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 . . . .

"It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill"

This post continues a conversation that most recentlyhas been carried on at I cite under the post titled "Kill!  Kill!"  The topic is solidarity; Jodi takes issue, via two quotes from Zizek, with my attempt to formulate a notion of solidarity in Derridian/Levinasian terms (earlier posts here and here).  Leaving the Zizek quotes aside for the moment (I'll return to them below), here is Jodi's account of the difference between her Zizekian notion of solidarity and mine:

One of the first major differences concerns the Levinasian injunction 'thou shalt not kill,' an injunction at the 'level of ethical debt to the Other' (Adam's words). Zizek's position is strictly opposed to this; in fact, he inverts the prohibition entirely: 'it is not permitted to us not to kill.' For Adam, the Levinasian injunction is one of accountability to a Third, an accountability that prevents one from treating killing perversely, that is, by making excuses for killing. In Zizek's version, the Levinasian injunction does not escape obscenity of the superego, however, precisely because of the inability to satisfy or even grasp the injunction under which we come under. To this extent, far from escaping the murderous dimension of Stalinism, the injunction not to kill devolves into kill, kill!

Additional differences appear, I think, when we consider the way that Adam's Levinasian position oscillates primarily between All and One: my accountability to all, becomes, ultimately, MY accountability. What is missing--the mediation of a collective, of a militant, solidarity group. Thus, Adam's examples involve the individual having to deal with getting up in the morning, contributing to charity, deciding whether or not to strike. These are already political, in Adam's view. To my mind, these are personal and ethical matters. They can be politicized. In fact, I don't think that the acts on their own are even ethical; they are meaningless until mediated, interpreted, made part of a collective political practice, or, until interpreted, reflected upon.

Thus, Adam wants to eliminate the partisan divide from his notion of solidarity; to my mind, this takes the notion away from class struggle, from the fundamental antagonism constitutive of the social. The only struggle discernible in Adam's account is that of the individual toward all (or, toward all humans, because division is unavoidable, Adam encounters the opposite of the human and the impulse toward dehumanization). There simply isn't the conceptual space for a partisan, solidary association of those engaged in political struggle. In fact, the Levinasian framework seems to foreclose the very possibility of such a politics insofar as it limits the political field in advance, precluding the possibility that these limitations have been and remain matters of political struggle and determination.

(There's also a very interesting exchange between Jodi and Alain, who holds down the Levinasian end of the discussion, in the comments as well. )

Jodi's objections and her reliance on Zizek (and on his characteristically inflammatory interpretation of the first commandment as, in effect if not intention, "Kill!  Kill!") would be a great stepping off point for a discussion of the relationship between the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the relation to the Other and the Levinasian-ethical one, but I don't feel up to that at the moment (in large part because my knowledge of Lacan is so schematic that I'm not the person to attempt it).  But, leaving that general question aside, what interests me is that it's pretty clear to me that Jodi and I don't actually disagree on much.  Thus, Jodi seems to have misunderstood me, or, perhaps -- although for obvious reasons I hesitate to suggest this -- misunderstood Zizek on this point.

The key moment of this misunderstanding is encapsulated in Jodi's citation of the quote from Brecht's "Die Massnahme" that Zizek relies on in articulating his understanding of "thou shalt not kill":  "It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill."  To be clear (I hope):  I agree with this sentiment entirely, precisely as stated.  Which is to say, I agree that it is not, in fact, given to us not to kill, at least not yet ("still"), and that the infinitely long wait for that still-undelivered gift is a matter of melancholic regret (a tonality that (I think) is palpable even in this English rendition of Brecht's original German). 

The full passage from which Zizek (and then Jodi) draws this quotation is as follows, and it seems to me to confirm this reading:

"It is a terrible thing to kill.
But not only others would we kill, but ourselves too if need be
Since only force can alter this
Murderous world, as
Every living creature knows.
It is still, we said
Not given to us not to kill."

It is in fact a terrible thing to kill -- that is all that "thou shalt not kill" means and can mean -- but it's nevertheless, sometimes, a necessary thing.  There is  no inconsistency in those two positions if one accepts that "thou shalt not kill" is an ethical injunction rather than a principle of truth in the philosophical (read: ontological) sense.  Politics, in the essentially Derridian reading of Levinas that I've been defending, is a matter of actuality, the art of the possible, the (always contingent) formation of alliances that are ultimately strategic (in the Schmittian friend-enemy sense) no matter how based they may be in deep-seated structural interests.  And politics is essential, "since only force can alter this murderous world," as Brecht so beautifully puts it.  As such, politics is (as Jodi insists) distinct from ethical responsibility, which however rooted in the singularity of the face-to-face is by that very token owed to all, as well as being subject to the (again, ethical) edict to do no violence to the Other.  Derrida's point, however, is that ethical responsibility itself demands that we strategize, calculate, engage in politics -- in a word, that we kill -- just to the extent that the Other is not an abstraction but an actuality, a singular being that exists in fact in "this murderous world" of ours.  (And the flip side of this demand is that politics cannot be avoided -- the point of my examples of getting up in the morning, deciding to contribute to Oxfam or to let those children starve, to cross the picket line or not, and so on, is that not that they are ethical (they may or may not be), but that they are necessarily political just insofar as they all involve, directly or indirectly, an act of killing.  To put it another way, that this world is "murderous" is not a politically contingent fact but itself an existential-ontological condition.) 

Thus, while it may be true that I want to "eliminate the partisan divide from [my] notion of solidarity" -- and in fact I do, because I think that's the only way to preserve the sense of  solidarity as event per my earlier post -- I certainly do not want to "eliminate the partisan divide" itself; in fact, the point of the Derridian-Levinasian position is that one has to take sides, decide which side that you're on, precisely by virtue of one's ethical  responsibility.  But I do think that it matters that the source of this partisan side-taking is ethical (in the Levinasian sense) rather than something else.  I'm not at all sure that Jodi agrees with this, however (in fact some of the things she says in the comments strongly suggest  otherwise), and it's here that I think she may misinterpret Zizek, at least on this narrow point (Jodi, please correct me on this if, as I expect, you disagree). 

I say this because Zizek himself articulates quite beautifully the significance of the ethical to  the political in the very essay from which Jodi takes that wonderful Brecht quote (a signficance that, as I've tried to suggest, is already nascent in the melancholic tone of the quote itself).  (The essay, on the director Heinrich Mueller, is available on-line here.)  In this passage, which concludes the essay, Zizek distinguishes between the "must" -- the sphere of the Real of "this murderous world," where killing is a political necessity -- and the "ought," the level of the Symbolic order and the obscene splitting of the moral injunction by the superego (which, by the way, operates at a different level of subject-constitution than Levinasian ethical responsibility, something that I think isn't clear in Jodi's post).  He draws from this distinction the need for a politics that  abides by a principle of "Justice with Love," that is, of "killing with pieta," "killing without dehumanizing the enemy," or as I would put it, a politics ("killing") suffused with ethical responsibility:

"Must" and "Ought" thus relate as the Real and the Symbolic: the Real of a drive whose injunction cannot be avoided (which is why Lacan says that the status of a drive is ethical); the Ought as a symbolic ideal caught in the dialectic of desire (if you ought not do something, this very prohibition generates the desire to do it). When you "must" do something, it means you have no choice but to do it, even if is terrible: in Wagner's Die Walkuere, Wotan is cornered by Fricka and he "must" ("cannot but") allow the murder of Siegmund, although his heart bleeds for him; he "must" ("cannot but") punish Brunhilde, his dearest child, the embodiment of his own innermost striving. And, incidentally, the same goes for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the Bayreuth staging of which was Mueller's last great theatrical achievement: they MUST, they CANNOT BUT, indulge in their passion, even if this goes against their Sollen, their social obligations.

In Wotan's forced exercise of punishment, Wagner encounters here the paradox of the "killing with pieta" at work from the Talmud (which calls us to dispense Justice with Love) to Brecht's two key Lehrstuecke, Der Jasager and Die Massnahme, in which the young comrade is killed by his companions with loving tenderness. And although Mueller disagreed with Die Massnahme, proposing, in his Mauser, a critique of its political logic, his critique is strictly internal: his reproach to Brecht is precisely that he did not draw all the consequences from the stance of "killing with pieta," of killing without dehumanizing the enemy. And this is what today, in our time in which the abstract humanitarian rejection of violence is accompanied by its obscene double, the anonymous killing WITHOUT pieta, we need more than ever.

Beautifully put, and entirely consistent, I think, with the Derridian-Levinasian take on the ethical status of the political.  Nothing could be more foreign to the singularity of Levinasian ethics than an "abstract humanitarian rejection of violence"; and nothing, sorrowfully, more consistent with Derrida's political interpretation of Levinas than a (Talmudic) notion of killing "with loving tenderness."  "It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill."  Yes, exactly, alas. 

 

On solidarity (II) -- response to a comment

Nate posted a comment at I cite that I want to respond to here.  Nate says, inter alia:

As much as I like the formulation of solidarity as an event between those who don't (or don't need to? that seems an important difference, somehow, and I'm not clear on which you mean) have anything in common... there's also the matter that there are points and places where solidarity should not be extended, or should be only in the most limited of senses (such that extension or full extension of solidarity would be something of a mockery of the word). At a basic level, I mean solidarity with bosses. Class struggle involves hurting people at least emotionally (and more so if we look at a number of historical examples - I hope I don't sound like I'm romanticizing violence against people, I think that's actually quite ill advised). Picket lines hurt bosses profits, and some frontline managers almost always get fired in a successful union drive, in retaliation for not busting the union and because managers don't have (m)any protect labor rights so they make good sacrifices to appease upper management's anger. Of course, you could say that no schema of solidarity (certainly not one I can indicate) contains a decision procedure for who solidarity happens to/between and who it doesn't happen to/between, and I'd have to agree. But solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of.

I disagree -- let me see if I can articulate this.  "Solidarity" in the fundamental sense that I'm trying to develop is in fact inherently unstable, that is, lacking in the kind of limits that Nate (and many others) think are necessary for political action.  That's because although solidarity qua event is a response to singularity -- and therefore "limited" in the extreme -- Nate is correct that there are no theoretical (or ethical) limits on  the singularities (the "faces") to whom one turns one's own face.   But that doesn't render politics impossible (something that I think is a concern of Jodi's as well), it simply humanizes it, if I can use that word.  Again, there's a level-of-analysis elision that seems virtually impossible to avoid with Levinas (a sign, I think, of the genuine novelty and brilliance of his thought) that creates this confusion.  Let me put it this way, using a Levinasian example.  Levinas says, "Thou shalt not kill" is an unbreakable injunction; that is, one quite literally cannot "kill" the Other whom one encounters in the face-to-face.  Yeeesh, you say, how  am I supposed to go about my day-to-day political activities without "killing" at least some Others, if not literally then at least figuratively or indirectly (by causing a front-line manager to get fired, lose her health insurance, fail to get needed medical attention, and die, to use Nate's example)?  The answer is that the unbreakable injunction "thou shalt not kill" is for Levinas an injunction at the (ontologically constitutive, albeit) level of the ethical debt to the Other.   That is, the thing that one cannot kill is one's pre-existing debt (or responsibility) to that Other.  What does this mean in terms of Nate's example?  It does not mean that you should refuse to join the strike because the event of your solidarity with the striking Other will have lethal consequences for some Third (the front-line manager).  In fact every act of solidarity with an Other has quite literally lethal consequences for some Third, in fact a multitude of Thirds (Derrida has some really beautiful and passionate lines on this in The Gift of Death).  What it means is that your act of solidarity with the striking Other cannot and does not relieve you from your ethical responsibility for all those other Thirds, including the  front-line manager.  It precludes you from relying on the political calculation -- "the achievement of the greater good for the union members justifies the sacrifice of certain lackeys of the bosses" -- as a mode of dismissal of that responsibility. 

Does this induce political paralysis?  It does not and cannot, it is never a matter of "choice," of "choosing" to act politically or not.  Every day in every way, everything you do (and every single thing you don't do), is a political action in this sense that, again, to put it hyperbolically but not unrealistically, sacrifices a multitude of Thirds to the (fundamentally political, whether one is conscious of this or not) calculation of the moment.  I get out of bed.  Should I immediately go to my check book and contribute to Oxfam to save the life of three malnourished children?  No, I need to eat breakfast and get to work . . . .  There is no escape from this, and so "political paralysis" is no more an option than eliminating one's ethical responsibility for all those Thirds that you've just killed by deciding to eat breakfast.  That's finitude; politics is not a choice, and what Levinas tells us, I think importantly, is that ethical responsibility isn't a choice either.

So what then?  Given that politics is inevitable and responsibility for that politics is inevitable, where does that go?  What difference do those inevitabilities matter at the level of the political decision?  Two not entirely consistent responses to this:  Initially, this (let's call it) politico-ethical condition of existence determines nothing, at least in terms of normative guidance to the content of the political act (this is the point of Derrida's discussion of the unbridgable split between the ethical injunction to act politically and the indeterminate content of the responsive political act in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas).  But secondarily, it seems to me, this ethical origin of the political (to give it another name) has at least two consequences.  The first is at the level of discourse about and justifications for the political act.  It seems to me that the underogable responsibilty for the Third puts significant limits on how one talks about one's political opponents -- de-humanization, it seems to me, is right out, inconsistent with that responsibility.  That, I think, is very important in its own right.  But I also think that that limitation will have implications -- indeterminate ones, but implications nonetheless -- for the content of the political calculation itself.  The underogable fact of this responsibility for the Third can -- in fact, arguably must -- itself become a factor to be weighed in the political calculation, and that will -- usually, maybe not always (I don't think you can rule out in advance the possibility that war will sometimes be necessary even from an ethical perspective) -- eliminate certain political options (to take an easy example, the mass slaughter of one's political opponents).  So even at the level of the content of the political decision, "Levinasian solidarity" affects one's political decision.   (This, by the way, is an example of what I mean by the ethical "suffusing" the political calculation in earlier posts here and here.)

One final point and then I'll stop.  Nate says, "solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of."  Maybe, but hasn't that "infinite/limitless solidarity with those with whom one has nothing in common" in fact always determined the teleology of the great "solidarity-based" political movements, from salvationist religious discourses to Marxism?  Doesn't the Internationale (I think these are words; I ought to know this . . .) look forward to the day when the "working class becomes the human race"?  It seems to me that one of the great advantages of the Levinasian (especially in this regard I should say "Derridian/Levinasian") notion of solidarity is that it provides a way of articulating that traditional teleology with political action in a way that avoids the rather historically disastrous consequences of standing by that teleology as such.  And since this thread is partly about Agamben, too, I should say that one of the most admirable things about  Agamben's onto-linguistic utopian politics of "life itself" is the way it tries to preserve the utopian element of the traditional political teleologies while ridding them of the elements that have led to their demise in premature declarations of their achievement (and the resultant slaughter of those who don't agree or whose existence provides evidence to the contrary).  While I think that Agamben's effort to save the form of the political embodied in these traditional teleologies ultimately fails as a basis for politics, I think he comes closer to succeeding at this level -- that is, at eliminating those lingering elements that allow for the perversions of Stalinism, the Crusades, and so on -- better than anyone else.

On solidarity (I) -- phenomenology of the picket line

(This discussion has already been updated/elaborated somewhat via an exchange of comments at Jodi's most recent I cite solidarity post.  And here.)

I want to try to systematize my thoughts about the recent solidarity thread (or should I say, "meme"?  -- I don't want to, I'm an old-word person like Benjamin rather than a new-word person like Derrida . . . ) wending its way around my blogospheric neighborhood, but this post probably won't be it, so I'm giving it a Roman numeral "(I)" as a commitment of sorts to return . . . .  What I'll try to do here instead, which will end up addressing "solidarity" anyway, is respond to some excellent questions put to me in comments to an earlier post on Agamben and Derrida by Jodi Dean and squibb.  This post is thus really an extended comment-response elevated into post-dom.

Jodi asks: 

Would your Derridean solidarity then be something like the infusion of the Other into a political calculation? If it is, I don't see how that is solidarity in any political sense; it seems to come after, to supplement, the calculation; and, it is hard to tell apart from a general ethical regard. Solidarity should be something stronger, no?

That's the right question, and I'm not entirely sure how to answer it.  This is also the issue that opens up into the more systematic thinking about solidarity that I'd like to come back to later.    Nevertheless . . .  I wrote a paper a couple of years ago that, among other things, attempts to sketch in a very preliminary way something like this Derridean/Levinasian solidarity through a merger of sorts of Levinas with Kantian social-contractarian political theory (abstract and cite here).  The notion that I was trying to articulate was something like (these are not terms I used in the paper but they're accurate enough) Derridean/Levinasian political solidarity as an aufhebung of the (very "strong") solidarity of the classical polis and the extremely abstract, denatured and "weak" solidarity of the modern, Kantian political subject with its fellow rational beings.  In any event, I'll leave that level of response for later (if ever).  For now I just want to think about Jodi's notion of "strong" solidarity on one hand -- behind which seems to be some kind of substantive, shared commitment, whether it's common class interest or some other characteristic or life-situation shared by the party members -- and "weak" solidarity on the other, based (Jodi suggests) on some (abstract, denatured, etc.) "general ethical regard" for the Otherness of the Other in general.  Should solidarity be something stronger than this?

Yes and no, I think.  Yes, "solidarity" does seem to imply, at first blush at least, some kind of substantive bond that ties party or group members together, something more concrete than their shared status as rational willing beings entitled to respect, or what have you.  But it seems to me that the situation is more complex when you look at it more closely.  Think about a union picket line.  Which of these is the more genuine exemplar of "solidarity" in the sense that (I think) we really mean it when we use it in everyday speech:  (1) the bond between the union members walking the line; or (2) the decision by a non-union member, confronted by a picket line on her way to work, not to cross the line?  It seems to me that the second situation exemplifies solidarity in its highest best sense, and more importantly, in the sense that ultimately underlies all the other senses in which we use it -- including, that is, the solidarity among the union picketers themselves.  That is, it seems to me that true solidarity takes place (and one of the points I'd stress is that it ought to be a "taking place" and not a characteristic of certain groups) when the I encounters another who, prior to the event of solidarity, did not share substantive commitments of the subject, and who (ideally) need not have shared any characteristics or elements of her life-situation, either.  That is, solidarity takes place when the I encounters an Other and is drawn into her stance to the point of being willing to substitute herself for that Other (here, by literally or figuratively joining the union members on the picket-line and on strike, by honoring the line and refusing to work).  Even if the Levinasian terminology is a little strained I trust the point is clear enough.  Solidarity as event in this sense seems closer to Levinas to me than to any analysis in terms of underlying or pre-existing political interest or commitment. 

And in answer to Jodi I guess I would say that the ethical moment does "suffuse" the political calculation (or better, decision, which as Derrida tells us (correctly in my view) is never finally calculable at all); not as an after-the-fact "supplement," however, but as (prior) quasi-transcendental motivation and pre-condition of possibility.  And as I've already suggested, I would also want to argue (but won't here) that "solidarity as event" in this (Levinasian) sense is the presupposition of the more immediately intuitive sense of solidarity as non-event or "thing," as particular shared commitment among members of a party or group. 

Jodi's other question is about the other side of my initial post, Agamben's linguistified ontology and its relation to politics ("it isn't clear to me how he can have a properly destitute subject and still have politics"), as are squibb's questions (e.g., "What is the nature of the relationship between ‘sayability,’ posited by Agamben, and politics? . . . . .  [I]s he saying ‘sayability’ accounts for the possibility of politics? Or for the possibility of a certain kind of politics?").  Given how long this has already turned out and how late it's gotten here, I'll leave that for another time.