{"id":9846,"date":"2012-11-19T01:13:01","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T06:13:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9846"},"modified":"2013-06-06T17:09:40","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T22:09:40","slug":"148-death-drive-ethics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/19\/148-death-drive-ethics\/","title":{"rendered":"148 death drive ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Slavoj, \u017di\u017eek, \u201cNeighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.\u201d The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology.<\/em> Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.<\/p>\n

The responsibility for the other \u2014 the subject as the response to the infinite call embodied in the other\u2019s face, a face that is simultaneously helpless, vulnerable, and issuing an unconditional command \u2014 is, for Levinas, asymmetrical and nonreciprocal: I am responsible for the other without having any right to claim that the other should display the same responsibility for me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Levinas likes to quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky here: \u201cWe are all responsible for everything and guilty in front of everyone, but I am that more than all others.\u201d The ethical asymmetry between me and the other addressing me with the infinite call is the primordial fact, and \u201cI\u201d should never lose my grounding in this irreducibly first-person relationship to the other, which should go to extremes, if necessary. I should be ready to take responsibility for the other up to taking his place, up to becoming a hostage for him<\/span>: \u201cSubjectivity as such is primordially a hostage, responsible to the extent that it becomes the sacrifice for others\u201d (DF,98).<\/p>\n

This is how Levinas defines the \u201creconciliatory sacrifice\u201d: a gesture by means of which the Same as the hostage take the place of (replaces) the Other. Is this gesture of \u201creconciliatory sacrifice,\u201d however, not Christ\u2019s gesture par excellence? Was He not the hostage who took the place of all of us and, therefore, exemplarily human (\u201cecce homo\u201d)?<\/p>\n

Far from preaching an easy grounding of politics in the ethics of the respect and responsibility for the Other, Levinas instead insists on their absolute incompatibility, on the gap separating the two dimensions: ethics involves an asymmetric relationship in which I am always-already responsible for the Other<\/strong>, while politics is the domain of symmetrical equality and distributive justice. However, is this solution not all too neat?<\/p>\n

That is to say, is such a notion of politics not already \u201cpostpolitical,\u201d excluding the properly political dimension (on account of which, for Hannah Arendt, tyranny is politics at its purest), in short, excluding precisely the dimension of what Carl Schmitt called political theology?<\/p>\n

One is tempted to say that, far from being reducible to the symmetric domain of equality and distributive justice, politics is the very \u201cimpossible\u201d link between this domain and that of (theological) ethics, the way ethics cuts across the symmetry of equal relations, distorting and displacing them.<\/p>\n

In his Ethics and Infinity<\/em>, Levinas emphasizes how what appears as the most natural should become the most questionable\u2014 like Spinoza\u2019s notion that every entity naturally strives for its self-perseverance, for the full assertion of its being and its immanent powers: Do I have (the right) to be? By insisting on being, do I deprive others of their place, do I ultimately kill them?<\/p>\n

(Although Levinas dismisses Freud as irrelevant for his radical ethical problematic, was Freud also in his own way not aware of it? Is “death drive”<\/span> at its most elementary not the sabotaging of one\u2019s own striving to be<\/span>, to actualize one\u2019s powers and potentials? And for that very reason, is not<\/strong> death drive<\/span> the last support of ethics?<\/strong>)<\/p>\n

151: Is not the fundamental insight of the late Lacan<\/strong> precisely that there is an inherent obstacle to full<\/span> jouissance<\/span> operative already in the<\/span> drive<\/span> which functions beyond the Law? The inherent \u201cobstacle\u201d on account of which a<\/span> drive<\/span> involves a curved space, gets caught in a repetitive movement around its object, is not yet \u201csymbolic castration.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For the late Lacan, on the contrary, Prohibition<\/span>, far from standing for a traumatic cut, enters precisely in order to pacify the situation, to rid us of the inherent impossibility inscribed in the functioning of a<\/span> drive<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Slavoj, \u017di\u017eek, \u201cNeighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.\u201d The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190. The responsibility for the other \u2014 the subject as the response to the infinite call embodied in the other\u2019s face, a face that is simultaneously helpless, vulnerable, … Continue reading “148 death drive ethics”<\/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":[125,21,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-jouissance","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9846","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=9846"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11179,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9846\/revisions\/11179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}