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Infinitely Demanding? Not really...
Since I am feeling guilty about not posting, I'm posting some remarks that really aren't even up to the level of a blog post. They are more like notes for a blog post or sketches for blog posts to come (but necessarily deferred). Anyway, I skimmed Simon Critchley's new book, Infinitely Demanding, yesterday. All you anarchists who hate the state and reduce politics to funny and provocative street theater will love this book. The rest of you? Not so much.
The book reads well and is systematically organized--that's a huge plus. The basic argument builds from Critchley's particular version of Levinasian ethics as a motivation for a political response to the present. I'll leave this aside for now (although it would be a topic to come).
The actual political response is anarchic. And, here I wonder if this anarchy is repeated/performed in the argumentation. Critchley argues both for a politics of naming (very Laclau and Mouffe counter hegemonic strategy) and an experience of multiple singularities. But, these two elements don't seem to fit well together. He thinks
the political task ... is one of inventing a name around which a political subject can be aggregated from the various social struggles through which we are living.
and
Any attempt to order these singularities into a should-to-shoulder 'fighting collectivity,' as Carl Schmitt might say, is doomed to fail.
I won't go into my criticisms of naming (my contribution to the volume Radical Democracy and the Internet has one version of the argument). For now, it seems that the purpose of a name for a political subject is precisely to form or produce a fighting collectivity.
The problem is both with 'fighting'--Critchley's view is avowedly pacifist (which in my mind means that the bad guys get to use guns and weapons and the good guys don't)--and collectivity--Critchley does not think that leftists should struggle for state power. On the contrary, he sees politics as taking a distance toward the state. His politics, then, remains one of resistance and performance, never one of governance. Political responsibility--to the infinite demand--seems to require acknowledgement alone, like making puppets or doing some kind of ironic street theater. It is simply about dissent and nothing more.
It seems to me that permanent dissent is not only politically unwise, it is also impossible. To dissent from some things involves affirming other things. It involves taking a stand about what things matter, about priorities. Anything else is posturing and hysterical provocation. And, weirdly, Critchley might even be ok with this: he views Billionaires for Bush as
perfoming their powerlessness in the face of power.
Come again? The Billionaires (and I've marched with and as them before) take the system at its word. The performance is one of occupying the position of enunciation of the wealthy and neoliberal enemies of social and economic justice, of making it absolutely vivid, clear, and unavoidable--yes, this is what democracy looks like: "Save our gated communities!" "More Blood for Oil!" "Repeal the Estate Tax."
Finally, in my view, Critchley goes too far when he links Al Qaeda with Lenin, Blanqui, and Mao. There are different forms and settings of revolutionary vanguardism. They are not all the same. Some are religious. Some are not. Some are committed to destroying the old. Some are committed to ending colonial occupation and imperial expropriation. Some are committed to bringing something new into being. Critchley blurs these distinctions in order to repeat, in leftist guise, the conservative argument that anyone who rejects capitalism and liberal democracy is necessarily on the side of the terrorists. There is one battle in this view--the one between the so-called West and the terrorists. Within the West, the only politics left to the left is one of performance and resistance. Anything more puts the left on the side of the terrorists. This sort of equation fails to see how Bush and bin Laden are two sides of the same coin, the capitalist coin.
By Jodi | July 10, 2007 in Books | Permalink
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» Infinitely Demanding? Not really... from I cite
I have a sketch of some remarks that could preliminarily be thought of as a possible blog post on Simon' Critchley's new book over at: Long Sunday: Infinitely Demanding? Not really.... Since I am feeling guilty about not posting, I'm [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 10, 2007 3:10:05 PM
» On Simon Critchley, opining without reading, political motivation, etc. from Before the Law
There's a great comment stream at Long Sunday right now, following a post by Jodi Dean on Simon Critchley's new book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. I'm finding it thoroughly enjoyable in part because it's turned into [Read More]
Tracked on Jul 12, 2007 2:29:51 PM
Comments
Jodi,
Interesting note, sometime after reading the book I went to see Critchley and Hardt talk at the ICA. The most curious thing about Simon's position was the comparatively weak theorization of 'direct democracy' it was as if the concept when activated was going to resolve all of our current and developing problems.
It was clearer at the talk than in the text that Simon's notion of direct democracy has never been considered against the issues that haunt the rest of us, including recent concerns such as consumption, climate change as well as the more historically obvious desires to oppress. All of which suggest the necessity that constraints would be required even on direct democracy.
Posted by: sdv | Jul 10, 2007 3:41:56 PM
SDV--thanks for the remark. It was the ICA program that pushed me to read the book. Perhaps part of the problem is that the impulses in the book are those of a concerned citizen (or person if citizen is too statist). So, the material on ethics is systematic and well-considered, but the problems come in with the too quick move to politics. So, here, it's like one is talking with a friend or something rather than reading a philosopher or political theorist. Given the volumes of work on direct democracy, as well as Simon's conversations with Laclau, Habermasians, and Deleuzian political theorists, it is, though, rather odd and disappointing, how limited the view of politics remains.
Posted by: Jodi | Jul 10, 2007 4:12:22 PM
Critchley's sense of the problem of the political seems remniscent of the cat anecdote from Derrida's _The Gift of Death_--another Levinas-inspired foray into ethics (if I feed my cat, all other cats in the world starve). Has anyone, by the way, written a book on Levinas and the political? Does Levinas make the same problematic jump from the ethical to the political?
Posted by: Roger Whitson | Jul 10, 2007 9:18:29 PM
Roger, I'm not sure what you're identifying as the problem, so it's hard to respond, but Levinas is dealing primarily with ethics, the problem of the other, its demand, and so on. But this ethical relationship is somewhat of a necessary antecedent to his understanding of the political - brought on by the other other or the third. When someone is drowning in a river, Levinas believes the ethical obligation is to attempt to save them. When two people are drowning and you only have time to pick one, and some sort of external standard for the decision enters the equation, that's the realm of politics.
That's obviously the hugely simplified distinction, and there are a lot of folks who have tried to expand that into something more concrete, though none are particularly programmatic, which is fair, I think, as Levinas can hardly be called a programmatic thinker. But Zygmunt Bauman has a trilogy of books on the subject (Postmodern Ethics, Life in Fragments, Postmodernity and Its Discontents), Critchley obviously works it, Derrida in Gift of Death, Caputo picks up on the Derridean take and extends portions of it. Those are the names that come to mind quickly, at any rate.
I will say that in one regard at least, though I don't know the specifics, Critchley's not entirely off-base: the ideological founder of modern Islamic fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, found much inspiration in Lenin, at least from a methodological perspective.
One other thought, before I finish this comment - it seems to me as if Butler's essay on mourning and shared vulnerability (sorry, I forget the exact name of it, and I'm still unpacking books - it's the second chapter in her post 9-11 book) may be an example of naming without the necessary co-constitution of a fighting collectivity.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 11, 2007 1:11:14 AM
Re Kenneth's point about the ethics / politics distinction ... i'm less inclined to let Levinas off the hook here, but in any case Critchley (i've not read the text under discussion, so i'm basing this on a couple of recent lectures / essays of his) is taking his cue more from the Derridean reading of Levinas, i think. What Derrida is doing (e.g. with the 'democracy to come' stuff) seems like a deliberate blurring of this distinction, so that the ethical claim made by the individual (e.g. the drowning person) is already political in its not being political - it's Derrida's standard move which in this case makes the ethical the condition of possibility & impossibility for the political. The basic point for Derrida and Critchley is that because politics necessarily involves compromises and trade-offs between ethical claims, it is illegitimate from the ethical standpoint.
Critchley then turns this refusal of politics around into a political position ('anarchism', notionally), a step that i don't think Derrida ever quite took (possibly because he thought less strategically & more tactically about the ethics / politics nexus). It's easy to dismiss this kind of theoretically intransigent lifestyle-radicalism as an infantile disorder (& largely justified), but it seems to point up some revealing tensions in the Levinasian & Derridean material. (Personally i think Derrida got it about right in 'Violence & metaphysics' ...)
It seems like a missed opportunity to me - classical anarchism was important to my intellectual development & i don't think it's ever got the attention it deserves in theory circles (either anglo- or francophone). But Critchley's not the man for the job.
Posted by: tl | Jul 11, 2007 6:17:00 AM
"Levinas and the Political" by Howard Caygill, to answer that question. It's pretty good.
Levinas is not any sort of moral sentimentalist, nor is he a utopian pacifist. His ethics, (as "first philosophy", remember), is not political only because it is fundamentally informed by the poitical; it aims to delimit the political, in terms of a before and beyond. It is "religious" precisely in the sense that it presses to such extremes of ambiguity as could never be made the stuff of anything programatically political. The political, as "necessary", is to be suffered: the political is war, and commerce that leads on to war. It is the subsumption of the singular and "infinite" by totality. The ethical is the disruption that interrupts the subsumption by totality, and postpones and resists the inevitability of war. (His treatment of temporality and the counter-historical thrust of the "immemorial past" need to be taken account of here). But, precisely as such, it leads on to the inevitability of war.
I don't know that Levinas is not a "programmatic" thinker. It depends, I suppose, on where you look and what your looking for. His thorough-going critique of phenomenology, his "retroduction" of modal thinking, as opposed to categorical/representational thought, and his examination of Western philosophy, "reason", as a totalizing ontological rationality of "truth" inevitably allied to an imperialistic political ontology of power strike me as programatic enough. His ethics of responsibility is an-archic in the literal sense of groundless and unprincipled, not grounded in any ontological "truth" or established political order, "pre-original", "first philosophy", in an utterly transformed sense from the Greek meaning. But he's not an anarchist in the political sense of the word and would be opposed to such a foundation prioritizing freedom over responsibility. If he had a political philosophy, which he shied away from as not to his purpose, it would presumably be some version of civic republcanism, but in a prophetic opposition to the monarchical power of the state and its idolatry. But one can't really "translate" Levinas' "fundamental ethics" into any political doctrine or program, not just because that mistakes the philosophical level at which his thinking occurs and remains, but because that would be to miss and negate the whole point of "infinite responsibility" as a political realism that refuses the reification of human beings into any totalizing closure of political order.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Jul 11, 2007 8:25:51 AM
... but for Critchley's purposes, we don't necessarily need to 'translate' Levinas into political 'doctrine', just use the ethical as a means of critiquing particular political positions. (That's if i've correctly guessed at Critchley's gist.) Calling this 'anarchism' doesn't need to imply a stable or consistent political programme (the idea of anarchism as a rejection of politics as opposed to a theory within the political field is widespread in the classical anarchist thinkers).
This is of questionable usefulness, because any political position at all is ultimately equally open to the ethical critique, and on principle there are no rules by which one such challenge could be said to be more successful than another. What it points up re Levinas, for me, is the difficulty of understanding a concept of ethics which is divorced from politics altogether - how an 'infinite responsibility' makes any difference in a world of finite agents & actions (at least as long as it's divorced from a religious context which would give some content to this relation.)
Posted by: tl | Jul 11, 2007 9:50:03 AM
Hello,
I'm not a fancy theory person, just a plane jane (albeit one who has also organized with Billionaires for Bush, among others; maybe I know Jodi accidentally!), but I would like to add three cents: it's all well and good to dismiss Critchley et al. under the heading "infantile disorder," but I should just like to say that his position does not — not not not! — stand in the place of anarchism tout court or as such. It's a particular (and, to my mind, self-canceling) sub-strain.
I dunno, I saw that whole Stoppard trilogy, the first play I'd ever gone to as an adult, and it was a good time and all, but so ill-informed and cheap about anarchism that it put a bee in my bonnet.
PS: progressivism doesn't get to claim the negative. Ever. This may seem off-topic but I suspect it isn't, as we worry the ethics/politics nexus.
Posted by: jane | Jul 11, 2007 12:41:29 PM
tl:
Don't know from Critchley. Haven't read him. Doesn't much sound like I'd want to from here.
The "infinite" is opposed to "totality" and arises in critical response to the Hegelian absolute, which claimed to mediate and reconcile the finite and the infinite, and Heidegger's Dasein analytic of finitude. But, as I understand him, Levinas basically accepts the Dasein analytic of finitude, and his revisionary moves in reinstituting a conception of a subject,- (which is emphatically not an epistemological subject, nor a unitary one, but a divided, uprooted and eroded subject of an ethics of heteronomous freedom),- occur within that analytic of finitude. Not just the subject, but the other is finite and mortal. The other only "inspires" with the infinite, provokes with desire (for the good beyond Being, any given order), because the other, as entirely separate, can not be objectified. The other is acategorical, and can neither be categorically identified, nor identified with, though it is always and routinely possible to "violently" attempt to do so. The face of the other is denuded, powerless: it's only 'power" is to put in check and thwart the power of my freedom to assimilate or reduce him/her to the same, to the terms of my knowledge and identity. But it is also only the relation to the face of the other that uniquely individuates me through my responsibility for, (not to), the other, in which I am substituted for the other, to the point of being held hostage and persecuted by the other, since I am responsible for the other, up to being responsible for the other's responsiblity, and even for the other's responsibility for the third, who is other to the other. That is the "infinity" that breaks through and disrupts totality, with its impossible but relentless striving after its own continuity and realization: the infinite connotes a temporality of postponement and deferral, which is a lack of finality. Though Levinas was a self-identified and strictly observant Jew, I think, especially after the War, his main writings are not "confessional" and religious, but philosophical, i.e. universal: a universal criticism of philosophical universality, "reason". And he states that they are "onto-theologically" atheist. God or "illeity" only "exists" in Levinas in the traces left by the other in his/her passing. God simply amounts to the permanent suspicion that one might be utterly in the wrong, in which case one is overthrown, truly "in God's hands". One could perhaps think of the infinite as successive levels of normative transformation, which are never final, hence delimitable, nor foreseeable and assimilated to the same and "in advance". The infinite is what can't be reified into a given order, a finite set of relationships, a doctrine, an objective knowledge. The infinite is the "gratuitous".
Levinas "ethics" is not some sort of seeking after moral "purity", avoiding any contamination by the political. To the contrary, he sees the political, what he calls the level of political ontology, which is not what he deals with and doesn't develop, as necessary and inevitable. Something of the same hard-bitten thought that I think could be found in Schmitt and certainly Arendt informs Levinas' take on the political too: that the political can not be wholely moralized, and any over-moralization of politics does harm to both and renders it all the more deadly and amoral. The other, after all, is just anybody, even the enemy. The passage into the political is necessary,- (which would be one way that Levinas would differ from anarchism, in that he thinks that political community can never be abolished, any more than the ethical solidarity or "fraternity", on which it is based and by which it is riven),- even if it is contrary to ethics, and Levinas ethics are, in one way or another,"violent". Criticism would not be directed at the necessity of the political, but rather only at the specific forms of "necessity" lodged in and by political claims and acts. I think one of the things that Levinas was aiming at was precisely to restore the sense of human agency from without its multiple dissolutions in modern naturalisms, (and, of course, against Heideggerian destining of Being). He specifically cites the need for a conception of morality that has been through the Nietzschean critique of morality and can withstand it. But Levinas is not doing formal systematic rational prescriptive ethics; rather, in opposition to such ethics and its impossibility, his "fundamental" ethics only seeks to uncover the unexpungeable source of ethical normativity, without appeal to "principles", and distinct from the rational ontological normativity of "truth". But to speak of "rules" of criticism is to miss the level and modal character of Levinas' thinking, placing it on the level of discourse and representation, the "said" and not the "saying". (It's based on a phenomenological analysis of meaning, but one which exceeds phenomenological intentionality and reverses it into the modal). If his ethics abuts upon the political, it's not in terms of discursive contents or presciptive criticisms, but in terms of the reparative and renovative modes of action implied by the "prophetic". And his modal thinking, though emphatically anti-dialectical, is replete with contradictory tensions, disjunctive combinations, so that, when he opposes the "work of justice" to the "work of the state", he is not separating, but rather conjoining the two. The same could be said more generally of the relation between the ethical and the political that his work delimits. But where his conception of the ethical most conjoins with and effects the political is in his difficult conception of heteronomous freedom. That is where he would part company with political anarchism, seeing it as rejoining the foundational concern with autonomous freedom at the root of Western philosophy and its will-to-power. And Levinas is not just criticizing implicitly modern "totalitarianism", but liberalism, as well, even though he would be a liberal of sorts, concerned with "human rights", though probably not in the sense of an apolitical legalism, that short-circuits the place of political action. Indeed, politically speaking, the difficult practice of heteronomous freedom, without succumbing to subjection or oppression and without grounds or guarantees, is precisely what the appeal to infinity, amidst the conditionedness and finitude of human lives and fates, is meant to sustain, as the unlimited horizons of "final" and successive judgment for which one is irremissibly responsible. That would be how the infinite infects and inflects the finite acts of finite agents. This ethics is separate from the political precisely because it is an ethics of "necessary" political risk, (devolving biographically from a critical response to the "Rectoral Address"). You could think of Levinas as the anti-Sartre, though the two maintained personally cordial relations.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Jul 11, 2007 1:42:22 PM
I find William Large is very good and clear on Levinas.
Posted by: Matt | Jul 11, 2007 3:14:40 PM
Worth adding I think that Critchley referencing Sayyid Outb and contemporary Islamism through the adoption of revolutionary vangardist structures is I think disingenuous, because it is better understood as being a continuation of 19th C Islamic modernisation strategies. Which avoids the absurdity of always referring to them through our concepts and would hopefully would have avoided the imbecilic references to schmitt.
Given the intellectual challenge that we currently face, Critchley's selection of ethicists is alarmingly narrow, consequently I’d only accept the accuracy of the suggestion that his ethical writing is "systematic and well-considered" if you could support such a statement. Which obviously I do not think you can...
Posted by: sdv | Jul 11, 2007 4:35:06 PM
Jane:
what you said. i'm continually staggered by how otherwise intelligent people believe that anarchism can be dismissed as patently unthinkable. But ill-informed partisanship is potentially as damaging.
John:
Most of the criticisms i made above were directed at Critchley rather than Levinas, in particular the tendency for Critchley's (and to some extent also the late Derrida's) "Levinasian" politics to devolve upon a refusal to make concrete political decisions (say, about the distribution of material goods) on the grounds that it might impinge on the ethical dignity of the individuals affected.
i'm intrigued by your development of this theme wrt Levinas: on the one hand you say that doing political philosophy is "not to his purpose", on the other you read him (in a subjunctive or per-impossibile mood) as a "liberal of sorts, concerned with 'human rights'" - presumably in the sense of upholding the rights of the person qua person, against the rest of society if need be - which seems not that far from the Critchleyan/Derridean position. i'm not sure whether these are intended as alternative or mutually complementary readings; i'm also not clear what an "ethics of 'necessary' political risk" would look like - is this just to say that the political meaning of a given situation becomes irrelevant in the face of the infinite ethical demand, whilst remaining an inescapable determinant of action?
i'd like to engage more deeply with your presentation of Levinas but ... TBH i've had a fair few of these conversations & i always end up with the feeling that there's a lot of hard-to-swallow concept-mongering going on just to give voice to "the permanent suspicion that one might be utterly in the wrong". Not that that's not important, but there are surely other ways to get there.
Posted by: tl | Jul 11, 2007 5:01:59 PM
SDV--Critchley's ethical discussion includes others besides Levinas, although Levinas is crucial. He also builds from Badiou, Knud Ejler Logstrup, Lacan and Freud. I am inclined to agree with your statement on Islamicism, but don't know enough about it to say much one way or the other. Rather, my agreement comes from a general skepticism toward assimilating all revolutionary impulses to a single source or thread.
Posted by: Jodi | Jul 11, 2007 7:16:07 PM
tl:
Shorter version. Levinas' ethics can't be "translated" into a politics, though it it relevant in "in-forming" a politics. He's of no use in organizing political action, except that such organization has always already occurred, and must be disengaged and re-engaged, (saying, unsaying, resaying). Politics is pre-eminently transformative action, and may well require violent means, whether with or against the state. But if one chooses violence, one is all the more "responsible", which should condition any such choice. Violence, in one form or another, is the all-but-inevitable, "necessary" risk of the political. Talk of "transcendence" and "infinity" is in no wise other-worldly, but this-worldly, and foregrounds "real", if futural and "virtual", issues. The criterion of "justice" is not the realization of the self, but the emancipation of the other. If politics is to be transformative, that involves innovations in the norms binding human relations and their conditions. One must decide, but no philosophy could provide for the necessity of decisions a priori; and if "to decide for one is to decide for all", one can't escape the consequences of one's decision, and responsibility is borne alone, singularly. One of the nice features of Levinas' account is that he rebukes Heidegger's starting point in the needfulness of angst and being-toward-death. Levinas starts with enjoyment of the "elements", which is what one donates before the indigence of the face of the other. In other words, Levinas' ethics is a refusal of the traditional account of death as the ultima ratio of the political. Action opens up intervals, temporal postponements, in the inevitability of death. But it is neither violence, nor death that brings about the eclipse of the singularity of both self and other; it is rather the mediation by the "neutrality" to be found in the identifying categorical self of the modal relation between self and other, subsuming all singularity into the realization of totality as the destining of Being, that occludes the "sincerity" underpinning the tranformations of communication involved in projects of collective action. If Levinas is at all "liberal", though he's more republican than liberal, he's not a Rawlsian, appealing to a formal schema balancing "equal rights". And, of course, Levinas is not saying that "responsibility" usually obtains empirically in politics. The "normal" rule in conventional politics, including the politics of professions, is CYA.
Critchley, from what little I can gather here, not having read him, seems to be engaging in a moralizing criticism of politics, which is sentimental and holier-than-thou. Levinas is not only much subtler than that, but also more fraught and bitter. Levinas is certainly not oblivious to issues of material distributions and conditions and his criticisms of Marx are largely sympathetic. He's certainly far more compatible with "materialism" than Heidegger. I myself am not unsympathetic to anarchist strains in the collectivist or syndicalist vein of self-organization of workers and communities, and Levinas is not restricting politics to reference to the organized violence of sovereign states, any more than he is denying such reference. And what's irreducible for Levinas is not the value or values of the individual, but the individuated responsibility of the divided, uprooted and eroded self. Finally, note that what Levinas is criticizing in the political is its traditional subsumption and abstraction by theoretical reason, echoing in that respect Arendt, who'd probably never even heard of him.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Jul 11, 2007 7:54:19 PM
Just to be clear, I have no idea if Critchley talks about Qutb - I haven't read the new Critchley book. But Qutb definitely talks about and was influenced by Lenin, even if he found Lenin's materialism degrading. My only point was that it may not be that Critchley is stitching together disparate things; rather he may be aware that these disparate things already have stitches between them.
As for everything else, thus far, what John C. has said works for me. And better than I would have said it.
Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 12, 2007 12:37:53 AM
John:
am getting there, i think. Your point about the subsumption of the political in the theoretical indicates the necessity to distinguish the relation between ethical and political theory from the relation between theory in general and political action or organisation. i assumed we'd mostly been talking about the former, altho obviously the distinction can't be made entirely watertight.
i'm also starting to get the link between the idea of transcendence as futural and politics as constitutively open to the unexpected transformation of social relations. The difficulty of situating this idea w.r.t. the traditional gamut of political theories is that practically all of them (at least from the centre leftwards) have laid claim to this openness in one way or another. So whether you think Levinas' thought is more compatible with, say, liberalism or anarchism comes down to which of the latter you think more effectively promotes this kind of ethically informed openness to transformation (in particular, whether a state apparatus to guarantee individual rights benefits more than it harms). But that decision is at a pretty oblique tangent to Levinas himself.
Posted by: tl | Jul 12, 2007 4:42:23 AM
Kenneth,
Just to confirm that Critchley does reference both Al Queada and Qutb in the way you raise. Referring to the Retort collective understanding in the first reference. However if you read the references through other histories of the relations between Islamism and modernity (capital), for example Nash's fascinating 'from empire to orient' the meaning of Outb's relation to lenin becomes something very different from what is implied. In other words there are the links you reference, but there are other probably more important ones that Critchley (and Retort) do not and even perhaps refuse to consider.
As for whether John C's reading of Levinas is relevant to Critchley's use of Levinas in the book in question... Without rereading the book again I'm not sure I can evaluate whether Critchley's position and use of Levinas has changed to support his neo-anarchism. But what is clear is that the idea of 'ethics as anarchic meta-politics' is no more attractive than direct-democracy and for similar reasons.
Posted by: sdv | Jul 12, 2007 7:00:48 AM
A very enthusiastic ditto to everything John C. Halasz says about Levinas (with the exception of the caveat below) and in particular to his recommendation of Howard Caygill's book, which is an excellent antidote to the treacly, sentimentalized appropriations of Levinas that have become prevalent in some areas. Although I haven't read it yet (but am about to), on the strength of two great lectures I've heard her give I would also recommend Bettina Bergo's Levinas Between Ethics and Politics -- she's also one of Levinas's main translators.
My caveat about John's wonderful exegesis of Levinas is in his (John's) apparent acceptance at face value of Levinas's "refusal of the traditional account of death as the ultima ratio of the political." It's not that I think that John is necessarily wrong about Levinas, but that this claim is itself difficult to square (I think) with some of Levinas's other principles, including the inevitability and necessity of political violence. In particular, I think that Levinas's phenomenology of death is inadequate in an extremely interesting way. In Totality and Infinity, in order to bring death within the sphere of the relation to the Other (and thus pull it away from Heidegger's interpretation of it as one's ultimate "ownmostness"), Levinas interprets "death" as "murder" -- he claims that our fundamental experience of death is personal in the sense of a taking away of our life by another. I find that to be shockingly wrong both as a matter of intuition -- I think that the cruelty, or angst, or whatever word you want to use (including hope or desire, a la Blanchot) of death lies precisely in its impersonality -- but also as a matter of Levinas's own philosophy: It seems to turn him into Carl Schmitt, by tipping the relation to the Other decisively in the direction of enmity. (Which is not to say that I think it ought to be tipped decisively in the direction of love (the sentimentalized Levinas), either -- I prefer Derrida's interpretation of the Other as undecidably suspended between the two by virtue of its absolute alterity). Levinas's later writings on death (the one that I know is the lecture series translated as God, Death and Time) add some additional baggage to this interpretation but ultimately return to it, so I think this is what he really thought. I'm interested in this because I'm interested in the problem of the relationship between the ethical (the relations/nonrelation to the Other) and the political (which, it seems to me, is necessarily tied up with the question of death as killing and not just mortality), and the (in)adequacy of Levinas's account of death thus seems to me a good place to begin thinking about the problem (and alternative ways to think it).
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jul 12, 2007 10:22:23 AM
tl:
As to the questions of theory here, I think I should try and clarify that Levinas is not quite offering a theory, not only in the sense that his ethics is pre-political, in the sense I tried to outline above, but because he works at the "fundamental" level open up by Heidegger's work, "beneath" or "prior" to the distinction between subject and object, (though, of course, Levinas switches that to the distinction between self and other), such that Levinas does not explicate a relation between theory and practice, but rather "dissolves" the distinction between theory and practice. The status of his main works then is a bit hard to pin down, but it's not really an ethical theory, (which is always a bit of an oxymoron), but more like an extended meditation upon the ethical, with decided, if indirect, implications for practice or praxis, and with a certain hortatory exigency. But the main point here, which is what I was trying to convey to begin with, is that his work is basically philosophical, with only indirect implication for the political, (which he mostly doesn't quite directly thematize), so that it can't quite be aligned with any political position or theory. (So I've already said too much in aligning him with any imputed politics; the ethical address is "universal" in that it would apply to any socialized human being, which is to say also in a significant dimension, any political agent, even of opposed or "enemy" views or disposition). But, of course, the philosophical status of the work,- (and I think Levinas is a very fine, rigorous, and even, in a phenomenological vein, technically accomplished thinker),- also means that the work bears quasi-systematic implications for other issues than the political, even as it ties its various issues into its quasi-systematic knots. For example, his work bears considerable (anti-)epistemological implications. He seems to imply that cognitive norms of "truth" are or must be subtended by ethical norms of justice, which are nonetheless distinct and even opposed, else the appeal to "truth" results only in a boundless cynicism,- (er, not that a considerable dose of cynicism, to the point of bitterness, is not required in this world to maintain, if not one's sanity, then at least one's sense of "equilibrium"). Which brings out the "value", even the alleged riches, of knowledge, even as such knowledge is implicated in its complicity with power, its reduction to a means of domination, in that manner Levinas has of excavating and explicating the contradictory tensions and ambivalences that lie at the "heart" of "things". Similarly, there are complicated hermeneutic implications, (which I myself am interested in, but have never been able to get a firm handle on), since the meaning and understanding of anything said is always subtended and roiled by the modal relations to the other, whom it addresses, which co-constitute its meaning and import, ( the saying, which always ends up in an unsaying and becomes a resaying), because contact and relatedness with the presence (and absence) of the other and all the others is at the source of speech, the generation of meaning, and its temporality. Thirdly, a broad implication of Levinas' meditations seems to me to constitute, through its account of the genesis of a "subject" haunted by the other, a metacritique of existentialism, with its "heroic" myth or image of the lone individual in an utterly indifferent universe, whose decision singularly decides its fate and world.
As to your point that all modern and "progressive" political theories, (and, er, ideologies), presume the openness of the future, however dated and dated,- (there's a lot of retrospective mourning there),- it's well taken, but I think that Levinas can be taken as pointing out the ambiguity of such "openness", in that there are ways of assuming such openness "in advance" that effectively close it off, such that the effect of his thinking is to "double" the consideration. And certainly his criticism of the mediating "neutrality" constitutive of the knowledge and identity of the identifying subject cuts against the claims of any norm-free, hence non-or-post-ideological self, even while challenging the exclusiveness of ideological commitments. Also, politics is not just about any theory or ideology, but about agency, since, in modernity, it increasingly becomes not a matter of ruling, but of being ruled. And human agency, "freedom", always carries with it, as its doppelgaenger, power, which the inevitably collective conditions of human life generate, and must channel, (re)distribute, and regenerate. I think it's here that Levinas' thorough-going ambivalence about the "work of the state" comes home to roost. (Those words from the "Rectoral Address" about "our German science" and "the German people that knows itself through its state" bring out well the issues of power/knowledge and rulers-and-ruled). The state is a source of organized violence and coercive "authority" and readily oppresses. But it is also a factor of balance in inevitable political conflict, which it, in fact, both provokes and "reconciles", and an organizer and protector of collective goods. I myself am ambivalent about the matter, since, without the state, there would not be anything to put in check and regulate the power of capital, even as the state is captured by and enables that power and its expansionary and imperialistic depredations. Equally, the "rights" accorded by the state are ambiguous, protecting and limiting the individual, while, not only is there the standard criticism of formal legal equality serving to maintain and reproduce substantive inequality,- (cue Anatole France),- but "rights" require coercive enforcement power, such that the bearer of rights is already invested by state power, and there is the very real sense that "they give you your rights in order to take away your freedom",- ("Miranda", anyone?). But perhaps the most important point is that there must be realms or domains for the formation of social relations and the generation of initiatives, without which there can be no responsive social and political action and agency. Whether the state actually protects such domains and possibilities, or merely exploits them, or destroys them is always an open question. Ditto for any economistic conception of the political. And it's to that concern that the "pre-political" orientation of Levinas' ethics most effectively speaks. In fact, for all its criticism of "spontaneity", the idealist category par excellence, as the supposed foundation of "mind", I think his conception of heteronomous freedom on the part of always finite, limited and conditioned, but also socially related and embodied "subjects",- (and there's also some really good stuff about sensibility and affectivity as already bound up in the relation to the other, which I think is actually roughly "biologically" correct),- brings out the "spirit" of political anarchism much more genuinely than libertarian conceptions of individual "autonomy", even if it notes the paradox of rebellion, as always dragging with it what it rebels against.
Perhaps the simplest way to summarize the upshot of Levinas' ethical meditations is that they constitute a twilight ethics of the meantime, which subtends our always mean times and the reciprocal and reflexive decisions that make them so.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Jul 13, 2007 2:23:50 AM
Adam Thurschwell:
But is there really such a thing as a phenomenology of death? 'Cause is death a phenomenon? (I'll refrain from quoting Hamlet here). I believe that Levinas' phrase is that death "strikes without being received". (Death is an angel, as we are not, but who's to say what message that angel delivers?) I don't know how many times and ways it's been pointed out that Heidegger's being-towards-death doesn't involve any actual event of death, but only its imaginary projection and anticipation. And since he relies upon such an extremity as an utmost limit condition to break out of metaphysical subjectivism and idealism, it's doubtfful whether he succeeds in that endeavor, except by fiat. Indeed, Levinas' point is that the other constitutes a different limit condition, one which is "prior to" and "beneath" the condition of death. And the other is "primordially" encountered not in my murder, but in the form of my murderous desires toward the other, as toward my ownmost limits and my imperative needs. (And it is the other and not death that "gives birth" to time). I see Levinas' account as taking aim squarely at the weakest point of "Being and Time", namely, its account of "Mitsein", and the associated intrication of "das Man" and "authenticity". Not only is "Mitsein" latently functionalistic, since the other is encountered as sharing the same communal standards within the "Zuhanden", but, for all the differentiation of authentic and inauthentic modes of understanding the other in its Being, (which again is the "same" as mine), not only is the utter separateness and difference of the existence of the other missed or occluded, but also its role in the constitution, formation or genesis of the self, in the first place. And that goes fairly directly to the terrible ambiguity of Dasein, as to whether it is an individual or collective conception, a matter of the authentic decision of the lone individual or of the collective "decision" of a whole people in appropriating its heritage as its destiny, which surfaces in the sudden peripety of the "Rectoral Address".
Which doesn't only go biographically to why death is a "personal" issue, but invokes the shared fate involved. The imperative, (in accordance with the Talmudic rule that each commandment is double, both a positive and a negative injunction), is not just "thou shallt not kill", but also thou shallt not abandon the other unto death, leave the other alone to his/her dying. Which is also the generational and generative issue of carrying on the memory of the dead. To be sure, Levinas is also setting himself against "intersubjectivity", whether in the Hegelian or the Husserlian accounts, but I think he's basically inverting those accounts, while breaking their assumptions of presence, simultaneity, and reciprocity. It's the formative role in the constitution of the "subject" of the limit, separateness, and death of the other that renders death as at once personal and impersonal, a personal commitment transacted across an impersonal world.
I doubt Levinas had even heard of Schmitt, let alone read him, at least early on, but he didn't have to, since he experienced the consequences of the Schmittian political directly and got the "message". Far from Levinas conceiving the political in Schmittian terms of emnity, he's drafting the terms of a response to such a conception. If politics is a "necessary evil",- and the actual or potential exorbitance of its evils need no exaggeration,- then the question is not how to pursue politics by other means, but how to transmute such necessary evil into possible good. Inspite of his criticism or circumspection with respect to "spontaneity", there's that Bergonian vitalist strain to Levinas' thinking, that "guarantees" that the "immemorial past" returns as the hope of future solidarities.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Jul 13, 2007 4:37:56 AM
John,
I of course agree with you that Levinas in no way conceived of the political in Schmittian terms -- that is the very opposite of his intentions -- but that is precisely what makes his phenomenology (or "fundamental analysis" -- I won't quibble over terminology; he devotes a subsection of T & I to it) of death so interesting, because he in fact "intersubjectives" death by equating it with murder of one's self, not of the other. That doesn't make anything that you say wrong (as usual I find that I agree with everything you say), but it does create a "vulnerability," so to speak, in Levinas's thinking that I have no wish to attack, but rather to exploit in order to extend and fulfill his underlying intentions. Again, I agree with virtually everything you say here -- in particular, the notion that "thou shallt not abandon the other unto death, leave the other alone to his/her dying . . . [w]hich is also the generational and generative issue of carrying on the memory of the dead"; and "the formative role in the constitution of the 'subject' of the limit, separateness, and death of the other that renders death as at once personal and impersonal, a personal commitment transacted across an impersonal world," to name two statements that jumped out at me (all beautifully and accurately put, I think). The question is, though, how one interprets this "shared fate" (again, the right expression, I think) and death's role in it.
I think that you're right that Levinas's interpretation tends to downplay death (at least in comparison to Heidegger), or at least clearly and explicitly gives priority to the death of the Other. In fact, my sense is that there's a certain unresolved ambiguity between these two slightly different positions -- is death not fundamental, or is the death of the Other fundamental? -- in his work that to me is another sign of something interesting going on that requires further development. Levinas obviously believes in the fundamentality of our "shared fate" (the subject is constituted by its impossible relation to the Other, etc.), so the question becomes how death fits into this.
One way to go is in the direction Jean Luc Nancy takes in The Inoperative Community, which basically elevates Mitsein to fundamental status but otherwise remains with Heidegger. I don't think that works (a position with which I suspect you'd agree based on your posts). Another way to think about our "shared fate" is to interpret everything you've said about our not being able to leave the other alone in his dying, and the way that the other's death is formative of subjectivity, in terms of language and the relation of language to death. Which is why I'm thinking about Blanchot these days. Derrida says, e.g., in a passage that doesn't cite Blanchot but comes right out of him, in Memoires for Paul de Man, that to call a friend (or anyone else) by name is already to anticipate his/her death, since the name of necessity can be used to refer to him/her after his/her death. In that sense, the name -- the Other's existence in language -- is what makes it literally impossible to "leave the other alone to his/her dying" (even *before* his/her death) and is "also the generational and generative issue of carrying on the memory of the dead" (as you put it). Moreover, since language is also the (impersonal) matrix of subjectivity, it's what plays "the formative role in the constitution of the 'subject' [as] the limit, separateness, and death of the other that renders death as at once personal and impersonal, a personal commitment transacted across an impersonal world." To put this another way, while I think that you may be right that "Levinas' point is that the other constitutes a different limit condition, one which is 'prior to' and 'beneath' the condition of death," I'm not sure that he's correct about that. I prefer Blanchot's telegraphic statement, "the Other is death already," which I understand as extreme shorthand that incorporates all of his other views on death as (necessarily) mediated in language and language as the privileged medium of death.
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jul 13, 2007 10:51:50 AM
By the way, for what it's worth (which isn't much since I haven't actually read the book, either), I addressed the Simon Critchley part of this thread over at Before the Law. Still not sure how to resolve the long comment vs. personal blog post question . . .
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jul 13, 2007 11:05:00 AM
Adam Thurschwell:
Just some "technical" matters, to try and clean things up a bit here. There are difficulties of the adequacy of language and just how to express things. (Wittgenstein speaks of "meaning in a secondary sense", meaning which is neither literal, nor metaphorical, but one simply feels compelled to put it that way, because one doesn't know how else to express it: an example would be the use of "ought" to express a moral imperative, which is fairly standard, but also a bit odd). There is a considerable torsion is Levinas' mode of expression involved in the fact that he is expressing modal thinking that is literally inexpressible, a "saying" that can not be reduced to a said, something incommunicable that nonetheless lies at the basis of and operates throughout communication. And we are dealing with a post-or-non-foundational thinking, such that while there are "layers" of meaning, there is no bottom, which gives the notion of "depth" an axial twist. Hence the resort to terms like "pre-original" and the oxymoronic "immemorial past". And when I said that the other as a constitutive limit of the "subject" is "prior to" or "beneath" death as a limit, I didn't mean "prior" in a logical, nor quite a temporal sense. Since we are dealing with the matter of signification, or, better, the signfying of signification, how meaning means, when I said "prior" or "beneath", I was trying to convey the sense of a different dimension, that the other is a different constitutive limit of the "subject" and its signifyingness than death, one which conditions, (though not "transcendentally"), the meaning of death as a constitutive limit. To be sure, the other, temporality and death together form the constitutive limits of the finite "subject" (and agent), together with the natural language, which underpins, renders possible and discloses them. (It's perfectly reasonable to say that natural language is the condition which renders human existence possible, without which it would not be conceivable, but it's hard to see what would be added by proclaiming that condition "transcendental", as if one could impossibly get back behind language, or as if the current "grammar" of natural language were not subject to changes and transformations). And it's also the case that those fundamental constitutive conditions of the finite "subject" need to be brought together in some account of that "subject". But Levinas tends to shy away from discussing language per se. That's partly because he doesn't want to get caught up in the surrounding and then reigning "structuralism", and because he is not concerned with signs or semantics, but with the modal dimension of signification that in a sense "animates" their meanings, and which, even as it draws together and unifies signification into the "whole" of a said, breaks through and breaks up that unity and "wholeness". And natural language, as Wittgenstein repeatedly reminds us, is an immense dispersion that does not constitute one "thing", but a disparate multiplicy of "things". But also because the modal relation to the other, "beneath", "behind", "to the side of" or "traverse to" any linguistic articulation or communication can not itself be said, (but, as Wittgenstein would have it, in the similar instance of the so-called "private language argument", can only be indirectly "shown", though one could add that there can't be any strict markers of "illocutionary" or rhetorical forces, since they too would only become subject to the "play' of such forces). The foregoing I at least hope goes to indicating why Levinas tarries with a certain materiality/corporeality/empiricity in the modal relation to the other, "prior to" and "beneath", if open and vulnerable to, the disclosive and active Being-in-the-world of language. If there is an incommunicable communicative "infrastructure" to language, it can neither be entirely taken up into, nor reduced to language and what is transacted in it, including the words of hatred that it can convey.
I think that you are right that Levinas treats of death in terms of murder, though,- (I'm relying on somewhat old memory here),- I don't know that he prioritizes my murder of, over by, the other, but rather that there is a certain zone of indifference there. Partly this might be due to the post-Holocaust context of his meditations, though Levinas is not the sort of historicist for whom that could be entirely and reductively determining. Coming from my Frankfurt School background, I would certainly see the ghost of Hegel and the master-slave dialectic there, though it's probably Kojeve's somewhat Heideggerianized (mis)interpretation that's most directly influential. But, of course, Levinas is precisely cutting into and against that account and refusing its conception of "recognition" and "intersubjectivity", partly through his insistence on the asymmetry that obtains in the relation to the other. (In contemporary terms, that would cut against Habermas' more-or-less pragmatic appeals to intersubjectivity in the universal pragmatics of the "ideal speech situation" and its imputed consensus). So it can't quite be said that Levinas treats the limit of death in intersubjective terms. Of course, you're also right that death is also an objective event, which is also the limit of "my" time, and as such is inevitable and, in that sense, necessary. Which it seems odd that Levinas does not treat of. But I think that some sense of that lacuna can be made out, when one realizes that such a conception of death as my end and hence the finite marker of "my" time connects up with the issue of survival and his criticism of the "conatus essendi" as the basis of "necessity". (Compare to Adorno's "self-preservation gone wild" in which the drive to preservation effectively destroys the very self which is its ostensible end). This also connects up with the "otherwise than being" and the "beyond essence", which I also tend to see in Hegelian terms, not simply as "antiessentialism", but as a refusal of the distinction between essence and existence, since the modal relation to the other is neither nothingness, nor being, but something "positive" in a completely different sense. (As well, of course, it is distinct from and traverse to conceptual thinking, from concept formation, acquisition and possession and categorical identification, as instrumental for the survival of the finite "subject" and its inherence in Being). It's the excess or surplus of the modal over anything identified as "necessary" that figures the "gratuitous", in contrast to the needfulness of survival in the face of death due to the survival of "my" time before its end. Murder signifies the finite boundedness of the self and its needfulness in the face of the other, whereas refraining from the act of murder signifies the gratuitousness of desire (for the good) provoked by the other, which opens up the horizons of a future other than that of my end, not a living toward one's end that reconciles the sting of death with finitude, but a living beyond one's death that allows one to live out one's distended present toward the openness of a future beyond one's finite end, which becomes, yes, an impersonal and objective, but also peaceful, event. Death becomes less something shared, than dedicated, rather than "appropriated". And that futurity is what is being figured by the "infinity" and "traces" of the other, as the sense of sense, ("sens" also meaning "direction", of course), guiding praxis, as a future that transforms the solidarities at the basis of the survival of shared social life from ones rooted in exclusiveness and fixed identities to more porous forms of solidarity, open to and enriched by differences, a praxis that does not transmit to the future the "spirit of revenge". That's why I said that it's the other that "gives birth" to temporality, rather than the end of death. (Compare Arendt's thought of "natality"). The difference is between a temporality, (hence lived finitude), conceived in terms of the reproduction, (and impossible recuperation) of the same, and a temporality conceived in terms of its transformation of possibilities. Whatever horror attends one's own death and whatever the losses sustained by living one's life, both of which, in one sense, are generated and "contained" in language, and, in another, remain "outside" it, as an irreducible remainder, both are inflected by the relation to the other, which is why, I think, the issue of murder by or of the other amounts to a "zone of indifference".
Of course, when I said that Levinas was refusing the traditional notion of death as the ultima ratio of the political, I didn't mean that he was denying that reality. But everything turns on how and for what one understands the "necessary" violence of the political, or, otherwise put, how one understands that modal word "necessary" in that context. It's Hobbes who is most often identified with that traditional account, but it's on the economistic dimension of Hobbes' thinking that Levinas pronounces this specific verdict: that the idea that the rational pursuit of self-interest conduces to and produces the good order of society is "hatefulness itself". It's a matter of understanding the "economy" of Being and just what of that "economy" generates and conduces to the violence of the political, and just what transformations of that "economy" of Being conduce to the overcoming of its violence, which might "justify", but can never wholely redeem such "necessary" violence. I think Levinas' point is that such understandings don't come from Being itself, but from attending gratuitously "beyond" it, from breaks in its "economy".
Of course, if you'd want me to understand your point about Blanchot, you'd have to point me to some start-up read to add to the pile and list of books. Yes, I do spend to much time on the internet. Sorry, this is a bit rambling, but I wanted to clarify my understanding or intuition of what in Levinas remains "beneath" and "outside" of language, and beyond its (recuperations) of death.
Posted by: john c. halasz | Jul 14, 2007 12:46:04 AM
John, thank you for this; I am quite overwhelmed (not to say envious!) of your precision and the depth of your knowledge of Levinas and others. (If you write a book on Levinas, I promise to buy it!) I have too little time to respond to this, so I'll be very brief, but -- especially since this seems to have become a back and forth between the two of us -- I will try to expand on this later over at Before the Law (needless to say, this is not meant to further exclusivize this but simply to use up my disk space allotment rather than LS's . . .)
Once again, I see very little disagreement between us, and what there is seems to be textual -- does Levinas assimilate "death" to "murder of the self by the other" (me) or is this assimilation more ambiguous (or "indifferent")? By way of trying to answer this, I'm going to post a section of a draft paper I gave last fall on this issue at Before the Law, and will have to come back to this later, when I get the chance, and will also try to explain why I think Blanchot's work is the most productive in this regard, at least for me. The very short explanation is that I'm coming to this in part from the direction of the political, and specifically the consistent association of sovereignty with the power over death (to kill, to demand the sacrifice of the citizen's life in defense of the life of the state through military conscription). Since death seems to me to be central and unavoidable to any conception of the political, to reconcile (whatever that word means in this context) the ethical with the political, which I take is part of Levinas's project, as a conceptual matter at least it would be good if the notion of "death" could be made a point of contact between the two. Hence my interest in Levinas's (failed, in my view) attempt to understand death in ethical terms, and hence my interest in Blanchot, who in certain respects treads the line between Heidegger and Levinas. As for something by Blanchot to read, put "Literature and the Right to Death" at the top of your pile (it's in the book translated as The Work of Fire) -- it's mercifully short, it's brilliantly written, and it's utterly, totally enlightening about just about everything in the completely obscure way that only Blanchot (and sometimes Walter Benjamin) manages to pull off . . . .
Posted by: Adam Thurschwell | Jul 14, 2007 10:33:34 AM
Amazing that someone would have the audacity to toss Wittgenstein's name in here along with the PoMo'sters. The Witt. of the Tractatus would simply ask Postmods, existentialists, marxists to define their terms (and define "proposition" itself), show how those propositions connect to the world (or to thinking at least), and then establish whether statements in the PoMo schema are T v F (or assign a probability value to 'em). Ah suspect even Marx --empiricist to his bones-- would have agreed.
Posted by: Perezoso | Jul 14, 2007 11:22:05 AM
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