Before the Law

Levinas and death, part I

What follows is an excerpt from a draft paper on Levinas's interpretation of death I presented at a conference this past fall.  I'm posting it here to respond to and continue an exchange I've been having with John C. Halasz over at Long Sunday, to which exchange I refer you for the background . . . .  More to follow later, I hope and expect.

The first fragment is, I think, more cryptic.  "The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and weighs upon me like an obsession with death."€  The ethical Other is, for Blanchot, death already; death stands in place of the Other and thus, one can infer that our relationship to the Other is like, indeed is the same as, our relationship to death.  What can this possibly mean? 
    Before trying to suggest a Blanchotian answer to that question, it is worth noting that although Levinas in various places compares the relationship to the Other to the relationship to death -- death confronts the ego as a trauma, absolute and unknowable exteriority irreducible to thematization, and so on -- he never, to my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong!) identifies the Other with death.  By way of single example, in Otherwise than Being, in his discussion of substitution and the self as hostage, he says that in the infinite responsibility for the Other, the self "is in a deathlike passivity!" (124; my emphasis). 
    But if he does not take the step of identifying death with the Other, that does not mean he can avoid the problem of death at the heart of the aporia between the ethical face-to-face and justice for the third.  Indeed, in its most general form, the problem I'™m addressing here in the medium of death--€“ how to locate an ethical exigency within and prior to the conatus of ontology, how to find the Other within the Same --“ constituted his entire project in Otherwise than Being and much of his late work.  While he addressed the specific question of death at greatest length (at least, to my knowledge, in the work that'™s been translated into English) in the seminar series titled Death and Time, references to death and the problem of finding an ethical interpretation of it to contest Heidegger'€™s ontological interpretation are scattered throughout his work. 
    One strategy he employs to negotiate this problem, upon which the discussion of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being apparently rests, is to suggest that the constitution of the self and Ego in subjection to the ethical Other simply bypasses the Heideggerian foundation of egoity or jemeinigkeit on death.  Thus, he says that the ethical constitution of the subject as hostage has a "œmeaning despite death"€ and that "€œ[c]ontrary to the ontology of death this self opens an order in which death can be not recognized."  (115).  Even more clearly, at the end of the chapter on "œSubstitution," where he specifically takes up the problem of the third in relation to the ethical constitution of subjectivity, acknowledging that it rests on different, "œunethical" (in his sense) grounds, he claims that the ethical self'™s passivity "œis not only the possibility of death in being, the possibility of impossibility."  Rather, this ethical constitution gives birth a meaning of death as "'being able to die' subject to sacrifice," that is, a meaning for death that -- aside from or next to the meaning of death as Dasein'™s ownmost possibility -- makes the sacrifice of the one-for-another equally fundamental.
    I do not think this strategy works, at least to the extent that Levinas'™s ambition is to ground ontology on ethics, and not simply give ethics an equal share of philosophical profundity.  To recognize another meaning for death --“ an ethical one in addition to the ontological one -- is not the same as making the ethical relationship fundamental.  Nor do I think that Levinas'™s other solution, which he elaborated in Totality and Infinity, works, either.  In the section on "The Will and Death," Levinas takes up the phenomenology of death and attempts to articulate a meaning for death that avoids the ontological interpretations of a passage to nothingness or passage to a higher existence in favor of one that rests on the social relationship.  How does he give death, which for Heidegger is what was most unshareably one'™s own, a social meaning?  By associating it with murder.  Death, he says, "threatens me from beyond," and refers to a "malevolence, . . . the residue of a bad will which surprises and stalks."  (234)  Thus death, "€œthe unknown that frightens," appears to consciousness as if it "€œcomes from the other, and this alterity, precisely as absolute, strikes me in an evil design or in a judgment of justice."  In short, "[i]n the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions for dying, were inseparable from the essence of death."  (234, original emphasis).   And thus, Levinas claims, death'™s meaning is social before it is ontological, referring first of all to the threat of an Other and the possibility of being murdered.
    I mentioned Jesse Sims's article before, in which he argues that Schmitt's concept of politics as war necessarily rests on Levinas's concept of peace.  I think this argument is correct, as far as it goes.  But it seems to me that in the passages I have just quoted Levinas concedes everything to Schmitt -- even granting the sociality still implied in the relation of friend to enemy, the notion at the heart of Sims'™s argument --“ at least to the extent that Schmitt’s conception of killing ultimately rests on a conception of death.  For here, hasn'™t Levinas privileged, absolutely, at least insofar as the question is death, the Other as enemy, as murderer?  Of course the Other is the unknown and always may arrive to kill instead of welcome (we know this from Levinas himself as well as Derrida), but here Levinas goes beyond that possibility and gives an absolute priority to, or so it seems to me, the murderous Other.  Moreover, he says that the meaning of death appears as the Other's "evil design or . . . judgment of justice."  By attributing death's meaning as a "judgment of justice," hasn't Levinas here conceded to the relationship to third, with its necessary return to the ontological exigency, the primary role in the meaning of death?  And, more fundamentally, doesn't the exigency of death-as-murder refer, before it suggests the possibility of an appeal to the murderous Other for mercy, to the conatus of the self fearful first of all for its own life? 
    Levinas insists that he does not intend to insert death into "a primitive (or developed) religious system that would explain it" -- that is, an animistic notion of natural forces as taking on human malevolence.  Yet it appears to me that that is exactly what he does in this argument.  Apart from that, it also seems to me that his phenomenological analysis of death is faulty here as well -- whether or not we anticipate death as something that will befall us, I don't think people relate this thought to murderous intent, but, absent special cases, to impersonal and inhuman forces.  Be that as it may, Levinas at least purported to retain this analysis of death as late as the 1975 lecture course on Death and Time that I mentioned above, and while I do not believe that it appears as such in Otherwise than Being, it may provide one explanation for the -- to my mind unnecessary for his philosophical purposes -- hyperbolic rhetoric of "persecution" and "accusation" that Levinas employs in the course of analyzing subjectivity as substitution and hostage, to the extent that this rhetoric can be read as a sublimation of the murderous approach of the Other.

On Simon Critchley, opining without reading, political motivation, etc.

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 a discussion of Levinas's positioning vis a vis the ethical and the political (a topic I can't stay away from), but mostly because it's such a pristine example of one of my very favorite pastimes, shooting from the hip with definitive opinions about books that I haven't actually read.   Jodi begins by admitting that she's only skimmed the book before skewering it in her post, and the discussion that follows is full of admissions of not having read it, but . . ., haven't read the book but have seen him lecture recently and . . ., and so on.  You gotta love (and recognize and, in my case at least, identify with) it . . . .

Anyway, having put in my two bits on the Levinas issues in the comments there, I will join the fray of uninformed opiners over here.  Jodi begins by noting that Critchley's argument begins with the question of political motivation ("The basic argument builds from Critchley's particular version of Levinasian ethics as a motivation for a political response to the present"), but then leaves that aside (she says she'll have more to say about it later, which I look forward to) in favor of a critique of Critchley's (substantive) anarchist political stance.  I can't argue with Jodi's critique -- since I haven't read that far in Critchley's book yet -- but, having gotten as far as the introduction (really -- I even finished it!), I want to defend Critchley insofar as he begins with the question of political motivation.  In particular, I agree with him that "modernity itself has had the effect of generating a motivational deficit in morality that undermines the possibility of ethical secularism," that "[w]hat is required . . . is a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either [what Critchley calls] passive or active nihilism," and that "[w]hat is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating, empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present."  Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the substantive political stance that he grows from this beginning, I applaud him for framing the fundamental problem in terms of motivation. 

What does "motivation" mean in this context?  Well, I don't know what Critchley means exactly, since, uh, I haven't actually read the book (he does say the fundamental question is "How does a self bind itself to whatever it determines as its good?" in the introduction, at least).  But that won't stop me from speculating that he means something like the "ethical injunction" that Derrida posits in Adieu to Levinas which enjoins a political decision without, however, in any way determining the content of that political decision.  "Political motivation" would thus be the quasi-transcendental, ethical condition not only of possibility but of necessity for the political decision.  I would also read into this notion of "political motivation" Derrida's discussion of the ethical relation to alterity as the moment of disjunction that rends the present and demands, in every moment, (inevitably violent, from the perspective of ethics) political action as redemption of past violence (in Specters of Marx, the section about Heidegger's "Anaximander Fragment").  In that sense, the notion of "political motivation" that I have in mind (and who knows, maybe Critchley does, too!) is also the transcendental condition of possibility/necessity of temporality and history as well.  I'm sorely tempted to continue speculating in this vein -- I have some ideas about where, why and how Critchley goes wrong, if he goes wrong, in the substantive political stance draws from all this -- but perhaps I'll read a few more pages first . . . .

Agamben fails to rise from the dead (or in my estimation)

Sitting in my hotel room in London, on my way home from attending "The Messianic Now: Politics, Religion, Philosophy" in Lancaster, England -- a great conference, with kudos to the organizers, Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher -- I feel compelled to testify to what I saw and what I failed to see today.  The conference  title is pretty much self-explanatory; lots of talk about Benjamin, Scholem, Derrida, etc., and, of course, Agamben, who was probably mentioned more than anyone else, and who was billed as the keynote speaker for the concluding session this afternoon.  Based on things I had heard and my own, limited (failure of) communication with him, I had had my doubts all along that he was actually going to show, but was repeatedly told by the conference organizers that he was on board.  Chatting with one of the organizers after I arrived, I learned that he had something of a personal relationship with Agamben -- had spent some time with him at an event in Germany -- and that Agamben had repeatedly assured him that he was going to come, and that he wanted to do a session with graduate students and an open public lecture on Friday in addition to today's conference lecture (all of which, I assume, had been arranged).  In any event, yesterday I was told that Agamben had e-mailed as recently as Tuesday that he was coming (although, interestingly, he failed to respond to the specific request that he tell the organizers what flight he wanted to take from Venice).  Needless to say, come today, the moment of truth, the ho nyn kairos, and, behold, oh ye of too much  faith, he fails to show.

It's sorely tempting to turn this into an allegory of the competing virtues of a Levinasian ethics of responsibility and a Heideggerian ethos of dwelling contentedly in one's ownmost (one's ownmost, mind you, and no one else's!) possibilities, but that might make me sound resentful . . . .  In fact, the much-discussed question of Agamben's heralded parousia -- will he or won't he? -- provided the perfect background music to this conference on messianism, and his ultimate failure to come may have spoken more eloquently to the contemporary relevance of messianism -- or academic messianism, anyway -- than anything he could have actually  said . . . .

Agamben and essentialism

There's an interesting thread on Agamben playing out at I-cite, during the course of which the question of whether he is an essentialist or not came up.  The source of the charge is the transhistorical understanding of sovereignty that he proposes in the Homo Sacer books.  I started to leave a comment but it got too long so I'm doing it here; another late night effort on the eve of my journey to seek the Messiah in Lancaster, England (at the "Messianic Now" conference, where Agamben will allegedly give the closing address), so excuse the informal, not to say snotty, nature of what follows and look at the I-cite thread here for the background . . . .

I'm not sure either of the terms "essentialism" or "anti-essentialism" (or the distinction itself) capture Agamben, any more than they would Heidegger.  He certainly does make these very strong statements about the nature of sovereignty.   In one sense, these obviously are claims about "the essence" of sovereignty.  But since it's clear that when he says "sovereignty" he (also) means "Being" (he says this explicitly in Homo Sacer), the notion of "essentialism" ceases to apply, since what he's actually talking about is what makes (gives, "es gibt," etc.) "essence" in the first place.  He's looking for a political (ontological) state beyond sovereignty (Being), which is why Jodi in her original I-cite post correctly (I think) ties some of his appeal to the longing for a post-identitarian politics .  What Agamben is trying to articulate (in The Coming Community and other places) is a kind of solidarity without identity, that which gathers together without violently forcing  itself upon that which is gathered, etc. etc. etc. (I don't think I'm violently forcing him into a Heideggerian mold, by the way, I think it's there just beneath the surface.)  Part of Agamben's appeal is that he's the great white hope, so to speak, of Philosophy with a capital P, the guy who can pull it all together and make sense of it all by re-Asking the Question of Sovereignty (Being), demonstrating along the way that all the historical and other differences that the feckless doubters insist matter (gender in particular, I would point out) are in fact best understood as excrescences of the History of Sovereignty (Being).  Too strong, perhaps, although I'm not actually sure about that . . . . 

In any event, because his analysis and critique of sovereignty are pitched at the level of fundamental ontology, you can think of him as either an essentialist or an anti-essentialist.  His political stance  is, essentially (sorry), aimed at overcoming essence (Being) -- that's the significance of his analysis of "being thus," "whatever being," etc. in The Coming Community for example -- which means (in some sense) that he both believes and doesn't believe in "essence."  The real question for me is whether the question of sovereignty is best posed solely on this axis (so to speak) of Being, or appears as a question at all only because it is actually stretched along two different (metaphorical-conceptual) axes, the ontological (Being, Heidegger, etc.) and the ethical (the Other, the Good beyond Being, Levinas, etc.).  That at least seems to me the direction that Derrida was going in his own analysis of sovereignty in Rogues, which I think is the most productive counter-point to Agamben, rather than the (somewhat tired at this point) essentialism/anti-essentialism  debate.