But, again, cannot this fidelity be understood precisely as a fidelity to the call of the vulnerable Other in all its precariousness? \ud83d\ude42 This is Critchley’s argument that \u017d disagrees with:)<\/p>\n
The answer is not that the ethical agent should also experience his or her own fragility \u2015 the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication<\/em> of the neighbor<\/span>, or what Levinas effectively did with his notion of the neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.<\/p>\n Levinas<\/strong> deploys the notion of the subject as constituted by its recognition of an unconditional ethical Call<\/span> engendered by the experience of injustices and wrongs: the subject emerges as a reaction to the traumatic encounter with the helpless suffering Other (the Neighbor)<\/span>.<\/p>\n This is why it is constitutively decentered, not autonomous, but split by the ethical Call, a subject defined by the experience of an internalized demand that it can never meet, a demand that exceeds it.<\/p>\n The paradox constitutive of the subject is thus that the demand that the subject cannot meet is what makes the subject, so that the subject is constitutively divided, its autonomy \u201calways usurped by the heteronomous experience of the other\u2019s demand\u201d: \u201cmy relation to the other is not some benign benevolence, compassionate care or respect for the other\u2019s autonomy, but is the obsessive experience of a responsibility that persecutes me with its sheer weight. I am the other\u2019s hostage.\u201d37<\/span><\/p>\n My elementary situation is thus that of an eternal struggle against myself: I am forever split between egotistic rootedness in a particular familiar world around which my life gravitates, and the unconditional call of responsibility for the Other<\/span>: \u201cThe I which arises in enjoyment as a separate being having apart in itself the centre around which its existence gravitates, is confirmed in its singularity by purging itself of this gravitation, and purges itself interminably.\u201d [Critchley Infinitely Demanding<\/em>]<\/p>\n Levinas likes to quote Dostoyevsky here: \u201cWe are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others.\u201d The underlying cruelty is that of the superego<\/span>, of course.<\/p>\n What is the superego<\/span>? In a Motel One, close to Alexanderplatz in Berlin, the do-not-disturb signs read: \u201cI am enjoying my Motel One room \u2026 please don\u2019t disturb!\u201d Not only is this message obscene insofar as it compels the hotel guest who wants peace and quiet to declare that he is enjoying his room, the deeper obscenity resides in the fact that his desire not to be disturbed is implicitly characterized as a desire to enjoy himself in peace (and not, for example, to sleep or to work).<\/p>\n Recall the strange fact, regularly evoked by Primo Levi and other Holocaust survivors, about how their intimate reaction to their survival was marked by a deep split: consciously, they were fully aware that their survival was the result of a meaningless accident, that they were not in any way guilty for it, that the only guilty perpetrators were their Nazi torturers. At the same time, they were (more than merely) haunted by an \u201cirrational\u201d feeling of guilt, as if they had survived at the expense of others and were thus somehow responsible for their deaths \u2015 as is well known, this unbearable feeling of guilt drove many of them to suicide. This displays the agency of the superego<\/span> at its purest: as the obscene agency which manipulates us into a spiraling movement of self-destruction<\/span>.<\/p>\n The function of the superego<\/span> is precisely to obfuscate the cause of the terror constitutive of our being-human, the inhuman core of being-human, the dimension of what the German Idealists called negativity and Freud called the death drive<\/span>. Far from being the traumatic hard core of the Real<\/span> from which sublimations protect us, the superego<\/span> is itself a mask screening off the Real<\/span>.<\/p>\n For Levinas, the traumatic intrusion of the radically heterogeneous Real Thing<\/span> which decenters the subject is identical with<\/em> the ethical Call of the Good, while, for Lacan, on the contrary, it is the primordial \u201cevil Thing,\u201d something that can never be sublated into a version of the Good, something which forever remains a disturbing cut. Therein lies the revenge of Evil for our domestication of the Neighbor as the source of the ethical call<\/span>: the \u201crepressed Evil\u201d returns in the guise of the superego’s<\/span> distortion of the ethical call itself.<\/p>\n But there is a further question to be raised here: is the opposition between fellow-man and Neighbor the ultimate horizon of our experience of others?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is clear that for Levinas the \u201cface\u201d is not the name for my fellow-man with whom I can empathize, who is \u201clike me,\u201d my semblant<\/em>, but the name for a radical facelessness, for the Real<\/span> of the abyss of an Otherness whose intrusion destabilizes every homeostatic exchange with others.<\/p>\n However, does not the very fact that Levinas can use the term \u201cface\u201d to designate its opposite, the faceless abyss of the other, point to the link between the two, to the fact that they belong to the same field? Is not the faceless abyss of the Neighbor a faceless Beyond engendered by the face itself, the face\u2019s inherent overcoming, like the terrifying image (vortex, maelstrom, Medusa\u2019s head, Irma\u2019s throat \u2026) which is too strong for our eyes, which closes down the very dimension of what can be seen?<\/p>\n Insofar as, for Lacan, the face functions as an imaginary lure, the Real<\/span> of the faceless Neighbor is the imaginary Real<\/span>; the question is thus whether there is another, symbolic, Real<\/span>. What emerges if, in a vague homology, we push the symbolic as far as the same self-canceling into which the face is pushed to give rise to the faceless abyss of the Neighbor?<\/p>\n What would be the status of the human individual as a symbolic Real<\/span>?<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n What emerges at this point is the subject, the Cartesian cogito<\/span> which, according to Lacan, is none other than the subject of the unconscious. No wonder that Lacan refers to this subject as an \u201canswer of the real<\/span>\u201d: it emerges when the symbolic is pushed to the limit of its impossibility<\/span>, of its immanent Real<\/span>. This subject is totally de-substantialized;<\/span> coinciding with its own failure-to-be, it is a mere cut, a gap<\/span>, in the order of being.<\/p>\n If the axis fellow-man\/Neighbor remains our ultimate horizon, we have to abandon the dimension of universality: the Neighbor is a singular abyss which resists universality.<\/p>\n But is it then the case that the non-universalizable Neighbor is the ultimate horizon of our ethico-political activity? Is the highest norm the injunction to respect the neighbor\u2019s Otherness?<\/p>\n No wonder Levinas is so popular today among leftist-multiculturalist liberals who improvise endlessly on the motif of impossible universality\u2015every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.<\/p>\n The question to be posed here is whether every ethical universality is really based on the exclusion of the abyss of the Neighbor, or whether there is a universality which does not<\/em> exclude the Neighbor.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The answer is: yes, the universality grounded in the “part of no-part,”<\/span> the singular universality exemplified in those who lack a determined place in the social totality, who are \u201cout of place\u201d in it and as such directly stand for the universal dimension<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" But, again, cannot this fidelity be understood precisely as a fidelity to the call of the vulnerable Other in all its precariousness? \ud83d\ude42 This is Critchley’s argument that \u017d disagrees with:) The answer is not that the ethical agent should also experience his or her own fragility \u2015 the temptation to be resisted here is … Continue reading “\u017d on Levinas Butler pt2”<\/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":[78,138,38,76,15,20],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-9327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-ethics","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-zizek","tag-ltn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327","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=9327"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11118,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9327\/revisions\/11118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}