What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the \u201cinhuman\u201d in Kant\u2019s transcendental turn.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbour<\/span> is with reference to Kant\u2019s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgement: the positive statement \u2018the soul is mortal\u2019 can be negated in two ways. We can either deny a predicate (\u2018the soul is not mortal\u2019), or affirm a non-predicate (\u2018the soul in non-mortal\u2019).\u00a0 The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between \u2018he is not dead\u2019 and \u2018he is undead\u2019.<\/p>\n The indefinite judgement opens up a third domain that undermines the distinction between dead and non-dead (alive): the \u2018undead<\/span>\u2019 are neither alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous \u2018living dead\u2019.\u00a0 And the same goes for \u2018inhuman\u2019: \u2018he is not human\u2019 is not the same as \u2018he is inhuman\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018He is not human\u2019 means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while \u2018he is inhuman\u2019 means something thoroughly different, namely the fact that he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.<\/p>\n And perhaps one should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian philosophical revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, while with Kant, the excess to be fought is immanent and concerns the very core of subjectivity itself.<\/span>\u00a0 (Which is why, in German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity<\/strong> is Night, the \u2018Night of the World<\/span>\u2019, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness around.)<\/p>\n In the pre-Kantian universe, when a hero goes mad he is deprived of his humanity, and animal passions or divine madness take over.\u00a0 With Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.<\/strong>\u00a0 [How to Read Lacan46-47,2006. TN 159-160 2005]<\/p>\n Critique of Levinas<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, \u201cinhuman\u201d Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity<\/span>, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann<\/span>, the \u201cliving dead\u201d in the concentration camps. TN 160, 2005<\/p>\n … the<\/em> temptation to be resisted here is the ethical \u201cgentrification\u201d of the neighbour,<\/span> the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. [TN 163, 2005]<\/p>\n Although I try to isolate a certain emancipatory kernel of religion, I must nonetheless emphasize that I am an absolute materialist. I think that one of the trends to which I am very much opposed is the recent post-secular theological turn of deconstruction; the idea being that while there is no ontotheological God there is nonetheless some kind of unconditional ethical injunction up to which we cannot every live.\u00a0 So what re-emerges here is a split between ethics and politics.\u00a0 Ethics stands for the unconditional injunction which you can never fulfill and so you have to accept the gap between unconditional injunction and the always contingent failed interventions that you make. Ethics becomes the domain of the unconditional, spectrality, Otherness and so on, whereas politics consists of practical interventions. This Levinasian Otherness can then be formulated directly as the divine dimension, or it can be formulated just as the messianic utopian dimension inherent to language as such and so on.<\/p>\n I think Lacanian ethics breaks out of this. \u00a0Lacan cannot be incorporated into this paradigm.\u00a0 What Lacan does is precisely to assert the radical politicization of ethics; not in the sense that ethics should be subordinated to power struggles, but in terms of accepting radical contingency. The elementary political position is one that affirms this contingency and this means that you don\u2019t have any guarantee in any norms whatsoever. You have to risk and to decide. This is the lesson of Lacan.\u00a0 Do not compromise your desire. Do not look for support in any form of big Other \u2013 even if this big Other is totally empty or a Levinasian unconditional injunction. You must risk the act without guarantee.<\/p>\n In this sense the ultimate foundation of ethics is political. And, for Lacan, depoliticized ethics is an ethical betrayal because you put the blame on the Other.\u00a0 Depoliticized ethics means that you rely on some figure of the big Other. But the Lacanian act is precisely the act in which you assume that there is no big Other. Conv162-163 2004<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [Lenin\u2019s] idea is simply that there is no big Other; you never get the guarantee; you must act.\u00a0 You must take the risk and act. I think this is the Lenin who is truly a Lacanian Lenin. Conv164<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the \u201cinhuman\u201d in Kant\u2019s transcendental turn. Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this inhuman dimension of the neighbour is with reference to Kant\u2019s philosophy. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant introduced a key distinction between negative … Continue reading “undead Kant”<\/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":[138,125,142,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butlerethics","category-drive","category-nightworld","category-subjectivity","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404","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=8404"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9791,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8404\/revisions\/9791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}