Difficulties of Ethical Life 9780823291397

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Difficulties of Ethical Life

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Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

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John D. Caputo, series editor

P E R S PE C T I V E S I N C O N T I N E N TA L PHILOSO PHY

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E d i t e d b y S H A N N O N S U L L I VA N and DENNIS J. SCHMIDT

Difficulties of Ethical Life

F O R D H A M U N IV E R SI T Y P RE SS New York

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2008

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Copyright 䉷 2008 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Debra Bergoffen’s essay, ‘‘9/11: America and the Politics of Innocence,’’ is a revised and abridged version of ‘‘Between the Ethics and Politics of Innocence,’’ which was published in the Australian Feminist Law Journal 24 (June 2006): 49–68. Cynthia Willett’s essay, ‘‘Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship,’’ was originally published in a slightly different form as ‘‘Engage the Enemy,’’ in Cynthia Willett, Irony in the Age of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 92–115. Reproduced by permission of Indiana University Press. Further use is prohibited by law. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Difficulties of ethical life / edited by Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt.— 1st ed. p. cm.—(Perspectives in continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0-8232–2973–4 (cloth : alk. paper)— ISBN 978–0-8232–2974–1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ethics. I. Sullivan, Shannon, 1967– II. Schmidt, Dennis J. BJ37.D54 2008 170—dc22 2008022306 Printed in the United States of America 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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Contents

Introduction Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt PART I : Q UESTIONS

OF

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E THICS

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In the Name of Goodness Charles E. Scott

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What Is Philosophical Ethics? Gu¨nter Figal

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Hermeneutics as Original Ethics Dennis J. Schmidt

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PART I I : T HE E THICS OF I NTERSUBJECTIVITY I N T E R P E R S O N A L R E L AT I O N S

AND

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Ethical Experience, Ethical Subjectivity Simon Critchley

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9/11: America and the Politics of Innocence Debra B. Bergoffen

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Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship Cynthia Willett

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The Intimacy of Strangers: The Difficulty of Closeness and the Ethics of Distance Eduardo Mendieta PART I I I : R ESPONSIBILITY

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Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility Robert Bernasconi

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Racism and Responsibility Ladelle McWhorter

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Whiteness as Family: Race, Class, and Responsibility Shannon Sullivan

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PART I V : T HE E THICS

OF

N ONTRUTH

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Narrating Pain: The Ethics of Catharsis Richard Kearney

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On Deception: Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive Peg Birmingham

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Notes Contributors Index

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213 239 243

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Difficulties of Ethical Life

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Introduction S H A N N O N S U L L I VA N A N D DENNIS J. SCHMIDT

It has long been recognized that the task of living well and justly has a special relation to the project of philosophy. From its origins, philosophy has made a claim to have a privileged relation to this task of thinking and living an ethical life. Only religion has made an equally serious claim on how it is that we are to understand and practice the ethical life. As a result of this deep kinship, the history of philosophy has, at crucial points, been shaped by the desire to pose and answer questions of ethical life: What does such a life mean? How are we to understand the meaning of ethicality? What are the obstacles to ethical living? Should we assume that an ethical life is a ‘‘better’’ life? Crucial junctures in this development of philosophy have frequently been shaped by the challenges of ethical thought and life. The assumption driving this volume is that the present historical juncture is precisely such a moment when philosophy is being radically challenged by questions of ethical life. There seem to be two reasons for this. First, the tradition of philosophy is undergoing fundamental transformations. One speaks more frequently of the end of philosophy than one does of its lively future, and there is a strong sense, since Friedrich Nietzsche, that the inherited traditions of philosophy are no longer tenable and need to be radically critiqued. Second, the structures and conditions of life have been radically altered as well. Technology and globalization have changed the possibilities of life and death; science is changing the way we perceive the universe and even the character of life itself; political events and wars 1

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have altered the face of our cultural possibilities. In short, the movement of history and the developments of culture and knowledge seem to have outstripped the capacity of traditional forms of reflection on the ethical life to understand how we are to live well and justly. Ethical life has always been difficult, but it is difficult in new and challenging ways at this historical juncture. This volume gathers a diverse group of philosophers who share the assumption that ours is an especially challenging moment for anyone concerned with the questions of ethical life. In different ways, they address what each takes to be a crucial question that needs to be addressed if thinking is once again to lay claim to having real and original insights into the task of living an ethical life. The concern in each case is to ask about the philosophical significance of these transformations of our times. The essays in this volume address a wide, but nonetheless clearly connected, set of issues relevant to this project: race; the possibility of responsibility, religion, terror, torture, deception; and even the very possibility of an ethical life. Some of the questions addressed are specific to our times; some are ancient questions but with quite contemporary twists. Part I begins with questions about the nature of ethics itself. In ‘‘In the Name of Goodness,’’ Charles E. Scott examines goodness in the context of moral virtues. Arguing that the quality of goodness depends on its being recognized as good, Scott teases out the vulnerability of goodness and the resulting need for the good to vigilantly preserve and promote it. For Scott, the desire to be good can be motivated and fulfilled by orders of behavior and meaning that are thought of as immoral and perverse. The desire for goodness, in other words, is not necessarily governed by goodness itself. Reflecting on David Wood’s reading of Nietzsche on revenge through Martin Heidegger’s account of temporality, Scott opens up an alternative to goodness that is based on the indifference of time. If goodness can fall under the jurisdiction of motivating values such as revenge, then perhaps it is worth exploring a way of living that is neither good nor bad and thus can be responsive to the gift of time that affirms the impossibility of thorough completion. Gu¨nter Figal also raises questions about the nature and value of philosophical ethics, in particular, whether ethics can fulfill the expectations attached to it in the wake of technoscientific revolutions and the acceleration of globalization. In ‘‘What Is Philosophical Ethics?’’ Figal argues that one of philosophy’s original tasks is to address not just the possibilities but also the limitations of philosophical ethics. Ethics traditionally has been defined as exploring the question of how one should live, and the answer to this question often is thought to be found in the best-grounded 2

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argument for a particular way of life. What then grounds such an argument? According to Figal, that question can be appropriately answered only when it asks about something more than and different from one possibility of living. The proper task of philosophical ethics is to orient life beyond current prevailing life possibilities, and yet it does so in order to return to the concrete specificities of life experience. Ethics clarifies forms of life as appropriate to human nature in that it is natural for human beings to exist in life-forms, and it simultaneously opens up forms of life alternative to those that are factically given. Focusing on the importance of freedom, speech, and time for human life-forms, Figal closes with the claim that philosophical ethics is hermeneutical. Disclosed in historical reflection, philosophical ethics is a feat of mediation and interpretation that is bound up with the demands of forms of life. Continuing Figal’s turn to hermeneutics, Dennis J. Schmidt argues in ‘‘Hermeneutics as Original Ethics’’ that although the very ideal of the ethical has become questionable, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work provides one of the most promising ways to think about ethical life. Or, perhaps better put, precisely because the very ideal of the ethical has become questionable, hermeneutics as formulated by Gadamer can provide something like an ‘‘original ethics.’’ Although Heidegger briefly alluded to the need for ethics to become original again, he doubted that an original ethics was possible in the present historical moment. Mindful of Heidegger’s concern, Schmidt nonetheless finds that the very structure of hermeneutics—and, in particular, its historical consciousness—is ethically significant, and for this reason hermeneutics can be responsible to the original ethical demand of freedom. Hermeneutics speaks to an original ethics in that it works against the forgetting of the past that characterizes the present age. As Schmidt explains, writing and especially memory are crucial to this work. Memory instructs, educates, and obliges, and it has a special kinship with death. The obligation that memory creates is to life, teaching us what life needs and what it can give. For Schmidt, hermeneutics does not provide what commonly passes as ethics, but it offers something far more important: a sense of freedom and the incalculable in relationship to the past that opens up new possibilities for ethical living and thinking. Part II turns to ethical questions that emerge from intersubjective and interpersonal relationships. In ‘‘Ethical Experience, Ethical Subjectivity,’’ Simon Critchley confronts contemporary political disappointment with the world and argues that a secular conception of morality is needed to motivate ethical commitment. Returning to what he sees as the basic question of ethics, Critchley asks how a self binds itself to whatever it determines to be good. Focusing on ethical experience as an activity of a Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt

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subject, Critchley argues that the experience of being ethical is the experience of approving a demand that insists that it be heard. Who, then, is this subject who experiences the demand? The ethical subject is the one who shapes itself in relation to a demand that it can never adequately or fully meet. Building on the ethical philosophies of Alain Badiou, Knud Ejler Løgstrup, and Emmanuel Levinas, Critchley demonstrates how the impossibility of fulfilling ethical demands splits the subject between itself and the impossibility of its responsibility. The structure of ethical subjectivity, located in ethical experience, is that of a self that is committed to an unfulfillable, asymmetrical demand that binds one to another. These ethical bonds can have national and international, as well as personal, dimensions. In ‘‘9/11: America and the Politics of Innocence,’’ Debra B. Bergoffen examines how post-9/11 America has adopted a politics of innocence that attempts to free itself from the ethical requirements of intersubjectivity. Bergoffen explains that although justice includes righting a wrong suffered by an innocent victim, injustice often results when existential innocence is translated into ontological innocence, in which a person or a nation refuses to recognize that it could be destabilizing or threatening to another. With Jacques Lacan, Bergoffen shows that the myth of (ontological) innocence invests the symbolic with the imaginary promise of perfection, purity, and infallibility, leaving no room for a person or a nation to be critically self-reflective. And with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Bergoffen argues that a political and ethical alternative is possible, namely, a humanism without illusions in which people are thrown toward one another in the sociality of the symbolic to create a communicative heterogeneity. For Bergoffen, although the politics of innocence may be a recipe for injustice, a dynamic relationship between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real offers ethical possibilities that could provide grounds for a noninnocent future. Perhaps because of its intersubjective dimensions, ethical life tends to include conflict, especially in political arenas. In ‘‘Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship,’’ Cynthia Willett uses comedy to explore the relevance of friendship to contemporary democratic theory. For Willett, the comic potentially can help a democracy avoid the dangers of hubris, self-deception, and hypocrisy. To explore this potential, Willett begins with Jacques Derrida’s discussion of friendship in relationship to the democracy to come. Derrida’s concern that the Western model of friendship has centered on the relationship between brothers is a concern that this model overemphasizes the importance of similarity for one’s ethical relationships. Reading Derrida’s turn from friendship to ‘‘aimance’’ as a hint that comic romance might offer 4

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an alternative to the Western notion of friendship, Willett turns to Hollywood comedies of remarriage, in which spirited conflicts between former lovers often erupt. With Stanley Cavell, Willett uses such films as The Philadelphia Story to demonstrate the core ethical lesson of remarriage comedy: the person you thought was your enemy might turn out to be your best friend instead. According to Willett, this lesson demonstrates how the companionships of romantic comedy often serve as a miniature form of democracy. Both concern human imperfection, social interdependence, and the checks and balances provided by the adventure and contest of interpersonal relations. Just as enemies and friends are not always easy to distinguish, so too are strangers and intimates often made ambiguous by the impact of technology on lived spatiality. In ‘‘The Intimacy of Strangers: The Difficulty of Closeness and the Ethics of Distance,’’ Eduardo Mendieta draws on the work of Plato, Avishai Margalit, Hans Jonas, and Levinas to demonstrate how ethics, in contrast to morality, is rooted in closeness and vicinity. For Mendieta, ethical life involves face-to-face relationships in which I can see the other to whom I relate. Yet contemporary technologies such as cell phones and the Internet have undermined traditional forms of spatiality associated with ethical relations. Cell phones flatten space, allowing the private to colonize the public, and the Internet grants an anonymity that renders people ethically unaccountable. As Mendieta argues, by making strangers seem near and those who are close by and familiar seem remote, contemporary technologies fundamentally rearrange our sense of space (and time), producing a new social geography with distinctive ethical challenges. Questions concerning responsibility run throughout this volume, and Part III focuses on them in particular by examining responsibility in the midst of racism and white privilege. Robert Bernasconi begins the section on responsibility and race with a history of the term responsibility. In ‘‘Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility,’’ he pursues a revolution in ethical thinking that was begun by Levinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. The idea of responsibility becomes noteworthy when it is distinguished from that of accountability. Whereas accountability looks backward to rectify past wrongs, responsibility does not restrict itself to the past. The idea of responsibility also becomes noteworthy when it no longer is restricted to ministerial responsibility, in which clear restrictions exist regarding for whom and for what one is responsible. For Sartre, responsibility is hyperbolic. It means being responsibility for everything—my freedom, myself, Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt

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and my world—and it calls for action in response to it. Tracing the relationship between Sartre’s notion of hyperbolic responsibility to Levinas’s conception of infinite responsibility, Bernasconi argues that responsibility is not dependent on a person’s or a society’s ability to prevent an injustice. Steering us away from an ethics of excuses, Bernasconi demonstrates why we are hyperbolically and infinitely responsible to and for the world. Ladelle McWhorter takes up the issue of responsibility in the context of racism in the United States. In ‘‘Racism and Responsibility,’’ she questions whether intentional racism on the part of contemporary white people is what has prevented people of color from making greater political and economic progress. Suspicious of tying issues of racial disparity to the subjective choices and individual responsibility of white people, McWhorter wishes to sidestep moral discourse on race, which tends to center on judgments of guilt or innocence. What is needed instead, she argues, is a genealogy of racial categories that can transform relationships to race—those of white and nonwhite people alike—by revealing its porosity and instability. Drawing on Michel Foucault, McWhorter demonstrates that racial injustice might not begin with individual subjects and thus that passing moral judgment on them probably will not produce change. Solutions to racial injustice will not be moral or personal in McWhorter’s view; they will be political and systematic. Those who are concerned about racism can take responsibility for it by helping create an ethos that unfits them for racial normalization. Working from a psychoanalytic perspective, Shannon Sullivan also considers questions of white responsibility for racism and white privilege. In ‘‘Whiteness as Family: Race, Class, and Responsibility,’’ she begins with the question of whether the racial category of whiteness can be transformed into something other than a category of racist exclusion and oppression. Her reply is that whiteness can and should be reconceived as family: a group of past, present, and future people that contemporary white people are responsible for, whether or not they like or agree with them. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche, Sullivan explains how unconscious messages about white supremacy and white privilege connect contemporary white people with the generations of white people that preceded them. She then focuses on a group of white people that most contemporary white people would find difficult to accept as their ancestors: white Southern slaveholders in the United States. White people have a long history of othering people who are different from them, such as their black slaves. According to Sullivan, contemporary white people only repeat this racist process when, in the name of an alleged racial progressivism, they demonize other white people whom they 6

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perceive as inferior because they are racist. Instead of deflecting the locus and origin of racism onto another ‘‘lower’’ class of white people as a way of ensuring their own moral goodness, ‘‘progressive’’ white people today need to find a way to be responsible for and to all white people as part of their antiracist efforts. Part IV closes the volume by examining the ethical implications of various forms of nontruth. In ‘‘Narrating Pain: The Ethics of Catharsis,’’ Richard Kearney examines the cathartic function of narrative. For Kearney, fiction, storytelling, myth, and other forms of narrative enable those who are suffering to grapple with pain and trauma that cannot be faced head-on. As anthropologists such as Claude Le´vi-Strauss and psychologists such as Sigmund Freud have demonstrated, recounting an unbearable experience through narrative can provide symbolic solutions to lived problems that generate immense pain. Focusing on narratives of genocide, Kearney examines some of the ‘‘impossible stories’’ that had to be told after such traumas as the Armenian slaughter in Turkey and the Holocaust in Germany. These stories allow survivors to experience that which could not be fully experienced in the immediacy of trauma and thereby find some measure of healing. For Kearney, the creative repetition of narrative is ethically imperative because it provides a wider lens through which to review and relive—that is, view and live differently, but perhaps even more truthfully than the original experience allowed—insufferable pain and unbearable loss. As Kearney shows, what history cannot solve, fictional and other narratives can at least partially resolve. Yet nontruth also has its dangers. In ‘‘On Deception: Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive,’’ Peg Birmingham puts Hannah Arendt into conversation with Derrida to show how radical deception presents one of the most difficult challenges for ethical life today. For Arendt, totalitarianism is different from other dictatorial regimes because it engages in radical deception. Unlike mere falsehood, error, or even deliberate lying, radical deception fabricates truth by fabricating reality. But whereas Arendt retains a notion of ‘‘factual truth’’ as a bulwark against radical deception, Derrida argues that reality is constituted by performative acts. If all reality is performative, however, how can we judge which performances are deceptive? Birmingham turns to Derrida’s work on the archive to answer this question, distinguishing performative fictions, which are always destroying and remaking an arche, from hallucinatory ideologies, which destroy an arche in the guise of fully constituted significations that have always existed. As Birmingham demonstrates, for Arendt and Derrida alike, radical evil takes the form of a totalizing logic that dominates Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt

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the whole of reality. When this occurs, nothing of an original archive remains. As this volume attests, a wide range of difficulties—often historically unique difficulties—confront any effort to think and speak of an ethical life today. The essays gathered here approach these difficulties as the source of a stimulation, an impulse, that can lead to new avenues for ethical reflection and can even reshape the character of what counts as philosophy. Philosophy is indeed being challenged by these and other difficulties of ethical life. And it is becoming increasingly clear that such a challenge moves right to the heart of what philosophy might contribute to the concern for a life well and responsibly lived. This book grew out of a 2005 Pennsylvania State University Rock Ethics Institute conference titled ‘‘Difficulties of Ethical Life.’’ The conference was cosponsored by the Penn State Departments of Philosophy and English. We wish to thank the conference speakers and attendees, all of whom provided lively and stimulating discussion of significant ethical issues. We also thank the Rock Ethics Institute, especially staff members Kathy Rumbaugh and Barb Edwards, for their helpful support of the conference. Above all, we thank Nancy Tuana, director of the Rock Ethics Institute, for encouraging this and other work on difficult ethical issues confronting us today.

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In the Name of Goodness CHARLES E. SCOTT

In short, I am full of doubts. I really don’t know why I have decided to pluck up my courage and present, as if it were authentic, the manuscript of Adso of Melk. Let us say it is an act of love. Or, if you like, a way of ridding myself of numerous, persistent obsessions. I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbe´ Vallet volume, there was a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world. Now, after ten years or more, the man of letters (restored to his highest dignity) can happily write out of pure love of writing. And so I now feel free to tell, for sheer narrative pleasure, the story of Adso of Melk, and I am comforted and consoled in finding it immeasurably remote in time (now that the waking of reason has dispelled all the monsters that its sleep had generated), gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties. —Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (translated from the Italian by William Weaver) All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them. —Isak Dinesen (author of Out of Africa)

The word goodness, like the word nature, carries a huge burden. Both words suggest orders of highly diverse things. They can suggest the availability of systematic comprehension and articulation of those things they 11

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name, a common quality that allows at least the promise of a harmonious whole. Goodness often operates in its meaning on an axis of virtues and sustained social practices. The meaning of the word seems to intend a community that is organized by right values, that is, by goods. It would be a community that carries a sense of goodness, a community enacted in the name of goodness. Goodness means the quality of being good. Good, however, has so many senses that a sense of goodness is in jeopardy from the start. Good can mean a favorable character as well as profitable (a good deal). It means virtuous (a good person) as well as large in quantity (they won by a good margin). It can mean fertile (a good field) or conforming to a standard (good English). As a noun it can name something that conforms to a moral order or, in the plural, merchandise. It can mean proof of wrongdoing (she didn’t have the goods on them) or forever (gone for good); net gain (ten bucks to the good) or certain kinds of people (the good). Goodness, on the other hand, does not generally mean the quality of fertility, profitability, or proof of wrongdoing, and although I plan to emphasize the problems raised by variety and differentiation among goods, I would like to restrict the sense of goodness to a context of moral virtues. We will also note that goodness has an overtone of eliciting a specific result, as in the phrase ‘‘good for a laugh’’ or ‘‘good for the happiness of this group of people.’’ But on the whole we will pay attention to the quality manifest in just and commendable conduct and in tendencies to a favorable character. I also want to hold in mind that in its Sanskrit origin goodness connotes the quality of holding fast. The burden of goodness, then, is found in its naming a quality that specifies the senses or meaning of moral commonality in the midst of many diverging practices and forces. It names a qualitative identity that persists in many situations and times, a persistence that means constancy, a constancy of connections among diverse goods. Further, goodness names a discernible quality that allows for interconnected or systematic comprehension, for an intelligent design that spawns articulate rationalities based on goodness. In short, in its force of naming a quality, goodness gives a certain authoritative and positive power to goods as well as negative power or value to nongoods or antigoods. It allows for procedures of sorting things out according to their definitive qualities. It provides a stable point of reference for recognition and judgment, for ordering behaviors and attitudes, for guidance in educating and correcting. The power of a name like goodness is also found as a force of singularization. When people appear in their goodness, they stand out as this good 12

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one like other good ones who share the same quality in their singular characters. Goodness is in this case recognized as an intrinsic quality, not as on the surface, as it were, but indwelling the good ones. There are certainly behaviors that are good for something, and there are people who are good in the sense that they are skilled at what they do or who help in the progress of a larger purpose. But a morally good person or morally good actions are at the very least good in their singular happening because of their goodness. It is as though they happen in the name of goodness. In its quality of goodness morally good behavior is thus characterized by both order and singularity: singularity in the sense that goodness happens in a person’s specific actions and way of living, and order in the sense that goods are discernibly interconnected in an accountable manner. At best, morally good behavior and attitudes would compose a body of people who, like those in a well-trained chorus or schooled in ritual performances, find their satisfaction in disciplined repetitions of goodness and who are able to override those inclinations and emotions that would carry them away from the order of goodness. A positive sense of goodness brings people to order and defines good individuals. Repetition seems necessary in singularized movements of goodness. The need for fine-tuning in new and different experiences, coping with the apparently unremitting forces of forgetfulness, meanness, foolishness, self-absorption, and transforming perspectives—the re-birth of goodness in constantly changing situations requires its repetition, its re-adaptation, its repeated affirmation if lives are to continue to be good. Goodness appears to be dependent on recognition—re-cognition—if its ordering sense is to remain forceful. It requires re-membering—replication—for its endurance in the stretch of times and circumstances. Its dependence on recognition poses problems for the quality of goodness. There is no certainty that recognitions of goodness will be thoroughly under its governance, because recognitions are themselves composed of many diverse factors, such as the chaotic ambiguity of language, the often subtle and pervasive influence of powerful interests, and the impact of aggressive behaviors, practices, and attitudes. Such factors can produce perverse qualities opposed to goodness, as well as dilute and weaken its force. Goodness is vulnerable to so many powers in the power of its own recognized definition and sensibility! Who will preserve its force? Who will speak and act for it? Who will stand for its authority? Who will hold firm to goodness? The good, of course, will do their best. To preserve and keep established orders of goodness they might form schools; special signs and Charles E. Scott

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calendars; groups of the committed; sites for retreat, renewal, and remembrance; specially constituted libraries and curricula; institutes; guides for parents; bodies of authoritative writings; disciplines of practice; and systems of enforcement. Given the vulnerability of those orders, vigilance and careful education are crucial. Distraction and disintegration seem to be constant in the orders of goodness and especially at the margins of the values where their power fades out. Not only does disorder characterize the lives of the good in the forces of desire, self-interest, laziness, and historical formations of meaning. Strong orders of goodness seem also to engender curiosity before nongood differences, to give rise to interest, even intense interest in what is not governed by goodness. Not to mention the emotions of love that are overwhelmed by certain singularities and that overthrow the goodness of wisdom and moral practice, as though in the performance of a great choir a tenor begins to sing a different song. The story of goodness that I have told so far, however, refers to it in terms of a dominant system of virtues and their practice. The narrative is captivated by an image of a defining order, as though dominant moral practices constituted a prerogative for interpreting and articulating goodness, as though the privileges of powerful virtues included outlawing or banishing contrary values. Clearly there are regions where certain goods rule. In fact, there are many such regions and subregions, from families and communes to local organizations to states and cultures. Usually, I imagine, there are clusters of different goods in all moral orders, struggles for power and movements of deviation. Far from a universal system of goods, there are huge moral differences in which one people’s virtues are another’s vices. When we consider goodness by reference to different moral systems or oppositions active within such orders, the image of a system of goodness seems absurd. Goodness appears rather more as an abstract category that is available for determination by contradictory, shaping social forces. Viewed this way, goodness seems to be indifferent to the authority of any regional grouping. It appears as a powerful category that is on hand for the justification of radically opposed ways of life. As the quality or state of being good, goodness is accessible to any group that has the power to name what is good and what is bad. Goodness doesn’t seem to intend any one set that authorizes itself in the name of goodness. Such indifference can lead us to hope that goodness names something discoverable and ‘‘natural,’’ something in our hearts and minds, no matter how deeply hidden, or in the very nature of living events or in a physical order in the universe. Perhaps nature itself tends toward a grand and good unity and for unknown reasons is having a hard time getting there. Or, if 14

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not nature, the human spirit—something in human nature that strives for the quality of goodness and in its time will come to a recognition of what is truly good and truly bad. Perhaps goodness names a natural reality, in some way like a being, something properly called goodness itself. Outside of hopes and interpretations, however, we have little evidence for such a reality, and we face ourselves and our lineages repeatedly in the images of ‘‘natural entities’’ by which we variously cast the unity of people and things. The abstract indifference of goodness seems blandly to house those images along with so many others, to slip into many histories and senses, to have an availability that only absence of nature and identity enjoys. This is not such a good story I’m telling in the sense that it isn’t especially upbuilding. It doesn’t seem to be conforming to a standard of virtue; if it tends toward the formation of favorable character, the tendency is very retiring; whether it is even salutary is not at all clear. It seems to undercut the authority, even the value of goodness. If I understand this narrative correctly, it does not support goodness even as a desirable good. What’s the point? Let’s think about desire for goodness. Desire for Goodness I assume that most people we know want to be good in some sense, to have a share of goodness, as it were. More than recognition that they are good, most people we know probably want to feel good about themselves, to enjoy a sense of personal integrity and accomplishment, and to feel integrated with what they find good in their environment. That doesn’t mean that they all want the same thing or what we recognize as a salutary character or that they want to be skilled in what we know as worthwhile pursuits. What appears good to them might appear defiant or illegal to us or selfish or just plain wrong. They might be good members of parties we find bad or hold fast to values we consider irresponsible. But at the end of the day (and with many exceptions, I am sure), most people we know probably feel a desire to respect themselves in their goodness and to be a good part of some social order. The desire to be good, in other words, can be a desire that is fulfilled by what we think of as perverse and by orders of behavior that we judge to be radically immoral. How might we interpret the desire to be good? As the faint voice of goodness, now in the image of something much greater than we, and specifically good? As a natural drift toward spiritual maturation and ultimate exposure of the perversity of hindrances to such growth? Is the quality of Charles E. Scott

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goodness really—in fact—a sign of something elemental in life, or perhaps more than a sign, a participant in a force of goodness that exceeds human comprehension? As good, are we in the flow of such purposeful excess? And they, the not-good, is their devious flow to be corrected in the name of goodness? Wars have been fought over smaller stakes, but I suppose if we’re on the side of goodness and want to be good by holding fast to it, we should do all we can to convert or at least restrain those who fight against what we most virtuously want. My unhappiness over those interpretive options arises from the observation that the desire to be good, like goodness in this respect, is not under the jurisdiction of any specific group of virtues. This desire has more to do with perceptions of what is salutary in interconnected groups of lives than with states of nature or supratemporal worlds. Our desire to be good brings to expression an extensive lineage of physical development and moral practices. The immense and creative force of ‘‘goodness’’—its value—has its own history of formation. I am unable to say whether the force of goodness carries the transvaluation of what was once bad and then, by weakness of spirit, became good (as Friedrich Nietzsche has it). I expect, however, that the rise and fall of various goods in their dominating force has less to do with willpower, that, indeed, desire has less to do with willpower than Nietzsche thought. Desires appear to arise with a considerable amount of chemical and genetic information as well as with formations that originate in structures of punishment, repression and encouragement, cultural sensibility and thoroughly appropriated manners of life and belief. Desire thus appears to arise not from a greater desire or conscious purposes but from biological and cultural elements that together figure something different, something other to chemicals, genes, and social influences, something by the name of desires that we embody and translate in our singular lives. Desires do not tell us much about things other than themselves and the lineages they carry, and when we break them down into their component parts, we do not have much to go on other than the parts and their organization, much less a foundation for them. Desires, like clouds, rise to their glory, reflecting much that is around them, and then dissipate, leaving a wake, certainly, but not for long. Translating Goodness From one angle of observation, I have been addressing the translation of a sense of goodness by means of textures of goods. Translation suggests carrying across an interval or divide, transferring something or moving it 16

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definitively into a different being. Something that is translated, whether a word or a person, never remains unchanged. Translation persistently and strangely opens up differences—opens out to differences—in efforts to establish sameness of meaning. It brings with it slippage and departure as well as communication and connection. Translation is different from simple repetition. It seems to carry with it something unrepeatable, something adrift and yet transferred and transmuted in a translational occurrence. Or at least it does on favorable translation days when, by translation, we encounter traces of what is translated in its difference from what is representably before us. Deeds and affections in the name of goodness, especially when they are viewed by reference to their conflicting and uncountable differences, appear to translate a sense of goodness; they appear as goods and transfer to various circumstances that qualitative sense. I have said that an untranslatable indifference seems to come with the differences that goods make, and I have interpreted such indifference by reference to the ubiquity of goodness in its sense and force, the seeming indifference of its name to its many and often opposing translations. It’s almost as though goodness named a transcendent force of life, although it appears on close inspection to be rather more like a powerful name with all the rights and privileges that powerful names have. A Doubtful Option Many people in our culture, I expect, are reasonably aware of the excesses occasioned by passions for certain values: deception and guile in the name of ‘‘higher’’ goods, honesty that hides ambiguities, narrow and destructive commitments, we–they structures in connecting with people, enflamed righteousness, to name a few. And we know the terrible damage that a lack of passion for values can bring: carelessness before suffering, silence in the presence of oppression, self-absorption and unwillingness to serve the interest of other people, detachment from the travail of things. On the one hand, people’s intense desire that something be so—that their sense of justice, for example, rule their society or that all people enjoy a democratic form of government—can wreak havoc in their simple and straight-arrow invocation of justice and democracy. On the other hand, people without imaginative passion, without visions of improved lives, can look for pockets of security and allow havoc its sway. Is there anything more important or more dangerous than human goodness? More decisive or more destructive than human commitments? More in question than Charles E. Scott

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‘‘human’’ and ‘‘goodness’’? Wherever there is a ‘‘we’’ the name of goodness seems to operate, as though being a ‘‘we’’ were goodness in itself. In the epigraph of this essay I quote the translator and editor of the ‘‘Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenthcentury Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century.’’1 This anonymous translator carries out his scholarly work beginning in the tumultuous year 1968, when Eastern and Western Europe underwent a considerable political upheaval. It was also a time of considerable personal upset for the translator. He decided to transcribe from notes and sketchy sources into modern Italian a narrative purportedly written by Adso of Melk in the fourteenth century, providing a sense of continuity and contemporaneity that falsify the translator’s own doubts about the uncertain and broken quality of his sources. My reasons for including the epigraph are these: the translator tells a story by translation; he says that it is written with no sense for its timeliness; he identifies the time of his writing as one in which many people write out of virtuous, political commitments to ethical relevance; he identifies his own motivation as narrative pleasure, a pleasure he takes in Adso’s perplexed and ordered account of a labyrinthine mystery that takes place in a labyrinthine library filled with apocalyptic symbolism, a library that is destroyed by an apocalyptic fire caused by a blind sense of goodness; and this narrative, in contrast to Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, is chronologically straightforward and uses its apparent temporal and narrative exactness of order to heighten the irony in presenting an order of goodness that destroys a repository of learning as well as curiosity and heartfelt laughter. The translator, I think, takes pleasure in presenting a labyrinth that is like the labyrinth of both translation and the lineage of this translation. It is a pleasure that leads to laughter in presenting an extremely serious dedication to an order of goodness. The narrative, in its apparent and pleased indifference to political and moral relevance, enjoys many levels of good humor as well as sorrow as it speaks of the self-destruction of a specific order of goodness. Its pleasure and neutrality in the telling of highly partisan conflicts allows a region where the kinds of goods that it describes have no jurisdiction. It allows nonpartisan distance and a quality of resonance, empathy, and imaginative play, but not a clear sense of goodness. A relief takes place in the book’s irrelevant pleasure, offsetting the awful sobriety inspired by an overheated sense of goodness and offsetting also a contemporary, overheated desire for relevance that is probably in the direct lineage of the earlier sobriety. It’s not that the narrative is good (or bad). It’s that it releases an almost indifferent quality of enjoyment, an 18

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option to carelessness and to a sense of goodness as well, a pleasure that seems congruent with the indifference that is lost to translations of goodness into intensely desired goods. This relief takes place as a narrative freedom, a special opening to stories of conflict without an imperative to dominate the conflicts, stories of impassioned quests and self-protective organizations, but stories that do not require poetic justice or an uplifting moral. This narrative intention of freedom that incorporates a sensibility of pleasure in telling, writing, discovering, and inventing is surely a doubtful option to the multiple passions whose stories it tells, a doubtful option to moral seriousness. But the force of this freedom—its valence, its value—provides an atmosphere that allows for something other than the kinds of desire that have dominated many of our moral traditions. It allows for attitudes and values formed in the recognized slippage of translations and the foolishness of many moral conflicts, and it provides an opening to transmutations of what we often think of as moral commitments in the name of goodness. This freedom allows for growth of freedom, for an unfolding of free space, and, perhaps, for ways of life that hold in question the powerful name of goodness. I would like to consider one instance of such transmutation. David Wood on Revenge I am speaking of transformations of attitudes and contexts for recognition when I speak of this pleasure in translating Adso’s piecemeal narrative about a clash among ‘‘the good.’’ It includes a shift in the narrative’s world from virtuous commitment to a presentation of such commitment outside the jurisdiction of the commitment. Adso remained a good Dominican even as he transcribed the strange events in the remote and now lost abbey. He tells a story that happens outside the reach of his commitments; his commitments are part of the story, but he does not attempt to understand the story on the basis of the major characters’ or his beliefs. He reports his piety and faith rather than writing a document of faith. And the translator remains true to his task in the pleasure he takes in presenting an order—like a grammatical order—that houses a radical and random absence of order. The value of this kind of attitude—that of Adso’s narrative and of the translator’s, an attitude that has little to do with political and virtuous relevance, one that allows without comment a presentation of nongood disorders of disaster, an attitude that is able to culminate in laughter (to Adso’s unresolved surprise as well as sorrow)—the valence and force of this kind of attitude is elaborated in Nietzsche’s understanding of revenge. Charles E. Scott

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I would like to carry out this elaboration by noting David Wood’s way of reading (his translation of ) that understanding. Wood approaches Nietzsche’s attitude toward revenge through Martin Heidegger’s transformation of Nietzsche’s account of revenge against time. This is not a process of refutation but one of transformation that seems to have a significant and affirmative resonance with the finite quality of time. Instead of narration, we are turning to a way of thinking and a signifying structure that transforms Nietzsche’s thought of revenge without taking revenge on it, transforms Nietzsche’s thought in a way that also appropriates it. I find in this transformation an approximation to the narrative freedom found in The Name of the Rose, and that amounts to a translation, in Nietzsche’s, Wood’s, and Heidegger’s instances, of an nonrepresentable dimension of time. It suggests a different ethos or way of life from that lived in the name of goodness. The accent now falls on the aspect of Nietzsche’s account of revenge that addresses the ways we experience and give order to time. ‘‘Revenge’’ takes place as people, in their dominant images and beliefs, defy inevitabilities in their lives, the continuous transformations of values and meanings, for example, or the perspectival limitations in knowledge and certainty. When we think of the past as completed in the sense that what happened has happened and cannot be changed, we are faced with another inevitability that accompanies conceptions of time as a series of completed nows: the inevitability that forward, transforming temporal movement is qualified by the petrification of the past. In this sense of inevitability, a deep hopelessness and heaviness seeps into human spiritedness, something like a preconscious sense of defeat by time—on the one hand, we are forever losing what we most prize, and on the other, the dead hand of the past clutches our spirit and squeezes life force from it. In the consequent spirit of revenge, people lose motivation for genuine accomplishment, passionate curiosity, artistic creativity, and the discipline and fortitude that kind of living requires. We sink into repeated moral platitudes, behaviors within easy range of accomplishment, cultivation of we-ish taste rather than unique deeds. We repeat our defeat as we order ourselves to defend what is ours and destroy differences that challenge us. Above all, we require that indifferent time have meaning and purpose. You know the dreary consequences: societies of good and evil, thought by calculation and argument, simpleminded lies about the past and its harsh impact, and democracies authorized by the lowest common denominator, in which excellence becomes the enemy; orders without arete¯. So does Nietzsche find revenge. 20

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David Wood begins his discussion of revenge by considering the flow of repetition when Heidegger returns to Nietzsche’s thought of revenge and rethinks it.2 Heidegger returns to Nietzsche’s thought to think with him and to follow his thought as much as he can despite a profound divergence on the question of temporality. One of his purposes is to engage an important and originary movement in Western philosophy, a trajectory of nonrepresentational thinking in the West that Nietzsche brings to an original articulation in his conceptualization of revenge. Heidegger’s engagement constitutes an exchange, an encounter in which thinking, as distinct from reportage, happens. It will be an encounter that is not reducible to either thinker’s stance or to a combination of their positions or to argument and refutation. It will be a determination of thought in a temporal movement of repetition in which something other to representable contents might be traced, ‘‘something,’’ as it were, that seems to appear indirectly and in excess to representations. Wood uses the word given, in this context: something outside of representation is given or gives itself to be thought. Not a quality and not a conceptual truth, but time’s occurrence, its dissolution of representability and of the dominance of meaning—in the language of this essay, time’s indifference and its strange force that translates repeatedly as the question of being deathly and living at the same time. Such an occurrence is similar to a conversation the experience of which occasions a transformation for the participants, however slight, of the way they were or of what they knew or believed when the conversation began, a conversation that unfreezes past attitudes and practices and opens toward different behavior. If I were careful, I might be able to call such an experience a transference of what cannot be said directly but appears to be traced in the life of the exchange. And traced, perhaps, only in the exchange. In Heidegger’s terms, some people attempt to retrieve or recover such occurrences not by imitating them or ritualizing their memory but by repeatedly engaging those philosophers whose thought is considerably in excess to what can be re-presented about their thought. The engagement is the site of transformation as well as of repetition, and if it’s a good day for thinking, something of time will happen with reflective intensity that is not a matter of will or of objective knowledge but is a matter of release from the progenitors of revenge—a release, as Wood and Nietzsche and Heidegger have it, from that commonality that deeply fears the risks of time’s transformative openings and departures. Wood then engages Heidegger in Heidegger’s retrieval of Nietzsche’s thought of revenge. After noting Heidegger’s appropriation of Nietzsche’s showing that one kind of pervasive revenge arises from a sense of time as a series of nows in which the past appears as always lost, and after noting Charles E. Scott

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the limits of Heidegger’s analysis and critical observations, Wood does some performative repeating of his own. He not only says that Heidegger’s process of engaging Nietzsche ‘‘demonstrates’’ a ‘‘repetition of [Nietzsche’s] singularity’’ by the way he rethinks the account of time that underlies Nietzsche’s thought. He also shows that Heidegger returns to Nietzsche in a way that performs an overcoming of the experience of time that determines the spirit of revenge. As he shows that Heidegger’s thought in the spirit of renewal turns beyond the force of revenge, Wood opens the way for a repetition of Heidegger’s thought. It is a translational repetition and way of thought informed by Wood’s engagements with thinkers after Heidegger, with Jacques Derrida above all but also with Emmanuel Levinas and many others. Wood’s engagement with Heidegger is attuned to the way Heidegger’s thought moves—to the way it lives—in its enactment, attuned to its performative and I would add translational dimension. And Wood brings thought in the aftermath of Heidegger’s thought to bear in his retrieval of Heidegger, just as Heidegger brought thought after Nietzsche to bear in his return to Nietzsche. To Heidegger’s thought of retrieval, in other words, Wood gives a transformational dimension that is informed by Derrida’s and Levinas’s translations of Heidegger’s thought. That kind of retrieval is like Heidegger’s retrieval of Nietzsche in the sense that something past is translated in the force of its aftermath into something that opens out to a nondetermined future. The retrieval is a repetition of an originary quality in thinking, of a disposition toward natality and new life that invests Western thought. That’s ‘‘what’’ is traced—like a quality that will not happen as an object or representation. So we have three aspects of retrieval going on at once: (1) Heidegger’s retrieval of Nietzsche that Wood follows; (2) Nietzsche’s retrieval of revenge in Western culture, a retrieval that Heidegger translates in the work that Wood brings forward; and (3) Wood’s retrieval of Heidegger in a translation that comprises thinking in a lineage that comes after Heidegger. In all three instances the issue concerns a kind of vengefulness, a pattern of inflicting injury on lively events, a pattern that arises from a sense of time without attunement to the continuous opening out of time, its always providing translatability for events in their passage. Time’s mortality gives possibility and transfiguration: revenge as Nietzsche thinks of it arises out of a profoundly hampered sense of futurity, transformation, and death. And it is the transformation of this hampered sense that Wood finds in Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche’s thought. The transformation of the spirit of revenge also happens in the form and movement of Wood’s retrieval of Heidegger. It’s not correctness or the knockdown 22

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of Heidegger’s or Nietzsche’s thought by critical blows that really counts for thinking. It’s encountering the life of a way of thinking, hearing it, experiencing it, carrying it forward by translational thinking, by a shift in the signifying structure that presents it, by the value of a different way of thinking that comes to itself and its order in the impact and forceful lineage of the thinking that undergoes translation. Above all, for Wood, what counts is paying attention to the transformative dimensions of thinking because affirmation of continuing transformation composes a friendly environment, not a vengeful one, for the lives of thought as well as for the lives of other kinds of things. For Wood, it’s as though time with its continuous transmutational futurity is at once a gift and a giver. The gift of time when it is well thought translates revenge into life-affirmation. He calls it a responsive relation to the impossibility of thorough completion. I add that it is also a responsive relation to a dimension of living that appears as neither good nor bad, but appears as indifferently else than goodness. Revenge and Goodness To say that goodness is bad would be absurd. The badness of goodness is not the problem that I want to address in this essay. Goodness names the problem. The problem is with a sense of the quality of being good. I have noticed particularly orders of goodness, the extreme diversity of goods and their orders. I have attributed ordering power to the name and sense of goodness, and I have interpreted the connection between the quality of being good and goods as one of translation in which the indifference of goodness is often lost. I have also said that in its ordering force in specific moral systems, despite its indifference to determinate content, and in its enmeshment with the desire to be good, goodness appears to inspire systems of obedience and conformity as well as violence. Violence arises as people attempt to gain sole ownership of the rights to goodness’s translation. The validity and right of various ways of life seem to depend on such ownership. All manner of bads are spawned in knowledge and recognition controlled by these possessive good mores. Goodness is not bad; it’s rather as though it were a good thing, as though it were a difference instead of merely a quality of whatever people find to be good. Goodness, as it appears in goods, is a value only when the name is employed to persuade people to follow particular systems of behavior and to feel in certain ways. Goodness, in other words, becomes a progenitor of revenge against its own indifference when it is translated in definitive terms, as though it itself were a code of behavior, as though it itself were a different kind of Charles E. Scott

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being from, say, evil, as though it itself were like a self and not simply a name that can help clarify who ‘‘we’’ are, who ‘‘they’’ are, and the ways in which we and they are indifferently different. When we tell stories and engage in thinking without revenge, options to orders in the name of goodness can emerge. One such option occurs when people translate affirmatively the indifference of time. That option presents a different disposition for commitments and beliefs. Whether self-overcoming or translation come to the fore of our recognitions, orders of transformative expectation emerge, the heavy-handed seriousness that often characterizes Western morality and universalization decreases. Another kind of entertainment of options and differences emerges with an altered type of concerned energy—not so much beyond good and evil as different from the polarization and its ordering force. It is an issue of sensibilities, of cultural dispositions that people seldom recognize. It is one of attitudes and options that come into view with discursive influence and form knowledge and practices outside the sanction of goodness’s name.

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2

What Is Philosophical Ethics? ¨ NTER FIGAL GU

The question ‘‘What is ethics?’’ carries the burden of seeming to be interesting, in no small part because so much is expected of philosophical ethics. If philosophy still receives the attention of a broader public at all and ethics is not dismissed as philosophy’s declaration of its own superiority, then it concerns above all the question of the good life and the correct comportment of self-interest. The reasons for this are generally familiar and thus call for only a brief recollection. The first reason lies in the technoscientific revolution of the moderns, which opened new possibilities of influencing and shaping life—especially human life—calling into question the limits of the permissible and the feasible. It follows that traditional possibilities of orientation have largely lost their powers of persuasion. Religious connections—where they are still in effect—are also no longer self-evident, so not only self-determination but also the need to decide without self-evident or traditionally secured criteria has grown larger. And finally, the loss of everyday life’s selfevidence has accelerated with the phenomenon known as ‘‘globalization.’’ Foreign cultures are moving closer to one another, which calls upon us to clarify the relation of various life orientations to each other. It is above all questionable whether philosophical ethics has the power to fulfill the expectations attached to it. Whether ethics is capable of producing appropriate and binding discussions of the permissible uses of Thanks to Christopher Lauer for his excellent translation of this essay. 25

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scientific capabilities is highly debatable. Science has a powerful ally: its success, which makes every doubt about the scientific description of life and the world seem old-fashioned. The demand for ethics to counteract the loss of life’s everyday self-evidence should also be viewed with skepticism. That a philosophical dispute that is itself without a foundation in education and general culture can replace mature traditions is quite improbable. The orientation of life does not allow of abstract description, and the attempt to give one without reference to social connections cannot succeed. Faring no better, finally, is the attempt to clarify the relation of different cultures to each other. Whether this is in each case possible depends first and foremost on the convictions in the dominant culture itself, so the force of a discourse predicated on universality is surely limited. The question of the meaning of philosophical ethics in connection with the problems just outlined is thus a thoroughly open one. This must be acknowledged, for nothing would be more disastrous for philosophy than to accede to a general demand to make ethics as effective as possible. On the contrary, one should not overestimate the meaning of philosophy and especially of ethics; the more one forgoes such illusions, the more clearly one can judge the orienting power of philosophical ethics. It is important to think of the limits as well as the possibilities of such ethics, and philosophy must reflect upon its own origins and the tasks that emerge from that origin. A self-reflection of this sort indeed reacts to the public’s expectations of philosophical ethics. But self-reflection does not have its legitimacy merely in muffling and circumscribing these expectations imposed on philosophy. Rather, the critique of the public image of philosophy should here also be self-critique. The expectations of philosophical ethics have been awakened and supported by philosophy, especially by modern philosophy. In the moderns, ethics wins prominence as practical rather than theoretical philosophy. Immanuel Kant, the modern philosopher par excellence, completes this turn, in that he determines the ‘‘ultimate aim to which the speculation of reason in its transcendental employment is directed’’ as a practical one.1 The three objects to which reason is directed in its ultimate aim—namely, the freedom of the will, immortality of the soul, and existence of God—are ‘‘not in any way necessary for knowledge,’’2 but ‘‘must concern only the practical.’’3 The practical here becomes philosophy’s decisive point of orientation. There are several reasons for this development. The most important of them recalls the public interest in philosophical ethics: it is the technoscientific revolution that has and continues to inform the essence of modern philosophy. It could even be said that the philosophy of the moderns 26

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cannot be understood without this revolution. As soon as knowledge is determined as knowledge from experience (Erfahrungswissen) and understood on the model of the natural sciences, observations that fail to match this model are ‘‘not in any way necessary for knowledge.’’ Of course, philosophy does not cease to observe the world. But such philosophical observations change their character, at first subtly, so Kant could still understand them as observations of a speculative reason; they were not themselves practical, but only submitted to a practical ‘‘ultimate aim.’’ But it follows that something submitted to a practical aim should itself be called practical. As soon as that happens, philosophical observations that are ‘‘not in any way necessary for knowledge’’ move to practical philosophy and are themselves understood as practical. This changes not only the philosophical observations that have been relegated to practical philosophy but also practical philosophy itself. It now carries with it the burden that previously fell to theoretical philosophy. As soon as the priority of science over theoretical philosophy becomes the ruling position, ethics becomes the placeholder for philosophy in general. It falls prey as part of a conception of the world that has lost its credibility under the dominance of modern science. Or at least this is one of the two possibilities for modern philosophy. The other could be taken as the more sincere possibility, but it has the disadvantage that it is bound up with an erasure of philosophy. It finds its classical formulation in Ludwig Wittgenstein, who commits philosophy entirely to the thought and speech forms of natural science and at the same time explains the peculiar tasks of practical philosophy as inexpressible. ‘‘The correct method in philosophy’’ consists for Wittgenstein in ‘‘saying nothing but that which may be said, thus propositions of natural science—thus something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.’’4 Admittedly, with this the problems of life ‘‘remain completely untouched.’’5 But these problems are not solved by philosophical discussion; philosophy does not even clarify them either in their essence or in view of their possible solutions. The question of the problems of life is no question, and ‘‘this itself is the answer.’’6 The alternative to the philosophical self-emptying recommended by Wittgenstein is the totalization of practical philosophy, as it was prepared by Kant and carried out by many authors of the twentieth century. Its difficulty lies in the fact that practical philosophy was traditionally dependent on theoretical philosophy, and it is not easy to conceive how it should bear the foundational burdens that it thus took over. However, Gu¨ nter Figal

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before one discusses these problems, let alone can answer them, the traditional image of philosophical ethics must be placed before oneself. It is necessary to examine this image impartially, for only then can a meaningful discussion emerge over whether philosophical ethics can provide a contribution to ‘‘conflict management.’’

 Ethics, as it is understood in our tradition, is more self-sufficient than other philosophical questions and can be broadly defined as the working out of the question of how one should live. Or we could say with HansGeorg Gadamer, it is the Aristotelian answer to the Socratic question.7 This question already gives rise to a circle. There is a question only when a previously unquestioned possibility of living loses its obligatory nature. At the same time, it is only through this loss that—in the confrontation with other cultures—other possibilities become visible. Life could also be other than it is; it divides itself into a spectrum of obligations to do one thing or the other, and the impression can arise that how one lives is fundamentally arbitrary, dependent only on the currently ruling conditions and conventions. It belongs to the essence of philosophy not to stand for this. The basic ethical question of how one should live is indeed motivated by the variety of life possibilities, but only to the extent that one does not abandon oneself to variety in the sense of a sophistic pluralism. With the basic ethical question and then as a formalized ‘‘ethics,’’ philosophy takes up the demand of variety, as Robert Spaemann once put it, to interrogate ‘‘the grounds of differentiation in the search for the best-grounded argument.’’8 Admittedly, this raises a peculiar ethical problem: How should one think this search for the best-grounded argument? What should the bestgrounded argument be? This question can be answered appropriately only when that which is asked after is more than and something different from one possibility of living among others. It does not concern playing the advantages of one possibility for life against those of another in order to come at last to a conclusion based on a cost-benefit analysis. The result of such a calculation could not itself be persuasive, because it would again be easy to relativize under other points of view. There thus remains only one solution: ethical reflection must in principle go beyond prevailing possibilities of life and find points of view from which human life can be described and judged in view of the obligatory nature of deciding and acting. Philosophical ethics is transcendent over varying possibilities of living, but it is only so in order to come back to the prevailing life possibilities. As Aristotle emphasizes, one arrives at philosophical ethics not by 28

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knowing but by acting.9 Those who are addressed in ethical discourse are not philosophers but citizens with an already furnished life experience. They should be capable of connecting what is clarified in philosophy to their lives and thus conducting themselves with the clarity that philosophy brings about. With this we can now specify the ethical task of philosophy more precisely. It consists in the orientation of life beyond or outside of determinate life-forms. A life-form is here understood as the imprint (Gepra¨ge) of the individual by means of dwelling in a context of life, residence, and character (Charakter) in one. Life-form is what in Greek is called ethos. In a lifeform the belongingness and agreement of humans who lead a common life have their ground. Therefore, this commonness must not be a harmony. A life-form allows differences and conflicts just as much as understandings and agreements. But these are possible only under common assumptions. Agreement in a life-form is like agreement in a language;10 different contentions and positions can be collected in it because there is something common that is neither a contention nor a position but allows these in the first instance. If one were to put this permissive self in question or repudiate moments that essentially belong to it, it would no longer be a difference inside the life-form but its sabotage and eventually a step beyond it. It would be comparable to offending against the grammar of a language ever anew, with the goal of eventually establishing a new language. This does not simply happen to life-forms. It is grounded in their essence, for they exist only because they are limited. No life-form is in the manner that it is compelling; each could also be otherwise, which confirms that life-forms—like languages—change and develop. But such change will always be permissible only at the boundaries of the life-form. One will not be able to give up certain convictions without abandoning the life-form. Which changes occur depends on whether something that immediately offends against agreement proves able to be integrated. Where exactly the limits of the possibilities for integration lie cannot be expressed in general. Here deceptions are possible, so offenses against basic convictions can be taken as if they belong to the life-form, which is then in truth already endangered. By then a life-form has already become indifferent. In such indifference there is nevertheless a self-deception, for without life-forms there is no human life. There must always be a play space for conduct so that there can evolve possibilities of conduct that deserve this name and are not only conditioned specimens of conduct. Possibilities of conduct are like the propositions of a language, which one can form and Gu¨ nter Figal

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utter only when one knows the language. Without life-forms there is no independent conduct. Accordingly, a life-form does not simply vanish when it has become questionable or no longer obligatory. It is still there, like a language that one has learned and mastered but then has subsequently doubted its possibilities of expression. Or like a house in which one stays but no longer dwells. Here all possibilities of conduct are the same, but they no longer have any importance. One no longer stays in them when one becomes aware of them. One no longer performs them as possibilities of conduct of one’s own life but perceives them as from above. What from the perspective of a life-form is an irritation, a failure, or a catastrophe appears from the perspective of philosophy as an opportunity. One has escaped the prejudice in a life-form and can relate oneself philosophically to it. This means that the life-form has become conceivable in its essence; one is able to grasp its meaning for human life. What this consists in was in one respect already addressed: life-forms open possibilities for leading one’s life, deciding, and acting. However, this happens only in that they give determinate possibilities reality in committing to them. What in possibilities of conduct belongs to a lifeform is no longer simply thinkable or representable. Thus one can prepare oneself and others to perceive, and so to grasp and realize, a life-form; one can discover and establish dispositions of conduct that are especially suitable for perceiving these possibilities. They can be appropriated through practice and habituation so that one is able to conduct oneself as well as possible in the appropriate life-form. Dispositions of this sort would, however, be nothing more than neutral skills if they were simply determined only relatively to a prevailing lifeform. But when taken in their ethical significance, they appear as virtues (Tugenden), and they are virtues in turn only when they are conditions for life being led as well as possible. Or put differently, dispositions of conduct are virtues only when they are not efficiency conditions of a life-form and the essence or the nature of human beings itself comes to the fore in them. Now we can also say precisely why the orientation of life is the proper task of philosophical ethics: ethics is the clarification of life-forms under the unified perspective of a determination of human nature. Thus philosophical ethics can on the one hand assess whether life-forms are appropriate to human nature. On the other hand, it can open the possibility that one remains in life-forms not simply because they are factically given but because one can understand these life-forms as appropriate to nature, as ‘‘natural’’ to human beings. Then life-forms correspond to the fact that 30

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the human being is independent of the determinate commitments of prevailing life-forms. Although life-forms could be otherwise, and although there are others beside them, as natural or appropriate to nature they can no longer be relativized. The factical givenness of a life-form now loses the contingency and arbitrariness that the life-form took on in being obligatory. The life-form grasps its obligatory nature in another way, without therefore being able to be derived as necessary from human nature or maintained as the only possible set of commitments. Aristotle also gives a clue for understanding the relation of human nature and life-forms when he says that virtues come to be present neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but it is natural for us to take them on.11 Life-forms are neither of nature nor contrary to nature. It is natural for us to be in lifeforms. But since they are not of nature, they can also be counter-natural and bend or suppress human nature. The most important objection to these considerations comes nearly by itself: it may be doubted whether a determination of human nature is possible independent of life-forms in general. Life-forms are indeed not simply play spaces of conduct, but as such always also horizons of understanding for life and the world. What we think of ourselves and bring to language is never without such a horizon. It is always colored by traditions and their language; no one begins the interpretation and explication of life and the world on a conceptual, neutral basis. That every attempt to determine human nature is shaped by life-forms is uncontested. But that, like the life-forms themselves, gives only a clue for how human nature is to be investigated, namely, by asking from within a life-form what it means to be within a life-form. Answering this question permits no imaginary standpoint outside a life-form but only the capability ‘‘to put in brackets’’ its unquestioned validity, that is, in the sense of the phenomenological epoche´ not to conduct oneself inside the life-form but to observe this conduct from the standpoint of its possibility. This possibility is the same for all life-forms; otherwise, one would never have to deal with another life-form but with something different, which would withdraw or resist the concept of the life-form. But in its selfhood it is not immediately or intuitively given but is accessible only through descriptions that can be made from various standpoints, in various respects. Descriptions are interpretations and as such never complete; they are amendable and sometimes even replaceable. Indeed, interpretations are knowable only through the matter (Sache) common to them. Even the attempt to give indications of human nature is interpretive. That an interpretation is grounded in its matter could show itself only through further interpretations setting out from other positions. To this extent the Gu¨ nter Figal

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requisite objectivity (Sachlichkeit) remains unidentifiable for such an attempt. It can arise, however, from the plausibility of the demonstration that its objectivity is at least not a groundless misrepresentation. There are, so far as I can see, three essential moments of human life that can be taken from an observation of life-forms from the standpoint of their possibility. Insofar as a life-form is a play space of conduct, it does not exist without freedom. To conduct oneself always means to leave other possibilities of conduct to the side or to discard them altogether. That in turn is not possible without possibilities as such being present for the decision and, after the decision has been reached, remaining present; only to the extent that one knows what one has not done does one know that one has decided on something. What is not actually given is present only in language; language is the medium in which something not present can be present. What is merely linguistically present is, however, not achievable or realizable without something further. It can even, like a possibility of conduct that is overtaken in the course of events, be withdrawn once and for all. Possibilities of conduct can be just as little understood without this withdrawal as without the withholding of what is still undecided, not realized. Thus without time, there are no life-forms as play spaces of conduct. Freedom, speech, and time are, as one can say in summary, the three dimensions of space, which is, as the play space of conduct, a life-form. The human being does not exist without this spatiality. Spatiality allows the human being to be in the various forms that condition life and indeed is itself what is unconditioned in one’s being (Wesen). Freedom, speech, and time are therefore also the aspects of human life that precede all questioning of the meaning of being for one another. On the basis of freedom, every human life is submitted to the demand to question how one should live. It is through this demand that an instrumentalization of human life is forbidden, regardless of whether someone satisfies the demand or not. On the basis of his freedom every human being is, as Kant said, ‘‘an end in himself ’’ and thus has no ‘‘relative worth, that is, a price, but rather an inner worth, that is, dignity.’’12 On the basis of language, human life is placed in the reason proper to it. Reason is language and as such the determination of a being, for which there is no ground that is not itself delivered over to an abyss. Language as reason is, as Heidegger formulates it, the ‘‘dwelling place of the essence of human beings,’’13 and indeed not in the sense that this residence could be distinguished from an essence for itself, but in such a way that it is the residence that belongs to the essence. Speech is the heeding of the world, the possibility of speaking and being spoken to. In language there is the organized openness of what is, which can always be uttered and shared with others ever anew. On the 32

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basis of time, human life has the essential trait of finitude. That does not mean that human life has only a certain duration that can be ascertained, as it were, from without. Rather, human life is led in the knowledge of finitude and thus stands under the demand of cognizing its own possibilities as limited. Only this knowledge lets us understand Plato’s insight in the Republic regarding the original political insight, namely, that one cannot do everything, and hence the need for others. Dignity, reason, and finitude serve as unconditioned, essential determinations of human life in establishing how this life is to be led. Dignity can be encountered appropriately only with respect (Achtung). That means that respect (Achtung) is to respect (respektieren) dignity’s unconditionality unconditionally, not only in response to its interests or the compulsion of a threatening self-consciousness, which, as Hegel has shown, is experienced as recognition.14 Reason demands an openness (Aufgeschlossenheit) that has to ensure its prevailing possibilities in order to be able to be what it should be. Openness must be carefully distinguished from the boundless willingness to get involved in every little thing. It does not prove itself in the abandoning of the individual but in the arts of mediation, of interpretation, and of translation. In the end, finitude demands as practical insight into the need of human life that solidarity without which there is no stable living together, whether private or public. Respect, openness, and solidarity are attitudes that are demanded by the nature of human beings and are thus virtues in an exemplary sense. As a question of these virtues, every life-form is to be measured against human nature. The more a life-form is just to human nature, the more justly one will be able to call the life-form a virtue. To this extent, the possibility of judging life-forms, which is independent of prevailing conditions, is found with the determination of human nature in actions. The same goes for life-forms that have no concept of human nature or refuse such a concept. And it also goes for life-forms that themselves develop determinations of human nature, whether they draw from these outlined ethical consequences or not. That a determination of human nature is possible in the sense outlined above leads back to the question voiced at the beginning about the selfunderstanding of ethics—as practical philosophy as opposed to theoretical. This self-understanding is in no way compelling. Nothing in the theoretical determination of human nature necessitates adopting it. Besides, the determination of human nature is not in itself ethical. Indeed, it keeps its distance from determinate life-forms and therewith also from the question of how one should live, which always sets itself only in determinate Gu¨ nter Figal

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life-forms. Thus there remains in force the traditional argument, represented most definitively by Aristotle, that ethics is not only not everything but also not the primary subject of philosophy. Only because of this peripheral placement is ethics possible; only on this account can it be persuasive. But what does that mean more precisely? When the relation of theoretical and practical philosophy is understood in this sense, philosophy shows ethics to be hermeneutical. It is so in that it owes itself an interpretation. Philosophical ethics is a feat of mediation that covers philosophical insight and practical life and in so doing establishes at the same time their difference. Otherwise, what one calls ‘‘ethics’’ can be a social technology, a doctrine of prudence in human conduct, a religiously motivated guide for life and action, or something similar, but one would not be able to conceive of it as the original task of philosophy. Philosophy is in its essence first theoretical philosophy, and its reference to living and acting consists initially only in that it is bound up with the demand of being a life-form. This demand discloses itself in historical reflection. It is embodied definitively by Socrates, as portrayed in the Platonic dialogues. But it was Aristotle who first held it to be possible to make intelligible from philosophical insight the life-form of those who do not philosophize and also to allow this life-form to exist for itself. In the life of Socrates philosophical insight and life-form come together. Aristotle, in contrast, carries out the project of philosophical ethics from the insight of the manifoldness of philosophy and the (political) world of action and so appeals to the hermeneutical act of mediation. Hermeneutical reflection uncovers both as such. It is thus the conceptual clarification of the hermeneutical that is also there without it, and likewise the self-reflection of hermeneutical philosophy.

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3

Hermeneutics as Original Ethics DENNIS J. SCHMIDT

Ethical questioning has always been defined by its essential difficulty: it is that realm of questioning that begins where the uncomplicated and the facile have ceased. One speaks of ethics only when there is difficulty; Immanuel Kant’s notion of ‘‘judgment,’’ especially as Hannah Arendt develops it, nicely captures the problem of ethical life as emerging out of an undecidability and the failure of theoretical knowledge. Nonetheless, even if ethics has always been a matter of the difficult, there seems to be a special and new form of difficulty defining the problematic of ethical thought today: the very idea of the ethical has become questionable. Some of the most cherished assumptions underpinning the dominant traditions of ethical thought—assumptions about subjectivity, agency, and autonomy, among others—have been called into question, and those traditions have largely collapsed, or at least lost all vitality, under this questioning. The most telling form of this decline of ethical thought is found in what now goes by the name of ‘‘applied ethics’’—as if ethics were simply applied theory. Nothing signals the loss of an ethical sensibility more than the emergence of such ‘‘applied ethics.’’ But this decline of ethical thought is not new; Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed it and spoke of the clear need to think ‘‘beyond good and evil’’ if we were ever to be in a position to take up the task of ethical reflection. Martin Heidegger, who was often criticized for not taking up the enigmas of ethical life, was well aware of Nietzsche’s insight into this difficulty of discussing ethical life at the end of the West’s long-standing 35

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commitment to metaphysics. When explicitly asked about the possibility of an ethics for our times, Heidegger only alluded cryptically to the need for ethics to become ‘‘original’’ again, that is, to be thought of anew from out of the sources of ethical life. His oblique references to ethical matters, coupled with the blunders of his own political acts, have made it difficult to pursue ethical concerns from the perspectives opened up by Heidegger. And yet I want to argue that those perspectives offer one of the most promising avenues for thinking about ethical life at this time when the very idea of an ethics is questionable. Although Heidegger’s own writings do seem to obscure the possibilities of a new approach to thinking about the difficulties of ethical life, one of the paths that has emerged in the wake of Heidegger’s own work, namely, hermeneutics as we find it formulated by Hans-Georg Gadamer, does indeed develop some of the promises of the new philosophical starting point we find in Heidegger. Consequently, the argument that I want to make in what follows is that the philosophical hermeneutics we find formulated in Gadamer’s work is fundamentally—not accidentally or subsequently, but fundamentally— concerned with the task of thinking about that which Heidegger referred to as an ‘‘original ethics.’’ I am well aware of the provocation of such a claim; nonetheless, I want to defend it and suggest that we would do well to recognize just how it is that Gadamer’s hermeneutics outlines something like an ‘‘original ethics,’’ since such an ethics belongs very much to the heart of hermeneutic theory. I will say more below about what I take the problem of an ‘‘original ethics’’ to be, but first let me make some preliminary comments about the rather outrageous contention that in the heart of hermeneutics we find a concern with ethics—original or otherwise. Hermeneutics has already suffered enough misrepresentation by being portrayed as a ‘‘method’’; might not I be proposing that we misrepresent it yet again, this time as an ‘‘ethics’’? After all, not even a single volume of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke is devoted to the topic of ethics, so why would one dare suggest that it is not only prominent but fundamental to hermeneutics? There are three obvious ways to begin to defend this view, and although none of them are sufficient to make the case I want to make, I do want to note them for two reasons: first, elements of each are important and do contribute to my argument; and second, taking the three approaches together, one begins to see just how widespread Gadamer’s concern with ethical notions is. One quickly comes to suspect that there might not be a single volume of Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke devoted to ethics simply because a concern with ethics saturates the whole of his work. 36

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A first approach to exposing the ethical element in hermeneutics would be to turn to Gadamer’s texts and remarks that explicitly deal with questions of ethics. One would find an overwhelming number of texts ranging from Gadamer’s first works to his final works.1 The list is ultimately quite massive. Although I do not want to argue that any of these works suffice to build the argument that I want to make here, they do give evidence that a concern with ethics was a lifelong project for Gadamer. They also remind us of the proximity of hermeneutics to practical philosophy and that when Gadamer wrote about ethics, two figures—Aristotle and Kant—were singled out. Aristotle above all seems to have a special place when Gadamer deals with ethics. There are several reasons for this, but most of all Gadamer seems to be taken with the way Aristotle so clearly avoids effacing the essential freedom of ethical matters by refusing to absolutize his notion of the ethical. Gadamer makes this clear when he writes that ‘‘Aristotle can recognize the conditionedness of all human being in the content of his doctrine of ethos without his doctrine having to deny that it too is conditioned. A philosophical ethics, which in this way does not only know about its own questionableness but rather makes this questionableness into its essential content seems to me to be the sole way of satisfying the unconditionality of the ethical.’’2 More could be said about this privilege of Aristotle in Gadamer’s works on ethics, but what is important now is simply to note that the Aristotelian aspect of Gadamer’s explicit remarks on ethics is strong and ever present, and that this affection for Aristotle clearly colors Gadamer’s own self-understanding regarding ethical matters. A second approach would be to turn to the role that ethical texts have played in Gadamer’s efforts to outline his theory of hermeneutics. Wahrheit und Methode is built in significant ways on the parallels between its own agenda and that described by Kant’s Critique of Judgment and by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (to name only the most prominent instances of this turn to ethical texts as a means of elaborating the fundaments of hermeneutics). More precisely, the decisive development in part 1 of Wahrheit und Methode is found when Gadamer turns to Kant’s discussion of judgment. Although it is true that he turns specifically to the case of aesthetic judgment, the link between the aesthetic and the moral is never lost on Gadamer. Likewise, in part 2 Gadamer returns to Aristotle’s ethics because the Aristotelian analysis offers ‘‘a kind of model for the problems of hermeneutics.’’3 This approach is especially instructive in helping expose the structural affinity between the foundations of hermeneutics and the ethical concerns, again, of Kant and Aristotle. One sees clearly that key moments in Gadamer’s development of hermeneutic theory have Dennis J. Schmidt

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been formulated by means of drawing on a strong parallel with texts that have a decidedly ethical meaning. This is no accident. Indeed, part of my argument is that, insofar as Gadamer turns to other texts in the history of philosophy as providing either a precedent or illustration of his own claims about hermeneutics, he can, in the end, do this only with reference to texts addressing ethical life. The reason for this is simple: the key insight of hermeneutic theory is an insight that can only be explained ethically. Finally, a third way of defending the claim that philosophical hermeneutics makes an essential and original contribution to the question of ethical life would be to extrapolate the ethical significance of key hermeneutical concepts. There are many notions that are ripe for such an extension into ethical issues—notions such as openness, dialogue, tradition, communication, understanding, and Bildung to name only a few that demonstrate the proximity of hermeneutics to practical philosophy. These notions clearly have the trait that Gadamer so admired in Greek thought: ‘‘It belongs to the ancient concept of science that such a transition into praxis lies in the knowledge itself. Science is not an anonymous formulation of truths, but rather a human comportment (hexis tou aletheuein).’’4 One might say that the knowing and acting that Gadamer describes as aimed at ‘‘understanding’’ changes the ‘‘subject’’ who knows and acts. The knowing that hermeneutics describes does not leave the knower untouched. Indeed, understanding is not, in the first instance, a cognitive matter but verifies itself in the change it effects in one who understands. In the end, I would argue that the character of this change needs to be understood ethically. In short, the key hermeneutic notions do not require a translation into the realm of praxis, since they translate themselves and this self-movement belongs to their truth. Gadamer theorizes this inherent relation of key hermeneutic notions to praxis when he discusses what he calls ‘‘the problem of application,’’ a description that I personally find problematic but that he deems ‘‘the central problem of hermeneutics.’’5 Each of these three approaches to the role and significance of ethics for Gadamer—following his own explicit commentaries on ethical texts, outlining parallels and influences, or extrapolating consequences—are instructive and worth pursuing, and, in the end, elements of each will be helpful in making my argument. But my claim wants to say more than one can defend by starting with any of these approaches. I want to claim that the very structure of hermeneutics is ethically significant and that for this reason hermeneutics as Gadamer has outlined it is responsive to the original ethical demand, namely, the demand of freedom. Furthermore, although the 38

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proximity of hermeneutics to traditional ethical concerns is, as I have already indicated, rather easy to document by reference to Gadamer’s texts, my claim is that the most far-reaching contribution of hermeneutics to ethical life comes in recognizing how it answers to what Heidegger designated as the need for an ‘‘original ethics.’’ So my task is to demonstrate how it is that the very idea of a philosophical hermeneutics offers a promising reply to Heidegger’s call for an ‘‘original ethics.’’ I want to begin by saying something about what I understand by this enigmatic notion of an ‘‘original ethics.’’

 So far as I know, Heidegger enlists this notion only once in his career, namely, in his ‘‘Brief u¨ber den Humanismus.’’ Heidegger’s call for this distinctive approach to ethical life comes in response to Jean Beaufret’s comment, ‘‘What I’ve been trying to do for a long time now is to determine precisely the relation of ontology to a possible ethics.’’6 The assumption that Heidegger takes to be driving Beaufret’s question is that ethical thought needs to understand itself in the service of, or as a supplement to, theory—in other words, that the idea is understood as the final arbiter of ethical reflection and that the practical is measured by the theoretical. Heidegger quickly dismisses the chief assumption driving Beaufret’s question by arguing that ethics as it has been understood since Plato is incapable of grasping ‘‘the breadth and depth’’ and ‘‘the essence’’ of the challenge to thinking found in the word ethics. The reason for this is simple: the task of thinking with regard to ethics cannot be reached—not even in the slightest—by a conception of ethics that places action in the service of an ideal that stands outside of time and history. This means that the very impulse behind Beaufret’s question, according to Heidegger, overlooks what it is that makes something like either ontology or ethics possible at all, namely, the movement of the history of being. That is what dispenses thinking, and yet it is precisely this that cannot be grasped in the present age, which suffers from a lack of understanding of the force of history. Heidegger is blunt about the closure of the possibility of ethical questioning and equally clear in his indications of where something like that possibility can still be found: ‘‘The tragedies of Sophocles—provided such a comparison is at all permissible—preserve the ethos in their sayings more primordially than Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics.’ ’’7 As an illustration of what an original reflection on ethos might be like, Heidegger then cites Heraclitus’s fragment 119, ethos anthropoi daimon, which he translates as ‘‘Der (geheure) Aufenthalt ist dem Menschen das Offene fu¨r die Anwesung des Gottes (des un-geheuren).’’8 One might translate this into English Dennis J. Schmidt

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as ‘‘The (familiar) abode for man is the opening for the presencing of god (the un-familiar one).’’ This is a problematic translation, to say the least. The word ethos has its original sense in Homer as the place where an animal lives, the place where it belongs and that defines its nature in some crucial way. Heidegger draws on this sense of the word when he reads the Heraclitean fragment and enlists that to speak of the origins of ethical life for us. In the end, the clearest indication of what such an original ethics might address comes when Heidegger says, ‘‘If the name ‘ethics,’ in keeping with the basic meaning of the word ethos, should now mean that ‘ethics’ ponders the abode of man, then that thinking that thinks the truth of being as the primordial element of man, as one who exists, is in itself, the original ethics.’’9 For Heidegger, this means that to think ethics originally is to think human being as Da-sein. It is to think from out of the sources of being. Heidegger is always quite clear about the obstacles to thinking of ethical life anew. Above all, the link between the failure to understand oneself as Da-sein and the hegemony of technology is repeatedly asserted. One might even say that in the present age, those who still do not understand themselves as Da-sein give themselves Machenschaft as a rule. However, Heidegger is quite obscure about what might be said about an original ethics as such. His resistance is not a matter of simply withholding something or of a lack of interest in it. Rather, he would, I believe, argue that to speak about an original ethics is not given as a possibility in the present historical moment. If an elemental listening is requisite for ethical reflection, then one might say that ours is the age of a noise that makes such listening nearly impossible. But for Heidegger, to speak of ethics is premature since we are not yet in a position to see through the obstacles to what can be said. Nonetheless, I do believe that by thinking about the character of the obstacles facing us today, one can tease out some of the contours of what demands such an original ethics might make on one who would risk speaking about ethics after Heidegger. Since my purpose is not to provide a close reading of Heidegger on this point, what I want to do here is simply present what I take to be the results of this approach somewhat schematically in the form of six theses. I have two rather serious hesitations about this procedure: first, I worry that such a dogmatic form might reinscribe the sort of primacy of theory for the questions of ethics that I want to avoid; and second, these theses, drawn from Heidegger, not only do not account for the full field of what Heidegger offers us in this regard, but they also do not entirely match up with what I take to be the hermeneutic form of original ethics. Gadamer 40

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offers both more and less than what is outlined in these theses. Nonetheless, in the interest of both provocation and brevity, I propose that the following six theses might serve as indications of the general character of any possible original ethics. One might describe these theses as outlining some of the hallmarks of what we must know and bear in mind if thinking is to pass as responsible. 1. The domain of the ethical is not solely defined by the orbit of the human, by that which we define and can know. There is a double significance to this. First, it means that understanding human relations can never solely be a matter of reflecting on ethical reflections, since political relations—relations of power and other forces not defined by the human—must also be considered when thinking of the realm of the human. Second, it means that when we ask about the ethical, we cannot confine ourselves to the human but must understand the significance of the nonhuman as well. This means that nature, animal life, even the monstrous and the divine, belong to the realm of ethical questioning. 2. The domain of the ethical is not to be thought of according to categories drawn from the realm of law and juridical life. Guilt, responsibility, innocence, judgment, pardon do retain a place in ethical reflections; however, they need to be understood as derivative notions rather than the original ethical categories around which reflection must center itself. Although these categories are fully appropriate for understanding political life, they do not get at the heart of ethical life, which is to be found beyond—or perhaps better, beneath—good and evil understood as juridical notions. Insofar as it is a matter of the human, ethical life is much more a matter of the preservation of the dignity of the human that resides in freedom. 3. Insofar as ethics is about human life at all, it is not defined primarily by the spheres of guilt and responsibility but is, as Spinoza (and the Greeks generally) knew, much more a matter of asking whether there can be a doctrine of the happy life. In saying this I want to argue that ethical reflections are withdrawn from every calculus of good and from the realm of the juridical. One might say here that the notion of the good is withdrawn from any conception of the good associated with right and wrong, but that the question of the good remains for ethics as the question of the good of life itself. 4. The language proper to thinking about ethics is not confined to conceptual language; in other words, philosophizing has no corner on how it is that we are able to take up the enigma of ethical life. The arts and literature are equally adept at this and, as Greek tragedy demonstrates, in some ways even more adept than philosophical reason at addressing this field of concerns that center on the issues of freedom but that nonetheless do not let Dennis J. Schmidt

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themselves be defined by the human. The insistence on conceptual language in philosophical reflections on ethics has led to the misplaced emphasis on the idea of the imperative as the supreme ethical measure. 5. An original ethics is an ethics of sources. By this I mean simply that to respond to the task of ethics—to think the realm of life as it appears in history—one needs to think from out of the events that constitute the realm of appearances. For us, this means that original ethics, rather than starting from the assumptions of human subjectivity, starts as an invitation to our own mortality. When Heidegger spoke of the ‘‘call of conscience,’’ he was speaking of the way in which our being mortal summons us to the real and yet incalculable source of our own being. This silent call of conscience is the call to understand oneself as Da-sein. An original ethics starts then not with the notion of a subject and of agency but with this radicalized moment disclosed by our own mortality, our relation to both time and history. 6. The knowing that defines an original ethics is not the knowing of techne¯. Indeed, the first step toward opening the possibility of such an ethics begins with a critique of techne¯ and of the notion that thinking is a technique. Nothing could be further from the sense of original ethics than the notion that ‘‘application’’ was a problem for ethical reflections. The knowing that characterizes ethical consciousness is distinct both from technical knowing and from theoretical knowing. One might do well simply to say that ethical knowing is understanding. Such, in crude outline, are what I take to be some of the most important trademarks of a possible original ethics that one might glean from Heidegger’s work. I admit both that this list is, in the final analysis, simply an assertion and that it is in need of explanation and defense. But, for my purposes here, I do believe it is useful as a way of indicating the broad contours of what might be the task assigned to ethics after Heidegger. Before I turn to Gadamer’s work on that task, one more point needs to be stressed about the possibility of an original ethics that might be drawn from Heidegger’s own work, namely, that for Heidegger, all talk of ethics is premature and must begin with a critique of the present historical moment. History has placed a new burden on ethical reflection. For Heidegger, this burden is experienced first in the peculiar distress of our age, namely, the lack of history. It is a quite unusual form of distress. Distress is usually something felt as a discomfort of which one is quite conscious, such as shoes that do not fit, but the distress of the present age, according to Heidegger, is that we lack a consciousness of our distress, and the simplest explanation for this is that we lack a historical consciousness. Our age is defined by forgetting, and what has been forgotten most of all is history 42

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itself, that is, the region of that which summons memory. Reawakening this historical consciousness is the first step in recovering the possibility of an original ethics. Ethical consciousness begins not as an experience of values and duties but as historical consciousness. It is no accident then that the great hallmark of hermeneutics is precisely such a historical consciousness.

 Let me return to Gadamer by suggesting both that the hermeneutical situation that he outlines mirrors precisely the original ethical situation and that the ‘‘hermeneutic subject’’ is, in the end, quite distinct from the metaphysical conception of the subject. I also want to suggest that the hermeneutic situation mirrors precisely the original problematic that Heidegger suggests is captured by Heraclitus’s saying etho¯s anthro¯poi daimo¯n. One might put the point in other words and say that Gadamer has indeed thought the being that we are as Da-sein, as the being for whom all questions are matters of understanding and for whom the question describes the character of all being. The general feature of understanding, which is the knowing that characterizes the hermeneutic subject, is that the way in which one knows (as well as what one knows) is able to have an effect on the subject and the subject’s way of doing things, that is, on one’s etho¯s. The Greeks had a very interesting word that one can find in Plutarch and that exists in the form of a noun, a verb, and an adjective. It is the word ¯ethopoiein, which means making ¯ethos, producing ¯ethos, transforming one’s way of being, one’s mode of existence.10 I would like to argue now that understanding, the real telos of the hermeneutic subject as Gadamer describes it, is ethopoietic11 since understanding is a knowledge that, in the end, governs action. It is also a knowledge that, once learned, cannot be forgotten, since it becomes an element of the one who knows. Obviously, this is a sweeping claim that I cannot defend in all proper detail. What I propose to do instead is to discuss how it is that the hermeneutic sense of historical consciousness does indeed begin to work against the forgetting that characterizes the present age and how this countermovement opens up ethical possibilities otherwise forgotten. In the end, I will need to show how historical consciousness opens up on the field of ethical life and how such consciousness returns us to the sources of ethical life. That will be how I conclude. Here I will begin with a simpler set of remarks about the conditions requisite for historical consciousness. Two conditions must be met for there to be even the possibility of history: there must be both memory and writing. Memory is, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, ‘‘the womb of history,’’12 and writing constitutes the historical object and will, as Plato tells it in the Phaedrus, ‘‘teach forgetfulness Dennis J. Schmidt

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[mathonton lethen] in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory.’’13 Though it might well be the case that writing enables forgetting, without writing, without texts, history would not happen for us, since oral traditions do not have the same character as written traditions. This of course means that forgetting will be the ground, the very possibility, of memory. This is also why texts carry the deepest injunction of memory as their secret: they carry the need to be reanimated, to be understood. Every text is at war with the forgetfulness that belongs to it. As Gadamer puts it, ‘‘The written word and what partakes of it . . . is the intelligibility of mind transferred to the most alien medium. Nothing is so purely the trace of the mind as writing, but nothing is so dependent on the understanding mind either.’’14 History depends on textuality, on what Gadamer describes as the ‘‘transformation into a form [Verwandlung ins Gebilde].’’15 I will not rehearse Gadamer’s analysis of this transformation, except to note that key to that analysis is what he refers to as the ‘‘ideality’’ of the word, that is, the startling capacity of the word to give the illusion of arresting time itself.16 Thanks to this ideality of the word, history happens in the form of a text, and because it has been transformed into a ‘‘form,’’ history is able to extend beyond the reach of memory. It is able to found history. Thus exceeding the life of memory, history is also able to become an abstraction, an object, and in becoming this, history itself is lost. What is left is the simple representation of history. Or, as Heidegger might put it, when history is thus objectified, what is left is the numbing distress of the lack of history. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is, as we all know, devoted to the work of memory. That is, it is centered on the reanimation of history that comes to us in the form of a text. This memory work is, however, not practiced for its own sake but must be seen as itself in the service of understanding. Early in Wahrheit und Methode, Gadamer gives an account of what he means by memory, saying that the nature of memory is not rightly understood if it is regarded merely as a general talent or capacity. Keeping in mind, forgetting, and recalling belong to the historical constitution of man and are themselves part of his history. . . . Memory must be formed; for memory is not memory for anything and everything. One has a memory for some things, and not for others; one wants to preserve one thing in memory and banish another. It is time to see memory as an essential element of the finite historical being of man.17 Memory, like writing, has a task, a goal, one that is intelligible only in the light of understanding. From this point of view, it is not difficult to see that memory is obliged.18 But, of course, the question is, to what? 44

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Shortly after he discusses the phenomenon of memory, Gadamer follows Hermann von Helmholtz and suggests how it is that memory, properly developed, leads to tact. I do not intend to follow that discussion, except to note how it is that memory is itself instructive. In other words, memory, not simply the content of memories but memory itself, educates. But about what? And how does this happen? That the phenomenology of memory is a complex matter—involving the question of the image, the question of mimesis and repetition, as well as questions about presence and absence—is clear and does not need to be rehearsed here, since my present agenda concerns how it is that memory, this womb of history, opens the possibility of an original ethics.19 To do this, I need to ask what it is that memory as such teaches. I begin with Aristotle’s comment that ‘‘all memory is of the past’’20 and with an observation about the ambition of all memory, namely, that it be faithful to the past.21 One way to interpret this truth of memory is to find a special kinship between memory and death. This kinship is well recognized. It is also the source of much controversy. Plato finds the emphasis on this kinship between memory and death to be at the root of what he finds so objectionable about poets, especially Homer, for whom this kinship is definitive of the stories he tells. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel too finds this struggle of memory and death to be at the heart of the dialectic. Sigmund Freud of course makes it one of the chief keys to our psychic lives. Heidegger calls mourning ‘‘heilig.’’ Jacques Derrida too privileges it, finding in the work of mourning the summit of the possibilities of memory. We already find this kinship of memory and death figured in the Greek imagination as Hades, where the bond between the ambition of memory and death is worked out. There is a ritual that enabled the living to communicate with the dead: one fed the dead the blood of life. Once this was done, so long as the blood flowed, the dead could tell their stories to the living. In short, what was needed to communicate with the dead, to do the work of memory, was the gift of life. One might say that this ritual was a way of suggesting that the bond between memory and death, which is so obvious, could be completed and enacted only by establishing the bond between memory and life. If the task of memory is, in the end, to confront death, one can carry out this task only by recognizing that the deepest impulse of memory is drawn from life. This is something I believe that Gadamer knew, and this knowledge animates his understanding of the task of a philosophical hermeneutics. I would also add that this is what separates him from Heidegger and Derrida, who are otherwise closest to him. Indeed, it is striking how few the Dennis J. Schmidt

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references to mourning are in Gadamer’s work, how little death is privileged for Gadamer in the way it is in both Heidegger and Derrida. One finds instead a clear and abiding sense that memory—to borrow Kant’s phrase from another context—‘‘quickens the feeling of life.’’ The work of memory, the fundamental work of hermeneutics, is to give life again and in so doing to let history happen. Gadamer gives some indication of this when he speaks of reading a text, by saying that ‘‘in deciphering and interpreting it, a miracle takes place: the transformation of something alien and dead into total contemporaneity and familiarity.’’22 One might say that the real obligation of memory is to life. Even more, one begins here to see what it is that memory as such, memory that has earned the honor of the name, teaches: it teaches what life needs and what life can give. The simple act of reading, of reviving a text, the elemental hermeneutic act, always, when done properly, teaches this secret of memory and so lets history happen again. Gadamer’s great gift as a reader, his astonishing capacity to bring a text to life, was deeply related to his great and deep affection for life itself.

 But what does this have to do with my argument that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics outlines, at bottom, something like what Heidegger called an ‘‘original ethics’’? I have already argued that Gadamer’s extensive commentary on ethical texts, the readiness of key hermeneutic notions for ethical interpretations, and his tendency to draw on ethical texts when formulating the elements of hermeneutics all give evidence that philosophical hermeneutics has a natural inclination to ethical concerns. But what about this discussion of memory and life—does it add anything new to this argument? Here I would refer to the great insight of Kant’s third Critique, a text that serves as a pillar in Gadamer’s development of hermeneutics. In the third Critique, when speaking of what is ‘‘quickened’’ with the ‘‘feeling of life,’’ Kant suggests that a sense of the incalculable and a sense of freedom are each deepened. Kant arrives at this insight at the high point of the third Critique, that is, in section 59, where we see how beauty is the symbol of the moral. I think it is no accident that Gadamer concludes Wahrheit und Methode with the remark that the concept of the beautiful ‘‘can be of service to [exposing the universal claim] of hermeneutics.’’23 I do not intend to make this case for Kant, nor do I intend to show the role of the beautiful in these matters, but I do want to suggest that it is precisely these senses—of freedom and of the incalculable—that lie at the bottom of what the hermeneutic relation to the past always revives, and it is these 46

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senses of freedom and of the incalculable that open up the possibility of thinking about ethics from out of its deepest sources. Hermeneutics is, above all else, always a lesson in the finitude of being. Gadamer, like Aristotle, always refuses to absolutize this lesson and to make the finite utterly beyond the reach of memory and of life. Heidegger invariably thought of this finitude of being as a matter of death. Gadamer does indeed recognize this, but he also understands that the real finitude of life is not only found in reflection on our being mortal. In finding that the finitude of life metes itself out in our sense that life is, at bottom, incalculable and free, Gadamer’s hermeneutics draws close to the sources that dispense history and thus finds the possibility of speaking of ethics at all. Responsible thinking does justice to these sources and these senses. Among the great merits of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the way in which it persistently reminds us of the limits of what can be understood—of the past, of the other, even of ourselves—and this reminder is itself a sort of call. One might rightly describe this as the call of memory, or even the call of history. It is not difficult to see how this opening up of history is, simultaneously, the opening of the self to itself. The work of memory, which revives the possibility of history, is, at the same time, the work that educates me about myself. When its work is well done, when it remembers that it too arises out of forgetting, memory does not supply the illusion that I understand the past or that I have surpassed what animated the past. Rather, it disrupts the certainty that I might otherwise have— even about myself. This hermeneutic work of memory is thus ethopoietic. But perhaps it is best to describe this call that the hermeneutic experience issues as the call of life itself. I am not sure that it is quite the same as what Heidegger once described as the ‘‘call of conscience,’’ but I am sure that this call of life itself comes very close to opening up what Heidegger suggested belongs to an original ethics. There is no code of rules, no law or imperative that one can find here. No duty, no set of values, no standards of good and evil, no laying down of the law. In short, nothing of what might commonly pass for an ethics. What one does find is a sense of the unpresentable, unsayable, incalculable, and, in the final analysis, the free. One arrives at what Friedrich Schelling called the ‘‘deepest center of life,’’ that is, the freedom that I am. And one finds the obligation of memory to revive this sense, which is, in the end, the sense of life. That is the point at which talk of ethics—original or otherwise—can finally begin.

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4

Ethical Experience, Ethical Subjectivity SIMON CRITCHLEY

Ethical Experience For me, philosophy does not begin, as ancient tradition related by Aristotle contends, in an experience of wonder (thaumazein) at the fact that things (nature, the world, the universe) are, but rather with the indeterminate but palpable sense that something desired has not been fulfilled, that a fantastic effort has failed. One feels that things are not, or at least not the way we expected or hoped they might be. Philosophy begins in disappointment. Although there might well be precursors, I see this as a specifically modern conception of philosophy. To give it a name and date, one could say that it is a conception of philosophy that follows from Immanuel Kant’s Copernican turn, namely, that the great metaphysical dream of the soul moving frictionless toward knowledge of itself, thingsin-themselves, and God is just that, a dream. Absolute knowledge or a direct ontology of things as they are is decisively beyond the ken of fallible, finite creatures such as ourselves. An insistent theme of my work is that human beings are exceedingly limited creatures, a mere vapor or virus can destroy us. As Blaise Pascal said, we are the weakest reed in nature and this fact requires an acknowledgment that is very reluctantly given. Our culture is endlessly beset with Promethean myths of overcoming the human condition, whether through the fantasy of artificial intelligence or through contemporary delusions about cloning and genetic manipulation. We seem to have enormous difficulty in accepting our limitedness, our finiteness, and this failure is a cause, in my view, of much tragedy. 51

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One could give an entire taxonomy of disappointment, but the two forms of disappointment that concern me most urgently in my work are religious and political. These forms of disappointment are not entirely separable and continually leak into one another. Indeed, ethical and religious categories are rightly difficult to distinguish at times, and in discussions of ethics we often have recourse to religious categories, whether Christian, Judaic, or something else. The experience of religious disappointment provokes the potentially abyssal question, If the legitimating theological structures and religious belief systems in which people like us believed are no longer believable, if, to coin a phrase, God is dead, then what becomes of the question of the meaning of life? It is this question that provokes the visit of what Friedrich Nietzsche refers to as the uncanniest of guests: nihilism. Nihilism is the breakdown of the order of meaning, where all that we previously imagined as a divine, transcendent basis for moral valuation has become meaningless. Nihilism is this declaration of meaninglessness, a sense of indifference, directionlessness, or, at its worst, despair that can flood into all areas of life. For some, this is the defining experience of youth— witness the deaths of numerous young romantics, whether John Keats, Sid Vicious, or Kurt Cobain—for others it lasts a whole lifetime. The philosophical task set by Nietzsche and followed by many others in the Continental tradition is how to respond to nihilism, or better, how to resist nihilism. For me, philosophical activity, the free movement of thought and critical reflection, is defined by the militant resistance to nihilism. That is, philosophy is defined by the thinking through of the fact that the basis of meaning has become meaningless. Our devalued values require what Nietzsche calls revaluation or transvaluation. All the difficulty here consists in thinking through the question of meaning without bewitching ourselves with new and exotic forms of meaning, with imported brands of existential balm, the sort of thing that Nietzsche called ‘‘European Buddhism.’’ However, this essay is concerned with the other major form of disappointment that interests me, political disappointment. In the latter, the sense of something lacking or failing arises from the realization that we inhabit a violently unjust world, a world defined by the horror of war, a world where, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky says, blood is being spilled in the merriest way, as if it were champagne. Such an experience of disappointment is acutely tangible at the present moment, with the corruption and corrosion of established political structures and an unending war against terror where the moods of entire populations are controlled through a politics of fear. The experience of political disappointment provokes the 52

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question of justice and, to my mind, the need for an ethics or what others might call normative principles that might enable us to face and face down the present political situation. This is not the only option offered up by the present situation. This is why I mentioned religious disappointment and the problem of nihilism. Keeping that problem in mind, I think that the present can provoke coherent, but in my view deeply misguided, responses that we might describe as ‘‘passive nihilism’’ and ‘‘active nihilism.’’ The passive nihilist looks at the world from a certain distance and finds it meaningless. Scornful of the pretensions of liberal humanism, with its metaphysical faith in progress, improvement, and the perfectibility of humankind—a belief that it claims is held with the same dogmatic assurance as that with which Christianity was held in Europe until the late eighteenth century—the passive nihilist concludes that we are simply animals, and rather nasty aggressive primates at that, what we might call homo rapines, rapacious animals. Rather than acting in the world and trying to transform it, the passive nihilist simply focuses on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for perfecting himself, oneself, whether through discovering one’s inner child, manipulating pyramids, writing pessimistic-sounding essays, taking up yoga, or whatever. At its best, in the face of the increasing brutality of reality, the passive nihilist tries to achieve a mystical stillness, calm contemplation, ‘‘European Buddhism.’’ The active nihilist also finds everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and contemplating, he tries to destroy this world and bring another into being. The history of active nihilism is fascinating, and a consideration of it would take us back into various utopian, radical political, and even terrorist groups, from Fourierist utopian phalansteries of free love and leisure to late-nineteenth-century anarchism, through to the Promethean activism of bolshevism, futurism, and situationism. At the present time, however, the quintessence of the active nihilist is al-Qaeda, this covert and utterly postmodern quasi-corporation outside of any state control, which uses the technological resources of capitalist globalization (elaborate and coded forms of communication, the speed and fluidity of financial transactions, and obviously transportation) against that globalization. The aim of the destruction of the World Trade Center was the initiation of a new series of religious wars. I am sadder than I can say that this aim has been successful. The logic of al-Qaeda is that the modern world, the world of capitalism, liberal democracy, and secular humanism, is meaningless and that the only way to remake meaning is through acts of spectacular destruction, acts that it is no underestimate to say have redefined the contemporary world and made the pre-9/11 world seem remote and oddly quaint. Simon Critchley

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Although they are opposed, both active and passive nihilism are Siamese twins of sorts, as they both agree on the meaninglessness of reality, or rather its essential unreality, which inspires either passive withdrawal or violent destruction. I will be following a different path. It seems to me that we have to think through and think out of the situation in which we find ourselves (in passing, I think the old Sartrean category of situation has become increasingly pressing in thinking about the present). We have to resist and reject the temptation of nihilism and face up to the hard reality of the world. What does that reality show? It shows violent injustice here and around the world, it shows growing social and economic inequalities here and around the world, it shows that the distinction between what goes on here and around the world is increasingly fatuous. It shows, in my parlance, massive political disappointment. It shows that because of corruption, corrosion, and fatigue, the institutions of liberal democracy are not in the best of health. It shows populations governed by fear, in particular, fear of outsiders, whose current name is ‘‘immigrants,’’ ‘‘refugees,’’ or ‘‘asylum seekers,’’ populations turning inward toward some reactionary self-conception, which is something happening in a frightening manner all across Europe at present. It is here that we have to recognize the force of al-Qaeda’s position and its diagnosis of the present. In a word, secular liberal democracy simply doesn’t motivate subjects sufficiently. On the contrary, the political institutions of the Western democracies at this point in time appear strangely demotivating. There is increasing talk of a democratic deficit, of an increasing feeling of the irrelevance of traditional politics to the lives of citizens. But more than that, I think there is a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democracy, where people experience the norms that govern contemporary society as external to their subjectivity. Whether it is talk of interest maximization or even certain forms of human-rights talk, norms are experienced as externally binding rather than internally compelling. Secular liberal democracy simply doesn’t seem to motivate subjects sufficiently. On the contrary, returning to active and passive nihilism, I think that what motivates subjects are frameworks of belief that call that secular project into question. Love it or hate it, one has to recognize that there is something utterly motivating about the Islamist worldview, but the source of motivation is metaphysical or theological. What is most depressing about the many depressing features of the current U.S. administration is the sort of metaphysical or theological symmetry between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. This is why we have entered a period of new religious war. So let us say that there is a motivational deficit at the heart of contemporary democratic life, which is bound 54

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up with the failure or inadequacy of secular conceptions of morality. What unites active and passive nihilists is a metaphysical or theological nature of the critique of secular democracy, whether that is a jihadist activism or a Buddhistic passivity. I would here agree with my colleague Jay Bernstein in claiming that what is missing or what has been deeply unsuccessful is a wholly secular and motivating conception of morality. Such is the complete immodest intention behind my essay. With the collapse of Marxist (which I separate from Karl Marx) opposition in the West in the 1980s and the increasing distrust of the legitimacy of democratic procedures and the rise of nationalist or theological atavism, there is a need for a new secular and critical vocabulary that attempts to articulate the possibility of commitment and even militancy and addresses the motivational deficit in morals and politics. I would like to imagine a motivating ethics, an ethics that empowers subjects, a political ethics that is able to respond to and possibly transform the situation in which we find ourselves. This brings me to my initial question: if we are going to stand a chance of thinking of an ethics that empowers subjects to political action, a motivating ethics, then we require an answer to what I see as the basic question of ethics. It is to this that I would now like to turn. Approval and Demand How does a self bind itself to whatever it determines to be its good? In my view, this is the fundamental question of ethics. To answer it, we require a description and explanation of the subjective commitment to ethical action. Such is the ambition of this essay. All questions of normative justification, whether with reference to theories of justice, rights, duties, obligations, or whatever, should be referred to as what I call ‘‘ethical experience.’’ I will explain this presently, but my claim is that ethical experience elicits the core structure of moral selfhood, what we might think of as the existential matrix of ethics. As such, and this is what really interests me, ethical experience furnishes an account of the motivational force to act morally, of that by virtue of which a self decides to pledge itself to some conception of the good. My polemical contention is that without a plausible account of motivational force, that is, without a conception of the ethical subject, moral reflection is reduced to the empty manipulation of the standard justificatory frameworks, such as deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics; Kant, Aristotle, and Mill. My argument can be broken down into a meta-ethical and a normative part. I understand meta-ethics to be the inquiry into the nature of ethics and what makes ethics the things that it is, and normative ethics to be the Simon Critchley

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recommendation of a specific conception of morality. On the basis of my meta-ethical argument about ethical experience, which will be illustrated with the example of Kant, I will go on to offer a normative model of ethical subjectivity. What do I mean by ethical experience? I would like to begin by trying to pick out the formal structure of ethical experience, or what, with Dieter Henrich and Jay Bernstein, we can call the grammar of the concept of moral insight.1 First, with the word experience in the ethical domain I do not mean a passive display of external images in the theater of consciousness. Experience is not sheer passivity. Rather, ethical experience is an activity whereby a subject engages in the emergence of new objects for itself. This distinction broadly follows that between Erlebnis and Erfahrung in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, where the latter is the emergence of new, true objects for consciousness. So ethical experience is activity, the activity of the subject. In my view, ethical experience begins with the experience of a demand to which I give my approval. Therefore, there are two key components to ethical experience: approval and demand. Let me begin by unpacking the notion of approval. The claim here is that there can be no sense of the good—however that is filled out at the level of content, and I understand it for the moment in an entirely formal and empty manner—without an act of approval, affirmation, or approbation. That is, the ethical statement ‘‘love thy neighbor as thyself ’’ is of a different order from the epistemic claim that ‘‘I am now seated in a chair.’’ Why? Because my ethical statement implies an approval of the activity of loving one’s neighbor, whereas I can be quite indifferent about the chair I am sitting on. If I say, to use a less common moral example, ‘‘It would be good for parrots to receive the right to vote in elections,’’ then my saying this implies that I approve of this development. In this rough and ready way, we might draw the Kantian distinction between practical reason and theoretical reason, ethics and epistemology. However, this is not to say that approval is absent from epistemic claims or factual statements. One might legitimately object that if I say, ‘‘There is a large portion of Baltic herring on the table,’’ then my saying this implies a tacit approval of that fact, for I am particularly partial to the aforementioned herring. Alternatively, if I say, ‘‘There is a dead rat in my fridge,’’ or, with Inspector Clouseau, ‘‘There is a bomb in my room,’’ then my factual statements imply strong disapproval, a disapproval, moreover, bordering on the moral assertion that it is not good for me to have a rat in my fridge or a bomb in my room. The difference between factual and moral statements with respect to approval is thus a difference of degree and not a difference of kind. My point is simply that there is a difference and that moral statements imply strong approval or disapproval of 56

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the states of affairs under discussion: ‘‘famine relief is essential’’ versus ‘‘charity begins at home,’’ ‘‘abortion is every woman’s right’’ versus ‘‘life is sacred,’’ or ‘‘war is always wrong’’ versus ‘‘war in certain extreme cases is necessary and justified,’’ and so on. However, although the good comes into view only through approval, it is not good by virtue of approval. That approval is an approval of something, namely, a demand that demands approval. In my example, the approval of parrots receiving the right to vote is related to the fact that—at least in my singular moral imagination—parrots make a certain demand, namely, the demand for political representation. Ethical experience is, first and foremost, the approval of a demand, a demand that demands approval. Ethical experience has to be circular, although, one hopes, only virtuously so. Leaving parrots to one side, and turning to the history of philosophy and religion, we can think about how this formal concept of demand can be filled out with various contents. Here is a list of demands for approval: Mosaic law in the Bible, the Good beyond Being in Plato, the resurrected Christ in Saint Paul and Saint Augustine, the Good as the goal of desire for Saint Thomas Aquinas, the practical ideal of generosity for Rene´ Descartes, the experience of benevolence for Francis Hutcheson and of sympathy for Adam Smith and David Hume, the greatest happiness of the greatest number for Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the moral law in Kant, practical faith as the goal of subjective striving in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the abyssal intuition of freedom in Friedrich Schelling, the creature’s feeling of absolute dependency on a creator in Friedrich Schleiermacher, pity for the suffering of one’s fellow human beings in JeanJacques Rousseau or for all creatures in Arthur Schopenhauer, the thought of eternal return in Nietzsche, the ethico-teleological idea in the Kantian sense for Edmund Husserl, the call of conscience in Martin Heidegger, the relation to the Thou in Martin Buber, the claim of the nonidentical in Theodor Adorno, and so on—this list might be extended. The point is that each of these positions is the expression of a demand to which the self gives its approval and that this structure of demand and approval gives the shape of ethical experience. So the essential feature of ethical experience is that the subject of the demand—the moral self— assents to that demand, agrees to finding it good, binds itself to that good, and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that good. I will extend this very short history of ethics with the example of Kant and some contemporary thinkers, but note that my little list has some big gaps, some of which will be discussed presently. Simon Critchley

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What I called above the virtuous circularity of ethical experience raises the question, what comes first, demand or approval? Prima facie, one is perhaps inclined to say that the demand comes first; that is, without some sort of demand there is nothing to approve. This would appear to be true experientially. Let me take two examples: Bob Geldof, the London-based Irish rock star turned activist and philanthropist, and the resurrection of Christ. In late autumn 1984, Bob Geldof experienced the demand of Ethiopian famine victims during a particularly distressing BBC newscast. Approving of this demand, he became subjectively committed to doing something to alleviate their plight, and thus the Band Aid and Live Aid projects were born. Much money was raised, much good was done, and Bob eventually became Sir Bob. Quod erat demonstrandum, for the priority of demand over approval, it would seem. However, another person watching the same newscast as Sir Bob might not have experienced the same demand, or indeed might have experienced no demand at all. If this seems to be an argument from moral callousness, then consider another example, that of Christ’s resurrection. To the believer, the resurrection is a fact, a fact that places a demand on the self, and it is in relation to that demand that Christian subjectivity takes shape. Yet to the nonbeliever, there is just an empty tomb, the grave of the radical rabbi Jesus executed by the occupying Roman authorities. The point is that the demand is not somehow objectively given in the state of affairs. Rather, the demand is only experienced as a demand for the self who approves of it. Therefore, although experientially (in the life of the believer or Sir Bob) it is as if the demand precedes the approval of the demand, one is obliged to conclude that demand and approval are, to use an ugly Heideggerian word, equiprimordial, they arise at the same time. The demand is only a demand for a subject who approves of the demand. Hence, once again, the circularity of ethical experience. Selfhood, Self-Division, Guilt It might already be apparent that my claim about ethical experience being first constituted in a demand that I approve is also a claim about the nature of the self. Let me try to clarify this concept of selfhood or ethical subjectivity by advancing two theses, one—I hope—uncontroversial, and the other a little more controversial. 1. The self is something that shapes itself through its relation to whatever it determines to be its good, whether that is the Torah, the resurrected Christ, the moral law, the community in which it lives, suffering humanity, all God’s creatures, or whatever. That is, if the demand of the good 58

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requires the approval of that demand in order to be experienced as a demand, then that approval is given by a self. Who else could give it? The good is good only insofar as the self approves of it; otherwise, we would either be in the uneasy Rousseauesque dilemma of forcing people to be free or have to accept that moral action consists in the cynical manipulation of norms for which one has no personal commitment, a brutal form of ethical externalism. An ethical subject can be defined as a self relating itself approvingly, bindingly, to the demand of its good. Ethical experience presupposes the existence of an experiencing subject. I hope that is uncontroversial. It is a simple deduction. 2. Now, more controversially, this claim about the relation of presupposition between ethical experience and the subject of that experience can be deepened in the following way. I have argued that the demand of the good requires approval by a self in order to be experienced as a demand. Accordingly, moral life is an aspect of what it means to be a self that can be placed alongside other areas of life: epistemic, aesthetic, political, and so on. So far, so good. However, one can go on and argue more forcefully that this demand of the good founds the self, or better, that the demand of the good is the fundamental principle of the subject’s articulation. What we think of as a self is fundamentally an ethical subject, a self that is constituted in a relation to its good, a self—our self—that is organized around certain core values and commitments. Of course, this is another way of claiming the primacy of practical reason. This second thesis is best argued negatively, through the experience of failure, betrayal, and evil—namely, that if I act in such a way that I know to be evil, then I am acting in a manner destructive of the self that I am, or that I have chosen to be. I have failed myself or betrayed myself. Once again, such a claim is quite formal and does not presuppose any specific content to the good, let alone any moralistic prudishness. For example, my good could be perpetual peace or permanent revolution, merciful meekness or bloody vengeance, the Kantian moral law or the Sadean droit de jouir, where the ‘‘Divine Marquis’’ believed that one’s right to have an orgasm with whomever one chose whenever one felt so inclined required the construction of specifically designated sex houses in the streets of Paris. The point here is that the ethical subject is constituted in relation to a demand that is determined as good, and that this can be felt most acutely when I fail to act in accordance with that demand or when I deliberately transgress it and betray myself. I can be a failing Sadean as much as a failing Kantian. So far, I am talking meta-ethically, not normatively. This is why Plato is perfectly consequent when he claims that vice is destructive of self, the deeper point being that the experience of whatever Simon Critchley

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we determine as vice reveals in a negative profile the self that one has chosen to be. Anyone who has tried—and failed—to overcome some form of addiction will understand what is meant here. Let me take an example close to my own heart, that of smoking. Let us say that having been a committed smoker for most of my adult life, I decide to quit. I might say to myself repeatedly in the manner of a mantra, ‘‘I am a nonsmoker, my conception of the good excludes smoking, which is bad. It killed my father, and I won’t let it kill me. I promised my mother, my sister, and my partner that I would stop.’’ And yet I find myself at a party, perhaps in a strange place at the end of a stressful journey, where I am due to give a lecture on a topic that I find particularly difficult. It is a summer’s evening, the fresh trout at dinner was exquisite, the local wine is pleasingly robust, the company is new and charming. A few drinks later, I am offered and accept a cigarette and enjoy the transgression immeasurably. The following morning I wake up with a throbbing head, a sore throat, and a mind full of self-loathing. In the shower, I convince myself that I can feel a malignant cancerous growth under my left shoulder blade. The ethical subject that I have chosen to be enters into conflict with the self that I am, producing a divided experience of self as self-failure. I fail morally all the time. As will be familiar to many of us, the affect or emotion that accompanies this experience is guilt. Guilt is the affect that produces a certain splitting or division in the subject, something that Saint Paul understood rather well: ‘‘For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.’’2 This experience of selfdivision isthe genesis of the morsus conscientiae, the sting of bad conscience. Nietzsche, who in many ways is the unhappy Siamese twin of Saint Paul, calls bad conscience ‘‘this most uncanny and most interesting plant of all our earthly vegetation.’’3 The guilty conscience is a strange fruit, for Nietzsche a late fruit, and I shall return to the question of split ethical subjectivity below when I turn to that most perfect of Nietzscheans, Emmanuel Levinas. However, the point at issue here is that the phenomenon of guilty conscience reveals—negatively—the fundamentally moral articulation of the self: namely, that ethical subjectivity is not just an aspect or dimension of subjective life but is rather the fundamental feature of what we think of as a self, the repository of our deepest commitments and values. I have argued for two claims, very simple and at this point possibly unpromising claims: first, that to explain how a self binds itself to some conception of the good, we require a theory of ethical experience, an account of the existential matrix of ethics, which I think is based on the

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concepts of approval and demand; and second, that ethical experience presupposes a notion of the ethical subject disposed toward the approved demand of its good. An ethical subject is not just an aspect of being a self but is the fundamental articulation of our subjectivity. I am going to move from the meta-ethical to the normative dimension and construct an account of the ethical subject using concepts from Alain Badiou, Emmanuel Levinas, and Knud Ejler Løgstrup. I hope that this will put some flesh on my theoretical skeleton. Ethical Subjectivity We have to construct an ethical subject. Is this simple? No. Is it likely to be persuasive? Probably not. Then again, I suggested above that moral argumentation is not going to be able to take us the whole way and that where argumentation won’t reach we require something like exhortation or persuasion. I therefore recommend to you most warmly my picture of the ethical subject, but I can’t and shouldn’t try to force you to accept it. Below I take three concepts from three thinkers and then let a fourth raise a question on the problem of sublimation. From Alain Badiou I take the idea of the subject committing itself in fidelity to the universality of a demand that opens in a singular situation but exceeds that situation. What I take from Badiou is a concept of fidelity or commitment, where commitment is to a situated universality. From Knud Ejler Løgstrup I take the idea of what he calls ‘‘the ethical demand’’ and his emphasis on the radical, unfulfillable, and one-sided character of that demand and the asymmetry of the ethical relation that it establishes. From Emmanuel Levinas I try to show how this moment of asymmetry in the description of my relation to the infinite demand of the other’s face becomes what Maurice Blanchot, in a memorable phrase, calls ‘‘the curvature of intersubjective space.’’ Furthermore, this curvature shapes the inner space of subjectivity itself, where the ethical subject is defined in terms of a split between itself and an exorbitant demand that it can never meet, the demand to be infinitely responsible. So my normative claim, if you will, is that the basis of any ethics should be a conception of ethical experience based on the exorbitant demand of infinite responsibility. Not only that, I also recommend that this exorbitant demand of which I approve is that in relation to which the ethical subject should form itself. The subject shapes itself in relation to a demand that it can never meet, which divides and sunders the subject, the experience of what I will call ‘‘heteroaffectivity.’’

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Alain Badiou—Situated Universality Let me begin with Badiou, whose work has only recently been translated and begun to be discussed in the English-speaking world. I am very interested in his work and have a lot of things to say about it, but let me cut to the chase. In his splendid short book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou provides a quite other meaning to ethics by relating it not to abstractions, like God, Man, or the Other, but to concrete situations. In an intriguing echo of Jean-Paul Sartre, the category of situation is at the center of Badiou’s ethical theory. If the problem with the ethics of ‘‘Man’’ or ‘‘the Other’’ is the abstract universality of these concepts, then Badiou’s remedy is not some concrete relativism, but rather what I would call a situated universality, where the subject commits itself ethically in terms of a demand that is received from that situation, for example, a situation of political injustice: a strike, an act of police brutality, a miscarriage of justice. But this demand is not reducible to the situation. It is, rather, a situated demand that is addressed to everyone and hence universal. For example, the demand that flows from the situation of the discriminatory treatment of immigrant workers in Paris by the city authorities is a general claim for equality that exceeds that situation. I could talk a lot more about this example and the work of l’organisation politique around the issue of the sans papiers. However, where one would usually expect to speak about universality as the means of justification for norms of action, what is most provocative about Badiou’s ethics of situations is that he describes it as an ethics of truths (e´thique des ve´rite´s). Truths are understood as durable and nonrelativistic maxims for singular and determinate processes, what Badiou calls ‘‘processes of truth [processus de ve´rite´].’’ To return to the above example, to be committed over a period of time to seeking equal treatment, rights, and benefits for immigrant workers in Paris is a process of truth. Note that true is here being used in a manner close to its root meaning of ‘‘being true to’’ or ‘‘troth,’’ namely, an act of fidelity that is kept alive in the German treu, loyal or faithful. For Badiou, truth is ‘‘the real process of fidelity to an event.’’4 One is true to a demand insofar as one persists in being faithful to its summons. In terms of my theory of ethical experience, Badiou’s ethics is an entirely formal theory, a grammar of moral insight, not a specific determination of the good. However, what is motivating this formalism is a theory of the subject that has strong normative significance—expressed in Badiou’s oft-cited words of Samuel Beckett, ‘‘il faut continuer [one must go on]’’—although the specific content given to the good is subject-relative 62

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and situation-specific. Ethics cannot be based on any pregiven account of the subject, because the subject is not something that one is but something that one becomes. One can speak of the subject in Badiou as a subject-in-becoming only insofar as it shapes itself in relation to the demand apprehended in a situation. Also, the subject is not just the individual, and Badiou’s ethics is not some sort of affirmative solipsism. A subject—say the subject of a political movement or an avant-garde artistic group—can be a collectivity, a group, a plurality of individuals. The structure of ethical experience in Badiou can be seen in a particularly pure form in his 1997 book on Saint Paul, Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme.5 Prima facie, it might well seem odd for a devout atheist like Badiou to concern himself with the founder of the Christian Church, but what interests Badiou in Paul is the connection between the subject and the event. More precisely, Badiou’s question is, What law can structure a subject in relation to an event ‘‘of which the only ‘proof ’ is rightly that a subject declares it [dont la seule ‘preuve’ est justement qu’un sujet le de´clare]’’? Of course for Paul, this event is the resurrection of Christ, something that can only have the status of a fable for an atheist like Badiou. Let me emphasize here, in relation to Badiou’s founding dualism of being and the event (l’eˆtre et l’e´ve´nement), that what interests him is the notion of an event that is not empirically demonstrable in the order of being. The event demands an act of faith that Paul rightly compares to folly. We begin with the experience of a demand or an address, which is the event of grace (charis), and the subject defines itself by approving of this event in a declaration of faith, or what Badiou prefers to call la conviction. The subject defines itself by binding itself approvingly, in trothful truth, to the demand that the event makes on it. For Badiou, but equally for Slavoj Zˇizˇek, it is this feature of Pauline Christianity, its universality based on the situated Faktum of an event that cannot be reduced to any empirical Tatsache, that provides an exemplary figure for contemporary political militantism.6 It is a question of Paul’s activist nomadism against the vast imperial war machine of Rome (and the analogy between the Roman Empire and the contemporary American empire, under attack from barbarians, is clear to see). In a radical distinction from the politics of government and state administration, politics is here understood as a non-state- and non-party-based form of activism that begins from the real situations in which people find themselves. Politics is an activity of thought that is directed to the constructed universality of an event that takes place in a singular situation. Simon Critchley

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I have some reservations about Badiou’s work. They concern his rather dogmatic attempt to exclude religion as one of the conditions for an event (there are only four conditions for the event: mathematics, politics, art, and love), his questionable use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in explaining the relation between subject and event, and a certain heroism of the decision that I detect in Badiou, particularly in his political pronouncements.7 Yet despite these reservations, what grips me in Badiou’s work is his account of the relation of subject to event. His account permits ethics to be approached as a subjective process or, better perhaps, a process of the formation of ethical subjectivity, where a self commits itself with fidelity to a concrete situation, a singular occurrence that places a demand on the self. Yet this emphasis on the singular and the concrete does not entail relativism, but rather a situated universalism where an event can be justified only if it is addressed to all. My commitment to the situation motivates ethical action whose justification exceeds that situation and works to bring about its transformation and amelioration. For me, Badiou’s work allows us to breathe life back into the seemingly caduque category of commitment. In my opinion, Badiou’s ethics goes some way to making up the motivational deficit in morality that is the target of my analysis. Knud Ejler Løgstrup—The Unfulfillable Demand I would now like to turn to Løgstrup. Løgstrup’s relevance for my argument can be rather obviously inferred from the title of his important 1956 book, The Ethical Demand.8 Løgstrup and Levinas are almost exact contemporaries: they both studied at Strasbourg and Freiburg at the same time, and they were both exposed to similar philosophical influences such as Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. In many ways, what makes Løgstrup’s work fascinating is the fact that he presents a rather similar position to Levinas, but from within the Christian tradition. Again, like Levinas, his conception of ethics runs against the current of the major traditions in moral theory, such as Kantianism or any teleological conception of morality, whether utilitarian or Aristotelian. In a Kantian view, I act out of duty for no other reason than duty itself, whereas in a teleological view, I act for the sake of the greatest happiness of the greatest number or some conception of eudaimonia. For Løgstrup, by contrast, what the ethical demand requires is that I act for the sake of this living particular human being in front of me: my neighbor, whether stranger or familiar, friend or foe. Løgstrup’s understanding of Christianity is that the individual relation to God is determined wholly at the point of his relation to the neighbor. Therefore, one’s existence is completely at 64

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stake in the relation to the other person, and to fail the other is to fail that existence irreparably. So what is the ethical demand for Løgstrup? It is Christ’s utterly exorbitant demand in the Sermon on the Mount. Although Løgstrup nowhere cites the scriptural text, I think the following is the passage he has in mind: Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you: That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise upon the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so? Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.9 This is a ridiculous demand! Just consider for a moment what Christ is saying to his audience: you might have heard the wisdom of Leviticus that you should love your neighbor as yourself, but that is not enough; you should also love your enemies, you should love those who curse, despise, hate, and willfully persecute you. One imagines Carl Schmitt’s ears burning. Christ’s argument here is that if you love only those who love you in return, then you are not open to the more radical demand of the stranger, the foreigner, the adversary. If you love only your own brethren, the people of your tribe, nation, or community, then you are no better than the publicans, the publicani, those docile servants of Gentile oppressors who dutifully do whatever the Romans ask of them. What Christ asks of his audience, which is—let it not be forgotten—a Jewish audience, is that they subject themselves to this exorbitant demand if they wish to be truly the children of their Father, God. That is, Christ is asking his audience to be perfect, godlike, ‘‘even as your Father which is in heaven.’’ Of course, such an ethical demand is profoundly paradoxical: can a human being aspire to divine perfection? Obviously not. Yet it is precisely the paradoxical character of the demand that interests Løgstrup, for it demonstrates its radicality. One finds a similar logic in Christ’s arguments Simon Critchley

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about the nature of forgiveness. When he is asked how many times a person should forgive his or her brother, Christ answered, not seven times, but seventy times seven. This is why Løgstrup describes the demand as not just radical but unfulfillable and one-sided. To fulfill the demand would be to become God, which is hardly likely. It is one-sided because it makes an asymmetrical claim—I am not the equal of the demand that is made upon me, and the ethical relation is not a relation of equals. As Løgstrup writes in words that could be those of Levinas, ‘‘Responsibility for the other person never consists in our assuming the responsibility which is his or hers.’’10 Responsibility does not here imply reciprocity. Christ is asking for the impossible; he is articulating a demand that cannot, by definition, be met by fallible, finite human creatures. One might also argue that it is a demand that cannot reasonably be made by one human being to another. This is indeed true; it is utterly unreasonable for one person to demand that another be godlike—unless, of course, that person is God. To the believer, Christ is not just human but also divine and is therefore the living embodiment of the paradox of the finite and the infinite. Does this mean that Løgstrup’s ethics is theological? Does his account of the ethical demand require the acceptance of belief in God, more specifically, the divinity of Jesus Christ? These are much more delicate questions than they might at first appear. Obviously, as I have said, Løgstrup is trying to make sense of the radical ethical demand at the heart of Christ’s teaching. Yet I have also argued that for Løgstrup, the entire meaning of Christianity is that the individual relation to God is determined wholly at the point of his relation to the neighbor. Therefore, to be Christian in this view does not mean subscribing to whatever variety of more or less obscure metaphysical beliefs in the incarnation, resurrection, or whatever. It means rather that one’s entire existence should be organized around the fact of the ethical demand insofar as that demand is enacted in the relation to the other person. In this regard, Løgstrup’s views on Christ’s divinity are extremely interesting. The question of whether it is God himself that we meet in the person of Jesus of Nazareth is something that ultimately, he insists, cannot be decided.11 What interests Løgstrup is not the nicely intractable theological issue of Christ’s divinity, but the fact that Jesus makes an exorbitant demand in an act of preaching, that is, in an address from one individual to another. What we learn from Jesus’ words and works is that our existence should be shaped by the approval of the radical, one-sided, unfulfillable ethical demand of the other and that to fail the other is to fail in our existence. Of course, we are going to fail. That’s the point. 66

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The core of Løgstrup’s teaching is that human morality requires responsivity to the ethical demand, an approval of the demand that is experienced in relation to another living person, the neighbor, whether friend or foe. What this entails, interestingly I think, is that the ethical demand is phenomenologically the same for the secularist and the theist. I experience a radical demand and try to shape my subjectivity in relation to it. Whether the demand ultimately emanates from God, the abyssal void at the heart of being, the fairies at the bottom of my garden, or some other occult source is something we cannot know, for good Kantian reasons. The ultimate metaphysical source of ethical obligation, should there be such a thing, is simply not cognizable. I, however, take the more extreme view that the question of the metaphysical ground or basis of ethical obligation should simply be disregarded as a philosophical wheel spinning with neither friction nor forward movement. Instead, the focus should be on the radicality of the human demand that faces us, a demand that requires phenomenology, not metaphysics. To put it more paradoxically, knowing that there is no God, we have subjected ourselves to the demand to be godlike, knowing that we are sure to fail because of our finite condition. For Løgstrup, as we have seen, to fail to meet the ethical demand of the neighbor is to fail our existence irreparably. We can now see that such failure is inevitable, for we can never hope to fulfill the radicality of the ethical demand. But far from failure being a reason for dejection or disaffection, I think it should be viewed as the condition for both moderation and courage in ethical action. The motto of ethical subjectivity is given by Beckett in Worstward Ho, ‘‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’’12 Emmanuel Levinas—The Split Subject In my rather heterodox view, the basic operation of Levinas’s entire work is the experience of an exorbitant demand that heteronomously determines the ethical subject. This demand is the imperative ‘‘tu ne tueras point [you shall not kill],’’ which is expressed in the resistance of the other’s face. The demand provokes an act of approval on the part of the subject, the words ‘‘me voici [here I am],’’ the Hebrew hinneni of Abraham’s response to the demand of God in Genesis 22. Levinas insists that the subject discovers itself as an object, in the accusative case as he puts it, as interlocuted by the demand of the other. But the Levinasian subject is constituted through an act of approval to a demand to which it is fundamentally inadequate. I am not the equal of the demand that is made upon me. It is this fundamental inadequacy of approval to demand that explains Simon Critchley

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why, for Levinas, the relation to the other is asymmetrical—that is, the subject relates itself to something that exceeds its relational capacity. This is what Levinas paradoxically calls ‘‘le rapport sans rapport [the relation without relation],’’ which is arguably the central concept of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. Yet how can there be a relation between beings that remain absolute within that relation? Logically speaking, this is a contradiction in terms, yet it is precisely such a relation that Levinas wants to describe as ethical. This difficulty can be illuminated by considering the function of the concept of infinity in Levinas’s work. From the late 1950s onward, he describes the ethical relation to the other in terms of infinity. What does this mean? Levinas’s claim is very simple, but even quite sophisticated readers still get it muddled. The idea is that the ethical relation to the other has a formal resemblance to the relation, in Descartes’ Third Meditation, between the res cogitans and the infinity of God. What interests Levinas in this moment of Descartes’ argument is that the human subject has an idea of infinity and that this idea, by definition, is a thought that contains more than can be thought. As Levinas puts it, in what is almost a mantra in his published work, ‘‘In thinking infinity the I from the first thinks more than it thinks.’’13 It is this formal structure of a thought that thinks more than it can think, that has a surplus within itself, that intrigues Levinas, because it sketches the contours of a relation to something that is always in excess of whatever idea I may have of it, that always escapes me. The Cartesian picture of the relation of the res cogitans to God through the idea of the infinite provides Levinas with a picture or formal model of a relation between two terms that is based on height, inequality, nonreciprocity, and asymmetry. As he writes, in a characteristic series of antitheses, ‘‘The idea of the infinite consists precisely and paradoxically in thinking more than what is thought while nevertheless conserving it in its excessive relation to thought. The idea of the infinite consists in grasping the ungraspable while nevertheless guaranteeing its status as ungraspable.’’14 However, Levinas is making no substantive claim at this point; he is not saying that I actually do possess the idea of the infinite in the way Descartes describes; nor is he claiming that the other is God, as some readers mistakenly continue to believe. As Levinas is a phenomenologist, it becomes a question for him of trying to locate some concrete content for this formal structure. Levinas’s major substantive claim, which resounds in different ways throughout his mature work, is that the ethical relation of the self to the other corresponds to this picture, concretely fulfilling this model. One might say that 68

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the ethical relation to the face of the other person is the social expression of this formal structure. Levinas writes, ‘‘The idea of infinity is the social relationship,’’ and again, ‘‘The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face.’’15 Thus, the ethical relation to the other produces what Levinas calls, in a favorite formulation that is rightly emphasized by Blanchot in his writings on Levinas, ‘‘a curvature of intersubjective space.’’16 When I am actually within the ethical relation, I experience the other as the high point of this curvature. Accordingly, the relation can be totalized only by imagining myself occupying some godlike third-person perspective outside the relation. From a Levinasian point of view, this is the common shortcoming of various theories of intersubjectivity. Let us consider those that our French chums call ‘‘les trois H’’: Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. Hegel’s thesis is that subjectivity is constituted through an intersubjective dialectic, namely, the life-and-death struggle of master and slave. For Husserl, my full constitution as an ego is dependent on a relation to the alter ego, whereas for Heidegger, Dasein is Mitsein, what it means to be a person is indistinguishable from my being with others. For each of ‘‘les trois H,’’ the relation between self and other is a relation of equality, symmetry, and reciprocity. Levinas’s polemical point is that the relation between myself and the other only appears as a relation of equality, symmetry, and reciprocity from a neutral third-person perspective that stands outside that relation. When I am within the relation, the other is not my equal, and my responsibility toward the other is infinite. It is such a nondialectical model of intersubjectivity that Levinas has in mind, I think, with the notion of the ‘‘relation without relation.’’ The picture of ethical experience that I am trying to elicit can be explored by picking out one item in the philosophical vocabulary of Levinas’s later work: trauma. What is trauma? Trauma has both a physiological and a psychological meaning, denoting a violence effected by an external agency, which can be a blow to the head as much as the shock of emotional bereavement. As such, a trauma is a heteronomous fact that comes from outside the self without warning—for example, a terrorist explosion or an earthquake. Whence arises the riddle of traumatic neurosis. Traumatic neurosis is the disorder that arises after the experience of a trauma, where its effect lives on at the heart of the subject. Like other neuroses, it is compulsive and repetitive: the original scene of the trauma is obsessively and unconsciously repeated, perhaps in nightmares or insomnia. It is the phenomenon of traumatic neurosis, in the form of shell shock or war neurosis, that causes Sigmund Freud such theoretical difficulties in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—if there is a compulsion to repeat Simon Critchley

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at work in traumatic neurosis that repeats the origin of trauma, how can traumatic neurosis be consistent with the thesis of Freud’s early work that dreams and other psychic phenomena are wish fulfillments governed by the pleasure principle? It cannot, and it is on the basis of the clinical evidence of traumatic neurosis that Freud is led to introduce the repetition compulsion and to engage in the wild speculation that he calls ‘‘the death drive.’’ In his later work, Levinas constructs what he calls an ‘‘ethical language,’’ composed of several strange, wonderful, and hyperbolical terms: persecution, obsession, substitution, hostage, and trauma (this is an ethical language!). Levinas makes the extreme claim that my relation to the other is not some benign benevolence or compassionate care but an obsessive experience of a responsibility that persecutes me with its sheer weight. I am the other’s hostage, taken by the other and prepared to substitute myself for any suffering and humiliation that the other may undergo. I am responsible for the persecution I undergo and even for my persecutor, a claim that, given the experience of Levinas’s family and people during the Second World War, is nothing less than breathtaking. In a number of texts from the late 1960s and 1970s, Levinas describes my relation of infinite responsibility to the other as a trauma. I want to focus on the notion of trauma in order to bring out the links between Levinas and the psychoanalytic dimensions of ethical experience. Although Levinas was extremely hostile toward psychoanalysis and largely ignorant of it (‘‘la psychanalyse . . . c’est la pornographie n’est-ce pas?’’), I would like to redescribe Levinas in psychoanalytic terms because those terms are secular and nonmetaphysical. For Levinas, the ethical demand is a traumatic demand; it is something that comes from outside the subject, from a heteronomous source, but leaves its imprint within the subject. At its heart, the ethical subject is marked by an experience of hetero-affectivity: the most inside of my inside is somehow outside; the core of my subjectivity is exposed to otherness. Ethical experience in Levinas is rooted in the claim that responsibility begins with a subject approving of a demand that it can never meet, a one-sided, radical, and unfulfillable demand in Løgstrup’s sense. Levinas writes, ‘‘To be I signifies not being able to escape responsibility’’; or again, ‘‘to be a ‘self ’ is to be responsible before having done anything.’’17 I, as it were, decide to be a subject that I know I cannot be. I give myself up to a demand that makes an imprint upon me without my ever being able to understand it. ‘‘I’’ am an existential exaggeration. In language closer to Levinas, this is another way of thinking about what he means by the claim that ethics is not ontology. Arguably, the main thesis of Levinas’s work is 70

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that the ethical relation to the other is not one of comprehension and cannot therefore be subsumed within Heideggerian Seinsversta¨ndnis, understanding of being. We can now see how this thesis looks from the perspective of ethical subjectivity: the relation to the other lives on as an imprint in the subject to which it responds but which the subject cannot comprehend. That is, there is something at the heart of me that arguably makes me the ‘‘me’’ that I am but is quite opaque to me. There is a moment of irreducible facticity at the heart of the subject. In my view, and this is a somewhat heterodox claim, the key concept in Levinas’s work is ethical subjectivity. The precondition for the ethical relation to the other is found in Levinas’s picture of the ethical subject. It is because of a disposition toward alterity at the heart of the subject that relatedness to the other is possible. This is why I tend to privilege Levinas’s later work Otherwise than Being over his earlier work Totality and Infinity, for it is here that ethics is worked out as a theory of the subject, what he calls ‘‘the other within the same.’’ In terms of the overall normative argument of my essay, commitment or fidelity (Badiou) to the unfulfillable, one-sided, and radical demand that pledges me to the other (Løgstrup) can now be seen to be the structure of ethical subjectivity itself (Levinas). The ethical subject is defined by the approval of a traumatic heteronomous demand at its heart. But, importantly, the subject is also divided by this demand; it is constitutively split between itself and a demand that it cannot meet, but which is that by virtue of which it becomes a subject. The ethical subject is a split subject. What are we to do with this split? Are we to repair this tear at the subject’s heart or bear this tear?

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5

9/11: America and the Politics of Innocence DEBRA B. BERGOFFEN

On the one hand it seems obvious—righting the wrong suffered by the innocent victim is a necessary ingredient of a politics of justice. The agreed-upon justice of the allied cause in World War II and the agreedupon injustice of the failure to intervene in the genocide in Rwanda testify to the rightness of this ethical-political intuition. The Geneva Conventions established after World War II, the U.N. war-crimes tribunals, and the human-rights treaties being negotiated at U.N.-sponsored meetings speak powerfully to the necessity of translating our ethical obligation to the innocent victim into concrete political practices. Things become difficult, however, when we bring the name Hiroshima into the discussion and when we attend to the debates surrounding the U.N.-NATO intervention in the genocidal violence that raged in the former Yugoslavia. They become even more difficult when we examine the ways in which the ethical figure of the innocent victim has been translated into a post-9/11 American politics of innocence. This essay focuses on this post-9/11 American translation. It is premised on the idea that a politics of justice is possible and argues that a politics of justice must take up the difficult task of translating the ethical into the political. I lean on Jacques Lacan for identifying these difficulties and turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty for ways to negotiate them. Most of this essay examines the ways in which the post-9/11 American politics of innocence is a case study of how the imaginary’s seduction of the symbolic

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infects the translation of the ethical into the political and betrays its ethical aims. The point of the discussion, however, is to use the example of post-9/11 American politics to examine how the tension between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real can become the ground of a politics of justice. Beginning with 9/11 I begin concretely and personally. Like most Americans, I have a vivid memory of the morning of September 11. I was listening to a book on tape while driving to school. When I shut off the engine, the tape popped out and the news came on. I could not believe what I was hearing. I thought it was a version of the ‘‘War of the Worlds’’ radio hoax. George Mason University is about fifteen miles from the Pentagon. By the time I got from the parking lot to my office, students were already at my door coming to say that they were leaving campus to try to find out if friends and family were alive, wounded, or dead. Confusion, fear, uncertainty best describe those early hours after the attack. There was also a surreal sense of awe. We played and replayed the images of the World Trade Center towers going up in flames, not quite believing what we were seeing. As things calmed down, I found my responses to 9/11 mirroring my reactions to the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine shootings. I also found myself at odds with most Americans. After Oklahoma City and Columbine, I asked the questions other Americans were asking: How could this happen here? What could have provoked these attacks? Are they isolated, irrational acts of mentally unstable people, or is there something in the American way that breeds this violence? The country engaged in a collective soul searching. The immediate post-9/11 reaction was different. Any sort of soul searching was met with anger. Any questioning of our foreign policy was deemed unpatriotic. The Oklahoma City perpetrators were identified as members of right-wing extremist militias. The 9/11 men were called terrorists. The Oklahoma City bombers were arrested, tried, and convicted. Our immediate response to 9/11 was to seek revenge. The presidential debates of 2004 are instructive in this regard. Neither George W. Bush nor John Kerry spoke of criminal proceedings for Osama bin Laden or his followers. The issue between them concerned the proper strategies for finding and killing bin Laden and his al-Qaeda recruits. Following 9/11, it was a matter of war. No war on the militia movement ensued after

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Oklahoma City.1 After the grieving and the mourning, the life of the nation went on as usual. After 9/11, the grieving and mourning took on melancholic forms. In Oklahoma City and Columbine the crime is identified with a place and innocence remained with the victims. The crime of the twin towers and the Pentagon is identified with a date and the innocence of the victims has spilled over into the nation. Post-9/11, America became a nation of innocence. Time and the Other I think we have to pay attention to the fact that we have marked the crime of 9/11 temporally rather than spatially, and to the fact that the perpetrators of the crime are identified as the Other in the full Hegelian-Lacanianexistential sense of the term, in order to make sense of this phenomenon of American declared innocence. In marking the crime in terms of time rather than space, we marked 9/11 as an event—a break in time. Coming so close to the beginning of a new century, a beginning that in many quarters was anticipated with great anxiety, 9/11 could be seen as embodying the threat posed by the millennial moment. Prior to 9/11, the threat of the end seemed not to have materialized. The computers did not crash. The world did not end. Post-9/11, the threat became real. The sun kept rising, the computers kept running, but the idea that our way of life could—might—be destroyed made the idea of the end real again. Had those planes been commandeered by American-born neo-Nazis, 9/11 would have been understood as an American tragedy, not as a cataclysmic event of world historical significance. Experienced by Americans as an act of the Other, however, 9/11 marked the beginning of the time of the threat of the Other. We now saw ourselves as engaged in a Manichaean struggle for the future. As developed in the dialectical, psychoanalytic, and existential literatures, the question of the Other is linked to the question of violence. Whether it is the aggression that Jacques Lacan identifies as the necessary corollary of the mirror stage, the aggression of the fight to the death and the oppression of the master–slave relationship that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel cites as necessary stages in the dialectic of self-consciousness, or the aggression of the look that Jean-Paul Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness, the Other is positioned as the one who destabilizes my experience of myself as occupying a secure and legitimate place in the world. The analyst, the phenomenologist of the Spirit, and the existentialist read the reaction to the threat of the Other differently. For Lacan it is a 74

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protective move in defense of the fortress imaginary ego; for Hegel it is a declaration of my status as the absolute subject; for Sartre it is an affirmation of my existential freedom. All these readings, however, share a common intuition: the meaning of the relationship between the subject and the Other, and aggression, concerns the refusal of the subject to accept its position in an intersubjective world as a one among many. Recognizing this refusal, none of these readings suggest that the Other represents a violation of, or a threat to, my innocence. The violence engendered by the presence of the Other is a violence born of competing claims to subjectivity and of mutual (unwelcome) experiences of vulnerability. Though all these literatures recognize this violence as an inevitable feature of the human situation, none gives violence the last word. Each speaks of the possibility of an ethics and politics that recognizes an alternative relationship to the Other: a Lacanian ethics-politics that speaks of and for the desire of subject rather than of the demands of and for the ego; a Hegelian ethics-politics of mutual recognition; a Beauvoirian ethicspolitics of ambiguity and appeal. In each case, transcending the violence of the self–other relationship requires that I recognize the Other’s destabilizing effects on me as the legitimate meaning of intersubjectivity. It also requires that I acknowledge the ways in which I destabilize the Other in its subjectivity and that I accept that I am experienced by the Other as a threat. If Hegel, Lacan, and Sartre are correct, my threat to the Other is not found in what I do. It inheres in the very fact that I am. From this perspective, we are all parties to the violence. No one is innocent. From this perspective, renouncing the claim to innocence is essential to the project of the ethical, for in claiming the mantle of innocence, I position myself as absolutely wronged. I return myself to the original position of the absolute subject who anchors the violence of intersubjectivity. Ontologically, to refuse the mantle of innocence is to accept the inevitability of the destabilizing threat I pose to the Other and to recognize the legitimacy of the Other’s destabilizing effects on my claims to absolute subjectivity. To say that no one is ontologically innocent is not to say that existentially there are no innocent victims. It is not to suggest that a politics that speaks for the innocent victim always condemns us to an interminable cycle of violence. It does suggest that the unproblematic innocence of the passengers in the planes and the people in the twin towers and the Pentagon who were murdered on 9/11 becomes problematic when it invokes an ontology of innocence to produce a politics of innocence that releases the subject of this politics (in this case the United States) from the ethical requirements of intersubjectivity. Debra B. Bergoffen

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American Innocence Just as the turn of the century set the frame for the American experience of 9/11 as a cataclysmic event, the post-9/11 American declaration of innocence also treads prepared ground. It draws on a powerful myth of the American psyche. According to Benjamin Barber, who cites Thomas Paine, America’s founders saw themselves creating a city on a hill that would be free of European corruption.2 The United States saw itself as a place of innocence and renewal that would inaugurate a new history. This myth of innocence, according to Barber, relied on another myth, the myth of independence. America was free from European corruption because it was free from European influence. An ocean and military power guaranteed its autonomy and mission. Barber argues that 9/11 shattered the American myths of innocence and independence. He says that we must now face the reality of global anarchy.3 Contrary to Barber, I think 9/11 shattered the American myth of invulnerability but not its myth of innocence. The attacks made it clear that being the most powerful nation on earth does not guarantee our security. That was the point the attackers intended to make and they made it. They also intended to make another point: that our values are corrupt and evil. Here they failed, for instead of causing Americans to question their values, the attacks set off a wave of patriotic and nationalist selfaffirmations. Our innocence was reaffirmed. If it could no longer be anchored in our autonomy, it could still be secured in our sense of (self-) righteousness. However vulnerable it might have now experienced itself, America still saw itself as carrying a message of redemption. The changed status of the messenger of redemption did not change America’s judgment about the righteousness of its message. Spinning the existential thread of the innocence of the victims into the weave of an ontological cloak of innocence, we have pursued a politics of innocence that refuses to recognize the subject status of the Other. This politics is written in the torture memos of the Justice Department, the White House, and the Pentagon. It has materialized in the prisoner abuses in Guanta´namo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Sifting It through Lacan The Lacanian principles of the symbolic and its limits help us understand why this politics of innocence is a recipe for injustice. Psychoanalytic discourse speaks of human finitude and contingency in terms of the experiences of desire, lack, negativity, and uncertainty. It also attends to the 76

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ways in which we refuse these experiences and defend ourselves against them. Lacanian psychoanalysis is particularly attentive to the ways in which these experiences and their repression are played out in language. Establishing a distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real, where the symbolic is positioned as rescuing us from the psychotic threat of the imaginary, and the Real is identified as that which resists the megalomaniac claims of the symbolic, Lacan also speaks of the ways in which the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real intersect. No domain is isolated from the effects of the Other. The ethics of psychoanalysis, as an ethics of our desire, concerns the negotiation of these distinctions and intersections. It is a matter of recognizing the ways in which the limits established by these domains and the flows among them negotiate the finitude and contingency of our condition. Yannis Stavrakakis finds that Slavoj Zˇizˇek best describes this ethical subjective position when he writes, ‘‘The only true ethical stance is to assume fully the impossible task of symbolizing the real, inclusive of its necessary failure.’’4 We are linguistic beings. The symbolic is our home. It is also our seduction. For as we experience the power of the symbolic to negotiate the real, we come to believe in the power of the symbolic to adequately represent and control the real. This belief is a residue of the imaginary; for so long as we lived in the domain of the imaginary, we believed that we were absolute, both in our status as desiring subjects and in our status as absolute objects of the (m)Other’s desire. We believed that we knew our desire and that we could secure its object. Seduced by the imaginary promise of the symbolic, we ‘‘forget’’ its limits. We forget that the Real (the object of our desire) is unrepresentable. This forgetting is not innocent. It is a refusal of our contingency, of our lack, of our limits. It is, in short, unethical. A psychoanalytic ethics requires a self-reflexive critical symbolic gesture that recognizes the contingent and transient character of all symbolic constructs. We must refuse phantasmic symbolic constructs and investments.5 We must also recognize the ways in which the imaginary invades the symbolic and transforms it from that which situates our desire within the context of the Real to that which promises to fulfill the demands of desire. Moving this psychoanalytic understanding of the ethical into the domain of the political requires, Stavrakakis tells us, ‘‘the articulation of symbolic constructs that will include a recognition of the real limits of the symbolic and will attempt to symbolically institutionalize real lack.’’6 Reading the American declaration of innocence within the context of the Lacanian understanding of the ethical requirements of the political, Debra B. Bergoffen

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we see that this myth of innocence invests the symbolic with a purity reminiscent of the imaginary promise of perfection. The truth of the symbolic, its impurity, imperfection, incompleteness, is refused. There is no recognition of the failure of the symbolic to fully represent the Real in the symbolic construct of American innocence. There is no room here for critical self-reflection, for the experience of uncertainty, or for the possibility that in representing ourselves to ourselves as innocent, we may be dupes of our desire to be justified rather than responsive to the call for justice embedded in the experience of the limit. Further, in politicizing this phantasmic symbolic construct of innocence—that is, in materializing it in a war against terrorism that refuses to recognize the limits of the rules of war, that rejects civil-liberties restraints on government (the Patriot Act), and that excuses itself from the human-rights strictures of the Geneva Conventions in detention camps and compounds—the American government makes clear its refusal to institutionalize real lack. From this perspective, the American commitment to the seductions of the imaginary makes its commitment to justice all but impossible. Symbolically, institutionalizing real lack never seems to have been considered as a possible response to 9/11—at least not from mainstream America. Outside America, however, the idea of a politics that recognized the limits of the symbolic seemed both possible and practical. When Martin Shaw, viewing the American response to 9/11 from the vantage point of the University of Sussex, writes, ‘‘Although policing and legal actions were the obvious ways of tracking down covert terrorist networks, nothing less than war appeared to satisfy the American need to avenge the terrible wrong and humiliation,’’7 he alerts us to the fact that a war on terrorism was not the obvious response to the 9/11 attacks. He also calls our attention to the ways in which the American decision to initiate a war on terrorism expresses a desire to avenge two things: a terrible wrong and an experience of humiliation. That 9/11 was a terrible wrong needs no explanation. That it was humiliating, however, is less than clear. It seems to me that 9/11 could be experienced as humiliating only by a nation seduced by an imaginary investment in its invincibility. The attacks disrupted that investment. They made our vulnerability real. For a nation operating within the limits of the symbolic, an experience of vulnerability would be one way to register the intrusion of the Real. It would be one way of understanding the symbolic’s function as a check on the inflated promises of the imaginary. Recognizing the limits of our power, recognizing the limits of our security, might be humbling but not humiliating, for there should be no debasement attached to an experience of the truth of the limits of the symbolic. 78

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Experiencing the intrusion of the Real as humiliating, however, can be understood if the intrusion is experienced through the lens of the myth of invulnerability rather than from the ethical position of the symbolic. If the myth of American innocence prior to 9/11 was tied to a myth of an invincible nation on a mission of global redemption, then 9/11, in destroying this myth of invincibility, would be experienced as degrading. By forcing us to recognize our position in the symbolic and the seductive power of the myth, however, the crisis provoked by 9/11 could have initiated a critique of this long-standing mythical national frame. It did not. Instead, it birthed a 9/11 politics that reaffirmed the myth. Shaw takes note of this when he writes, ‘‘At the turn of the new century, America’s power is embedded within complex international alliances and institutions. But its leaders and people still think of themselves chiefly as members of a powerful nation: a tendency that was powerfully reinforced in the reaction to the terror massacres of 11 September 2001.’’8 The myth of American innocence justifies the use of our power. The threat to the myth of our invulnerable autonomy requires that we use this power absolutely. In refusing to be bound by the limits of international law and constitutional protections, we attempt to demonstrate the truth of the myth. We also establish ourselves as unethical and unjust. The Innocent Victim and the Politics of Fear Internationally, the American myth of innocence invoked the position of the innocent victim to justify the use of unlimited force, which, in avenging the crime of 9/11, would transform America from a vulnerable innocent victim into an invulnerable innocent power. Domestically, the post9/11 transformation of the myth of American innocence into the myth of America as the innocent victim worked differently. It became the grounds for a politics of fear that seemed to take its lessons from Thomas Hobbes. Everything will be sacrificed for security—the security of the myth of absolute sovereignty. As Hobbes describes the state of nature, our insecurity is grounded in the contest between the limit of the Real and the desire to be the absolute subject. None of us is capable of dominating the Other; no limit of the subject is recognized; finding the nasty and brutish conditions of anarchy unbearable, we designate an absolute sovereign and give it the power to legislate the limit. In Lacanian language, we authorize the Law of the Father. The post-9/11 politics of fear, however, is not grounded in the dilemma of Hobbesian anarchy. It is rooted in the disruption of our myth of invulnerability and in the determination to protect the myth of our Debra B. Bergoffen

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innocence. It is a reaction to the threat that the Other poses to our imaginary investments. Declaring our innocence, we absolve ourselves of responsibility. This declaration, however, brings some unintended consequences, for the position of the innocent victim is a passive position. As innocent victims, we are subject to the power of the Other rather than subjects in our own right. Enter the domestic politics of fear. So long as we are committed to maintaining our position of innocence, we will not examine our foreign policy for clues to the attacks, we will not scrutinize our methods of diplomacy, for if we are innocent no mistakes were made, no diplomatic signals were crossed. As the innocent humiliated victim, we see revenge as the only recourse. In taking revenge, we maintain our innocence and reinstate ourselves as invulnerable. We reclaim our original position. For if we were not a powerful nation we would not be able to take revenge. Thus the domestic politics of fear is translated into (and is justified in order to pursue) an international politics of revenge. Again we must be careful. The reality of the innocent victim is not the issue. The claim is not that all claims of innocence are phantasmic; the claim is that the experience of the innocent victim can become, and in the case of post-9/11 American policies, has become, a phantasmic politics of innocence. Not all politics emerging from the experience of the innocent victim will produce a politics of innocence. The Indian nonviolent democratic movement, the American civil-rights movement, and the South African postapartheid truth and reconciliation commissions demonstrate that the experience of the innocent victim can produce a politics that speaks to the limits imposed by the real on the symbolic and exercised by the symbolic on the imaginary. This type of politics, however, requires a commitment to the limitations of the position of the symbolic subject and a recognition of the other’s legitimate claims to subjectivity. Were the United States not the only world superpower, were it a weak nation under attack, the questions raised by the position of the innocent victim would be different. For then it would be appropriate to ask whether the existence of a nation positioned as an innocent victim testified to an unjust, unequal distribution of power such that some peoples are positioned to harm others, and other peoples are positioned as having no recourse but to submit. Here the critique of the politics of innocence would take a different course. Between the critique of a powerful nation pursuing a politics of innocence in order to establish its invulnerability and the critique of an international (dis)order that exploits the weakness of certain nations by rendering them innocent victims, we discover that however disparate these claims to and situations of innocence are, they 80

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speak to the same phenomenon—our vulnerability. The powerful nation refuses to speak of its vulnerability. The powerless nation is forced to live according to the speech that translates the vulnerable (our shared human condition) into the victim (the violated human being). Neither the refusal of vulnerability nor the translation of vulnerability into victim is just. To date, these two languages of the limit (its refusal in the language of invulnerability and its exploitation in the politics of domination) have ruled political life. The question concerns the possibility of other languages and the effect of 9/11 on the trajectory of the symbolic’s articulation of the limit. To begin the questioning raised by this question, I turn to the histories of the just-war tradition, the U.N. war-crimes tribunals, and international crimes-against-humanity treaties for empirical sites where other languages of vulnerability are being articulated. I also turn to Merleau-Ponty’s new humanism and theories of dialogue and violence for theoretical groundings. Between the empirical sites and the theoretical groundings, I find myself affirming the possibility of a just and livable language of vulnerability. In this affirmation, I share Barber’s hope. He reads 9/11 as epitomizing the reality of the twenty-first century’s global anarchy. Likening the current anarchy to the chaos of the European religious wars of an earlier century, which provided the context of and impetus for the democratic forms of sovereignty legitimated by social-contract theories, Barber looks for new forms of global sovereignty to emerge in the face of our twenty-firstcentury terror. He looks forward to the development of a global civic faith that will anchor new forms of global citizenship.9 The Just-War Tradition The just-war tradition is one of the earliest attempts at articulating this global civic faith. It attempts to speak the language of political justice by simultaneously acknowledging and limiting the sovereignty of the state. Allowing that only sovereign states have the right to declare war, just-war theory curtails that right by insisting that in declaring war states abide by the laws of peace and requiring that in waging war states respect the rights of innocents. In recognizing the inevitability of violence, the inevitability of the nation’s (subject’s) refusal to limit its symbolic claims, just-war doctrine also articulates the demands of the symbolic, for it insists that the enemy other be recognized as having legitimate claims to the status of the subject. In the language of the just-war tradition, enemies are members of a universal human community. War must be waged in such a way as to ensure that respect for our common humanity is preserved. As wartime Debra B. Bergoffen

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enemies we must not set ourselves up as innocent subjects with absolute right, God, on our side. We must remember that though as enemies we inflate the ways in which we are vulnerable to each other, even as enemies we are related to and legitimately limited by each other. In recognizing the inevitability of war while speaking of the demands of peace, just-war theory attempts to straddle the divide between the moral and political domains. It is an ambiguous discourse that speaks of the realities of violence and the politics of power while appealing to principles of peace that obligate us to limit the objectives, strategies, and possibilities of war. Its ambiguities have been read as impossibilities in many quarters. I am not interested here in taking up a full analysis of the difficulties of the just-war tradition. That would take me too far afield. I am, however, interested in the way in which just-war theory and international conventions grounded in it reject the idea that the position of the innocent victim justifies recourse to unrestrained violence and refuse the idea of the infallibility of innocence (i.e., the mistranslation of existential innocence into ontological innocence).10 According to Robert Fullinwider, the concept of innocence links the realities of war and terrorism. He notes that both war and terrorism are political forms of violence. Both create killing fields. The concept of innocence and respect for innocents, however, distinguishes the terrorist from the soldier. Terrorists are identified as murderers because they target the innocent. Soldiers are said to be justified in their killing so long as they observe the just-war tradition of not targeting innocent civilians.11 As Fullinwider sees it, the difference between the terrorist’s and the soldier’s relationship to innocence grounds the international order; in his view, this just-war distinction between civilian and soldier, between an illegitimate target of violence and a legitimate one, determines both the conditions under which war may be initiated and the parameters of legitimate violence once war has begun. To play by the rules of the just-war contract, before declaring war a nation must establish that violence is the only way to redress an injustice inflicted on itself or on another nation that has asked for its help. It must establish that an affront to its innocence can be rectified only by war. Once war has begun, the violence must observe limits that respect the enemy other in its humanity so that the hostile parties may find their way back from war to peace. The specifics of this respect are found in warcrimes codes that make it illegal to target nonmilitary persons (innocents) and in rules regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that return the 82

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enemy soldier to an innocent status once he or she has been disarmed. Under the logic of the just-war tradition, innocence is a circumscribed position. It neither establishes a nation as infallible nor gives it the right to wage war until it secures its position as invulnerable. Once a nation is attacked, a nation’s innocence may be defended, but the defense must be limited by the objective of reestablishing the conditions of peace, namely, recognition of our mutual legitimate claims to subjectivity. Whereas I have been arguing that the American response to the 9/11 attacks can be understood in terms of its myths of innocence and invulnerability, Fullinwider argues that the universal condemnation of Osama bin Laden is rooted not in his attacks on innocents but in the threat he poses to the international community. By claiming the private right to determine when, where, how, and why violence may be unleashed, bin Laden throws us back into John Locke’s state of nature. Further, by claiming authority for his private right to violence, bin Laden positions himself as an instrument of God.12 We should not miss the fact, however, that bin Laden excuses himself from the limits of the symbolic (as articulated in the just-war rules of the limitation of sovereignty) by establishing himself as infallibly innocent, that is, as a messenger of God whose righteousness is unquestionable. Whereas in the case of the American mystification, the reality of the innocent victim reinvigorated and resituated the myth of American innocence, with bin Laden the idea of innocence is grounded in an idea of a divinely sanctioned myth of self-righteousness. In both cases, particular claims of ethical or religious innocence (the innocent victims of the 9/11 attacks, the individual who experiences himself or herself as God’s innocent servant) are taken up politically, where they become institutional myths of innocence and are used to justify violence in the service of invulnerability (the United States) or infallibility (Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda). Further, the mythical positions of the United States and Osama bin Laden are not always distinguishable. Bin Laden also takes on the mantle of the innocent victim. The United States also identifies itself as speaking for the truth of God. Sifted through the lens of the just-war tradition, Osama bin Laden and the United States have violated the just-war contracts of peace, limited sovereignty, and circumscribed innocence. Though the United States has not (yet) gone so far as to declare itself infallible, the old American idea that we are the city on the hill, to quote Bob Dylan, ‘‘With God on Our Side,’’ has taken on new currency as we assume the position of the innocent victim and pursue the war on terrorism. Debra B. Bergoffen

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Written in 1963, Dylan’s ‘‘With God on Our Side’’ chronicles an American’s (and perhaps America’s) loss of innocence. Though the song is written in the first person, this person introduces himself to us as having no name. His age, he tells us, is also irrelevant. So long as he believes that God is on our side, he can live anonymously, marked only by his location, a country called the Midwest; for this is a sufficient ground of identity. With the loss of innocence, however, comes a loss of anonymity. Between the opening stanza’s Midwestern affirmation of God on our side and the closing stanza’s affirmation of an ‘‘I’’ who questions America’s proclaimed self-righteousness we are given a history lesson—or rather we are given an account of how American history is taught in a country called the Midwest. Here, the chronology of U.S. war making is narrated as a story intended to validate the ideology of ‘‘God on our side.’’ This Midwesterner, however, hears something else. Noting the ways in which God seems to change sides in accordance with American self-interest (the Germans, whom we once fought as enemies of God, now have God on their side in our Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union) and attending to the ways in which the ‘‘God on our side’’ premise allows the United States to justify horrific ends-justify-the-means strategies, the Midwesterner becomes confused. This confusion fosters the emergence of an ‘‘I’’ who tells us that we must each take responsibility for determining whether or not God is on our side. Appealing to an unexamined American righteousness to justify U.S. policies is the equivalent of the ‘‘obeying orders’’ defense. Interestingly, rather than give up the ‘‘God is on our side’’ justification, Dylan appeals to it in order to establish the criteria by which to judge American policies. ‘‘If God is on our side,’’ he writes, ‘‘He will stop the next war.’’ Dylan’s lyrics reflect the anti-war mood of the 1960s. The myth of inherent and nameless American righteousness and innocence and the idea that abstaining from critically assessing U.S. policies was the mark of a true American were losing ground. Today, 9/11 has resurrected that ground. Vulnerability, Innocence, and Human Rights There are, however, other forces at work that suggest that the just-war limits on violence in the name of a circumscribed idea of innocence may produce a language of vulnerability that speaks of the limit of the real. These forces may be found in the evolving history of human-rights treaties and institutions. Though it makes no headlines and it would be too simplistic to declare that a struggle between good and evil is being waged 84

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behind our backs, there is a struggle going on between a 9/11 politics of the imaginary and a human-rights politics of the symbolic. The American and al-Qaeda politics of 9/11 is a politics of absolute sovereignty. It is a recipe for conflict, terrorism, culture wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocides. A human-rights politics of the symbolic renounces the idea of absolute sovereignty. It begins by learning to count beyond one. It renounces the idea of absolute sovereignty, appealing instead to the idea of human dignity. When becoming parties to humanrights treaties, nations endorse the idea that human rights are essential to the adequate being of a human being and are therefore moral rights that belong to everyone, everywhere. Though they speak of the individual, these rights are defined in terms of the ideal human community.13 The discourse of human rights is not a discourse of autonomy. Perusing the documents and debates through which these ideas of humanity are made concrete, I find that the ideal human community envisioned in these treaties and covenants is grounded in an understanding of the symbolic limit and our situated vulnerability. That is, instead of inscribing our situated vulnerability under the idea of an ontological innocence that legitimates the claims of the absolute subject, the language of human rights inscribes it under the idea of a shared dignity that can be lived only through the limits of intersubjectivity. Merleau-Ponty and the Politics of Symbolic Responsibility Morning headlines and evening news stories report the policies generated by the post-9/11 American politics of innocence. They bear witness to the materialities of a symbolic infected by the imaginary’s demands. MerleauPonty’s discussions of the violence of dialogue and delineation of a new humanism point to another political possibility. In ‘‘Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,’’ Merleau-Ponty tells us that speech establishes us in a community of doing—making meaning.14 In speech we are thrown toward each other. I pull the other toward what I know and she does not yet understand, and she pulls me toward her in the same way. In this dialogue there are anticipations, transgressions, encroachments. There is a violence here. Not the violence of war grounded in the desire of the imaginary absolute subject to silence the enemy other, but the violence of a speech grounded in the sociality of the symbolic that destroys hegemony in order to create a communicative heterogeneity. Dialogue begins with the familiar; hence the need for the universal that we both acknowledge. If the dialogue is genuine, however, if it is a meeting between those who have something to say to each other, we will be Debra B. Bergoffen

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surprised and disoriented by each other and through this surprise and disorientation be opened to new possibilities and meanings. This tug and pull of dialogical speech can occur only within a shared cultural world, for we cannot encroach on each other without being in proximity to each other.15 The condition of speaking to each other is a shared vocabulary. The meaning of speaking to each other concerns the renewal and recreation of this vocabulary and its power to transform our lived realities.16 Our commonly acknowledged universal must be fluid enough to withstand the creative tensions of this encounter.17 Working with this understanding of speech as dialogue, Merleau-Ponty proposes a new definition of humanism. Contrasting his new humanism with the humanism of the Enlightenment, Merleau-Ponty describes his new humanism as a humanism without illusions. It is not captivated by images of fulfillment and totality. It does not rely on the guarantees of the idea of progress. It eschews the foundations of natural or divine law. It is grounded in the postmodern experience of contingency and hope. Even if progress is not guaranteed, it is still possible. Even if moral and social structures are not given in either the natural or the divine order of things, they remain credible and imaginable. Merleau-Ponty’s new humanism engages the future as the time of contingency and promise. The promise is articulated through an image that responds to the contingencies of a symbolic limited by the real. In Merleau-Ponty’s framing, images are not Lacanian imagos. They do not lure us to repeat the infantile aggressions of the past. Instead they represent the ethical possibilities of the symbolic. The ethical image of human dignity grounds Merleau-Ponty’s new humanism. By representing ourselves to each other as having a right to a life with dignity, we set the stage for such a life. Now, the image, a symbolic contingency, is a demand on the mind for work.18 The way of this work is through language, for key to Merleau-Ponty’s new humanism is the idea that human beings are linguistic beings. The ideas through which we represent ourselves to ourselves and to each other are historical and contingent symbols. These symbols do not represent a static extralinguistic world. They create lived meanings and relationships. They are fluid. We live within and through their flows. As our symbolic systems change, as we change our representation of ourselves, we change ourselves.19 Merleau-Ponty’s new humanism also inaugurates a new definition of rationality. It is now defined as an agreement of minds made possible by an idea that serves as a ‘‘catchall’’ for other ideas so that a unity of a common world can be invoked though not verified. Viewed from the perspective of this reconceptualized humanism and reason, U.N. conferences, 86

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treaties, resolutions, and court verdicts are producing the rationality of a global human-rights culture that proceeds from the ‘‘catchall’’ idea of human dignity. This shared ‘‘catchall’’ universal is both a point of departure and a site of contestation. We agree that this concept of human dignity is essential to any peace that aspires to be just. We struggle over exactly what it is we mean when we invoke the concept of dignity. In this struggle, we are engaged in what Merleau-Ponty describes as the violence of dialogue—a violence through which we are creating the image through which we live our humanity. Between Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to the symbolic ideal of the new humanism and Lacan’s discussions of the symbolic’s vulnerability to the seductions of the imaginary, the difficulties of translating the ethical voice of the innocent victim into a politics responsive to the existential evil of violated innocence may be seen in terms of proper translations and preserved tensions. In moving between the ethical and the political, we are moving between the ontological and the existential and traversing the domains of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real. The hope of the ethical-political translation project resides in our attentiveness to the ways in which these domains cross and double-cross each other. We need to be alert to the ways in which the ruses of innocence conflate the ontological and the existential, and to the ways in which this conflation undermines the symbolic rule of the limit. Once this rule is breached, the translation project will fail. Justice will not be served. We will be subject to the violent intrusion of the real—not because the real is on the side of justice, but because a symbolic in the service of the imaginary invites the return of the repressed. Lacan alerts us to the dangers the imaginary poses to the Real. MerleauPonty shows us a different function of the imaginary. Most of this essay has focused on the difficulties of translating the ethical into the political in terms of the difficulties the imaginary poses to the symbolic. If we think of the relationship between the imaginary and the symbolic through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s violence of dialogue, new humanism, and redefined rationality, however, the difficulties identified by Lacan may be read as productive tensions, for as worked through in Merleau-Ponty, though the movement of the symbolic is necessary to disrupt the reifying tendencies of the imaginary, ideals produced by the imagination are crucial to the flow of the symbolic. From this perspective, the difficulty of the ethicalpolitical translation project—the difficulty of sustaining the proper relationship between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real—is also the ground of its hope.

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6

Engage the Enemy Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship CYNTHIA WILLETT

Introduction: Contemporary Democratic Theory and the Friend–Enemy Distinction Of all the good things that we rely on for individual happiness, few are as important as friendship. This is true not only on a personal level. As Aristotle argues, cooperative bonds in the household and among citizens ground thriving political communities. Of course, modern-day liberals rightly reject Aristotle’s tight, conflict-free communitarianism for a more fluid, egalitarian, and multicultural society, but it is difficult to envision the ideals of politics, including citizenship and justice, apart from some strong sense of social bonds. The ontologically detached and excessively rational agent proposed by some liberal theorists obscures the attachments that bind us to others. These attachments give us our depth as persons. It would be hard to live without them. But then it is also hard to live with them. As any casual study of politics reminds us, passionate attachments can fuel fierce alliances and tragic conflicts. Post–Cold War tensions in Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East have led to the downfall of states and the rise of global terror. The relentless tensions of the post–Cold War era may have divided the world I am grateful to the audience at a Pennsylvania State University philosophy colloquium on November 11, 2005, and especially Claire Katz, Dan Conway, Emily Grosholz, and Shannon Sullivan for helpful comments on this chapter. 88

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along unpredictable lines, but they have also given rise to a curious convergence among otherwise opposed political perspectives. Leftist democracy theorists influenced by deconstruction and democratic imperialists of the Bush administration may not have much in common, but they do agree on at least one thing: the vital role of the friend–enemy distinction for democratic politics.1 Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau argue that rationalists such as Ju¨rgen Habermas who aim to eliminate conflict as the basis for democracy ignore the subtle forms of coercion behind any appearance of consensus.2 These radical democrats lack faith not only in reason but also in the Old Left’s revolutionary fervor for a perfect utopian world. Instead of reaching out for a romanticized world without conflict and politics, Mouffe and Laclau call on New Left movements to form alliances (what they term ‘‘equivalences’’) to displace the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. This forging of a leftist hegemony would entail (via the logic of deconstruction) the exclusion of those who do not share equivalent ideas of freedom and equality. There is no politics without the potential for enemies. The radical democracy theorists may be right to point out as part of their political realism the persistence of irrational conflict and to expose the usual appeals for resolving conflict through common reason as the ploy of some emerging hegemon. But these deconstructive democrats have difficulty locating any clear way out of political tensions that are potentially deadly. Mouffe is fully aware of the problem. As she explains, once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of a world without exclusion and antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how a pluralistic democratic order is possible.3 Such an order could be based, she argues, only on a distinction between ‘‘enemy’’ and ‘‘adversary’’ whose existence is legitimate and must be tolerated. A pluralistic democracy would transform a deadly and antagonistic politics based on enemies to an agonistic politics that allows opponents to be treated as tolerable adversaries who belong to a ‘‘common symbolic space’’ in a ‘‘multipolar’’ world. The question she leaves us with is what kind of political ethics could define this common symbolic space and restrain conflict in a multipolar world so that inevitable conflict does not turn deadly. The conservative liberal theorist Michael Ignatieff puts forth claims on behalf of spreading American-style freedom and democracy that are arguably even more bereft of sound ethical limits. Ignatieff defends the moral idealism in the foreign-policy goals of the Bush administration against the relativism of leftists.4 He acknowledges that such imperial intervention might very well entail the tragic logic of self-deception and hubris, but he argues that Jeffersonian democracy is well worth the risk. He writes: Cynthia Willett

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What is exceptional about the Jefferson dream is that it is the last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of national claims to universal significance. All the others—the Soviet, the French and the British—have been consigned to the ash heap of history. This may explain why what so many Americans regard as simply an exercise in good intentions strikes even their allies as a delusive piece of hubris. The problem here is that while no one wants imperialism to win, no one in his right mind can want liberty to fail either. If the American project of encouraging freedom fails, there may be no one else available with the resourcefulness and energy, even the self-deception, necessary for the task.5 But if to the rest of the world the U.S. policy of democratic imperialism sounds less like a noble contest of ideals and more like just plain old hypocrisy, then perhaps this is because avoiding the dangers of hubris and self-deception are not incidental to what democracy should mean. Contemporary democracy theorists on the left and on the right who have brought from classical drama the notion of agon, or contest and struggle, back to the center of the political stage fail to face up to its dramatic structure, its narrative nodal points, or even, for what I would call an authentic democratic politics, the vital play of irony against hubris. For as we shall see, the successful use of irony against the self-deceived arrogance averts the tragic, and it allows for the imperfect friendships known through that literary genre that opposes the tragic, namely, the comic. In what follows, I explore the relevance of the comic for contemporary democracy theory through a reflection on nothing less profound than Hollywood comedies of remarriage as defined by Stanley Cavell. But let’s first take a brief glance at what the Western philosophical tradition has had to say on friendship, through the eyes of one of its more ambivalent friends. Derrida, the Politics of Friendship, and the Democracy to Come In an extensive study of friendship, published as The Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida draws the general conclusion that the prevailing philosophical model of friendship in the Western canon is based on one single type of relationship—the relationship between brothers. As he writes: ‘‘From Plato to Montaigne, Aristotle to Kant, Cicero to Hegel, the great philosophical and canonical discourses on friendship will have explicitly tied the friend-brother to virtue and justice, to moral reason and political reason.’’6 90

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The prominence of the friend-brother relation, especially for our contemporary interest in democracy, is clear already in classical Greek philosophy. Aristotle, as Derrida points out, suggests that whereas the bond between husband and wife illustrates the virtue of aristocracy, and monarchy grows out of the natural relationship between father and child, a wellfounded democracy is like the friendship between brothers.7 Of course, Aristotle had an ambivalent attitude toward democracy, but the favorable characterization of social bonds in terms of a friendship between brothers stuck. We might think of the motto of the French Republic, ‘‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’’ or of Philadelphia (which is incidentally the setting of that classic Hollywood remarriage comedy The Philadelphia Story, but more on this later), often referred to as the ‘‘cradle of liberty’’ and the City of Brotherly Love. In an essay elaborating on Derrida’s claims, John Caputo suggests that ‘‘when the ‘Society of Friends,’ the Quakers, named their polity Philadelphia, the city of ‘brotherly love,’ . . . this was surely only a figure for loving all humanity, all our friends. But that is the very thing Derrida is questioning.’’8 Derrida’s concern is the way in which this single prevailing model of friendship overemphasizes the importance of similarity for our ethical relationships and fails to account for how we might approach on a friendly basis those who are different from ourselves. He observes that the typical focus on brothers in conceptualizing our ethical identities leaves out or distorts the type of friendships that women cultivate either among themselves or with men. He questions Aristotle’s dismissal of the importance of eros, or sexual tension, for some of the best friendships. And he wonders how the dynamic of these alternative relationships might alter or expand our notions of virtue and justice, perhaps for the better. After all, Aristotle’s elaborate account of the friend as another self continues to strike many scholars as narcissistic, elitist, and male centered because the Aristotelian account evolves around the superiority of two men who are fairly much alike in what the Greeks called arete¯—what Caputo loosely translates as ‘‘virile stuff.’’ Assuming the concerns are more or less well founded, the Aristotelian model of friendship cannot serve very well for pluralistic democrats. There must be better models for understanding exemplary types of friendship in democracies than those based on nearly perfect citizens who are just about the same in every way. Derrida concludes his extensive study with an appeal for just such an alternative model of friendship and politics. But oddly, although Derrida argues for the importance of women throughout his study, he rests his final appeal not on behalf of friendships between women and men, or among women themselves, but on the otherwise friendless stranger. This Cynthia Willett

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appeal draws us toward the refugee uprooted from family and community, without a history or even a clear future, and of course, lacking any of the protective rights of citizenship. I am not going to insist that this radically detachable stranger vaguely fits some kind of liberal archetype of prepolitical man (man in the state of nature), although it is tempting to do so. I do want to return, however, to Derrida’s neglect of women. My alternative focus on more down-to-earth ethical realism (or at least the kind of realism we get in romantic comedies) should not be read as a gesture of dismissal for Derrida’s high-minded insights. On the contrary, an ethical-religious modality of hospitality of the type that he suggests opens generously toward strangers and should supplement any progressive liberal politics and its accompanying theory of justice, even if only on a quasi-religious plane. Note that although Derrida may critique the rationalism and universalism of Enlightenment ideals and resist any temptation to offer for democracy theory a utopian blueprint for the future, he is no left-leaning political realist of the kind that neoconservatives love to hate. On the contrary, although they may not be friends, Derrida and the neoconservatives hold one thing in common: along with the neoconservatives, Derrida shares the Enlightenment’s hope and what after Ignatieff we could call a moral idealism for a democracy that is ‘‘indefinitely perfectible.’’9 His ‘‘prayer’’ on behalf of the stranger in a ‘‘democracy to come’’ provides a deeply ethical contrast with the aristocratic model of rule by the excellent ones, the elite men of virtue, which is how Aristotle defines his own version of a ‘‘city of prayer.’’10 If for Derrida democracy remains more a prayer than a definable goal or rational principle, it is because of his concern first and foremost for those who fall outside of any hegemonic plan (even those radical democracies of the kind offered by Laclau and Mouffe). Of course, Derrida’s hyperbolic ethical concern is necessarily riddled with the classical aporia of deconstruction. No doubt, we might find lurking behind the mask of the stranger the face of the deadly terrorist! Still, the possibility of extending friendship toward someone who is not in any ordinary sense our friend, who may indeed be our worst enemy, is for Derrida a prayer for happiness, too. In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Richard Rorty accuses Derrida of being sentimental and even romantic, and Derrida does not shy away from these charges: ‘‘I am very sentimental and I believe in happiness,’’ he acknowledges.11 And with this turn toward the quasi-religious plane of friendship and justice, the arch deconstructionist no longer sounds like the postmodern ironist, or the Parisian Puck, as he was once known. In his later writings, Derrida has turned quite dramatically away from such earlier skeptical poses to embrace in his work on friendship what he calls 92

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‘‘aimance.’’12 It is not exactly clear what Derrida means by this strange new word. Aimance can be partly translated as love. It also suggests, as Caputo remarks, the English word romance.13 ‘‘For friendship is ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ ’’ Caputo adds in his comments, as he draws his line from Shakespearean romantic comedy.14 Now, this shift back and forth between comedy and the sublime— between sentimental romance on the one hand and hospitality for the stranger on the other—is not only confusing, but it seems to be pulling us in two quite different directions at once. The plea for a democracy of strangers points toward the most sobering act of generosity we might ever encounter. On the other hand, sentimental love, or aimance, draws its sensibility from the ironic, sometimes even zany, playfulness embedded in romantic comedy, as the allusion to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests. Both forms of friendship threaten autonomy or self-rule with a heteronomy that Derrida, following another Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, uses to decenter traditional subject-centered ethics. Either form can liberate, unleash, or otherwise disorient passions away from the self-interested practical self, or calm, rational rule-following individual, and toward the disruptive force of our entanglements with others. But then although Derrida dwells on a highly serious quasi-religious mode of hospitality for his ethics, as he does in his later writings, he leaves us wondering if comic romance might provide some alternative, perhaps more pragmatic, ethics for contemporary democracy theory. Romantic Comedy and Pragmatism It is not surprising that Derrida teases us with the possibilities of romantic comedy, only to leave the genre neglected in an otherwise exhaustive study of friendship. Romantic comedy emerged and just as quickly disappeared from the modern stage with Shakespeare, and hardly does it enter into anything remotely resembling what might be called the Western philosophical canon. And yet romantic comedy characteristically centers dramatic tension around conflict-ridden relationships, often enough, erotic relationships between men and women. Interestingly too, only recently did romantic comedy make a comeback, this time in Hollywood film. Stanley Cavell examines this return in those classic 1930s and 1940s Hollywood films that he defines as comedies of remarriage in his Pursuits of Happiness.15 Cavell focuses on the emerging egalitarianism between men and women, and the implications of this equality for democracy. The genre turns around contests not just between men, but rather more centrally, Cynthia Willett

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between a man and a woman, neither of whom is content to allow the other to gain the upper hand. In introducing the genre, Cavell provides a hint of historical background, suggesting that the films address the daughters of the generation who fought for and won the suffrage. These daughters shifted the struggle toward the spheres of family and civil society. The setting of such a prominent film as George Cukor’s 1940 film The Philadelphia Story in Philadelphia, the cradle of liberty, points toward a generation’s attempt to rethink the meaning of a free society, not we might say (having read Derrida) through brotherly love, but through romantic comedy’s focus on remarriage. Cavell’s study of comedies of remarriage takes us some steps forward in understanding models of friendship relevant for both virtue and justice, models that subdue the narcissistic, aristocratic, or patriarchal vices that most concern Derrida. The friendships in these films exhibit some of these tendencies, to be sure, but the friendships also work against such forces, which are portrayed as blocks on human happiness. Hence we shall find in the comic agon a model of democratic conflict that falls to this side of the messianic moment of Derrida’s perfect democracy to come and yet avoids the tragic fury of forces that may follow the friend–enemy model of politics. For as we shall see, the lesson of remarriage comedy turns out to be similar to what Oedipus learns in the deadly encounter with the stranger at the crossroads in the Sophoclean tragedy: beware lest that person whom you took as your enemy turn out to have been your friend. This is the core ethical lesson for both comedy and tragic drama. Indeed, often enough one turns out to be one’s own worst enemy. But if romantic comedy and tragedy are in some ways the same, they are also in some ways different. Whereas tragic dialectic can romanticize lethal conflict as an inevitable ground of the human condition, comedy offers clues for its pragmatic limits. Cavell’s remarks on the difference between John Dewey’s pragmatic moderation and the nineteenth-century tragic romanticism as found in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel provides some philosophical backdrop before we launch into a full-scale discussion of film comedy. Cavell explains that ‘‘even though anyone could say he began his life as a Hegelian, really the Hegel that Dewey uses consists of two or three moves. They are very important moves. They are moves that exist by trying to find the middle way of two extremes, but they are not moves that sense the spiritual negation—the mutual negation—of these extremes. So that to find a way out of the mutual negation is itself a kind of spiritual torture. In Dewey you don’t have spiritual torture.’’16 The contrast between the mild 94

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optimism of twentieth-century social pragmatism and the tortuous perfectionism of tragic thinkers, along with their post-Nietzschean counterparts, opens a path toward better understanding the contributions of Hollywood comedy to contemporary ideas of equality, freedom, and democracy. The Comedy of Remarriage The comedies of remarriage, perhaps best exemplified by Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story but also including such films as The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941), It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Adam’s Rib (George Cukor, 1949), and The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), emerged as central to Hollywood film from 1934 to 1949 and then reappeared in the 1990s.17 I view Cavell’s interpretation of the genre’s major literary themes as revolving around two political elements. First, as I mentioned earlier, Cavell’s depiction of the films as comedies of equality between men and women locates the basis for what we can identify as a democratic element. Cavell argues that democracies require a spirited relationship between equals, beginning with what has been one of its basic institutions, namely, marriage. He elaborates on the role of marriage through the classic social-contract image of autonomous individuals leaving a state of nature and yielding some of their natural freedom to accept the bonds of society and the happiness these bonds secure. The second political element of the comedy, what Cavell locates as an aristocratic tendency in these films, seems to balance, at least for Cavell, the first element without contradicting it. He locates the aristocratic element primarily in the pursuit of perfection. According to this view, the films portray the ethical or spiritual education of character. Cavell’s attention to the tension of democratic and aristocratic elements produces a rich reading of the films. Cavell’s own intellectual roots in nineteenth-century transcendentalism lead him, however, to overvalue perfectionist themes that romantic comedy’s mishaps more often than not tend to undermine. And in fact, the rowdy upheavals of the sexually vibrant 1920s and the socioeconomic crisis of the Depression set the stage for these films to mock a range of pretensions of personality and society, both aristocratic and Victorian.18 Let’s look again at the key themes of one of the major films as we shift the parameters of the genre from classic liberal contract theory and aristocratic perfectionism to the social pragmatism of 1930s American political culture.19 Cynthia Willett

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Let’s start with Cavell’s discussion of the democratic element. In his essay on The Philadelphia Story, Cavell draws arguments from John Milton’s tract on divorce to explain the importance of happiness in a marriage for democracy. It has less to do with the traditional emphasis on raising children than one would expect. Milton writes, ‘‘No effect of tyranny can sit more heavily on the commonwealth than . . . household unhappiness on the family. And farewell all hope of true reformation in the state, while such an evil as this lies undiscerned or unregarded in the house: on the redress whereof depends not only the spiritful and orderly life of our grown men, but the willing and careful education of our children.’’20 Milton goes on to describe ‘‘unhappiness in the marriage [as] bondage to ‘a mute and spiritless mate.’ ’’ After citing these remarks, Cavell elaborates: ‘‘It seems to me accordingly to be implied that a certain happiness, anyway a certain spirited and orderly participation, is owed to the commonwealth by those who have sworn allegiance to it—that if the covenant of marriage is a miniature of the covenant of the commonwealth, then one may be said to owe the commonwealth participation that takes the form of a meet and cheerful conversation.’’21 Although it is said that a spirited marriage is good for children, Cavell takes the main point to be that a good marriage, like a good commonwealth, turns not on reproducing the population but on lively conversation. Cavell draws out the theme of conversation in a discussion of two scenes in The Philadelphia Story. In the first of the scenes Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn blame each other for the failure of their marriage. (I use the actor’s instead of the character’s name in cases where the actor’s presence is striking in the film. As Cavell notes, the genre plays on this presence with illusions and puns, as in the line I am about to quote from Cary Grant’s character in the film.) The remark occurs in a scene where Hepburn reminds her former husband of the vice, his weakness for alcohol, that led to their divorce. His reply: ‘‘Granted. But you took on that problem when you married me. You were no helpmeet there, Red. You were a scold.’’ Cavell takes up Cary Grant’s claim here. It not the vice per se but the lack of a certain kind of conversation that marred their relationship. He writes: ‘‘This . . . is once more exactly a brief for his divorce from her, based on Milton’s . . . perception that ‘a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.’ The conjunction of being a helpmeet with being willing to converse . . . comes out again in a late exchange [after she realizes that she has some problems of her own]. . . . ‘I’m such an unholy mess of a girl [she laments, seeming to agree with his accusations],’ to which he responds, ‘Why that’s no good, that’s not even conversation.’ ’’22 96

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Now, any feminist critic of Cavell has to smile after reading his comments, because it is fairly clear in the film that the brief for divorce comes from the woman, not the man. The film emphasizes the fact that she could not live with his drinking problem. This slip on Cavell’s part alerts us to be on the lookout for ways he tilts the reading of the genre in favor of a male perspective. It is this tilt that I want to contest, along with some of the traditional biases of narcissism, elitism, and patriarchy that, as Derrida suggests, any good democrat might want to deconstruct. As long as we are looking to the genre, most of the films that Cavell picks out in fact favor the woman’s perspective over the man’s. Now, The Philadelphia Story is an exception to this tendency, but exceptions, as Cavell likes to remind us, do not necessarily undermine general rules. Still, Cavell is right that the films often enough do center marriage around a spirited conversation, driven by an ever-allusive difference. This comic dynamic perpetuates what is colloquially called the ‘‘battle of the sexes.’’ But as we shall later see, the comic dynamic reoccurs between partners and friends of the same sex, and wherever it occurs it produces an erotic basis for some of our friendships, friendships that may well be, as Cavell writes of marriage, ‘‘a miniature of the covenant of the commonwealth.’’ The question is whether the conversations have any kind of determinate structure or recurring themes and images that might lend a hand in deconstructing the undemocratic forces of elitism, narcissism, and patriarchy. Among the several connected themes of the genre of remarriage comedies Cavell notes the absence of the woman’s mother. Again, this is not true for every single film and, as Cavell notes, happens not to be true for The Philadelphia Story. (But as I have said, exceptions do not disprove rules.) And so for good reason, Cavell interprets a recurring dismissal of all that the traditional (somewhat Victorian) mother can stand for as further evidence in favor of the spirited pleasures of conversation and the erotic tensions upon which these pleasures may be based. My only concern here is again with Cavell’s one-sided focus, for the traditional father is equally a problem in these films, as we shall see clearly in The Philadelphia Story. Marriage is not to be taken as having some staid moral purpose like obedience, property, or good reputation, let alone some old-fashioned devotion to nurturing and care that renders the self mute. On the contrary, the major characters reject such unpleasant Victorian values along with their happily-ever-after promise of a peaceful and secure home life. Another prevalent image, the presence of a boat or other vehicle set for adventure, turns the marriage around a more stimulating and less Victorian axis. In The Philadelphia Story this boat is called the True Cynthia Willett

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Love, and the boat is associated not only with the marriage of Hepburn and Grant but also with the fiery redhead Hepburn herself. (In The Awful Truth, the vehicle is a motorcycle.) To expand on Cavell’s thought a bit here, we could contrast the themes of security, dependency, and morality that defined the earlier respectable marriage—themes that reappear in the Cold War period—with the themes of adventure, freedom, and contest in the comedies of remarriage. This is important because even if the female characters occasionally yield to submissive poses of bondage, poses that should make a contemporary audience wince (as when Hepburn parrots Grant’s words in announcing the change of plans in the final wedding scene), the women in the films are the equal to the men in style and personality—in short, the comic virtues. Aristotle consigned what must be one of the primary comic virtues, wit, to an inferior mode of friendship, but he understood the highest type of friendship around a limited number of very close friends held together through the pleasure of conversation. If we allow for the fact that these friends might not all share the same perspective, that they might be as different as the fantasized difference between the sexes, then we might also allow for a little more playful conflict in the highest form of philosophical conversation between some intimate friends. Indeed, we might say that without comic play, including the incongruities of perspective or meaning displayed in wit, there is none of the fiery red spirit that Milton and Cavell agree are necessary for democracy. Democracy requires the comic virtues practiced between couples and clusters of friends. These comic virtues contrast sharply with the vices of the boor but also with the pedant or any other type who drains the spirit of ‘‘gaiety and social wisdom’’ (here I do repeat Cavell’s phrase).23 Even in the wedding scene in The Philadelphia Story, where Hepburn nods to Grant’s fatherly authority and offers to be ‘‘yar,’’ like their boat the True Love, meaning ‘‘easy to handle,’’ Grant responds: ‘‘Be whatever you want. You’re my redhead.’’ The association of the female characters and relationships with a boat or some such vehicle of adventure rather than, say, with oceanic figures of (s)mothering love reinforces the spirited quality of marriage and society, with the usual difficulties in tow. Cavell teases out Nietzschean themes in the films to underscore the point that marriage is not in these films and should not ever be about a happy ending where conflict is resolved. The claim is perhaps clearest in his discussion of The Awful Truth. Marriage aims not for the goal of a tame, domesticated, and dully secure life. Marriage is a daily festival of contests, or, to use the Nietzschean theme, the ‘‘repetition’’ of playfully 98

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erotic conversation. In comedy, to say ‘‘yes’’ to this festive existence manifests itself through perpetual conflict, for although these romantic comedies incorporate the element of adventure (usually, the chief element of romance), they avoid romance’s typical gesture of consigning the woman to the role of trophy, the hero’s prize. In these comedies of remarriage, the woman is the man’s prime rival. ‘‘The love impulse manifests itself as conflict’’ is not only the sage advice of an otherwise ludicrous psychiatrist in Bringing Up Baby, but also what I think we could identify, again expanding only a bit from Cavell’s own suggestions, as an underlying theme of all these films. Of course, Milton does talk about restraint, or orderliness, as well, and these contests do have certain very necessary limits that we need to fully consider. Let’s return to Cavell’s locus of the major themes or images of the genre and see how far we can follow him. As I have said, the first two images, the untamable vehicle of adventure and freedom and the absence of the nurturing mother, pose the woman less as a prize and a promise for the end of conflict than as a permanent enemy combatant. In the more egalitarian moments of the films, each partner in the couple becomes the vehicle for the other’s freedom. In other moments, one of the two serves as the vehicle for liberating the other from what might otherwise be a mute and dispiriting life. In any case, this liberated desire, this spirited expression of erotic tension, gives us the meaning of freedom in these films. If marriage is about bondage, there is in this bondage not less but greater freedom. Marriage liberates these characters from the enervating bonds of the old society. A third image of the films that is important to Cavell is the allusion to the pair as so much alike as to be sister and brother. Now, it is true that this image is there, but Cavell’s particular interpretation takes us down a path that I do not wish to go. On the contrary, as I shall suggest, a reexamination of the image of the pair as sister and brother points to where the two political elements (liberal democratic and aristocratic) that Cavell lays out begin to unravel and alternative pragmatic parameters for the necessary checks and balances of different types of people in an egalitarian society begin to appear. The difference between our interpretations stems from our responses to the central question that Cavell poses at the beginning of his essay on The Philadelphia Story, namely, How is it that of Hepburn’s three suitors in the film—her former husband Cary Grant, a lower-middle-class journalist played by Jimmy Stewart, and a wealthy former coal miner named George with whom she is engaged until the end of the film—her former husband ends up back with Hepburn? For Cavell, the answer turns on sameness, on the couple being like sister and brother, whereas I shall argue Cynthia Willett

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that on the contrary, the erotic tension that holds the couple together turns on their differences. Clearly, George is not the right partner for Hepburn, but is there a simple reason? If the film does not invite us to like his character, it is not for any moral failing. On the contrary, George represents a very high form of moral rectitude, too high if anything, at least for comic romance. We could say that he’s just the kind of moral idealist that neoconservatives praise. The problem with his character is not his moral stance but his less-than-inviting social manners—boorish manners that are hardly conducive to the gay and sociable wisdom on which the comic vision depends. Hepburn’s decision against George (and it is a woman’s decision here that is at stake) is also a rejection of a type of marriage based on work and moral rectitude. Marriage in this film is not primarily about those values of a conservative life, economic wealth and upright morals. Comedy points toward a social ethics of manners that tempers moral concerns and holds together society. But then why reject Stewart? Stewart’s character is also drawn from the less privileged classes, but unlike George, he has some of the comic virtues. He certainly brings the pleasure of contest and spirited engagement. Hepburn remarks, after reading his book of short stories, that underneath a veneer of cynicism, he has the magical gift of the poet. Although the poetic gift does go hand in hand with a narcissistic tendency, at least in Stewart, the gift of transformative vision is real nonetheless. Near the end of the film, after the transformative scene at the pool, the formerly cynical Stewart tells Hepburn that she is like a queen, and even proposes to her, but this changed woman turns him down. Cavell does not give us anything like a full answer as to why this happens, but he does give us some enticing hints. He raises the question whether class differences between Stewart and Hepburn keep them apart. This is also when Cavell turns his focus to the sibling-like relationship between Hepburn and Grant. As Cavell writes, ‘‘Having grown up together, or anyway having created a childhood past together, remains a law for the happiness of the pair in the universe of remarriage comedies.’’24 The childhood theme comes up in the films in different ways, and it serves, among other things, to bring out the playful intimacy and equality between the couple. In a film purporting to be about the Philadelphia story, we might understand the needs of the couple as an analogy for the needs of the nation-state. The nation requires an imagined or otherwise quasi-mythical sense of a common past or collective memory lest it collapse. This is one problem for failed states. So too marital happiness requires creating a sense of a past together. Cavell, however, chooses instead to emphasize the sibling-like sameness of the couple, to the point that 100

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Susan Bordo, in her own reflections on the genre, even goes so far as to call the relationship ‘‘slightly incestuous.’’25 Now, this allusion to incest, or marriage within kinship lines, points further down the aristocratic path of remarriage comedies than I want to go. If the growing-up-together theme underscores the similarity between two superior characters who are enough the same that they might as well be siblings, the genre is not going to provide so much a substantial alternative to the canonical model of friendship that Derrida rightly aims to deconstruct as an interesting variation of it. Cavell often counterposes the sameness of the couple with an allusion to the importance of sexual difference. But what does that difference amount to? Before, however, we can look for a way out of the aristocratic democracy that Cavell reads into remarriage comedies, we need to understand it. Remarriage comedies, at least as Cavell sees them, turn on the education of manners. It is Cavell’s concern with a proper education, or what he calls the perfection of character, that prepares him to respond to the question of what kind of companionship provides the best foundation for democracy. The perfectionist theme takes in a couple more images from remarriage plays. Cavell argues that remarriage comedy, like old comedy, typically focuses on the heroine, who undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth (think of the subplot of Much Ado about Nothing). As in older comedy, this death and rebirth have something to do with the heroine’s virginity. In traditional Shakespearean comedy, the father attempts to protect his daughter’s virginity; its apparent soiling signifies her death, and the recovery of innocence, her rebirth. In the remarriage comedy, the theme of virginity comes up in a new way. The issue is no longer one of protecting physical virginity; instead, the theme alludes to the heroine’s original sense of being intact as an autonomous person, or so Cavell insists. Her symbolic death (as in Hepburn’s venture at the pool with Stewart) signifies her willingness to yield her virginal autonomy through a kind of education (symbolically a ‘‘rebirth’’) that is also an emancipation. This emancipation is, Cavell argues, provided by men who bear something of a paternal authority as well as magical powers. If this sounds somewhat patriarchal, it is, and it doesn’t always fit the films. In Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, and The Lady Eve, it is primarily the woman who is ‘‘educating’’ the man, usually about his own desires. As I have said, this education counts as a kind of liberation, the kind that comedy provides, and tilts the entire film somewhat toward the female point of view. Cavell is right, however, to note that in The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn is lectured to about her imperfections by a variety Cynthia Willett

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of men, including not only her own patriarchal father but also the somewhat paternalistic Grant. Whatever the paternal role in her education, we can see clearly that the change amounts to her learning to reconnect with herself and these men. Cavell is cautious about how we might interpret this paternal authority in what are, after all, comedies of equality. Certainly, there is a clear distinction between the kind of paternal authority that we see in Grant and that of her old-fashioned, patriarchal father. As Cavell explains, Grant’s ‘‘authoritativeness, or charisma, may poorly or prejudicially be interpreted as a power to control events. Maybe it is a power not to interfere in them but rather to let them happen. (The association of an explicitly magical person with a power of letting others find their way . . .)’’26 Cavell alludes to the wise man as magus, magician, teacher, therapist, and perhaps philosopher, too, given that Cavell does pose himself through his style in these essays as something of a similar paternal and ironic figure. The Socratic role of the teacher is pivotal for the creation of the woman, or Cavell’s ‘‘new woman,’’ against the norms of obedience or respectability. Cavell does not mention any complementary metamorphosis for men, although he does acknowledge in passing that women in the films can liberate men. And so one wonders if there is not more back and forth between the two characters than Cavell’s definition of the genre allows. In any case, as I have said, regardless of whether this midwifery role for the central male character is generally true, it does appear to operate in The Philadelphia Story. In fact, various men tell Hepburn that she is like a virginal Greek goddess, a ‘‘married maiden,’’ Grant says, and that she cannot be a full woman until she gives up that high-and-mighty pose. Cavell interprets this virginity as yielding her natural autonomy for the sake of a Lockean-style contract, one that marks her pathway from natural autonomy into social bonds. Now let’s return to our initial puzzle, namely, the question of why Hepburn should end up with the seemingly paternalistic upper-class Grant rather than the less paternalistic and just as magical Stewart, especially in an egalitarian comedy. As I have said, Cavell claims that the pairs to be rewed in the genre have in some sense grown up together. True enough. Grant does characterize his relation to Hepburn in this way; but still, by the end of the film, this requirement could apply at least as much to Stewart and Hepburn, taken together as a couple, as to Hepburn and Grant. In fact, within the bounds of the film, Grant’s character does not undergo any great change at all, and certainly not in relation to Hepburn. Grant has mastered his excessive drinking, but that was pointedly not with Hepburn’s assistance. Even more, the paternalistic Grant insists that 102

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his companion’s task is not so much to change him as to accept him, vices and all. So much for his education by her. Meanwhile, the film shows both Stewart and Hepburn coming to terms with their mutual arrogance and general snobbishness. Why not say that Hepburn and Stewart are with respect to this vice like sister and brother and that they both have some growing up to do? After all, as I mentioned earlier, in the climactic moment of the film, both undergo a metamorphosis from a compromising rendezvous the night before Hepburn’s planned wedding to George. Stewart learns to be less of a snob toward the rich. And the social embarrassment of the incident prompts Hepburn to acknowledge her own mishaps and accept vices in others as well. Her virginal goddess-like character does not have to do with her refusal to surrender her natural autonomy for the sake of marriage. It has much to do with her queenly arrogance and the very vital need to repair an already existing social fabric. It is this altered focus that shifts the parameters away from that Cavellian weave of classic liberal autonomy and aristocratic perfectionism and toward the emerging social pragmatism of the 1930s. Let’s return to the question of Stewart and Hepburn. The magic of the late-night rendezvous brings greater self-awareness to a humbled Hepburn. It also leaves Stewart so mesmerized by Hepburn that he returns from the encounter with some of his intellectual snobbery against the upper class in check. In this sense, we could say that the film turns on both Hepburn and Stewart ‘‘growing up,’’ and doing so together like sister and brother. But this mutually transformative education apparently does not set them up as the appropriate pair to marry, and we need to understand why. Are we left with class difference as the only plausible block to their further relationship? That would underscore the film’s aristocratic themes, and in one of the most snobbish ways possible. Let’s look more carefully at what Cavell thinks is aristocratic about the film, and why he judges this to be a good thing. His argument for an aristocratic element in a comedy of equality is actually quite complicated. It begins with a consideration of what the film depicts as appealing in inherited wealth. Cavell is not interested in the elements of the film that legitimate artificial class pretensions or rigid class definitions, at least not in any obvious way, and he sees Hepburn as undermining class pretensions in her appreciation of characters like Stewart. What Cavell views as salutary about the upper class is their leisure for the cultivation of what he calls the ‘‘genuine individual.’’27 Cavell writes that a ‘first-class human being,’ an otherwise dark notion . . . [does not have] to do with a hierarchy of social classes, or with some idea that Cynthia Willett

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there are different kinds of human beings. . . . [T]he difference I see . . . may be expressed this way: the natural aristocrat, better in degree but not in kind than his fellows, is not inherently superior to others, but . . . further along a spiritual path anyone might take and appreciate. . . . This is dangerous moral territory . . . under surveillance most explicitly with George’s defeat and departure. . . . This danger must be run in [comic] romance, which wishes the promise of union and renewal, not expulsion.28 It might help for focus if we think of the cultivation less of the genuine individual per se than of intimate companionship to avoid what I take to be a possible misreading of Cavell’s text, as well as to correct Cavell’s dare I say characteristic tilt toward a one-sided male perspective. It is odd, after all, that Cavell places a photo of a radiant Cary Grant at the opening of a book that is supposed to be about the (re)creation of the modern woman, or egalitarian marriage, rather than any kind of male narcissism. Comic romance, unlike the genre called romance, ensures that perfection is not pursued by the separate individual who seeks self-knowledge in the reflective sphere of nature, as Henry David Thoreau might be said to have done at Walden Pond. This path to self-knowledge is presumably traveled through what, in an account of such romantic comedies as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Northrop Frye terms a green world and, as I have emphasized, for these couples is an erotic sphere of adventure, metamorphosis, and contest.29 The nineteenth-century transcendental motif of selfknowledge reoccurs in a narrative of romantic comedy where I think we can say it is a bit more down-to-earth. The couple grows through an intimate encounter, as Stewart and Hepburn might be said to have done together at the pool, not alone in the more sublime dimensions of thought but in their pleasure together. Cavell offers his version of what such a path of self-knowledge for a couple might entail, through an argument drawn from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. According to Arnold, a flourishing society requires the correct balance of Hebraic conscience and pagan Greek spontaneity. Cavell views Hepburn’s self-righteousness as an instance of Hebraic conscience that can be properly balanced only by Grant’s spontaneity. The result of this balance in marriage, as in a nation, is the perfect union. Marriage requires that Grant and Hepburn correct their individual flaws and advance spiritually toward a cultivation of the virtues. Cavell emphasizes that this path toward perfection does not entail any artificial classist assumptions regarding different kinds of human beings, but only that humanness comes in degrees and that a metamorphosis along this path 104

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makes possible a more perfect individual. So George is not as good a human being as Hepburn and Grant, and this is not because of an inherent class difference but because of shades of self-deception that Hepburn and Grant have overcome. Comedy leaves as exiles those melancholy spirits that threaten social ruin with their envy and jealousy, and George is apparently just such an overly flawed character. Hepburn, on the other hand, overcomes the worst parts of her queenly presence, retaining the virtues of her Hebraic conscience while yielding to the compassion, desire, and vulnerability of a flesh-and-blood human being. But do Cavell’s perfectionist sensibility and the aristocracy of character it sustains really cohere with the zany pleasures and screwball mishaps of comedies of remarriage? Admittedly there are lingering aristocratic themes in a film in which George declares, as he marches off in the end, that class, along with the whole aristocratic lifestyle that Hepburn and Grant represent, is on its way out. But it is also true that in these films, even the ridiculous characters utter truths that need to be heard. And in a democracy, that is as it should be. Indeed, Cavell’s aristocratic focus on perfectionist themes might be persuasive except for one overwhelming fact. The whole point of the film is not that Hepburn learns to become a more perfect person. What Hepburn learns first and foremost is not to strive toward some grand image of herself. On the contrary, Hepburn must come to accept human imperfection. It is true that she does become a better human being because of this insight, but crucially, what she most needs to learn is that she is not that pagan goddess of strength, that superior creature that she had tried to be, and that attempting to play such a role is destructive, both to herself and to those around her. One is often enough one’s own worst enemy. The situation at the pool serves as a kind of social leveler between Hepburn and the others in her life, prompting her to strip off her goddess pretensions along with a Greek robe and acknowledge human frailties. But then we should see as well that this morally uptight goddess blurs the images of pagan and Hebrew that Cavell aims to separate. Arnold’s theory of culture is just not going to work for this film. In fact, Red, as Hepburn’s character is called, is much more spontaneous and spirited, and in this sense ‘‘pagan,’’ than the coolly ironic Grant. In any case, as far as I can see, the film does not aim primarily to open a romantic path toward perfection, a rather narcissistic if not snobbish quality for a genre that turns on the prevalence of comic error and unexpected irony, but instead to point out that acknowledging ordinary vices is part of what allows friendships to thrive. Cynthia Willett

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Cavell’s perfectionist themes drawn from such nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Thoreau and his pond seem heavy-handed, if not a tad bit narcissistic in this Depression-era Hollywood film. Interestingly, the theme of narcissism does come up in the film. Hepburn alludes rather mysteriously to the beauty of Narcissus in a gesture of some kind toward the poet Stewart. She does this after having left George at the party and before the event at the pool with Stewart. Although she seems to use the comparison in appreciation of Stewart’s poetic gifts, she adds rather oddly that Narcissus drowned as he tried to kiss a reflection of the moon, who was also a goddess. I think it is this mysterious comparison that gives us our most important clue as to why Stewart’s proposal is to be rejected. Stewart’s desire for Hepburn may be based in part, as is Grant’s, on the solid ground of friendship, but unlike Grant’s it is way too tinged by the kind of narcissistic fantasies that accompany what may be called romantic love. These fantasies are narcissistic inasmuch as they come less from knowing the other person, vices and all, than from idolizing them. And for this film, it is the wrong kind of love. Stewart may be the immediate vehicle for Hepburn’s self-knowledge, but the encounter at the pool leads him to view her less as she is than as a queen. It is finally Grant, not Stewart, who both understands and balances her limitations and promises a more salutary relationship. But if this balance is not because of some dialectic between his spontaneity and her rigid conscience, then what kind of balance does he offer? Let’s go back to see if we can find the pattern to the characters who finally pair up in remarriage comedies, some pattern that further rules out Hepburn and Stewart becoming a couple. Cavell provides a strong clue when he points toward the ways in which many of the themes of The Philadelphia Story come straight out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Taking the parallels between the two plots, we can see Grant as spurned by the uppity Hepburn, just as Oberon is by Titania, queen of the fairies. In Shakespeare’s play, Oberon plays the role of deflationary ironist to Titania’s overinflated arrogance. The ironist sets the stage for metamorphosis and steps back to watch the plot unfold. The roles of Grant and Hepburn are similar. Comic plots often enough set up characters of contrasting vices on an Aristotelian scale of the virtues. In other comedies, the characters may balance one another along the lines of pagan spontaneity and Hebraic conscience, but this is no rigid rule. In the case of this film, Grant and Hepburn play the parts of what Aristotle terms the eiron and the alazon, with the deflationary ironist set against the overinflated boaster, someone 106

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whom we might otherwise call an arrogant snob. Much of the agon of comedy is generated by the contest between characters who may be richly drawn yet embody such contrasting vices. In The Philadelphia Story we see the agon between the deflationary ironist and the uppity snob not only in the main plot, in the characters of Grant and Hepburn, but also in the dynamic between Stewart and Ruth Hussey’s character, the photographer and would-be artist Liz. Hussey serves as a useful and witty deflator to Stewart’s pretensions in much the same way as Grant does for Hepburn. When Stewart loses the ironic skepticism that usually defines him and falls into the trap of idolizing Hepburn as a queen, he is no longer useful in the same way. This poet’s gift of transformative perception recalls the narcissistic projections of romantic love; it does not make for the egalitarian marriage of contest and conversation (or ‘‘spirited conversation,’’ as Cavell writes) that gives us pleasure in the films. The egalitarian contests play lovers against one another in, as Cavell says, the perpetual festival of contests. Hepburn may be held in bounds by Grant’s cool irony; but without her fiery boldness there would be no spirit in the relationship. In this genre of companion-style marriage, we do not have the romanticization of separate spheres of gender identity from the Victorian era, or any complementary doctrines of male and female perfection, as these spheres presumed. On the contrary, here we have marriage as friendship, but in the state of perpetual conflict—relentless sibling rivalry, we might say, but without the sameness that should concern deconstructionists like Derrida. If Grant is the magus-educator in this story, as Cavell suggests, it is less because he embodies some perfect pagan principle of spontaneity than because of his role as ironist. Of course, in relation to George, the boor, Grant does reveal as well a spontaneous side. And in fact, rich characters have multiple aspects to their identity and so thrive in multiple relationships. Marriage does not suffice to complete one, and only the romantic lover would think it could. Still, in this film marriage is central, and Grant’s persona is most apparent in contrast with the self-deceptive arrogance of the virginal goddess that he helps expose. As the teacher or philosopher, a paternal yet not patriarchal Grant steps back from direct control, lending the hand of the ironist to the plot here and there but allowing those around him to unravel and rediscover who they are for themselves. This is not to say that the characters accomplish this task by themselves; it is just to say that pedantic moralizing lectures of the type given by Hepburn’s father are likely less to educate than to harden their intended target. This film ends with less equality than, say, the equality between Beatrice and Benedict in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing Cynthia Willett

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because whatever spirit Red adds to the marriage, Grant’s ironic role takes the upper hand. This film is for that reason less egalitarian than one might want. Still, the film serves well to show that what is needed most in a democracy threatening to become an imperial hegemon is not another moral lecture but the mocking tone of the comic ironist. No wonder Aaron McGruder, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Jon Stewart are among our most salutary political voices today. Romantic comedy tries as best it can to include everyone in the new society, lest the play darken. The pleasure at the end comes from a festive celebration of imperfect souls. So why must the film expel the imperfect George, the self-made man and exemplar of one contending view of what it means to be American? Cavell argues that it is his envy and resentment of his betters, which is to say that George is not in that class of better people. If we are to avoid the more aristocratic side of Cavell’s interpretation, however, we might focus less on George’s occasional envy and more on the unyielding sense of superiority that his quickness to condemn betrays. This same kind of moral arrogance mars Hepburn’s own character, and George is not going to help her keep this vice in check. The film doesn’t finally exclude him from all society, just this one. This is not to say that the film constitutes any unproblematic endorsement of democracy either. The film makes clear through the uninvited appearance of Spy Magazine at the wedding that ‘‘the people’’ are not immune from their own types of overreaching. The tyranny of majorities, and the necessity for preserving some sense of the private life against this kind of public surveillance, is signaled by the antics of Sidney Kidd, the magazine’s editor. Still, these tyrannical forces are perhaps never so lethal as when the masses unite with the wealthy under the imperial banner of moral self-righteousness, and it is in the figure of George, not Sidney Kidd, that we find the latter tendency. Remarriage comedy depends not on the cultivation of individual perfection but on the balance of our different vices and the incomplete virtues they enable through our social bonds. Throughout the comedies of remarriage, marriage is envisioned not as a perfect union of superior characters, but instead as the conflict-ridden romance based on playing off vice against vice, vices that become disastrous, as tragedy demonstrates, when they are not reined in. Of course, this play of vices doesn’t necessarily divide up between characters quite as neatly as happens in The Philadelphia Story or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The central couple in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, Beatrice and Benedict, each take turns playing the role of ironist against overinflated tendencies in the other. (In contrast, romantic love pulls together the couple in Much Ado’s 108

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subplot). Other comedies of remarriage show different comic vices. In Bringing Up Baby, a screwball Katharine Hepburn falls for the boorish Cary Grant. Not even in comedy is the boor—that enemy of comedy— once and for all dismissed from social relevance. Rather, the genre of remarriage comedy illustrates in the realm of character and marriage what Madisonian liberalism recommends for the machinery of government, and the pragmatist expands to the larger democratic society—a necessary balance of countervailing powers, without too much investment of authority in any one place over time.30 This kind of pragmatic liberalism does not encourage us to target enemies, as do our radical democratic friends, but instead, picking up on the subtitle of a more recent remarriage comedy, to engage them. Indeed, this play of checks and balances in romantic comedy disappeared in the security-oriented 1950s and its aftermath, only to once again emerge in the post–Cold War era. In the Coen brothers’ comedy of remarriage I alluded to above, Intolerable Cruelty: Engage the Enemy (2003), George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones play their arrogance off one another just like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict. In another Coen brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski (1998), Jeff Bridges plays the ironist slacker to a self-righteous Vietnam veteran played by John Goodman. This is a buddy film, not a comedy of remarriage, but their friendship rests similarly on the constant friction between them, and that friction too stems from the difference of perspective their respective vices lend them. It is even clearer in The Big Lebowski than in the older films that the characters are not ever going to correct their vices and that they do not expect anything different of one another. Instead, as is typical of these kinds of buddy films, the play of their vices against one another sustains the friendship. It is the friendship of the buddy films, not romantic love or morally and economically defined gender roles, that defines 1930s romantic comedy and allows what otherwise might seem like a traditional defense of marriage to open up a path for understanding a broader conception of the many kinds of friendship that ground a democratic society. I have said that the social ethos of remarriage comedy coheres less with a classic liberal contract theory than with the social pragmatism of 1930s U.S. culture and shows some signs of reemerging in the post–Cold War era romantic film comedy. Let’s see if we can now be clear on what these different genres of democratic politics entail. Contract theory rests on the decision of the individual to yield natural autonomy for the security of a union. Cavell draws on contract theory when he argues that remarriage comedy centers around yielding independence (or symbolically, one’s virginity) in the pursuit of happiness through marriage. Cynthia Willett

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These films, however, are not about marriage but remarriage. The remarriage theme centers around revitalizing friendships that are already there rather than their original creation from some virginal state of nature. Accordingly, the films do not revolve around the need to yield some degree of independence for the security marriage can bring; this picture of domestic life as a threat to one’s freedom may dominate the so-called matriarchal comedies of the 1950s, as has been argued.31 Susan Bordo points out the sardonic quality of Rock Hudson’s speech in the 1959 film Pillow Talk: ‘‘Before a man gets married, he’s like a tree in the forest. He stands there, independent, an entity unto himself. And then he’s chopped down.’’32 A situation characterized by what one scholar describes as ‘‘female hubris and male angst’’ leads, as Bordo writes, to ‘‘male rebellion against domesticity’’ in the James Dean–style existential films of the 1960s and Clint Eastwood action figures of the next several decades.33 In these films, women are sex goddesses or trophies but not real friends. Long-standing friendships repair the disruption that our ordinary vices cause in a social life. The classic liberal tension between autonomy and dependence does not bear on Hepburn’s decision to remarry Grant. It comes up only in her lecture to her mother. Hepburn urges her mother to give up on her philandering husband and save her self-respect, to which her mother expresses fears of abandonment. Whereas the mother’s options leave the simple choice of self-respect or a dependent kind of love, Hepburn’s choice is posed by more complex parameters. Her choice revolves around three suitors and three types of relationships: the romantic love projected by the poet, Stewart; the status-oriented marriage of the upright George; or the unending contest with Grant. Remarriage to Grant promises not only restraint but also emancipation, the freedom that one experiences in, as Cavell would have it, a conversation with a friend. And if this is freedom, it is not what liberal theory posits as autonomy but what romantic comedy unfolds as the liberation of eros of a predominantly social kind. It assumes human imperfection, social interdependence, and the vital play of checks and balances that a spirited exchange provides. It is in this social vision of friendship in adventure and contest that we find a microcosm for democracy. Conclusion Democracy, like friendship, is based not on virtue but on vice and the spirited conflicts that our ordinary vices sustain. But if these vices are to enable our virtues, then they must act as restraints on one another. Blind arrogance is one of the more dangerous vices in politics, as in friendship, 110

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and often the basis for tragedy. It is as well the ready target of laughter in comic romance. Let us assume that the companionships of romantic comedy serve as a miniature form of democracy. If so, then we might say that democracy thrives through conversation and contest as well as through dialogue’s comic structure. The balance of irony against arrogance is not incidental to democracy but essential to its basic meaning.

Cynthia Willett

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7

The Intimacy of Strangers The Difficulty of Closeness and the Ethics of Distance E D UA R D O M E N D I E TA

One of the central themes of Plato’s work is the question, why be moral? Some of his most memorable and important dialogues are focused on the reasons why it is better to be moral than not, why it is better to be done wrong than to do wrong, why it is more noble to be just, and why to wish suffering and pain on our enemies is unworthy of beautiful souls. Plato links morality not just to reason but to the pursuit of happiness and to the beautiful soul, which is mirrored in the noble and just city Kallipolis. The Republic is probably the one work in which Plato most successfully links the philosophical vocation with the pursuit of morality and the quest for the just city. It is in the Republic that we are exposed to one of the most important allegories of the Western philosophical canon, namely, the allegory of the cave. In this same extended dialogue, Plato exposes us, through the mouth of Glaucon, to the story of the ring of Gyges. According to Glaucon’s telling of the story, after a violent storm, Gyges of Lydia comes upon a ring that allows him to become invisible. Taking advantage of his recently gained invisibility, Gyges arranges to seduce the king’s wife, I want to thank Jennifer Farquhar, Chad Kautzer, Cynthia Willett, and Martin Woessner, who read an early version of this essay and made extensive comments and suggestions. I was worried that this essay could become ammunition in the arsenal of the Bible Belt prophets of moral purity and transparency of heart, but my colleagues have assuaged me that my arguments here are not pliable toward those ends. I remain responsible for its obscurity and density. 112

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recruit her help in killing the king, and then take over the kingdom.1 Glaucon asks rhetorically whether the just person and the unjust person would act differently had both access to the same power. Glaucon in fact avers: ‘‘Both would pursue the same course [of crime with impunity].’’ This leads him to conclude: ‘‘This, some would say, is strong evidence that no one is just willingly, but only when compelled. No one believes justice to be a good thing when it is kept private, since whenever either person thinks he can do injustice with impunity, he does it.’’2 It is not difficult to see that the ring of Gyges is an allegory for the power of social opprobrium and censure. In fact, publicness, the visibility of the agora, ¨ ffenlichkeit, acts as the Public Square, or what Ju¨rgen Habermas called O 3 a force that keeps us moral. In private, hidden and concealed from the eye of our fellow citizens, we are just as weak and incontinent as the most corrupt soul. The ethical relation is a topology. It involves subjects standing before others, being held accountable by others, who can be direct witnesses of our character, within a space that is discrete but not measurable. The ethical relation involves distance, whether it is of closeness or farness. Distance is not necessarily what is farthest, for it can be the most proximate, yet not reachable. The distance that is involved in the ethical relation can be spatial and temporal. Being in the openness or publicness in which we stand before others is a clearing that is also temporal: it is either a now, a was, a has been, or a will be in which the other speaks to us in and across time. The classic philosophical distinction between ethics and morality, or Sittlichkeit and Moralita¨t to use the German terms for each correspondingly, could be formulated in terms of closeness and remoteness; thus one could say that ethics is to closeness as morality is to remoteness. Whereas the former provides us with a set of behavioral codes that we apply in the vicinity of those with whom we dwell in closeness, the latter provides us with maxims or principles that apply to strangers and remote individuals with whom we may not interact directly at all. Ethics is addressed to the concrete other who is my neighbor; morality is addressed to the abstract other who is our addressee in universal language. Avishai Margalit has articulated this difference in a slightly different formulation, one that nonetheless retains the reference to space, distance, and closeness. Margalit writes in his Ethics of Memory, ‘‘Morality is long on geography and short on memory. Ethics is typically short on geography and long on memory.’’4 What Margalit is pointing out with this provocative formulation is that whereas ethics is rooted in closeness and vicinity, morality attempts to bridge distance and remoteness through other forms of moral reasoning and norms. The point here is that all ethical relations presuppose some Eduardo Mendieta

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sort of spatiality. The ethical articulates an ontology of human spatiality. Alternatively, we could argue that the ethical itself is an articulation of what Martin Heidegger called Dasein’s worldhood.5 There is no ethics without the prior and originary worldhood of a particular ethical subject, who in turn is always in relation with others. Strangers and intimates with whom we share degrees of visibility and audibility populate the spatiality of the ethical relation. It is these links between publicness, or visibility, and ethics that are captured in Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ‘‘face to face.’’ The face is the epiphany of the other as an other who interpellates us from his or her radical alterity. The face-to-face relation is a relation to the stranger, who comes to us to reveal a world in which we can be ethical. The face of the other is the disclosure of an appellation beyond custom, the quotidian, the average, and the foreseeable. The face announces and speaks, though we do not know what. But it is this apparition and annunciation that clear a space from within which we gather ourselves to assume the place of the ethical subject. If in the face to face there is an epiphany of God, and God is the utmost stranger, then the face to face is the encounter with the utmost alterity, but in a form that commands our solicitude. Levinas writes that ‘‘ethics is the spiritual optics,’’6 by which we can take him to mean that it is only through human relationality that something like a radical metaphysical distance is disclosed. But it is precisely in the horizon of this distance that the ethical experience as such is made possible. God may be invisible and inscrutable, but at the same time Godself is accessible in ‘‘justice.’’ In the face, sociality, as the foundation of ethics, is disclosed. ‘‘Sociality is the alterity of the face.’’7 Ethics is a response to the stranger in the visage and audibility of the human face and saying. Yet in Levinas, the visibility of the face, the challenging of the human visage, which is always the epiphany of the utterly strange, is held in suspension by the voice. The visage of the human may reveal, but it is speech that solicits, interpellates, and commands. Levinas notes that ‘‘speech cuts across vision.’’8 Although vision discloses in the face to face the stranger, it nonetheless does not provide for full metaphysical freedom. Vision appropriates to itself the seen—that which as an object stands over and against us. Vision seeks to exhaust and encompass. It aims at ‘‘adequation.’’ Tension, resolution, reconciliation, a letting be that is proper to the other, is possible only in the field of speech. In vision, the other is my other, and I can turn away from it. In speech, the other is always an interlocutor, inscrutable and incalculable, and thus irreducible and nonexhaustible. There is indeed a tension between what Levinas says about the face to face as a divine prismatics and discourse or speech as the horizon 114

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in which the other as other is both encountered and respected in her freedom. In contrast to the field of vision, which tends to objectification and temporal suspension, in speech the other is never just an other and never frozen in time. Even if face is what forbids killing, it is the saying face that establishes the ethical relation. The face, in a sense, is not seen. The ‘‘relation to the face is straightaway ethical. The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying: ‘thou shalt not kill.’ ’’9 Levinas confirmed this difference between speech and vision when he wrote, ‘‘In discourse the divergence that inevitably opens between the Other as my theme and the Other as my interlocutor, emancipated from the theme that seemed a moment to hold him, forthwith contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor. The formal structure of language thereby announces the ethical inviolability of the Other and, without any odor of the ‘numinous,’ his ‘holiness.’ ’’10 Levinas contends with and rejects the ontology implicit in Plato’s epistemology, namely, that what can be known is what is truly real, whereas what we experience is merely a transient appearance that is unworthy of our attention. The face is this fleeting, evanescent moment that Plato derides. But the voice of the other is even more fleeting and diaphanous. In the whisper of lovers, and in the murmur of the dying, the topology of ethics is revealed. Nonetheless, Levinas holds on to the insight that links visibility, and thus distance and proximity, to ethics, which is the theme of the story of the ring of Gyges. Hans Jonas, one of the most important ethicists of the twentieth century, also studied and thematized the relationship between visibility and ethics, although he did it in terms of sight and eternity. In a famous and brilliant essay entitled ‘‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,’’11 Jonas develops a phenomenology of the senses that, as the title announces, grants the place of privilege to sight. For Jonas sight is the sense of simultaneity par excellence. That is to say, sight coordinates, juxtaposes, and brings into coexistence within a field of vision what is extensive. It does all of this in an instant. At a glance, a world is given. It is in the simultaneity of the flash of what is seen that sight gives us a glimpse of the eternal. The flash of vision is a flash of timelessness as an instance of time. All the other senses are unable, structurally and ontologically, to unify the manifold of their experiences into a temporal and spatial unity. Thus, Jonas elaborates on the differences between the senses in the following way. ‘‘Thus it would seem that the three cases can be distinguished in this formula: Hearing—presentation of sequences through sequence; touch—presentation of simultaneity through sequence; sight—presentation of simultaneity through simultaneity.’’12 As Eduardo Mendieta

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if reversing Plato, Jonas concludes that it is the very ephemerality of the visible that discloses the eternal and infinite. And it is precisely sight, and its field of vision, that is the phenomenological foundation of all knowledge. The senses do not deceive us nor lead us astray from knowledge or what is true, good, beautiful, and just. They are the very possibility of our having those very ideas qua frozen flashes of sight. Sight, however, holds a unique place in the economy of senses and the sensible. For Jonas, ‘‘only the simultaneity of sight, with its extended ‘present’ of enduring objects, allows the distinction between change and the unchanging and therefore between becoming and being. All other senses operate by registering change and cannot make that distinction. Only sight therefore provides the sensual basis on which the mind may conceive the idea of the eternal, that which never changes and is always present.’’13 All technology can be thought of as a prosthetic, and every technological device as the extension of a particular organ, or group of organs. In this way, all technology intervenes in the way we bridge distance and make objects and other human beings either visible or invisible. Technology is intricately woven into our ethical relationship precisely because it is a prosthetic that collapses spatial and temporal distances and reveals in the field of vision that which would be seen with our eyes only through the transverse of long distances. I seek to explore the ethical difficulties that arise when strangers became intimates, and intimates become strangers, when temporal and spatial distances are collapsed, when our lives are flooded with the faces of starving children continents away and simultaneously are blind to the starving poor outside our doors, and when new technological innovations intervene in our quotidian existence in such a way that we are granted something like the power of the ring of Gyges. These technological innovations not only grant us new ways of being invisible but also lead to new forms of ethical and moral inaction. Some of these new technologies allow us to transform communication into mere information exchange and to gaze over the face of the other, but they also allow us to disabuse ourselves into thinking that ‘‘signing’’ an Internet petition or sending an instant message to a government number are forms of ethical and political action. The eviscerated face-to-face ethical moment does not just allow us to act unethically or with impunity, but it also allows us to not act, or to not actively participate. There is impunity, but also no risk taking, no reaching across space to aid and respond to the other. I will explore these difficulties by focusing on two phenomenological case studies. First, I want to approach the challenge of the proximity of strangers through the prism of the mobile phone. Second, I will turn to the Internet, and in particular, the explosion of cyberporn. The cell 116

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phone is not just a mobile phone. It is a device that deterritorializes and delocalizes its users—hence the almost reflexive need to preface every conversation with, ‘‘I am at . . .’’ As a deterritorializing dispositif, it offers its users a version of the ring of Gyges’ invisibility. I will focus, however, on the way in which it rearranges the borders between the private and the public. The Internet is probably a more powerful ring of Gyges, or one with a hyperdrive. In the case of the Internet, which is not yet totally uncoupled from physical links, notwithstanding the greater convergence between cell phones and Internet terminals, there are four factors that I will foreground against the background of the transformation of quantity into quality: effectiveness, ease, access, and anonymity. The Private Colonizes the Public It is more the norm than the exception to walk into a Starbucks coffee shop and find most people typing away on a laptop, listening to their iPods, or talking on a cell phone, oblivious to the other people in the place. There is no animosity behind this observation. No particular phobia, hate, or derision is concealed behind it. It is simply an observation about a particular type of social arrangement that has begun to become prevalent in most urban and suburban centers in the United States and Europe. People are gathering in public places to be alone, and their computers and cell phones keep them connected to others in distant places and time zones. One aspect of this phenomenon that must not go unnoticed is that these sites have become loci of capital accumulation. These sites are putatively public, but through public spending become sites of private appropriation. The commons, for instance, are held in reserve, protected from private appropriation. Yet, as it has been shown with bioprospecting and timber extraction, they are also becoming sites of accumulation and extraction of capital by dispossession. Public spaces have always been a measure of public investment. There is no public space without some modicum of public spending on developing and maintaining its infrastructure. What is particular is that these new forms of public spaces are sites of corporate and private investment and private consumption. They are sites of accumulation and in many cases of conspicuous consumption. Upon entering the coffee shop described above, one is likely to enter a space with a higher concentration of computational and processing power than can be found in entire cities in the developing world. The cell phone epitomizes for us the dialectical loop in which individual bodies and cybercapitalist sites of production, accumulation, and consumption are caught. Karl Marx already understood how the bodies Eduardo Mendieta

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of workers become appendages of machines, and machines extensions of particularly socialized bodies. Already for Marx, however, the body is extended in a spatiotemporal continuum, in which machines intervene to create temporalities and spatialities. The cell phone is just one of those spatiotemporal machines that disciplines the body, allowing us to both produce and consume in new productive ways.14 David Harvey has captured eloquently Marx’s political economy of bodies in technology: The body is an unfinished project, historically and geographically malleable in certain ways. It is not, of course, infinitely or even easily malleable and certain of its inherent (‘natural’ or biologically inherited) qualities cannot be erased. But the body continues to evolve and change in ways that reflect both an internal transformative dynamics (often the locus of psychoanalytic work) and the effect of external processes (most often invoked in social constructionist approaches). . . . The body is not a closed and sealed entity, but a relational ‘thing’ that is created, bounded, sustained, and ultimately dissolved in a spatiotemporal flux of multiple processes. This entails a relational-dialectical view in which the body (constructed as a thing-like entity) internalizes the effects of the processes that create, support, sustain, and dissolve it. The body which we inhabit and which is for us the irreducible measure of all things is not itself irreducible.15 The cell phone is a device that transforms our habitat and the mode in which we inhabit our bodies. Here, however, I am not primarily concerned with the political economy of these emergent forms of publicness and embodiment. I am, rather, interested in the phenomenological and ethical effects of these ersatz public spaces qua sites of capital accumulation and bodies of accumulation. The cell phone is undoubtedly an incredibly useful device that has freed us from space, time, routine, and oppressive schedules. We can be practically anywhere and can still be reached there, provided there is coverage or one has a portable satellite phone. We can be reached at any time and can reach anyone, so long as that person picks up the phone. We can call our offices to check our messages en route, or leave early to beat the rush hour and still do late-afternoon office work on the car or commuter train. We can put the kids on the bus as we check in on the office and the appointments for the day, or pick them up at the end of the day as we postpone a meeting or make plans for the next day. The day, as a routine of appointed tasks, has been rendered fluid. Evidently, this flexibility and freedom exacts its own costs.16 We may bring the office with our cell 118

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phones, but the office never leaves our lives. Now that work has been decoupled from space or locality, it has also been detemporalized, or rather, the workday is now distended throughout the entire span of the day.17 Work never ends, because we can never leave the office. The office comes along with our cell phones and computers. Thus, the freedom we gain from the portability of cell phones and computers entails our nominal unconditional availability. We are in an eternal now, in a field of vision in which we are always visible and transparent. The cell phone is the new Benthamite panopticon. There are now designated ‘‘silent cars’’ in commuter trains, and here silent means emphatically ‘‘no cell-phone talking.’’ Step into one of the other cars, and you will be assaulted by a blast of sound—the cacophony of Das Man. We now preface our lecture classes and seminars with a request for politeness and the injunction to turn off cell phones. Some of us have had to resort to excessive and ridiculous policies in which the owner of a cell phone that goes off in the middle of the lecture, or class, has to leave. If one’s phone is on, and one must take the call, the call is clearly more important than the class, and therefore that person should leave and take the call. Curiously, the end of a lecture was generally anticipated or announced by the closing of books and the zipping of backpacks. Now it is announced by the sound of cell phones turning on. Before, students would walk out of class in clusters, talking to each other about the lecture or the next assignment or the next class. Now, they leave the lecture hall talking to someone else on the cell phone. They look like our Starbucks aficionados, but moving. Again, this is supposed to be as dispassionate an account or portrayal as it can be. It is not a matter of being a Luddite, or technophobe, or even of impugning the youth of today. The two examples are meant to direct our attention to the way in which the cell phone has been injected into the very fabric of our everyday existences. Now, our quotidian existence is meditated by a dispositif that makes us endlessly available. This device deterritorializes us and frees us to roam in space and time. Deracinated from everyday life, we are everywhere, and nothing catches our attention. The solicitude of that which is nearest is sacrificed for that which is farthest. You may be on a train, on a bus, in a coffee shop, in a bar, or in a supermarket. You are reading, thinking, gazing, in a public private moment, an intimate public moment, in which you may be sharing something with someone, or you are just alone. Then a neighbor, someone in the seat behind you or in front of you, makes or receives a call. You are suddenly plunged into the private life, or work, of a stranger. More often than not, these are private calls. You suddenly know more than you ever Eduardo Mendieta

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wanted to know about a total stranger. You hear about the young man’s womanizing and his conquest last night. You hear about divorce negotiations and test results for STDs. You hear about the ‘‘stupidity’’ of bosses and supervisors, or why someone is late, and so on. Most of the time, these conversations are held as though you or your other neighbors did not exist. You have become invisible, and they are anonymous. A phenomenological analysis of the cell phone reveals that it is a powerful device that makes us invisible to others and makes others invisible to us. When you are on the cell phone, it is as though you are now in a cubicle and no one else can see you or hear you. As I noted above, the cell phone makes fluid the workday routine in such a way that the workday never ends. Analogously, the cell phone also makes every space available. Space becomes entirely permeable and deroutinized. Spaces, or locales, are no longer attached to specific tasks. Urinals, for instance, are not just where you urinate, but also places where you may watch the news, the weather report, or the football game on the television screen. Urinals are also the place where you can have a phone conversation as you urinate (I have seen this happen more than once). If you can bring work with you, work is everywhere. Similarly, if you can talk to anyone anytime and anywhere, then everywhere is nowhere specific. Space, as it were, has become flat and smooth. We could use Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura— which he related to space and the unique status of works of arts as aesthetic objects—and suggest that the cell phone has rendered space itself auraless, or more precisely, that no space can grant any object or practice any aura.18 This is why it is entirely predictable that cell phones will go off at Mass, even if the pope is preaching. De-auratized space is smooth, flat, and without value or valence. It has been rendered this way by the mediation of cell phones. One aspect of this process of the de-auratization of space wrought by the cell phone is the way in which it has catalyzed what I would like to call—reversing and giving a different connotation to Habermas’s theory of the colonization of the life-world by systems imperatives19 —the colonization of the public by the private. The cell phone permits the private to colonize the public in such a way that the public is no longer the unity of public needs, interests, memories, goals, and rituals. Now the public is the aggregation of private voices. The vacuous cacophony of Das Man, busy and distracted with idle chatter, displaces, drowns out, the public voice of a polity seeking to form a general will. This corrosive effect on public space is proportional to the way in which public spaces have become sites of private and corporate accumulation. A Marxist analysis of the political economy of public spaces is met halfway by a political phenomenology that discloses the ways in 120

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which public space is eviscerated of its publicness and silenced by the vacuous discursivity of private voices deaf and blind to the other as a person and co-citizen. Trapped in a Loop, Click at Your Own Risk It is simply astonishing how quickly the Internet has insinuated itself into our private and public lives. In less than a decade the Internet has exploded into one of the most important devices to regulate our lives. It is a means of production, education, research, entertainment, and socializing. You can order everything from furniture, toys, books, to all kinds of services online. You can also find dates and develop relationships online. You can read the news and find out about the latest mathematical proof before it is even published in a print journal. Through the Web you can wage guerrilla war and sustain a revolutionary movement while you remain hidden in a jungle, as has been the case with Subcomandante Marcos.20 The Internet promises to become the universal library, an everrevised and revisable encyclopedia that the Enlightenment philosophers could only dream about. Like the cell phone, the Internet has also intervened in the ways in which we live in intimacy with strangers and estrangement with our intimates. One of the most troubling aspects of the Internet is the way in which it has allowed for both the proliferation and dissemination of pornography. Cyberporn, in fact, may have overtaken traditional print and celluloid pornography. In the summer of 2003, there were 260 million pages of porn online, reflecting an 1800 percent increase from 1998. According to a Web site called Divorce Wizards, porn accounts for 7 percent of the 3.3 billion pages indexed by Google in 2003.21 If one typed ‘‘porn’’ in the Google search box in January 2007, one would have gotten 92,200,000 hits! It has been reported that cyberporn produces one-fifth of the total pornography in the United States, which is a $10 to $14 billion industry. Although these numbers, reported originally in the New York Times by Frank Rich in 2001, have come under fire by journalists, the number is clearly high and indicative of the profitability of online pornography.22 The sheer amount of porn is not as relevant as is the ease with which it can be accessed and in some cases, the ways in which the means of its access deliberately and systemically exposes unsuspecting browsers to extreme forms of porn. There are four key aspects of cyberporn that I want to discuss briefly as a way to approach the question of the relationship between ethics, distance, and visibility. In the following, I discuss cyberporn’s effectiveness, access, ease, and anonymity. Eduardo Mendieta

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During the late 1990s, while discussing Iris Marion Young’s phenomenology of the breast in her classic essay ‘‘Breasted Existence: The Look and the Feeling,’’23 some of my students brought up the name of Pamela Anderson. I must have been making some general points about plastic beauty and impossible anatomical ideals, and my students must have thought that Anderson illustrated some of these points. At the time I had never heard about nor seen Anderson. So, I Googled her, and to my surprise, I entered a world that I had no idea existed on the Web (yes, I used to be that naive and unsophisticated about the Web). What I discovered at the time is that if you click on a link, you will get caught in loops that bring you deeper and deeper into the surprising world of cyberporn. In fact, there are all kinds of software ploys and benign cyberviruses that keep returning you to different porn clearinghouses and cyberporn windows.24 It is extremely hard to access the Internet without being exposed to the proliferation and pervasiveness of cyberporn. This is an example of what I call the effectiveness of cyberporn. In contrast with both print and celluloid porn, cyberporn is in your face, literally. In addition, because of the present arrangement of the Web, it is difficult to regulate access to it. One can put filters on browsers, but these filters then interact adversely with your other aims. The point that is relevant here is not the quantity of porn per se, but the kinds of porn. It may be, nonetheless, that on the World Wide Web quantity dialectically transforms into quality, that the sheer number of Web pages devoted to porn both enable and demand the posting of more extreme, arcane, unsuspected, and bizarre forms of pornography. It may be true that sometimes porn is in the eye of the beholder, and that it is entirely dependent on a series of arbitrary conventions. Yet the representations of extreme forms of sexualized violence that one can access, even without wanting to, raise serious and challenging questions about the unintended consequences of so much unregulated access. We will pass over in silence a catalog of genres of porn that, as Susan Dwyer has eloquently argued in her important essay ‘‘Enter Here—At Your Own Risk,’’25 have exposed children and adults alike to a type of moral jeopardy. Cyberporn, like all porn, both facilitates and legitimates certain forms of sexual fantasizing. Yet the effectiveness with which extreme porn pervades the Web leads users to be exposed to a type of porn that is ‘‘morally risky.’’26 For Dwyer, the moral risk entailed by cyberporn is not linked to the feminist antiporn stance that says that porn is the theory and rape is the practice. Rather, basing her arguments on Aristotelian virtue ethics, she lays out an analysis that focuses on the ways in which these forms of fantasizing enable certain forms of agency. Cyberporn changes the dependency between fantast (a person who fantasizes), 122

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the content of his fantasies, and his relationship to these contents vis-a`-vis socially proscribed fantasizing. Dwyer argues that cyberporn contributes to the legitimating of certain forms of fantasizing insofar as it provides a cornucopia of visual fantasies, which, inasmuch as they are so easily accessible and in such quantities, further reinforces the ‘‘normalcy’’ of those fantasies. Yet cyberporn points in the direction of something that is latent in all technology, namely, the way in which technology mediates even the constitution of the ego and the desire that solidifies that ego. Michael Uebel, in his important essay ‘‘Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn,’’ has sought to specify with greater clarity the circuit: desire, technology, self. In this essay he aims, ‘‘in the following symptomatological analysis of three key formal aspects of the subject’s relation to Cyberporn (the contract, the image, and the viewing apparatus), to justify turning the aphorism [quoted a few sentences earlier in his essay, which reads ‘‘lust motivates technology’’] around so that ‘technology motivates lust.’ Cybertechnology reinvents the ego, inscribing it with new relations of pleasure and pain, activity and passivity.’’27 The point that Dwyer and I, echoing her, are making is succinctly articulated by Uebel when he concludes a section of his essay in the following way: ‘‘Cybersex technologies are setting up especially seductive fantasies, whose presence modify our very reality—not only our reality-sense, or principle.’’28 Technology, I have been arguing throughout this essay, is a prosthesis that does not leave its user unchanged. The Internet, like every other technological innovation, changes us, changes its user. In the case of cyberporn, it is the range and intensity of our fantasizing itself that is changed. What at one time may have been a deeply disturbing, embarrassing, and troubling fantasy has now turned into an acceptable and widely shared dream, a bit off the range of most fantasies, but surely nothing that should be labeled a pathology. Here, technology affects our fantasizing, not just our embodiment. Some public libraries have had to devise ways to ensure that computer screens can be seen only by their immediate users, not by anyone who may be standing or walking behind. In most cases this need arose from the realization that many public-library users were using the public computers to access porn, in public. Any computer with a Web browser is now a gateway into the largest adult bookstore in the world. The ease with which one can access cyberporn is linked to the very structural matrix of the Web. The Web is access and ease coupled into a new phrase ‘‘surfing the Web.’’ This combined ease and access to porn on the Web has given rise to new forms of dependency and addiction, and has become a major factor in the failure of relationships and marriages. Ryan Singel, reporting Eduardo Mendieta

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for Wired News in 2004, writes, ‘‘Internet pornography is the new crack cocaine, leading to addiction, misogyny, pedophilia, boob jobs and erectile dysfunction, according to clinicians and researchers testifying before a Senate committee.’’29 Pamela Paul, a contributing editor to Time magazine, in her book Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families,30 documented the disastrous and destructive effects of porn addiction. Paul not only has provided us with a wonderful journalistic account of the pornification of American popular culture, but has also provided us with a gripping and mesmerizing narrative about the ways in which cyberporn affects women, men, and teenagers, and how it can destroy families, reputations, and relationships. The statistics fluctuate, and will be changing continuously, so at this point it would be defeating to write any single number. Yet Paul has captured succinctly the factors that make cyberporn both potentially more dangerous and philosophically more challenging than other forms of technologically mediated embodied desire and representation: ‘‘The three A’s of Internet pornography—access, affordability, and anonymity—have turbocharged the Internet in a way unparalleled by any other media.’’31 What Paul refers to as access and affordability I have collapsed into my own categories of ease and access. Affordability is an aspect of access. In most cases, as was insinuated by my reference to the use of public-library terminals to access porn, users can access porn without spending a nickel. Paul, however, does accurately single out an aspect of cyberporn that is essential to its proliferation, and that is the high level of anonymity that its consumption presupposes and enables. Evidently, ease and access (including affordability), combined with anonymity, metastasizes the Internet into a technological device that intervenes in the sociality of our embodiment. It is the ‘‘anonymity’’ of cyberporn that is relevant in our present context, namely, within the context of the relationship between ethics, distance, and visibility.32 Anonymity, in synergy with ease and access, removes one of the main factors that regulated the consumption of porn, namely, shame and embarrassment. Shame is related to being seen and to seeing. As Bernard Williams notes, ‘‘The basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition.’’33 Shame is directly connected to nakedness, specifically to sexual nakedness. Thus, Williams draws out the etymological relationship in Greek between aidoia, the word for genitals, and aidos, or shame. This seen and being seen is related to the vulnerability of the seen person who is seen naked, an extreme form of embodied vulnerability. The other side of vulnerability entailed by shame is the derision, condescension, or derogation entailed by the gaze. We experience shame 124

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through a gaze, or are shamed by a certain gaze. A gaze can shame. Here, the shaming gaze is related to a form of power. To be shamed by a gaze means that one’s vulnerability has been exposed and exploited. On the other side, we have seen that the shaming gaze exerts a certain form of power. Shame has to do with distance, and in this way it is related to the topology of ethics. Still, the power that I am talking about with respect to shame is related to the power to make visible, to expose to the eye. The shaming gaze and being shamed are related to publicness, to a certain distance of the eye and the presence of others in the field of vision. The suggestion is not that we should shame people to domesticate them into morality, but that the anonymity that the Internet grants to its users has essentially neutralized the monitoring and coordinating role that shame used to perform in ethics and social mores. It is the neutralization of shame through anonymity that is phenomenologically and ethically relevant, precisely because it discloses, albeit negatively through its absence, the entwinement of ethics and distance. Cyberporn augurs a whole new catalog of ethical imperatives and responsibilities, precisely because the censuring and guiding role of shame, or public shame, has been destabilized, neutralized, and almost entirely abolished. Conclusion There is a story, a version of which is to be found in Denis Diderot’s Entretien d’un pe`re avec ses enfants; ou, Du danger de se mettre au-dessus des lois [Conversations of a father with his children; or, The danger of setting oneself above the law],34 which could be viewed as the Enlightenment version of Plato’s story of the ring of Gyges. Honore´ de Balzac retells the story, altering it and wrongly attributing it to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the following way. Rastignac asks Biachon, both characters in Balzac’s Pe`re Goriot, the following: ‘‘Have you read Rousseau?’’ ‘‘Yes’’ ‘‘Do you remember the passage where he asks the reader what he would do if he could make a fortune killing an old mandarin in China by simply exerting his will, without stirring from Paris?’’ ‘‘Yes’’ ‘‘Well?’’ ‘‘Bah! I’m at my thirty-third mandarin.’’35 The cultural historian Carlo Ginzburg traces the history of this particular story in his 1994 Amnesty Lecture at Oxford University entitled ‘‘To Eduardo Mendieta

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Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance.’’36 Ginzburg concludes that the earliest roots of this thought experiment can be found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and that some of its most recent versions can be found in David Hume, who dealt directly with the relationship between distance and ethics. Indeed, Hume devotes several pages, under the section entitled ‘‘Of Contiguity and Distance in Space and Time,’’ to this relationship in his A Treatise of Human Nature.37 There Hume summarizes aptly his analysis in this way: ‘‘Thus we have accounted for three phænomena, which seem pretty remarkable. Why distance weakens the conception and passion: Why distance in time has a greater effect than that in space: And why distance in past time has still a greater effect than that in the future.’’38 In this essay, I have focused predominantly, though not exclusively, on the links between space and ethics, or the passions, to use Hume’s terminology. Margalit, whom I quoted at the outset, sought to triangulate ethics with memory and caring, for memory is what keeps present that which has receded into the past. Memory, however, is only sustained by care.39 The question of temporal distance is essential to ethics; thus, the topology of ethics must include an account of the role of remembrance and memory.40 Memory, or the absence of it, is a means for bridging distance, and so is fantasy. Whereas memory holds present, or reenacts, a past event in the now, fantasy brings forth from the future what is anticipated, desired, or feared. In this essay, I sought to explore the phenomenological and ethical implications of two technological innovations that have had profound impacts on how we inhabit our bodies and how we develop new forms of habitation. The cell phone, I have argued, deterritorializes us, as space and time are flattened. The resulting de-auratization of both time and space entails a drawing of a new geography of social space, in which we live in contiguity with the private lives of strangers and public space has been colonized by the private, therefore silencing the voice of public political and cultural life. All technology affects human spatiality, or more precisely, human topopoesis. For this reason, we should speak of a technotopoesis. The confluence and entwinement of techne¯ with topos and ethos is what I sought to capture with the call for a topology of ethics. As I argued, cell phones and cyberporn condition new modalities of intimacy and distance that catalyze new ethical imperatives as well as failures and ethical quiescence and turpitude. I then discussed the World Wide Web and the emergence of a new phenomenon, which, I suggested, is not just a matter of quantity but a matter of quality—namely, cyberporn. The Web, with its ease, access, and anonymity—or, in Pamela Paul’s terms, access, affordability, and anonymity—has both allowed and 126

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compelled the proliferation of morally dangerous forms of sexual fantasizing. The anonymity that the Web grants has led to the neutralization of the guiding role of shame. The suggestion is not that we should return to the days of shaming by branding (e.g., scarlet letters on the forehead—P for pornographers). Rather, I explored the ways in which the evisceration of the moral role of shame revealed to us, through its absence, the fundamental role of visibility, the gaze, moral vulnerability, and nakedness. In this way, we returned full circle, as it were, to Levinas’s reflections, in which the face and voice are linked to give rise to the ethical as such. Anonymity, as it pertains to these forms of morally dangerous forms of fantasizing, turns out to be a form of impunity and power that renders us ethically unassailable and unaccountable. Anonymity allows us to be concealed and to conceal—without a visage, a face, the anonymous does not have to give an account of its gaze. Levinas described the face in this way: ‘‘There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity. It is the most destitute also: there is an essential poverty in the face. . . . The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill.’’41 Both technological devices, the cell phone and the Web, as prostheses of the body’s lust for more body, intervene and rearrange so fundamentally our sense of space and time that new social geographies emerge. Both also make explicit the links between what we may call moral geography, or the topology of ethics, and the moral imagination. Ethics and morality in essence have been about welcoming the stranger, being solicitous of the foreigner, responding responsibly to the alterity of the other. Now, however, the stranger and the foreigner are next to us, and the mundane and familiar are in the distance of technologically mediated sociality. We now live in intimacy with strangers, and our intimates have become strangers.

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8

Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility ROBERT BERNASCONI

Responsibility and Accountability The term responsibility is so ubiquitous in discussions of ethics and politics today that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it has been in use for only a little more than two hundred years and that philosophers have seen a need for it in ethics for only about half that time. More precisely, it is a term that cannot be found in classical Greek or Latin and indeed appears first as a noun only in French and English around 1787. In this essay I explore the history of the term responsibility in order to introduce a certain revolution in ethical thinking, initiated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas, that has been underway since the 1940s. I believe that this thinking provides crucial resources for addressing some of the most difficult problems that threaten the world today, both the long-standing problems of hunger and poverty, but also new problems that arise from the advent of technology, such as global warming, gene manipulation, and cloning.1 It is not only because their thinking on responsibility answers to these pressing problems that it merits our attention. The idea that human beings should not and cannot evade these problems any longer is widespread. Responsibility is, as it were, an ethical invention, but it is also a challenge.2 The novelty of the idea of responsibility, and not just the word, comes into focus when one distinguishes it from accountability. Accountability, as I am using the term, is primarily backward-looking, focusing on the 131

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rectification of past crimes or failings. Issues of accountability were addressed in the law courts, and it is possible to see these issues being taken up into the philosophical literature in Plato’s Laws and at the beginning of the third book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle addresses the question of whether certain acts that draw praise or blame are done wittingly or unwittingly.3 Attention to the legal context leads Bernard Williams to claim that any apparent difference between the Greek and the contemporary notions of responsibility must be traced back to a difference between their and our conceptions of law and does not ultimately reflect different views on responsibility.4 However, this approach overlooks the transformation of the conception of ethics in the West through the Christianization of morality, which made ethics a matter of conscience. Once the will came to take a central place in ethics with Saint Augustine, and subsequently the question of the intention of the agent was given prominence by Peter Abelard, the separation of the primarily legal conception of accountability, which for the most part focuses on what was done, from the moral conception, whose focus is on what the agent was thinking, became more pronounced. Nevertheless, the legal model for a long while retained its preeminence insofar as the moral meaning of an act was determined by the judgment of God in much the same way that its legal meaning was determined by the judgment of the courts. Furthermore, the philosophical study of ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to be dominated by casuistry, which, among other things, had the task of setting limits to one’s duties and providing the excuses one needed when confronting one’s creator, much as a defense lawyer provides a client with extenuating circumstances and alibis.5 Much of the history of ethics can be read as the history of excuses. History of the Term Responsibility In this section I argue that the term responsibility was introduced in an attempt to render more precise a network of legal relationships that arose within the West in the context of the advent of representative democracy, shaped as it was by the rise of capitalism. The radical individualism created by this new form of society destroyed the existing bonds of society and highlighted in a one-sided way the independence of each from the others. It made it necessary to formulate an answerability to others that many other forms of society have tended to take for granted. I show here how philosophers attempted to assimilate this new notion of ‘‘responsibility’’ to the old idea of legal accountability and that these attempts were in large measure successful for a time. It was only later, during the extreme 132

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circumstances of the German occupation of France during the Second World War, that the hitherto largely concealed resources of the term responsibility were unleashed by Jean-Paul Sartre. The English word responsibility, like the French responsabilite´ and the German Verantwortlichkeit, appeared as a noun for the first time in the final years of the eighteenth century.6 However, one can find the corresponding adjectives earlier. For example, the French responsable goes back to the thirteenth century and initially meant ‘‘guaranteeing,’’ ‘‘being admissible in justice,’’ or ‘‘being able to resist’’ in the sense that a fortification can resist or answer to an attack. The noun Verantwortung, unlike Verantwortlichkeit, can be traced back to the fifteenth century,7 and the German verantwortlich was apparently first used in 1664 to refer to ministerial accountability. None of these German terms appears in the 1827 edition of Wilhelm Traugott Krug’s Allgemeines Handwo¨rterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften, but the adjective verantwortlich is included in the supplementary volume published two years later, where it refers to the duty of accountability (Rechenschaft)—understood in terms of speech and answer—because everyone has a judge over them, for example, God.8 The English adjective responsible was first used in 1599, and it seems to have meant answering to someone or something. By 1643, in the context of the English Civil War, it meant being answerable either to the king or to Parliament. In 1650 the term meant being answerable to a charge or accusation. In 1691 John Locke used this word in the context of a discussion of the inadequacy of written accounts to serve as a pledge in the way that money can. His explanation was that ‘‘the Bill, Bond, or other Note of Debt, I receive from one Man will not be accepted as Security by another, he not knowing that the Bill or Bond is true or legal, or that the Man bound to me is honest or responsible.’’9 This last reference highlights not only the way in which the notion of being responsible corresponds to the burgeoning democratic institutions but also the need, with the rise of capitalism, to place more emphasis on promising, which led to an increased focus both on the constancy of a person over time. This in turn raised issues of personal identity and of being as good as one’s word. It was only within the context of the new institutions and pressures of bourgeois capitalism that it became necessary to articulate a notion of responsibility. Whereas the German term Verantwortlichkeit, which was first used by Heinrich Heine, was for the most part little more than a synonym for Zurechnung, that is, imputation or ascription, which seems to imply the existence of a judge, in France the word responsabilite´ appears first in 1788 just prior to the French Revolution and is used to refer both to the responsibility of a government and to the responsibility of the directors of Robert Bernasconi

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a company.10 Both ministers and directors are answerable. Similarly, in English, the word responsibility can be found first in the specifically political context of the idea of a government that is responsible to the people through frequent elections: in 1787 James Madison, in the Federalist No. 63, argued that elections ‘‘produce’’ responsibility. But he also attributed to this relatively new conception of responsibility features that made it readily assimilable to the old legal model of accountability: ‘‘Responsibility in order to be reasonable must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party.’’11 A further article in 1788, this one by Alexander Hamilton, explained that responsibility is ‘‘of two kinds, to censure and to punishment.’’12 The decisive moment in the genesis of a distinct concept of responsibility emerges only when Benjamin Constant, in his 1815 essay ‘‘De la responsabilite´ des ministres,’’ documents for the first time the character of this new sense of responsibility.13 The significance is that Constant insists on a rigorous distinction between responsibility and legal arrangements, which I call here accountability, although Constant’s English translator uses that term as a synonym for responsibility.14 According to Constant, if a minister breaks the law, then that minister is subject to the full jurisdiction of the law. When a minister exercises his power in a way that is unwarranted by law, he acts as a private person. Such acts are illegal and, like all illegal acts that he performs as a private person, are covered by the courts.15 Responsibility, properly understood, is, by contrast, at issue only when no law is broken. More precisely, the term responsibility refers to the wrong or unjust, but not illegal, use of power entrusted by the law.16 It is the nature of such acts that they cannot be specified in advance or codified.17 For this reason, ministers who have acted unjustly but not illegally cannot be brought before the courts, but must be taken ‘‘before the national representatives.’’18 The novelty of this situation calls for a different approach to punishment, if there is to be punishment. In the most serious cases he envisages death, torture, or banishment. However, Constant also speculates that in the majority of cases no punishment would be necessary: it would be sufficient if the minister lost his position.19 Constant similarly, by making the ministers responsible, places the monarch above redress.20 In this way Constant carves out a special realm of responsibility separate from accountability. Constant was not so much trying to construct a sound theory of responsibility from principles as seeking to articulate the theory that underlay the practices of his time. He had his own political agenda, of course, but his attempts to deduce, as it were, an idea of ministerial responsibility arose from his observations of relatively new political developments in 134

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France and Britain. The French constitution of 1815 had declared the king inviolable and the ministers responsible.21 In 1817 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also took up this development, and he continued to show an interest in it. However, his approach was somewhat different from that of Constant. Hegel believed that ministers were responsible because they address the objective aspects of decision, that is, those pertaining to its content and circumstances as well as its legal basis, whereas the monarch is raised above responsibility for the acts of government because the monarch is the ultimate subjectivity of decision.22 Constant shows more insight into these new developments than Hegel because he highlights the difference between legal accountability and responsibility, focusing in particular on the indeterminacy of our responsibilities.23 This emerges most clearly in his discussion of so-called subordinate or inferior agents, those who are acting under orders from a higher authority, such as ministers. Constant refers that problem to the law. A subordinate agent who acts under orders that are legally given has done nothing wrong. He is not held responsible. Furthermore, when the minister is held responsible for abuse of his or her legal powers, those who execute the orders are not responsible. It is, in Constant’s view, only when the agents execute an illegal order—such as a crime directed against ‘‘safety, liberty, individual property’’—that the subordinate agents must be held responsible.24 The list of crimes reflects the economic and political landscape that gave rise to the theory, although the idea of responsibility has the potential, as we can see once we turn to Sartre and Levinas, to throw that landscape into question. Constant’s point is that just as ministers are responsible or answerable to the elected assembly, so subordinate agents are responsible or answerable to a jury. Although the subordinate agents are in their responsibility referred to the law, the jury that represents popular opinion or common sense is the appropriate body for determining nuances that cannot be specified in writing in advance and thus call for judgment.25 The responsibility of subordinate agents is before a jury, just as the responsibility of ministers is before the national representatives, because the determination of one’s responsibilities cannot readily be codified in law. The initial tendency among philosophers was to deny the need for a notion of responsibility. One sees this already in what is said to be the first philosophical use of the term responsibility in English. Alexander Bain in 1859 argued against using the word because it simply meant to him ‘‘punishability.’’ It is introduced only to be renounced immediately: The term ‘‘Responsibility,’’ is a figurative expression of the kind called by writers on Rhetoric ‘‘Metonomy,’’ where a thing is named Robert Bernasconi

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by some of its causes, effects, or adjuncts, as when the crown is put for royalty, the mitre for episcopacy, etc. Seeing that in every country, where forms of justice have been established, a criminal is allowed to answer the charge made against him before he is punished; this circumstance has been taken up and used to designate punishment. We shall find it conduce to clearness to put aside the figure, and employ the literal term. Instead, therefore, of responsibility, I shall substitute punishability; for a man can never be said to be responsible, if you are not prepared to punish him when he cannot satisfactorily answer the charges made against him.26 It was perhaps in a vague recollection of Bain that in 1865 John Stuart Mill, in the context of a discussion of Sir William Hamilton’s discussion of accountability, declared that ‘‘responsibility means punishment.’’27 In 1876 F. H. Bradley, in his essay on ‘‘the vulgar understanding of responsibility,’’ cited Mill’s dictum and, although he corrected it to say that responsibility was associated with liability to punishment, as one might be guiltless, he showed no interest in developing there a nonvulgar notion of responsibility.28 The origins of the dominant idea of responsibility can still be heard in Max Weber’s description of an ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) as an ethics in which ‘‘one must answer for the (foreseeable) consequences of one’s action’’ as opposed to an ethics of principled conviction (Gesinnungsethik), which disregards any evil consequences that flow from an act performed from pure conviction.29 Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl’s significance in this context is that in L’ide´e de responsabilite´ he distinguished between a legal, social, or objective responsibility and a moral or subjective responsibility, which he described as located in conscience and without content.30 The latter can thus be seen as an echo of responsibility, as Constant used the term, to the extent that it is differentiated from legal accountability, is indeterminate, and is not essentially tied to punishment. Nevertheless, the fact that Le´vy-Bruhl understood moral responsibility as divorced from society and answerable only to conscience shows the distance from Constant’s conception. One should also observe that Le´vy-Bruhl ignored the novelty of the idea of responsibility. He presented it as an indispensable feature of morality that we would abandon only at our peril. Already showing the ethnological interest that would lead him subsequently to write books on a so-called primitive mentality, he saw responsibility as a permanent feature of society. Following Le´vy-Bruhl, thinking in terms of responsibility quickly came to be taken for granted. Already in 1887 Friedrich Nietzsche posed the 136

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question of morality in terms of responsibility.31 This culminated in Jacques Derrida’s attempt in The Gift of Death to present European history as a history of responsibility.32 Hyperbolic Responsibility In 1943 a new conception of responsibility—I call it ‘‘hyperbolic responsibility’’—was born, or perhaps one should say, was ‘‘discovered.’’ It arose when Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness announced: ‘‘I am responsible for everything.’’33 The only exception he allowed was responsibility for responsibility itself: I am condemned to responsibility for everything. This establishes the grammar of hyperbolic responsibility. One can never say of anything, ‘‘It is not my responsibility, it has nothing to do with me.’’ Before exploring the philosophical basis for this claim, which lies in Sartre’s conception of freedom, according to which I am totally free, I would like to say something about the immediate context in which Sartre discovered this new form of responsibility. In late November 1939, Sartre, who, along with thousands of others, had been mobilized into the French army, was reading Jules Romains’s novels Verdun: The Prelude and Verdun: The Battle. Romains was regarded as one of the great literary figures of France at that time, and these two books on Verdun, which were part of the series Men of Good Will, which eventually ran to twenty-seven volumes, had just been published in the previous year. They provide a vivid portrait of one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War, told both on the grand scale and at the level of the individual, and so were natural reading for soldiers waiting for war to reach them. The central character of the novels, Jean Jerphanion, is a lieutenant in the infantry, and during a brief period of leave in Paris, he discusses with his close friend, Pierre Jallez, both the battle and the contempt that soldiers at the front feel for civilians and those soldiers who have soft jobs. Jallez observes that the soldiers were not simply pitiable victims of someone else’s folly, because they themselves had once been civilians and had played their part in the stupidity that led to war. By way of agreement Jerphanion says: ‘‘War claims many victims, but very few of them are innocent.’’34 Sartre cites the sentence in his War Diaries but misquotes it: he reports Jerphanion as having said that there are no innocent victims.35 It is in this same modified version that the sentence is cited in Being and Nothingness. In this way Sartre suggests that his ontological claim that I am totally free finds some support, however distant, in the widespread conviction that each of us has some responsibility not only for what we Robert Bernasconi

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do but also for what happens to us, because we might at some earlier point have acted to prevent it. However, this sense that I get what I deserve is generalized and given an ontological underpinning. Sartre seems to think that I cannot present myself as a passive victim. It is a scandalous statement and recalls the vicious judgment of Hegel, who in the context of his early presentation of his ideas on the philosophy of history in Heidelberg proclaimed: ‘‘No people ever suffered wrong; what it suffered, it had merited.’’36 However, although these formulations by Hegel and Sartre sound similar, they have very different meanings. Hegel is passing a judgment on a people in the context of Friedrich Schiller’s phrase that ‘‘die Weltgeschichte ist ein Weltgericht [world history is a court of world judgment].’’ Sartre, by contrast, is issuing a call to action: it is up to me to act or, one might even say, ‘‘own’’ each situation in which I find myself. Sartre’s claim that ‘‘I am condemned to be free’’ means that freedom is without limits, except that we are not free to cease being free.37 But he also acknowledges that the sentence could be paraphrased in Martin Heidegger’s language by the formula ‘‘we are thrown into freedom’’ or ‘‘we are abandoned to freedom.’’38 Sartre’s account of freedom thus follows from his particular understanding of Heidegger’s account of the thrown project, even though at this point Sartre seems to highlight somewhat one-sidedly the projection of possibilities by which I determine the way the world appears to me rather than the abandonment, the thrownness, or the facticity of my existence. Because my projection of my possibilities of existence determines my situation and the way things appear, and because it is ultimately up to me to determine my project, then it would seem to follow that there is a sense in which I choose my world. It is only in terms of a given project that things are an obstacle as opposed to being irrelevant, indifferent, or even advantageous. If I came to the mountains to climb, their height might be an obstacle, but if I came to admire the beauty of nature, then their height contributes to the dramatic effect. It is because I choose my world that it seems plausible to Sartre to say that I am responsible for the war, even to the point where it is as if I had declared it. The claim is certainly counterintuitive; Sartre’s attempt to convince his readers works by stages. At first the claim seems to be simply that if I go to war and do not become a deserter or a pacifist, then I have accepted it. To that extent I am faced with a choice. That there is a war was not up to me. Denying that there is one will not bring peace, but the attitude I take toward the war is up to me and determines the impact it has on me. It is here that Sartre comes closest to what might 138

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ordinarily be meant by saying that there are no innocent victims. That is the first step in Sartre’s argument. In a second stage of the argument, Sartre applies the lessons he has learned from Heidegger: my choice of myself and of the war is one and the same choice. For the same reason that I cannot tell what my project contributes and what belongs to the facticity of the situation, I cannot say definitively what I am confronted by beyond my control, or what my contribution is. This means that ultimately I am this situation in which I find myself and, furthermore, that I have chosen it. To choose it is to be responsible for it. This argument is accompanied by a corresponding transformation in the notion of responsibility. Sartre initially tells the reader that he is employing the ordinary sense of responsibility: he explicates that as prereflective consciousness of being the ‘‘incontestable author of an event or an object.’’ However, within two pages he draws the extraordinary conclusion with which I began: ‘‘I am responsible for everything, in fact, except my very responsibility.’’ This sense of responsibility is clearly very different from the ordinary sense of responsibility, according to which I am accountable only for those acts of which I am indisputably the author. Nevertheless, Sartre is clear that there is a relation of responsibility to property: ‘‘Responsibility is the original form of property. (And reciprocally all property implies, in the eyes of the State for example, responsibility).’’39 This relation of responsibility to property, though described in a most general fashion, nevertheless serves to recall the context of the concept’s birth in a society that gave unprecedented importance to a form of private property with which one identifies oneself. Commentators on Sartre tend to focus on his conception of freedom and less on this new notion of responsibility. They tend not to focus on the fact that my freedom is my responsibility for my freedom, for myself, and for the world.40 They thus undermine the sense in which Sartre’s philosophy always calls for action, for a response. Sartre’s argument is that ontological freedom is not only something I cannot avoid in its form as responsibility, but also something I must strive to concretize not just for myself, but for others. This leads directly to his politics of commitment, as becomes clear already in Existentialism and Humanism and Anti-Semite and Jew. Sartre argues in Existentialism and Humanism that nobody is free unless all are free: ‘‘Obviously, freedom as the definition of man does not depend upon others, but as soon as there is a commitment, I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as mine. I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.’’41 Robert Bernasconi

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One finds a similar claim in Simone de Beauvoir: ‘‘To want existence, to want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will.’’42 It is because my freedom means my responsibility for the world, and thus my responsibility for everyone’s oppression, that history has direction, thereby rescuing Sartre from the idea of freedom as arbitrariness and equivocation, which Maurice Merleau-Ponty attributed to him.43 In Anti-Semite and Jew Sartre defines the human being as ‘‘a being having freedom within the limits of a situation.’’44 Sartre then proceeds to show that this conception leads directly to political action. To be authentic is to assume the responsibilities and risks that arise from consciousness of the situation. Sartre’s philosophy of freedom does not lead to resignation, or stoic indifference to one’s circumstances, but to taking responsibility. There are no excuses, whatever the conditions. This is confirmed in Truth and Existence, a manuscript dating from 1948: ‘‘I have shown that freedom always means assuming our responsibilities afterwards for what we have neither created nor wanted. (That car knocks me down. I couldn’t avoid it. I’m missing an arm. My freedom began there: assuming that disability that I did not create.) But it cannot escape from its condition.’’45 For Sartre, the idea of responsibility cannot be separated from the idea of freedom, but his argument is not the standard one that I am responsible only for actions that have their undisputable origin in me. This, the traditional view, had been his starting point in Being and Nothingness, where he illustrates his conviction that actions are in principle intentional by offering the example of a worker charged with dynamiting a quarry. The worker simply obeyed orders and produced the expected result, but nevertheless he acted: ‘‘He knew what he was doing or, if you prefer, he intentionally realized a conscious project.’’46 I suspect that one can hear in this sentence, as throughout the whole chapter, a response to the German occupation of Paris. It is that same historical context, I believe, that encourages Sartre in his argument that I am responsible for everything because I am free to make something of whatever happens, free to turn it into an opportunity. In this way Sartre’s conception of hyperbolic responsibility transcends legalistic notions of accountability and culpability. The radical difference between the new concept of responsibility introduced by Sartre and the notion of responsibility as accountability that preceded it is that whereas the latter focuses on establishing the limits of what can be expected from me in any given situation and to that extent is an heir to casuistry as well as to the law courts, Sartre introduces his concept of responsibility to 140

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make the point that I have no excuse for not doing something now.47 I cannot rest content with things as they are. Sartrean responsibility not only is directed toward the future but refers to the way we give meaning to the past. To be sure, it makes no sense to say that I am responsible for what happened in the distant past, long before I was born, in terms of the most familiar conception of responsibility that has its source in law. But the Sartrean conception has a different basis. It arises from his conviction that in choosing myself in the sense of my project, I determine the way that the world appears to me and to that extent can be said to choose the world. My actions, together with my understanding of those actions, contribute to the meaning ascribed to the past. An extreme example of choosing the past is provided by those who deny the existence of the Holocaust. But we choose the past all the time by determining its meaning through the way we live. A secular Jew who decides after the Holocaust that he or she will practice Judaism so that Hitler does not win the war after all is taking responsibility for the past. Support for affirmative action or for reparations is another way in which people today take responsibility for a course of events that had their origin long ago but whose impact continues to the present. Infinite Responsibility I will now turn to Emmanuel Levinas to explore the resources that he provides for overcoming the limitations of the original or restrictive conception of responsibility. I will focus here on establishing the sense in which, for all its differences, Levinas’s conception of infinite responsibility has a relation to Sartre’s hyperbolic responsibility.48 Already in his early works, Levinas employs the term responsibility in passing, but it is first in ‘‘Is Ontology Fundamental?’’ in 1951 that he introduces the idea that I am responsible beyond my intentions.49 This becomes a central idea for Levinas in Totality and Infinity, where he cites Rabbi Yochanan as saying, ‘‘To leave men without food is a fault that no circumstance attenuates; the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary does not apply here.’’50 Levinas comments, ‘‘Before the hunger of men responsibility is measured only ‘objectively.’ ’’ Levinas’s idea of infinite responsibility, by highlighting the sense in which responsibility is objective, frees us from the ethics of intention. At the same time he withdraws philosophical ethics from the task of establishing good conscience, which is its role within casuistry. Everything is now my affair and I have to answer to everyone for it. There are no extenuating circumstances; there is no role for excuses. Furthermore, the more I do, the more I feel Robert Bernasconi

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my responsibilities: like desire, they increase as they are met, so responsibility never reaches its limits. Levinas writes: ‘‘The infinity of responsibility denotes not its actual immensity but a responsibility increasing in the measure that it is assumed: duties become greater in the measure that they are accomplished.’’51 To clarify what is new in Levinas, I will turn briefly to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose account of a responsibility in the face of the future bears a superficial resemblance to that of Levinas. In Humanism and Terror in 1947 Merleau-Ponty showed how within communism a certain conception of responsibility had emerged that represented a radical alternative to the dominant liberal tradition of the West. Before passing to a consideration of Nikolai Bukharin’s trial in Moscow, Merleau-Ponty addressed his French audience in terms that they would undoubtedly have understood, that is to say, in terms of the existential judgment that they faced during the German occupation during the Second World War, whether to collaborate or resist. Merleau-Ponty suggested that if Germany had won the war, the collaborators would have been excused for accepting the inevitable. Because the Allies won, the collaborators found themselves exposed as instigators of a crime for which there is no excuse.52 Turning to the Moscow purges, Merleau-Ponty wrote: Historical responsibility transcends the categories of liberal thought—intention and act, circumstances and will, objective and subjective. It overwhelms the individual in his acts, mingles the objective and subjective, imputes circumstances to the will; thus it substitutes for the individual as he feels himself to be a role or phantom in which he cannot reorganize himself, but in which he must see himself, since that is what he was for his victims. And today it is his victims who are right.53 Merleau-Ponty’s point is that the contingent future, once it enters into the present, appears historically necessary and with it comes a harsh assignment of responsibility that is not mitigated or qualified by intentions. To be sure, Merleau-Ponty does not accept the Communist position in its entirety, but he does conclude that if history can impute responsibilities to us ‘‘which are never entirely ours,’’ then we are in ‘‘the painful situation’’ of never being able to condemn anything with a clear conscience.54 To be sure, that does not mean that we no longer condemn anything, but it does mean, Merleau-Ponty suggests, that at this delicate point right at the beginning of the Cold War, Western politics was deprived of ‘‘that wonderfully clear conscience’’ with which it issued its judgment of others.55 142

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Levinas shares with Merleau-Ponty this rejection of good conscience; indeed, it is central to his ethics. But a major part of Totality and Infinity is directed against the idea of the judgment of history, which Levinas associates with Hegel, but which, as I have shown, also implicates MerleauPonty.56 Levinas thus rejects the ethics of intentions on which modern liberalism relies, and yet he manages to promote an objective conception of responsibility without embracing the concept of responsibility that arises from Marxism. The law courts pass judgment on the accused; God passes judgment on the sinner; and, since Kant’s ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose,’’ history passes judgment on us from the future, whether we act or fail to act.57 But, although the Levinasian Other puts us in question, there is, at the level of what Levinas calls ethics, no judgment of individual acts, legitimating some and condemning others. Levinas’s question is not, what should I do? He does not disallow the question; he explicitly acknowledges that this question can be addressed on the basis of his works.58 But his question is much more like, how is ethics possible such that it is impossible to disregard one’s responsibility? A philosopher of duties would focus on what one is obliged to do so that one can set about fulfilling one’s obligations. Levinas is concerned with going beyond one’s obligations—‘‘the incessant overflowing of duty accomplished, by ever broader responsibilities.’’59 It is sometimes said that Levinas neglects politics, but this is false. In today’s world, the idea of an ethics divorced from politics seems more questionable than ever: politics does not trump ethics in the way that Hegel thought it did, but to try to be ethical without paying attention to the political effects of one’s actions would be dismissed today as absurdly naive. I have tried to show elsewhere that Levinas was from the outset concerned not with ethics, such that politics was an afterthought, but with the conjunction between ethics and politics—or, more precisely, the interruption of politics by ethics.60 It is in the world, the world that politics dominates, that one intervenes. This is ultimately the meaning of Levinas’s remark that one cannot approach the Other with empty hands.61 Levinas’s conception of infinite responsibility resembles Sartre’s hyperbolic responsibility in a number of ways. It is a responsibility for everything without limits, even for what happened before I was born or what will happen to future generations. It is also asymmetrical—that is to say, it is always preeminently my responsibility. Hence Levinas liked to quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky: ‘‘Every one of us is responsible for everyone else in every way, and I most of all.’’62 He was thereby not only expanding the range of responsibility but introducing an idea of asymmetry that departs Robert Bernasconi

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from previous ethical frameworks because it combats the urge to universalization and the homogenization of demands. Nevertheless, there are also decisive differences between Sartre’s conception of responsibility and Levinas’s. First, Sartre’s conception of responsibility arises in the context of a philosophy of freedom, whereas Levinas insists that in responsibility my freedom is called into question.63 To be sure, this last phrase is misleading if it is taken to mean that my freedom is in some way prior to my responsibility. When Levinas says that freedom implies responsibility,64 he is not deriving responsibility from freedom, as Sartre does, for the sake of my freedom. He is instead proposing that arbitrary freedom and the Hegelian-Marxist idea of freedom as conformity to reason in history, the two dominant ideas of freedom within the Western philosophical tradition, are both equally bankrupt. If my freedom appears to me as arbitrary, it is only because it must answer to the Other. It calls for justification.65 It is because Levinas insists on going behind the free I (moi), be it the Cartesian subject or even Heidegger’s Dasein, to locate responsibility in a self that belongs to the Other that Levinas’s philosophy does not culminate, as some readers would have it, in the issuing of apologies. By the apology, the I seeks to recover itself, to reassert itself after its encounter. This is the significance of Levinas’s turn in the final section of Totality and Infinity to a concern for future generations, a relation in which the I maintains itself only by becoming other in an infinite time, a future that is not my own. It is by going behind the subject that Levinas goes beyond the face. In Sartre, to be responsible is to be the one who must take the initiative. In Levinas, I find myself already responsible in the experience of being called to act by another’s suffering: my responsibility is met first in my passivity.66 Levinasian responsibility is not only without guilt, because it is not cast within a legal framework that issues judgment, but also without paternalism, precisely because it points back not to a subject who takes control but to a self who is passive.67 Nevertheless, in going beyond the ethics of intention, the ethics of infinite responsibility does not directly challenge the laws that hold one accountable for the unintended consequences of actions one performed. It is only because I am responsible for everything before everyone that I can be made accountable before the law for this or that action. It is sometimes objected that expanding one’s obligations leads one to a sense of fatalism or impotence rather than to heightened moral activity. Indeed, it is often suggested that if I am responsible for everything, I am responsible for nothing. Nothing better reveals the pervasiveness of casuistry in ethical thinking today than this idea. It assumes that the object of ethics is to escape guilt and establish a good conscience 144

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and that because I cannot escape guilt I might as well do nothing.68 In other words, it assumes that responsibility means punishability or that responsibility can be translated into specific obligations. Once Levinasian responsibility is located within its historical context in its radical difference from accountability, the objection must disappear. Levinas does not highlight the novelty of his conception of infinite responsibility, but he does claim that the Greek philosophical tradition has difficulty explaining the case in which someone sacrifices his or her life for another, the case in which others give away to a stranger what they need for themselves, and the case in which still others forgive those who have wronged them. However, Levinas claims that responsibility of this kind is recognized in the Hebraic tradition, specifically locating in the Talmud an idea of a responsibility for the Other’s responsibility.69 For Levinas it is not accidental that it is known within Judaism. It is the persecuted above all who know responsibility because they alone experience responsibility for everyone, including the one who persecutes them.70 The idea that he might have ‘‘invented’’ responsibility would have been anathema to him. He appears to attribute the possibility of its rediscovery to secularization. I will close this essay by exploring the question of how current conditions call for the idea of a responsibility that transcends ideas of accountability. Responsibility and Globalization The original or ministerial notion of responsibility limits responsibility; it limits those before whom one is responsible and for what one is responsible. Ministers are responsible to the national representatives for unjust use of their legal powers. Similarly, the directors of a company are responsible in the sense of being answerable before their shareholders for the money invested in that company. This places restrictions on what the directors can do. This restrictive notion of responsibility represents an important safeguard. The directors of a company are held accountable for the funds invested, not just in a legal sense of not misusing them, but also for getting a good return on the capital. However, this has important consequences that are not always recognized. The employees of the company are not the company: they are reduced to means toward making a profit and their circumstances can legitimately be considered only to the extent that treating them badly might affect profitability. Although the ministerial notion of responsibility is still fundamentally backward-looking, in a way that hyperbolic and infinite responsibility are not, it nevertheless influences what actions a company can take. If the directors of a company Robert Bernasconi

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pursue some goal that we might all agree is worthwhile—such as helping fight disease or hunger in the third world—they are in breach of their legal responsibilities, unless they can argue that it is a useful publicrelations exercise that will eventually boost ‘‘the bottom line.’’ In earlier times one could look to governments to restrain companies because governments not only had the means to do so, but, as answerable to the people, they had a responsibility to do so. However, in the global economy, transnational companies transcend the institutions that might restrain them. At this point one needs to look in one of two directions: either one tries to produce international global institutions that have the means to hold those companies answerable to more than just their greedy shareholders, or one must transform the conception of responsibility so that broader obligations are recognized, obligations to the future and obligations to correct past wrongs that have become institutionally enshrined in the unjust distribution of wealth and power. This renders the hyperbolic and infinite notions of responsibility vital resources for rethinking the way in which restrictive notions of responsibility are casuistical, safeguarding good conscience, but at a high price for the oppressed and the future of our world. We live in a world where we in the richer countries have the means to address problems that we did not cause or will, but from which we nevertheless are beneficiaries and to which by virtue of our very existence we contribute—for example, as a white man in a racially segregated and sexist society, or as someone with more than enough whereas others do without. We live in a world in which we can sustain our lifestyles and priorities only by surrounding ourselves with a high wall that says again and again, this is not my affair, this is not my business, this is not my problem. In a word, we conclude that this is not my responsibility. And yet there is clear evidence in various alternative political movements, including those directed against the dominance of a global capitalism that pursues profits without regard for employees, the poor, or the future of the planet, that the call to infinite responsibility is being heard. However, this sense of responsibility does not derive from the fact that as a result of globalization, we live in a world where, acting in unison, we could solve the problem of world hunger. Responsibility is not dependent on our ability to have prevented the fault. Nor does it rely on our ability to identify the imputable agents.71 To believe so would be to mistake accountability for responsibility. To confine ourselves to restrictive ideas of responsibility is to act out the contemporary equivalent of the war criminal’s defense: ‘‘I was only following orders.’’ An alternative is given with the relatively new conceptions of hyperbolic and infinite responsibility. They liberate us from an ethics of excuses to say that I am without excuse.72 146

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9

Racism and Responsibility LADELLE McWHORTER

Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and fifty years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, members of racial minority groups are still disproportionately disadvantaged in American society. Despite official civic integration, despite a massive shift in the terms of public discourse, despite a publicly avowed moral and cognitive reorientation on the part of a significant number of whites, neighborhoods and schools are more segregated than ever, whites still control an overwhelming percentage of this country’s wealth and hold a virtual monopoly on elite corporate and governmental positions, the distribution of income and health care is still dramatically unequal, and a disproportionate number of people of color live in poverty.1 Something is wrong. But what, exactly? Back in the 1950s, when most of these disparities were even greater, what seemed to be wrong was that white people had intentionally placed barriers in the way of people of color to prevent them from acquiring education, jobs, property, or political representation. After the Civil War, blacks had made strides forward politically and economically: some held national public office; some had started businesses; many had acquired land. Whites took systematic steps at the end of the nineteenth century to reverse that trend, inventing elaborate systems of segregation to hamper blacks’ (and other nonwhites’, most notably Native Americans’ and Chinese Americans’) participation in government and commerce. Some whites engaged in these efforts to frustrate minority advancement because 147

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they had political and economic interests that were threatened by this new source of competition. Perhaps others did so out of resentment over their losses in the aftermath of the war. Many probably did so at least in part because they believed the scientific theories of the time that suggested that minority races were plagued with various forms of physical degeneracy that made them prone to disease and crime and thus were potential health and safety hazards for whites. Whatever their motives, for the next seven decades, whites readily admitted that they wanted such barriers, and as minorities challenged them, whites used every means at their disposal to maintain them. Under those circumstances, it was easy to account for disparities along racial lines. The obvious culprit was blatant racism. But these days, with racist biological theories discredited and generally forgotten,2 with segregation legally dismantled, and with most white people agreeing that racial discrimination and racist attitudes are morally wrong, how can we account for these stubborn disparities? Could something other than racism be the cause? I am well aware that even raising this question opens a person to the charge of racism, regardless of what answer one ultimately suggests. Many people assume that if you ask the question, you have rejected what they take to be apparent, namely, that racism is the cause of inequalities and if you do not blame racists for it, then the victims—disadvantaged racial minorities themselves—must be the ones you blame. Questions of race, it seems, almost always lead to judgments of guilt or innocence. Asking these questions invites moral discourse, even if one would prefer to engage in a discourse of another kind, and it very often also invites moral censure. That fact—the fact that race cannot readily be discussed outside the bounds of what I will call here post-Enlightenment moral discourse—in itself seems worth examining. In this essay I want to put forth a suspicion that it is this very insistence on keeping questions of racial disparity squarely within the boundaries of contemporary moral discourse, securely tied to subjective choice and individual responsibility, that prevents us from adequately addressing racial injustice and effectively eliminating it. Before going further, I should make clear what I mean here by racism. I take racism, as discussed and critiqued in race-theory discourses both in sociology and in feminist and cultural studies, to be the name of a conglomerate of mental phenomena—beliefs, feelings, attitudes, values— that can motivate acts of racial discrimination and violence. Racism thus understood may or may not show itself at any given moment, for though it can display itself in utterance or deed, its true residence lies hidden in the mind. Consider the classic definition of ethnic prejudice put forth by Gordon Allport in 1954: ‘‘Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a 148

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faulty and inflexible generalization’’3 —in other words, it is cognitive. And likewise a somewhat more recent definition of racism offered by W. J. Wilson: racism is ‘‘an ideology of racial domination or exploitation that (1) incorporates beliefs in a particular race’s cultural and/or inherent biological inferiority and (2) uses such beliefs to justify and prescribe inferior or unequal treatment for that group.’’4 Some people’s racism may be a purely cognitive matter; they may believe that it is a verifiable fact that people of color are morally or intellectually inferior to whites. Such people have been taught that these claims are true, or they have generalized from limited experience. Further experience or empirical evidence can disconfirm and thus alter their beliefs, and racism can dissipate. However, as many researchers have noted, some racism seems not to be amenable to alteration on the basis of new evidence. Some racists apparently do not hold their racism in the manner of an empirical belief but rather in the manner of a metaphysical conviction. Their racist beliefs are merely cognitive expressions of a deep affective orientation to the world. No amount of evidence will ever ‘‘correct’’ these ‘‘beliefs,’’ and if such people’s racism does dissipate at some point, they will undergo that dissipation not as a change of opinion but as a conversion experience. Nevertheless, whether it is of the first or the second type, racism is a fundamentally mental phenomenon; its source and location is human subjectivity. If racism is a mental phenomenon, then the assumption that all instances of racial injustice are the products of racism means that all instances of racial injustice are the effects of behavior generated by the mental states of individual (usually, though certainly not always, white) people.5 Thus, one widely held assumption underlying much of race theory at present is that racial injustice persists in our society because individual people make it so. Racial injustice, like racism itself, has a subjective origin.6 But what about the fact that most white Americans nowadays claim not to harbor any racist beliefs or attitudes? In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of researchers heralded this new disavowal of racism as a sign of progress, and it certainly was a change from four or five decades before, when whites vociferously avowed racist beliefs. Over time, however, as the number of avowed racists seemed to decrease much faster than the number of nonwhites living in poverty, researchers began to think instead that their survey questions were flawed.7 Whites really did continue to harbor racist beliefs and attitudes. They must; otherwise, there was no way to account for continued racial injustice.8 Perhaps because of widespread moral condemnation of racism, whites were just unwilling to say so. The survey questions had to be changed. Ladelle McWhorter

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Researchers Joe Feagin and Hernan Vera found that, indeed, if you ask the right questions, white racism will display itself even in subjects who at first disavow racist attitudes and values. With some encouragement, many white people will make comments that clearly indicate belief in the inherent inferiority of people of color, and many more will make ambiguous comments that could be interpreted to indicate such a belief.9 Feagin and Vera conclude, ‘‘Conviction about some type of white superiority is a key part of the racial thinking of many whites.’’10 If we accept Wilson’s definition of racism, which holds that racist attributions of inferiority may be ascribed to cultural as well as biological factors, many white respondents are easily classifiable as racist. Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith found that significant percentages of whites believe that blacks are lazy, violent, and unpatriotic (among other allegedly negative characteristics), just as in previous decades. In contrast to the past, however, today’s whites typically assert that these characteristics are the results of black culture—which they take to be monolithic and which supposedly encourages irresponsibility, dependence, and self-indulgence—rather than the results of genetics or racial biology.11 The stereotypes function just as before: whites assume that all blacks or most blacks fit them; they make decisions about interaction and the distribution of goods in their control on the basis of them; and they vigorously oppose government programs designed to offset centuries of discrimination as ‘‘special rights’’ or ‘‘handouts.’’12 It comes as no surprise to me that researchers discover racism among white Americans despite the elimination of biological essentialism from public discourse. No doubt the repeated sight of solemn, composed civilrights marchers confronting savage segregationists did undermine the racist belief that whites hold a monopoly on dignity and moral rectitude among those whose racist beliefs were empirically rather than metaphysically based. But racist ideologies did not collapse in the 1960s; there was no mass conversion experience. All that collapsed at that time was a tacit national consensus about how racial difference should be managed. Segregation had failed as a management strategy, and the discourses that permeated it had lost credibility as early as 1946.13 White racists could no longer assume, as they had for decades, that all whites would assent or at least acquiesce to their views baldly stated, so they stopped stating them baldly. As some people of color got jobs and took leadership positions that enabled them to occupy seats of authority with powers of surveillance over whites, that reticence redoubled. To protect one’s material interests, one might have to be tight-lipped about race, but that was certainly not the same thing as changing one’s mind. 150

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There are real changes, though. According to researchers like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, many white people at the beginning of the twenty-first century—perhaps in contrast to most white people twenty-five years earlier— are not just cynically hiding their racism from researchers, their employers, their neighbors, and the courts; when they look at themselves, they honestly do not see racism.14 Nevertheless, says Bonilla-Silva in his provocatively titled book Racism without Racists, they are racists in fact. Bonilla-Silva suggests that many whites manage to persist in racism by justifying racially biased decisions and discriminatory actions on the basis of convictions other than the inherent biological or cultural inferiority of nonwhites. Their motive, he holds, is to maintain and benefit from the systematic disadvantage of people of color, but their racism is disguised as color-blind, abstract liberalism,15 and it is disguised so well that the whites themselves no longer perceive the racism they implicitly espouse. BonillaSilva investigates these mechanisms of disguise and reveals how cognitive frameworks like color-blind liberalism really do just recode racist assumptions and permit the uninterrupted practice of racism as usual. As he puts it, ‘‘Whether actors express ‘resentment’ or ‘hostility’ toward minorities is largely irrelevant for the maintenance of white privilege.’’16 Racism is alive and well. Most sociological studies of white racial attitudes seem to assume with Bonilla-Silva that white people commit acts that perpetuate racial injustice because they want to maintain a racially unjust political and economic system; whether whites admit it or not, we all know at some level that we benefit from racial disparities, and the vast majority of us desire to continue receiving those benefits. Hence we want nonwhites to suffer, not because we necessarily believe that they are inferior, although in fact many of us do, but because we know that their suffering is a prerequisite for our gain. Of course, wanting somebody to suffer who does not deserve to suffer is evil, so the less sure a given white person is that people of color are inherently morally inferior, the stronger the incentive is to lie to cover up the racism (and the selfishness) that motivates one’s decisions and actions. In contrast to sociology, however, the race theory coming out of feminist and cultural studies since the mid-1990s—the subfield that has come to be called whiteness studies17—does not typically assume that whites whose behavior perpetuates racial injustice necessarily want people of color to suffer, even indirectly. The discourse of ‘‘white privilege’’ affords whiteness-studies theorists a means of reorienting discussion of racial injustice away from racism per se and thus of talking about the ways in which white people, without actively choosing to hurt people of color, Ladelle McWhorter

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participate in practices that result in racial injustice.18 Many of these theorists believe that if whites are brought to recognize that such practices are unfair to people of color, they will desist and injustice will decrease. As far as I have been able to determine, the earliest writings on white privilege are those of the feminist theorist Peggy McIntosh, who published papers in 1988 and 1989 entitled ‘‘White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies’’ and ‘‘White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,’’ respectively. McIntosh defines white privilege as ‘‘an invisible package of unearned assets’’19 analogous to the unearned assets that feminists had already begun to call ‘‘male privilege.’’ She goes on to list forty-six such privileges, from ‘‘I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time’’ to ‘‘I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin.’’20 She does not claim that her list is exhaustive; in fact, she urges refinement and extension and changes the list herself in subsequent publications. She even says that the term privilege is inapt, since ‘‘its connotations are too positive to fit the conditions and behaviors which ‘privilege systems’ produce.’’21 But she continues to use the word, and it has become ubiquitous in race studies in the ensuing twenty years, where it has rarely received any critique.22 One white privilege—one McIntosh does not list (although her inclusion of the availability of so-called flesh-colored bandages points to it) but subsequent whiteness-studies theorists have insisted on—is that of belonging to a racial group that is taken to be the biological and social norm and therefore having no basic experience of specific racial identity.23 As Laurie Fuller puts it, ‘‘White people do not conceptualize whiteness as an identity. Instead, white people assume that we are really just Americans or humans and we don’t need to think about being white people because white is just the normal, natural way of being human. Race is something that describes a quality of African Americans or Asian Americans, not white people.’’24 The first order of business in the project of ending white privilege, the argument goes, is to get white people to experience themselves as raced subjects, as members of one race in a multiracial society, rather than as the standard from which raced subjects deviate. As the feminist theorist Ruth Frankenberg asserts, ‘‘Naming whiteness displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance.’’25 The first step for white people in recovery from racism is to name ourselves white, to confess and own our raced subjectivity. The next step is to confront the privileges we have as a consequence of that identity 152

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and, having realized the injustice in our continuing to exercise those privileges, divest ourselves of them. McIntosh’s discussion of divestiture, which is largely implicit rather than explicit in her work, builds on parallels with male privilege. For sexism to decline, men must give up their ‘‘unearned assets’’—for example, the priority they have in university curricula. To study more works by women, we must study fewer works by men. Likewise, to study more works by people of color, we must study fewer works by whites. If we stick with examples of privilege like this one of curricular inclusion—that is, with examples that involve allocation of time or goods—divestiture makes sense. Things become more complex as soon as we leave the realm of the strictly quantifiable, however. For example, how does one divest oneself of ‘‘privilege’’ number 5, ‘‘I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed,’’26 or ‘‘privilege’’ number 23, ‘‘I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider’’?27 One cannot simply agree to bear a greater share of store clerks’ harassment so that an African American shopper can bear less, and one surely should not forgo the right, indeed the responsibility, to criticize our government just because an Asian American might be ostracized for doing so.28 The language of privilege does not work here, and the strategy of divestiture, even if feasible, could conceivably allow more racial injustice than it alleviates. Nevertheless, within whiteness studies divestiture is the strategy of choice.29 It finds its most radical expression in the writings of the self-styled race traitors Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, who hold that the very racial identity that enables one to lay claim to privilege must be eschewed. ‘‘The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.’’30 Whiteness is privilege, they claim, so the only morally responsible option is to divest oneself of one’s white racial identity entirely by refusing all the privileges associated with whiteness.31 Quite apart from the practical questions these strategies for ending racial injustice might raise—and they raise a great many—is the more fundamental question of whether racial injustice necessarily originates in subjectivity in the first place. To use terms taken from Michel Foucault, subjectivities may be the anchor or relay points for power, but they may not be the sovereign origins of it. In fact, they may themselves be products of that same network of power. Ignatiev and Garvey come close to this idea when they maintain that racial identities are historically constructed, but they seem to assume that subjectivity itself is not. White racial identity, in their view, appears to be something that an otherwise neutral given Ladelle McWhorter

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subject assumes and can, with effort, refuse. But in fact, as careful attention to the real advantages that most whites have over most people of color in the United States clearly shows, divestiture is not an option. Some of the most important advantages are not things at all—not land or stocks and bonds or oil wells, although such things are very important and their unfair distribution must be addressed. The most important ‘‘things’’ are, for example, having developed one’s bones and brains in a house or apartment in a part of the world relatively free of toxic substances like lead and mercury,32 having grown up with literate elders who had the leisure time to pursue intellectual or artistic or political interests, having developed as a personality in a society in which others, even most strangers, clearly believe one’s life to be precious and one’s suffering to be misfortune. These and many other ‘‘white privileges’’ are not things any of us lucky enough to have had them can give up, for the simple reason that they are now us—our bodies, our psyches, our intellects, our self-esteem. And what is wrong is not that we have had these things; it is that many others have not had and do not have and will not have these things unless something pretty drastic is done.33 But fifty years of moral condemnation of racism has done nothing that drastic. In fact, it has done virtually nothing at all, other than prevent people from analyzing racial injustice as a systemic problem that shapes our society and our selves long before any one of us ever becomes a moral agent of any sort, let alone a racist. Hence, I propose that we abandon the rhetoric of sin and sacrifice, and with it the strategy of divestiture—in fact, I would like to propose that we abandon the language of skin privilege altogether since it tends to obscure the ways in which subjectivities are formed in networks of power—and study race in much the same way that Foucault has studied sexuality, as a dispositif, as an apparatus of biopower with a specific history. Doing so, I believe, will do more to disrupt unjust racial power arrangements, including racial subject positions, than any critique of skin privilege ever could. As we all know from Foucault’s analyses, biopower arose in the nineteenth century; race and racism preexist its advent. But a good genealogy will show that race was transformed in the nineteenth century and absorbed into biopolitical discourses and practices in much the same way that many other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century disciplinary practices and identities were. Space does not permit a thorough genealogy of race here, but I will offer a brief sketch derived from the recent work of several U.S. historians, as well as from Foucault himself.

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Although the word race first appeared in English in 1580,34 Foucault argues that both the concept of race as a specifically human form of differentiation and political discourses of race and racism emerged in the seventeenth century. At that time a new discourse, one Foucault calls a discourse of ‘‘race war,’’ enabled an English underclass to distinguish itself from its rulers and critique its government and laws.35 The claim that the rulers were of an alien (Norman) race and that their laws were simply a means of conquest and ongoing oppression (of a Saxon race) served to constitute that underclass in their own eyes as a distinct people and to rally them for revolution. This discourse was easily adapted for other purposes, however, and so it had widespread currency in a variety of forms all across the political spectrum in ensuing decades.36 In early uses of the concept, race was not primarily a morphological phenomenon. Races were distinct because of their distinct lineages, customs, languages, or values and perhaps their distinct characters or religious beliefs. A major transformation in the concept of race occurred when the word ceased to name distinctions between cultural or linguistic communities and came to be applied only to morphologically distinguishable groups (whose members might not share a language or culture or even a geographical region). Foucault calls this transition a ‘‘biological transcription,’’37 meaning that race was thereafter considered fundamentally a heritable physical trait. However, since the word biological sounds scientific and Foucault later distinguishes what he calls ‘‘scientific racism’’ from the racism associated with this earlier concept, I would prefer to call this a morphological transcription instead. By the late eighteenth century, this morphological transcription having taken place, race was primarily about bodies, not language or custom or political history. Foucault correlates this event with ‘‘nationalist movements in Europe and with nationalities’ struggles against the great State apparatuses (essentially the Russian and the Austrian)’’ and with colonization.38 In the Anglo colonies of North America, race was deliberately introduced at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a means of dividing and disempowering a labor force. In The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, the historian Theodore Allen asserts that neither race nor racism as we know them existed in colonial America in the seventeenth century. What did exist in abundance was the horrific exploitation of laborers, especially in the tobacco colonies, as planters grabbed up land faster than labor could be imported into a marshy death trap where most workers perished within three years of arrival. Most laborers in the early years were indentured servants, meaning

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that they worked for some specific length of time agreed to by contract (usually—unless they were simply liquored up and kidnapped or, as happened with orphans, stolen off the streets of London and ‘‘apprenticed’’ to planters or, as happened with many young women, purchased from impoverished parents). If they survived their term of indenture—very many did not—and managed to hang on to their indenture papers and convince their ‘‘employers’’ to go with them to court to have the term of contract officially terminated (this did not happen automatically), then they were entitled to freedom dues, which consisted of a certain number of acres of land and a set of tools to start their own plantations. Prior to the end of their term of service, indentured servants could be sold by their masters. Indeed, indentured servants were regularly traded as chattel. But they were not chattel for life—unless their lives happened to be prematurely curtailed. As the years wore on, enough indentured servants survived to acquire land that there was a glut of tobacco on the market. For that reason and others, prices fell. It was clear to the wealthy that freedom dues had to be avoided; there was no room for more producers and plenty of need for more labor. Upward mobility had to cease. British law clearly forbade lifetime chattel servitude. Men could be bought and sold, made to work for free, confined against their will, and beaten almost to death, but they could not be made to suffer all these things for their entire lives. (Things were slightly different for women; as wives, women could be bought outright, forced to work for free, confined, and beaten for their entire lives. Why were they not considered slaves? Because British law prohibited husbands from reselling them after the initial purchase.) Colonial planters began to find ways around British law. Allen puts the number of European men, women, and children brought to Virginia and Maryland between 1607 and 1682 at 92,000, of which more than 75 percent were made to be, in fact if not in law, lifelong chattel slaves in the tobacco colonies.39 But they did not take to it kindly. Allen documents hundreds of incidents of resistance and rebellion. The entire colonial labor force was extremely unruly and quite apt to act with solidarity across what we now perceive as racial lines.40 European, African, and Native American bondlaborers often escaped together, sometimes seeking asylum in nearby Native American communities, where they were welcomed. Many chose to fight rather than run, however, and racially mixed groups of militant laborers menaced planters throughout the seventeenth century, cooperating with each other apparently without racial discord. How could planters bring such a large and volatile labor force under their control? And how could they prevent the planting class from expanding as bond-laborers earned their right to land and market share? The 156

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easiest way was to stop importing so many European bond-laborers whose rights were recognized and sometimes enforced by European governments. Native Americans were not optimal slave material, since their knowledge of the land and kinship ties with neighboring groups made escape a constant possibility. But Africans, strangers in the New World without Old World governments to protect their rights, could be used indefinitely, with no freedom dues ever paid. After the British chartered the Royal Africa Company in 1667 to exploit their newly acquired access to the African coasts following the Second Dutch War, the supply of vulnerable Africans seemed endless. Slavery, then, was not at first a racist institution in North America (although obviously it was an unjust and oppressive one). Nor was racism characteristic of the general population of laborers in Anglo-America in the seventeenth century. Racism was invented to persuade laborers of European descent not to act in solidarity with, and to accept the lifelong enslavement of, African laborers. This was no easy feat; after all, the lifelong enslavement of any group ran counter to the economic interests of all laborers.41 Therefore, Allen claims, the colonial governments of the tobacco colonies—acting independently of the British government— deliberately drove an ideological wedge between laborers of African and European descent, and the U.S. government continued this policy in the late eighteenth century. This was done systematically not by degrading chattel slaves (which would have been difficult, considering how degraded they already were) but rather by lowering the legal status of free laborers of African descent and elevating that of free laborers of European descent. This is how, according to Allen, the so-called white race was created. It was established as a legal and economic category in colonial and then in U.S. law and policy as a way of co-opting the European American portion of the labor force so that enslavement of a subset of the total labor force— the African American portion—could proceed unhampered. When it revised the Virginia Code in 1705, the Virginia General Assembly enacted a number of new laws that changed the civil status of free African Americans, differentiating them for the first time from free European Americans. In addition to making these changes, the General Assembly, as Allen says, ‘‘took special pains to be sure that the people they ruled were propagandized in the moral and legal ethos of white-supremacism,’’42 pains they persisted in taking with the enactment of more such laws over the next two decades. Allen describes the new rules in detail: For consciousness-raising purposes (to prevent ‘‘pretense of ignorance’’), the laws mandated that parish clerks or churchwardens, Ladelle McWhorter

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once each spring and fall at the close of Sunday service, should read (‘‘publish’’) these laws in full to the congregants. Sheriffs were ordered to have the same done at the courthouse door at the June or July term of court. If we presume, in the absence of any contrary record, that this mandate was followed, we must conclude that the general public was regularly and systematically subjected to official white-supremacist agitation. It was to be drummed into the minds of the people that, for the first time, no free African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a ‘‘Christian, not being a negro, mulatto or Indian’’ {note here that in 1705 the Virginians had as yet no way to refer to ‘‘white people’’}; that African-American freeholders were no longer to be allowed to vote; that the provision of a previous enactment was being reinforced against the mating of English and Negroes as producing ‘‘abominable mixture’’ and ‘‘spurious issue’’; that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots by African-American bond-laborers, ‘‘any white person {and notice here, eighteen years later, the use of the term white} . . . found in the company with any [illegally congregated] slaves’’ was to be fined (along with free African-Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine of fifteen shillings, or to ‘‘receive, on his, or her, or their bare backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on.’’43 Obviously, if Americans of European descent already considered African Americans their inferiors, discriminated against them, refused to associate with them, and ignored their interests and needs, no such policy of public recitation would have been necessary—nor would many of the laws recited have been necessary. The point was to produce racial division where little or none existed and to do so in order to control the labor force and thus allay elite fears of a general uprising and a destabilization of the colonial economy. The general laboring population was not the only group who had to be taught the lessons of morphological racism by colonial governmental officials. In 1723, after the Virginia General Assembly drastically curtailed basic civil rights for free blacks,44 the British attorney general Richard West launched an inquiry. Denying anyone the right to vote in any colonial election on the basis of skin color was a clear departure from English law and from previous colonial statutes. West wrote, ‘‘I cannot see why one freeman should be used worse than another, merely upon account of his complexion.’’45 In response, colonial governor William Gooch explained that free Negroes and mulattoes tended to be sympathetic to slaves, many having previously been slaves themselves. Recent uprisings of 158

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slaves in which black freeholders had participated made that fact obvious. Therefore the governor thought it wise to affix to them ‘‘a perpetual Brand . . . by excluding them from that great Privilege of a Freeman.’’46 Gooch was no racist; he did not believe that blacks were inferior to whites. He simply wanted to limit freeholders’ support of slave rebellions. Race hatred was not the fundamental reason for new racial distinctions in law. The basic reason was strategic: the easiest way to contain people who, because of their personal affiliations and histories, could not be supposed to support the current and quite profitable organization of colonial labor was to create law that marked them permanently as an underclass and distanced them from other laborers who might otherwise share their interests. Contrary to tradition and legal precedent, colonial governments deliberately established morphological race as a civil concept. Over the course of the eighteenth century, race, a form of embodiment, became a form of subjectivity—of citizenship, of social status, and finally of personal identity. By Thomas Jefferson’s day, race was no longer a matter of lineage or culture at all; it was simply a matter of morphology—skin color, hair texture, facial structure—along with the internal physiology that was thought to attend such variations, including increased or decreased capacity for rational thought. What had once been a political scheme had become within sixty years a kind of common sense. Law and policy in the new United States would thus be based on the assumption that racial subjectivity is real, that members of the black and red races are incapable of exercising the responsibilities of full citizenship in a free republic, and that lifelong servitude is appropriate for some races but inappropriate for others. However, morphological race in the late eighteenth century was not, strictly speaking, a scientific concept; it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that race became fully integrated into biological thought. Foucault writes, ‘‘At the time when the notion of race struggle was about to be replaced by that of class struggle . . . it was in fact only natural that attempts should be made by one side to recode the old counterhistory not in terms of class, but in terms of races—races in the biological and medical sense.’’47 The ruling classes took over the morphological concept of race, reworked it with the aid of evolutionary theory, and deployed it to offset the discourse of class that was developing in the years immediately preceding and following the revolutions of 1848. Now race became a question of ‘‘differentiation of species, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest.’’48 The various races were subspecies that had developed along different lines in response to different environmental pressures; consequently, they had differing capacities and vulnerabilities Ladelle McWhorter

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that made each one more or less likely to develop at an acceptable rate toward that nineteenth-century Western ideal, ‘‘civilization.’’ Nineteenth-century U.S. policy regarding indigenous peoples and those peoples whose ancestors had been imported against their will reflected this view that there was one and only one ideal of human development and that various racial types could be judged against that ideal and the norms of development toward it. In other words, U.S. policy coalesced with the techniques of power and knowledge that Foucault has famously labeled ‘‘normalization.’’ The Bureau of Indian Affairs undertook a number of programs to force Native Americans to abandon their tribal practices, to assimilate to white American culture, insofar as possible to develop into white people.49 Under this view, Native Americans were merely retarded compared with whites and might be brought along with the proper management strategies, but African Americans were irreversibly abnormal. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientists claimed that African Americans were degenerate as a race and prone to alcoholism, venereal disease, insanity, and idiocy; segregation practices and laws were established in great part to prevent the spread of black contagion to white blood.50 U.S. immigration policy in the first half of the twentieth century clearly reflects the view that members of allegedly less developed races were a biological threat to white Americans.51 As Foucault puts it, writing about Western Europe during the same period, ‘‘Thanks to the shift from law to norm, . . . sovereignty was able to invest or take over the discourse of race struggle and reutilize it for its own strategy. State sovereignty thus becomes the imperative to protect the race’’52—the white race, that is. And the enemy of the normalizing state is deviance in all its forms. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses of race that developed out of biological accounts of normality and closely allied anthropological accounts of progress toward civilization hold up the white race as the standard from which all other races deviate. Racial identities are deviant identities, just as the sexual identities that Foucault lists are— ‘‘mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts,’’ and so on.53 The outcasts in Western societies of the twentieth century are always figured as deviants in their very truth as selves. Within those societies, racial difference has become part of a general discourse of norm and deviance, part of the growing network of power that uses normalization to control populations. It is no accident that throughout the twentieth century race was thoroughly sexualized and sex was very often overtly racialized. Racial and sexual identities as we know and live them now, in contrast to those of two hundred years ago, are products and tools of normalization and biopower.54 160

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Just as Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality can help loosen the hold that sexual identities have over us and lessen the compulsion to confess and conform to sexual networks of power, genealogies of race can expose racial categories and identities as formations of power and through that exposure change our relationship to them, to each other, and to ourselves. Genealogy is not a self-sacrificial strategy of divestiture; it is an antinormalizing discipline that engenders movements of self-overcoming opening toward fundamental transformation in subjectivity and social practice. As genealogy reveals the porosity of the past, it reopens the future. As it exposes the accidents that constitute norms, it frees difference from the confines of deviance. Genealogy as a practice is part of an ethos, a way of living that resists and counters normalization. It is an antinormalizing discipline. If we are serious about ending racial injustice, simply passing moral judgment on normalized subjectivities is futile. The institutions that shape every aspect of our lives carry racist values within them. No one can successfully resist the repetition of those values in our society and in our lives by simply refusing ‘‘skin privilege’’ or by renouncing white identity. The solution to racial injustice is not moral and personal; it is political and systemic. But moral discourse, focused on sovereign individuals as the origins of evil, blocks any progress in that direction. What we need instead is an ethos that includes countermemory—genealogical archival research combined with local accounts of living race differently55—an ethos that fosters our capacities without increasing our docility and thus unfits us for normalization. We need an ethos that creates the conditions under which we might eventually be able to disrupt and thoroughly undermine the normalizing institutions that perpetrate the racial injustice that so very many of us do not want in our society anymore.

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10

Whiteness as Family Race, Class, and Responsibility S H A N N O N S U L L I VA N

In the end, [white slaveholding] Southerners were asking, ‘‘What is history about? What is it for?’’ In what measure are human beings the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of those who have gone before? —Historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class If one is going to reproach little children for the sins of their grandfathers, one must first of all have a very primitive conception of what constitutes responsibility. . . . One must believe that what their elders did the young are capable of doing. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew

It is all too easy to think of historical events in which white people have dominated, oppressed, and even exterminated people of color. Native American genocide, the Middle Passage and the enslavement of Africans, and the World War II internment of Japanese Americans are just a few of the most obvious examples from American history. Outside of militant racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, most people today agree that whiteness has had a shameful past. There is less agreement, however, about how antiracist white people should respond to their past and, in particular, to the racial category of whiteness. If whiteness is and can mean nothing other than white supremacy, domination, and privilege, then the continuation of whiteness necessarily means the continuation of a racist past into the present. In that case, whiteness should be abolished.1 But if 162

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whiteness could become something other than the domination and oppression of people of color, then its transformation, rather than abolition, might be called for.2 The pressing question that emerges from this disagreement is, what could whiteness be or become? My response is that whiteness can and should be reconceived as family. Thought of as family, whiteness becomes the group of people—both past, present, and future, and with all their flaws, faults, and crimes—that a white person is particularly responsible to and for. Contra Jean-Paul Sartre, this does not entail operating with a crude notion of responsibility. Thinking of whiteness as family does not mean reproaching a person today for the racism of his or her ancestors years ago, as if that person personally chose their racist beliefs and actions for them. It does, however, mean giving history its due. And it gives history its due in a more personal and gripping way than does the notion of collective responsibility for the past, making it harder for contemporary white people to shrug off questions concerning their relationship to previous generations.3 Thinking of whiteness as family means reckoning with the ways in which white people today are the descendants of white people who have gone before and the fact that they often have the ability to do things similar to what their elders did. Even if, for example, a particular white person’s ‘‘blood’’ ancestors never owned slaves or lynched black people, contemporary white people still can and need to respond to the racism of earlier generations. This is because their racism is not merely past history; it lives on today. Although conspicuous and deliberate displays of white domination in the United States and other Western nations generally have disappeared since the late 1960s, white racism against people of color continues to operate, and it does so in increasingly hidden, seemingly nonexistent ways. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the conscious affirmation of white supremacy was transformed into the unconscious habits of white privilege.4 This unconscious connection with earlier generations of white people is one important reason those earlier generations are the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of white people today. In what follows, I draw on the work of the French psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche to explain some of the transgenerational unconscious connections between white people that make them subtly and intricately responsible for each other. I then focus on a group of people who are very difficult for most contemporary white people to affirm as their ancestors: white Southern slaveholders of the nineteenth century. Considering them as part of a family to which contemporary white people belong, I argue that for the sake of antiracist struggle, white slaveholders should not be dismissed as monstrously evil and thus as being of no relation to white Shannon Sullivan

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people today. Contemporary white people only replicate the racist process of othering people who are different from them when they shun their white ancestors in this way. Affirming relations with white slaveholders, I show how objectionable messages from them concerning white supremacy can be retranslated into a valid concern about caring for white people across class lines. Learning to relate to rather than dismiss white people that one finds objectionable is a way to transform the meaning of whiteness into a concept of family that supports antiracist struggle. The advantage of using Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic theory in critical philosophy of race—rather than that of, say, Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan—is that Laplanche’s work explicitly accounts for the development of the unconscious in a sociopolitical world. For Laplanche, human beings are not born with an unconscious; it is created through a process of seduction of children by the adult world.5 But the term seduction must be understood in its original etymological sense of alteration, especially by leading someone (astray). Seduction occurs when adult caregivers send messages to children at least a portion of which the children cannot understand. The remnants of a message that is not understood become parts of a child’s unconscious. In their communications with children, adults transform children’s psyches, leading children away from the relatively straightforward experience of consciousness to the complicated development of unconscious desire, fantasy, and belief. We can see the unspoken communication of enigmatic messages from adult to child in Laplanche’s favorite example of seduction: the breastfeeding mother. Since the breast is an erogenous zone for most women, the act of nursing an infant tends to involve much more than the straightforward act of feeding the child. The mother often takes pleasure not only in the nurturing that she provides but also in the physical, sexual sensations that she experiences. Both aspects of the mother’s pleasure are at least vaguely sensed by the infant, but the infant does not, and developmentally cannot, understand the sexual side of what the mother communicates to him or her. The infant’s experience nursing includes a puzzled question: ‘‘This breast that feeds but also excites me, that excites me as it excites itself, what does it want of me? What does it want to tell me that it doesn’t already know itself ?’’6 The mother also cannot answer these questions fully, because of past repressions involving her own sexuality. Because the breast is not just an object for the infant but also an erogenous zone for the mother, breast-feeding is the event of seduction in which an adult’s unconscious contributes to the creation of the infant’s. Although Laplanche appeals to breast-feeding to explain seduction, seduction is not limited to or isolated within the nuclear family. The example of breast-feeding, which centers on the mother, could even be 164

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considered a fable. Its point is not that an infant must encounter a literal breast to develop an unconscious—as if adults who were exclusively bottlefed as infants do not have an unconscious life—but that the ‘‘outside’’ world is the source of (sexually charged) material for the beginnings of the unconscious.7 The entire adult world, with all its social, political, global, and other complexities, sends enigmatic messages to young children. These messages may be channeled through a mother and father in many cases, but seduction is not primarily an Oedipal process. The theory of seduction ‘‘take[s] psychoanalytic account of a plurality of cultural scripts from the very beginning of an infant’s life, . . . opening up a space for the mediation of psychoanalytical and socio-historical categories.’’8 Those categories can and often do involve more than sexuality. Although Laplanche never discusses race, he allows that ‘‘certain psychoanalytic parameters—all psychoanalytic parameters—may vary as a result of cultural differences.’’9 In a white privileged world, those differences include race and racism, which regularly contribute to the enigmatic messages sent to children from the adult world. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye demonstrates how messages about white privilege can be passed from the adult world to children. When the eight-year-old black girl Claudia receives a blond, blue-eyed doll for Christmas, she explains that ‘‘from the clucking sounds of adults I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish. . . . Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pinkskinned doll was what every girl child treasured.’’10 When Claudia rips apart the doll, the adults’ response is more complex than anger or disappointment: ‘‘Tears threatened to erase the aloofness of their authority. The emotion of years of unfulfilled longing preened in their voices.’’11 An enigmatic message about white privilege and white beauty is conveyed to Claudia, who does not understand why the adults think that the white doll is something to treasure or why longing swells their voices as they cry at the doll’s dismemberment. Nor do the adults completely understand the message that they convey to Claudia with their emotional outcry. They know that white racism negatively affects their lives and want to protect their children from it, but they do not fully grasp how their longing to participate in the very white privilege that they hate has shaped their perspective on the world. Although Laplanche never discusses the possibility, the degree to which and the ways in which messages are enigmatic can change over time. Messages about white superiority, for example, probably always had an enigmatic aspect to them for young children who developmentally did not Shannon Sullivan

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understand racial hierarchies. The example of white men cutting off the genitals of lynched black men after they were dead shows that something more than the straightforward inflicting of pain, punishment, and even death was at work in those situations. But in the days of U.S. slavery and Jim Crow, most messages sent by white people about alleged white supremacy were fairly easy to translate. Compared with white Americans in the twentieth-first century, white Americans in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth centuries experienced relatively few anxieties when dominating nonwhite people. White slaveholders, for example, often discussed the sale and purchase of black slaves as if it were no different from the sale and purchase of farm animals.12 The relatively transparent message of white supremacy became more opaque after World War II, when shock at the Nazi’s attempted genocide of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and others was followed by the civil-rights movement in the United States. Messages about alleged white supremacy were and are still sent in today’s post-civil-rights era, but they are increasingly enigmatic given the anxiety that most white people experience about openly affirming racist beliefs. One of the central messages concerning race and white supremacy that has been transmitted from white slaveholders to white people today is the claim that those who were different from them were absolutely Other. In this Manichaean worldview, the Other usually is cast as monstrous—as difficult to see as or relate to as a human being—and as such is absolutely evil. Black people were the Other to white slaveholders: more like a thing than a person, and evil in their tendency to rape, steal, and flee their white owners. As Charles Mills explains, ‘‘the terms of the [slavery] contract require of the slave an ongoing self-negation of personhood, an acceptance of chattel status.’’13 The othering of black people is part of the message of white supremacy, fairly transparent hundreds of years ago although contributing to the enigmatic white desire for black Others that had to be repressed. Today this message operates in much more opaque, unconscious ways. Racist beliefs about black and other nonwhite people tend to operate as if they were nonexistent, and often they perpetuate themselves in the guise of antiracism, as in the case of doctrines of color blindness.14 The message communicated, however, is still that black is bad, white is good, and the two are irremediably opposed. White slaveholders’ relationship to their black slaves offers a striking example of othering, but the process is not restricted to a black-white binary. Othering also has operated, for example, between Latinos and blacks in post-civil-rights Texas, between blacks and Koreans in post–Rodney King California, and between whites and Arabs and Muslims in a post-9/11 166

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world. And it occurs between groups of white people themselves. Without downplaying the effects of othering on people of color, I want to focus on an instance of white people’s othering of different groups of white people. One of the results of attempting to translate the increasingly enigmatic message of white supremacy sent by white slaveholders is that overt white racists, and white slaveholders in particular, have been transformed into incomprehensible Others. In a day and age when most white people consciously consider racism to be abhorrent, it is difficult for them to understand the racist practice of systematically and brutally enslaving black people. Or more precisely, it is difficult for them to relate to the white people who often willingly and happily engaged in this horrific practice. There seems to be no way to comprehend the motives, beliefs, and actions of white slaveholders regarding their black slaves, except as incomprehensibly selfish, greedy, and evil. The othering of white Southern slaveholders began as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, when Northerners often addressed them as inferior idiots. As the Virginian Albert Bledsoe complained on behalf of Southerners in 1860, Northern abolitionists have seldom condescended to argue the great question of Liberty and Slavery with us as with equals. On the contrary, they habitually address us as if nothing but purblind ignorance of the very first elements of moral science could shield our minds against the force of their irresistible arguments. In the overflowing exuberance of their philanthropy, they take pity of our most lamentable moral darkness, and graciously condescend to teach us the very A B C of ethical philosophy!15 Not much has changed in this regard since then, except that the attitude of Northern abolitionists toward the South has spread across the nation. To most contemporary white people—including many white Southerners—white slaveholders from the nineteenth century often seem like a class of people very different from themselves, not just historically separated from white people today but also morally and psychologically divorced from them. It is difficult to recognize them as comprehensible human beings. There can be something very reassuring to a contemporary antiracist white person in the characterization of white slaveholders as Other. If an insurmountable gulf exists between white slaveholders and white people today, then as a white person I can be sure that I am not like them. If they are inexplicably evil, then I can understand myself as good. If they are quintessentially racist, then I can be confident that I am not. The Shannon Sullivan

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irony here, however, is that when they demonize white slaveholders in this way, contemporary white people engage in the very act of othering people who are different from them that white slaveholders engaged in with black slaves. Viewing white slaveholders as incomprehensibly evil and therefore Not Like Us replicates the very patterns of white racism that the repudiation of white slaveholders is meant to challenge. The practice of othering groups of people different from oneself is a central characteristic of white racism that can occur between different groups of white people. White racism has pernicious effects not only in white people’s relationships with nonwhite people but also in their relationships with other white people. This is not to downplay the insidious effects of white domination in black and other nonwhite people’s lives; nor is it to claim a victim status for white people as if they have been equally harmed by white racism. It instead is to claim that there are multiple fronts on which to fight white racism and white supremacy and that the fight needs to be waged on all fronts simultaneously. One of those fronts involves white people’s relationships with other white people. Overcoming white racism and white domination must include overcoming antiracist white people’s disavowal of other white people whom they perceive as racist. This disavowal not only serves as a defense mechanism against perceiving one’s own racism, but it also does nothing to address the perpetuation of racist beliefs and acts by other white people. One way to disturb the white othering of other white people is to think of whiteness as an extended family. Seduction theory provides the seeds for this idea by challenging the Freudian reduction of family to an Oedipal triangle.16 The concept of seduction expands the scope of family to include people in immediate contact with a child—grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, day-care workers, and babysitters, as well as parents— and those such as great- and great-great-grandparents (and so on) who died before a child was born. Considered as the group of adults who send enigmatic messages to a child and thus help form the child’s unconscious, the family extends across great expanses of time and space. Indeed, in Laplanche’s account, the family includes people who technically are not ‘‘blood kin.’’ This is an important point when thinking of whiteness as a transgenerational family. As a white person, I do not have to be related via physical reproduction to slaveholders from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to have a kinship with them. My ‘‘blood’’ ancestors might never have owned slaves, and yet growing up white in the United States means that white slaveholders can and should be thought of as my forebearers. (Indeed, white people already tend to do this with the so-called Founding 168

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Fathers of the United States, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, although they tend to downplay or ignore the fact that most of the founders owned slaves.17) In this sense, the claim that whiteness is family is prescriptive rather than descriptive.18 Antiracist white people should think of their race as a family because doing so can help them see how their present is affected by enigmatically racist messages from the past. And seeing this impact can help them more effectively struggle against racism. In another important sense, however, the claim that whiteness is a family also is descriptive. If one does not restrict kinship to the biological, or reality to factual realism, then whiteness not only should be considered a family, but it is a family. Regarding the first point, an ideal family is a group whose members are obligated to care for one another regardless of whether they like each other.19 These caring obligations are not necessarily restricted to blood ties, as the case of adoption demonstrates. Understood as ‘‘modes of enduring relationships,’’ in Judith Butler’s words, kinship need not be limited to the biological.20 Regarding the second point, reality is much more complicated than the false dichotomy between the literal and the metaphorical admits. The literal, material, and factual, in opposition to mere metaphor and psychological fantasy, are not all that exist. Seduction, for example, is neither a literal sexual event nor a made-up fantasy, but instead a real situation of unconscious communication and creation.21 Likewise, the assertion that whiteness is a family is neither a claim that all white people literally are biologically related nor an imaginative metaphor that merely uses the concept of family to understand race. Whiteness is a family because the enigmatic messages concerning race transmitted by white slaveholders to contemporary white people are real: they have real effects in the lives of white and nonwhite people today. Given that the unconscious of adults was formed through failed attempts to translate enigmatic messages sent to them as children by their adult world—and so on and so on—the budding unconscious of any particular child is affected by the unconscious life of an adult world much larger than the one immediately surrounding that child. Seduction, in other words, should be thought of as ‘‘a multiply transgenerational project.’’22 Enigmatic messages passed from one generation to the next are not identical. They are altered, sometimes slightly and sometimes greatly, in the attempt to translate them, and it is the remnants of those attempts, not the entire message, that composes one’s unconscious. But a powerful link exists between the unconscious of a contemporary person and that of the adult world existing hundreds of years ago, helping explain how a culture reproduces itself even as it is transformed. Across time and space, Shannon Sullivan

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seduction connects generations of people through the formation of their unconscious lives. This means that contemporary white people are linked in significant psychological ways to generations of white people who preceded them. Of course, it was not just white people who made up the adult world hundreds of years ago in, for example, the United States. African Americans and Native Americans in particular were part of that world, even as they were treated by white culture as nonadults in the form of irrational children or wards of the state. Both white and nonwhite adults sent enigmatic messages to the white children in their care, influencing their unconscious development. A full account of racial seduction would need to address the various relationships that adults of color had with white children, especially black women’s frequent roles of nursemaid and nanny. I focus here on the constitutive relationship between contemporary white people and earlier generations of white adults because of contemporary white people’s tendency to other their white forbearers. Seduction theory has significant implications for nonracist white people who think of themselves as very different from white slaveholders, white supremacists, and other white racists. Acknowledging the seductive link between earlier generations of white slaveholders and white people today means acknowledging that a contemporary white person’s unconscious has been formed out of enigmatic messages sent by white racists. It means that the racism of years ago lives on in the unconscious desires, fears, and beliefs of well-intentioned white people today. This does not mean that contemporary white people are doomed to repeat the racism of the past. But to avoid repetition of the past, white people must recognize, rather than deny, the link with earlier generations of white people. Family is a network of relations into which a person is born without his or her consent. Unlike a club, membership in a family is not voluntary. Family also is a place where a person learns how to love other family members even though he or she does not like them. Whiteness is a family in both of these senses: ‘‘You can disagree with your family, you can become an outcast from your family, you can be disowned by your family, but it is still your family.’’23 In this historical moment, whiteness is compulsory for white people; it is not a club that they can simply leave. What then should one do if one is born into a racial family that he or she does not like? Rather than try to quit the family as if he or she were not a member of it, a white person instead should acknowledge the network of relations with white people of which he or she is a part. This means learning how to stand by and with, even while critical of, white people that one disagrees with and perhaps even detests. Thought of as 170

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family, whiteness is a group of people that a white person is particularly responsible to and for. Being responsible for them means ‘‘tak[ing] seriously the fact that the worst behavior of members of their family reflects poorly on them.’’24 And being responsible to them means answering to other white people for one’s own behavior as a white person. Let me focus on being responsible for some of the worst behavior of white people by examining contemporary white people’s relationship with white slaveholders, which will allow me to return to the issue of being responsible to other contemporary white people. What might it mean for a white person today to take responsibility for the actions of white slaveholders hundreds of years ago, and how can thinking of whiteness as a family knit together by seduction help a white person do this? Taking a cue from Laplanche, I believe that assuming responsibility for racist white ancestors means de- and then retranslating the increasingly enigmatic messages they sent about the Otherness of people different from themselves. De-translation is at the heart of analysis, which helps clear the way for a new, richer translation.25 This is especially true for ‘‘extramural psychoanalysis,’’ which addresses cultural messages, such as those concerning race, ‘‘outside the walls’’ of an analyst’s office.26 To take responsibility for messages about racist othering sent by white slaveholders means not to create a situation of transference that repeats, with a difference, an original traumatic scene in which the messages were communicated. In the case of contemporary white people’s relationships with white slaveholders, there is no original scene to which to return. The specific authors of the message are absent, not only dead but also distanced by hundreds of years of history, and the cultural message received from them ‘‘is received by [people today] without [it] having been explicitly addressed to [them].’’27 Instead of transference, what often is needed in the case of racist messages about othering is their loosening: ‘‘For what is new in analysis, in relation to culture, is not transference, it is . . . analysis—that is, Lo¨sung . . . analysis, solution and resolution, dissolution.’’28 Loosening makes possible the creation of a ‘‘better’’ translation in that it is ‘‘more complete, more comprehensive, and less repressive.’’29 Beginning with a present translation, analysis returns to the past to loosen that translation, which can enable a different future based on a new translation.30 To begin loosening and then retranslating white slaveholders’ racist message of othering, we need to realize that white slaveholders were not entirely the people we tend to think they were.31 Their worldviews are not completely abhorrent, and they have valid concerns that can and should be affirmed by antiracist white people. And this is true for white slaveholders as slaveholders. I am not arguing, in other words, that we should Shannon Sullivan

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separate the slavery-related aspects of a slaveholder’s person or life and then affirm the remainder, for example, his or her gentleness with animals, patience with children, or generous giving to civic and religious causes. In part, this is because, to varying degrees, slavery underscored every aspect of slaveholders’ lives, and thus their lives cannot be neatly compartmentalized. But more importantly, it is because this seeming affirmation of white slaveholders is a covert form of disavowal. It continues to view the slavery-related aspects of white ancestors’ lives as beyond the pale, admitting of no points of meaningful contact with the lives and concerns of reasonable white people today. This ‘‘affirmation’’ still treats white slaveholders as irremediably Other. What then are some of the valid concerns of slaveholders that we can learn from today? The most important ones involve the issue of the relationship of individual to society. As the nineteenth-century slavery apologist James Henley Thornwell argued, ‘‘It is not the narrow question of Abolitionism of Slavery—not simply whether we shall emancipate our Negroes or not; the real question is the relations of man to society . . . a question as broad as the interests of the human race.’’32 The answer to that question, according to white Southerners, was that organic social relations are the proper basis for human life.33 Southern writers on the subject closely followed Aristotle in claiming the social basis for individuality.34 Humans are not individual atoms sealed off from one another. They are interconnected, communal beings who can live and thrive only in networks of supportive relationships with one another. Love, loyalty, and family were some of the important ways that people were tied together. The social, political, economic, and other structures of a nationstate should support the human need for those ties. This was the only way to establish a stable society in which individual human beings can flourish. According to slavery apologists, slavery was the best way to do just that. White slaveholders viewed slavery as a network of mutual responsibilities that established reciprocity between themselves and their slaves.35 It was a network, moreover, that successfully dealt with the allegedly different capabilities of the parties involved. Many slaveholders saw the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality as misguided and thought that they should be openly recognized as such.36 Even though masters and slaves were considered unequal, each party had a duty to the other: the duty to serve well, in the case of the slave, and the duty to be a good master, in the case of the slaveholder. The result allegedly was the development of meaningful ties between the two parties based on loyalty and even love. Black slaves were a part of the household that, along with his wife and 172

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children, the male head firmly but lovingly cared for. ‘‘My family, white and black’’—this was at the heart of white Southern social philosophy.37 Defending slavery concerned more than defending human bondage. Above all, it concerned a Southern way of life that placed closely knit social and family relationships at its center. This helps explain why Southerners refused the North’s offers of compensated emancipation, including Lincoln’s offer of $400 million shortly before Northern victory in the Civil War. Such offers misunderstood the larger Southern worldview into which slavery fit, reducing slavery to merely an economic issue.38 The call for abolition was particularly alarming to Southerners, moreover, precisely because it came from Northerners. In Southern eyes, the free-labor industrialism of the North was built on a radical notion of individualism whose effects were ‘‘egotism, greed, and ‘unmanly homage to Mammon.’ ’’39 Southerners claimed that without an organic basis to northern society, the greedy pursuit of wealth was the only thing that tied Yankees together. And a feeble tie it was, producing the oppression and exploitation of the poor by the rich. Closely connecting capitalism and individualism, Southern apologists for slavery charged that capitalism destroyed the social bonds that produced caring human relations.40 As George Fitzhugh, the nineteenth century’s most radical defender of slavery, insisted, ‘‘We deny that there is a society in free countries. They who act each for himself, who are hostile, antagonistic and competitive, are not social and do not constitute a society.’’41 Free labor resulted in all social relations being reduced to their monetary value. The ‘‘callous and brutal relations of the cash nexus’’ meant that there was no protection or security for those who were forced to sell their labor.42 So-called free labor was really slavery in disguise, a type of slavery far worse than the peculiar institution found in the South because Northern ‘‘slavery’’ had no organic bonds to mitigate it. In the view of many white Southerners, the oppression and exploitation of the white laboring classes in post-feudalist Europe demonstrated the horrific dangers of the industrial capitalism that was growing in North America. The two alternatives to it were socialism and slavery, and it was only slavery that was morally sanctioned in the Christian Bible and that had proven itself workable in ancient times up to the then present.43 Socialism or slavery—a startling juxtaposition, especially for many contemporary Americans who think of their country as the global bastion of capitalism and freedom. But it is a juxtaposition that gets something right even though nineteenth-century Southerners made the wrong choice in response to it. White slaveholders were right that the free-labor industrial Shannon Sullivan

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system blossoming in the North exploited and oppressed the white working class, and they were right that an alternative to it was needed. As they refined their arguments in favor of slavery, white Southerners increasingly turned to the history of the ‘‘humbler classes,’’ insisting as did one Virginian that ‘‘the time is long past when they could be disregarded in the social organization.’’44 Capitalism neglected the vast majority of people, ‘‘provid[ing] for the ascendancy of the strong over the weak and mak[ing] the rich richer and the poor poorer.’’45 Unlike capitalism, which increasingly impoverishes families as their size and needs increase, slavery allegedly protects the lower (slave) class because masters are obligated to provide for all who are in their care. ‘‘By uniting the interest and sympathy of the superior white master with his property right in the slave, [slavery] protect[ed] and elevate[d] the black man’’ and thus ‘‘secure[d] the well-being of both races.’’46 Indeed, according to Fitzhugh, slavery was not so much opposed to socialism as it was the fulfillment of its goals. Given that slaveholders provided food, clothing, and shelter to all their slaves, including the elderly and infirm, slavery was ‘‘a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.’’47 To be sure, the reality of slaveholders’ treatment of slaves was very different from Fitzhugh’s ideal. As did other former slaves, Frederick Douglass revealed the violence and terror at the heart of U.S. slavery in his autobiographical narratives.48 The contrast between the violent treatment of slaves and the affirmation of them as beloved family members likely produced extremely enigmatic messages for the white children in the household. The strong emphasis that slaveholders placed on the importance of family is especially ironic given that perhaps the most devastating effect of slavery was to tear apart black families.49 When rethinking whiteness, critical philosophers of race need a very different conception of family from that held by white slaveholders. In particular, they need to dislodge the violence that often lies at the heart of family, especially in its patriarchal version of a male head of household commanding his wife, children, and (in some cases) slaves. Caring and abuse were inseparable in slaveholding families, and thus it is not too surprising that Southerners’ care for the white working class included exploitation. Fitzhugh and other white slaveholders used the history of the working classes primarily to bolster support for the ongoing enslavement of black people, and their concern for the ‘‘common people’’ was always mixed with a self-interested and harmful goal. Many Southerners who attacked the Northern system of free labor envisioned some form of personal or industrial servitude for the white working class in 174

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whose name they fought. Releasing white laborers from the clutches of industrial capitalism did not mean, in Southern eyes, that all white people would or could become equal to one another. There is nothing pure to be found in the slaveholders’ attacks on capitalism and atomistic individualism. But my embrace of white slaveholders as racial ancestors is not based on a quest for purity. Operating with mixed motives and often despicable intentions, white slaveholders nonetheless insisted that the needs of the white working classes be taken into consideration by those who governed a society. The propertied class of white people should not dismiss the interests of poorer whites, who were forced to sell the only thing they owned, their labor. The personal subsistence and security of all members of a society, including the nonlaboring young, elderly, and ill, should be its first priority, and only then should it aim for material progress and economic profit.50 This is a message retranslated for ends that are different from those the slaveholders intended, and as such it is a message that contemporary white people can and should affirm. Put more generally, it is a message concerning the invidious effects of classism within the family of white people, operating not only via economic but also educational, moral, aesthetic, and other differences. Retranslated in this way, white slaveholders’ message about caring for different classes of white people can loosen the tendency to other that is contained within that care. When middle- and upper-class white people consider poor and working-class white people as inherently inferior, they (attempt to) draw a sharp line between the two groups as if they share nothing in common. Viewing lower-class white people as unintelligent, aesthetically unsophisticated, morally deficient, and thus deservedly impoverished, middle- and upper-class white people engage in a process of othering that replicates white slaveholders’ attitude toward black slaves. I am particularly concerned here about the contemporary ‘‘good liberal,’’ middle-class white person who considers himself or herself an antiracist, and yet—often precisely for that reason—avoids associating with lower-class white people, whose views on race and racism often seem crude and offensive. White people who have acknowledged white privilege and want to work against it sometimes prefer to struggle exclusively alongside people of color rather than interact with racist white people.51 Not only does this avoidance mean losing possible opportunities to share an antiracist perspective with another white person, but it also creates a chasm between different groups of white people as if they were absolutely and irremediably different from one another. The crude lower classes are racist and the enlightened middle and upper classes are not—in this way, Shannon Sullivan

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so-called intelligent white liberals pit themselves against other white people, who are posited as the main source of racist evil. Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism provides an unintentional example of such class-based scapegoating with regard to race. When AntiSemite and Jew was published in 1946, Jews in France and elsewhere were considered to be a different race than ‘‘real’’ white Europeans. Sartre explains those Europeans’ anti-Semitism as a passionate choice of oneself that involves a comprehensive Manichaean worldview in which Jews are evil and French people are good. Like Friedrich Nietzsche’s last man, Sartre’s anti-Semite prizes mediocrity. He lives in bad faith, telling himself the lie that racial and other values are given by the world rather than created by human beings. Lacking the strength to face the truth of human existence, he prefers to be a member of the crowd and avoid individual responsibility. Filled with resentment, he attempts to lift himself up by tearing others down. The anti-Semite’s comparison of himself with Jews to prove his alleged superiority is not just psychological but also material and class-based. Claiming that ‘‘many anti-Semites—the majority, perhaps—belong to the lower middle class,’’ Sartre argues that anti-Semitism is a way for the petty bourgeois to think of themselves as part of the upper class of rightful owners of France.52 Anti-Semitism is ‘‘a poor man’s snobbery’’ that provides the anti-Semite with a sense of ‘‘profound equality which brings him close to the nobleman and the man of wealth,’’ which would disappear if he did not have the Jew to contrast himself with.53 Speaking on behalf of the anti-Semite, Sartre avers, ‘‘By treating the Jew as an inferior and pernicious being, I affirm at the same time that I belong to the elite.’’54 Thanks to its wealth, the upper class has a secure sense of its rights over the country and thus has no need to oppose or deprecate the Jews. Sartre would admit that anti-Semitism can be found in the upper classes, but he suggests that ‘‘the rich for the most part exploit this passion for their own uses rather than abandon themselves to it.’’55 (Sartre also explains away signs of anti-Semitism in the proletariat.56) Prejudice against and the oppression of Jews thus is the primary result of the bad faith of the lower middle class, according to Sartre. Granted, the economic inequalities of capitalism structurally support their bad faith and thus must be overcome before anti-Semitism can be eliminated completely. But this does not erase the fact that the lower middle class chooses to oppress the Jews and needs to accept responsibility for that choice. The middle to upper classes, by contrast, are absolved by Sartre. His existential analysis of anti-Semitism assures them that they are not primarily to blame for it. 176

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Rather than deflect anti-Semitism and racism onto others as a way of ensuring one’s own moral goodness, contemporary ‘‘good liberal’’ white people need to recognize that this deflection is an offshoot of the very racism that they wish to challenge. Struggle against white privilege and domination must include struggle against invidious class divisions between white people themselves. This claim does not simplistically reduce race and racism to class and classism. It instead identifies white class divisions as simultaneously fueling and fueled by white exploitation of people of color. White people’s self-focus does not necessarily support white supremacy or white solipsism. White people can and should work against racism by examining the type and quality of relationships that occur between different groups of white people. In their attempt to combat racism, white people tend to focus on people of color. This is a good thing for white people to do when, for example, it means that they are learning to see people of color rather than treat them as invisible, as famously illustrated in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.57 But it is problematic when the focus becomes exclusive, as if the particular situations and experiences of white people had no relevance to antiracist struggle. White people who are concerned about racism need to clean up their own house and not use their antiracism as an excuse to avoid doing so. Rather than solely being a site of domination and oppression, whiteness can be a family in which members care for each other even though they might not always like each other. In particular, being responsible for white ancestors who were slaveholders can help contemporary white people be responsible to each other in ways that also are beneficial to people of color. Linda Martı´n Alcoff has argued that white people need to develop a double consciousness with regard to their racial past. This would be a double consciousness that acknowledged not just the shameful but also the positive aspects of white history: not just white racists, such as slaveholders, but also white race traitors who challenged white domination.58 I agree, but I want to complicate Alcoff ’s account by suggesting that white people also need a double consciousness with respect to white racists themselves. White slaveholders, for example, not only held despicable beliefs about black people and engaged in reprehensible acts toward them, but they also insisted that middle- and upper-class white people not discard lower-class white people in the trash bin of capitalist progress. When contemporary white people no longer other white slaveholders, they can develop a double consciousness with regard to them, enabling white people to retranslate an important message about the need to connect across class lines. Shannon Sullivan

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Although this message has been sent by people of color, such as W. E. B. Du Bois in his monumental analysis of class and race in Black Reconstruction, it is important also to hear it from white slaveholders. The complicated message sent by white slaveholders about caring across white class lines allows antiracist white people to partially affirm, rather than absolutely dismiss, their slaveholding heritage and racist past. This affirmation is dangerous, I realize, because it could play into the hands of militant racists who seek intellectual justification for their prejudice against and violent behavior toward people of color.59 Fully recognizing that danger, I continue to think that the partial affirmation of white slaveholders is important. It helps create the possibility for stronger antiracist ties between different classes of contemporary white people by undercutting the tendency to other those who are different from oneself. Granted, embracing white slaveholders as family will not eliminate all racism or dissolve all enigmatic messages involving race. Every translation, including retranslations, involves repression of enigmatic remnants, and thus the retranslation of white slaveholders’ message about classism will contribute to the unconscious habits of contemporary white people in ways that could need future loosening.60 Although inevitably filled with risk, affirmation of white slaveholders as family members can be an important step for contemporary white people to take as they struggle against the racist process of othering. Transformed into a network of meaningful, caring connections, even if and especially when those connections are difficult to sustain, whiteness reconceived as family can have a positive role to play in an antiracist world.

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11

Narrating Pain The Ethics of Catharsis RICHARD KEARNEY

One of the most enduring ethical functions of narrative is catharsis. From the ancient Greeks to the present day, the healing powers of storytelling have been recognized and even revered. In his Poetics, Aristotle spoke about the purgative character of representation as a double act of muthosmimesis (plotting-imitating). More specifically, he defined the function of katharsis as ‘‘purgation of pity and fear.’’ This comes about, he explains, whenever the dramatic imitation of certain actions arouses pity and fear in order to provide an outlet for pity and fear.1 The recounting of experience through the formal medium of plot, fiction, or spectacle permits us to repeat the past forward, so to speak. And this very act of creative repetition allows for a certain kind of pleasure or release. In the play of narrative recreation we are invited to revisit our lives—through the actions and personas of others—so as to live them otherwise. We discover a way to give a future to the past. And this is, for the Greeks as for us today, an ethical imperative. There have been multiple interpretations of what exactly Aristotle meant by his pithy formulation of catharsis. So I begin by offering a brief account of my own reading. By pity (eleos), I think, Aristotle was referring to the basic act of empathy evoked by an imaginative portrayal of human action and suffering. As Aristotle was addressing the role of tragic drama, the audience’s emotional response to the events unfolding on stage before them would have been central to the aesthetic experience. But left to itself,

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pathos risked becoming bathos. There was always the danger of a pathology of pity, a sentimental or histrionic extreme where the spectator loses his or her wits and becomes blinded by excessive passion. Empathy might veer toward an overidentification with the imaginary characters unless checked by a countervailing movement of distance and detachment. This second movement Aristotle called fear (phobos). This contrary gesture challenged the extremity of affect by introducing some sort of estrangement device (as Bertolt Brecht would later call it). For Aristotle, it was generally the chorus or commentary that cut across the fictional pretense of the drama and interpolated the message of the story. The audience thus found itself thrown back on itself, as it were, suddenly removed from the heat of the action, reflecting on the ‘‘hidden cause of things.’’ But if this movement of fear were to be taken to its extreme, we would end up as cold voyeurs, mercilessly contemplating the horrors depicted on the stage. That is why Aristotle insisted on a certain balancing of these opposing stances—subjective and objective, attached and detached, proximate and distant. And it was precisely this balancing that resulted in catharsis—that singular experience of release, equanimity, and calm that issued from the mutual encounter and surpassing of pity by fear and of fear by pity. In short, catharsis invites us both beyond a pathology of pity to compassion and beyond a pathology of fear to serenity. It literally purges two of our most basic affects—pathos and eleos—until they are distilled and sublimated into a healing brew. It might almost be compared to a homeopathic remedy that finds the vaccination or antidote within the disease, turning malady into health. This therapeutic transformation played a crucial ethical function for Athenian society in preparing the spectators of tragic drama to be balanced and responsible citizens of the polis. And this is not less true, I would argue, for contemporary society. How, then, is catharsis actually expressed? Often as a power of vicariousness, of being elsewhere (in another time or place), of imagining differently, of experiencing the world through the eyes of strangers. It is what William Shakespeare meant, I think, when he spoke of the wisdom that comes from exposing ourselves ‘‘to feel what wretches feel.’’ Or when he has Hamlet discover his ‘‘prophetic soul’’ after the near-fatal journey to England and the exchange in the graveyard, finally declaring that the ‘‘readiness is all.’’ It is, no doubt, what William Butler Yeats meant when he spoke of ‘‘gaiety transfiguring all that dread.’’ Or what James Joyce was referring to when he had Stephen Dedalus define aesthetic purgation as the ability to sympathize with suffering while acknowledging the ‘‘secret cause.’’2 182

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Let me try to illustrate this enigmatic mood of catharsis by means of a more detailed anthropological and cultural analysis.

 I begin with some anthropological examples of how catharsis is linked to the process of narration—what Aristotle meant by muthos-mimesis. The healing character of narrative goes back to the earliest forms of myth. In Structural Anthropology, Claude Le´vi-Strauss writes of shamanistic invocations of ancient mythic stories to bring about therapeutic effects. In one particularly striking instance, he recounts how a village shaman rehearses a legendary battle between a hapless mortal caught in a cave and fierce monsters prowling on the outside, with a view to healing a woman dying in childbirth because of a blocked birth canal. Having no access to surgical or medical intervention, the shaman has recourse only to the most ancient of therapies—myth. And as he and the other villagers gather around the woman in labor and recite aloud the final battle scene where the prisoner escapes from the cave and defeats the monsters, something magical occurs. The child is actually born.3 Another mythological narrative that Le´vi-Strauss explores is that of Oedipus Rex. Here he identifies a transformational logic at work that attempts to resolve at an imaginary level certain fundamental human contradictions that cannot be solved in reality. Le´vi-Strauss shows how this myth comprises a series of recurring oppositions revolving around the structural antithesis of underrating and overrating blood relations. Far from being haphazard events, these oppositions undergo specific patterns of transmutation according to highly organized rules. A primary purpose of this oppositional logic in the narrative is to reconcile the cultural desire of humans to escape from their autochthonous, earthly origins by overcoming monsters (Cadmus overcomes the dragon, Oedipus overcomes the Sphinx) and the awareness of the difficulties imposed by nature on the realization of such a desire (epitomized by Oedipus’s physical handicaps: he is swollen-footed and eventually blind). The logic of the myth, according to Le´vi-Strauss, mediates the contradictory relationship between nature and culture. It suggests that even if nature (monsters) can be overcome, human culture continues to feel the pressure of nature (a clubfoot, blindness, lameness, etc.). And this narrative mediation in turn responds, symbolically, to the age-old question, where do we come from? the one or the many? are we born from one (Mother Nature) or from two (the human culture of parents)? Myths do not necessarily provide a cognitive answer to these irresolvable conundrums so much as a symbolic response at the cathartic level of Richard Kearney

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imaginary plots, characters, and representations. What cannot be solved historically, in other words, can be resolved fictionally in terms of a structural balancing of opposites.4 This equilibrating function is also epitomized, claims Le´vi-Strauss, in the mediational role of certain recurring mythic figures and idioms: the trickster, who mediates between the upper and lower worlds; ashes (as in the legendary ‘‘Cinderella’’ syndrome), which mediate between the horizontal earth where ashes lie and the vertical sky into which ashes ascend in flame; coyotes and ravens, which mediate between the herbivorous and carnivorous types (as carrion feeders they resemble the former in not killing what they eat and the latter insofar as they eat meat); totems, which mediate between divine and animal orders; and sacred garments, which mediate between the order of nature (they are made of organic materials such as linen, cotton, and flax) and the order of culture (they are woven and stitched into patterns). But this function of crossing is no gratuitous feat. The kind of logic in mythical mediation is, for Le´vi-Strauss, just as rigorous as that of modern science or mathematics! And what is more, it offers a certain ‘‘timeless’’ wisdom of equanimity insofar as it taps into an unconscious reservoir of synchronic structures that never change from one historical period, culture, or community to the next. This logic of ageless myth—directly available through ‘‘cold societies’’ that do not alter over time, and only indirectly through ‘‘hot societies’’ like our own that do change constantly—Le´vi-Strauss calls ‘‘the savage mind [la pense´e sauvage].’’ Myths are ‘‘machines for the suppression of time’’ because they furnish a specific sense of cathartic appeasement that calms our deep anxiety about our temporal origins and endings. They offer a structural response to the existential questions, where do we come from? and, where are we going?

 Many modern psychologists have followed Le´vi-Strauss’s claim that the cathartic function of myth is by no means confined to ‘‘primitive’’ societies but continues to operate in the human psyche today. Examining the depth structures of mythic stories, both Marie-Luise von Franz (The Interpretation of Fairy Tales) and Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment) make the point that folkloric tales can serve to heal deep psychic wounds by allowing trauma victims or other disturbed persons to find some expression for inhibited feelings. Myths enable us to experience certain otherwise inexperienced experiences—that is, events that were too painful to be properly registered at the time but that can, apre`s coup, be allowed into expression indirectly, fictionally, ‘‘as if ’’ they were happening. Thus good 184

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and evil mothers—foster mothers and fairy godmothers—in famous folktales allow for the symbolic articulation of children’s deeply ambivalent attitudes toward their own mothers (good because loving, nourishing, present; bad because other, separate, absent). And the same goes for surrogate fathers (as benign protectors or malign castrators). Sigmund Freud had, of course, already alluded to this in his account of the fort-da scenario. He recounts how one day he witnessed his grandson struggle with the painful absence of his mother. The infant managed to overcome his acute anxiety at the departure of his mother by playing a game of symbolic naming—there-here—as he cast a spool of string from his cot and then pulled it back again. So doing, the infant was, Freud observed, fictionally imitating the otherwise intolerable comings and goings of the mother. Freud recognized this primal scene of symbolic play as the shortest story ever told—one that brought about a basic sense of catharsis that appeased the child. What remained inexplicable at the level of reality (the absence of the mother) was resolved, at least momentarily, in the playacting with the spool and words of make-believe. Imagining that the game of words was imitating the game of life, the child performed his first therapeutic feat of ‘‘let’s pretend!’’ But happy endings are not the only answer. Unhappy endings could also bring a kind of relief. Since young children (and adults too) have always had difficulty accounting for the existence of pain, terror, and darkness in the world, it was often the most violent plot conclusions to bedtime stories that enabled the children to sleep soundly. One thinks of the wicked witch in Snow White having her eyes plucked out by crows, or the ugly sisters in Cinderella dancing themselves to death as they clambered over a cliff in molten-hot shoes! In fact, the theory was that if children didn’t hear such stories, they were more likely to wake with terrible nightmares in the middle of the night. If the structured recitation of timeless narratives didn’t do the trick, the dream-work of the unconscious would have to make up for it—at the cost of a restless, interrupted sleep. Once again we find symbolic solutions to lived problems. But if children used stories to cope with the loss of parents, parents have also been known to tell stories to cope with the loss of children. Here we might cite the research of Lisa Schnell, which is based on the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience. In a piece called ‘‘Learning How to Tell: Narratives of Child Loss,’’ Schnell uses the model of post-traumatic stress disorder to argue that narratives, as elaborate versions of dream-work, serve to ‘‘master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neuroses.’’5 In short, the argument goes, when we find ourselves unable to Richard Kearney

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deal with the traumatizing shock (Schreck) of a certain accident involving inadmissible pain—such as child loss—we actually prevent ourselves from experiencing it at the time and so need to retrieve the unexperienced experience after the event (nachtra¨glich) via narratives that represent the traumatic event in a vicarious fashion. We thereby permit a certain genuine mourning anguish that can be worked through and appropriated. The narrative work of displacement and condensation, of emplotment and schematism, of estrangement and synthesis, enables us to get in touch with the reality of the suffering that could not be faced head-on or firsthand. Thus stories may, paradoxically, come to the rescue of truth. Schnell accounts for the phenomenon of ‘‘creative compensation’’ by suggesting that the narrative repetition of events can release us from the obsessional repression of trauma (enabling repetition undoing disabling repetition, as it were). Of course, in instances of child loss we find a limit for such a compensation or catharsis theory; but Schnell insists that even here the very attempt—however doomed to failure—to put the loss into some kind of story itself somehow contributes to the slow healing process. In some cases of unbearable trauma, the narrative mourner becomes like Penelope with her tapestry: ‘‘As long as she was still working at it, no-one could say that Odysseus would never come home.’’ Sometimes, Schnell suggests, ‘‘the closest we get to answering the saddest questions life asks us, is to respond in the most beautiful language we can muster.’’6 Here again we see how, at a therapeutic level of personal loss, stories can become cathartic ways of revisiting blocked emotions of ‘‘pity and fear,’’ a pity too deep and a fear too huge to be dealt with at the time. Indeed, the seemingly unspeakable traumas of death, terror, and pain— that come together in experiences of child loss—are a true test for the narrative powers and limits of catharsis.

 As ancient myth evolved historically, it split into two different kinds of narrative—historical and fictional. The former (history) claimed to tell things ‘‘as’’ they actually happened (historia rerum gestarum), whereas the latter (fiction) took poetic license to tell things ‘‘as if ’’ they actually happened. Interestingly, the same term could be used for both in several languages—for example, histoire in French, Geschichte in German—but the truth claims were essentially divergent in each case. It is arguable that the function of catharsis is available in both narrative genres. And although Aristotle seems to have emphasized the cathartic role of poetic-dramatic muthos—which he argued disclosed the ‘‘essence’’ of events rather than just chronicling particular ‘‘facts’’ like the historian—it may well be that 186

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the ancient Athenians who frequented the theater viewed the tragic spectacle before them as both fantastical and (at least in part) historical. Verisimilitude and the credible ‘‘imitation of an action’’ were indispensable ingredients for a successful classical drama. Indeed, even today it is probable that people receive a certain ‘‘cathartic’’ release from deep trauma in having their histories (personal or communal) recounted and acknowledged. Just think of the important therapeutic role played by truth and justice tribunals, war-crimes cases, and war or genocide memorials—not to mention the daily therapies available to individual patients in psychoanalytic, counseling, or confessional sessions where the cathartic powers of the ‘‘talking cure’’ address the pain of countless sufferers who recount their ‘‘case histories.’’7 I will return to the question of historical remembering below. But first let me say a few words about the cathartic function of fictional narratives. In my own Irish tradition, storytelling has always enjoyed a significant healing role. One of the earliest works written in Ireland was the Book of Invasions, an account of the various migrations, occupations, and plantations that made up the history of the Irish people. It comprised an imaginative mix of fantasy and chronicle and clearly sought to offer a response to the age-old question of identity, who are we? As the adage goes, if someone asks you who you are, you tell your story.8 And even if someone else doesn’t ask you, you will invariably ask yourself, for stories have always been ways in which people explain themselves to themselves and to others. The great sagas and folktales of Gaelic Ireland served this purpose, right down to the establishment of the modern Irish nation. Indeed, it is no accident that one of the very first Irishmen to ever speak in English literature—Captain Macmorris in Shakespeare’s Henry V—asks the question, ‘‘What is my nation?’’ In fact, it has been said that to be Irish is to be someone who asks the question of what it means to be Irish! Modern Irish literature can be fruitfully read as an endless multiplicity of responses to the question of meaning and identity. Given the split character of the Irish psyche—straddling north and south, Catholic and Protestant, Anglo and Celt, Unionist and Nationalist, tribalist and universalist—it is not surprising that the literatures of Ireland, in both languages, have witnessed countless attempts to balance these contrary and often contradictory pressures. The purpose of much of this writing can be seen, I believe, as poetic catharsis. What is broken and betrayed in empirical history can be transmuted into the poiesis-muthos-mimesis of literary imagination. As the Irish playwright Brian Friel remarked, Irish literature is ‘‘opulent with tomorrows,’’ penned in the optative mood, its words serving as weapons of the dispossessed. The suffering of historical Richard Kearney

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defeat, failure, exile, and disinheritance is narratively transformed into a cathartic act of fiction. Or as the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney puts it: ‘‘Two buckets are easier carried than one, I grew up in between.’’ But well before Heaney and Friel, one could cite the examples of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, and James Joyce, all writers who turned the tragedy of double belonging (in Joyce’s case, to the point of near psychosis according to Carl Jung) into the marvel of reinvention. And that is what it surely was in most cases—re-creation, reinterpretation, and reinvention—for, as Joyce noted, ‘‘it’s a brave man that would invent something that never happened.’’ Indeed, in Ulysses Joyce managed to translate the tragic pain of his national and personal history into one of the greatest works of modernist fiction. He expressed this in the telling metaphor of the surrogate father and son—Bloom and Stephen—seeking to be reconciled through the word. ‘‘There can be no reconciliation if there has not been a sundering,’’ as Joyce observes.9 And the sunderings recorded in this narrative trajectory are legion—between pater et filius, Greek and Jew, English and Irish, cuckold and bawd, sacred and mundane, spirit and flesh, art and life, tradition and modernity, and so on. We might mention here, in passing, how this theme of atoning the split between father and son recurs throughout various works of Irish literature, including the great drama written by Joyce’s contemporary John Millington Synge entitled The Playboy of the Western World. This play tells of an estranged son who becomes a hero by inventing a story of parricide, only to be finally reconciled with his father! The son, Christy Mahon, sums up the moral of the story thus: ‘‘I was made a man by the power of a lie.’’ This and the other literary narratives cited above express a recurring narrative phenomenon: we write in order to ‘‘fill the hole inside us.’’10 What is true of Irish literature is, I suspect, true of all national and world literatures, albeit inflected in each case with distinct cultural contexts, contents, moods, characters, and tones.

 In the remainder of this essay, I want to look at how the cathartic function applies to the most controversial limit cases of trauma, namely, narratives of genocide. Here one encounters the cogent objection that catharsis is really out of place, since it seeks to appease or resolve in some way the irredeemable horror of evil. My argument will be that even if cathartic narrative seems utterly inadequate here, it is important to go on telling the story and seeking some sort of purgative release, however minimal or provisional. Otherwise, melancholy wins out over mourning, paralysis 188

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over pathos, and oblivion over remembrance. The stakes are not insignificant. This is, I admit, a highly vexed issue, and I explore the following examples of genocide stories by way of a ‘‘free variation’’ of attempts to try to make sense of the senseless. In J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, the protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, offers this arresting account of the indispensable importance of narrative imagination for ethical sensibility: ‘‘The particular horror of the camps,’’ she writes, the horror that convinces us that what went on there was a crime against humanity, is not that despite a humanity shared with their victims, the killers treated them like lice. That is too abstract. The horror is that the killers refused to think themselves into the place of their victims, as did everyone else. They said, ‘‘It is they in those cattle-cars rattling past.’’ They did not say, ‘‘How would it be if it were I in that cattle-car?’’ . . . They said, ‘‘It must be the dead who are being burnt today, making the air stink and falling in ash on my cabbages.’’ They did not say, ‘‘How would it be if I were burning?’’ ‘‘In other words,’’ concludes Costello, they closed their hearts. The heart is the seat of a faculty, sympathy, that allows us to share at times the being of another. . . . There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity, and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it. There is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination.’’11 Coetzee’s basic message here seems to be this: if we possess narrative compassion, we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love. The loving is in the healing, the catharsis, the balancing of deep empathy with wise acknowledgement of ‘‘the hidden cause.’’ In this instance, we might say that the narrative catharsis, performed and prescribed by the narrator, offers a singular mix of compassion and awe, whereby we experience the suffering of other beings—strangers, aliens, scapegoats, victims—as though we were them. And it is precisely this double response of difference (as if ) and identity (as) that provokes a reversal of our habitual attitude, with all its built-in protection devices and denial mechanisms. One experiences oneself as another and the other as oneself. One begins to apprehend otherwise unapprehendable suffering.

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Another especially impressive instance of the cathartic narrator is Helen Bamber. The main reason for this, we are told in her biography by Neil Belton, is that she was an exceptionally ‘‘good listener.’’ Here is an attentive witness par excellence. Bamber was not only a founding member of Amnesty International, but she was also one of the first therapists to enter the concentration camps after the war. Bamber’s goal was to encourage the survivors to somehow convert their trauma into stories and thereby find some release from their mute and immutable paralysis. Here she encountered ‘‘impossible stories’’ that had to be told. Bamber describes this narrative paradox—telling the untellable—well in her account of counseling victims after her arrival in Belsen, Germany, in the immediate wake of the liberation. ‘‘[I] would be sitting there in one of those chilly rooms, on a rough blanket on a bed, and the person I was talking to would suddenly begin to tell me what they had seen, or try to tell what it was like. . . . Above all else there was the need to tell you everything, over and over and over.’’12 Eventually, Bamber realized that what was most important in all of this was to ‘‘listen and receive this,’’ as if it were part of you and that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself playing some useful role. A sort of mourning beneath and beyond tears: ‘‘It wasn’t so much grief as a pouring out of some ghastly vomit like a kind of horror.’’13 The purgative idiom here is not accidental. What Bamber’s accounts of these basic firsthand testimonies makes evident is that Holocaust stories—like all stories of deep trauma, fear, and pain—are to be understood less as tales of heroic triumph over adversity than as truncated, wounded quasi narratives that call out to be heard, impossible stories that the victims and survivors nonetheless have to tell. Indeed, Primo Levi, arguably the most famous narrator-survivor of them all, compared this narrative impulse to tell and retell the story to something as basic as an alimentary need. Without such conversion from aphasia to testimony, from silent wounds to narrated words (however stammered or inarticulate), the survivors could not survive their own survival. They could not lift themselves from their bunks and walk out the gates of the death camps. They could not pass from death back into life. One especially vivid account of narrative testimony in Belsen says this with terrible poignancy. Bamber describes a play in Yiddish that was performed for remaining survivors by other survivors. It reenacted a typical family at the table and was received in total attention by the audience. She writes: The family portrayed would be obviously an orthodox family; and then the Nazis would come in. And they would drag or kill the 190

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mother; and the power of the scene turned around the abuse of the mother, and the break-up of the family. The depiction of the Nazis was realistic and violent. The sense of disaster about to happen could be felt in that hall. Nothing explicit about the aftermath was shown, as I remember it. I have never seen anything so effective, despite the crudity of the stage and the performance. It was raw and so close to the experience of the audience. There was never any applause. Each time was like a purging.14 Aristotle would have called this purgation by pity and fear katharsis. And of course, the key to the deep power of releasement from the nightmare that this basic muthos-mimesis allowed is the fact that it balanced the act of identification with a theatrical representation so that the pain, which could not be lived directly, could be relived by being re-presented ‘‘as if ’’ it were happening again, but this time from a certain distance (the ‘‘estrangement’’ being provided, however minimally, by the theatrical form and plot). The survivors were thus permitted to reexperience their own previously un-experienced experience because it was too unbearable to be registered or processed in the original immediacy of the trauma. Thus, stories become cathartic to the extent that they combine empathic imagination with a certain acknowledgment of the cause and context of the suffering, thereby offering a wider lens to review one’s own insufferable pain. The degree of detachment afforded by the narrative representation may be small indeed, but without it one would be smothered by trauma to the point of numbness. Without some mediation through muthos-mimesis, one risks succumbing to the sheer overwhelmingness of horror. Indeed, in this regard it is telling that several camp survivors have recounted how they finally achieved some relief from the trauma when they recognized themselves, from a certain formal distance, in characters portrayed in narrative accounts of the Holocaust, often well after the events took place. One could cite here the important debates on the role of mourning in such films as Schindler’s List or Shoah or Life Is Beautiful, not to mention the literary accounts of authors like Eli Wiesel, Etty Hillesum, Amos Oz, or Primo Levi.15 These various narrative testimonies— cinematic, theatrical, literary, documentary—invite subsequent generations to recall, in however flawed or fractured a manner, the unspeakable events of the Holocaust ‘‘as if ’’ they were experiencing them for themselves. And even though such narrative representations inevitably fail to do full justice to the singularity of the horror, they allow, despite all the odds, many people to remember what actually happened so that, in Primo Levi’s words, ‘‘it may never happen again.’’ Richard Kearney

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Speaking of her work as both a counselor in the camps and, later in Amnesty International, as a therapist for survivors of torture in Latin America, Bamber points to the need for cathartic witness, which implies something more profound than mere cognitive information of the facts (though that is crucial too). Narrating stories of horror and injustice, she insists, is a way of never giving up on the dead. ‘‘We must acknowledge the truth as well as having knowledge of it.’’16 This double duty of testimonial admission (through narrative) and cognition (through scientific evidence and explanation) seeks to honor our debt to the dead, to commemorate the forgotten, to foster the forfeited of history.

 My final example of narrating horror concerns the Armenian genocide. This case of cathartic testimony involves a documentary film made by a survivor of this ‘‘officially’’ unacknowledged massacre. One evening in the summer of 1915, a young Armenian mother hid her baby in a mulberry bush in the mountain village of Kharpert in eastern Turkey. The child, who survived the slaughter of the village population by Turkish troops, was J. Michael Hagopian, who, eighty years later, completed a major documentary called Voices from the Lake. The killing of over 1.5 million Armenians has been called the ‘‘silent genocide,’’ since it has always been denied by the Turkish government. Hagopian spent years researching the film, traveling widely to glean firsthand testimonies and stitch together the awful events that unfolded in 1915. One of the most important pieces of evidence was a series of photographs taken by an American diplomat posted to Turkey at the time, which he buried on his departure from the country for fear they would be confiscated by the Turkish authorities. Many years later he returned and retrieved the photos, faded and gnawed at the edges, but providing proof nonetheless of claims that over ten thousand bodies were deposited in the lake just west of Kharpert. This reclaiming of buried ‘‘imitations of an action’’ served as confirmation of Hagopian’s story of genocide, verifying the dictum ‘‘you can kill a people but you cannot silence their voices.’’17 In allowing these suppressed voices to speak at last, after more than eighty years of silence, Hagopian permits a certain working through of memory, a powerful act of mourning, though by no means a miracle cure. This is crucial to our understanding of catharsis. It is a matter of retrieving painful truths—through the ‘‘gap’’ of narrative mimesis (the ‘‘as’’ of history or the ‘‘as if ’’ of fiction)—rather than some alchemical potion. Catharsis is not magic. It is a labor of recognition but no guaranteed remedy.18 Moreover, the act of testimony, I repeat, involves both an affective 192

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empathy with the victims and a cognitive knowledge of the events that actually occurred (in this case provided by the forensic and empirical evidence of photos that enable us to count the bodies and see the casualties). We need a story to be struck by the horror, and history to know the ‘‘hidden cause’’ that occasioned it. In Hagopian’s layered narrative, catharsis conjoins both pathos and phronesis, both feeling and finding out. The gap of narration, mentioned above, can refer to the ‘‘as’’ of historical narrative or to the ‘‘as if ’’ of fictional narrative. Indeed, in the three genocide testimonies we have just been examining—those of Coetzee, Bamber, and Hagopian—the gap of narration usually involves some combination of both. In witnessing to past pain, narratives imitate the life of suffering—and action—in such a way as to refigure events absent, unbearable, and otherwise forgotten. Narrative catharsis, I have been arguing, is a way of making absent things present in a unique balancing of compassion and dispassion, of identification and contemplation, of particular emotion and universal understanding. It is a task that, if finely and delicately achieved, may proffer some measure of healing. Epilogue Narrative is not, of course, always on the side of the angels. History making and storytelling can just as easily result in propaganda and distortion as in healing and release. For every truthful testimony to horror there are those who engage in denial. The ‘‘official history’’ of Turkish negationism of the Armenian genocide and the revisionist controversies in France (Robert Faurisson), Germany (Ernst Nolde), and Britain (David Irving) regarding the Holocaust are timely reminders of the manipulative and mendacious potentials of narrativity. Not every narrative version of the past tells it ‘‘as it actually happened,’’ and the inevitable temporal discrepancy between past and present usually allows for a certain conflict of interpretations. This notwithstanding, I would still claim that cathartic narratives serve the truth. Indeed, I would go further in suggesting that narratives can be genuinely remedial only to the extent that they are ‘‘true,’’ or at least as true as is humanly possible given the epistemological limits involved in every finite representation of past events. Testimonial narratives might be said to be cathartic, therefore, to the degree that they are true to the ‘‘essence’’ of these events (poiesis-mimesis) and true to the singular details of the empirical facts themselves (anagnoresis-mimesis). There must be both affect and acknowledgment. What obtains for collective history also obtains for individual case histories. For every enabling narrative in therapy you can find a disabling Richard Kearney

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one. For every Little Hans healed there is a Dora maimed or misunderstood. Alongside the therapeutic cures for victims of child abuse we find controversies surrounding false memory syndrome (especially concerning long-term recovered memory).19 And, here again, I would argue that what we need to constantly ask is, whose story is it anyway? who is telling the story? to whom is it told? about what is it told? in what manner? and for what reason? For, to juggle with Shakespeare, no story is either good or bad but thinking makes it so. And by thinking here I understand the critical faculty of attentive ethical reason that must always accompany the moving force of poetical imagination. Without the former, our responses are blind. Without the latter, they are fleshless. Cathartic narratives are those that combine both. Catharsis is the chiasmus where poetics and ethics meet and where pain finds—sometimes—some release.

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12

On Deception Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive PEG BIRMINGHAM

Of course, this question of a politics of the archive is our permanent orientation here. . . . This question will never be determined as one political question among others. It runs through the whole of the field and in truth determines politics from top to bottom as res publica. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (translated by Eric Prenowitz)

It is not often noted that the problem of deception occupies a central place in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. At the outset of The Origins of Totalitarianism, prior to her analysis of anti-Semitism, imperialism, or radical evil, she raises the issue of deception, considering the difference between ancient and modern sophists and their relation to truth and reality: Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their ‘‘universal art of changing the mind by arguments’’ (Phaedrus 261) had nothing to do with truth, but aimed at opinions which by their nature are changing, and which are valid only ‘‘at the time of the agreement and as long as the agreement lasts’’ (Theatetus 172). . . . The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing 195

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victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.1 In these early pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt claims that the characteristic that sets totalitarianism apart from tyrannical and dictatorial regimes is precisely the sophistic victory at the expense of reality, which she argues institutes a ‘‘lying world order’’ or what also might be deemed ‘‘radical deception.’’ Indeed, her discussion of radical evil cannot be understood apart from her continuing preoccupation with the problem of this particular kind of deception. When Arendt writes in 1945, ‘‘The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe,’’2 she is indicating in the strongest terms possible that the problem of radical evil is by no means eradicated with the defeat of totalitarianism, in large part because of radical evil’s inseparable link to radical deception, which for her has nothing to do with what we understand by falsehood, error, or even the deliberate lie—the ways in which deception in all its guises is traditionally distinguished from truth. Falsehood and error are the opposites of truth, whereas a deliberate lie is the intentional dissimulation of the truth. Radical deception is something else altogether. Conflating reality with truth, Arendt argues that philosophy itself opens the door to the possibility of ‘‘a lying world order.’’ In her 1945 essay titled ‘‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism,’’ she writes, ‘‘If Western philosophy has maintained that reality is truth—for this is of course the ontological basis of the adequatio rei et intellectus—then totalitarianism has concluded from this that we can fabricate truth insofar as we can fabricate reality: that we do not have to wait until reality unveils itself and shows us its true face, but we can bring into being a reality whose structure will be known to us from the beginning because the whole thing is our product.’’3 Arendt makes the same point in another 1945 essay, ‘‘The Seeds of a Fascist International’’: It was always a too little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda that it was not satisfied with lying but deliberately proposed to transform its lies into reality. . . . For such a fabrication of a lying reality no one was prepared. The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more or less common to propaganda everywhere and of every time. The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old Occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and made that ‘‘true’’ which until then could only be stated as a lie.4 196

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For Arendt this introduces a mutation into the history of the lie: ‘‘One can say that to some extent fascism has added a new variation to the old art of lying—the most devilish variation—that of lying the truth.’’5 This mutation in the history of the lie occupies Jacques Derrida’s 1994 essay ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ an essay devoted largely to Arendt’s essay ‘‘Truth and Politics’’ and its claims regarding deception and factual reality. He agrees with Arendt on several points, most especially her insight that the lie in its modern mutation is something other than an epistemological problem. Speaking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘‘Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense,’’ Derrida writes, Nietzsche continues to pose or suppose some continuity between the error and the lie, thus between the true and the veracious, which allows him to treat the lie in the neutrality of an extra-moral sense, as a theoretical and epistemological problem. This gesture is neither illegitimate nor without interest, but we will come back to it only after having taken account of the irreducibly ethical dimension of the lie, where the phenomenon of the lie as such is intrinsically foreign to the problem of knowledge, truth, the true, and the false.6 Like Arendt, Derrida likens the phenomenon of the lie to a kind of radical evil: ‘‘If there is a history of the lie, that is of false witness and of perjury (for every lie is a perjury), and if this history touches on some radicality of evil named ‘lie’ or ‘perjury,’ then, on the one hand, it cannot let itself be reappropriated by a history of error or of truth in the ‘extra-moral’ sense. On the other hand, although the lie supposes, or so it seems, the deliberate invention of a fiction, nevertheless not all fiction or fable amounts to lying—and neither does literature.’’7 Not all fictions or fables are lies. Further, and most important, although all lies for Derrida touch on the radicality of evil, only the phenomenon of the lie actually embraces radical evil. In other words, the mutation of the lie into its most ‘‘devilish version’’ occurs when the lie becomes a phenomenon. And the phenomenon of the lie, Derrida argues, ‘‘is the destruction of reality or of the original archive.’’8 He makes this same point a year later in Archive Fever, arguing that the destruction of the archive ‘‘verges on radical evil.’’9 With this claim, Derrida is very close to Arendt’s claim that the modern lie is the destruction of reality. Still further, for both Arendt and Derrida, radical deception with its inherent destruction of reality presents the most difficult challenge for the ethical life today. Yet profound disagreements remain between them, at the center of which is Derrida’s criticism of Arendt’s notion of factual truth, which he argues is an unsustainable notion given the performativity constitutive of reality. His criticism of Peg Birmingham

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Arendt on this issue, however, opens the door to many difficulties in Derrida’s own account of the phenomenon of the lie, most notably, performativity. If reality is constituted through a performative event or act, as Derrida claims it is, then by what measure or standard do we judge a deceptive performance? And when is the deception such that it becomes a phenomenon of radical evil? In what follows, I first examine briefly Arendt’s claim that radical deception has to do with the destruction of reality, or what she calls ‘‘factual truth,’’ and then look at Derrida’s criticism of her claims. Second, I turn to Derrida’s notion of fiction, keeping in mind the difference he claims between fiction and lies (whereas every lie is a fiction, not every fiction is a lie), arguing that his account of fiction in Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry gives us an account of performativity of reality that to my mind is a persuasive correction to Arendt’s account. In the third section of the essay, I take up the notion of the ‘‘original archive,’’ which on the face of it seems to pose a problem for Derrida’s claim that radical evil is the destruction of reality and the original archive. In other words, if the destruction of the archive is possible, if the archive is itself capable of destruction—and this must be the case because otherwise there would be no trace—then when or in what form does the destruction of the original archive become the radicality of evil? Finally, I conclude with a consideration of the phenomenon of the lie as radical evil. Truths of Reason and Factual Truths Arendt’s distinction between truths of reason and factual truth is difficult to sort out because almost always her language commits the very glide that she critiques Western philosophy for, namely, confusing truth with reality, again a confusion at the very heart of the ontological supposition, ‘‘adequatio rei et intellectus.’’ Her term ‘‘factual truth’’ reveals her confusion, or, more precisely, her imprecision. ‘‘Truths of reason,’’ she argues, are necessary: two plus two equals four, or a square has four sides; they are coercive insofar as the truth of the mathematical or geometrical statement is not gained through persuasion. Rational force alone coerces me to assent to the truth of these claims. Factual truths, on the other hand, are characterized by their contingency; they have no necessity; they could have been otherwise. Arendt writes, ‘‘Facts have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise, and this annoying contingency is literally unlimited.’’ They are the result of action that could have happened in ways other than it did. There is no necessity to action—this is 198

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what makes it what it is, unexpected and unpredictable, the beginning of something new. To stay with Arendt’s examples, there was no necessity that compelled Germany to invade Belgium in 1914. Nor was there any necessity to France’s not being a victorious superpower at the end of World War II. In each case, it could have been otherwise. Germany could have stayed home. France could have acted with more valor. The problem we run into is that we usually view action from the point of view of its completion rather than its inaugural moment. After the war, the invasion can no longer be otherwise; it cannot be undone. The same can be said for the actual performance of France in World War II. To focus on the event’s necessity, that is, the inability to undo it once done, is to miss the profound contingency of the act itself. Indeed, the paradox is that that the event possesses both a ‘‘stubborn thereness’’ and an ‘‘inherent contingency.’’ In ‘‘Truth and Politics,’’ Arendt states: ‘‘And the surest sign of the factuality of facts and events is precisely this stubborn thereness, whose inherent contingency ultimately defies all attempts at conclusive explanation.’’10 For Arendt, it is the contingency of factual truths that makes them most like doxa. Yet for all of Arendt’s insistence on the public space as a space of doxa, she is not one who unconditionally celebrates doxa over factual truth. She insists on the distinction between the two. Doxa is always open to persuasion, and there is always a plurality of doxa that together make up the public space as a space of opinion. Factual truths, on the other hand, although ‘‘political in nature,’’ are not strictly speaking part of the public space, if by that is meant the space of persuasion, contest, and debate. Arendt argues that ‘‘facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. . . . Factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.’’11 At the same time, although factual truth and opinions occupy the same realm, namely, the public space, they are in different locations. Factual truth provides the limits to the public space as a space of action and of contested and debatable opinions. In this way, they function more like laws that provide the walls of the public space. Factual truths, she argues, are not lawful walls but the very ground of reality upon which the public space is enacted. Moreover, factual truths are not open to persuasion. I can try to convince you for the next many months that Belgium invaded Germany, or that France was a great superpower after the war, but even if I succeed in Peg Birmingham

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changing your mind, I have not thereby altered the reality of what occurred. The best way to destroy factual truths, however, is to reduce them to so many opinions that can then be easily dismissed as ‘‘just another opinion’’ open to dispute, contest, and interpretation. At the same time, it is not possible to prove factual truths in the way that one can prove a geometrical theorem. The establishing and the validity of factual truths require witnesses and testimony: ‘‘It is always related to other people, it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony.’’12 Arendt suggests that without the testimony of the witness, there is no public space whatsoever—the witness establishes the very ground of reality, the very condition for the public space, without whom the perseverance of this reality is threatened. Asking the Kantian question of whether truth should be sacrificed for the survival of the world, Arendt answers: ‘‘What is at stake is survival, the perseverance in existence . . . and no human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without those willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously, namely legein ta onta, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without those willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.’’13 The status of factual truths is at the center of Derrida’s reading of Arendt in ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ wherein he raises the suspicion of whether, in her formulation of factual truths, Arendt appeals to something like an objective reality as the bulwark against deception: ‘‘This suspicion can touch on everything that exceeds, in more than one direction, the determination of truth as objectivity, as the theme of a constative utterance, or even as adequation; at the limit it touches on any consideration of performative utterances. In other words, the same suspicion would be aimed at any problematic that delimits questions and a fortiori deconstructs the authority of truth as objectivity.’’14 Although Derrida is sympathetic to Arendt’s warnings against the destruction of factual truths, he nonetheless poses the decisive problematic concerning the constitution of factual truths or reality, namely, the problem of performativity: ‘‘Ethical, juridical, or political responsibility, if there is any, consists in deciding on the strategic orientation to give to this problematic [of performativity], which remains an interpretive and active problematic, in any case a performative one, for which truth, no more than reality, is not an object given in advance than it would be a matter of simply reflecting adequately.’’15 The question then is, how do we understand the phenomenon of the lie if reality and truth are constituted through a performativity that renders the very notion of factual truth unstable? To answer, I suggest that 200

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we turn to Derrida’s distinction between fictions and lies, keeping in mind his claim that whereas every lie is a fiction, not every fiction is a lie. Facts, Fiction, and History The discussion of fiction emerges early in Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s Origin of Geometry; it emerges in the discussion of origins, which, in turn, is a discussion of history. Derrida is interested in a notion of history understood in a more primordial sense as original repetition: ‘‘Provided the notion of history is conceived in a new sense, the question posed must be understood in its most historic sense. It is a question of repeating an origin.’’16 Further, the reflection on origins and history is a reflection on responsibility: ‘‘To meditate on or investigate the sense (besinnen) of origins is at the same time to make oneself responsible (verantworten) for the sense (Sinn) . . . [to] bring this sense to the clarity of its ‘fulfil[ment],’ and put oneself in a position of responsibility for this sense starting from the total sense of our existence.’’17 (This insistence that the reflection on origins and history carries with it this demand of responsibility will be extremely important when we take up below the phenomenon of the lie, or what I am calling radical deception.) Derrida begins his reflection on ‘‘origins’’ by discussing a key difference between Husserl and Immanuel Kant. For Kant there is an ‘‘indifference to the factual origin,’’ whereas for Husserl ‘‘both the necessity to proceed from the fact of constituted science and the regression towards the nonempirical origins are at the same time conditions of possibility.’’18 Derrida argues that this indifference to the factual origin is more legitimate in Kant than in Husserl because ‘‘the inaugural mutation which interests Kant hands over geometry rather than creates it; it sets free a possibility, which is nothing less than historical, in order to hand it to us.’’19 On the other hand, for Husserl the productive act is constitutive and creative: ‘‘The objects or objectivities that it intends did not exist before it; and this ‘before’ of the ideal objectivity marks more than the chronological eve of a fact: it marks a transcendental prehistory.’’20 The difference between Kant and Husserl is the difference between the ‘‘ready-made’’ and the ‘‘constitutive creative’’ work of reflection. For Husserl, reflection is precisely the activity of instituting—it is productive and creative— whereas for Kant, it is ‘‘already done.’’ It is in this context that Derrida first raises the specter of fiction. Indeed, he distinguishes between hallucination and fiction on the basis of the latter’s link to a particular kind of history: ‘‘Hallucination, then, is truth’s accomplice only in a static world of constituted significations. To Peg Birmingham

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proceed to the ground and primordial constitution of truth, we must return, starting from the real world, to a creative experience.’’21 (And here I simply ask whether a different history of truth would make it difficult for the hallucinatory accomplice. I will return to this question in the conclusion.) The true contrary of hallucination is fiction, understood precisely in terms of a ‘‘creative experience,’’ that is, as constitutive of reality. Hence, its distinction from hallucination. Derrida insists that we think about history, an original history in the sense that it is linked to the reawakening of origins, in order to think about the status of this fiction. Paradoxically, Derrida argues that this ‘‘original history,’’ as the invariance of the instituting fact, can never be repeated as such. The instituting fact marks a singular historical origin that is irreplaceable and invariable.22 The invariance of this instituting fact must be distinguished from the Husserlian eidetic invariance. In other words, to think of the invariance of the fact is to move from eidetic invariance to an institutive history; it is to move from the eidetic to the historical reduction. This historical reduction is one that reactivates the sense of the first time as a unique fact. It takes account of the sense of fact, not the factuality of the fact. The sense of fact is precisely the creative experiences of an original history. In other words, the sense of fact is a fiction. This for Derrida is the aperion: the fact in its pure factuality is fiction. ‘‘Also, when Husserl affirms that a sense-production must have first presented itself as evident in the personal consciousness of the inventor, and when he asks the question of its subsequent (in a factual chronological order) objectification, he elicits a kind of fiction destined to show the characteristics of ideal Objectivity are problematic and to show they are not a matter of course.’’23 This aperion of the inseparability of fact and sense, or, in other words, the inseparability of fact and fiction, is not unresolvable: ‘‘Is this to say that this inseparability of fact and sense in the oneness of an instituting act precludes access for phenomenology to all history and to the pure eidos of a forever submerged origin? Not at all.’’24 Passage through the aperion is achieved through the historical reduction that takes us to the singularity of origins: ‘‘The historical reduction, which also operates by variation, will be reactivating and noetic. Instead of repeating the constituted sense of an ideal object, one will have to reawaken the dependence of sense with respect to an inaugural and institutive act concealed under secondary passivities and infinite sedimentations—a primordial act which created the object whose eidos is determined by the iterative reduction.’’25 This notion of an ‘‘iterative reduction’’ allows us to grasp the singularity of the instituting act as original repetition. The iterative or historical

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reduction gives the origin of repetition a creative origin that is marked by the absence of the repeated. This must be the case because if the sense of the instituting act to be repeated were totally present, if it were not characterized by lack of plentitude, no repetition could occur. In other words, the sense of the instituting act is given only in the repetition of an origin with which it cannot coincide, because it is of the very essence of the origin, the instituting act, to be pure anteriority. The original event is marked by the lack of self-presence. Furthermore, this original repetition is the condition for reproduction, recitation, representation. (In his later thought, this same problem appears in Derrida’s many reflections on the ‘‘yes, yes’’—the second ‘‘yes’’ is required for saying the first.) The significance of this is that original repetition gives the sense of an open history. Derrida clarifies what he means by such ‘‘openness.’’ History is understood here as the infinite totality of possible experience. There is a unity, but it is a unity of a tradition ‘‘infinitely open to all its own revolutions.’’ This is not, however, an abstract history; rather it is a concrete and specific history that arises in an instituting, temporal, creative act. Derrida argues that the essence of history, history as such, is a primordial concrete essence that makes a generalizing operation, the operation of sense, possible. Here again he is pointing to an understanding of the historical as a creative adventure: ‘‘A system that has been originally produced only once—that remains de facto and de jure irreversible. These then are the interconnections of what is, in the fullest sense of the word, history itself.’’26 These interconnections are nothing but the possibilities of the appearance of history as such, outside of which nothing exists. History itself, therefore, establishes the possibility of its own appearing, and this possibility of appearing is through language. The creative appearance of the historical adventure is always a linguistic appearance. Here, Derrida argues, we have the broadest notion of literature or fiction. This is the case insofar as literature, fiction in the broadest sense, is inhabited by a certain distance. This absence or distance that characterizes the origin is, however, ‘‘not identical with any of its empirical, phonetic, or graphic materializations.’’27 In literary language this distance or absence is made word: ‘‘Art sets off in quest of a language that can recapture this absence itself and represent the endless movement of comprehension.’’28 This ‘‘making word’’ defines the singularity of a narrative that characterizes a historical adventure. It is this event of singularity, the singularity of a narrative, that marks the junction of history, fiction, and language. Language, the act of fiction in its broadest sense, inaugurates the appearance of history.

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At this point, Derrida begins to explain the relation between history and fiction. The instituting act is a kind of fiction. I start with the constituted object and work my way back to the instituting fact. Thus, the primordial sense of the intentional act is given in its final sense. The historical reduction depends on both teleology and an account of origin. However, this origin has the status of a ‘‘fiction.’’ Derrida argues that it is not the case that the narration, the condition of history, is such that it falls into a static, structural, and normative schema. Nor does it give us a merely factual content of development. This historical account of the instituting act, this primordial singularity, is not an account of what really happened. We are not being told a story. As in the sense of origins described above, there is something that is not present that did not take place. Hence the fiction. Although finitude is the essential we can never go beyond, there is a rift in the finite that characterizes the openness of history. This marks the irruption of the infinite in the finite—‘‘the always-already-there of a future which keeps the indetermination of its infinite openness intact.’’ Here Derrida is beginning to think of the status of the always already as a future that is always yet to come, that keeps its ‘‘infinite openness intact.’’ At the same time, this historical, linguistic incarnation sets free sense or meaning rather than binding it. Derrida quotes Eugen Fink: ‘‘In sensible embodiment occurs the ‘localization’ and the ‘temporalization’ of what is by its being-sense, unlocated and untemporal.’’29 It is this infinite openness that saves the Leiblichkeit from corporeal disaster inasmuch as the irruption of the infinite allows for a revolution within empirical culture. It is what allows for the ‘‘passage to the limit.’’ Derrida argues, ‘‘Naturally, this passage to the limit is only the going beyond every sensible and factual limit. It concerns the ideal limit of an infinite transgression, not the factual limit of the transgressed finitude.’’30 In other words, there is no transgressing finitude itself; rather, there is always at the heart of history an infinite transgression. Again, the in-finite must be understood in terms of the instituting, fictive act. This means that within the instituting act there is the possibility of an infinite number of births, ‘‘in which, each time, another birth is announced, while still being concealed.’’31 This institutive in-infinite that characterizes the work of the instituting act is not access to some possibility that is itself ahistoric yet discovered within a history. Rather, the openness of the in-finite is the ‘‘openness of history itself, in the utmost depths and purity of its essence.’’32 The rift in the finite, this instituting infinitization, characterizes a radical freedom at the very heart of history. 204

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At the same time, the ‘‘always already’’ denotes a fundamental delay at the very heart of history. This is due to the absence at the very origin of the historical. Delay, then, is the absolute only in the sense that delay marks that historical origin that is absolved of all relation, that which marks the limit of all discourse: ‘‘The Absolute is present only in being deferred-delayed without respite, this impotence and this impossible are given in a primordial and pure consciousness of Difference. . . . The primordial Difference of the absolute Origin.’’33 This primordial difference that marks the absolute origin can only be anticipated. Hence, it is a delay that is teleological, but a teleology without end. Thus, the ‘‘always already’’ marks a very different sense of temporality; it is a temporality that forever disrupts and challenges the linear temporality of a narrative. This is why Derrida insists throughout his work that fiction is not storytelling. Therefore, the openness of the historic present, as well as its absolute and inescapable delay, is such that the historic present always appears as a project. The effaced/disclosed trace of the origin (not a past present) and the anticipated differed/deferred end (not a future present) inscribe what must be performed as our present. A performing, fictive act therefore constitutes present reality. For Derrida, then, ‘‘factual truth’’ is always constituted through a performative fiction, a performance that establishes at once both the instituting fact or event and its manifold of sense. Although Arendt recognizes that facts require the testimony of a witness, she does not develop an account of testimony or witnessing that would problematize her account of the constitution of factual truth and reality. Even so, Arendt’s claim that totalitarianism is unique in its substituting fictions for reality, thereby establishing a ‘‘lying world order,’’ is persuasive. Certainly Derrida agrees with this part of her analysis in his essay ‘‘History of the Lie.’’ How, then, can we talk about the phenomenon of the lie when factual truth cannot be stabilized? Or more precisely, given that reality is always a performative fiction, how can Derrida claim that the phenomenon of the lie is the destruction of reality? Here I suggest that we turn to Derrida’s reflections on the original archive, recalling that for him ‘‘the phenomenon of the lie is the destruction of reality or the original archive.’’ Archive Trouble: The ‘‘Next to the Last Word’’ In Archive Fever, published in 1995, one year after the essay ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ Derrida writes, ‘‘Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive.’ . . . Nothing is more troubled and more troubling.’’34 The trouble is at least twofold. First, Derrida points out that Peg Birmingham

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from the beginning, the archive contains two principles: the institutive and the conservative, the revolutionary and the traditional. In other words, archive understood as arche denotes two principles: the principle of beginning and the principle of order and law. Both are given at once; the principle of beginning carries its nomological principle within it. The second trouble in the archive, and it is not separable from the first, stems from our need of the archive (mal d’archive). We are mal d’archive—in need of archives. I will take up each trouble in turn. The trouble with the archival beginning is that it provides a topos for what is always a unique and singular event, without precedent and without sequel. At the same time, the irreducible singularity of the event is inscribed, traced, retained, and archived; it is always already an event of inscription and conservation. As we saw above in Derrida’s analysis of the event in Origin of Geometry, even as it consigns and conserves, the inscription produces a new event, thereby affecting the presumed primary event it is supposed to retain and archive. In the essay ‘‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),’’ Derrida writes, ‘‘There is the event one archives, the archived event . . . and the archiving event, the archivation. The latter is not the same thing, structurally, as the archived event, even if, in certain cases, it is indissociable from it or even contemporary with it.’’35 Derrida clarifies this by considering the report of ‘‘two midges immobilized in amber the color of honey when they were surprised by death as they made love—fifty-four million years before humans appeared on earth, a jouissance took place whose archive we preserve.’’36 He points out that ‘‘on the one hand, [we have] impassive but fragile matter, the material depository, the document, and on the other hand, singularity, the one time only, the once and for all of the event thus consigned.’’37 And yet this event survives and happens to us, a trace of an event that took place only once, one time only, but that envelops its own archivation, arriving and happening to us. This is troubling, for an event ought to retain its singularity; it ought not, Derrida claims, to give in or be reduced to repetition, and yet the archive always figures a place that produces the event no less than it records or consigns it. Developing his account of the instituting act in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida argues that the archival production has three orders: (1) the order of memory by reference to an irreversible event that has already happened, (2) the order of inscription or a consignment of the event, and (3) the order of a performance or operation that is at the same time the result and the trace left by the performance. He then asks, ‘‘Is the work the trace of the event, the name of the trace of the event that will institute it as work? Or is it the institution of this event itself ?’’ Derrida answers, ‘‘It is both at once.’’38 206

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The significance of this is twofold. First, there is no last word, but only what Derrida calls the ‘‘next to the last word.’’ Returning to the ‘‘yes, yes’’—not only does the second ‘‘yes’’ constitute the first, but it itself is consigned to yet another ‘‘yes.’’ And second, although there is a first word and a ‘‘before the first word’’ that marks the commencement, this word and what is prior to it is what Derrida refers to as ‘‘the unknowable weight of the archive,’’ a weight that imprints itself on the archive, opening the future and all that ties memory to the promise. The first word and the prior to the first word, the beginning or the event itself, is the impossible that resists all appropriation (and Derrida more than once states that materiality is the name he gives to all that resists appropriation) while at the same time it is inscribed and consigned to a history and an opening on the future with respect to all that will come. This is troubling, Derrida claims, precisely because of the ‘‘irreplaceable singularity of the document to interpret, to repeat, to reproduce, each time in its original uniqueness.’’ An archive ought to be idiomatic; it ought to retain something of its singularity—it ought not, he argues, to give in or be reduced to repetition. Thus the archive ‘‘poses trouble for translation: at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction.’’39 Here Derrida is very close to Arendt in his claim that there is something in the archive that remains beyond the reach of interpretation and repetition. Is this not precisely what Arendt is pointing to when she states, ‘‘Even if we admit that every generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don’t admit the right to touch the factual matter itself.’’40 And yet Derrida problematizes Arendt’s account of factual matter, pointing out that she is only partially correct: the factual matter is at once beyond reach and always reinscribed in an interpretation, reproduction, recitation. The singular event is troubling for translation and interpretation in its resistance to appropriation and reproduction even as it is always already taken up into archival inscription and consignment. And it is also troubling because the uniquely singular ought to be beyond the reach of inscription, and yet from the beginning it is inscribed and consigned. At the same time, archive trouble is due to what Derrida calls a fundamental ‘‘en mal d’archive.’’ In fact, there would be no trouble d’archive if we were not en mal d’archive—in need of archives. In other words, we would not find the resistance and repetition of the singular event so troubling if we did not have a need to go in search of origins. This need, he suggests, is a more fundamental trouble than the trouble outlined above. Peg Birmingham

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Derrida uses the word mal not to indicate a sickness or a suffering but to point to the interminable desire for the archive ‘‘right where it slips away.’’ This is the irrepressible desire for the origin, a homesickness, he argues, for the ‘‘return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.’’ Our desire for the absolute commencement, this compulsion or desire, this archival fever, is the desire to forgo the topological work of the archive for archaeology, the latter infused with the desire to excavate the origin to that moment when it appears in the nude without archive. In other words, the en mal d’archive is the discontent with having only the next to the last word. We are feverish with a desire for the impossible—to excavate to the point where nothing no longer resists. Ultimately, Derrida argues, this was Sigmund Freud’s impossible dream: the origin speaks. Stones speak!—the archaeological delusion of having appropriated not only the first word but the prior to the word. And with this we can have the last word. Nothing is impossible. Or, as Arendt remarks in The Origins of Totalitarianism, we have arrived at the totalitarian fantasy that everything is possible.41 I want to turn briefly to Arendt because when reading Derrida’s account of the mal d’archive, the question remains, How do we account for this homesickness, this nostalgia for the archaic place of commencement that makes the archive fundamentally troubling? I suggest that Hannah Arendt’s insight that the human condition is a condition of commencement is helpful for understanding why this is the case. Each one of us is a singular and unique beginning, before whom there is no one. The event of natality is the archaic beginning that carries its principle within it. For Arendt, the principle is double: the principle of initium or freedom and the principle of givenness. Agreeing with Baron de Montesquieu that a principle always has an affective dimension, she argues that the human condition is marked by a double affectivity: pleasure that accompanies plurality and the gratitude for givenness. Yet Derrida’s account suggests that there is another affectivity that accompanies this archaic event of natality, namely, what he is calling a homesickness or a longing for the absolute commencement, the absolute beginning that marks each of our births. This would suggest that the en mal d’archive is part of the human condition and something that always poses both a promise and a threat. Derrida suggests that the en mal d’archive is inseparable from the death drive, ‘‘without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive.’’42 His reading of the death drive is important here because it is going to allow us to distinguish two different senses of destroying the archive, one that verges on radical evil and one that embraces radical evil. (I will return to this in the concluding section.) Derrida, in 208

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his reading of Freud, points out that the death drive, which Freud also calls the aggressive or destructive drive, never leaves the archive. Indeed, Derrida argues that ‘‘it destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement. It works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own ‘proper’ traces.’’43 Outside, exterior to the archive, the death drive is ‘‘anarchivic.’’44 And yet there is no archive without this exteriority. The archive always occurs at the ‘‘place of originary and structural breakdown of memory.’’45 Thus, Derrida argues further, ‘‘there is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.’’46 And because there is no archive that is not consigned in an external place that ensures the possibility of repetition and reproduction, Derrida insists that the logic of repetition and memory remains indissociable from the death drive and thus from destruction. The archive is made possible by the death drive, by originary finitude and expropriation. For Derrida, the consequence of this is that at the very place that permits and conditions the archive, we will never find ‘‘anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument.’’47 Conclusion: Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive Given that the a priori conditions of the original archive are finitude and expropriation, with its accompanying destruction, how then can Derrida, agreeing with Arendt, claim that radical evil is the destruction of reality and the original archive? After all, if the destruction of the archive is possible, if the archive is itself destructing (for otherwise there is no possibility of the trace), then in what way does this destruction become radical evil? I want to conclude by suggesting that we take seriously Derrida’s careful distinction between, on the one hand, a destruction that ‘‘verges on radical evil’’ and, on the other hand, a destruction that is radical evil. The first kind of destruction is precisely the one just outlined: marked by finitude and expropriation, the inherent capability of the original archive for destruction, leaving a trace, an ash. This archival destruction, inherent to the archive itself, only verges on radical evil. Derrida provides here a caution: this first kind of archival destruction, although distinct from the second, is never very far from the kind of destruction that is radical evil. This is the threat and the menace that requires the infinite ethical task of demonstrating the archive—‘‘the discussion, the recalling of evidence and Peg Birmingham

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witnesses, the work and discipline of memory, the indisputable demonstration of an archive? An infinite task, no doubt, which must be begun over and over again, but isn’t that the distinctive feature of a task, whatever it may be?’’48 Here Derrida takes up again his claim in Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, namely, that the reflection on origins and history carries with it this ethical demand of responsibility, which is the infinite ethical task of ‘‘demonstrating the archive’’ in the face of the archive’s inherent destructibility. And this seems to me to be very close to Arendt’s insight that factual reality forever requires the testimony of witnesses willing to testify to what is, without whom the very perseverance of reality is threatened. There is, however, a second kind of destruction, which, as I have mentioned at several places in this essay, Derrida names the ‘‘phenomenon of the lie.’’ As we have seen, Derrida is quite critical of Arendt’s claim that this destruction is carried out by an ‘‘image-substitute’’ that no longer refers to an original, as if reality is not itself constituted through performative fictions. However, at the conclusion of ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ Derrida points to a different kind of ‘‘fiction’’ that allows us to distinguish between performative fictions forever in need of demonstration and witness and the phenomenon of the lie, the latter characterized by a particular and devilish fiction, namely, ideology. Ideology, he argues, marks a site, a place of the modern mutation of the lie as a phenomenon. In his essay ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ Derrida does little more than point to this site. I submit, however, that if we return to Derrida’s discussion in Origin of Geometry, we find there a clue to the kind of ‘‘fiction’’ at work in ideology that for Derrida makes it destructive of reality and the original archive and distinguishes it from the destruction always at work in the archive. Recall that in this early work, Derrida distinguishes between fictions and hallucinations. Hallucinations, he argues, ‘‘are truth’s accomplice only in a static world of constituted significations.’’ Ideology, the phenomenon of the lie, is a hallucination that destroys performative fictions characterized by archival memory and an open history, replacing these fictions with a hallucinatory reality of ironclad consistency and totalizing significations in which memory is destroyed and history becomes closed, a law unto itself. This view is in complete agreement with Arendt’s analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism, particularly her claim that ideology’s hellish fantasies are characterized by a ‘‘strident logicality,’’ a logic through which the whole of reality is thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to total domination. Derrida makes a similar point in Archive Fever, suggesting that ideology reinvests the destruction of the original archive into the totalizing and inexhaustible logic that capitalizes everything. This is the 210

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hallucination of having the first and last word, which, as we saw above, is the destruction of the original archive; it is the destruction of all that resists—that which is impossible and beyond reach. This is radical evil: everything is possible. This leads to the silence of the cemetery. Not even stones speak. Nothing remains. Not even an ash.

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Notes

In the Name of Goodness Charles E. Scott 1. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Warner Books, 1980), xvi. 2. The following account is based on David Wood’s Thinking after Heidegger (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002), 60–77. What Is Philosophical Ethics? Gu¨nter Figal 1. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, vol. 3 of Werke, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden, Germany: Insel-Verlag, 1956–1964), A798/B826. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 2. Ibid., A799/B827. 3. Ibid., A800/B828. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, in Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1969), 5.53. 5. Ibid., 6.52. 6. Ibid. Wittgenstein varies and clarifies these thoughts in saying, ‘‘The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?).’’ Ibid., 6.521. 7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘‘Die sokratische Frage und Aristoteles,’’ in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, Griechische Philosophie III (Tu¨bingen, Germany: Mohr, 213

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1991), 373. ‘‘One must approach Aristotelian ethics not so much with the question of how Aristotle seeks to differentiate himself from Plato and the Platonic Socrates as with how Aristotle aims to take up and hold onto the spiritual heir of Socrates that Aristotle finds in Plato.’’ Ibid., 380. 8. Robert Spaemann, ‘‘Was ist philosophische Ethik?’’ in Grenzen: Zur ethischen Dimension des Handelns (Stuttgart, Germany: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 19. 9. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1095a5–6. 10. See Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, § 241, in Schriften, vol. 1 (see note 4): ‘‘It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life [Lebensform].’’ 11. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1103a24–26. 12. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Berlin: Walter de ¨ ber den Gruyter & Co., 1968), 410 (my emphasis). See Robert Spaemann, ‘‘U Begriff der Menschenwu¨rde,’’ in Grenzen: Zur ethischen Dimension des Handelns (Stuttgart, Germany: Klett-Cotta, 2001), 107–122. 13. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, vol. 12 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Klostermann, 1976–2004), 11. 14. On the interpretation of this Hegelian contention, see Gu¨nter Figal, ‘‘Lebensverstricktheit und Abstandnahme: ‘Verhalten zu sich,’ ’’ in Anschluß an Heidegger, Kierkegaard und Hegel (Tu¨bingen, Germany: Attempto-Verlag, 2001). Hermeneutics as Original Ethics Dennis J. Schmidt 1. The list is simply too long to even begin to detail, but a few titles might help you recall others. So I will remind you of early works such as ‘‘Praktisches ¨ ber Wissen’’ (1930) and Platos dialektische Ethik (1931), middle works such as ‘‘U die Mo¨glichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik’’ (1963), and later works such as ‘‘Die Idee der praktischen Philosophie’’ (1983) up through ‘‘Freundschaft und Solitarita¨t’’ (1999). ¨ ber die Mo¨glichkeit einer philosophischen 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘‘U Ethik,’’ in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, Neuere Philosophie II (Tu¨bingen, Germany: Mohr, 1987), 188 (emphasis added). ‘‘Aristotles [kann] die Bedingtheit alles menschlichen Seins im Inhalt seiner Lehre vom Ethos anerkennen, ohne dass diese Lehre selber ihre Bedingtheit verleugnete. Eine philosophische Ethik, die dergestalt nicht nur um ihre eingene Fragwu¨rdigkeit weiss, sondern eben diese Fragwu¨rdigkeit zu ihrem wesentlichen Inhalt hat, scheint mir allein der Unbedingtheit des Sittlichen zu genu¨gen.’’ Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, Hermeneutik I (Tu¨bingen, Germany: Mohr, 1990), 329. ‘‘Die aristotelische Analyse [zeigt sich] als eine Art Modell der in der hermeneutischen Aufgabe gelegenen Probleme.’’ ¨ ber die Mo¨glichkeit einer philosophischen Ethik,’’ 175. ‘‘Es 4. Gadamer, ‘‘U ¨ bergang zur Praxis [geho¨rt] zum antiken Wissensbegriff u¨berhaupt, dass solcher U 214

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in ihm selber liegt: Wissenschaft ist nicht ein anonymer Inbegriff von Wahrheiten, sondern eine menschlichen Haltung (hexis tou aletheuein).’’ 5. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 312 (‘‘das zentrale Problem der Hermeneutik u¨berhaupt’’). 6. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Brief u¨ber den Humanismus,’’ in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Klostermann, 1978), 349. ‘‘Ce que je cherche a` faire, depuis longtemps de´ja`, c’est pre´ciser le rapport de l’ontologie avec une e´thique possible?’’ 7. Ibid., 350. ‘‘Die Trago¨dien des Sophokles bergen, falls u¨berhaupt ein solcher Vergleich erlaubt ist, in ihrem Sagen das ethos anfa¨nglicher als die Vorlesungen des Aristotles u¨ber ‘Ethik.’ ’’ 8. Ibid., 353. 9. Ibid. ‘‘Soll nun gema¨ss der Grundbedeutung des Wortes ethos der Name Ethik dies sagen, dass sie den Aufenthalt des Menschen bedenkt, dann ist dasjenige Denken, das die Wahrheit des Seins als das anfa¨ngliche Element des Menschen als eines eksistierenden denkt, in sich schon die urspru¨ngliche Ethik.’’ 10. See Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 237. 11. The term is Foucault’s; see ibid., 237. 12. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Blamey and Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 87. 13. Plato, Phaedrus 275A. 14. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 168–169. ‘‘Schrift und was an ihr teil hat . . . ist die ins Fremdeste enta¨usserte Versta¨ndlichkeit des Geistes. Nichts ist so sehr reine Geitesspur wie Schrift, nichts aber auch so auf den verstehenden Geist angewiesen wie sie.’’ 15. Ibid., 116. 16. Ibid., 394. 17. Ibid., 21. ‘‘Man fasst u¨bringens das Wesen des Geda¨chtnisses selbst nicht richtig, wenn man darin nichts al seine allgemeine Anlage oder Fa¨higkeit sieht. Behalten und Vergessen und Wiedererinnern geho¨ren der geschichtlichen Verfassung des Menschen an und bilden selbst ein Stuck seiner Geschichte. . . . Das Geda¨chtnis muss gebildet werden. Denn Geda¨chtnis ist nicht Geda¨chtnis u¨berhaupt und fu¨r alles. Man hat fu¨r manches ein Geda¨chtnis, fu¨r anderes nicht, und man will etwas im Geda¨chtnis bewahren, wie man anderes aus ihm verbannt. Es ware Zeit, das Pha¨nomen des Geda¨chtnisses . . . als einen Wesenzug des endlichgeschichtlichen Seins des Menschen zu erkennen.’’ 18. One sees this as well in the original sense of the word historia in Homer. See Homer Iliad 18.501, 23.486. The one who does the work of memory by telling stories is obliged to assume the role of the judge. 19. The Greeks had two words to designate memory: mneme¯ and anamne¯sis. Were I to indicate the focus of my remarks in this paper, I would say that I am more concerned with mneme¯ since it can appear even to the point of becoming pathos. Notes to pages 38– 45

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20. Aristotle On Memory and Recollection 449b15 (parva naturalia). 21. On this, see Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 21. 22. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 169. ‘‘In ihrer Entzifferung und ihrer Deutung geschieht ein Wunder, die Verwandlung von etwas Fremden und Totem in schlechhinniges Zugleichsein und Vertrautsein.’’ 23. Ibid., 481. Ethical Experience, Ethical Subjectivity Simon Critchley 1. Dieter Henrich, ‘‘The Concept of Moral Insight and Kant’s Doctrine of the Fact of Reason,’’ in The Unity of Reason, ed. Richard Velkley (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 55–87. I would like to thank Jay Bernstein for bringing this article to my attention and explaining its importance for my project in conversations back in the mid-1990s. For Bernstein’s highly original application of the concept of moral insight to Theodor Adorno, see Jay Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), particularly the discussion of Henrich, pages 21–36. 2. Romans 7:19. 3. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. R. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 82. 4. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 42. 5. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 6. See Slavoj Zˇizˇek, The Fragile Absolute: Why the Christian Legacy Is Worth Defending (London: Verso, 2000). 7. See Simon Critchley, ‘‘Demanding Approval: On the Ethics of Alain Badiou,’’ Radical Philosophy, no. 100 (2000): 18–30. 8. Knud Ejler Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre and Hans Fink (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 9. Matthew 5:43–48 10. Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, 28. 11. Ibid., 213–214. 12. Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, in Nohow On (London: Calder, 1992), 101. 13. See Emanuel Levinas, ‘‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,’’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1987), 54. 14. Emanuel Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 19. 15. Levinas, ‘‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,’’ 54; Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonos Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 50. 216

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16. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 291. 17. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 17; Emanuel Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (see note 14), 94. 9/11: America and the Politics of Innocence Debra B. Bergoffen 1. In his March 9, 2005, column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, prompted by the suspicion that Matt Hale, a white supremacist awaiting sentencing for soliciting the murder of federal district judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, was guilty of murdering the judge’s husband and mother, noted this asymmetry and warned of the threat to American security by its homegrown violent extremists. 2. Benjamin R. Barber, ‘‘The War of All against All: The Politics of Fear,’’ in War after September 11, ed. V. G. Gehring (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 82–83. 3. Ibid., 83. 4. Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1995), 85 (quoting Slavoj Zˇizˇek). 5. Ibid., 89. 6. Ibid., 88. 7. Martin Shaw, War and Genocide: Organized Killing in Modern Society (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 209. 8. Ibid., 216. 9. Barber, ‘‘The War of All against All,’’ 84, 88. 10. Robert K. Fullinwider, ‘‘Terrorism, Innocence, and War,’’ in War after September 11 (see note 2), 30. 11. Ibid., 21. 12. Ibid., 22–33. 13. Youcef Bouandel, Human Rights and Comparative Politics (Brookfield, Vt.: Dartmouth Publishing, 1977), 19–21. 14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,’’ in The Prose of the World (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 131–133. 15. Ibid., 139. 16. Ibid., 141, 143. 17. Ibid., 131–133. 18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘Man and Adversity,’’ in Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 240–243. 19. Ibid., 225. Engage the Enemy Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of Friendship Cynthia Willett 1. See especially Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Notes to pages 69– 89

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2. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 3. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 4. 4. Michael Ignatieff, ‘‘Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?’’ New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005, 42. 5. Ibid., 45. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 277. 7. Ibid., 197–198. 8. John D. Caputo, ‘‘Who Is Derrida’s Zarathustra? Of Fraternity, Friendship, and a Democracy to Come,’’ Research in Phenomenology 29 (1999): 185. For a Nietzschean critique of Derrida’s politics of friendship, see John Lysaker, ‘‘Friendship at the End of Metaphysics,’’ Soundings 79, nos. 3–4 (1996). 9. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 306. 10. For a defense of Aristotle’s city of prayer as a true aristocracy, see Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 138–142. 11. Chantal Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 77. 12. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 66. 13. Caputo, ‘‘Who Is Derrida’s Zarathustra?’’ 190. 14. Ibid., 190. 15. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). 16. For Stanley Cavell’s observation of the difference between Dewey and Hegel, see his interview in The American Philosopher, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 125. 17. Paul Taylor and Robert Gooding-Williams are both currently engaged in examining the contemporary relevance of these films for racial politics. 18. On the sexual radicalism unleashed by the 1920s and the redefinition of marriage that culminated in the twentieth century, see Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History (New York: Viking, 2005), especially chapter 15, pages 247–262. 19. For a discussion of the contemporary relevance of pragmatism, see Michael Walzer, Politics and Passion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 159–161. For speculation on the effects of the eclipse of pragmatism, as well as the blacklisting of Hollywood screenwriters during the McCarthy era, see John McCumber, Time in the Ditch (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2001), especially pages 90 and 94. 20. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 150–151. 21. Ibid., 151. 22. Ibid., 146. 23. Ibid., 238. 24. Ibid., 136. 25. Susan Bordo, The Male Body (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 161. 218

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26. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 139. 27. Ibid., 155. 28. Ibid., 156. 29. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 182. 30. Cf. Walzer, Politics and Passion, 25–26: ‘‘Countervalence is, in a way, a response to the structuralist critique of liberalism. It makes for an informal constitutionalization of social life; as the state is divided and balanced, so is civil society.’’ 31. Alexander Walker, Sex in the Movies (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 244–249. 32. Bordo, The Male Body, 117. 33. Walker, Sex in the Movies, 250; Bordo, The Male Body, 119. The Intimacy of Strangers The Difficulty of Closeness and the Ethics of Distance Eduardo Mendieta 1. Plato, Republic 360a–361a, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, Ind., and Cambridge, U.K.: Hackett, 2004), 38–39. 2. Ibid., 360c, at 38–39. 3. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, ‘‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article,’’ in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 136–142. See also George Myerson, Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone (Cambridge, U.K.: Icon Books, 2001). Although I agree with many points in Myerson’s little book, I think that the attempt to link Heidegger and Habermas in terms of their respective notions of communication and dialogue misconstrues the ways in which Habermas linked publicness and communication to democracy and accountability and Heidegger linked publicness to the inauthentic and deficient modes of human existence. 4. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 8. 5. See Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), especially chapter 3, ‘‘Humanism and Homelessness.’’ See also Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 276–297. 6. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 78. 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 103. 8. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 87 (emphasis in original). Notes to pages 102–115

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10. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195. Compare that with what Levinas says about the face in Ethics and Infinity, 87. 11. Hans Jonas, ‘‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,’’ in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 135–156 (originally published 1966). 12. Ibid., 142. 13. Ibid., 144–145. 14. Time and space are forms of human dwelling. They do not preexist human practices of measuring them. One of the most insightful books about the interrelationship between technology, ethos, and topos is James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999). 15. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 98. This quote comes from an article originally published in 1998 in the journal Society and Space, under the title ‘‘The Body as an Accumulation Strategy.’’ 16. The cell phone can be and has been used for disruptive and revolutionary means. Thus, during contemporary antiwar demonstrations, for example, many of the acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent disruption are coordinated by cell phone. The ‘‘black blocs’’ in San Francisco were highly effective and low tech, shutting down most of San Francisco for almost a week. Using bicycles and cell phones, protesters would block an intersection and then outrun and anticipate the police by minutes. See Jeffrey Paris, ‘‘The Black Bloc’s Ungovernable Protest,’’ Peace Review 15, no. 3 (2003): 317–322. At many of these demonstrations, police have confiscated cell phones, designating them ‘‘weapons.’’ 17. One of the best analyses of the relationship between capitalism and temporality, or the workday, remains E. P. Thompson, ‘‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,’’ in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: New Press, 1991), 352–403. On the effects of technology on temporality, and its relationship to capitalist accumulation, see David Harvey, ‘‘The Experience of Space and Time,’’ part 3 of The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 201–324. 18. See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version,’’ in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 251–283. 19. See Ju¨rgen Habermas, ‘‘Intermediate Reflections: System and Lifeworld,’’ part 6 of The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 113–197. 20. See Tom Hayden, ed., The Zapatista Reader (New York: Nation Books, 2001). 21. See Divorce Wizards, ‘‘Divorce Statistics,’’ http://www.divorcewizards .com/divorcestats_porn.html (accessed January 13, 2007). 22. For the statistic, see Susan Dwyer’s wonderful article ‘‘Enter Here—At Your Own Risk: The Moral Dangers of Cyberporn,’’ in The Impact of the Internet 220

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on Our Moral Lives, ed. Robert J. Cavalier (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2005), 69. For the challenge of Rich’s statistics, see Emmanuel Richard, ‘‘The Naked Untruth,’’ AlterNet, May 23, 2002, http://www.alternet.org/story/13212/. 23. Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: ‘‘Throwing Like a Girl’’ and Other Essays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 75–96. 24. See Michael Uebel, ‘‘Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn,’’ Theory and Event 3, no. 4 (2000), http://muse.jhu.edu/ journals/theory_and_event/ v003/3.4uebel.html. 25. See note 22 above. 26. Dwyer, ‘‘Enter Here—At Your Own Risk,’’ 83. 27. Uebel, ‘‘Toward a Symptomatology of Cyberporn,’’ 26. 28. Ibid., 31. 29. Ryan Singel, ‘‘Internet Porn: Worse than Crack?’’ Wired, November 19, 2004, http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65772,00.html. 30. Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (New York: Times Books, 2005). 31. Ibid., 215. 32. I want to distinguish between the kind of anonymity that is being exploited by cyberporn users and the kind of anonymity that is fundamental to the public life of democracies. Public anonymity is an achievement of the quest for political justice; without it, democracies could not be vibrant, and citizens would not risk transformative actions. Furthermore, we must not conflate anonymity with privacy; whereas the former is a positive freedom, the latter is a negative freedom. We should be able to engage in a series of public acts without having to reveal our identities, which could be used against us (economically, politically, socially). Privacy, however, is a negative freedom that specifies that state apparatuses cannot intervene in our lives without due process and without warrants. The private sphere is a haven from the state and other citizens. Anonymity allows us to move across social space as if invisible, at least in relation to the state. This freedom should also be protected. In short, I am urging that we not conflate the ethical and the political or the quest for the moral life and the quest for political justice. On these topics, I have benefited greatly from Chad Kautzer’s important piece ‘‘Utilitarian Topographies of the Public: State Surveillance and the Case for Public Anonymity,’’ in Lived Topographies and their Mediational Forces, ed. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Press, 2005), 163–182. 33. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 78. 34. See Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 160. 35. Ibid., 165 (quoting Balzac). 36. Ibid., 157–172. 37. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 274–280 (section 2.3.7). 38. Ibid., 277. Notes to pages 122–126

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39. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 27. 40. Two of the most sustained and insightful analyses on this question are Edith Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 41. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 86. Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility Robert Bernasconi 1. See, for example, Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation, and Ethical Responsibility,’’ in ‘‘Eco-Ethica et Globalisatio,’’ ed. Tomonobu Imamichi, Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae 20 (2003): 67–80. 2. On the idea of responsibility as an ethical invention, see Tomonobu Imamichi, ‘‘The Concept of an Eco-Ethics and the Development of Moral Thought,’’ in Introduction to Eco-Ethics (Tokyo: Centre international pour l’e´tude compare´e de philosophie et d’esthe´tique, 2003), 3. 3. Plato, Laws, bk. 9, 860d–869e, trans. R. G. Bury (London: William Heinemann, 1926), 224–253; and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 3, chap. 1, trans. H. Rackham, (London: William Heinemann, 1957), 116–129. See also Arthur W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 4. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 65. 5. I have told part of that story in ‘‘The Infinite Task of Confession—A Contribution to the History of Ethics,’’ in ‘‘Eco-Ethica et Communicatio,’’ ed. Tomonobu Imamichi, Acta Institutionis Philosophiae et Aestheticae 6 (1988): 75–92. 6. My survey of the history of the term is indebted to three short but important studies: Richard McKeon, ‘‘The Development and Significance of the Concept of Responsibility,’’ Revue internationale de philosophie 11 (1957): 3–32; Tomonobu Imamichi, Betrachtungen u¨ber das Eine (Tokyo: Institut der Aesthetik, 1968), 31; and Jacques Henriot, ‘‘Note sur la date et le sense de l’apparition du mot ‘responsabilite´,’ ’’ Archives de philosophie du droit 22 (1977): 45–62. I have also found, among more recent studies, the work of Kurt Bayertz to be especially helpful, although I am surprised by his continuing neglect of Sartre and Levinas. See Kurt Bayertz, ‘‘Eine Kurze Geschichte der Herkunft der Verantwortung,’’ Verantwortung: Prinzip oder Problem? ed. Kurt Bayertz (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995), 3–71. 7. See Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wo¨rterbuch, vol. 25 (Leipzig, Germany: Hirzel, 1956), 80. 8. Wilhelm Traugott Krug, Allgemeines Handwo¨rterbuch der philosophischen Wissenschaften, vol. 5 (Leipzig, Germany: Brodhaus, 1829), 247. McKeon is in 222

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error when he locates this entry in the 1827 edition, see McKeon, ‘‘The Development and Significance,’’ 9n. 9. John Locke, ‘‘Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money,’’ in Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 234. 10. Henriot, ‘‘Note sur la date,’’ 60. 11. Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 423–424. The article was at one time attributed to Alexander Hamilton. 12. Ibid., 476. 13. Benjamin Constant, ‘‘De la responsabilite´ des ministres,’’ in Oeuvres comple`tes, vol. 9, Principes de politique et autres ´ecrits (juin 1814–juillet 1815), ed. Oliver Devaux and Kurt Kloocke, (Tu¨bingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 2001), bk. 1, 439–496. The essay was immediately translated into English as ‘‘The Responsibility of Ministers’’ and appeared in the same year in The Pamphleteer 5, no. 10 (1815): 299–329 (the page numbers 315–329 are repeated). Constant took up some of the same issues, sometimes in the same language, in Principles of Politics, but it is clear that ‘‘De la responsabilite´ des ministres’’ was the definitive treatment. See Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables a` tous les gouvernements in Principes de politque et autre ´ecrits, bk. 2, 753–780. 14. See, for example, Constant, ‘‘De la responsabilite´ des ministres,’’ 442 (‘‘The Responsibility of the Ministers,’’ 302). 15. Ibid., 445–446 (304). 16. Ibid., 441 (302). 17. Ibid., 460–461 (315–316). 18. Ibid., 442 (302). 19. Ibid., 461 (316). 20. Ibid., 441 (301). 21. The entire fourth part of the six-part constitution was devoted to the responsibility of the ministers. ‘‘Acte additional aux constitutions de l’empire du 22 avril 1815,’’ in Les constitutions de la France depuis 1789, ed. Jacques Godechot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 236–237. 22. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen u¨ber Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, Vorlesungen 1 (Hamburg, Germany: Felix Meiner, 1983), 208, translated by Michael Stewart and Peter Hodgson as Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 257–258; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke 7 (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkump, 1978), 454–455, translated by H. B. Nisbet as Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 326–327. 23. There is nevertheless some slight indication from Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history that he recognized this aspect of the new idea of responsibility. Whereas George Staunton in his account of China had seen fit to ridicule the practice whereby the mandarins were held responsible for events beyond their control, Hegel, notwithstanding his generally condescending attitude toward the Notes to pages 133 –135

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Chinese, converted this evidence into a mere statement of fact, thereby suggesting that he recognized that such an arrangement belonged to the logic of responsibility. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China, 2nd ed. (London: W. Bulmer, 1798), 299–300. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen u¨ber die Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke 12 (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1970), 160, translated by J. Sibree as The Philosophy of History, (New York: Dover, 1956), 126. 24. Constant, ‘‘De la responsabilite´ des ministres,’’ 448 (‘‘The Responsibility of the Ministers,’’ 306–307). 25. Ibid., 452–453 (310–311). 26. Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: John W. Parker 1859), 564. 27. John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, ed. J. M. Robson, Collected Works 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 454. 28. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 4. 29. Max Weber, ‘‘Politik als Beruf,’’ in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tu¨bingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1988), 551–552, translated by Peter Lassiman and Ronald Spiers as ‘‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’’ in Political Writings (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 359–360. 30. Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, L’ide´e de responsabilite´ (Paris: Hachette, 1884), 27. 31. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Sa¨mtliche Werke 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 293. 32. Jacques Derrida, Donner la mort, in L’e´thique du don, ed. Jean-Michel Rabate´ and Michael Wetzel (Paris: Me´tailie´-Transition, 1992), 13, translated by David Wills as The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 4. Derrida references Jan Patocka’s Essais he´re´tiques, but the claim is Derrida’s not Patocka’s. 33. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’eˆtre et le ne´ant (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 516, translated by Hazel Barnes as Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1957), 441. 34. Jules Romains, Les hommes de bonne volonte´, vol. 16, Verdun (Paris: Flammarion, 1938), 220, translated by Gerard Hopkins as Verdun: The Prelude, the Battle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 443. 35. Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnets de la droˆle de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 198, translated by Quintin Hoare as War Diaries (London: Verso, 1984), 16. 36. ‘‘Kein Volk erlitt je Unrecht, sondern was er erlitt, hat es verdient.’’ Hegel, Vorlesungen u¨ber Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft, 257 (Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science, 307). 37. Sartre, L’eˆtre et le ne´ant, 515 (Being and Nothingness, 439). 38. Ibid., 565 (485). 39. Jean-Paul Sartre, Cahiers pour une morale (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 128, translated by David Pellauer as Notebooks for an Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 121. 224

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40. Sartre, L’eˆtre et le ne´ant, 639 (Being and Nothingness, 553). 41. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946), 83–84, translated by Philip Mairet as Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen, 1968), 52. 42. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguite´ (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 125, translated by Bernard Frechtman as The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 1976), 86–87. 43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phe´nome´nologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 512, translated by Colin Smith as Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1972), 448–449. 44. Jean-Paul Sartre, Re´flexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 109, translated by George J. Becker as Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1976), 90. 45. Jean-Paul Sartre, Ve´rite´ et existence (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 90, translated by Adrian van den Hoven as Truth and Existence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 46. 46. Sartre, L’eˆtre et le ne´ant, 508 (Being and Nothingness, 433). 47. Ibid., 638–642 (553–556). 48. There is a one-sided (Levinasian) study of this issue by Ste´phane Habib, La responsabilite´ chez Sartre et Levinas (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). 49. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-a`-l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 15, translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshaw as Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3. 50. Emmanuel Levinas, Totalite´ et infini (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 175, translated by Alphonso Lingis as Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 201. 51. Ibid., 222 (244). 52. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 43, translated by John O’Neill as Humanism and Terror (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 40. 53. Ibid., 46–47 (43). 54. Ibid., 180 (167). 55. Ibid., 189 (175). 56. Levinas, Totalite´ et infini, 217–225 (Totality and Infinity, 240–247). 57. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbu¨rgerlicher Absicht,’’ in Werke, vol. 7 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1968), 30–31, translated by M. B. Nisbet as ‘‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,’’ in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53. 58. Emmanuel Levinas, E´thique et infini (Paris: Fayard, 1982), 95–96, translated by Richard Cohen as Ethics and Infinity (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 90. 59. Levinas, Totalite´ et infini, 223–224 (Totality and Infinity, 246). Notes to pages 139–143

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60. Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of Ethics and Politics,’’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, no.1 (1999): 76–87. 61. Levinas, Totalite´ et infini, 147 (Totality and Infinity, 172). See also Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘Strangers and Slaves in the Land of Egypt: Levinas and the Politics of Otherness,’’ in Difficult Justice, ed. Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 246–261. 62. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), 1:339. 63. Levinas, Totalite´ et infini, 100 (Totality and Infinity, 103). 64. Ibid., 248 (271). 65. Ibid., 279–280 (303). 66. Levinas’s break with the Kantian ‘‘ought implies can’’ in a responsibility for the future might suggest parallels with the responsibility-ethics of Hans Jonas. However, the parallel should not be pushed too far. Jonas, in arriving at his ‘‘you ought because you act,’’ understands responsibility as a function of power and knowledge. It thus could remain from a Levinasian perspective situated at the level of the subject. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 123, 128. However, to show this in detail would lead me into Levinas’s idea of substitution, which goes beyond the scope of this essay. 67. The sense in which Levinasian responsibility is without paternalism is more complicated than this formulation suggests, because of Levinas’s discussion of paternity. However, I defer treatment of this concern for another occasion. 68. See, for example, Paul Ricoeur, Le Juste 1 (Paris: E´ditions Esprit, 1995), 66–67, translated by David Pellauer as The Just (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 32. 69. Emmanuel Levinas, De Dieu qui vient a` l’ide´e (Paris: J. Vrin 1986), 32, translated by Bettina Bergo as Of God Who Comes to Mind (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 13. See also Emmanuel Levinas, L’au-dela` du verset, (Paris: E´ditions du Minuit, 1982), 105–106, translated by Gary D. Mole as Beyond the Verse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 85. 70. See Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘ ‘Only the Persecuted . . .’: Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Persecuted,’’ in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77–86. 71. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘Secularisation et faim,’’ in Herme´neutique de la se´cularisation, ed. Enrico Castelli (Paris: Aubier, 1976), 101–109, translated by Bettina Bergo as ‘‘Secularization and Hunger,’’ Graduate Faculty Philosophical Journal 20, no. 2–vol. 21, no. 1 (1998): 3–12. See also Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘Globalisierung und Hunger’’ in Im Angesicht der Anderen, eds. Pascal Delhom and Alfred Hirsch (Zurich, Switzerland: Diaphenes, 2005), 115–129. That essay is a particularly important guide to the last paragraph of my current essay. 72. Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-a`-l’autre, 638–643 (Entre nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, 553–556). 226

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Racism and Responsibility Ladelle McWhorter 1. For some of these statistics on black Americans, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 2. U.S. Census statistics on poverty can be found at http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/ poverty.html. These data show that the percentage of white individuals living in poverty in the United States in 2001 was 7.8 percent, a figure that is up slightly from the early 1970s. The percentage of black individuals living in poverty in 2001 was 22.7 percent, down from 31.4 percent in 1973. The percentage of Asian and Pacific Islanders living in poverty in 2001 was 10.2 percent, down from 16.1 percent in 1987, the earliest year for which data are shown. For some information on housing disparity, see the articles in Robert D. Bullard, J. Eugene Grisby, and Charles Lee, eds., Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Afro-American Studies, 1994). For information on and discussion of the disparity in wealth between blacks and whites, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995), 50–52. Oliver and Shapiro speak of the ‘‘sedimentation of inequality,’’ a historical situation in which generation after generation of whites accumulated wealth when blacks were denied access to jobs and loans that would have allowed heritable accumulation. The result is that many whites begin life with an economic advantage that most blacks lack, even if all else is equal. 2. Not only degeneration theory and its relatives but even the very idea of biological racial inferiority has virtually disappeared from the public landscape. Numerous sociological studies support this claim. See, for example, Howard Schuman, Charlotte Steeh, and Lawrence Bobo, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). 3. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, Mass.: AddisonWesley, 1954), 9. 4. William J. Wilson, Power, Racism, and Privilege: Race Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspective (New York: Free Press, 1973), 32. 5. There is nothing in these definitions that precludes nonwhites from being racist, either toward whites or toward peoples of color, including their own racial group. This point is made explicit in Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge,1994), 72. 6. Some of Lawrence Bobo’s work is an important exception to this claim. See Lawrence Bobo and James R. Kluegel, ‘‘Status, Ideology, and Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Beliefs and Attitudes: Progress and Stagnation,’’ in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, ed. Steven A. Tuch and Jack K. Martin (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997), 93–120. Charles Mills also offers a different analysis, proposing to understand racial disparities as a result of white supremacy—a political and economic structure—rather than as a result of racism. Mills Notes to pages 147–149

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writes, ‘‘The idea of white supremacy is intended, in part, to capture the crucial reality that the normal workings of the social system continue to disadvantage blacks in large measure independently of any racist feeling.’’ See Charles W. Mills, ‘‘Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness,’’ in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 32. 7. One way in which they were flawed was that earlier studies had typically used categorical statements and asked for a yes or no response, whereas studies since the early 1990s have typically used bipolar scales that probably allow more nuanced stereotypical thinking to manifest itself. See Lawrence Bobo, James R. Kluegel, and Ryan A. Smith, ‘‘Laissez Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,’’ in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s (see note 6), 30. 8. As sociologist Joleen Kirschenman has noted, the existence of racial discrimination in employment is usually arrived at indirectly. Researchers control data for education and experience and then assume that any remaining disparities between employment of racial groups is a result of discrimination. See Joleen Kirschenman, ‘‘African-American Employers’ Attitudes toward AfricanAmerican Workers,’’ In Racial Attitudes in the 1990s (see note 6), 208. Much of Kirschman’s own work is an effort to substantiate this claim directly. 9. Feagin and Vera note that many of their research subjects realized that whites start out ahead of the game and, unless they are hampered in some way by affirmative action or other programs to raise the levels of nonwhite achievement, they will continue to be ahead of the game throughout life. A number of subjects expressed some regret that they would not, in fact, be able to hold onto their ‘‘lead’’ in the wake of antiracist political and economic programs in the 1980s and 1990s. See Joe R. Feagin and Hernan Vera, White Racism (New York: Routledge, 1995), chap. 7. 10. Ibid., 144. 11. Whites are not the only ones who make such assertions. See John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Perennial, 2000); the assertions themselves are not necessarily racist. What is clearly racist is the creation of stereotypes and the assumption that all or most individuals fit those stereotypes. 12. Bobo and Kluegel, ‘‘Status, Ideology, and Dimensions of Whites’ Racial Beliefs and Attitudes.’’ 13. This was the year researchers began to note a dramatic decline in the number of whites who expressed belief in the proposition that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites as a race. This change in the general population was noted about five years after Ashley Montagu gave his famous talk at the American Anthropological Association meetings denouncing the very concept of race as a social scientific fiction. See Ashley Montagu, ‘‘The Concept of Race in the Human Species in the Light of Genetics,’’ in The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2000), 100–107 (this essay was originally published in 1941). 228

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14. Actually, Feagin and Vera had observed the same phenomenon. See Feagin and Vera, White Racism, 160. 15. Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 28. 16. Ibid., 8. 17. For an overview of the rise of whiteness studies, see David W. Stowe, ‘‘Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies,’’ Lingua Franca, September/ October, 1996, 68–77 and Alastair Bonnett, ‘‘ ‘White Studies’: The Problems and Projects of a New Research Agenda,’’ Theory, Culture & Society 13, no. 2 (1996): 145–55. Bonnett actually dubs the subfield ‘‘white studies,’’ but he is chronicling the same phenomenon, albeit with slightly more cynicism. 18. See Lisa Heldke and Peg O’Connor, eds., Oppression, Privilege, and Resistance: Theoretical Perspectives on Racism, Sexism, and Heterosexism (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004), 299. 19. Peggy McIntosh, ‘‘White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies’’ (Wellesley College Center for Research on Women Working Paper No. 189, Wellesley, Mass, 1988), 1. 20. Ibid., 5, 9. 21. Ibid., 12. 22. Naomi Zack and Lewis Gordon are exceptions in that they both criticize use of the term sharply. See Naomi Zack, ‘‘White Ideas,’’ in Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections, ed. Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 80–81 and Lewis Gordon, ‘‘Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness,’’ in What White Looks Like (see note 6), 174–177. Heldke and O’Connor are the only theorists I have come across who make any attempt to justify their positive disposition toward and use of the term. See Heldke and O’Connor, Oppression, Privilege, and Resistance, 299. 23. This does vary somewhat by age and geographical region, however, with older whites in the Southern United States much more likely to understand their race as part of their core identity. There is some evidence that whites in countries such as South Africa, where segregation is a relatively recent experience, also have a deep awareness of themselves as fundamentally racial subjects. See Melissa Steyn, ‘‘White Identity in Context: A Personal Narrative,’’ in Whiteness: The Communication of Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith (London: Sage, 1999), 264. 24. Laurie Fuller, ‘‘ ‘Whitey’ and ‘Dyke’: Constructions of Identities in the Classroom,’’ in Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (see note 22), 70. 25. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6; see also Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall, ‘‘Introduction: Reflections on Whiteness,’’ in Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections (see note 22), 3. 26. McIntosh, ‘‘White Privilege and Male Privilege,’’ 5. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Critics have at times pointed out that not all white people have these ‘‘privileges’’ either. Respectful treatment, implicit trust, and political tolerance Notes to pages 151–153

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may well depend on the perceived social class of the individual in question, as well as on his or her race. Many of us white people who look or sound working class or poor or transgendered are often tailed in malls and discounted as citizens in public debate. Many of us also confront subtle and blatant discrimination in housing and use of public facilities and services as well, despite McIntosh’s listing such things as ‘‘white privileges.’’ 29. See Stowe, ‘‘Uncolored People,’’ 77. 30. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds., Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 10. 31. Ibid., 288. For a careful reading and critique of the ‘‘race traitor’’ position, see John H. McClendon III, ‘‘On the Nature of Whiteness and the Ontology of Race: Toward a Dialectical Materialist Analysis,’’ in What White Looks Like (see note 6), 218–224. 32. A number of studies through the 1980s showed that minorities are far more likely to live in highly polluted areas than whites are. See Karl Grossman, ‘‘Environmental Racism,’’ in The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book, 3rd ed., ed. Donald VanDeVeer and Christine Pierce (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/ Thomson, 2003), 550. 33. My position here is substantially the same as that put forth by Lewis Gordon. See Gordon, ‘‘Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness,’’ 175. 34. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 63. 35. Michel Foucault, ‘‘Society Must Be Defended’’: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), chaps. 3 and 5. 36. Ibid., chaps. 6, 7, and 8. 37. Ibid., 60. 38. Ibid., 60. 39. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London and New York, Verso, 1997), 122. 40. See also Theodore Allen, ‘‘ ‘. . . They Would Have Destroyed Me’: Slavery and the Origins of Racism,’’ Radical America 9 (May–June 1975): 41–63, especially page 44. 41. There is evidence that colonial laborers were well aware of this economic fact too. Georgia was founded in 1732 with the stated principle that there would be no chattel slavery there. But planters saw the prosperity of slave owners in South Carolina and began agitating for the right to emulate them. In this context Allen quotes a Savannah citizen claiming that free laborers would be impoverished by repeal of Georgia’s prohibition on slavery. See Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 252–253. 42. Ibid., 251. 43. Ibid. (internal citations omitted). 44. The most contentious was called ‘‘An Act directing the trial of Slaves, committing capital crimes; and for the more effectual punishing conspiracies and 230

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insurrections of them; and for the better government of Negroes, Mulattos, and Indians, bond or free.’’ See ibid., 41. 45. Quoted in ibid., 241. 46. Quoted in Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 127. 47. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 80. 48. Ibid. 49. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 184–193; Will Roscoe, The Zuni Man-Woman (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), esp. chap. 4. 50. Much has been written on this topic, but for a lengthy historical discussion, see George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), chaps. 8 and 9. 51. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 164–171. 52. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 81. 53. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 43. 54. For an analysis of this intersection of race and sex in biopolitical terms, see Ladelle McWhorter, ‘‘Race, Sex, and Biopower: A Foucauldian Genealogy,’’ Hypatia 19, no. 3 (2004): 38–62. 55. An example of this is Phyl Newbeck’s account of the relationships across races in Caroline County, Virginia, in her book on Loving v. Virginia. See Phyl Newbeck, Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Marriage Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). Whiteness as Family Race, Class, and Responsibility Shannon Sullivan 1. Noel Ignatiev, ‘‘Abolitionism and the White Studies Racket,’’ Race Traitor (1999) 10: 3–7; David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (New York: Verso, 1994). 2. Lucius Outlaw, ‘‘Rehabilitate Racial Whiteness?’’ in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004). 3. Thanks to Cindy Willett for raising questions about collective responsibility that helped me see this point. 4. Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 5. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (New York: Routledge, 1999). Notes to pages 158 –164

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6. Ibid., 128. 7. Ibid. 8. Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 2000), 209. 9. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 91. 10. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 19, 20. 11. Ibid., 72, 21. 12. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press, 1962), 11. 13. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 84. 14. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness. 15. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, ‘‘Liberty and Slavery; or, Slavery in the Light of Moral and Political Philosophy,’’ in Cotton Is King, and Pro-slavery Arguments Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on this Important Subject (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 272. 16. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 124. 17. Thanks to Phillip McReynolds for this observation. 18. Anna Stubblefield, Ethics along the Color Line (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 158. 19. Ibid., 166. 20. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 126. Nor need kinship be tied to a heterosexual imperative, which is Butler’s concern. 21. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 196. 22. Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, 109. 23. Stubblefield, Ethics along the Color Line, 175. 24. Ibid., 176. 25. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 164–65. 26. Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Martin Stanton, trans. Martin Stanton (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1992), 35; see also Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 244. 27. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 244. 28. Ibid., 230. 29. John Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the Drives, 170. 30. Ibid., 177; see also ibid., 172; Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 101. 31. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 214. 32. Quoted in Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 407. 33. Ibid., 312. 34. Ibid., 676. 232

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35. Ibid., 3; Drew Gilpin Faust, Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 55. 36. Faust, Southern Stories, 98. 37. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, 312. 38. Ibid., 110, 112. 39. Ibid., 672. 40. Ibid., 109. 41. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society (New York: Burt Franklin, 1965), 33. 42. Fox-Genovese and Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class, 313. 43. Ibid., 62–63, 174. 44. Ibid., 173. 45. Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 168. 46. Faust, Southern Stories, 23. 47. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 29. 48. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks, eds., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001). 49. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 11; see also Cynthia Willett, The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). 50. Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 56. 51. Stubblefield, Ethics along the Color Line, 173. 52. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 25. 53. Ibid., 26, 28. 54. Ibid., 27. 55. Ibid., 26. 56. See ibid., 37. 57. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); see also Charles Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). 58. Linda Martı´n Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 222–223. 59. Noel Ignatiev raises this concern about white studies in general in Ignatiev, ‘‘Abolitionism and the White Studies Racket,’’ 5. 60. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 112. Narrating Pain The Ethics of Catharsis Richard Kearney 1. Aristotle, Poetics 111a, trans. John Warrington, Everyman Library Translation (London: Dent, 1963), 12–13. It is important to understand catharsis not Notes to pages 172–181

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according to the Victorian model of a ‘‘purging,’’ ‘‘venting,’’ or ‘‘voiding’’ of the emotions—as if they were toxins to be removed from the psyche—but rather as a process of refining, distilling, integrating, and transfiguring the emotions or affects that allows pity to mutate into compassion and fear into genuine detachment. On this, see Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990). 2. For more on the cathartic role of narrative in Joyce and Irish literature, see Richard Kearney, On Stories (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), part 2, and Richard Kearney, ‘‘Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust,’’ in Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge, ed. Peter Gratton and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 183–208. For a more expanded account of the narrative character of catharsis, as both a poetical and an ethical power, see the conclusion to Kearney, On Stories, 137–142. 3. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, ‘‘The Effectiveness of Symbols,’’ in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson (New York: Penguin, 1968), 186–204. He explains: ‘‘The sick woman believes in the myth. . . . The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman accepts these mythical beings. . . . What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman, calling upon myth, will reintegrate within a whole where everything is meaningful. Once the sick woman understands, however, she does more than resign herself; she gets well. But no such thing happens to our sick when the causes of their diseases have been explained to them in terms of secretions, germs or viruses. We shall perhaps be accused of paradox if we answer that the reason lies in the fact that microbes exist and monsters do not. And yet the relationship between germ and disease is external to the mind of the patient, for it is a cause-and-effect relationship; whereas the relationship between monster and disease is internal to his mind, whether conscious or unconscious. It is a relationship between symbol and thing symbolized, or, to use the terminology of linguists, between sign and meaning. The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression—at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible—which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected.’’ 4. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, ‘‘The Structural Study of Myth,’’ in Structural Anthropology (see note 3), 206–244. 5. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), quoted in Lisa Schnell, ‘‘Learning How to Tell: Narratives of Child Loss’’ (unpublished paper). 234

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6. Schnell, ‘‘Learning How to Tell.’’ See also further examples of therapeutic power of mythological sagas and fairy stories from Beowulf to J. R. R. Tolkien in Kearney, On Stories, 159–161. 7. See Jacques Derrida’s subtle and trenchant critique of a certain psychotherapeutic facility of mourning and catharsis in his On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 50–51. ‘‘I believe it necessary,’’ he writes, ‘‘to distinguish between forgiveness and this process of reconciliation, this restitution of a health or a ‘normality,’ as necessary and desirable as it would appear through amnesties, the ‘work of mourning’ etc. A finalized forgiveness is not forgiveness; it is only a political strategy or a psycho-therapeutic economy.’’ Ibid., 50. 8. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988). 9. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1972), 195. See my development of this theme in Kearney, ‘‘Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust.’’ 10. For a fuller development of these themes, see Kearney, On Stories, 17–31. 11. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 34–35. For a more detailed discussion of this and other related examples, see the section entitled ‘‘Release (Catharsis)’’ in Kearney, On Stories, 137–142. Coetzee’s point is that the empathic imagination extends not just to humans being treated brutally like animals but to animals being treated brutally as less than animals! When one thinks of poems like Ted Hughes’s ‘‘The Jaguar’’ or Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem on the caged leopard (not to mention popular stories like The Jungle Book!), one realizes how effectively the empathic powers of imagination can traverse divisions between species. For a further analysis of the crucial ethical role of empathic imagination, see Richard Kearney, ‘‘Narrative Imagination—The Ethical Challenge,’’ in Poetics of Imagining, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 241–257. 12. Neil Belton, The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, a Life against Cruelty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 88–89 (also cited in Kearney, On Stories, 139–140). 13. Ibid. Of course, the complex question of transference and countertransference can also arise here, especially in the therapeutic context, where the ‘‘good listener’’ may have to be prepared to be a recipient not just of pain and suffering but also of much projected hatred and negative transference on the part of the traumatized and abused victim. Here the analyst may even have to entertain the possibility of being reviled—for a time—as a stand-in for the evil Nazi. I am grateful to my Boston College colleague Vanessa Rumble for these critical reflections on what otherwise might appear to be an overly irenic view of the therapist as healing-purifying-redemptive listener. 14. Ibid. 15. See Richard Kearney, ‘‘Testifying to History: The Case of Schindler’’ and ‘‘The Paradox of Testimony’’ in On Stories, 41–77, and Richard Kearney, ‘‘The Immemorial: A Task of Narrative,’’ in Strangers, Gods and Monsters (London and Notes to pages 186 –191

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New York: Routledge, 2003), 179–190. See also Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘‘Final Solution’’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 16. See Belton, The Good Listener, 228–229. 17. Michael Hagopian, ‘‘Voices from the Lake,’’ Montreal Gazette, April 22, 2000, 10. 18. See Kearney, On Stories, 187 n. 15. 19. For a detailed critical discussion of Freud’s famous ‘‘Dora case’’ and the controversies surrounding recent court cases about long-term recovered memory, see Kearney, On Stories, 31–46. It may be useful here to distinguish between two different (if often complementary) notions of truth—that is, truth as conformity or correspondence, as in the standard Aristotelian-realist position, and truth as authenticity, according to a more Aristotelian-Heideggerian model. The latter, more evident in therapeutic narratives than strictly historical ones, admits of a sense of finitude, mortality, and ‘‘negativity,’’ as expressed in Heidegger’s notion of ale¯theia and the Freudian-Lacanian notion of symbolic castration, that is, acknowledging oneself as one is with all the sense of ‘‘lack’’ and ‘‘limit’’ that this acceptance of the ‘‘real’’ implies. Here, ‘‘fear’’ as a genuine recognition of distance, separation, and loss (of the lost object), resulting in an authentic ‘‘letting go,’’ may well play a key role—though here again, it needs to be moderated and tempered by the pathos of pity, lest it become too stoical and solipsistic for survival (a worry one might have for Heidegger’s ‘‘existential solipsism’’ of Dasein in chapter 6 of Being and Time). An authentic sense of truth may often involve an acceptance of the partiality, fragmentariness, and insufficiency of our narrative and in that sense the impossibility of any full or final cure. The cure would be precisely in the serenity (fear distilled and clarified to its essential truth) of the letting go of not only the lost object but also of one’s own imaginary illusions and fantasies about oneself as phallic or uncastrated subject. I am grateful to my Boston College colleague William Richardson for bringing this distinction between truth as conformity and truth as authenticity to my attention, especially as it translates a Heideggerian insight into an analytic-therapeutic context. On Deception Radical Evil and the Destruction of the Archive Peg Birmingham 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 9. 2. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Nightmare and Flight,’’ in Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994), 134. 3. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘On the Nature of Totalitarianism,’’ in Essays in Understanding (see note 2), 354. 4. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘The Seeds of a Fascist International,’’ in Essays in Understanding (see note 2), 146–147 5. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Approaches to the ‘German Problem,’ ’’ in Essays in Understanding (see note 2), 111. 236

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6. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 29. 7. Ibid., 31 (emphasis mine). 8. Ibid., 42. 9. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 20. 10. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Truth and Politics,’’ in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 257. 11. Ibid., 238. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 229. 14. Derrida, ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ 59. 15. Ibid., 61. 16. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978), 34. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. Ibid., 38. 19. Ibid., 39. 20. Ibid., 40. 21. Ibid., 46. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 64 (emphasis mine). 24. Ibid., 47–48. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 65. 27. Ibid., 67. 28. Ibid., 51. 29. Ibid., 89. 30. Ibid., 127. 31. Ibid., 131. 32. Ibid., 132. 33. Ibid., 153. 34. Derrida, Archive Fever, 90. 35. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),’’ in Without Alibi (see note 6), 113. 36. Ibid., 130. 37. Ibid., 131. 38. Ibid., 134. 39. Derrida, Archive Fever, 90. 40. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘Truth and Politics,’’ 238–239. 41. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 303. 42. Derrida, Archive Fever, 29. 43. Ibid., 94. Notes to pages 197–209

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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•

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid. Ibid., 12 Derrida, ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ 52.

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Contributors

Debra Bergoffen is professor of philosophy and affiliated with the women’s studies and cultural studies programs at George Mason University. She is the author of The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (SUNY Press, 1996) and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of numerous articles on Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre. She is currently working on a book on genocidal rape and human rights titled Between Rape and Justice: Toward a Politics of the Vulnerable Body. Robert Bernasconi is Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury European philosophy and on social and political philosophy. He is the author of The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Prometheus, 1989) and Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (Humanities Press, 1993). He has also written a number of essays and edited a number of books on race. Peg Birmingham is professor of philosophy at DePaul University. She specializes in social and political theory as well as feminist theory. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Indiana University Press, 2006), the coeditor of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Kok Pharos, 1995), the cotranslator of Dominique Janicaud’s The Powers of the Rational (Indiana 239

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University Pres, 1994), and the author of many articles on Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault in such journals as Research in Phenomenology, the Graduate Journal of Philosophy, and Hypatia. Simon Critchley is professor and chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of many books, most recently Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007). The Book of Dead Philosophers is forthcoming from Vintage. Gu¨nter Figal is professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he holds the Husserl and Heidegger Chair. He is also the past holder of the prestigious Cardinal Mercier Chair at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. He is the author of many books on the history of philosophy, including Martin Heidegger: Pha¨nomenologie der Freiheit (Athenaum, 1988), Nietzsche: Eine philosophische Einfu¨hrung (Reclam, 1999), Der Sinn des Verstehens (Reclam, 1996), and Gegensta¨ndlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie (Mohr Siebeck, 2006), and the coeditor of Hermeneutische Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten (Mohr Siebeck, 2000). His publications in English include For a Philosophy of Freedom and Strife: Politics, Aesthetics, Metaphysics (SUNY Press, 1998). Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a visiting professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris–Sorbonne and the University of Nice. He is the author of over twenty books on European philosophy and literature and has edited or coedited fifteen more. He was formerly a member of the Arts Council of Ireland and the Higher Education Authority of Ireland and chairman of the Irish School of Film at University College Dublin. His most recent work in philosophy is a trilogy entitled Philosophy at the Limit, composed of On Stories (Routledge, 2002), The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (Routledge, 2003). Ladelle McWhorter holds the James Thomas Professorship in Philosophy and also is professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Indiana University Press, 1999) and more than two dozen articles on Michel Foucault, Georges Bataille, Luce Irigaray, and race theory. Her new book on Foucault and 240

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racism is currently in press with Indiana University Press and will be available in early 2009. Eduardo Mendieta is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at Stony Brook University. He is also the executive editor of Radical Philosophy Review. He has most recently published a book of interviews with Angela Y. Davis entitled Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (Seven Stories Press, 2005), as well as a book of interviews with Richard Rorty entitled Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself (Stanford University Press, 2005). He currently is at work on a book on war and philosophy. Dennis J. Schmidt is Liberal Arts Research Professor of philosophy, comparative literature, and German and director of special projects of the Institute for Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. He has visiting appointments at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and the University of Rome (‘‘La Sapienza’’), Italy. He is the author of The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy (MIT Press, 1988), On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of the Word, Freedom, and History (SUNY Press, 2005). He is the translator of Ernst Bloch’s Natural Law and Human Dignity (MIT Press, 1986), editor of Hermeneutics and the Poetic Motion (Center for Research in Translation, 1990), and coeditor, with Gu¨nter Figal, of Hermeneutische Wege: Hans-Georg Gadamer zum Hundertsten (Mohr Siebeck, 2000). He is also the editor of over a hundred books in the SUNY Press Series in Continental Philosophy. Charles E. Scott is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Ethics at Vanderbilt University. His most recent books are The Lives of Things (Indiana University Press, 2002) and Living with Indifference (Indiana University Press, 2007). Shannon Sullivan is head of the Philosophy Department and professor of philosophy, women’s studies, and African and African American studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Indiana University Press, 2001) and Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Indiana University Press, 2006). She is the coeditor, with Nancy Tuana, of Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (SUNY Press, Contributors

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2007) and a special issue of Hypatia titled ‘‘Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance’’ (Summer 2006). Cynthia Willett is professor of philosophy at Emory University. Her most recent book is Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom (Indiana University Press, 2008). She is the editor of Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (Blackwell, 1998) and the author of The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (Routledge, 1995). She is currently working on a book on transnational ethics.

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Index

abstract description, 26 accountability, 5 Aristotle, 132 Hegel, 135 ministers, 135 philosophers and, 132 responsibility and, 131–32 active nihilism, 53 activity, ethical experience as, 56 Adam’s Rib, 95 addiction, 60 Adso of Melk, 18–19 adversaries, 65 ageless myth, 184 aggression Lacan, 74 Sartre, 74 agon, 90 The Philadelphia Story, 107 agreement, life-forms, 29 aimance, Derrida, 93 al-Qaeda, 54 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 177 Allport, Gordon, 148–49 aloneness in public places, 117 America colonial

labor force, 156 race and, 155 as innocent victim in 9/11 attacks, 79 message of redemption post 9/11, 76 as nation of innocence after 9/11 attacks, 74 American civil-rights movement, 80 American innocence, myth of, 79 American psyche, myth of, 76 Amnesty International, 190 analyst, threat of the Other and, 74 Anderson, Pamela, 122 Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre), 176 aperion, 202 applied ethics, 35 Heidegger and, 35–36 approval demands for, 57 equiprimordiality, 58 ethical experience and, 56–57 order, 58 Archive Fever, 205–9 Arendt, Hannah, 7, 195–200, 205 arete, 20, 91 argument, best-grounded, 28 Aristotelian answer to the Socratic question, ethics as, 28 243

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Aristotle accountability, 132 cooperative bonds, 88 empathy, 181 fear, 182 friendship, 91 Gadamer and, 37 human nature, and life-forms, 31 katharsis, 181, 191 muthos-mimesis, 181, 183 Nicomachean Ethics, 37 philosophical ethics and, 28–29 Poetics, 181 virtues, presence, 31 wit, inferior mode of friendship and, 98 Armenian genocide, 192–93 Arnold, Matthew, 104 ashes in myth, 184 assimilation of Native Americans, 160 Augustine, Saint, 132 Awful Truth, The, 95, 98 woman educating man, 101 Badiou, Alain, 4, 61–64 Balzac, Honore´ de, 125 Bamber, Helen, 190, 192 Barber, Benjamin, founders’ creation of city on a hill, 76 beautiful soul, morality and, 112 Beauvoir, Simone de, 75, 140 Becket, Samuel, 62 being, questioning, 32 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 74 Bergoffen, Debra B., 4 Bernasconi, Robert, 5, 131 Bernstein, Jay, 55 best-grounded argument, 28 Bettelheim, Bruno, 184 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 69 Big Lebowski, The, 109 bin Laden, Osama, 54, 73, 83 Birmingham, Peg, 7, 195 Black Reconstruction, 178 Blanchot, Maurice, 61, 69 Bluest Eye, The, 165 Bobo, Lawrence, 150 bodies as appendages of machines, Marx, 117–18 244

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 151 Book of Invasions, 187 ‘‘Breasted Existence: The Look and the Feeling,’’ 122 Brecht, Bertolt, 182 Bringing Up Baby, 95, 99, 101 brothers, relationship between, 91 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 160 Bush, George W., similarities to Osama bin Laden, 54 capitalism, slavery and, 173–74 Caruth, Cathy, 185 catharsis, 181 Armenian genocide, 192–93 cathartic witness, 192 expression, 182 genocide and, 188 imagination and, 191 myths and, 183 current thought, 184 narration and, 183 Shakespeare, 182 storytelling and, 187 Yeats, 182 Cavell, Stanley, 90 The Awful Truth, marriage as daily festival of contests, 98 childhood theme in films, 100 contract theory and, 109 conversation, marriage and, 97 democracy, spirited relationship between equals, 95 female characters, submissive poses of bondage, 98 feminist critics, 97 friendships in films, 94 heroine, symbolic death and rebirth, 101 incest, 101 Nietzschean themes in films, 98 pair as alike as brother as sister, 99–100 paternal authority, 102 perfectionist themes, 105–6 The Philadelphia Story, 96 conversation in, 96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, 106

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Pursuits of Happiness, 93 self-knowledge of couple, 104 woman educating man, 101 cell phones, 5, 117–20 chattel servitude, 156 child rearing, marriage and, 96 Christ, 65–66 Christianity, Løgstrup, Knud Ejler, 64, 66 Christ’s resurrection, demand and, 58 City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia), 91 civil rights, Virginia General Assembly, free blacks, 158 closeness, ethics, 113 Coetzee, J. M., The Lives of Animals, 189–91 colonial America labor force, 156 race and, 155 color-blind liberalism, 151 comic ironists, democracy and, 108 comic play, friendship and, 98 comic virtues, 98 companion-style marriage, 107 conduct life-forms, 29 play space, 29 possibilities, withdrawal, 32 conflict, 4 life-forms, 29 conscience, sting of bad conscience, 60 Constant, Benjamin, 134 contract theory, 109 conversation friendship and, Aristotle, 98 marriage and, 97 The Philadelphia Story, 96 Conway, Dan, 88 coyote in myth, 184 creative compensation, child loss and, 186 Critchley, Simon, 3 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 37 Cukor, George, 94 Culture and Anarchy, 104 curvature of intersubjective space, 61, 69 cyberporn, 121–124 Da-sein, 43 Heidegger, 40

de-auratized space, 120 death, memory and, 45 deception Arendt, 195, 197 radical deception, 7 declaring war, rules of, 82 Deconstruction and Pragmatism, 92 deconstructive democrats, 89 demand Christ’s, 65 equiprimordiality, 58 ethical experience and, 56–57, 61 Geldof, 58 God, Abraham’s response, 67 to be godlike, 67 good and, 58–59 founding of the self, 59 Levinas, 61, 70 Løgstrup, 61, 67 order, 58 relation to other person, 66 self and, 59 situated, 62 demands, Christ, humans and, 66 demands for approval, 57 democracy agon, 90 comic ironist and, 108 Derrida, as prayer, 92 egalitarianism between men and women, 93 friendship between brothers and, 91 happiness in a marriage and, 96 indefinitely perfectible, 92 irony, 90 Jeffersonian, 89–90 liberal democracy, 54 marriage and, 95 pluralistic democratic order, 89 secular liberal democracy, 54 democracy theory, comic and, 90 democratic imperialism, 90 democrats, deconstructive, 89 Derrida, Jacques aimance, 93 aperion, 202 archive, destruction, 209–11 Archive Fever, 195, 205–9 Index

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democracy indefinitely perfectible, 92 as prayer, 92 fiction, 201, 203 hallucination and, 201–2 friendless stranger, 92 friendship, women and, 91 hallucination, 201–2 history absolute, 205 delay, 205 fiction and, 204 finite, 204 history as original repetition, 201 iterative reduction, 202 open history, 203 ‘‘History of the Lie,’’ 197 institutive history, 202 lie as radical evil, 197 literature, 203 memory and death, 45 Origin of Geometry, 201 original history, 202 origins, 201 The Politics of Friendship, 90 Descartes, Rene´, 68 desire, willpower and, 16 desire for goodness, 15–17 destabilizer, other as, 74 Dewey, John, 94 dialogue, speech as, 86 Diderot, Denis, 125 differences, life-forms, 29 dignity, 32, 33 Dinesen, Isak, 11 Disappointment, 52–53 dispositif, 154 ‘‘Divine Marquis,’’ 59 doctrine of the happy life, 41 domain of the ethical, 41 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 52 double belonging, 188 doxa, 198 droit de jouir, 59 Du Bois, W. E. B., 178 duty, Kant, 64 Dwyer, Susan, 122 Dylan, Bob, 83–84 246

Eco, Umberto, 11 Foucault’s Pendulum, 18 egalitarianism, men and women, 93 elemental listening, ethical reflection and, 40 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 177 empathy, Aristotle, 181 enemies, vulnerability and, 82 equiprimordiality, 58 equivalences, 89 Erfahrung, 56 Erlebnis, 56 Ethical Demand, The, (Løgstrup), 64 ethical experience, 51, as activity, 56 approval, 56–57 demand, 56–57 demand and, 61 Levinas, Emmanuel, 70 moral selfhood and, 55 structure, 56 subject, 59 trauma and, 70 ethical language, 70 ethical life, philosophy and, 1 ethical questioning, 35 ethical reflection elemental listening and, 40 possibilities of life and, 28 ethical subject, 59 ethical subjectivity, 60 ethics applied ethics, 35 Aristotelian answer to the Socratic question, 28 behavioral codes, 113 closeness and, 113 concreteness, 113 hermeneutics, 34 how one should live, 28 language proper to thinking about, 41 life-forms, clarification of, 30 meta-ethics, 55 versus morality, 113 nature of, 55 normative, 55 original ethics, 41–42 philosophical, 25

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philosophical ethics, 25 Aristotle and, 28–29 expectations, 25 orientation of life, 30 orienting power of, 26 philosophical insight, 34 possibilities of life and, 28 practical life, 34 public interest, 26 technoscientific revolution and, 26 political ethics, 55 as practical philosophy, 26 psychoanalytic, 77 self-sufficiency, 28 self-understanding of, 33 Sittlichkeit, 113 the will and, 132 worldhood, 114 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 62–64 ethics of intentions, 143 Ethics of Memory, 113 ethics of sources, 42 ethopoietic, hermeneutic work of memory, 47 ethos, 29 Heidegger, 40 eudaimonia, 64 European Buddhism, 52 events, Badiou, Alain, 64 existentialist, threat of the Other and, 74 experience, 27, 51 experience of being ethical, 4 face-to-face relation killing and, 115 Levinas, 114–15 Farquhar, Jennifer, 112 favorable character, good and, 12 Feagin, Joe, 150 fear, Aristotle, 182 fiction, 7 hallucination and, 201–2 history and, 204 fictional narratives, 186–87 fidelity, Badiou and, 61 Figal, Gu¨nter, 2 finitude, 33 solidarity and, 33

foreign policy, Bush administration, 89 foreigners, 65 forgiveness, Christ on, 66 Foucault, Michel, 6 biopower, 154 race, 154–55 Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco), 18 founders’ creation of city on a hill, 76 founding of self, demand of the good, 59 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 162 Frankenberg, Ruth, 152 Franz, Marie-Luise von, 184 free labor, 173 freedom, 32 de Beauvior, 140 Heidegger, 138 Kant on, 32 Levinas, 144 life-forms, 32 Sartre, 138, 139–40 Freud, Sigmund, 7 absence of mother, 185 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 69 memory and death, 45 friendless stranger, 92 friendship, 88 Aristotle, 91 comic play, 98 conversation and, Aristotle, 98 eros, 91 marriage as, 107 relationship between brothers, 90–91 revitalizing, remarriage comedies, 110 sexual tension, 91 women, 91 Derrida, 91 Fullinwider, Robert, 82, 83 future, responsibility and, 142 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 3, 28, 36–38 philosophical hermeneutics, original ethics and, 46 Garvey, John, 153 Geldof, Bob, 58 genocide, 7 catharsis and, 188 Genovese, Eugene, 162 Gesammelte Werke (Gadamer), 36 Index

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Glaucon, 112–13 globalization, responsibility and, 145–46 God, 66–68 God is dead, meaning of life and, 52 good demand and, 58–59 founding of the self, 59 favorable character, 12 meaning of, 12 moral differences, 14 self and, 58 self binding to, 55 sense of the quality of being good, 23 virtuous, 12 goodness, 11 desire for, 2, 15–16 disintegration and, 14 distraction and, 14 established orders of, 13–14 individuals and, 13 as intrinsic quality, 13 meaning, 12 moral systems, 14 moral virtues, 12 order and, 13 recognition and, 13 repetition in singularized movements of, 13 revenge and, 23–24 self-respect and, 15 sense of, 12 singularity, 13 as something discoverable, 14 spiritual maturation and, 15 translating, 16–17 violence and, 23 grace, Badiou, 63 grasping the ungraspable, 68 Grosholz, Emily, 88 guilt, 41, 60 guilty conscience, Nietzche, 60 Gyges of Lydia, 112 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 89, 113 hallucination, 201–2 Hamilton, Alexander, 134 happiness in a marriage, democracy and, 96 248

Harvey, David, 118 Hebraic conscience, 104, 106 heeding of the world, speech as, 32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich accountability, 135 Erfahrung, 56 Erlebnis, 56 ethics-politics, 75 memory and death, 45 oppression of the master–slave relationship, 74 responsibility, 135 subjectivity, intersubjective dialectic, 69 threat of the Other and, 74 hegemony, of technology, Heidegger on, 40 Heidegger, Martin, 2 applied ethics and, 35–36 Beaufret, Jean, 39 ‘‘Brief u¨ber den Humanismus,’’ 39 Da-sein, 40 Dasein is Mitsein, 69 Dasein’s worldhood, 114 ethos, 40 freedom, 138 hegemony of technology, 40 hermeneutics and, 36 Nietzsche and revenge, 20, 21 original ethics, 36 originality of ethics, 3 retrieval of Nietzsche, 22 tragedy of Sophocles, 39 Wood, David and, 21–22 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 45 Heraclitus, ethos anthropoi daimon, 43 hermeneutics ethics, 34 Gadamer, development of theory, 37–38 Heidegger and, 36 knowing and, 38 memory and, 46–47 as method, 36 practical philosophy, 37, 38 praxis, 38 Schmidt, Dennis J., 3 understanding, 38 heteroaffectivity, 61

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hexis tou aletheuein, 38 His Girl Friday, 95 historical narratives, 186 history, 204–5 history as original repetition, 201–3 Hobbes, Thomas, 79 Holocaust survivors, narratives of event, 191 how one should live, 28 human dignity, Merleau-Ponty, 86 human life, life-forms and, 29 human nature determination of, 33 life-forms, independence of, 31 human rights, politics of the symbolic, 84 humans, as limited creatures, 51 hyperbolic responsibility, 137–41 Ignatieff, Michael, 89 Ignatiev, Noel, 153 Imaginary, 77 imagination, catharsis and, 191 imaginative passions, 17 indentured servants, 155–56 Indian nonviolent democratic movement, 80 individuals, good, 13 infallibility of innocence, 82 infinite, Derrida, and, 204 infinite responsibility, 141–45 Levinas, 143 trauma and, 70 infinity, 68–69 innocence Fullinwider, Robert, 82 infallibility of, 82 Lacan and, 78 myth of American, 76 ontology of innocence, 75 people on planes in 9/11 attacks, 75 politics of innocence, 80 terrorists and, 82 war and terrorism, 82 innocent victim America as in 9/11 attacks, 79 bin Laden, 83 force in vengence and, 79 just-war theory, 82

revenge and, 80 war on terrorism, 83 innocents, 81–82 institutive history, 202 intentions ethics of, 143 responsibility and, 141 international politics of revenge, politics of fear and, 80 Internet, 5 changing the user, 123 pornography. See cyberporn interpersonal relationships, 3 Interpretation of Fairy Tales, The, 184 intersubjective relationships, 3 Intolerable Cruelty: Enage the Enemy, 109 Invisible Man, 177 Irish literature, 187–88 irony, democracy and, 90 Islam, worldview, 54 It Happened One Night, 95 Jeffersonian democracy, 89–90 Jim Crow, 166 Jonas, Hans, 115–16 judgment, Kant, Gadamer on, 37 just-war theory, 81–82 just-war tradition, 81–84 enemies as part of human community, 81 justice, willingness, 113 Kallipolis, 112 Kant, Immanuel Copernican turn, 51 Critique of Judgment, 37 dignity, 32 duty, 64 freedom and, 32 God as dream, 51 judgment, Gadamer on, 37 reason in its transcendental employment, 26 katharsis, 181, 191 Katz, Claire, 88 Kautzer, Chad, 112 Kearney, Richard, 7, 181 killing, face and, 115 Index

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Kluegel, James R., 150 knowing, hermeneutics and, 38 knowledge, from experience, 27

trauma, 69 the voice, 114–15 World World II and, 70 you shall not kill, 67 Leviticus, 65 Le´vy-Bruhl, Lucien, 136 liberal democracy, 54 liberalism, color-blind, 151 lie, as radical evil, 197 life-forms, 29 agreement, 29 appropriateness to human nature, 30 change and development, 29 clarification of, ethics as, 30 conduct, 29 freedom, 32 human life and, 29 human nature, independence of, 31 measuring against human nature, 33 obligatory, no longer, 30 obligatory nature, 31 opportunities, 30 possibility, 31 questionableness, 29 virtues, 30 linguistics, 77 literature, Derrida, 203 Lives of Animals, The, 189–91 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler, 4, 64–67 lynchings, 166

Lacan, Jacques, 4 aggression, 74 ethics-politics, 75 Law of the Father, 79 psychoanalysis, 76–77 symbolic, limits and, 76 threat of the Other and, 74 Laclau, Ernesto, 89 Lady Eve, The, 95 woman educating man, 101 language, 41 presence and, 32 reason as, 32 Laplanche, Jean, 6, 163–66 Law of the Father, 79 les trois H, 69 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 7, 183 Levinas, Emmanuel, 4, 93 Blanchot on, 69 demand and, 61, 70 approval to, 67 Descartes and, 68 ethical experience, 70 ethical language, 70 ethical relation to other, 70–71 ethics of intentions, 143 face-to-face relation, 114–15 freedom, 144 infinite responsibility, 143 infinity, 68 social relationship, 69 Løgstrup and, 64 other’s hostage, 70 Otherwise than Being, 71 persecution, 70 as phenomenologist, 68 politics, 143 psychoanalysis and, 70 relation to the other, 68 responsibility, paternalism, 144 speech, 114–15 thought that thinks more than it can think, 68 Totality and Infinity, 71 250

Madison, James, 134 Margalit, Avishai, 113 marriage child rearing and, 96 companion-style, 107 as daily festival of contests, 98 democracy and, 95 as friendship, 107 happiness in, democracy and, 96 partner as vehicle for other’s freedom, 99 spirited conversation and, 97 Marx, Karl, 117–18 McIntosh, Peggy, 152–53 McWhorter, Ladelle, 6, 147 meaning of life, God is dead, 52 memory, 43–44 death and, 45

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hermeneutics and, 46 instructiveness, 45 obligation of, 46 Mendieta, Eduardo, 5, 112 mental phenomena of racism, 148 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4 ‘‘Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,’’ 85 human dignity, 86 new humanism, 85 future and, 86 humanism of the Enlightenment and, 86 rationality, 86 the Other, 85 responsibility and the future, 142 on speech, 85 speech as dialogue, 86 violence of dialogue, 85, 87 meta-ethics, 55 Mill, John Stuart, 136 ministers, responsibility and accountability, 135 moral differences, 14 moral practices, desire to be good and, 16 moral selfhood, ethical experience and, 55 moral virtues, 2 goodness and, 12 Moralita¨t, 113 morality abstractness, 113 beautiful soul and, 112 demand and, Løgstrup, 67 versus ethics, 113 Moralita¨t, 113 principles, 113 publicness and, 113 pursuit of happiness and, 112 remoteness and, 113 morphological race, as civil concept, 159 morphological racism, 158 morphological transcription, race, 155 Morrison, Toni, 165 morsus conscientiae, 60 Mouffe, Chantal, 89 Much Ado about Nothing, 101 muthos-mimesis, 181, 183, 191 myth, 7 ageless, 184

of American psyche, 76 ashes, 184 catharsis, 183–84 child loss and, 185 children and, 185 coyotes, 184 experiencing pain and, 184 happy endings, 185 Le´vi-Strauss, 183 machines for the suppression of time, 184 psychic wounds and, 184 ravens, 184 sacred garments, 184 structural response to the existential questions, 184 totems, 184 trickster, 184 unhappy endings, 185 Name of the Rose, The (Eco), 18, 20 narrative, 7 catharsis and, 187 fictional, 186 historical, 186 Holocaust survivors, 191 Irish literature, 187–88 Native Americans assimilation of, 160 as slaves, 157 natural autonomy, security of union and, 109 natural sciences, 27 need for others, Plato, 33 neighbor, relation to, relation to God and, 66 New Left movement, 89 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 37, 132 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1 conscience, 60 decline of ethical thought, 35 European Buddhism, 52 good by weakness of spirit, 16 nihilism, 52 responsibility, morality and, 136–37 revenge and, 20 retrieval of, 22 Siamese twin of Saint Paul, 60 Wood, David and, 2, 20 Index

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nihilism, 52–53 9/11 attacks America as nation of innocence, 74 American myth of innocence and, 76 America’s message of redemption, 76 as break in time, 74 grieving, 74 innocence of people on planes, 75 marking in time rather than space, 74 mourning, 74 myth of invulnerability and, 79 perpetrators as Other, 74 politics of, 84 politics of fear, 79 politics of the imaginary, 84 post-9/11 America, 4 presidential debates of 2004, 73 prisoner abuses after, 76 revenge, 73 torture memos after, 76 war and, 73–74 ‘‘The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses,’’ 115 Normative ethics, 55 obligatory nature of life-forms, 31 observations, 27 ¨ ffenlichkeit, 113 O Oklahama City bombers versus 9/11 attacks, 73 ontology of innocence, 75 openness, reason and, 33 opportunities, life-forms, 30 order, goodness and, 13–14 orientation of life, philosophical ethics, 30 Origin of Geometry, 201 original ethics doctrine of the happy life, 41 ethics of sources, 42 Heidegger, 36 hermeneutics, Gadamer and, 36 juridical life and, 41 knowing of techne, 42 law and, 41 orbit of the human, 41 outline, 41–42 original history, 202 originality of ethics, Heidegger and, 3 252

Origins of Totalitarianism, The, 195–96 Other, The 9/11 perpetrators, 74 alternative relationship to, 75 as destabilizer, 74 Merleau-Ponty, 85 presence of, violence and, 75 threat of, 74 violence and, 74 white supremacy and, 166 othering, 166–68 other’s hostage, Levinas, 70 Otherwise than Being (Levinas), 71 outline of original ethics, 41 Paine, Thomas, 76 partner as vehicle for other’s freedom, 99 Pascal, Blaise, 51 Passions, 17 passive nihilism, 53 past, repeating the past forward, 181 paternal authority, Cavell, 102 Paul, Pamela, 124 Paul, Saint, 63 perfectionist themes in romantic comedies, 95, 101, 105–6 phenomenologist of the Spirit, threat of the Other and, 74 Philadelphia (City of Brotherly Love), 91 Philadelphia Story, The, 5, 94 agon, 107 boat, 97–98 Cavell, 96 conversation and, 96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, 106 philosophers, responsibility and accountability, 132, 135 philosophical ethics, 2, 25 Aristotle and, 28–29 expectations, 25–26 life-forms, appropriateness to human nature, 30 orientation of life, 30 orienting power of, 26 philosophical insight, 34 possibilities of life and, 28 practical life, 34 public interest, 26 technoscientific revolution and, 26

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philosophical self-emptying, 27 philosophy ethical life and, 1 expectations of philosophical ethics and, 26 natural science and, 27 observations, 27 orientation of life beyond or outside of determinate life-forms, 29 practical, ethics as, 26 public image, 26 theoretical, 26 physical development, desire to be good and, 16 Plato cave, 112 Glaucon, 112 memory and death, 45 morality, 112 need for others, 33 Republic, 112 pluralistic democratic order, 89 Poetics, 181 political disappointment, 52 political ethics, 55 politics attachments and, 88 comedy of remarriage, 95 cooperative bonds and, 88 of fear, 79–80 of the imaginary, 84 of innocence, 80 Levinas, 143 of sovereignty, 84 of the symbolic, 84 Politics of Friendship, The, 90 pornography, Internet. See cyberporn possibilities of life, how one should live and, 28 possibility, life-forms, 31 practical philosophy ethics as, 26 hermeneutics and, 37, 38 observations, 27 theoretical philosophy and, 27 totalization of, 27 praxis, 38 presence, language and, 32

prisoner abuses post 9/11, 76 processes of truth, Badiou, 62 propaganda, 193 psychoanalysis, Levinas and, 70 psychoanalytic ethics, 77 public image of philosophy, 26 public libraries, cyberporn and, 123 public places, 117 publicness, morality and, 113 punishment, responsibility and, 136 Pursuits of Happiness, 93 Race, 155, 158 race traitors, 153 racial injustice subjective origin, 149, 153 as systemic problem, 154 racism, 147–48. See also white racism abnormality of African Americans, 160 Americans claim to not harbor beliefs, 149–51 as cognitive matter, 149 color-blind liberalism, 151 combating, people of color and, 177 as mental phenomena, 148 origins of racial division, 158 reproachment for ancestors’, 163 responsibility and, 6 slavery and, 157 white race as standard, 160 white superiority, conviction about, 150 whiteness as identity, 152 whiteness studies, 151 Wilson, W. J., 149 Racism without Racists, 151 racist ancestors, responsibility for, 171 radical deception, 7 raven in myth, 184 Real, 77 reason, 33 as language, 32 openness and, 33 recognition dignity and, 33 goodness and, 13 relation between self and other, 69 relation to God, relation to neighbor and, 66 Index

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relation to other, infinity and, 68 relationships, 5 aimance, 93 brothers, 91 cyberporn and, 123–24 father and child, monarchy and, 91 husband and wife, aristocracy and, 91 sentimental love, 93 social relationship, infinity, 69 religious disappointment, 52 nihilism and, 53 remarriage comedies, 95 absence of woman’s mother, 97 The Big Lebowski, 109 Cavell and, 101 heroine, symbolic death and rebirth, 101 individual perfection, 108 Intolerable Cruelty: Engage the Enemy, 109 perfectionist theme, 101 pursuit of perfection, 104 revitalizing friendships, 110 vehicle set for adventure, 97 virginity theme, 101 woman as man’s prime rival, 99 remoteness, morality, 113 repeating the past forward, 181 Republic (Plato), 112 res cogitans, God and, 68 respect, dignity and, 33 responsibility, 5, 41 accountability and, 131–32 for another person, Løgstrup, 66 de Beauvior, 140 Constant, 134 as ethical invention, 131 etymology, 131 the future and, 142 globalization and, 145–46 Hamilton, 134 Hegel, 135 history of the term, 132–37 hyperbolic, 137–41 infinite, 141–45 intentions and, 141 legal context, 132, 134 Levinas, paternalism, 144 254

Le´vy-Bruhl, 136 Madison, 134 ministerial notion of, 144 ministers, 135 Nietzsche, 136–37 philosophers and, 132 punishment and, 136 racism and, 6 reciprocity and, 66 Sartre, 133, 137–40 Weber, 136 resurrection of Christ, demand and, 58 revenge 9/11 attacks, 73 goodness and, 23–24 innocent victim and, 80 Nietzsche and, 20 time and, 20 Wood, David, repetition, 21 Ricoeur, Paul, 43 ring of Gyges, 112–13 Romains, Jules, 137 romantic comedy, 93 new society, 108 perfectionist themes, 95 The Philadelphia Story, 94 Rorty, Richard, 92 rules of declaring war, 82 sacred garments in myth, 184 Sadeans, 59 Saint Paul: La Fondation de l’universalisme (Badiou), 63 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 162 aggression of the look, 74 Anti-Semite and Jew, 176 anti-Semitism, 176 Badiou, Alain and, 62 Being and Nothingness, 74 freedom, 138, 139 hyperbolic responsibility, 137–41 responsibility, 137–38 for everything, 139–40 threat of the Other and, 74 Truth and Existence, 140 Schmidt, Dennis J., 3 Schmitt, Carl, 65

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Schnell, Lisa Caruth, Cathy and, 185 creative compensation, 186 science, 26 natural sciences, 27 Scott, Charles E., 2 secular liberal democracy, 54 self betrayal, 59 binding to good, 55 demand and, 59 destructive behavior, 59 as ethical subject, 59 founding, demand of the good, 59 good and, 58 relation between self and other, 69 self-division, 60 self-evidence, 26 self-respect, goodness and, 15 sentimental love, 93 Sermon on the Mount, Løgstrup, 65 servitude, race and, 158 sexual fantasizing, cyberporn and, 122–23 sexual tension in friendships, 91 sexuality, breastfeeding, 164–65 Shakespeare, William, 93 Siamese twin of Saint Paul, Nietzsche, 60 sight, Jonas, Hans, 115–16 Singel, Ryan, 123 Sittlichkeit, 113 situated demand, 62 situations, Badiou, 62 slaveholders, white, 163 attitudes of Northerners, 167 demonization, 168 loosening message, 171 relationship to slaves, 166 sale and purchase of slaves, 166 slaves as family, 174 slavery, 156 abolition, 173 Africans, 157 capitalism and, 173–74 as economic issue, 173 free African Americans, 157 Native Americans, 157 racism and, 157 slavery apologists, 172–72

Smith, Ryan A., 150 smoking, 60 social practices, goodness and, 12 social relationship, infinity, 69 soldiers, innocents and, 82 solidarity, finitude and, 33 sophistic pluralism, 28 South African postapartheid truth and reconciliation commissions, 80 Southern slaveholders. See slaveholders, white Southerners, white working class and, 174 sovereign states, just-war theory, 81 sovereignty, politics of, 84 space, de-auratized, 120 Spaemann, Robert, 28 spatiality, 32 speech, 32 as dialogue, 86 as heeding of the world, 32 Levinas, 114–15 Merleau-Ponty, 85 spiritual maturation, 15 Stavrakakis, Yannis, Zˇizˇek and, 77 sting of bad conscience, 60 storytelling, 7 catharsis and, 187 healing powers of, 181, 187 propaganda, 193 strangers, 5, 65 subjectivity, Hegel, 69 Sullivan, Shannon, 6, 88, 162 Symbolic, 77 tact, 45 technoscientific revolution, philosophical ethics and, 26 teleologic, eudaimonia, 64 terrorism, 82 terrorists, innocents and, 82 theological ethics, Løgstrup, 66 theoretical philosophy, 26 practical philosophy and, 27 Thornwell, James Henley, 172 thought, infinity and, 68 thought that thinks more than it can think, 68 Index

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time, 32 finitude, 33 revenge and, 20 torture memos post 9/11, 76 totalitarianism, Arendt, 195–96 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 71 totalization of practical philosophy, 27 totem in myth, 184 translating goodness, 16–17 transmutational futurity, 23 trauma, 69–70 traumatic neurosis, 69 trickster in myth, 184 truth, reality and, 198 Truth and Existence, 140 truths, Badiou, 62 tu ne tueras point, 67 Uebel, Michael, 123 Unclaimed Experience, 185 understanding, hermeneutics, 38 universality, 62 unrestrained violence, just-war theory and, 82 Uses of Enchantment, The, 184 values goodness and, 12 lack of passion for, 17 passions for, 17 vengefulness, 22 Vera, Hernan, 150 Verantwortlichkeit, 133 violence other and, 74 presence of the Other, 75 Virginia General Assembly, 157–58 virtues goodness and, 12 life-forms and, 30 openness, 33 presence, Aristotle on, 31 respect, 33 solidarity, 33 virtuous, good, 12 the voice, Levinas, 114–15 Voices from the Lake, 192 vulnerability, as enemies, 82 256

Wahrheit und Methode (Gadamer), 37 war 9/11 attacks and, 73–74 declaring, rules of, 82 inevitability of, 82 innocents and, 81 as political form of violence, 82 respect for common humanity, 81 terrorism and, innocence and, 82 war on terrorism, innocent victim, 83 Weber, Max, 136 white people, 6 beliefs about blacks, 150 double consciousness, 177 perpetuation of racial injustice, 151 self-focus, 177 white race as standard, 160 whiteness as identity, 152 white privilege, 151 struggle against, 177 writings on, 152, 153 white race, creation of, 157 white racism, othering groups, 168 white supremacy, 165–66 whiteness abolition of, 162–63 as family, 163, 168–70 racist ancestors, 171 whiteness studies, 151 the will, ethics and, 132 Willett, Cynthia, 4, 88, 112 Williams, Bernard, 132 willpower, desire and, 16 Wilson, W. J., 149 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27 Woessner, Martin, 112 women chattel servitude, 156 Derrida, 91 friendships, 91 Wood, David, 2, 21–22 work, cell phones and, 119 World War II, Levinas, 70 you shall not kill, Levinas, 67 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 63, 77

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