{"id":9884,"date":"2012-11-19T15:41:23","date_gmt":"2012-11-19T20:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9884"},"modified":"2013-03-19T10:31:38","modified_gmt":"2013-03-19T15:31:38","slug":"162-3-face-neighbor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/19\/162-3-face-neighbor\/","title":{"rendered":"162-3 face neighbor"},"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. \u00a0Here is \u017d in Oct 2010 at Princeton in a great lecture outlining these points<\/a><\/p>\n

This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, \u201cinhuman\u201d Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the \u201cliving dead\u201d in the concentration camps<\/span>.<\/p>\n

This is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of the Shoah, one thing is self-evident apropos his questioning of one\u2019s own right to be and his emphasis on one\u2019s unconditional asymmetrical responsibility: this is not how a survivor of the Shoah, one who effectively experienced the ethical abyss of Shoah, thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is to say, insofar as, in his description of the ethical call, Levinas reproduces the basic coordinates of ideological interpellation (I become an ethical subject when I respond with \u201cHere I am!\u201d to the infinite call emanating from the vulnerable face of the other), one could say that the Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer able to say \u201cHere I am!\u201d (and in front of whom I can no longer say \u201cHere I am!\u201d).<\/p>\n

Recall the big gesture of identification with the exemplary victim: \u201cWe are all citizens of Sarajevo!\u201d and such; the problem with the Muselmann is that this gesture is no longer possible. It would be obscene to proclaim pathetically, \u201cWe are all Muselm\u00e4nner!\u201d<\/p>\n

When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his\/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind
\nwall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible.<\/p>\n

However, at this point, we again confront the key dilemma: what if it is precisely in the guise of the \u201cfaceless\u201d face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other\u2019s call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing a Muselmann, one hits upon one\u2019s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In short, what about bringing together Levinas\u2019s face and the topic of the \u201cneighbor\u201d in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous<\/span>, impenetrable Thing<\/span> that is the Nebenmensch,the Thing<\/span> that hystericizes and provokes me?<\/p>\n

What if the neighbor’s<\/span> face stands neither for my imaginary double\/semblant nor for the purely symbolic abstract \u201cpartner in communication,\u201d but for the Other in his or her dimension of the Real?<\/span><\/p>\n

What if, along these lines, we restore to the Levinasian \u201cface\u201d all its monstrosity<\/span>: face is not a harmonious Whole of the dazzling epiphany of a \u201chuman face,\u201d face is something the glimpse of which we get when we stumble upon a grotesquely distorted face, a face in the grip of a disgusting tic or grimace,<\/strong> a face which, precisely, confronts us when the neighbor \u201closes his face\u201d? To recall a case from popular culture, \u201cface\u201d is what, in Gaston Leroux\u2019s The Phantom of the Opera, the heroine gets a glimpse of when she sees for the first time the Phantom without his mask (and, as a reaction to the horror that confronts her, immediately loses her consciousness and falls to the ground).<\/p>\n

far from standing for absolute authenticity, such a monstrous<\/span> face is, rather, the ambiguity of the Real embodied,<\/span> the extreme\/impossible point at which opposites coincide, at which the innocence of the Other\u2019s vulnerable nakedness overlaps with pure evil. 162<\/p>\n

That is to say, what one should focus on here is the precise meaning of the term neighbor:<\/span> is the \u201cneighbor\u201d in the Judeo-Freudian sense, the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor, the same as the neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other\u2019s face?<\/span><\/p>\n

Is there not, in the very heart of the Judeo-Freudian inhuman neighbor<\/span>, a monstrous<\/span> dimension which is already minimally \u201cgentrified,\u201d domesticated, once it is conceived in the Levinasian sense?<\/span>\u00a0 What if the Levinasian face is yet another defense against this<\/span> monstrous<\/span> dimension of subjectivity<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

And what if the Jewish Law<\/strong> is to be conceived as strictly correlative to this inhuman neighbor?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In other words, what if the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the<\/span> neighbor<\/span>, to retain our proximity to the neighbor<\/span>, but, on the contrary, to keep the<\/strong> neighbor<\/span> at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the<\/strong> monstrosity<\/span> of the<\/strong> neighbor?<\/span><\/p>\n

In short, the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical \u201cgentrification\u201d of the neighbor<\/span>, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates.<\/strong> 163<\/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. \u00a0Here is \u017d in Oct 2010 at Princeton in a great lecture outlining these points This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, … Continue reading “162-3 face neighbor”<\/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":[125,142,76,15,41,20],"tags":[105],"class_list":["post-9884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drive","category-nightworld","category-sub-destitute","category-subjectivity","category-the-real","category-zizek","tag-thedebate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9884","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=9884"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9889,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9884\/revisions\/9889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}