{"id":9071,"date":"2012-06-28T16:28:08","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T21:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9071"},"modified":"2013-07-03T08:58:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-03T13:58:57","slug":"butler-and-bracha-ettinger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/06\/28\/butler-and-bracha-ettinger\/","title":{"rendered":"Butler on Levinas, Arendt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger<\/a> At European Graduate School in 2011<\/p>\n

The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place.<\/p>\n

The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose and responding to solicitations and languages we may not understand or even wish to understand.<\/p>\n

… I am trying to underscore that something impinges upon us, without our being able to anticipate or prepare for it in advance, and this means that we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition, but also as an ethical demand. I want to suggest that these are ethical obligations which do not require our consent, and neither are they the result of contracts or agreements into which any of us have deliberately entered.<\/p>\n

Can we understand the working of an ethical obligation upon our sensibilities.\u00a0 Indeed this word sensibility<\/em> is one that Levinas reserves for that region of responsiveness that precedes the ego.\u00a0 A kind of response that therefore is and is not my response.\u00a0 To say it is my response is to lodge the ego as its source.\u00a0 But what we’re trying to talk about here is a form of responsiveness that implies a dispossession of the egological.<\/p>\n

Ethical obligations that impose themselves upon us without our consent.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is, of course, one thing to claim this in the abstract, but quite another to understand what the difficulties are in struggling for social and political forms that are committed to fostering a sustainable interdependency on egalitarian terms. When any of us are affected by the sufferings of others, we recognize and affirm an interconnection with them, even when we do not know their names or speak their language. At its best, some media representations of suffering at a distance compel us to give up our more narrow communitarian ties, and to respond, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes even against our will, to a perceived injustice. Such presentations can bring the fate of others near or make it seem very far away, and yet, the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the media in these times depend on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. And we might find ways of understanding the interdependency that characterizes co-habitation precisely as these bonds.<\/p>\n

My own thesis is that the kind of ethical demands that emerge through the global circuits in these times depends on this reversibility of the proximity and distance. Indeed, I want to suggest that certain bonds are actually wrought through this very reversibility. If I am only bound to those who are close to me, already familiar, then my ethics are invariably parochial, communitarian, and exclusionary.<\/p>\n

If I am only bound to those who are \u201chuman\u201d in the abstract, then I avert every effort to translate culturally between my own situation and that of others. If I am only bound to those who suffer at a distance, but never those who are close to me, then I evacuate my situation in an effort to secure the distance that allows me to entertain ethical feeling.<\/p>\n

But if ethical relations are mediated \u2013 and I use that word deliberately here \u2013 confounding questions of location such that what is happening \u201cthere\u201d also happens in some sense \u201chere\u201d and if what is happening \u201cthere\u201d depends on the event being registered in several \u201celsewheres\u201d, then it would seem that the ethical claim of the event takes place always in a \u201chere\u201d and \u201cthere\u201d that are fundamentally bound to one another.<\/p>\n

In one sense, the event is emphatically local, since it is precisely the people there whose bodies are on the line. But if those bodies on the line are not registered elsewhere, there is no global response, and also, no global form of ethical recognition and connection, and so something of the reality of the event is lost. It is not just that one discrete population views another through certain media moments, but that such a response makes evident a form of global connectedness, however provisional, with those whose lives and actions are registered in this way. In short, to be unprepared for the media image that overwhelms can lead not to paralysis but to a situation of (a) being moved, and so acting precisely by virtue of being acted upon and (b) being at once there and here, and in different ways, accepting and negotiating the multi-locality of ethical connections we might rightly call global.<\/p>\n

Can we, then, turn to some versions of ethical philosophy in order to<\/strong> reformulate what it means to register an ethical demand during these times that is <\/strong>reducible neither to consent nor to established agreement and that takes place outside<\/strong> of established community bonds?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am trying to articulate a version of cohabitation<\/strong> that follows from the account of ethical obligation I am describing. Turning to Palestine\/Israel to suggest a set of Jewish views of cohabitation that demand a departure from communitarianism and even Jewish communitarianism and that may serve as a critical alternative during this time that state of Israel seeks to secure its claim to represent Jewishness.<\/p>\n

Levinas\u2019s position allows us the following conclusion: that the set of ethical values by which one population is bound to another in no ways depends on those two populations bearing similar marks of national, cultural, religious, racial belonging. It is interesting that Levinas insisted that we are bound to those we do not know, and even those we did not choose, could never have chosen, and that these obligations are, strictly speaking, pre-contractual<\/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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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. It is an agonizing contradiction at the heart of Levinas\u2019s writing.<\/span> But is it possible to take the ethical philosophy formulated there and deploy it against the very exclusionary assumptions by which it is sometimes supported? 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 condition and limit?<\/span><\/p>\n

Let us take as an example his argument that ethical relations are asymmetrical. In his work, the Other has priority over me. What does that concretely mean? Does the other not have the same obligation toward me? Why should I be obligated toward another who does not reciprocate in the same way toward me?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Levinas, reciprocity cannot be the basis of ethics, since ethics is not a bargain: it cannot be the case that my ethical relation to another is contingent on their ethical relation to me, since that would make that ethical relation less than absolute and binding; and it would establish my self-preservation as a distinct and bounded sort of being as more primary than any relation I have to another. For Levinas, no ethics can be derived from egoism; indeed, egoism is the defeat of ethics itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

I take distance from Levinas here, since though I agree in the refutation of the primacy of self-preservation for ethical thinking, I want to insist upon a certain intertwinement between that other life, all those other lives, and my own \u2014 one that is irreducible to national belonging or communitarian affiliation.<\/span><\/p>\n

In my view (which is surely not mine alone) the life of the other, the life that is not our own, is also our life, since whatever sense \u201cour\u201d life has is derived precisely from this sociality, this being already, and from the start, dependent on a world of others, constituted in and by a social world.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this way there are surely others distinct from me whose ethical claim upon me is irreducible to an egoistic calculation on my part. But that is because we are, however distinct, also bound to one another.<\/span><\/p>\n

And this is not always a happy or felicitous experience. To find that one\u2019s life is also the life of others, even as this life is distinct, and must be distinct, means that one\u2019s boundary is at once a limit and a site of adjacency, a mode of spatial and temporal nearness and even boundedness.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the bounded and living appearance of the body is the condition of being exposed to the other, exposed to solicitation, seduction, passion, injury, exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us. In this sense the exposure of the body points to its precarity [precariousness].<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, for Levinas, this precarious and corporeal being is responsible for the life of the other, which means that no matter how much one fears for one\u2019s own life, preserving the life of the other is paramount.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If only the Israeli army felt this way! Indeed, this is a form of responsibility that is not easy while undergoing a felt sense of precarity. Precarity names both the necessity and difficulty of ethics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is surely hard to feel at once vulnerable to destruction by the other and yet responsible for the other, and readers of Levinas object all the time to his formulation that we are, all of us, in some sense responsible for that which persecutes us. He does not mean that we bring about our persecution \u2013 not at all. Rather, \u201cpersecution\u201d is the strange and disconcerting name that Levinas gives for an ethical demand that imposes itself upon us against our will. We are, despite ourselves, open to this imposition, and though it overrides our will, its shows us that the claims that others make upon us are part of our very sensibility, our receptivity, and our answerability. We are, in other words, called upon, and this is only possible because we are in some sense vulnerable to claims that we cannot anticipate in advance, and for which there is no adequate preparation<\/span>.<\/p>\n

For Levinas, there is no other way to understand the ethical reality; ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that vulnerability and by that ethical relation. This ethical relation is not a virtue that I have or exercise; it is prior to any individual sense of self. It is not as a discrete individual that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. This is also, clearly, the condition of my injurability as well, and in this way my answerability and my injurability are bound up with one another. In other words, you may frighten me and threaten me, but my obligation to you must remain firm.<\/span><\/p>\n

This relation precedes individuation, and when I act ethically, I am undone as a bounded being. I come apart. I find that I am my relation to the \u201cyou\u201d whose life I seek to preserve, and without that relation, this \u201cI\u201d makes no sense, and has lost its mooring in this ethics that is always prior to the ontology of the ego.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another way to put this point is that the \u201cI\u201d becomes undone in its ethical relation to the \u201cyou\u201d which means that there is a very specific mode of being dispossessed that makes ethical relationality possible. If I possess myself too firmly or too rigidly, I cannot be in an ethical relation to you. The ethical relation means ceding a certain egological perspective for one which is structured fundamentally by a mode of address: you call upon me, and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable; that is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level, and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why bring a discussion of Levinas together with one regarding Arendt?<\/strong> Both Levinas and Arendt take issue with the classically liberal conception of individualism, that is, the idea that individuals knowingly enter into certain contracts, and their obligation follows from having deliberately and volitionally entered into agreements with one another. This view assumes that we are only responsible for those relations, codified by agreements, into which we have knowingly and volitionally entered.<\/p>\n

And Arendt disputes this view. Indeed, it was the substance of the argument that she made against Eichmann. He thought he could choose which populations should live and die, and in this sense he thought he could choose with whom to co-habit the earth. What he failed to understand, according to Arendt, is that no one has the prerogative to choose with whom to co-habit the earth.<\/p>\n

There is no one part of the population that can claim the earth for itself, no community or nation-state or regional unit, no clan, no party, and no race. As I have suggested, to make such a claim is to enter into a policy of genocide. This means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence<\/span>, the basis of her critique of nationalism, the obligation to live on the earth and in a polity that establishes mode of equality for a necessarily and irreversibly heterogenous population.<\/p>\n

Indeed, unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation<\/span> serve as well as the basis of our obligations not to destroy any part of the human population, and to outlaw genocide as a crime against humanity, but also to invest institutions with the demand to seek to make all lives liveable<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Thus, from unchosen co-habitation, Arendt derives notions of universality an equality<\/span><\/p>\n

that commit us to institutions that seek to sustain human lives without regarding some part of the population as socially dead, as redundant, or as intrinsically unworthy of life and therefore ungrievable.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But what is evident is that her views on cohabitation, federated authority, equality, and universality were in stark contrast to those who were defending nationalist forms of Jewish sovereignty, differential classifications for Jewish and non-citizens, military policies to uproot Palestinians from their lands, and efforts to establish a Jewish demographic majority for the state.<\/p>\n

Although it is so often taught that Israel became an historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, and that anyone who questions the founding principles of the Jewish state shows an extraordinary insensitivity to the plight of the Jews, there were Jewish thinkers and political activists at the time, including Arendt, Martin Buber, Hans Kohn, and Judah Magnus, who thought among the most important lessons of the Holocaust was an opposition to illegitimate state<\/strong> violence, to any state formation that sought to give electoral priority and citizenship to one race or religion, and that nation-states ought to be internationally barred from<\/strong> dispossessing whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live.<\/p>\n

For whoever \u201cwe\u201d are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone\u2019s consent and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds formed through settler colonialism and expulsion.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. It is not uninteresting to note that Arendt, herself a Jew and refugee, understood her obligation not to belong to the \u201cchosen people\u201d but rather to the unchosen, and to make mixed community precisely among those whose existence implies a right to exist and to lead a liveable life.<\/p>\n

In Sweden on May 27 2011 at the Nobel Museum Butler gave a similar talk and this is her paper here. IF you want to download it click here. Download a copy of Butler’s talk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judith Butler with Bracha Ettinger At European Graduate School in 2011 The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance, and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place. The second is what it means for our ethical obligations when we … Continue reading “Butler on Levinas, Arendt”<\/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":[84,78,138,38,115,103],"tags":[131,109],"class_list":["post-9071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abject","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-ethics","category-precarity","category-universal","tag-precariouslife","tag-whoa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071","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=9071"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11421,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9071\/revisions\/11421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}