{"id":9831,"date":"2012-11-18T22:35:04","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T03:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9831"},"modified":"2012-11-20T21:31:07","modified_gmt":"2012-11-21T02:31:07","slug":"plea-ethical-violence-138-9-z-summary-of-bs-position","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/18\/plea-ethical-violence-138-9-z-summary-of-bs-position\/","title":{"rendered":"138-9 plea ethical violence \u017d summary of B’s position"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavoj, \u017di\u017eek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology<\/em> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.<\/p>\n

Here is \u017di\u017eek’s interpretation of Butler’s ethics<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I reconstruct my life in a narrative, I always do it within a certain intersubjective context, answering the Other\u2019s call-injunction, addressing the Other in a certain way.<\/p>\n

This background, including the (unconscious) motivations and libidinal investments of my narrative, cannot ever be rendered fully transparent within the narrative. To fully account for oneself in a symbolic narrative is a priori impossible; the Socratic injunction, \u201cknow thyself,\u201d is impossible to fulfill for a priori structural reasons<\/span>.<\/p>\n

My very status as a subject depends on its links to the substantial Other: not only the regulative-symbolic Other of the tradition in which I am embedded, but also the bodily-desiring substance of the Other, the fact that, in the core of my being, I am irreducibly vulnerable, exposed to the Other(s). And far from limiting my ethical status (autonomy), this primordial vulnerability due to my constitutive exposure to the Other grounds<\/em><\/strong> it: what makes an individual human<\/em><\/strong> and thus something for which we are responsible, toward whom we have a duty to help, is his\/her very finitude and vulnerability.<\/p>\n

Far from undermining ethics (in the sense of rendering me ultimately nonresponsible: \u201cI am not a master of myself, what I do is conditioned by forces that overwhelm me.\u201d), this primordial exposure \/dependency opens up the properly ethical relation of individuals who accept and respect each other\u2019s vulnerability and limitation.<\/p>\n

Crucial here is the link between the impenetrability of the Other and my own impenetrability to myself: they are linked because my own being is grounded in the primordial exposure to the Other. Confronted with the Other, I never can fully account for myself. And when Butler emphasizes how one should not close oneself off to this exposure to the Other, how one should not try to transpose the unwilled into something willed, is she not thereby opposing the very core of Nietzsche\u2019s thought, the stance of willing the eternal return of the Same, which involves precisely the transposition of everything unwilled, everything we are thrown into as given, into something Willed?<\/p>\n

The first ethical gesture is thus to abandon the position of absolute self-positing subjectivity and to acknowledge one\u2019s exposure \/ thrownness, being overwhelmed by Other(ness): far from limiting our humanity, this limitation is its positive condition. This awareness of limitation implies a stance of fundamental forgiveness and a tolerant \u201clive and let live\u201d attitude: I will never be able to account for myself in front of the Other, because I am already nontransparent to myself, and I will never get from the Other a full answer to \u201cwho are you?\u201d because the Other is a mystery also for him \/herself.<\/p>\n

To recognize the Other is thus not primarily or ultimately to recognize the Other in a certain well-defined capacity (\u201cI recognize you as . . . rational, good, lovable\u201d), but to recognize you in the abyss of your very impenetrability and opacity. This mutual recognition of limitation thus opens up a space of sociality that is the solidarity of the vulnerable.\u00a0<\/span> \ud83d\ude42 \u017di\u017eek is looking for an opening to insert something of his monstrous neighbor.<\/p>\n

Page 139: Butler\u2019s central \u201cHegelian\u201d reflexive turn here is that it is not only that the subject has to adopt a stance toward the norms that regulate his activity \u2014 these norms in their turn determine who and what is or is not recognized as subject.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Relying on Foucault, Butler thus formulates the basic feature of critical tradition: when one criticizes and judges phenomena on behalf of norms, one should in the same gesture question the status of these norms. Say, when one holds something to be (un)true, one should at the same time question the criteria of \u201cholding something to be true,\u201d which are never abstract and ahistorical, but always part of a concrete context into which we are thrown.<\/p>\n

This move, of course, is the elementary Hegelian move formulated in the introduction to the Phenomenology: testing is always minimally self-relating and reflexive, in other words, when I am testing the truth of a statement or an act, I am always also testing the standard of testing, so that if the test fails, the standard of success or failure should also be problematized. This reference to Hegel is mediated by Adorno\u2019s critique of Hegel\u2019s idealism, a critique which Butler submits to critical reading.<\/p>\n

When Adorno claims that \u201cthe true injustice is always located at the place from which one blindly posits oneself as just and the other as unjust\u201d, does he thereby not basically repeat Hegel\u2019s old argument about the Beautiful Soul: \u201cThe true Evil is the very gaze which sees evil all around itself\u201d? Recall the arrogance of many West Germans in 1990, when they condemned the majority of East Germans as moral weaklings corrupted by the Communist police regime \u2014 this very gaze which saw in East Germans moral corruption was corruption itself.<\/p>\n

(Symptomatically, although many DDR files were opened to the public, the ones that remained secret are the files recording contact between East German and West German politicians \u2014 too much West sycophancy would be revealed here.)<\/p>\n

[There is a double paradox in Butler\u2019s establishing the link between Adorno\u2019s critique of the ethical violence of the abstract universality imposed from outside upon a concrete life-world and Hegel\u2019s critique of revolutionary terror as the supreme reign of the abstract universality.<\/p>\n

First, one should bear in mind that Hegel here relies on the standard conservative motif (elaborated before him by Edmund Burke) of organic traditional ties which a revolution violently disrupts and that Hegel\u2019s rejection of universal democracy is part of the same line of thought. So we have here Butler praising the \u201cconservative\u201d Hegel!<\/p>\n

Furthermore, Hegel is not simply rejecting revolutionary terror. He is in the same gesture asserting its necessity: we do not have a choice between the abstract universality of terror and the traditional organic unity \u2014 the choice is here forced, the first gesture is necessarily that of asserting abstract universality<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavoj, \u017di\u017eek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190. Here is \u017di\u017eek’s interpretation of Butler’s ethics The impossibility of fully accounting for oneself is conditioned by the irreducible intersubjective context of every narrative reconstitution: when I … Continue reading “138-9 plea ethical violence \u017d summary of B’s position”<\/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":[78,138,103,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-butlerethics","category-universal","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9831","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=9831"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9928,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9831\/revisions\/9928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}