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.

Comments

[sdv]

Adam/JOhn

Briefly I've been interested in the discussion between the two of you and think that Adam is wrong to move your discussion from here to another forum.

At the moment however neither of you seems able to produce an image of a politics founded on a levinas descended ethic that is an improvement on Critchley's. We have been reading your notes with interest in the hope that you might begin to succeed in constructing a non-liberal political ethic, something which Critchley fails to do as you'll see when and if you read it. The primary issue as you might expect is the inability to address the social and political consequences of the approach, which on the basis of the printed out notes you have not done either.

very interesting that it shows the inability of the ethic to address the non-human...

[sdv]

perosozo,

On the contrary, Wittgenstein is along with Kant and Nietszche one of the primary philosophical sources of postmodern thought. In some arguments over the body of PM Wittgenstein is considered as important, possibly more so than Heidegger. Central texts of postmodernity simply would not, could not have been written without Wittgensteins influential work. Consequently John's reference to Wittgenstein is not only interesting but also I think thematically correct.

[Perezoso]

Yes, passages from the Philosophical Investigations appear on postmodernist sites on occasion---perhaps there are others, however, out in the cheap seats who are not so fond of Ludwig the Mad's "meaning as use" school of semantics (which is to say, the Tractatus is Mad, and Phil. Invest., Mad cubed). Really, postmods seem concerned with anything and everything---except making true statements. For people who deny the possibility of truth (say construed in Kantian terms--- analytical or synthetic, or even in "vull--gar" terms, deductive or inductive reasoning), they apparently have no problem offering paragraph after paragraph of non-true, and non-confirmable statements. Funny how postmod rhetoric often resembles the writing of non-postmodernist clerics, whether xtian or jew. And, again, I assert that Marx-- economist and empiricist--- would hisself be opposed to pomo.

[Adam Thurschwell]

sdv, re: responding to John C. over at Before the Law, I simply felt a little ridiculous about including an extended excerpt from a draft paper of mine in a comment at somebody else's blog -- and, after all, it's only a point and click away . . . . As for the substance of your comment (which I take to be essentially the same point that you make in your comment at Before the Law, here , I don't agree that the "inability to address the social and political consequences of the approach" is a flaw in Levinasian ethics -- in fact, to be provocative (except that I also really believe this), I think it's a cardinal virtue of the approach. Is it really true that today, in our Western democracies at least, what we really need is a new theory that will dictate an affirmative "social and political" program for us to follow? Yes, a percipient critical-theoretical diagnosis of our current malaises is always welcome, but do we want a theorist in an armchair (or on a blog) to tell us what to do about those malaises? Wouldn't you rather decide for yourself, even acknowledging that you would want to know as many facts and hear as many intelligent views of the subject as you have time for before having to decide? Isn't our real problem (in the United States especially, but I think the problem is creeping into the rest of the (Western) world) the de-politicization of the populace, the sense that politics no long matters that much? Levinasian ethics, in my view, strikes at precisely that level of the political problem, by providing a theoretical justification for a motivating political impulse that is fundamentally social and non-egoistic, in the face of a society (and its dominant political theories) that deny the possibility of anything but a politics of (individual or group) self-interest. That is emphatically not to say that theorists shouldn't take on the project of analyzing concrete political situations that require action. But the Levinasian approach (which I also take to be the Derridian approach) is aimed at something different, which Critchley, it seems to me, rightly calls "political motivation."

[john c. halasz]

sdv:

I don't particulaly identify as "po-mo". I take it as it comes, whatever interests me. And I certainly don't mean to appoint myself any sort of spokesman for a Levinasian perspective. I just find him worthwhile and "informative". The main point I was trying to convey here is that Levinas doesn't "translate" into any particular politics, and that his "ethics", which is not "prescriptive", are pre-political, which precisely doesn't mean apolitical or anti-political. In fact, a point that could be drawn from Levinas is that any ethical motivation for political action or commitment is bound to become "distorted" by the exigencies of the political and the realities of power. Which doesn't count as a point against the political or a refusal to acknowledge the "reality" of power-relations, but rather as a delimitation of the ethical from the political, and a warning against the confusion of the two, or the effort to make the political into a "realization" of the ethical or moral and thereby miss the amoral "necessity" of the former and irretrievably deform the latter. At any rate, the main putative take-away from reading Levinas is not any political "ethics", nor any "solution" to political problems, but a mode of interogation, first of all of oneself and one's own orientations, and secondly for addressing political, social, epistemic, "religious" or other issues. The point is not to provide any "all-encompassing" ethics, but to provide an ethical perspective on the "all-encompassing".

"Ethics" are a-dime-a-dozen, at least, academically speaking. And, off-hand, Critchley's "anarchism as metapolitics" strikes me as "functionally" liberal. The word "liberal", of course, means "free", whether in pre-modern, Enlightenment, or modern usages, and when Levinas maintains loyalty to the "liberal" intentions of Husserl's phenomenological project, inspite of all his betrayals of that same project, he means its emancipatory hopes, not its actual execution or implications. When, in the end, he returns to its "original" locus, there is nothing left there, but a bombed-out crater, with which he tarries. As for liberalism more generally, though Levinas doesn't and wouldn't disclaim concern for "rights" or "human rights", his work would severely problematicize liberalism in the Rawlsian manner as "normative political philosophy", with whatever irrelevant hegemony it maintains in academic discourse, let alone economic liberalism. But it wouldn't thereby result in a non-liberal or anti-liberal image of the political or ethic. That is to miss the limited point of the work, which is to draw into question, which is not the same as refusing or denying, any political orientation or position, and not in any skeptical "spirit", since, like Wittgenstein, Levinas has left behind philosophical traditions that would define "reason" in terms of the ability to answer to and surmount merely and allegedly "skeptical" questions. So the upshot here is that I'm not sure the work of Levinas could be pressed into the task that you ask of it, not because it is "uninformative" with respect to that task, but because for Levinas, politics is not a matter of an "ethics", but is "ontological". And Levinas don't do "ontology". (He suggests a certain resistance to power politics, a counter-position to power as an end-in-itself, but he offers no clear theory or conception of power itself).

Me, I don't have the sorts of answers you would want. If knowledge is power (Bacon), and therefore (sic!) power is knowledge (Nietzsche), then what is power and how can we form any knowledge or conception of such a "thing"? (The semantics of the word itself is already ambiguous). I know of several sources or approaches that might provide partial components or fragmentary answers to such a question. Me, my approach would not be unheard of: a renewed political economy, and, following from that basis, a post-epistemological critique of knowledge production, in terms of its sources and constraints. That might at least "force" the relevant issues into the public-political-discursive domain from which they are routinely operatively excluded. Whatever political strategies, programs or modes of organization might follow from that would be situational and multiple. But I have no such rabbit to pull out of my hat or my ass.

I don't know what you mean by the non-human: the natural, the technolgical, or the "inhuman"? With respect to the first two, Heidegger might be a better place to look than Levinas, though I think his conception of technology is too de-differentiated, and the ecological implications of his thinking are largely inadvertent. As for the "advance" into the "inhuman", would that refer to a) the "development" of advanced modern "Western" cultures, or b) their confrontation with other, non-Western cultures, whether aboriginal, or "civilized"? In the first case, perhaps Levinas could be seen as protesting such "advance" in terms of its banalization and its fragmenting disintegration of human community and relatedness, though he's certainly not naively "humanistic", even if his conception of the other is strictly referent to the human. In the second case, Levinas remains largely Eurocentric and "Western" and that is a weakness of his thinking, though, as a native-born Russian speaker, that neck-of-the-woods was never off his "radar".

If you'd want to follow any further expatiations on matters Levinas, you could just click on Adam's handle here, or google his blog "Before the Law", which he recently reactivated, though I'm afraid that all you would find is further small points of punctilio, not any incisive "answers".

You might as well ignore "Perezoso" or any other of his pseudonymous gang as trolls. They're really just secret agents of MSN, sent to enforce disciplinary "normality". He doesn't even seem to realize that not only did logical positivism give a seriously distorted account of the bases, sources and methods of natural scientific inquiry, but it undercut the very possibility of giving a normative "justification" of the "value" of natural science. And as for Marx' "empiricism", which variant did he follow, that of Bentham or that of Comte? Indeed, he fails to realize that such "Enlightenment" fundamentalism, envisioning an ever continuous advance into an ever brighter, more glorious, and shallower "emancipated" future, is thoroughly complicit with neo-liberal reaction. (Cue music). "Off we goo into the wiild bluue yon-der, climbing hiigh into the sun..."

[john c. halasz]

Correction: "wiild" should be "wiide".

[tl]

John: a couple of quick questions:

(1) What would be the political relevance of a "critique of knowledge production" if "norms of 'truth' ... [and] norms of justice ... are ... distinct and even opposed"? I.e. if the "totalizing ontological rationality of 'truth' [is] inevitably allied to an imperialistic political ontology of power", what is to be gained from a critique of particular modes / models of truth? Or are we talking about a movement against truth / reason (?) simpliciter?

(2) Where does the "inhuman" fit in? i'm sure this is a schoolboy error, but i've never understood why the Other, which is supposed to be pure alterity vis-à-vis the ego, takes the form of another human person. This seems to put the inhuman in the very marginal position of being a kind of Other of the Other. i'm just wondering whether this relates to the idea of a futural politics of openness, viz. does it open onto post- or non-human futures (or onto the "disintegration of human community" in the course of constituting radically new forms of community) - and if not, does this not represent a questionable set of limitations on that openness?

[Jodi]

Adam, I'm reentering late so I won't be offended if you don't respond. Anyway, you say a couple of things in your last comment that I wanted to pick up. First, the matter of political motivation--this is Critchley's goal in using Levinas (and the account of ethics he, Critchley, develops/provides in the book). I'm not convinced that this is a vital move. And I'm not convinced because I don't see the fundamental problem today in terms of depoliticization or in terms of a politics of self (group or individual) interest. For better or worse, all sorts of social conservatives are highly mobilized. Some of their Christian conservative brethren are mobilized enough to try to install or produce from below a theocracy. Their justifications are not in terms of group or self interest but rather in terms of restoring the morality of America, following God's plan, eliminating contemporary sin, etc.

Second, you make an opposition between a theory that dictates a program and deciding for oneself. I think this kind of opposition is rather a trick and misleading. When one accuses a theorist of failing to provide a program or plan or solution one isn't asking for the theorist to dictate to them. One is are asking for some sign that another plan or approach is possible, some indication that a program is possible. One doesn't thereby forfeit one's opportunity to think or assess the various options available.

[Perezoso]

the very possibility of giving a normative "justification"

That's right genius. When you say "Normative," smile. Besides, I thought postmods were down with like "everything is relative, man" school of ethics; except when discussing logical positivists---then they "salivate like a Pavlov dog."

Levinas' comment on Hobbes is fairly typical sort of PoMo squeaks, if not crypto-clericalism. L. thought Hobbes model of Politics as based on self-interest is "hatefulness." Wow. Who needs to argue or discuss anything with Visionaries such as that around.

[Adam Thurschwell]

Jodi, very quickly, since I just swore to myself that I wouldn't do any more blogging until I got a little work done . . . .

You point out: "For better or worse, all sorts of social conservatives are highly mobilized. Some of their Christian conservative brethren are mobilized enough to try to install or produce from below a theocracy. Their justifications are not in terms of group or self interest but rather in terms of restoring the morality of America, following God's plan, eliminating contemporary sin, etc."

You're absolutely right, but they represent the flip-side of what (I view as) our predicament of depoliticization -- a reaction formation against the emptying out of political motivation as such that takes the form of a resurgence of traditionalist, substantive religious world-views in place of the (missing) political. The problem with that strategy is that it instantly falls back behind the (at least nascently) universalistic view of politics and its motivating meaning initiated by Kant, etc. But for reasons that you're familiar with we're too late for Kant and similar formalistic universalisms, which always turn out, at least insofar as they claim to have normative or directive content (per sdv's request, e.g.) to be either too empty to provide it or to themselves fall back, under the table as it were, into the (anti-universalistic) exclusion of the Other (the vice of the various early liberalisms that predicated "universality" on being fully human and therefore excluded "infidels," "savages," etc.). I think what we need is a source of political meaning that manages to be universal without being formalistically empty (and without simply following Hegel, who recognized and was trying to address this very problem in his Philosophy of Right). Political philosophy can't itself provide this source of political meaning but, maybe, it can help us recognize possible sources that we wouldn't notice otherwise. My feeling is that the Levinasian framework (especially as developed by Derrida), which manages to be both universalistic and absolutely singular -- demanding absolute responsibility for the singular Other qua absolutely unique and singular Other, but demanding it for *each and every* such Other without distinctions among them -- is the best bet at the present moment for at least a start on a (non-Hegelian) solution to the problem.

You say: "When one accuses a theorist of failing to provide a program or plan or solution one isn't asking for the theorist to dictate to them. One is are asking for some sign that another plan or approach is possible, some indication that a program is possible. One doesn't thereby forfeit one's opportunity to think or assess the various options available."

If what I said above makes any sense (which I recognize is highly questionable as I rush through this!), then that may partially answer this question as well. To the extent that the problem is a deficit in political motivation, then my whole invocation of Levinas is geared towards "an indication that a program is possible." And I didn't and don't mean to suggest that concrete analyses of concrete issues aren't critical; they are, and to the extent that such analyses are offered not as diktat but as helfpul guides to thinking about the problem, then we're all on the same page. But then the accusation leveled against the Levinasian analysis (by, e.g., sdv above) that it is empty of consequences, seems unfair. On one hand, it is not empty of consequence to the extent that one views, as I do, the problem of political motivation as pressing -- it is full of "consequences," I think, for how one thinks about this problem and its solutions, and even if one disagrees with those consequences and solutions, that's very different from accusing it of having none at all. On the other hand, to the extent that the most we want any theorist to do is offer us helpful ways of thinking about particular problems but ultimately -- in good democratic, and Derridian, fashion -- leaving it up to us to decide what, actually, to do, then how does that differ from the Levinasian approach -- at least to the extent that one views the deficit in political meaning/motivation as a real problem? Thus, in the end, I think your objections (and sdv's as well) probably come down to a sense that political motivation is not a problem. Is that right?

[Jodi]

Thanks, Adam, that clarifies quite a bit (although I still remained puzzled on the matter of diktat v. helpful guides, but maybe this does blur into the matter of political motivation). The accusation that the Levinasian position is empty of consequences is not mine (worse and similar are thrown at Zizek). But, your end point is the crucial one. And, I don't think that the problem is political motivation. So, there is a crucial split. To my mind the problem is in organization, institutionalization, and correctly analyzing the present conjuncture. I think that leftists all over the place are motivated--but their efforts are either in effective or in fact reinforce what they are trying to resist. I don't share your analysis of conservatives (or Christian conservatives). That's because I don't think the political is missing at all (here I disagree with Zizek). Rather, conservatives are politically active, doing their thing. Leftists pathetically insist the political is gone because they have failed politically. But that's just a change in the structure of hegemony--not a loss of the political (as if such a thing can be lost! an exceedingly odd claim, it seems to me).

[Adam Thurschwell]

Jodi, very quickly -- I'd put it this way: the struggle for power cannot be "lost" (in the sense of gone missing, etc,), but the political can be "lost" in this sense. That in turn presupposes that "the political" is something more or other than the struggle for power. Do you think there's a difference between the two? I ask that as a genuine question; it's certainly a legitimate position to take that "the political" is simply a matter of opposing forces -- a la Nietsche (or the conventional readings of him), Foucault, etc. I'm curious whether you see a difference, though, and, if you do, where you would currently locate and how you would define "the political."

[sdv]

The non-human seems the easiest place to start given the lack of time available.

"...As for the "advance" into the "inhuman", would that refer to a) the "development" of advanced modern "Western" cultures, or b) their confrontation with other, non-Western cultures, whether aboriginal, or "civilized"?..."

None of the above.

To speak of the non-human is precisely to address that that which is not human. Serres puts the scale of this problem rather more elegently and clearly than I did in a few sentences: "...In dominating the planet, we become accountable for it....We are going to have to decide about every thing and even about Everything..."

The core of the issue I was referring to with the introduction of the non-human concept is how could a human-centred ethics be reconstructed to enable such decisions to be made.

In the sentences following the above quote isn't it clear that you do not believe that the human can be decentred from Levinas's ethics precisely because of the localism of his thought or not ?

politics later...

[Adam Thurschwell]

sdv, without speaking for John, of course, who may have another view, I'll say that one of the virtues of Derrida's appropriation of Levinas is that it breaches precisely that limit, extending Levinnas's thought in a direction that is already present within it but with which his rhetoric (the "face of the other man," etc.) sometimes seems to come in conflict. That is, if the Other is truly not subject to knowledge, conceptual capture, predication, etc., then how the hell do we know he/she/it is human at all? So I think that one answer, at lesst, is that Levinsas is fully consistent with the "nonhuman," in fact, is better theoretically-equipped than anyone else . . . .

[Jodi]

Adam--I view the political as the fundamental antagonism constitutive of society (around which society is constituted and that which the very notion of society endeavors to hide, control, or channel--I do not think that this struggle is the same as democracy, which is what I think Ranciere thinks).

Further, I understand this definition as a version of Laclau's version of Schmitt (friend/enemy is on the right track but too narrow and tied to the sovereign). It's a version of Laclau rather than the same because my understanding is that class conflict is another name for the fundamental antagonism (as opposed to battle for hegemony which can be used to describe different kinds of struggles in articulation).

So, to say struggle for power is, to my mind, not wrong, but a little narrow and potentially misleading in that it could suggest the old political science idea of power over or of politics as who does what to whom and I want to distance myself from those views insofar as I think that the antagonism shapes, pushes the very terrain of possibilities within which politics operates.

So, politics isn't the same, of course, as the political but rather involves the conjuncture (to use good old Althusser's term for the setting or for politics as occurring necessarily within a setting that establishes a bunch of conditions. The political Act can disrupt or break through the conjuncture, but (and here I disagree with Zizek) there is politics without the Act, it just might be really slow, boring, potentially counterproductive remain in place politics (this is where I come back to a Zizekish position).

[Kenneth Rufo]

Jodi, what makes the political, in your estimation, the "fundamental" antagonism? I'm curious about this, because I see the implicit dismissal of the religious as a form of identification within the political arena to be a common facet of left "political" thought, as if religion has only recently been incorporated into politics. I've seen a number of clams like this - and Adam's seems the same - that, in effect, treat the rise of the Christian right as either a secondary effect of economic relations or distortions of a primary political impulse, and I always find it a curious dismissal.

[john c. halasz]

Correction of the correction: the original lyric was "wild" after all. It's a mondegreen!

tl:

Levinas doesn't deny cognition, truth, "ontology". In fact, he's caught within the "ontological", and struggling rather desperately, if not exactly to "escape" from it, to re-position the ethical within it, as irreducible to the terms of "ontology" (Heidegger, but also Hegel). The point is that "truth" and "rightness/justice/goodness" are distinct normative dimensions, and thus "opposed" in the sense that they don't factor into each other without remainder, even if they are also "necessarily" cross-implicated in this world. Truth-claims can be distinguished from claims to ethical norms, in that, if the factual conditions of a claim fail to hold or obtain, the truth-claim is held to account, whereas the ethical-norm claim holds the facts to account. Or, at least, that would be a nice neat distinction between a truth and a norm, were it not for the fact that a norm of "truth" is involved. So cognitive truth too has a normative dimension, and is not simply a matter of gathering the brute facts, since anything that could rise to the level of a truth-claim would involve conceptual generalizations and there are conditions for the applicability of concepts. (Not just anything could count, e.g., as a scientific theory of biology, and it's not just a matter of the preponderance of evidence, though that counts considerably, since evidence is always "theory-laden" and theories are under-determined by evidence: they must be well-conceived, in accordance with the "nature" of their subject-matter or object-domain. There's always the GIGO principle to consider, and its converse.)

But truth, of itself, does not necessarily "give" or bring about justice. It doesn't even necessarily "set you free". Since cognitive truth is concerned primarily with norm-free facts, it could just as well yield to or be complicit in oppression, since oppression is a fact of life. The counter-thrust here is to, e.g., Hegel's "absolute knowledge", which, as a kind of fully normative "super-truth", would claim to bring the conditions of justice with its own development and sit in judgment upon the world and its history. (Levinas engages with and against Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"). In fact, one of the basic fallacies ingredient in the modern philosophical project of epistemology is that new knowledge, the advance of modern science, would yield a new ethics, in accordance with such knowledge, "progress" in which morality and knowledge develop and march continuously together. In fact, there is only the same old ethics, if under new truth conditions for the application of norms. Or, if there is ethical change in the norms of justice, it comes about in a different dimension, and from a different "dynamic". (Just consider trying to explain to an Antebellum slave-owner why slavery is wrong,- assuming the best case of a fine educated Episcopalian gentleman, etc. What are the facts not in evidence that he might be missing? Is it really just a matter of the scope of application of the norm in question or dispute? What is it to “see” the worldly facts differently, when “for all the world”, many of those facts might align with the opposite side, at least factually, or be ambiguous, or in dispute? And let’s spare the “enormous condescension of posterity” here, as if our belatedness of itself amounted to “enlightenment” or virtue, and as if we could anachronistically choose sides.)

If “truth” and “justice” are opposed, but cross-implicated normative “powers” or dimensions in this world, then “truth” without “justice” would be called “cynicism”, whereas “justice” without “truth” would be called “fanaticism”. Their impossible and inconceivable reconciliation would be “redemption”, which is the figure of the Messianic. To revert to Benjamin, each generation has a “weak Messianic power”, and, recycling ancient Jewish legend, when the Messiah comes, very little will change, it will make the slightest bit of difference, but that smallest change, that slightest difference, is redemption: i.e. the coming of the Messiah does not usher in another world, but is this world, when its truth is seen in the light of justice. (So the an-archic in Levinas relates to the Messianic, for similar reasons to the more political anarchism of Benjamin, though there is no direct point of contact between the two, except that both were probably influenced by Rosenzweig). At any rate, a key point that Levinas makes in his critique of epistemology is that ethical norms of justice “must” be seen as subtending cognitive norms of truth, while not determining, nor reducing them, nor “grounding” their validity, but only with regard to the “value” of knowledge, else the latter are liable to “slip their skids” and become a nihilistic “justification” of oppression and catastrophe. Further, Levinas is attacking the traditional notion of theoretical knowledge, as “pure”, “disinterested”, and “neutral”. For Levinas there is no such transcendental standpoint, universal and neutral, per se, since all knowledge is interested, i.e. intricated with and rooted in Being. It’s the ethical relation to the other that is “dis-inter-ested”, i.e. uprooted from Being, but that is not a transcendental, theoretical standpoint, even if it at once subtends and is occluded by such a theoretical standpoint. Indeed, it is such mediating “neutrality”, (which is a third basic meaning of “the third”, together with the other of the other and “illeity”), that constitutes the identifying “subject” of knowledge, occluding the relation to the other and forming the complicity of such a “subject” and its knowledge with oppression, of oneself, as well as, of others. This goes to why the complaint that Levinas’ “ethics” is bereft of “political and social consequences” rather misses the point. There are always consequences, in endless cycles, and the “point” is to effect breaks in those cycles, which come, not from “outside” this world, but from the relation to the other, which breaks through, to produce factual and normative transformations that alter those cycles and their consequences and change their “directions”.

As to your second question about why the other is figured by Levinas as the other human being, rather than the otherness of Being, that’s obviously contested ground, with and against Heidegger, and I think also in relation to Derrida. I think maybe we should go back to the traditional optical metaphorics of light, to the ancient philosophical notion of the “natural light” of reason, perhaps best exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope, with his lit lantern held high in broad daylight, searching among the stoas, “looking for people”, the satiric version. Heidegger transforms that problematic into the “Lichtung”, literally the clearing, as in a forest, whereby ontological truth “eventuates” through the co-respondance between Dasein and Being. Again, Levinas does not simply reject such an account, but gives it revisionary “twists”, to bring out the other “light” of justice, with and against ontological truth. Only human beings bear and possess or are possessed by natural language, hence only they are “called” to an understanding of Being and can exercize care for its truth. (Animals are “poor in world”, whereas humans are “rich in world”, says Heidegger). Levinas’ “other” is human, because it is a bearer of phenomenological intentionality bestowed by language: the other is an entirely separate “source” of intentionality that withdraws from any and every manifestation of that intentionality, whether practical, cognitive, or linguistic, (which I can only interpret in terms of the “same”, assimilate to my knowledge, identity and perspective), and is “encountered” only as the locus of an address. (In terms of philosophy of language, Levinas counters Heidegger’s evocative account of language and meaning as “the house of Being” with an account of the other as the invocative source of language and meaning). One can only communicate, in any “literal” and meaningful sense, with other human beings, as finite, irreducibly particular beings, as opposed to communicating about “things”, Being, the world, or the “inhuman”, whether natural or artificial. (You communicate through your computer, not with it; only if, as per science fiction, there could develop machine based life and not just “intelligence”, could matters stand otherwise. Though the question of technology is extremely difficult and multifariously ambiguous, and I don’t think Levinas remotely addresses it adequately. And I’m not aware that he ever perspicuously addressed ecological issues). Hence it is only through the relation to the other that one is called to account, that one becomes “responsible”. But, of course, Levinas’ point is that, while one is singularly responsible before the “face” of the other, obligated by the uniqueness of the relation to the other, one’s responsibility, politically, hence too epistemically, speaking, can never be singular and exclusive, but opens onto a plurality. Levinas takes objection to Heidegger’s talk of the “voice” of Being in its “antihumanist” destiny, denouncing “a voice which no face commands”. And likewise he repudiates and excoriates the element of the sacred and the numinous with which Heidegger imbues his conception of the destining of Being. He sees therein a “pagan” submission to the mythified “powers” or forces of nature and their domination, which he denounces as “idolatry”. So I think the upshot is that whatever the futurally open forms or formlessness of coming community, Levinas would insist that they would remain “human” in the sense of based in that form of solidarity that he designates with the notion of “responsibility”. And presumably, realistically speaking, such future communities would devolve from the non-reproduction of our extant forms of community, or else, from the catastrophes that our current forms of community inflict on future generations through their modes of reproduction.

But does Levinas, even if he has decentered “ethics” from the “humanist” ego, still maintain an anthropocentric orientation, and thereby marginalize the non-human, whether natural or artificial? Well, only human beings can be bearers of norms and obligations,- (which is what makes talk of “animal rights” so irritating, since animals can no more be bearers of “rights” than they can be legitimately stigmatized as “evil”, whereas the real issue is human obligations toward natural being, whether wild, captive, or ecologically sustainable). And it’s not clear to me that the sorts of issues raised by the question are really ethical, even if they abut upon the ethical and raise the question of what is mediated through communication that Levinas refuses to the “immediacy” of the ethical, (but not the ontological). Certainly, there is foregrounded in Levinas a generalization of the ethical, such that the ethical is not just a sub-specialty of philosophy, nor a domain of special expertise on the part of philosophers, but stands “behind” and “beneath” a host of other concerns. (The same notion is implicit, I think, in Wittgenstein, as well). But that is not a claim for ethical omni-competence, but rather an extended delimitation of the ethical and its difference, (whatever difference it makes), as per epistemic, political or other issues. The idea that the ethical per se must answer to every possible question, as if, without its guidance, we would be powerless to think, know or act, misses the point, in that, it is only “after the fact” that we find ourselves “responsible”, as it were, “beforehand”, not “at hand”. The ethical, in Levinas’ conception, is certainly not the place-holder for the philosophical a priori, but precisely the opposite of anything like that. And to ask the ethical to “incorporate” the “inhuman” is in excess of the ethical excess and risk. It would amount to asking Levinas, in effect, to become Hegel all over again, which I think he would, not very politely, refuse to do.

A “critical political economy of knowledge production”, of course, has nothing to do with Levinas. That’s me, the “meta-Marxist”, my fantasy of “critical theory”. Of course, I would be thoroughly unscupulous in drafting Levinas, or Wittgenstein, or even, with and against, Foucault into such a philosophical daydream. Though I think that Bourdieu’s sociological conception of various “capitals” badly misses that capital is not simply an accumulation or store of wealth, but a produced means of production, I’d even steal from him. The obvious point is that knowledge is not simply a reflection of (pre)given facts, but is something produced, an abstractive organization of discourse, and that knowledge and “power”, as occupying one and the same world, mutually condition each other, such that knowledge is produced under decided politico-economic constraints and conditions, which result not just in limitations on “true” knowledge and the potentials it might open up, but, equally, in the production of false knowledges, for quasi-official reasons, (such as, e.g., the industrial-military complex, or corporate “intellectual property”). The production of knowledge is always an investment, in both senses of the word. The point would be to “force” such issues into the “openness” of the public-political, and contest and interrogate the interests and strategies at work in the production of knowledge, both true and false, and how such knowledges serve to “constitute” various communities as privileged or excluded, while also attempting to gain “knowledge” and understanding of how power is generated and actually operates, its various forms and modes of “conversion”. And, of course, draw into question the traditional “myth” that knowledge, or, more generally, formal-rational institutionalized discourses, serves to guide and regulate action and practice more-or-less beneficiently, or, aporetically, that action and practice generate knowledges.

[john c. halasz]

Well, maybe just briefly a comment on the Jodi/Adam exchange. Leaving Critchley aside, whose worry about motivation is reminiscent of Habermas, (or of Analytic arguments over externalism vs. internalism in ethics), I don't think that Levinas was one to go chasing endlessly after motivations. That was part of what "infinity" was meant to disrupt. He's not exactly an advocate of the ad hominem hermeneutics of suspicion, but rather crafting his thinking to withstand such a possibility. (Briefly, "logically", there could be language-games of acts without intentions, and there could be language-games of acts and intentions without motives. Motives are only "known" as inferences, and their implications and consequences for intentions and acts are dubious, and motives are always mixed. To ask after the motive rather than the intention is, often enough, pace Freud, to miss the point. There is no "purity" of motive, nor is one required "ethically", which is part of what drove Rousseau mad). I think that what Levinas' ethics is addressing fairly squarely and directly in the political is the paranoid tendency that is not just endemic, but intrinsic to it, (since, according to me, the political is pre-eminently the realm of alienation, which is why it tends to be subject to the "play" of "forces" of resentment and fear and their manipulation). Given Levinas' biographical-historical experience (born 1906), beginning with WW1 and the Russian Revolution in his childhood, his "world" is one of states and mass societies roiled by violent conflict. But there are no "masses" in Levinas' thinking; there is only the "infinity" of finite, irreducibly particular human existences. The issue is not the "motivation" of the political, but its non-indifference, not any desire for any apolitical escape into the private, but a resistance to the subsumption of the particularity of human existences by the violent "totality" of the political, and, obversely, the opening of the public-political to such particularity and its fragile solidarities. It’s not a matter of any deficit or excess of “motivation”, but of how the political is addressed and the terms of such address, which just might go to how the political is “constituted”.

To me, at any rate, it’s apparent that the religious right in the U.S. is a phalangist reactionary movement that has been mobilized and functionalized in accordance with the right-wing corporate hegemonic counter-offensive that began especially with the stagflationary crisis of the 1970’s. And it should be observed that it is also a post-modern apparatus, commodifying a sub-cultural niche. (The late, unlamented Rev. Falwell “prophetically” denouncing teletubbies was a marketing ploy). And it would be stupid not to recognize that it “corresponds” with the planned obsolescence of the industrial working-class and its various regional fall-outs. But what is interesting is that previously such religious fundamentalism was apolitical, “not of this world”, and, in fact, the fundamentalist desire for an authoritarian-dogmatic self-enclosure is precisely a kind of apolitical or antipolitical privatism. If I don’t take such “religious” motivation “seriously”, pace Kenneth Rufo, it’s because its theology is so obviously shoddy, lacking in anything like the authentic “depth” of a tradition, which, sheer lunacy aside, it has no comprehension of. What’s of note is the politicization of the anti-political, which dovetails nicely with the endless proselytizations of “free markets”, inducing more general depoliticization, i.e. the neutralization of political neutralization. If the virulence of the fundamentalists seems to have an excessive prominence, “moving the goal-posts”, then that is less a testimony to their actual,- (er, moronic),- “power” than the general “success” of the operative strategy. But we’re now deep into Vol. 3, “fictitious capital”, and who knows what the fallout might bring? "Interesting times"?

[tl]

John:

i think this will be my last effort here - it's at the stage where i need to properly get back to the texts.

i largely take your point about the restriction of the ethical to the human sphere, altho i do wonder how much the idea of language as a mediator here appeals implicitly to a notion of moral reciprocity which is hard to square with the asymmetry of the Levinasian ethical situation. What was really behind the point about the inhuman was a sense that the goalposts were slightly shifting. i felt (correct me if i’m wrong) that the futurity of the ethical encounter was offered partly as a counter to the expectation that a theory which claims insight into the ethical dimension of human existence should have a bit more to say than L. does about the actions and experiences of concrete, historically situated individuals. (Not that the expectation is for L. to be doing normative ethics in the traditional sense, but i still struggle with how pointing to the abyss of infinite responsibility which opens before/beyond each action can inform our thought about those actions, never mind the actions themselves.) (Incidentally, this is why i can’t stop seeing ethics as ultimately of a piece with politics.) So the deferral of this expectation would clear out the confusing business of judging right from wrong and get us to the phenomenological heart of the ethical experience. But when it turns out that the ethical is closely bound up with the human, this futurity is in its turn structured and delimited by – ok, not some kind of immutable human essence, but a field of concepts which determine a priori the possibilities of ethical engagement. (In Wittgensteinian terms, there’s some bedrock here somewhere which never flows away with the stream.) It feels as though i’m being told to abandon my blinkered attachment to a notion of ethics as relevant to human lives here and now, then getting told off for carrying this abandonment through too enthusiastically, to the point where the ethical puts the human into question. (The way i find myself playing this role of the obtuse pupil when confronted with Levinas & Levinasians is also interesting.)

As for the truth, justice & American way stuff, i’ve no problem with thinking of them as imbricated in some complex and conflictual, but partly mutually independent, way. But i’m still unclear about how this relates to “Western philosophy, ‘reason’, as a totalizing ontological rationality of ‘truth’ inevitably allied to an imperialistic political ontology of power”. Is the point just that reason / truth, in asserting its own independence from the ethical, inevitably ends up getting taken over by partial political interests? Can we fill this out historically at all, or is that missing the point?

Thanks for your help with this; it’s been useful.

[sdv]

Adam - it's clear that Critchley's reading of Levinas does not 'breach that limit'. Indeed even within Critchley's political structures if it did work there would be no reason for the co-option of aspects of Badiou and Logstrup's work. The political focus on the motivational deficit with regard to liberal democracy, the brief discussion of 'human rights' rather precisely marks the difficulty of establishing the non-human as eqivalent within the line of thought.

Whilst I can accept that you believe that Levinas's work, if read through Derrida, may be thought to adequately address the non-human, this is a misreading of Levinas-Derrida. I think for you to justify this argument you would have to explain how the theological, transcendental and the human centred aspects, (faciality, the other)etc can be removed and the work still remain recognizable.

The decentering of the human is not that easy.

[Perezoso]

"Western philosophy, ‘reason’, as a totalizing ontological rationality of ‘truth’ inevitably allied to an imperialistic political ontology of power”

That's a typical PoMo stealth move--identifying logic and Reason--especially that sinister "Aufklarung" variety---with imperialism, capitalism, the right, patriachy, etc.; anti-rationalists of whatever stripe are then offered, at least implicitly, as the Counterforce or "ethical" alternative. And it's pretty much BS, regardless of the conceptual pirouettes. Anti-rationalist rightists (ie. Nietzsche as nazi model for one--or Hegel's grand History march as communist model) and leftists, and clerics, theologians are at least as guilty as any supposed positivist or reductionist imperialists (is Carnap more guilty than Heidegger? nyet). Who are these sinister positivists that are always being pointed to, anyways? It's like a mock trial; but no one has to provide any evidence, no arguments (those too are the work of the Oppressor). You want to discuss normative ethics (and the problems thereof), try getting around Hume's fact/value distinction for starters (tho' one imagines that Levinass--oy vey!--would include Hume in that tradition of Hobbesian hatefulness).

[sdv]

I tend towards agreeing with Jodi's understanding of the political and the difficulties that emerge through the use of the concept of political motivation. Consequently I don't think I need to address the political ground that has already been covered. To clarify a little though, if one accepts Critchley's original statement that it is 'liberal western democracy' that suffers from a motivational deficit then perhaps the concept 'political motivation'may be reasonable. However this is such a restricted subset of the political that it remains completely unnecessary concept. For example it's clear from early in the Critchley book that his analysis of the 'present conjuncture' is very limited and consequently may be entirely irrelevant. His concept of political motivation requires that we accept that a non-liberal democracy, supported and justified by a moral and ethical commitment, can inspire the rejection of active and passive nihilism. Within Critchley's understanding the resurgence of Christian world-views would belong within the group that is named/identified as active nihilism. It is important then to realize that Critchley is precisely trying to produce a political text that has 'normative or directive content'.

I rather think that it should be acknowledged that Critchley effectively admits that he cannot build the required political ethic on the basis of the work of Levinas, hence the use of Badiou, Logstrup and so on. What is produced then may be related to Levinas but it is not the Levinas that is addressed by John and Adam. This is actually demonstrated by the response of both Adam and John to the political question, where Adam says 'the accusation leveled against the Levinasian analysis that it is empty of consequences....' is I think wrong, because the context is an attempt to produce a social and political position heavily informed with both the work of Levinas and also a stern political critic of the consequences of Levinasian approaches. Consequently whilst I would say the Levinasian position has little or no political use, it's clear that this is not necessarily to dismiss Critchley's position, but those who imagine that political positions can be informed, guided by such ethical positions.

Adam made the direct point that I imagine that 'political motivation is not a problem' – this is difficult, because in one sense I tend to agree with Jodi's response and the reference to the 'present conjuncture' for in fact political militancy always derives from the present, often ideologically supported by universalist and/or particularist programmes. This is case whether the underlying intention is reactionary or radical. Where I'd raise a caveat is that I regard politics more concretely in that i do regard the act of walking down the street as much a political act as I would the the support for animal rights (John fundamentally misunderstands the rights argument here, curiously similar to utilitarian arguments I thought), or if you wish left social/political activity.

Given the level of human accountability gestured to earlier I really don't think we can or should differentiate along the lines of the human animal any longer.

The problem I have with Jodi's reference to the political, which at one end of the spectrum I'd agree with is that given the level of responsibility and accountability we now hold, an antagonistic politics can only be maintained between humans – in the restricted space which we need to negotiate as a consequence of our recent responsibility. Our political understanding does not support this because it is fundamentally antagonistic, the struggles over hegemony do of course have the same inevitable restriction.

I actually thought earlier, before printing out and reading the comments more carefully that this would be something very different – apologies for that but the limits and the arguments of the levinas are clear enough, as indeed are the drawbacks.

John, it is perhaps worth saying that I never use the term post-modern insultingly, though my use and understanding of the term has shifted from the ground established by Lyotard, towards something that insists on its materialist core which is founded on the social, political and economic changes after approx 1968 and especially on the resulting neo-liberal counter-reformation... (thought I owed you that...)

[john c. halasz]

Just some ninth inning clean up.

tl:

It sounds to me you've just about "got" it. But Levinas is not abstracting from the "here and now" and focusing exclusively on the temporality of futurity. To the contrary, he is insistent on the here and now from which everything starts out and to which it returns, on the "immediacy" of the ethical, and later on the "proximity" of the relation to the other, who is the neighbor-as-stranger. It just that the here-and-now is never fully present, is not presence, and so he steps "behind" and "beneath" the present, into his shadowy meditations. But then those meditations do amount to an abandonment that carries one off to the point where "the ethical puts the human into question" from which one meets one's downfall. That's just the point of this movement of thinking: just what is the "human", what are its limits and possibilities, which "human"? And, of course, that a question and a task that is never completed, but must always be repeated.

The category of "totality" is a philosophy "thing", due to the "in principle" style of philosophical reasoning. Kant's "infinite task of science" would be an example of "totality", since it presupposes a fixed form of science, ( that of mathematical Newtonian mechanics). Even Hegel, with his "absolute knowledge" is not exactly claiming personal omniscience, but rather a certain completion of the principles of reason, wherein the world as a whole as an order of objective rational truths is reconciled with human freedom. Besides, "Geist" is precisely a collective "entity" in which individuals participate, so that its understandings are produced through such collective participation and are supra-personal. But Levinas' point is that totalizing tendency in the philsophical ideals of Western reason is both constantly at work and fundamentally uncompletable, such that it's "universal" claims are at once always at least a bit forced and always fall back into something partial, in both senses. It's the totalizing implications of the Western philsophical and cognitive conception of universal reason that lend it an affinity and complicity with trends toward expansionary or imperialistic domination, "power". For all the differences and distances between them, Levinas bears comparison to Horkheimer and Adorno in "The Dialectic of Enlightenment". It's the relation to the other, who is no-thing and acategorical that serves to disrupt and break through an "system" of categorical identifications that would seek, even tendentially, to be total or all-determining. So Levinas' ethics is non-cognitive, and "rooted" in the very indeterminacy of "freedom", which "must" be decided upon.

The example that Levinas offers of the totalizing compulsion of Western universal reason is, oddly enough, Nazism itself, since, with the collapse of earlier ideals of universality, something must be put in its place, which becomes for Nazism the “universal” concept of race, which hence views the whole Being of the world in terms of a universal struggle amongst races. That’s not so much a slander against ideals of reason, as a diagnosis of their limits and defaults. It’s a matter of maintaining a certain loyalty to the ideals of reason, even and precisely at the point of betraying them, risking even “immanent” criticisms of Nazism, the absolute enemy, since the critique of metaphysics in terms of the limits of reason is at the very root of the modern epistemological project in philosophy going back to Kant. (That critical dissolution of epistemology is where I see an affinity to Wittgenstein). As to “filling it out historically”, I don’t think that there should be much difficulty in that, since Levinas’ thinking was situated historically in the wake of the Holocaust and in the midst of the Cold War.

sdv:

I understood the force of your question about non-anthropocentic being, and, thinking about it, I deliberately avoided giving any answer in terms of it being registered ethically in terms of its impact on the human and social realm, to which ethics is referent, which would be to cheap and undermine the “seriousness” of the issue of ecological crises, by re-enforcing an anthropocentric perspective. My answer was, in effect, yes, that is a limitation on the ethical, but the question and its limitation are themselves not ethical and can’t be addressed in its terms. In Levinas’ terms, they belong to the “ontological” and the “economy” of Being, and, since for him the relation to the other is acategorical and thus non-cognitive, ethics could be of little avail. But that doesn’t vitiate that ethics, which raises the question of the very limit of the “human”, and which, while laying claim to a certain (counter-)universality of scope, is precisely not laying claim to totality. And I think the point that the ethical relation can only be subject to “what” actually or potentially can be communicatively addressed, I won’t say “fully”, but in such a way that one’s address and thus one’s question draws oneself into question through the possibility of a response that is quite other than the perspective framing one’s question, is rigorously “correct”. (At the end of a series of paragraphs in PI concerning cannibals and missionaries parables, there is a one sentence paragraph: “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him”. There is a limit to the potential intelligibility of communication that is rooted in the contingencies of the human. Even in the most naturalistic conception, there is a long evolution of animal sociality, especially through the human biological peculiarity of neotenic birth, that gave rise to the emergence of natural language, such that there is a large gap between the human animal and all other animals). And the point that the modal relation to the other subtends all communication and hence all discursive understanding and discourse, inflecting and affecting them in one way or another, is not something that can be obviated from any human understanding, even the most “purely” cognitive or “unethical”: it always bears implications “within” the implications and consequences of human knowledge and action.

But I would also question your claim that the technologically mediated and economically powered advance of human societies into nature, inverting the ancient domination by the mythified “powers” of nature renders humans totally responsible for deciding upon “everything”. I have no doubt that terrible decisions, in both senses of the word, will be made, as they are being made all the time, without “responsibility”, as ecological crises accelerate even before the human population has stabilized at its maximum. But, in the first place, not everything is a matter of decisions, precisely because decisions have consequences and are just a part of processes, so that such total decisions are effectively conceptually impossible. But also because “nature” of itself doesn’t provide clearly normative standards for deciding. An ecosystem, which is not a true system in the technical sense, doesn’t entail any optimal balance, but a range of variable tolerances and balances, and for all that it is urgent and desireable that we gather as much scientific information and understanding of the matter as possible, inevitably our decisions will spill over into political and economic conflict and dispute. It is less a matter of deciding for nature and its processes of balance than of learning to leave nature alone, let it be, let it “decide” for itself, by coming to understand our effects on the natural world and limiting them as much as sustainably possible. It’s not as if we could ever have some sort of supercybernetic machine which would be fully in control and put “us” in control.

But here there is still something of value to be reminded of by Levinas, since his ethics concerns precisely the uncontrollability of intentions and consequences and is an ethics of “after the fact”, in terms of which we find ourselves responsible. In other words, it’s an ethics of undoing as much as of doing, so the question is not just “what is to be done”, but how to deal with the having been done and the redoing. If it’s not exactly an ethics of “permanent revolution”, it is one that criticizes the inevitable uncontrollability and miscarriage of even the best intentions, and thus radically criticizes the reification of revolutions. (Which is why the criticism that his ethics has no social and political consequences is so odd; it is precisely delimiting the ethical from the political to bring out the necessity and the consequentiality of the political and its impact on the fundamentally social “constitution” of human existence). If Levinas offers no “guidance” for the political, because he is not offering a narrowly and specifically “political” ethics, that is not simply because his ethics is indeterminately “infinite”, (and thereby lost in some haze of “theological” abstraction), but because, aside from the fact that his ethics implicates a broader scope than just the narrowly political, he is specifically delimiting the ethical from the political, whether aporetically or not, to draw out not just the necessity and consequentiality of the political and action even to the point of violence, but to preserve the amoral “freedom” of the political, in which the prime criteria are efficacy and maneuver, from contamination by any “pure” moralism, even while refusing the forgetting of moral “costs”. It’s, in fact, an ironical ethics of the “autonomy” of the political. And if the political, as per the standard definition of the sovereignty of the state as “the organized monopoly on legitimate violence”, is necessarily involved with violence, in one degree or form or another, a political ethics would only be concerned with the question of its legitimation, in that strange alchemy which converts violence into ethical “legitimacy”, which is perhaps not the most important matter for thinking of the political. (In that definition of sovereignty perhaps the key word is “organized”, as the Bushevik idiot-savants found out unsurprisingly in Iraq). That is part of why I would question your and Jodi’s sense of the political as bound immediately to the situational and to its analysis, which not only theoretically intellectualizes political action in ways which might not prove helpful, (since theories will always prove a dime-a-dozen in the broader “picture” and the longer haul, and, er, tend to become the focus of distracting disputes, often only concerning “the narcissism of small differences”), and seems to side-step the hard, tedious, but crucial work of organization involved in any hope for efficacy, (which would be no more guided by theory than it would be aiming at bureaucracy), but it misses what Levinas’ seemingly quiet, unquiet meditation on the modal serves to bring out: namely, the fundamental, even central, importance of rhetoric and its mode of address to political action and practical reason, in a realm where, not only is there no epistemic securement of, let alone monopoly on, “truth”, but one is faced with the force of opposing rhetorics, which may well be fraudulent or hateful. It is an ethics that “can make one tremble”, though not through the instilling of fear. (It is worlds away from Sklar’s “liberalism of fear”, which remains strangely Hobbesian). And I don’t think that Levinas ethics has lost relevance in the situation of “advanced” political societies, which are advanced just as much in barbarism as in “civilization”, and in which I do think that a pervasive “de-politicization” has taken hold, what I termed above a neutralization of political neutralization itself, driven by economism and the mass-mediatization of mass-mediated societies, and dominated by what Luhmann cynically theorized as “self-legitimating political elites”, into that “post-modern” situation of ever-increasing disintegration and atomization with its ambivalent potentials for “freedom”. Indeed, it not just violence that Levinas asks hard questions about, but also hard questions about the “value” of freedom are at issue, when freedom, regarded as the fundamental right that grounds all other rights, becomes the locus of increasingly intensified, thus increasingly fragmenting conflicts “powering” the political drift of the organized chaos of late capitalism.

[sdv]

A brief response which hopefully marks the difference here.

Without repeating the original question, it seems clear that the limitations that are placed on Levinasian ethics do make the ethic incapable of addressing the actuality of the political and the human condition. “My answer was, in effect, yes, that is a limitation on the ethical, but the question and its limitation are themselves not ethical and can’t be addressed in its terms....” If we are to accept such a restricted notion of the ethical then the question becomes closer to how the Levinasian ethical can address the political at all. The differend between us is clear and there is no possibility of reaching a consensus, a judgment, an understanding, because after the question of the non-human has been raised it is an error and even I would suggest an impossibility to regard a human as having and greater value than a non-human.

To restate this slightly a contemporary ethics has to be able to address the equivalence in value between entities. Levinas is represented with the presumption that humans have greater value that the non-human, but there can be no justification for what is an absurd and a reactionary proposition. The problem with the Levinasian response to the non-human is that the ethic deliberately restricts, in a singularly reactionary fashion what might constitute the field of the political. Whereas what should be understood is that a useful left politics cannot not be informed by such a restricted ethic.

[john c. halasz]

dv:

1) So there is no significant difference between shooting and exterminating Tasmanians for sport and shooting and exterminating buffalos for sport, even though the latter occurs on a much larger scale and has the effect, if not of exterminating indigenous peoples, of destroying their way of life and starving them into submission? Or is the example itself too "reactionary"?

2) What is meant by
"the actuality of the political and the human condition"? Surely not a return to the Aristotelian conception of the political! Is "actuality" being opposed to the potentiality, virtuality or possibilities of the political? Or are you just translating from French, so it means "nowness", what is of immediate relevance? Yes, Levinas is implying that emancipation is never instantaneous, though it is in another sense always "momentary", in a discontinuous and "infinite" series of "moments". There is no singular "prise de conscience", and the political is not entirely comprised of or referent to consciousness, let alone conscience. That is partly why the other is not an object, nor a counterpart of consciousness, but always at least a world away. At any rate, you seems to miss Levinas' "method of exorbitation", and the reasons for it and the level at which it operates. The ethical exceeds and is larger and more "universal" than just the political, but the political exceeds and is larger and more "universal" than just the ethical, though neither are ever fully or simply "universal", nor is the "universal" ever simply delivered up to us, nor us to it, which is why one must decide, a matter of "responsibility".