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=8062"},"modified":"2011-06-24T14:13:22","modified_gmt":"2011-06-24T19:13:22","slug":"8062","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2011\/06\/24\/8062\/","title":{"rendered":"Can we use Levinas against himself? (1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation<\/a>” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011.<\/p>\n

Butler’s Thesis<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, … from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand.\u00a0 I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered. 2<\/p>\n

– Is what is happening so far from me that I can bear no responsibility for it?<\/p>\n

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

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

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

[What does it mean] to register an ethical demand during these times that is reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside of established community bonds? 5<\/p>\n

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

It is interesting that Levinas<\/strong> insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual<\/em>. And yet, he was of the one who claimed in an interview that the Palestinian had no face, and that he only meant to extend ethical obligations to those who were bound together by his version of Judeo-Christian and classical Greek origins. In some ways, he gave us the very principle that he betrayed. And this means that anyone and everyone are not only free, but obligated, to extend that principle to the Palestinian people, precisely because he could not. His failure directly contradicts his formulation of the demand to be ethically responsive to those who exceed our immediate sphere of belonging, but to whom we nevertheless belong, regardless of any question of what we choose or by what contracts we are bound, or what established forms of cultural belonging are available.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, this raises a question of how there can be an ethical relation to those who cannot appear within the horizon of ethics, who are not persons, or are not considered to be the kind of beings with whom one can or must enter into an ethical relation. Here is where a most painful division within Levinas\u2019s work continues to haunt those of us who seek ethical resources there. On the one hand, he tells us that we are claimed by others, including those we have never known, those we still don\u2019t know, and that we are born into this situation of being compelled to honor the life of the other, every other, whose claim on life comes before our own. On the other hand, he claims that this very ethical relation depends upon a specific set of religious and cultural conditions, Judaeo-Christian, and that those who are not formed within this tradition are not prepared for ethical life, and are not included as those who can make a claim upon those who belong to a narrow conception of the West. 7-8<\/p>\n

Can we, in other words, use Levinas against himself to help in the articulation of a global ethics that would extend beyond the religious and cultural communities that he saw as its necessary limit?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life and the Obligations of Cohabitation” The Neale Wheeler Watson Lecture 2011 Nobel Museum Stockholm Sweden, May 24 2011. Butler’s Thesis I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, … from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand.\u00a0 I want to suggest that these are ethical … Continue reading “Can we use Levinas against himself? (1)”<\/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":[78,138,38,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-ethics","category-precarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8062","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=8062"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8107,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8062\/revisions\/8107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}