{"id":9314,"date":"2012-09-20T13:42:28","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T18:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9314"},"modified":"2012-09-20T17:48:04","modified_gmt":"2012-09-20T22:48:04","slug":"z-on-levinas-butler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/09\/20\/z-on-levinas-butler\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017d on Levinas Butler pt1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile, and with a \u201cbroken heart\u201d \u2015 this is the liberal core of Levinas\u2019s thought, a core to which Butler<\/strong> also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject, caught in the abyss of decentered symbolic representation, and whose very identity hinges on an external, inconsistent network. Precarious Life<\/em>, London: Verso Books 2006.<\/p>\n

It is this precarious status of subjectivity which functions as the zero-level of all ethics: the absolute call, the injunction, emanating from the vulnerable neighbor\u2019s face<\/span>.\u00a0 To be an ethical subject means to experience oneself, in one\u2019s singularity, as the addressee of that unconditional call, as responsible and responding to it even when one chooses to ignore it.<\/p>\n

[From a Christian perspective, we should go to the end here: if man is created in God\u2019s image, the becoming-man-of-God means that the same goes for God: in Christ, God becomes a fragile absolute, precarious, vulnerable, and impotent.]<\/p>\n

The first thing to note here is the basic asymmetry of the situation: the other\u2019s face makes an unconditional demand on us; we did not ask for it, and we are not allowed to refuse it.<\/span> (And, of course, what Levinas means by \u201cthe face\u201d is not directly the physical face: a face can also be a mask for the face, there is no direct representation of the face.)<\/p>\n

This demand is the Real<\/span> which cannot be captured by any words; it marks the limit of language, every translation of it into language already distorts it<\/span>. It is not simply external to discourse\u2015it is its inner limit, as the encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, since there can be no discourse without the other. It is the real<\/span> of a violent encounter that (as Badiou would put it) throws me out of my existence as a human animal. 827<\/p>\n

[The irony here is that, with Butler, the encounter with the Other in its precariousness and fragility (finitude, mortality) has exactly the same structure as the Badiouian encounter of the Event which opens up the dimension of immortality or eternity.]<\/p>\n

And Butler is fully justified in emphasizing that this ethical injunction, at its most basic level, is a reaction to the quasi-automatic reaction to get rid of the other-neighbor, to kill him<\/span> (this urge can easily be accounted for in Freudo-Lacanian terms as the basic reaction to the encounter with the intrusive Neighbor-Thing<\/span>)<\/p>\n

But for Freud and Lacan (as was convincingly elaborated by Jean Laplanche), the traumatic encounter with the Other as a desiring<\/strong> which \u201cinterrupts the narcissistic circuit\u201d is precisely the basic experience constitutive of desiring subjectivity<\/strong>\u2015which is why, for Lacan, desire is a \u201cdesire of the Other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus Lacan\u2019s \u201cethics of psychoanalysis\u201d stands for his attempt to demonstrate that there is an ethical dimension discovered in the psychoanalytic experience, … Lacan\u2019s option involves neither the aggressive thrust to annihilate the Other – Neighbor-Thing<\/span>, nor its reversal into accepting the Other as the source of an unconditional ethical injunction. But why not?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\ud83d\ude42 constitutive of desiring subjectivity, is this initial approach what do you want.\u00a0 the enigma of the desire of the other which is mind blowing and throws us totally out of joint, we react as one would violently, or indifference, but the ethical call is to not forego hiding away, and to do something.\u00a0 This something as we have seen is within the 4 discourses \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

We should note that, in Levinas\u2019s account, it is not me who experiences myself as precarious<\/strong>, but the Other who addresses me. This is why, in my very asymmetric subordination to the Other\u2019s call, in my unconditional responsibility, in my being taken hostage by the Other, I assume supremacy over the Other<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Do we not encounter this wounded-precarious Other almost daily, in advertisements for charity<\/span> which bombard us with images of starving or disfigured children crying in agony? Far from undermining the hegemonic ideology, such adverts are one of its exemplary manifestations. 828<\/p>\n

Butler shows how the face itself can function as an instrument of dehumanization, like the faces of evil fundamentalists or despots (bin Laden, Saddam Hussein), and how the power regime also decides which faces we are allowed to see as worthy of grief and mourning<\/span> and which not \u2014 it was pictures of children burning from napalm that generated ethical outrage in the US public over Vietnam. Today, the very fragility of the suffering Other is part of the humanitarian ideological offensive.<\/span>\u00a0 828<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

What must be added to the precariousness and vulnerability of the ethical subject<\/strong> is the notion of absolute fidelity, the reference to an absolute point of infinity,<\/span> in accordance with Pascal\u2019s well-known thought that man is a tiny speck of dust in the universe, but at the same time infinite spirit<\/span>.\u00a0 828<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Fragility alone does not account for ethics<\/span> \u2015 the gaze of a tortured or wounded animal does not in itself make it an ethical subject. The two minimal components of the ethical subject are its precarious vulnerability and its fidelity<\/strong> to an \u201cimmortal Truth\u201d<\/span> (a principle for which, in clear and sometimes ridiculous contrast to its vulnerability and limitations, the subject is ready to put everything at stake)\u2015it is only this presence of an \u201cimmortal Truth\u201d<\/span> that makes human vulnerability different from that of a wounded animal. Furthermore, to these two, we should also add the \u201cdemonic\u201d immortality whose Freudian name is the (death) drive, the very core of the Neighbor-Thing.<\/span> 829<\/p>\n

[This is why, in psychoanalytic treatment, there is no face-to-face, neither the analyst nor his analysand sees the other\u2019s face<\/strong>: only in this way can the dimension of the Neighbor-Thing emerge<\/span>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that man can be a moral being only insofar as he is weak, limited, fragile, and with a \u201cbroken heart\u201d \u2015 this is the liberal core of Levinas\u2019s thought, a core to which Butler also subscribes when she focuses on the fragile symbolic status of a human subject, caught in the … Continue reading “\u017d on Levinas Butler pt1”<\/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":[78,138,125,115,76,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-drive","category-precarity","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9314","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=9314"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9318,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9314\/revisions\/9318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}